对抗塔利班的壁球冠军 图帕凯瓦齐尔

A few weeks ago, I met a young squash champion at a conference in Manhattan called “Women in the World”. Normally, that would not excite me, since I am not much of a sports fan.

不久前，我在曼哈顿的“当今女性”(Women in the World)会议上遇到一位年轻的壁球冠军。通常，这不会令我雀跃，因为我并不是个体育迷。

But this particular woman, Maria Toorpakai Wazir, left me feeling profoundly humbled; indeed, after chatting with her I will never look at a racquet in the same way again.

但这一位女性，玛丽亚•图帕凯•瓦齐尔(Maria Toorpakai Wazir)却让我深感卑微；真的，跟她聊过后，我再也不会像过去那样看待壁球这项运动了。

Twenty-five years ago, Toorpakai was born in Waziristan, a mountainous, tribal corner of north-west Pakistan that is struggling with Islamist fundamentalism. As it happens, this is close to the birthplace of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot by the Taliban in 2012 because she was attending school (she survived and later won the Nobel Peace Prize for championing female education). Toorpakai, like Malala, grew up chafing at the oppression she saw. So much so that when she was five years old, she refused to wear girls’ clothes.

25年前，图帕凯在瓦济里斯坦(Waziristan)出生。该地位于巴基斯坦西北部，是一个过着部落生活的山区，在伊斯兰原教旨主义的困扰下一直生存艰难。无独有偶，马拉拉•优萨福扎伊(Malala Yousafzai)也出生在这附近。因坚持上学，这位巴基斯坦女学生在2012年遭到塔利班的枪击（马拉拉活了下来，后来因捍卫妇女教育权利而获得诺贝尔和平奖)。与马拉拉一样，图帕凯从小就目睹着社会对女性的压迫，并感到愤愤不平。于是当她5岁时，就拒绝再穿上女装。

“I wanted to hang out just like my brothers,” she recalls. “They were running around, and wrestling, and I thought I would be just like them. So I tossed all my girly clothes in a fire [and] cut my hair.”

“我想像我的兄弟们一样出去玩，”她回忆说，“他们跑来跑去，互相打闹，我认为自己也能和他们一样。于是我把自己的女孩衣服全都扔进火里，还把头发剪了。”

Initially, her family was horrified. But, eventually, her father, Shamsum Quayyum Wazir, let her do some weightlifting, dressed as a boy and using the nickname “Genghis Khan” — and she won some competitions.

起初，她的家人吓坏了。但后来，父亲沙姆斯姆•加尧姆•瓦齐尔(Shamsum Quayyum Wazir)允许她练习举重，女扮男装，化名“成吉思汗(Genghis Khan)” ——她逐渐在一些比赛中脱颖而出。

Then, when her family moved to Peshawar, Toorpakai tried squash too, a popular sport in Pakistan. “Genghis” proved even better at that, and she started winning (boys’) championships. But when the organisers asked to see her birth certificate, she was exposed as a girl — and the Taliban threatened to kill her for the “crime” of wearing shorts.

后来，她们家搬到白沙瓦(Peshawar)，图帕凯也试着玩巴基斯坦流行的壁球。事实证明她更擅长这项运动，并开始在（男子）比赛中获胜。然而，当主办方要求她出示出生证明后，她的女儿身暴露了——塔利班威胁要处死她，“罪名”是穿着短裤。

She tried to face the Taliban down. The government even posted snipers on the squash courts to protect her. But Toorpakai became haunted by a vision of exploding glass. “I wasn’t scared for myself,” she said. “I was scared for everyone out there, because if I [went] to a squash court, it was going to get blown up.”

她试图直面塔利班的威胁。政府甚至在壁球场安插了狙击手来保护她。但渐渐地，球场爆炸、玻璃飞溅的景象老是浮现在她的想象中。“我并不担心自己，”她说，“我担心的是球场里的人，因为如果我去某个球场，它很有可能会炸掉。”

So, eventually, she gave up, and then spent several years as a teenager trapped at home, endlessly hitting balls against the walls. To pass the time, she wrote “thousands” of emails to squash champions around the world, asking for support. One day, Jonathon Power, a Canadian squash luminary, answered her call. And, as Toorpakai turned 20, she entered the professional circuit in Canada. She is now ranked 56 in the world and number one in Pakistan (although the latter ranking is somewhat academic, since she can no longer actually play there).

因此，最终，她放弃了。接下来的几年，她困在家中，没完没了地对着墙壁击球。为了打发时间，她写了“数千”封电子邮件，向世界各地的壁球冠军求助。直到某一天，加拿大壁球名将乔纳森•鲍尔(Jonathon Power)回应了她。于是，当图帕凯年满20岁时，她进入了加拿大职业巡回赛。目前她在世界排名第56位，在巴基斯坦排名第一（虽然后项排名有些空谈，因为她已不能在当地比赛）。

In some senses, this is a profoundly depressing story. Three decades ago, I worked as a charity volunteer in north-west Pakistan during a gap year and, while it was conservative, back then it was also a society of great kindness, courtesy and hospitality. As a teenage girl, I moved fairly freely, albeit wearing a headscarf. But now, as Toorpakai’s story shows, this sense of civility has been ripped apart by the war(s) in next-door Afghanistan, by corruption in the Pakistani state and by a rising tide of Islamist fundamentalism. It is a sad indictment of a national dream gone wrong.

在某种意义上，这是一个让人深感沮丧的故事。30年前，我利用间隔年在巴基斯坦西北部做慈善志愿者，那时，当地虽然守旧，但却是一个民风纯朴、礼貌好客的社会。虽然要戴着头巾，但十几岁的我仍然行动自如。而现在，图帕凯的故事却显示出，邻邦阿富汗的战乱、巴基斯坦政府的腐败以及伊斯兰原教旨主义崛起的浪潮，已将这种彬彬有礼的感觉粉碎殆尽。这反映的是对一个民族梦想的破灭，令人悲哀。

Yet Toorpakai’s story is also uplifting: if nothing else, it shows the courage that people sometimes display in the face of horror. And this is not just on the part of Toorpakai; her parents have also been extremely brave. And that highlights a crucial point that can be forgotten by feminists or at “women’s” conferences: that whenever a story emerges about a woman who has escaped from religious oppression, there is often a brave man involved too.

然而，图帕凯的故事也有鼓舞人心之处：它表现出人们在面对恐惧时，有时展现出的勇气。不仅图帕凯相当勇敢，她的父母亦然。它还突出了一个女权主义者和“女性”会议可能会忽视的关键点：一个女人逃脱宗教压迫的故事里，往往有一个英勇的男人。

If you are a father in a place such as Waziristan or Peshawar today, it takes guts to permit your daughter to defy the gender convention. The behaviour of women is deemed crucial for family “honour”. As an anthropologist might say, the cultural identity of the community is embedded in female behaviour, and any breach of the rules is viewed as a symbolic threat. Yet Toorpakai says that her father was “very supportive” of her desire to hit squash balls. “He believes in equality,” she insists. The same is true of Malala’s father: he took the brave decision to let her attend school.

如果你是一位父亲，身处瓦济里斯坦或白沙瓦这样的地方，允许女儿反抗性别传统需要极大的勇气。那里的人普遍认为，妇女的举止对家族的“颜面”至关重要。人类学家或许会说，群体的文化认同植根于女性的言行，对规则的任何触犯都被视为一种象征性的威胁。然而图帕凯却说，她父亲“非常支持”她打壁球的意愿。“父亲相信平等，”她坚称。马拉拉的父亲也是如此：勇敢地让女儿去上学。

So the next time I see a squash racquet, I will silently salute girls such as Malala and Maria Toorpakai — and be profoundly grateful for the freedom that women take for granted in the west. But I will also pay tribute to Shamsum Quayyum Wazir and the other (largely invisible) men who have been willing to break with convention. Without them, Toorpakai’s tale would not have had a happy(ish) end; and sadly this is rare.

所以下次我再看到壁球拍，我会默默向马拉拉和玛利亚•图帕凯这样的女孩们致敬——并由衷感激自己享有的自由，虽然它已被西方女性视作理所当然。我还会向沙姆斯姆•加尧姆•瓦齐尔及其他（基本默默无名的）男人致敬，他们愿意冲破习俗，没有他们，图帕凯的故事不会有圆满结局。很遗憾，这样的故事结局圆满的寥寥无几。