Ideas - How music transports the Afghan diaspora to their homeland

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

For Afghans, listening to a traditional song can bring them back "home." In 2021, when the Taliban seized power again in Afghanistan, orchestras disbanded and musicians fled for their lives. They brought with them their distinctive and storied music, embedded with notes hailing from classical music from Iran and India. IDEAS takes a journey to Afghanistan with members of the Afghan diaspora, and asks how the idea of home is encapsulated in music and how conflict has played a role in reshaping Afghan music.*This is the final episode in a five-part series called The Idea of Home exploring the multiple and contested meanings of home. This episode originally aired on June 16, 2022.Guests in this episode:Mir Mahdavi is a poet, a writer, and a researcher in the area of art, literature and poetry, originally from Afghanistan. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and holds a Ph.D. in cultural studies from Trent University and a MA of cultural studies from McMaster University. He was the publisher and the editor in chief of Atab, a weekly newspaper published during 2002-2003 in Kabul.Hangama is one of the most renowned female Afghan singers of her generation. Born in 1962 in Kabul, Hangama's stage name was chosen by her mother when she decided to pursue a career in music. She left Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and now lives in the Greater Toronto Area.Sara Soroor is an Afghan-Canadian singer-songwriter and childhood educator in the Greater Toronto Area. She is Hangama's daughter and started singing and playing the piano at age four.Wares Fazelyar was born and raised in Toronto, and plays the rubab. He is an advisory board member for the Afghan Youth Engagement and Development Initiative. He and his brother Haris perform Afghan folk music in the Greater Toronto Area.Wolayat Tabasum Niroo is a researcher and Fulbright scholar currently based in the United States. She has a PhD in Education from Old Dominion University and a MPhil in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. She grew up in Afghanistan and has studied how Afghan women's folk music creates an alternative space for political expression, grief and imagining other possibilities.

This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. No one sings about separation quite like Hangama does. Home is Afghanistan, and separation is at the heart of its story. music so powerful, it's so powerful it reaches across time and space. I think music is the main instrument in recreating a home. And poetry, I guess, comes next. but these two are very, very powerful phenomena

that help us to recreate the sins of past that you had lost. We're bringing you a special series on the idea of home and what it means to find safe harbor in a fractured world. We're speaking with members of the Afghan diaspora on an endless journey to find home. In the love songs? Are we not in love with our home? And the laments.

We Afghan people are very much attached to the theme of separation, because that defines our lives, separate from our homeland, separate. Even within Afghanistan, we have been displaced so many times. We're calling this episode The Way Home. Azora lives in the central Afghanistan covered with high-rise mountains, a very tough winter, a lot of snow, very difficult environment to live, very difficult environment to resist. My name is Mir Hussain Mahdavi.

I'm from Afghanistan, a poet and a writer and a researcher in the area of art and culture. I live in Hamilton. I know I get a snow, and you could see snow outside of my house. But this snow has nowhere closer to the snow that I had in Bahmian or Behesuit or any other place of Hazara. It is a much warmer snow, much better snow than I had experienced or my parents had experienced. So I think combining living in Hamilton and at the same time living in Bahamian and bringing these two together, merging these two living experience together. So it actually creates a moment that you cannot, in reality, you could not ever,

put them together. But for art and especially music, this is a possibility. For immigrants, we're naturally experiencing this combination of living into different places. So you see a lot of immigrants coming from Italy, coming from Afghanistan, from Iraq. They listen to their own music, they read their own newspaper, they speak with their own community, with the same language. They feel emotionally so much connected to where they are from, but physically they live in Hamilton. So this combination comes as a package,

but music helps to establish this to be more psychological reality for them. It's like a connecting chord, an umbilical cord in a way. Absolutely, absolutely. Even when Mir Hussain Mahdavi lived in Afghanistan, home was a complex idea. He is Hazara, a mostly Shia-Muslim ethnic community that's long been persecuted. One of the very, very significant ways that Hazara could express their deep miseries was music. And the type of the music that Hazara had used called Dambura.

