I woke up this morning thinking about BBC’s Our Girl (2013), horrified and unsettled at the fact that I used to enjoy watching it.1 Now I’m forcing you to witness me unscramble my thoughts via this newsletter post.
The Islamophobia runs rampant in this show. It really does. It’s fucking annoying that it does because the two leads have such good chemistry. But enough about them, they are capital-L losers.
As written in my previous articles, stories that explore the Middle East usually either glamourise or patronise war, conflict and the people involved in it. Through racist characterisation and storytelling, they will perpetuate the colonial mentality that deems White people as bringers of civilisation and peace.
This is definitely the case in Our Girl: Captain James and Molly Dawes are the White Saviours who fall in love while trying to save Afghanistan from itself.
Towards the middle of season 1, Molly makes friends with a young Afghan girl who is portrayed through a White feminist lens, with no consideration of the cultural or religious context she exists in. The young girls’ story is as follows: Muslim men are evil and hijabs are oppressive.2 The end.
What’s worse is that this little girl is just a plot device so Molly looks sweet and motherly to James as well as to the audience. But get this, right, James has a fucking wife and child back in England. But Molly’s so selfless and empathetic (as we can see through her interactions with Fragile Oppressed Muslim Girl) he just has to blow up his entire life to be with her.
The more I think about it, the more I believe there was absolutely no reason this show’s setting or exposition had to be in, or related to, Afghanistan in any way. The show never makes any kind of nuanced critical commentary about the legacies of proxy wars in the Middle East or its contemporary conflicts. Instead, the story revolving around ‘dangers’ in the Middle East was because the writers wanted to add stakes to the love story and allow the characters’ saviour complexes to kick in for the sake of drama.
While pondering the insanity of this show I was convinced that it was somehow funded by the British army. Not quite, according to my hours of Googling, but my research did reveal that the British Army and Our Girl teamed up for at least a couple of marketing stunts for the Army’s Facebook page. Sinister, to say the least.
This interview with creator Tony Grounds also reinforces how no Afghan perspectives were taken into account in the making of season 1, nor was there involvement of any Afghan person behind the scenes. Tony just woke up one day and decided to make shit up.
The UK’s role in Afghanistan spans years. Significantly, Aljazeera reported in 2022 that “commandos in the United Kingdom’s elite Special Air Service (SAS) corps killed at least 54 Afghans in suspicious circumstances during a six-month tour of Helmand province from November 2010 to May 2011”. A BBC investigation also revealed that this was purposefully hidden within the military chain of command. What is more, weapons were also planted on unarmed Afghan men to “justify the crimes”.
The BBC (the same network responsible for funding Our Girl) similarly reported that “when British special forces raided a family home in Afghanistan in 2012, they killed two young parents and gravely wounded their infant sons”.
I felt it was particularly relevant to critically discuss Our Girl now within the context of the Gaza solidarity encampments spreading globally, echoing anti-war movements from the 60s and 80s. Catalysed by the encampments at Columbia University, students and staff from all over the world have been protesting to demand an immediate ceasefire and for “their universities to divest from any firms complicit in Israeli abuses”.
It has been reported that over 2,000 students have been arrested by authorities so far in the US, with videos of police officers arresting unarmed protestors in both the US and Europe sweeping across social media.
As I write this, my alma mater — The London School of Economics and Political Science — has been declared complicit in the genocide of Palestinian people. As I write this my friend has set up camp inside the university’s Marshall Building for a second night. As I write this all I can think about is how brave these students are and how much is at stake.
It needs to be said and I’ll gladly be the one say it: I’ve had enough of stories that dehumanise structurally marginalised people and fail to make nuanced commentary on state-sponsored conflict. The courage of strangers, oceans apart, risking their lives to save each other are the stories we should be tuning into.
You can learn more about the LSE student encampment here.
Do NOT watch this show.
For some further reading, Binazir Haidari wrote a poem calling out the double standards of France’s hijab ban. My ex-colleague Safa Ahmed also wrote a beautiful piece about how the US failed Afghanistan here.