AN EXERCISE IN WORLDMAKING 2009 - ISS

192 TARA TABASSI
that assumed of the Orient. In the context of development, ‘timestanding-still-at-the-precipice-of-change’
connotes the ability of development
practitioners to sweep in, making claims despite changing realities
(Roe 1989:4).
Judgment of her physique ensues: ‘time and hardship have erased her
youth.’ The author reduces natural aging processes not only to time but
to hardship, and diminish her by equating it to ‘erasure’. Gula is dehumanized;
‘her skin looks like leather.’ This is reinforced: ‘the eyes still
glare. That has not softened,’ as if the intense look caught in 1985 will
permanently render her a hardened woman. ‘She has had a hard life,’
states McCurry in an authoritarian role as arbiter of beauty.
The paragraph concludes by demanding reflection: ‘Now, consider…
a young girl with sea green eyes. Her eyes challenge ours. Most of all,
they disturb. We cannot look away.’ This effective questioning of readers’
thoughts and its strategic timing implies another level of interaction -
- perhaps one of U.S. intervention in order to save… Afghan women…
like Gula?
Aggressive description of Gula’s plight continues metaphorically:
‘jaws of soviet invasion’ and imagery of airplanes ‘stabbing her with
dread.’ Dehumanizing metaphors describe Gula’s nameless brother’s
‘raptor face’ with ‘piercing eyes’ who speaking for Gula, ‘fill[s] in the narrative
of her life,’ and plays into negative representations of Afghani
males.
An apparently ‘respected’ (therefore authoritative), named Pakistani
journalist, Yusufzai, explains Gula’s experience, apologizing for Sharbat,
and how she ‘live[s] at the mercy of the politics of other countries,’ hinting
at the U.S. There is no mention or critique of U.S. involvement in
the article. Only present and future instability: ‘It is the ongoing tragedy
of Afghanistan. Invasion. Resistance. Invasion. Will it ever end?’, suggesting
need for a larger Hero. With that helpless tone, the author returns
to Gula and describes her life as ‘means to scratch out an existence,
nothing more,’ following dominant discourses of poverty as bland unfulfilling
livelihoods. Hey day’s ‘bare outline’ is described for her, as though
only a skeleton of a ‘real’ day’ – presumably those of cosmopolitan lives
filled with thoughts and opportunities. Gula’s life is apparently quite the
opposite, thoughtless and hopeless: ‘she cooks… cleans… does laundry.
She cares for her children: the centre of her life.’ Her brother again
speaks for her, ‘Sharbat has never known a happy day…except perhaps