It's undeniable that music had played and has played in my life a very significant rule in dealing with the problems that I have. It had actually played significant rule in shaping the face and the fate of the community that I grew up with and the community that I ethnically belonged to them. although it was a prohibited cultural phenomena. So I could say it was an underground hidden phenomena shaping the whole face of our culture in the way that we could deal with problems that we had.

So problems such as immigration, refugee, war, destructions, laws, all those issues were somehow coming to music to be resolved. Mir Mahdavi also finds resolution and refuge in the music of Afghan singer Hangama. Hangama is one of a very leading voice and character in music and in culture. Personally, I listened to her songs for such a long time that her voice becomes part of a joy of feeling of being at home or someone who is from a land called Afghanistan.

My name is Hangama. I'm a singer from Afghanistan, and I'm living since over 20 years here in Canada and Toronto. You began singing at 15 years old? Yes. Yeah, I was 15 years. And how did you get you to start seeing you, oh my God, I think I born in music and music and a singer. Because my mom says when I was a two years, when I was two years. Like three years. And this time I sing always la la, la, like that. But I love music. And this time, no YouTube, no television in Afghanistan, nothing. So always I ask my father, please bring me in radio. In those times, she went by her real name, Zohra. She'd listened to the radio at home and sing with her father, who was also a musician. And this time, a girl, it was difficult to come for singing.

The situation was in Afghanistan always, for a woman, it's hard time. Still, at age 15, her father took her to the Radio Afghanistan studio, where they immediately recognized her talent. And so began a prolific musical career. Her mother gave her the stage name of Hangama. She grew into one of the most famous female musicians in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 80s, and into the image of a modern Afghan woman, short-haired, full makeup, often a solitary swaying figure on a makeshift stage.

And for many Afghans living abroad, her music became synonymous with home. I like her older songs, which is all about separation. And for some reason, I think we Afghan people are very much attached to the theme of separation, because that defines our lives, separate from our homeland, separate. Even within Afghanistan, we have been displaced so many times. We lost the sense of the homeland connected to our ancestor. My name is Wolloyat Tabassum, but I am known for Tabassum Wolliatt, mostly in public. I prefer to go by Tabasson.

And I am a PhD candidate in the higher education program at Old Dominion University, funded by Fulbright Scholarship. So it's very strong in us. And her songs and her husband's song, when they sang together, it was all mostly about separation. Of course, their separation defined the love, separation of love, lover from beloved. But when it comes to separation from homeland, it's very much similar. Are we not in love with our homelands? We are. And separation, you know, from cis siblings, from parents, separation from brother, separation from father.

So separation is all our lives, I think. There are conflicting reports out of Afghanistan. Some say that Soviet forces now are in complete control of all major towns and highways. Others saying that heavy fighting continues in key areas of the country. As the fighting worsened, Hangama and her family decided to escape. Besides, the Soviet-backed regime was increasingly pressuring her to perform military. style songs, praising its rule. Always we have to sing for military, always sing.

They send them for us poetry. You have to sing this one. We can't. Hangama and her family escaped first to Pakistan, then ultimately to Germany. Meir and his family fled to Iran in 1980, and one piece of home proved crucial to maintaining a connection

while he walked the streets of an unfamiliar city. We would listen to Hazara-centered identity music to feel or to answer the question of who I am. had played many songs that actually centered on the idea of home and identity for Hussars. One called Sarzaman, the one I just played, it means my motherland. It's a very old tongue, probably more than 25 years old. So I would listen to this and probably walk around Tehran streets and think of myself walking in Bahamian or somewhere in Hazara communities in the center of Afghanistan. So that would help me to establish a psychological zone of comfort

to feel at home. Because for a refugee, the most important, The important concept is home. Refugee is someone who has lost home, who has carrying home with him all over the world. When the Soviet occupation ended in 1989, Tabasam Niru's family fled Kabul to their ancestral region in the northeast. For her now, home can be found in the sound of Adaira.

