'I feel their pain and I want to show the world': Afghan woman in Windsor uses art to portray life back home

When Kobra Safi came to Canada six weeks ago, she was alone, depressed and suffering from the trauma she left behind in Afghanistan.

“Being a woman in Afghanistan is not easy. It is very hard,” Safi said, thinking back to the day the Taliban took control of Kabul and changed the course of her life forever.

The trained plastic surgeon witnessed colleagues beaten for not wearing appropriate body-coverings while performing surgery. She felt she would be next and knew she had to get out.

After struggling to escape Afghanistan, she finally took refuge in Abu Dhabi and decided she wanted to make Canada her new home.

In September, she arrived in Windsor.

“And I felt that I'm free now. And I felt a new life,” she said, with a smile.

But Safi admits that smile is a mask, cloaking years of anguish, suffering and trauma at the hands of the Taliban, who have taken hold of the country that for many years, she called home.

She left behind her job, family, friends and her husband in search of a better life in Canada.

Even though she managed to get away and has many agencies like the Multicultural Council of Windsor helping her adapt to her new life, she thinks about everything she’s lost, feeling isolated and alone.

“Sometimes I was just sitting somewhere and crying loudly with myself. All these negative energy and sadness and depression had something to do to get out,” she said. “There wasn't any way for me without painting to express my feeling what I felt and I started painting to express my feeling by the art.”

Kobra Safi's paintings depict the horrors she left behind in Afghanistan pictured in Windsor, Ont. on Friday, Nov. 11, 2022. (Rich Garton/CTV News Windsor)

Safi is skilled with a scalpel but has no formal art training.

What she has plenty of is personal memories and shared trauma with the women of Afghanistan, many of whom, she says, have lost all hope.

But telling their stories and portraying their pain through painting is therapeutic.

“When I am painting, every brush I'm putting on the canvas is something that is healing me to show that this is what I am suffering and I am showing this by this painting to other people to see what is happening inside every one of us Afghan people,” Safi said.

Her art is steeped in symbolism conveying the hate, anger and bloodshed she left behind.

Kobra Safi's paintings depict the horrors she left behind in Afghanistan pictured in Windsor, Ont. on Friday, Nov. 11, 2022. (Rich Garton/CTV News Windsor)

One of her paintings shows a woman being oppressed by the Taliban, stripped naked and shackled by barbed wire and draped in a burqa.

“She is sad because she lost her control of everything of her life like education, job, her wishes, desires, and even on her body,” she said. “Afghanistan is now a prison of the Taliban.”

Each painting takes Safi a few days. The more complicated ones take up to a week. She doesn’t mind the process, noting each painting is usually preceded by an emotional experience and many tears.

But Safi also likes to portray hope — by highlighting the help she’s received from the Multicultural Council of Windsor-Essex and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

Kobra Safi's paintings depict the horrors she left behind in Afghanistan pictured in Windsor, Ont. on Friday, Nov. 11, 2022. (Rich Garton/CTV News Windsor)

“Life was dark and bleeding and they (IRCC) bring the colors to the Afghans life and they are now happy,” she said of one of her paintings.

Safi hopes to one day hold an exhibition of her work and raise money to help children and women in her home country to obtain an education.

“Now I am here, but I was one of them. And I feel now still now I am one of them,” Safi said.

“Every one of them is me. And I feel their pain and I want to show the world.” 

Kobra Safi's paintings depict the horrors she left behind in Afghanistan pictured in Windsor, Ont. on Friday, Nov. 11, 2022. (Rich Garton/CTV News Windsor)