Forsaken
By Lana Šlezić
House of Anansi Press
Lana Šlezić travelled to Afghanistan in 2004 with a “knapsack full of naïveté”—a
knapsack that included the belief that Afghan women were living in a post-burka and
less oppressive environment. The horrors Šlezić was instead confronted with led her to
turn her six-week assignment into a two-year one, and the result is a book of stunning
and sometimes gruesome images.
Collarbones, fiercely alluring eyes and red fingernails are revealed through the
shadows of delicate lace and the incisive daylight of darkened rooms. It is as though
the beauty of these women can only be found in furtive glimpses, rendering it
seductively transfixing against the often harsh backgrounds of concrete ruins and
peeling paint. In this context, the whip scars on an 11-year-old girl’s back or the bloody
sheet atop a gorgeous woman thought to be an honour-killing victim become another
artful addition to the milieu of defiant femininity amid the omnipresent brutality of a
war zone.
And if the photos don’t do enough to convey Šlezić’s stumbled-upon truth, the
photos are accompanied by six short, journal-like stories. Two of these stories mention
women who have lit, or allegedly lit, themselves on fire—a common suicide method
and potent metaphor for their desperation. To those who believed an invasion would
free Afghan women from patriarchal oppression, Forsaken is a rather disturbing wakeup
call.
—Wendy Glauser
