The Beauty Academy of Kabul

Tonight I watched the Beauty Academy of Kabul, about a group of hairdressers who travel to Afghanistan to start a beauty school. I have two main observations about this film. First of all, the images of Afghanistan are stunning to my American eyes. Kabul looks kind of like a bombed out version of Phoenix. Dusty and blindingly sunny; lovely, rugged mountains in the distance. It's beautiful, but it looks so bad (and this was filmed in 2003) and torn up, just covered in piles of rubble, with everybody going about their business as if nothing is wrong, that it makes me want to do something about the situation immediately. If I learned anything from volunteering in Louisiana last year, it was that it's really hard to look at destruction day in and day out and stay psychologically intact. So my heart really goes out to a nation where bombs have been falling for, quite literally, the span of my entire life.

The second observation I had was in the difference in attitude in the women. Now, some of the hairdressers in the movie had some ideas about how they were going to liberate the women of Afghanistan by teaching them to wear makeup, drive cars, not listen to their husbands all the time, etc. But sometimes I wish that I had to go home and ask my husband permission before getting myself into another cock-a-mainy situation. Certainly I cannot condone honor killings or other misguided practices of radical Islam. However, I am not sure that the so-called independence that American women have is true liberation. What I see when I look around America is a bunch of over-worked, frazzled women trying to raise up babies and earn money and look ten years younger. We think because we can do it all, we HAVE to do it all. Is liberation really working for us?

But this movie is about Afghan women. And it is definitely worth watching.