It's a drummed, it's a drum musical instrument that usually women play. And as a kid, I was very young, I had this little diet. a very little one so the children can hold with the little jingling plates. That's how I remember the home, you know, I grew up, the childhood that I remember in my homeland. But I'm wondering, just the sound of it, the pure sound of the Daira, what emotions does it bring to mind? I feel like it's so deeply connected with me. It moves me when I hear that.

It moves me, I don't know how to describe that in what way it moves me, meaning it's embedded in my mind. When I hear that, the image of, You know, the image of women sitting in a circle, women singing, other women clapping, and two women chattering in a corner, two women just tentatively listening, two women clapping, to women playing. And women who were singing, they used to be deep in their thoughts. The early violence forced 4.3 million Afghans to leave for Pakistan and Iran.

More left as the country swerved from one convulsion to another. The Soviet withdrawal, and then a full-fledged civil war between the Mujahideen and the sitting communist government. Then, just as they prevail, the Mujahideen fight amongst themselves. In 1995, the Taliban. takeover and impose a severe version of Islamic law. Tabassum's father, once a member of parliament under the Soviet-backed regime, destroyed his own books. I remember that my father was tearing it, sitting in next to the well, throwing it in the

well, so we can bury even the torn parts. I was sitting in the veranda or in the porch, and I just... just was staring at it. My father called me to come and help him with tearing it apart, the books destroying it as quickly as we could, and I couldn't. At last, I went and I look in the small pieces of those books, and I found a picture, half picture that was turned, and I just look at this page and this piece of paper, then I threw it. That's how I remember. Women were forced to veil, to stay at home, and the music was forced to stop.

When the Taliban came, we were banned even to play that, to have the cassettes, to have tape, to have TV in the home, and to have the male musicians in our parties or ceremonies, celebration ceremonies. Then we turned to diorama to entertain ourselves, and that was our music. So music became very much a very private affair. Yes, very much. And very much isolated to diarrhea, I would say, for women. And to the home? To the home, in the corner of the rooms, yes.

How did that help make up for the loss of music in general? I would say it was good in a way that it connected people more, meaning that it connected more women to each other. It made women to express their feelings more by using their own words. And it encouraged other women to try to sing, to try to have more artistic ways of expressing their thinking or copying songs from other women or making songs from other male musicians and turning it into women's song. And also women's songs are very, very sensitive.

And women sing in the most private places. Private it means they sang when they know that it was safe for them. I think one of the ways that Afghans would show their resistance and pulled together. their political and social power together and fight against Taliban was music. Music was banned, prohibited very strongly. If a household would play music, that household would be in trouble.

People would still listen to music to resist this dictatorship, this religious, ethnically centered dictatorship, listening to any type of music expressing their opposition. So a car passing by, playing music, they know if they get caught, they will be in trouble, but they would still play music to express their opposition.

It was a political tool in the hand of young Afghan activists to show their oppositions. Is there a song that you associate with that resistance to the Taliban, even though you weren't directly involved? Yeah, there is a very popular song. The singer's name is Abdul Wahub Madadi, and the lyrics in Farsi says That's the title of the song. Meaning, Motherland, my love to is my pride. This song.

since for a long time when we didn't have a national anthem, become a national anthem, unofficial national anthem. There are many other songs, but I'm very, very emotionally. It sounds like an anthem. Yeah. And it also sounds very hopeful. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. In 2001, after the fall of the Taliban,

Mir Hussein Mahdafi returned to Kabul, a devastated city that still felt more like home than any place in Iran. Though marked by yet more violence and displacement, the period following the U.S.-led invasion was, for many, especially in the diaspora, a rare moment of optimism, even hope. Hope was the main thing that we received after the fall of the Taliban. Hope for a better future for a more humanly society, a better future for all Afghans. But I assume the main source and the main power that

could actually grasp a sense of success was music. So music in post-Taliban era bring this sense of joy, happiness, hope, and togetherness. The moment a bomb went off in the Afghan parliament building in Kabul on Monday morning. It wasn't exactly a peaceful time. The Taliban's attacks were relentless. The pain of loss. Two women just in absolute despair.

US attacks also killed scores of civilians. But in 2006, Hangama decided to make the trip back anyway. And before I go, I talked with my mother as in Hamburg, Germany. I told them, here, Mommy John, I'm going to Afghanistan. Oh, no, don't go, please, please. Every day, she called me, don't go, don't go. I thought maybe people forget me. I don't remember I was one day, they are famous. I was Hangama in this 27 year. I was at home, like, different, like a housewife like that, no singing. So when I gone Afghanistan back, I shocked for suddenly because all people say, Hangomah, I love you.

Once again, she became Hangama. There's a comment on a video of you performing in Kabul. There's a comment on a video of you performing in Kabul and it's It says the following. It says, seeing these great and iconic individuals performing in Kabul after all these dark years gives us a reason for staying in this great land and serving this great nation to the best of our ability. What goes through your mind when you hear something like that? Some comments

that I actually I've seen, but even when she's read not only this comment but she's read multiple comments and she's just sat there crying

you know, happy tears but also like again when she went to Afghanistan after a long time she sang on the stage without a scarf without any covered head and she showed women

And the capability we have, you know, you don't have to hide of who you are. So she went back there, showing her size, showing her freedom of voice. And again, women were so empowered and so happy to see that. First female singer, I was after the Taliban. Mir Mahdavi was so optimistic about Afghanistan's future. He started a newspaper. But his journalism about the new government. government, earned him beatings and death threats. In 2003, he left once again, this time

for Canada. Are you having to turn back to the old music that represented home, or is there a new set of music that kind of speaks to what home is for you? I don't think we can leave the past altogether. In my understanding, the old songs and musics, I guess, our sense of being at home. Like, when I listen to those are who says I mean a man, it is my home. And I cannot just leave it there. But at the same time, this merging of different experience, we have new sons with, you know, new faces that define home differently and sometimes more profoundly, sometimes more emotionally.

But this new wave of singers and musicians, I guess, such as sorrow. and such as Baran Sajadhi, they are trying to define home in different ways, and I welcome that. You're listening to I'm going to Jani-As on CBC Radio 1 in Canada across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed.

You're listening to The Way Home, a documentary about Afghan music and the idea of home. We're exploring how music can recreate a lost homeland or bring it to life for a generation born outside its borders. The rhobab has a deep and warm sound. That's what feels like home, actually. I'm speaking with Wadis Vasiliar at his family home in Toronto. More specifically, we're sitting in the lap of Afghan cushions and carpets, and in his lap is a rabab.

Pretty old instrument. Mulberry wood, mother of pearl inlay. the red, black, and the greener the afghan flag colors. The gold, I guess, maybe is like the emblem inside the flag. The instrument is from Kabul, his parents' birthplace. We do have another one as well. That's also from Kabul. But that one's a bit more simpler. And that one stays with my brother. But this is, this is my baby. He's playing a song called Shinwari-Lavaray. This is a whole story, but separation has weakened my heart.

Thoughts of the homeland bring tears to my eyes. Too much love will drive me insane. These floodwaters do not scare me. My courage will carry me across. Why don't you return to your homeland? This is a conversation here. Why don't you return to your homeland? You think you're living like a king, but away from home,

one is merely a beggar. Help me leave the darkness behind that I may spread light across all my land. Warris Faselyar was born in Toronto in 1994. He has never set foot in Afghanistan. Home is a bit of a complicated thing, right? I grew up here in Toronto, born and raised. So Toronto is definitely home.

