ABSTRACT
The first thing I noticed upon entering many RAWA houses, especially those in Pakistan, was the bareness of the space. There were usually no knickknacks, no personal items, no family photographs, and as in many Afghan homes, little if any furniture. In part this is in keeping with the austerity of RAWA members’ lives. But these houses also have the appearance of being only a temporary home, which in Pakistan is often the case in both the long and the short term. As refugees, even RAWA members who have lived most of their lives in Pakistan are always planning for the day they will return to Afghanistan, their real home, and as members of an underground organization, they move from house to house frequently. Repeatedly, however, there was one item that interrupted the starkness of the rooms-the image of Meena, RAWA’s martyred founding leader. Often this was not a framed portrait, but a photo reprint or a picture clipped from a magazine then taped to the wall.
