Her story is uplifting, from Herat, Afghanistan, where she was born in 1996, to Utah, in the United States, where she took refuge at the age of 14. Twice, she escaped a forced marriage to an adult, sold by her own family. And since then, she has fought with her weapons – rap – against child labor, forced marriages, the renunciation of dreams… Sonita Alizada (or Alizadeh) will be in Caen in June as part of the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of Landing. Incredible destiny for a young woman of 27 years old today.
His young years were marked by fear of the Taliban and hunger. Born in Herat in 1996, she was around five years old when she fled with her parents and seven brothers and sisters, without papers, to Iran. “We thought that life would be easier there, without war, but it was very difficult to be accepted because of the image of the Afghans,” recalls Sonita Alizada in an interview with AFP. There too, there was a ban on going to school: “I shined shoes with my brothers then I sold flowers.” His first lucky star is a woman who clandestinely teaches girls to read and write in a mosque.
Back in Afghanistan, his ill father dies. She is 10 years old and her wedding is planned there. Then canceled when she returns to Iran. There, Sonita meets an association that allows her to take guitar lessons in secret… and encourages her to write after winning a poetry prize.
One day, the young girl heard the star rapper Eminem and, without understanding the lyrics, thought it was “probably the best way to share a story.” The young girl writes Brides for sale. “Like all girls, I’m in a cage, I’m just a sheep raised to devour,” she sings, in a wedding dress, barcode and bruises on her face. “Reread the Quran! He doesn’t say women are for sale.” Posted on the internet, the video was viewed more than 8,000 times on the first day.
His mother, married at 12 and illiterate, forbade him from rapping. She even wants to send her back to Afghanistan to marry her in turn. Against 9,000 dollars. Iranian documentary filmmaker Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami, who spotted her, paid her family $2,000, which granted her six months’ reprieve in Iran. An American NGO then suggested that he study in the United States. She seizes her chance.
Across the Atlantic, the beginnings are difficult for someone who only knows how to say “hi, I’m a rapper” in English. She arrives in Utah, a state which has reclassified polygamy as a simple crime under pressure from the Mormon community, and discovers that in the United States, too, marriages of minors exist. More than 300,000 minors, the vast majority girls, were married between 2000 and 2018 in the United States.
Sonita Alizada decided to tell her story in schools, all the way to the popular Sundance American Film Festival, where the documentary dedicated to her, Sonita, won the jury prize in 2016.
Sonita Alizada, who graduated last year in human rights and music in New York, now wants to study politics at Oxford. “Art and politics go together. All my music is about politics, about making a difference, about giving hope, about awareness. So I try to raise awareness through music,” underlines the woman who hopes, one day, to be able to take an active part in the future of her country.
In 2021, the young rapper won the Freedom Prize, created by the International Institute of Human Rights and Peace and the Normandy region. Three years later, on June 4, the young artist will sing Stand up with locals and the clip of the song, filmed on the landing beaches, will be broadcast in front of veterans of the Second World War.
“Always angry”, she continues to defend with rap and on social networks freedom in all its forms: to education, to express oneself, to choose one’s partner. She also set up two projects in Afghanistan to help children and women. Having become his biggest admirer, his mother appears in his music video Run Boy, which is about the Taliban trying to prevent girls from going to school.