And it helps that Toronto is such a diverse place that it's almost normal for everybody here to refer to something as back home other than Toronto. So in that sense, I guess it's not very complicated for me. But, you know, is Kabul home? I think in a sense it is, but I'll really have to see how I feel when I get the chance to go there. And for you, I mean, having, not knowing the place firsthand, but obviously having a connection to Afghanistan and to Kabul in particular,

how does the music maintain or create, I guess, a relationship between you and home, the ancestral home? That's a good question. I think that one, the music helps create. a connection to home in sort of the physical, in the worldly sense, that when I meet other folks, maybe even in other parts of the world, who are from Afghanistan themselves or, you know, their parents are from their, music can really be one of those things that connects us. So in that sense, it's definitely a connection to home.

But for me, Afghan music is more than just a connection to a physical homeland. music and specifically poetry, both music and poetry, especially when put together, can serve as a vessel to help you transcend beyond, I think, ideas of a physical home. As I always say, like, outside of this house is Canada, inside this house is Afghanistan. So I am Sarah, I'm Goma's daughter. I'm also recently been pursuing music more seriously, trying to follow my mom's steps. Sarah Serrur was born in 1996 in Toronto, and in many ways, her life is like any other 20-something living in the big city. As I wake up early in the morning, five, five in the morning, let's say that. I

start every morning. I get my life together going to the gym. Right after that, I start work. So I do work in a child care center, and I'm a preschool teacher. So I live a double life where I'm a singer and a teacher with a side. But music will always be my number one passion. Hopefully, it will take me somewhere. Yeah. Sarah Serrur's music has already taken her places. A video of her and her mother Hangama

Performing Together has had more than 3 million views on YouTube. She's building a devoted following around the world. But this is where she sits down to compose and practice. A basement in Vaughn, Ontario. This is our home. This is our music sanctuary. It's a room adorned with carpets. a plethora of microphones, and a wall covered with old photos of Hangama and other famous Afghan stars.

The piano sits just to the side. Any times we're going through emotions or having our sad feelings, this is where our space is to express it. We have my piano here where I spend sometimes hours just playing on it. My mom has her harmonium microphone. she's on here studying music till this day learning more things she never stops studying music she's just going at it she encourages me every night this is our place and and sometimes we share with others we invite our moms my parents friends and and family we gather around we share we sing we dance all this is our joy this is our happiness what is it that inspired you to begin singing

Well, oh my goodness. I mean, since I was young, I was always watching my mom perform, right? So whether it was in front of a small crowd family or a massive concert in front of hundreds of people. And I always had this passion of music in my life. So whether it was just, again, me singing or playing piano, I always wanted to do something with music. But my family was one thing that really encouraged me to sing. Music doesn't just start from my parents. It starts from my grandparents. So it was always passed down through generations. My mom would sit me down and when we started singing, whether it was Bollywood music or Afghan music, we would sing. Then I was four years old started singing with her. Over the years, that voice blossomed.

Sargushy, kharihawa, chupkis, me cahahed, the heart, the bilbersts, not chupah. But it was in shame My eyes jugged It's humongue-gun-kun-le-le-le-le-le-le- But it wasn't serious Until like a couple years ago 2019 when we did go to Afghanistan

to Tolo TV where we recorded the first duet together, Boza Amadi. And that translates to, you've come again. And it was just, I don't know, incredible to just get this opportunity to sing with my mom. That was the first time Sarah Sarah Surur had set foot in Afghanistan. I'm not going to lie, I was always feared by it based on what I've always seen in news. Again, I'm born and raised in Canada, so my mentality of Afghanistan was not too bad, but at the same time, I had fear because people would say, oh, there's been a bombing down the street or this and this, and I would fear, be like, if I'm going to Afghanistan, is this what I'm going to witness? Is this what I'm going to see? But it wasn't really like that. It was completely opposite. The second I landed in Afghanistan, we were welcomed with open arms. And that was just the incredible experience. Did it feel like home to you at all?

It did. It did. It really did. Because the second I stepped on our dirt, how we say, Chalka Afghanistan, the dirt in our land, and it just not only the people, but it smelled like home. I don't know how to explain it. It's weird. I've never been to Afghanistan other than that time. But it was a breath of, Fresh air. It was amazing.

