Manizha Talash, Afghanistan’s First Female Breakdancer, Will Compete on Olympics Refugee Team

Isabel Belén Guarco

It’s 2010, and I’m scrolling through YouTube in search of a new song to download to my iPod Shuffle. Sitting in my cozy preteen bedroom in a suburb of New York City, I decide on “Straight Outta Compton” by N.W.A., a hip-hop classic to add to my library, which is already filled with legends like Snoop Dogg and Lauryn Hill. On the other side of the world, another girl is also listening to N.W.A. She lives in Kabul, Afghanistan. For nearly 10 years, our countries have been at war. While I crank up the volume, lime green headphones pressed against my ears, she listens to the song to drown out the noise outside, where bombs are raining down on her neighborhood. It scares her, but what can she do? It’s just the way things are at home. So she closes her eyes and lets the music move her.

Manizha Talash is considered Afghanistan’s first female breakdancer. She officially began training in 2020, at age 17, with the Kabul-based Superiors Crew after watching a Facebook video of one of the members spinning on his head. When Manizha started breakdancing, a lot of people looked down on what she was doing. Music and dance in Afghanistan are haram, or forbidden, she tells me, and during periods of Taliban control, they’ve been considered crimes. On top of that, women in general are expected to adhere to strict and conservative societal norms.

Manizha started getting death threats. To protect her family, she changed her last name to Talash, the Persian word for “striving” or “pursuit.” Still, she couldn’t escape from danger. Threats escalated to violence, and after several bombing attempts, the club where Manizha trained was forced to permanently close. But the worst was still to come. In summer 2021, as the United States finished withdrawing its military presence in Afghanistan, the Taliban took over.

I met Manizha over Instagram through our mutual friend Jawad Sezdah, the Superiors Crew member who appeared in that Facebook video that started it all. Over seemingly countless DMs and phone calls, I heard about their perilous escape from Kabul, terrifying encounters with the Taliban, and their trek over the mountains on their way to Pakistan.

When I ask Manizha about it, she says they had no choice but to flee. They couldn’t live in a world where their art was considered a crime — where the things that gave them life were also the things that most endangered their lives. “I didn’t leave my country because I was afraid to die,” Manizha tells me. “It wasn’t the threat to my life that compelled me to go. It was the threat to my dreams.”

Manizha’s biggest dream, ever since she began breakdancing, has been to compete at the Paris 2024 Olympics, where breakdancing is debuting as an Olympic category. Just a few years ago, as a teenager in Kabul, she would imagine the day when she could represent her country and proudly wave its flag, busting out her moves on the Olympic stage.

But fleeing conflict and eventually becoming a refugee presented an obstacle, to say the least. Just a few months ago, Manizha was sweeping hair off the floor of a salon in the small town of Huesca, Spain, where she was granted political asylum. With the Olympics coming up this summer, she was growing doubtful that her dreams would ever come true.

Around the same time, I came across a photo of Manizha and Jawad while I was scrolling through Instagram. I wondered if anything ended up happening with the Olympics. I texted Jawad. “Nothing,” he replied. He had tried speaking with members of the breakdancing community in Spain about it, but no one had been able to do anything.

The Refugee Olympic Team — which was created for the 2016 Olympics in Rio — must be interested in Manizha, I thought, they just don’t know she exists. I dug up some email addresses for people who had worked with the Olympics in the past; wrote up a few paragraphs describing Manizha, linked every article ever written about her; and pressed send.

At around 3:00 the next morning, I woke up, annoyed, to my phone buzzing. I looked at the screen: “Dear Isabel, Thank you for your email. Do you have a phone number where I can call you? It is very late in the process but we would love to hear more about Manizha Talash. Kind regards, Gonzalo Barrio, Refugee Athlete Programmes Manager, Olympic Refuge Foundation.” I screamed.

Over the phone, Barrio informed me that most athletes in consideration for the Refugee Team had been receiving support from the Refugee Athlete Support program for more than a year. This was so last minute that if I had sent the email any later, it would have been very difficult to even consider Manizha for the Olympics. But her story was incredible. She would be the first breakdancer to ever compete with the Refugee Team. He believed in her. And he was going to try to do everything in his power to get her to Paris.

The next month Manizha quit her job at the hair salon, moved out of her tiny apartment, and boarded a train to Madrid. I sat right there with her, a camera in my hand. Since she started her official Olympic training, I’ve been making a movie about Manizha’s story. From now and through Paris, I’ll be by her side, documenting a slice of history.

The journey hasn’t been easy. Manizha’s training is rigorous, and we’ve run into what seem like endless logistical problems, including an intricate, hasty campaign to get her immediate family out of Afghanistan to protect them from the Taliban after the announcement of her involvement in the Olympics. Through all the challenges — even when we feel like we don’t know what we’re doing as a first-time Olympian and a first-time filmmaker — our friendship fuels us.

From the beginning I noticed how similar Manizha and I are. We listen to the same music, laugh at the same TikTok videos, like the same makeup brands — but I was born in the United States, and she was born in Afghanistan. I was born with all the freedom in the world to pursue my passions, and she was born into a society where her passion is called a crime. Luck may have dealt us different hands, but it also brought us together.

In Afghanistan, the term shir dokhtar directly translates to “lion girl.” At the Olympics, Manizha will not compete under the Afghan flag, but she is still determined to represent her country. The Taliban regime forces women and girls to conceal their faces, and severely restricts their ability to work, attend school, or engage in most activities outside the home. But to Manizha, the women and girls back home are strong. They are shir dokhtars. She is one, too. And as Manizha lives out her Olympic dream, she is determined to bring these women and girls with her in spirit, every step of the way.

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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue