adminthe nation’s first female rapper. Her lyrics though are not unfamiliar to many of her fellow countrywomen, she raps about rape, abuse and atrocities that Afghan women have endured during decades of war in a country gripped by poverty.
“My raps are about the sufferings of women in my country, the pains of the war that we have endured and the atrocities of the war’’ Feroz told AFP in an interview in the office of a local company that is helping her record her first album.
Like most fellow Afghans, the 23-year-old says her life is filled with bitterness, memories of war, bombing and refugee camps in neighbouring Iran and Pakistan.
She was taken to Pakistan as a child by her parents and later to Iran escaping a bloody civil war at home in 1990s. Two years after the 2001 US-led invasion of her war-scarred nation that toppled the Taliban the then-teenager returned home with her family. She worked as a carpet weaver with her other siblings for a living until she discovered her new talent. She was told that rap and hip- hop had become a way for many artists around the world to express daily hardships in their lives. Feroz says: “If rap singing is a way to tell your miseries’’ Afghans have a lot to say.
“That’s why I chose to be a rapper.”
She recalls her woes at Iranian refugee camps in her first recorded piece of music “Our Neighbours” which has been posted on YouTube and viewed nearly 100 000 times:
“What happened to us in the neighbouring country? We became the dirty Afghan’’.
“At their bakeries we were pushed at the back of the queue.”
“The lyrics are borne from personal experience,’’ Feroz said. “As a child when I was going to bring bread from our neighbourhood bakery, the Iranians would tell me ‘go back’ you dirty Afghan’,”
“I would be the last one in the line to get my bread,’’ she said.
Millions of Afghans still live in Iran and Pakistan’’ which together hosted about seven million refugees after the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. – AFP.
Online Reporter