BARRY SADID

MA HISTORY, SOAS UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

I chose to study History at SOAS for my MA to devote myself to the study of Afghan history in particular.

The writing of our history is made hard by our history itself, both the ongoing 43-year war and the deep inequalities that preceded it - like Afghanistan’s restricted literacy, leaving written documents produced mostly by a privileged few. The personal and public literature that does exist is mutilated and war-struck: correspondence lost in migration, buried night letters, destroyed government records, writing left in the hands of diaspora descendants incapable of reading it. We can barely write the histories of our own families.

Through my studies I want to write the history of my own family, and work with other Afghans towards tools - like oral history - that we can creatively apply to our context, and other war-struck contexts like ours, bakhayr.