Juarez's father was once active in the Kabul music scene until war caught up with him too. That forced him to leave for Pakistan, then India, and then Toronto, where he continues to play music and encourage his kids to do the same. It's fair to say that you can inherit home. I think that would be a good way to explain. how I feel about it, right? I mean, that idea of that home is something that I've inherited. It's funny to use that word, actually, my name means the inheritor. Yeah, no, it's definitely something

that's passed down, right? I recognize that having never been there, there are aspects of it that I absolutely might romanticize, and I've heard about it from the stories that my dad tells me, that my mom tells me, and particularly my dad, you know, he has very, very fond memories of his days in Kabul as a student, as a young man. And, um, hearing those stories, it definitely paints this very beautiful picture. Though, of course, the reality on the ground may be very different from what he describes or what he remembers. So I would say my idea of Kabul and Kabul being home is definitely in part inherited from

what he's sort of passed down to me, but also informed by, I think, the reality that I'm aware of on the ground, right? I'm not there in person, but of course, we all follow the news. We know what's happening. I've heard stories from my mom many, many times of her situations in Afghanistan where they had to escape because of the war and what had happened and this and this. And of course, it was heartbreaking, but it was at a different time because I did not get to witness it. I did not get to see with my own eyes. It was just through my mom's words and what I had to imagine.

Kabul is a city of five million now under the control of the Taliban. Many people are hiding out of the country. country. But a slow and chaotic visa program and ill-prepared evacuation plan has caused crowds to rush Kabul's airport, halting flights and overwhelming entry points. At least 12 people are believed to have died in the gunfire and crush. But this time, because there was videos and pictures and grow some like horrible things that are done to these innocent people and it just dropped me down that I can't believe that it's possible that someone could do something like that. Take Me Away represents actually a meaning behind.

For example, if I was someone in Afghanistan, a woman in Afghanistan, a woman in Afghanistan, than dealing with the situation that was currently happening. Where would I want to be? I want to be taken away, taken to a place where I'll be free. Some days I'll be waking up lonely. So take me away to a place I'll be left by you. Take me to a place, a place where I'll be free. Not in a sense where take me away from my home,

but take me where a place where I can live, where I can speak, I can breathe. You know, these women, these children, these people in Afghanistan haven't got this opportunity. Every time there's something happening, they've been in control. And women, they had to burn down their proof of education, and forced down to do whatever the Taliban had told them to do. Their tongues are tied, and they deserve freedom.

After the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, Tabasam Niru returned in 2013 to study women's folk music, specifically women's love songs, at least at the start. As a student of anthropology and as a student of gender studies, and women's studies, I was very much struck by the Western depiction of women, Afghan women by Western authors, be it in media, be it in the books and everything. And I was so against it. And I'm like, no, you don't have to make present Afghan women so voiceless. You don't have to present Afghan women so oppressed, so depressed.

They have their own freedom. They have their own moments that they can. perform their power, exercise their power, exert their power, exert their power, but it's hidden, you do not see it. So I was very much drawn to this idea of exploring that and showing that in fact there is an aspect that women can play and women have certainly some power, if not power, but that power is different from the world that you live, from the Western cultures.

So I went to explore that. And yet, I must admit that listening to these women's stories, seeing this woman to be women who were altered by war, by lawlessness, by oppression, I changed my mind. The way of my seeing was changed. And I was like, well, yes, they do have power. Singing is a powerful way to express themselves. But in fact, they were very much confined. Confined within their own experiences. Confined within their singing.

