‘The Taliban passed a death sentence on my mother’

Dominic Cavendish
Tue, October 5, 2021

Géhane Strehler plays Fariba in The Boy with Two Hearts - Jorge Lizalde Cano

When Afghan women were filmed demanding their rights on the streets of Kabul in August after the Taliban swept in to take power, many watched with detached admiration. But for one man those scenes stirred very personal memories of a lone woman’s courage in the face of Taliban oppression years ago.

Hamed Amiri was 10 when, in 2000, his mother – Fariba – incurred the wrath of the Taliban by speaking out in favour of women’s equality.

Her speech, in a school playground in Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city, in front of hundreds of women, changed his life. The occasion features in a memoir he wrote, published last year, which describes in heart-stopping detail his family’s ensuing journey, lasting more than a year, to reach the UK. His mother, father, younger brother Hessam, and older brother Hussein all made it here safely.


It was a case of flee or face the worst – a death sentence was swiftly pronounced on his mother by the local mullah, whom the family dubbed “the executioner” – “He had turned our local football pitch into a place of execution.”

What was her “crime”? “There was nothing aggressive about what she said,” he tells me. “She said that women should have a career, and be able to go out on their own. Education was non-existent for girls and that frustrated mum. She mentored girls, and tried to tell them to follow their aspirations, but they went on to get married at a young age and she got more and more frustrated. Eventually she said: ‘enough is enough. I’m going to talk about it.’ The audience that day dared defiance, clapping and cheering.”

Meeting me in his adoptive hometown of Cardiff, now 31 but still quite baby-faced, Amiri reflects – understandably cautiously, given that he still has family in Afghanistan – on the parallels between events today, and those of a generation ago. “I had the feeling ‘That’s what my mum did’. I think her speech 20 years ago may have had a long-lasting impact. Here were women again standing up for freedom and for equal rights.”

Fariba (Géhane Strehler) demands freedom for Afghan women in The Boy with Two Hearts - Jorge Lizalde Cano

The Boy with Two Hearts, the memoir Amiri penned while successfully working in the IT sector, reached a wider audience through Radio 4’s Book of the Week. It has now been turned into a play, premiering this week at the Wales Millennium Centre.

Which means that during rehearsals, and for the duration of the run, Amiri is able to watch an actor play his younger self, and other cast-members bring to life his close family: including crucially his older brother Hussein – who gave the book its title. The first heart is Hussein’s defective one, which fatally gave up in 2018, the second the figurative heart of gold that Amiri hopes to build a positive legacy from.

“It’s bizarre seeing the younger version of me. I do feel as if my brother’s essence is in the room. Perhaps it’s part of the grieving process but I feel he’s up there smiling, and I hope he’s proud of me introducing him to people.” He and his brother Hessam have been “in pieces”, he says, watching rehearsals; his mother and father – a former owner of a pharmacy – are weighing whether they can handle coming to see the show.

Such was the esteem in which the stoical, good-natured Hussein was held that when he died, some 40 hospital staff visited the bedside to pay him their respects. The book honours him and the bond between the three brothers (played here by actors of Afghan origin), showing it strengthened by adversity. But its main achievement is to put you in the shoes of a child facing constant peril and uncertainty, the family at the mercy of human traffickers and having more close shaves than the average Bond film.

Such ordeals as being robbed of all their money twice, getting stuffed into car-boots, and confined to containers and lorries for hours become nightmarishly real. It’s the kind of journey many will be risking in the wake of the Taliban takeover. “We could be telling a story that’s happening right now,” Amiri says. “And I hope people will better understand the journeys that refugees who’ve made it here have gone on.”

The Amiri family's journey as told on stage - Jorge Lizalde Cano

After they reached the UK – going the extra mile at the risk of life and limb on account of Hussein’s particular medical needs – it took years for Amiri to learn to trust people; it was the kindness that NHS staff showed his brother which brought him out of that state.

“I was so defensive I got into trouble at school. I never wanted anyone to help me. That was the impact of being on that journey and losing faith in humanity.” Of the many hair-raising moments he faced as the family went to Moscow, then on to Austria via Ukraine and Poland, winding up in a migrant camp in Calais, it was the attempt to get into a Channel-bound lorry through a hole cut in its roof that stays with him most.

“There was a moment when the lorry started moving away and I thought I was going to fall off the roof and die. You hear people say that your life flashes in front of your eyes at such times. As I was falling backwards I had the sensation that in my head I was saying goodbye to them, ‘I hope you get to the UK, carry on’. I can’t explain it but it was as if at the age of 10 I had made peace with saying goodbye to my family.” In the nick of time, his father reached up, grabbed him by the foot and pulled him inside.

Hamed Amiri at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff

He keeps an eye on the situation but shies away from blaming the return of the Taliban and humanitarian crisis on the UK or US. “It was mishandled and could have been planned better. But I’m not saying it was betrayal or abandonment. The Afghan government had years to make sure the right structures were in place.”

His relatives give him updates. “I asked my uncle for his thoughts. He said: ‘I was here when they were here the first time, I’m still going to stay here.’ Though it’s 20 years on, Amiri can remember what it was like as a child under Taliban rule.

“When you grow up in that environment, you realise how life is – you’ve got to be careful who to speak to, the guys with the AK47s are the rulers and you can’t argue with them. You develop coping mechanisms, otherwise you’d lose your mind.”

All the same, when asked to contemplate what lies ahead for Afghanistan he tries to accentuate the positives – as he knows his older brother would have done. “I’ve got to have hope that there will be some peace and prosperity and that it won’t be like last time. And this play is finally a story of family, hope and unity. I want people to watch it and walk away feeling some of that.”

The Boy with Two Hearts runs at the Wales Millennium Centre until October 23. Info: wmc.org.uk