First female rapper debuts in Afghanistan

“Listen to my story! Listen to my pain and suffering!” Afghanistan’s first female rapper Sosan Firooz pleads into her microphone.

With her first rap song, the outspoken 23-year-old singer is making history in her homeland where society frowns on women who take the stage. She is already shunned by some of her relatives.

But for Firooz, the best way to express herself is through rap, a musical genre that is just starting to generate a following in Afghanistan.

She sings about repression of women, her hopes for a peaceful Afghanistan and the misery she says she experienced as a small child living in neighbouring Iran. Her family fled there during the Afghan civil war of the 1990s and the hardline Taliban regime’s rise to power in 1996. During her five-year stay there, she said the Iranians looked with disdain on Afghan refugees.

“I remember while we were in Iran, we were called ‘dirty Afghans’ and told to go to the back of the line at the bakery,” Firooz, who also spent time as a refugee in Pakistan and returned to Afghanistan with her family seven years ago, told The Associated Press in an interview.

Her song’s message to Afghans: Stay in your homeland. Those who leave, she sings, will only get jobs washing dishes or working at a car wash.

“They will miss their homeland,” she raps in a staccato style, part rap and part hip-hop. “They will want to kiss the dust of their homeland.”

“What is the result of Afghans being refugees in Iran and Pakistan?” she raps in Dari, one of Afghanistan’s two main languages. “Half of them are addicts and the other half are terrorists!”

So far, the song, titled Our Neighbours has only been released on YouTube, with a video that shows a series of pictures of Firooz posing in a hip-hop style gear, with jeans, dangling chains and bracelets. In some pictures, she wears a bandana with skulls, but her long hair flows freely, with no headscarf — a rarity among Afghan women, including the few female singers.

Firooz is also an actress, appearing in secondary roles in a number of local TV soap operas. Earlier this month, she sang at a three-day music festival in Kabul. Because social interaction between men and women are restricted, the musicians played for a female audience the first day and males the last two days.—AP