Bamyan 1978. Transhumance. Before the wars in Afghanistan. The child in the photograph has beautiful hair. I observe it. He is in profile, sitting on the camel. Wear a colorful sweater. The mother will have done it with her hands for the little one. The breeches are blue. The black shoes. Next to it is a little girl, maybe it’s her sister. She has dark hair, she is motionless, she has a colorful dress. A black hen is perched on the animal’s hump.
It’s all true in the frame. People are real. True the colors, and the animals are. The blanket is real bordeaux, the brown shawl. They are true bags of supplies, necessary for cross the Bamyan valley, in Afghanistan. The two children accompany their parents in the seasonal migration of animals, from one area of the valley to another. The expressions on the faces are not very clear. Who knows if they will have lived the day as a moment of play, or will they have been afraid, or felt bored given the long journey. The girl has a handkerchief on her head.
Unpublished images by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi – Bamyan 1978, before the wars. Transhumance
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The frame was taken in the Bamyan valley in 1978, before the wars. In the archaeological site, then, there were the two huge statues of Buddha, which in 2001 were destroyed by the Taliban. I close my eyes, I imagine the enthusiasm of the two little ones in seeing the giant statues from afar. They will have discovered the incredible apparitions from the top of the camel. The sky is very blue, the children are in good company. Animals are usually affectionate with them. The siblings, along the way, will probably have been carefree. Free to cross the magnetic valley of Bamyan with your animal. There can be no more intense sense of freedom than what you feel as a child, when you are unaware of the dangers. The children of photography should be nearly fifty today. Will they survive the wars? What are you doing now?
And if it were one of the desperate faces I met during the TV reports onAfghanistan? The women ofAfghanistan: pain and fear, courage and endurance. I can not write or forget them. I dreamed of them tonight. I too was in a train car, crammed between them. We were sisters. Men did not want to let us off. We could not free ourselves from overwhelm, there was no stop that would work for us. I felt despair as a result of the lack of freedom. I was traveling, it was not a relief, but a nightmare. Around me were other women, covered from head to toe. Suffering as much as I am. Prisoner of male ferocity.
When I woke up I was shocked, I told myself that only in the dream had I heard the true voice of the women of theAfghanistan, there I was one of them. But my nightmare is over, theirs continues, I feel helpless. Return to the story of the frame. The child in the photograph has his head uncovered, he is freer than his sister. What are you doing today? What if he was one of the Taliban I saw, always on the news, at Kabul airport? Will he be one of them? Or has he escaped from Afghanistan, and is living free, happy, in another place in the world? Perhaps the photograph taken in the Bamyan valley in 1978 tells not only about a transhumance, but about the escape of a family before the wars.