From PILGRIMAGE Playwright Humaira Ghilzai
With the world premiere of Pilgrimage, Humaira Ghilzai becomes the first female playwright of Afghan descent to receive a professional production in the U.S. Humaira has long been the leading cultural consultant for American plays, TV series and films featuring Afghan stories and characters. In this short essay, she lets us in on her inspirations behind this moving and often funny play.
My family immigrated to the Bay Area in 1980 after fleeing Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion. We lost everything and had to start over as political asylees. That early experience of displacement shaped every part of who I am today, including my work as a writer, activist, and cultural advocate.
In 2015, I made a pilgrimage to Mecca with my aunt Mayen and a group of lively Afghan-American women. I was one of the youngest in the group, which meant I enjoyed the attention of all the aunties I picked up along the way. The journey was both a bonding experience with elders in my community and an awakening to the generational trauma woven through our lives. That experience became the seed from which Pilgrimage took root.
When I went on the pilgrimage, it was to satisfy a curiosity I’d carried as a child in a Muslim family. I approached the journey with an open mind and a deep desire to connect to my inherited religion. Many people in my family and community were very excited about the journey so I decided to blog about the experience as I went, and to my surprise, my readers — Muslims and non-Muslims alike — showed intense curiosity about the journey. Each post sparked vibrant questions, conversations and at times skeptics. The more questions people asked, the more compelled I felt to share honestly and vulnerably.
When I returned home, the interest didn’t fade so I created a presentation which I called “Pilgrimage to Mecca As a Secular Woman”. I was invited as a guest speaker to Century Club of San Francisco, the Stanford Women’s Club, and other community groups where people sat raptured by what I was sharing. The most common comment, “I didn’t know that women were allowed to do the pilgrimage with men.” The curiosity and thirst to better understand this often-misunderstood journey made me realize I could do more with my experience through storytelling that wasn’t just about me. During the COVID lockdown, I reached out to playwright Bridgette Dutta Portman, and together we began shaping Pilgrimage for the stage.
The dissonance in the play between the characters’ interpretations of Islam and the religion’s core teachings intentionally mirrors something I’ve seen repeatedly in immigrant communities: when cultural and religious ties are disrupted by displacement, a divide often forms between lived experience and inherited doctrine.
I also hope this production creates space to acknowledge the current reality facing Afghan women living under gender apartheid, where religion is manipulated to justify systemic oppression.
Collaborating with Bridgette, who shares my commitment to nuanced Muslim representation and LGBTQ+ inclusion, has been a gift. She has studied Arabic, is married to a South Asian man, and has long felt connected to immigrant communities.
This play also marks a personal milestone: I am the first Afghan-American woman to have a play professionally produced in the United States. That recognition is meaningful not only to me, but to the many Afghan women whose stories have been overlooked, flattened, or left untold. I carry their voices with me.
Outside of theater, my work has long focused on cultural preservation and education. I co-founded the Afghan Friends Network to support girls’ education in Ghazni, Afghanistan and to foster cultural exchange between communities in Afghanistan, the Afghan diaspora in the Bay Area, and allies seeking to better understand the plight of the Afghan people. I launched the Hayward/Ghazni Sister City Project, and for 15 years I wrote about Afghan food and culture on my blog, Afghan Culture Unveiled. As a cultural advisor for stage and screen — including The Kite Runner on Broadway and the West End — I’ve spent the past 17 years working to ensure Afghan stories are portrayed with truth and cultural integrity.
The Bay Area is home to one of the largest Afghan communities in the United States. I hope Pilgrimage opens space for reflection on our past, fosters dialogue about how we can support Afghan women today, and brings together generations of Afghan mothers, daughters, aunties, and grandmothers to celebrate how far we’ve come.