When I was only sitting next to them, they were a little freer. So, for instance, one of the women hold her, she couldn't sing in front of women. She took me in the corn field, back in the corns, because corns are very high and no one could see us. So she sang there. Music gave these women to travel music gave these women the power to travel backward

and forward in time to transcend the limitations of their own time and place. For Juarez, that's one of the most beautiful things about music. We use both of those things, time and space, right?

sound organized in time and space to sort of try to peek behind the curtain of time and space to connect with a home that is sort of metaphysical, that is beyond the bounds of time and space, right? We see this reference a lot in the poetry of Maulana Rumi, Maulana Balchi, or known just more commonly here in the West as Rumi. Maulana Rumi references in the very opening of his Masnavi this idea of separation. He refers to the nai, or the reed flute, and he speaks of separation a lot, and how when he was sort of cut from his origin, ever since then, he's been in this state of wailing, in this state of crying out, which I think is a metaphor for the sound of the reed flute.

But that sound, that organized sound within time and space is really, I think, a vessel in its highest form, a vessel to help one connect to that which is beyond time and space, to that home which lays outside of this world and into the spiritual realm, not one that is confined. Geographies matter, right? I'm not going to say that they don't. I'm sure I would not feel at home in certain parts of the world and other places I'm. might find home in those places. But those are temporary, right? Places change. They don't remain the same forever. Cobble today is not the Kabul that my dad left. I'm sure that if he went there today, I mean, I don't know, maybe he'd like it, but maybe he would feel like a stranger. And many people who've gone back to their homelands have sort of said that when they've revisited after a very long time. It's not what it was when they left. And so recognizing the sort of temporality of physical geographies, that's what gives me all the more reason to sort of emphasize and think about the true

home, the one in the divine realm, the one beyond the physical. This is very a powerful song. This is not my song. The singer, the originally singer is Zohar Huayda. He is no more. But, and Ustot Mahwash. But I'm, sometimes I'm singing this song in concert. The meaning behind, like, one verse of the song is once they're separated,

you'll always find your way back together, back together, united and as one. Could that sentiment still figure into Afghanistan's future? Very difficult, very difficult to say this one. I don't know what I say this, but one day when all in government with women, maybe. Otherwise with men in Afghanistan. At the moment right now, if you ask any Afghan, they can't give you a straight answer because we're losing hope. We had a lot of hope.

I never thought like that. Now is, you know, hope is gone. Yeah. I'm suffering for the young girl. And so it's very sad, very sad. No countries like Afghanistan. My God. Wasn't like that.

I see the picture of home just quiet, very quiet. I remember about these songs of the Taliban, you know, they, they call it songs or taranas and it's just an ugly sound. It's just an very boring sound. A couple of men sit to each other and they just sing about the Taliban's glories, about how they defeat America. I remember that. I feel the quietness everyone quiet people don't dare to talk

women don't dare to talk would you ever go back I will yes I will one day when it's safe for me to return when there is a place for a woman like me to go and to do something

not to stay in the corner of the home I'm wondering when you watch what's happening in Afghanistan where do you where do you locate home how do you find home honestly for me in general home is where family is and the people of afghanistan is like my family and and and again with all the situation that's happening like i home is where you find peace and and i can't see peace in afghanistan at the

moment. Sometimes people say it me because you and when you're coming in TV and of course you come in my home. And I thinking you are like my family. They say it for me. People say it for me. You don't know me. A girl said in Afghanistan, you are always at my home. You are part, you are part of our family. But you don't know. know me who I am. I cried. And then I hug the girl, yeah. I said, I am also with you, always. Yeah. Of course, I'm always miss my country, my people, especially, especially the woman. Yeah. Just before we left Hangama and Sarah's home, they played a song for us.

It's called Mehan Watan. It's for the homeland. I am in love with the name of our country. Yeah. You were once a country that you had freedom. I will risk my life for you. You are my everything? Yeah.

The name of our country is. our belief, is our hope. Both the each seem as. And it's just repeated. Yes. It's beautiful. Very, very, very good. You both have such gorgeous voice.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So what a treat. On ideas, you were listening to The Way Home. It's the last part of our series, The Idea of Home. This episode was produced by Pauline Holtzworth

and by me, Nala Ayyed, with production assistance from Taiy O'Bara. Many thanks to all of our guests. Lisa Yuso is the web producer of Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukshic. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayyad.