KABUL BEAUTY SALON

Frishta Amini and Anne Chaon

(Michel Lafon, 208 pages, 2023)

August 15, 2021: Frishta, a young beautician, is busy at work in one of Kabul’s upscale beauty salons when she hears shouts, stampeding, and the screech of metal curtains closing down. The Taliban . . . they have entered Kabul! A wind of panic seizes the female clientele and employees, silences the music, the blow dryers, and the chatter. Some women burst into tears; others are stunned into silence.

This vivid scene opens Frista Amini’s compelling account of her life. We follow her from Pakistan, where she first experiences exile as a teen, to Kabul, where she establishes herself as a working independent woman. For the entire year following the Taliban’s return, she and her colleagues daily brave the streets to serve their wealthy clientele in a semi-clandestine manner. The beauty salon remains a light in the darkness, but one that fades by the day. Thanks to two French female investigative journalists she encounters, she is able to flee to France—an opportunity that was not offered to her brother, Jawid, who underwent a seven-year arduous journey to leave Afghanistan, making his way to through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Germany, and finally ending up in Paris where sister and brother at last reunite.

Intimate and eloquent, Kabul Beauty Salon is the testimony of a young Afghan woman struggling to follow her dreams and flourish in the profession she loves while remaining a devoted daughter and sister amid Afghanistan’s tumultuous decades of war, conflict, and occupation.

Frishta Amini took refuge in Paris in September 2022. She obtained her residence permit in May 2023, and did everything possible to realize her dream: opening her own beauty salon.

Anne Chaon, head of the Istanbul bureau at Agence France-Presse, was AFP’s correspondent in Kabul from 2016 to 2021. She is the author of numerous reports on Afghanistan.