Sonita Alizadeh managed to escape the marriage arranged by her family and now sings to shed light on the dire conditions of Afghan women.
Sonita Alizadeh is an eighteen-year-old Afghan girl. She now lives and studies in the United States at the Wasatch Academy of the Arts, where she dreams of becoming a lawyer. But throughout her life, Sonita has had to endure a series of uprooting moves.
Her family fled the war in Afghanistan to settle in Tehran, the capital of Iran, when she was just 8 years old. Since Sonita was an undocumented Afghan refugee, she had no right to an education. That is why she began attending a non-profit organisation which, as well as giving her access to schooling, taught her how to make music.
Thanks to the NGO, the girl soon developed a passion for rap. After meeting a young Iranian filmmaker, she began creating music videos and her tracks quickly achieved considerable success. When Sonita had started to believe in her dream, however, she was given devastating news. She would have to return to Afghanistan with her mother: there, a man was ready to marry her for $9,000, and the family needed that money to pay for her brother's wedding.
At that point Sonita expressed her protest in the way she does best: she wrote the song Brides for sale.
The track begins like this:
Let me whisper, so no one will hear me speaking of girls being sold. My voice must not be heard because it goes against Sharia. Women must remain silent… this is our tradition.
In the video, Sonita is dressed as a bride, her face covered in bruises, a barcode on her forehead, as she pleads with her family not to sell her.
The young rapper immediately caused a great deal of talk, especially in her home country. And it is from there that her long journey begins: NoorJahan Akbar, from the Kabul-based organisation WLUML (Women Living Under Muslim Laws), sends the video to her Indonesian colleague Elie Calhoun. Elie posts it on Facebook, where it is seen by Cori Stern, co-founder of The Strongheart Group – a US project that aims to help young ambassadors of change amplify their voice.
From that moment Sonita's music spreads like wildfire: Mr Loftin of Wasatch Academy offers Sonita a scholarship; Laurie Michaels, a supporter of Strongheart, begins to firmly believe in the girl's potential and helps her continue her studies.
Sonita's extraordinary story has also been documented in a film: Sonita is a traveling swallow by Iranian director Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami, which will be released next autumn, and Sonita is ready to bring her experience on the subject of early and forced marriage to wider audiences because, as she recounted in an interview published on pri.org:
Rap allows you to tell your story to other people. It's a platform for sharing the words that are in my heart.
On the Stoneheart website they write:
Sonita Alizadeh is a force to be reckoned with. She is a very powerful voice for the right of girls and women to choose their own destiny (…) Her music has become a battle cry for many girls throughout Afghanistan.
And so it is: despite a presidential decree existing in Afghanistan since 2009 (not yet ratified by Parliament into law) on the elimination of violence against women, which prohibits forced marriages, the phenomenon has not diminished and the tradition of giving away young girls to settle family disputes or for money remains deeply entrenched.