Kandahar: Of Women and Imbalance in Exile

From all the material so far covered by the class on exilic figures, the absence of a female protagonist in such context remained a prevalent theme. The film Kandahar is our first experience with this figure, allowing for a new perspective and the discovery of an imbalance in the exilic state.

Women hold a nuance of roles in Kandahar that defies their former presentations as passive sideline characters. For in Kandahar the women are both in the background (dressed in burkas) and active figures, like the Red Cross women and, of course, the protagonist taking a stand and returning home to save her sister. Burkas and the end of education doesn’t mean these women are helpless. Consider certain factors— how, unlike the men, the women in Kandahar are never shown mutilated. How, when the family taking Nafas to Afghanistan are looted, it is the women who actively respond, hiding and fighting for their goods.

The burkas themselves are in a variety of colours—bright blues and yellows—that starkly contrast with the plain desert land. The doctor claims that for a person who lives under cover, the only reason or hope for that person is to be seen some day. This doesn’t seem to be an issue for the women standing out with colour and life wandering across the pale sands. Courage is associated with men—yet it is never the men willing to risk their lives to go to Kandahar, only the female protagonist. She may, unlike them, have a purpose, but essentially she takes initiative where they remain immobile and going nowhere.

In all this subtle empowering of the female exilic figures, we can not a similarity the film’s figure shares with the males in our discussed exilic texts. This is the presence of one gender in favor of the other, where the latter is pushed to the background in an almost meaningless existence. Such is seen with the role of women in Men in the Sun and Woh jo Kho Gai, where the woman holds a shadow of the presence the average character demands. This absent/present role for the women/men appears in Kandahar, where the women hold very active roles and contrast with the opposite sex shown lacking in limbs; in spirit to fight (such as the man taking Nafas from Iran, who didn’t fight but simply prayed and blessed the thieves when his family was looted) or show courage (to travel to Kandahar). The male figure is practically sidelined and debased to the point of mockery when the male companion at the end with Nafas is, in a sense, emasculated when he must don the burka to remain hidden.

It seems that with texts pertaining to exilic figures, where past cannot balance with present, humans with nature nor home with its inhabitants, neither can we have another natural balance—between women and men. Either must make room for or struggle against the other. The exilic state is thus nothing more than a rat race; a survival of the fittest, bereft of normalcy, balance and stability.