A CUNY Professor’s Quest to Rescue Her ‘Literary Family’ from the Taliban
In the aftermath of this summer’s U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the return to power of the Taliban, thousands of Afghan families are still trying to evacuate their country and come to the United States. Zohra Saed (left), a poet, editor and distinguished professor at Macaulay Honors College who was born in Afghanistan, has rallied her literary peers and friends in New York’s community of Central Asian immigrants to rescue one such imperiled family — a writer, his sister and father and nine other relatives, including children — who are all now in hiding. Saed enlisted one of her former students, Mayha Ghouri, a CUNY Law School graduate who is now an immigration attorney, to file applications for emergency visas that would allow them to evacuate and enter the United States. Saed and Ghouri join the CUNYcast to tell their dramatic story. RELATED LINKS ‘My Homeland’: A Poet’s Quest to Help a Family Flee Afghanistan (The New York Times) * CUNY Lecturer Mounts High-Stakes Effort to Help Imperiled Writer and His Family Flee Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan (CUNY News) * Explainer: Humanitarian Parole and the Afghan Evacuation (National Immigration Forum) * Contribute to the UpSet Press fundraising campaign for family’s evacuations * Afghanistan conflict background (Council on Foreign Relations) * About UpSet Press * About Neighbors Link EPISODE TRANSCRIPT RICK FIRSTMAN: This summer, when the U.S. started withdrawing from Afghanistan and the Taliban were quickly seizing control, Zohra Saed’s thoughts turned to the fate of one family. Zohra was born in Afghanistan, came to New York, earned three CUNY degrees, and now she’s a poet and editor and a professor at Macaulay Honors College. Three years ago, she began working with a writer in northern Afghanistan to translate the folk poems he’d been collecting and publish them in a book. But the Taliban’s return to power had her worried about him, as well as his sister and father and the rest of their family. In various ways, they’d been active in the modernization of Afghanistan that now made them targets of the Taliban. They had to get out. From her apartment in Brooklyn, Professor Saed set out to help the family, 12 people in all including children. She mobilized her social network of literary peers and friends in New York’s community of Central Asian immigrants. Then she enlisted one of her former students, Mayha Ghouri, a CUNY Law School graduate who is an immigration attorney, to file applications for visas under an emergency process that would allow the family to come to the United States. She has raised thousands of dollars for their application fees and travel expenses as the family remains in hiding and on the run in Afghanistan. I’m pleased to have both Zohra Saed and Mayha Ghouri here on the CUNYCast to talk about their quest. Zohra, I’d like to start with you and your own history, which is part of this story. Tell me about your family and your own journey to the United States.
