Osama (2003)
Written and directed by Siddiq Barmak
Over twenty years, during the US occupation of Afghanistan, an estimated 176,000 died as a result of the conflict. Well over six thousand US soldiers, contractors, and soldiers from allied nations were killed. What was it all for? It doesn’t seem like much that counters those deaths. Afghanistan has historically been a place where armies come to fail. Of all the films I’ve seen from Muslim-majority countries, this one felt the most regressive. The US equivalent would be regions of the States where right-wing militias are growing in power and enforcing their rule. I think it is essential to see this film not as a condemnation of Islam, a religion that has many positive aspects, but as a searing critique of patriarchy. Your average right-wing US pundit will always make it about religion because they ultimately don’t care about the oppression of women.
The Taliban enforces its brutal interpretation of the Koran by making women wear full-body burqas. Not one detail of their face or bodies is visible. Due to this, a young girl (Marina Golbahari) finds her family in crisis. Her mother works in a hospital in Kabul, but the Taliban cleared all the women out, believing this is inappropriate. These two live with the mother’s mother, and no men are around to help them earn a living. It’s decided that the girl will have her hair cut short and take the name “Osama,” passing for a boy and getting work at a milk vendor who is a family friend. This comes to an end when the Taliban draft all the boys into their madrasa, where they receive frenzied religious and military training. Osama becomes terrified that she will be caught, and it seems to be only a matter of time before it comes to pass.
The film does not hold back in depicting how women are treated in this system. I found it very harrowing. It reminded me a lot of the documentary Jesus Camp. While the surface details are different, a dangerous patriarchal militancy exists under the surface. The adults are clearly caught up in a mass delusion. This is partly caused by the constant need to defend their borders from foreign invasion. The reason so many countries want to control Afghanistan is because of the rare earth metals there. It’s estimated there are 1.4 million metric tons of these, along with silver, copper, lead, sulfur, zinc, cobalt, iron, and more. Industrial nations have this terrible habit of turning countries like this into violent extraction economies, taking all profit the nation could experience from selling these materials and instead stealing them.
Where did the Taliban come from? Has Afghanistan always been like this? The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was formed in the late 1970s and established by the socialist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. This was a far more progressive society at the time. You can see in the photo below that women in the country were living much more liberated lives. The unelected autocrat Mohammad Daoud Khan, who came to power during the 1973 coup, was ousted by this people’s revolution and would stay in power until 1992. So what happened to end this period of social & economic progress?
The Soviet Union intervened when fractures began to emerge within the PDPA. The United States saw this as an opportunity to intervene itself, funding the radical Islamic mujahideen to create strife within the country for the US’s gain. The collapse of the Soviet Union around this time caused them to pull their forces out and plunged Afghanistan into a decades-long civil war, which ended with the Taliban coming to power in 2021. It’s widely regarded that the CIA helped to create the Taliban in the same way they put Saddam Hussein and hosts of other dictators into power since World War II.
The oppression the women of Afghanistan face is played out with horrific authenticity in this film. The entire picture is seen through the eyes of Osama, with a stunning performance from 11-year-old Golbahari. This child will break your heart and convey emotion with such truth. She always seems on the verge of tears, especially when fears of being outed as a girl while at the madrasa take over her every thought. Every waking moment is one of terror. A man standing outside the gates of the house drives Osama and her family into a panic. The threat of rape and murder is always lingering.
This place feels surreal and couldn’t possibly happen in the modern era. The clothing, the ruined buildings, and the treatment of women feel like something from Biblical times. A group of women in burqas protest against the ban on them having jobs, only to be attacked with a hose by the Taliban. Westerners are working in the country, a woman at the hospital and a documentarian end up imprisoned, and we see what is done to them in the film’s ending.
Director Siddiq Barmak originally titled the film Rainbow and had it end on a hopeful note. The more he revised the script, the more dissatisfied he was with this choice. He made the right move, not letting the audience feel safe. We are in Osama’s shoes, terrified right along with her as she becomes a child bride and she will be raped by her elderly husband. She has no choice. She is not seen as a complete human being. She is property for a man.
This doesn’t sound too far from the twisted rhetoric of the manosphere podcasts that have gained traction in the States. While they are more secular in their discourse, the core principles of the subjugation of women are still there. I think the roots of this in the States are similar to what happened in Afghanistan. Society was put under tremendous stress to the point of a severe mass psychological breakdown. The way it will play out in the States will be different in regards to window dressing, but the patriarchal nature is the same.
Several US states in the South have legislatures that have dragged their heels and refused to explicitly outlaw child marriage. The constant obsession with the US Right over drag queens and trans people leads me to believe there is a profound sexual disturbance in the psyche of these people. While there is no quantitative evidence to show that children are in danger from drag queens and transgender people, you can’t go a week without a headline about someone in the Christian clergy or a cop being arrested and charged with possessing child sexual assault material or actually violating a child. These are the American equivalent to the Taliban, disgusting patriarchal and threat to women and girls, cis and trans.
Sadly, someone like Osama is a typical tragedy in this world. Many girls get such treatments every single day, and it is disturbing how cowardly the rest of us have been about allowing it to happen. The objectification of women and girls is a threat to our species and inhibits us from progressing to the next stage of our development. We’re too tied to gender labels as a means to limit people, never to empower them. The film ultimately works because of that central performance, an Afghan girl who brings such authenticity to the role.
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