I belong to Mohmand Agency—now merged district—but my family later moved to Charsadda. Because we lived on the border between two districts, my domicile ended up in Mardan. Each time someone asks me where are you from, I am reminded of Elif Shafak’s words in her book The Island of Missing Trees: “People from troubled islands can never be normal. We can pretend, we can even make amazing progress – but we can never really learn to feel safe. The ground that feels rock hard to others is choppy waters for our kind.”

The so-called war on terror left deep scars on our bodies and lands. My elder brother studied at the historic Islamia Collegiate boarding school, and I still remember my mother’s anxious face every time he and my cousin left for Peshawar. She would not breathe easy until they reached their hostel, because bombings in the city had become routine. Our family barely escaped death on multiple occasions. My uncle, Bakhtyar Kaka—our cricket team’s heart—was killed by “unknown” assailants in a bomb blast. Another uncle narrowly survived a terrorist attack on the Peshawar High Court, though his car was damaged; to this day he carries the invisible wounds of that moment. Later, during my ninth-grade year at Peshawar Model School in Charsadda, the Bacha Khan University attack unfolded just miles away. A cousin studying there, and another uncle who was an assistant professor, barely made it out alive.

By the time I entered university, my life had already been shaped—materially, psychologically, and emotionally—by violence. Yet what wounded me most was not only the bombings but the way Pashtun identity itself was cast under suspicion. If you admitted you were from FATA, or if your accent betrayed you, people looked at you with mistrust. Pashtun bodies were reduced to threats—either dangerous militants or sacrificial patriots, fit only for dying.

At the University of Peshawar, I met teachers who changed my path. Azmat Khan first nurtured my love for reading, and later Dr. Faizullah Jan and Dr. Irfan Ashraf introduced me to critical inquiry. Around this time, I read Hermann Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel and was struck by the passage: “How well little Giebenrath had come along! He'd given up playing games and running about almost of his own accord, he no longer burst out in stupid laughter during lectures, and he had even let himself be persuaded to abandon his gardening, his rabbits and silly fishing.” Like Giebenrath, I had been forced into premature seriousness, but through study I began to reclaim my own path.

In those years, I came to see how dominant representations of Pashtuns were shaped. Colonial writings had cast us as primitive warriors, violent and untamable. The Pakistani state and its media inherited and recycled these same tropes, leaving little room for Pashtuns as thinkers, poets, lovers, or builders of life. Pashtun Land has been turned into a war empire by Pakistani military and militants. 

This paper grows from that journey. It is both a personal attempt to challenge the narratives that scarred my childhood and an effort to imagine a more hopeful future for my people.