Zari, new female puppet, joins Afghan Sesame Street

Afghan puppeteer Mansoora Shirzad (right) records a segment with Sesame Street’s new character, a six-year-old Afghan girl called Zari, during a recording session for her first appearance on the local production of the show in Kabul. (Photo: AP)

There’s a new face on Sesame Street — a sassy, fun 6-year-old Afghan puppet girl called Zari, with purple skin, an orange nose and multi-coloured hair, an infectious giggle and outfits to please Afghanistan’s broad kaleidoscope of ethnicities and cultures.

Zari will wear a headscarf with her school uniform, which unlike that for girls across Afghanistan will not be black — Sesame Street characters do not wear black — but pale blue. Otherwise the eternal pre-teen will be mostly bare-headed.

She is a “universal character,” according to the team in Kabul that helped create Zari as the first Afghan character on the long-running children’s show, already the most popular in Afghanistan where children have taken Grover and the Cookie Monster to their hearts.

Zari — whose name means “shimmering” in Afghanistan’s two official languages, Dari and Pashtu — made her debut on Thursday on the fifth season of Afghanistan’s local production of the show called Baghch-e-Simsim, which translates as Sesame Garden.

She joins Sesame Street’s multi-cultural line-up, which includes Muppets in Bangladesh, Egypt and India who each do separate segments on their own national programs.

Zari, too, will have two segments in each show, one on her own and another in which she interviews people from a wide range of backgrounds aiming to educate her young audience about such things as the importance of study, exercise and health. While many of the show’s characters are non-gender specific, the Kabul producers said they felt it was important to make the Afghan character a girl to help overcome the endemic misogyny that is often excused as part of the country’s cultural and religious heritage. The goal in bringing Sesame Street to Afghanistan had always been to eventually have an indigenous character, said Clemence Quint, program manager for Lapis Communicat-ions, the Afghan partner of the Sesame Street Wor-kshop, which has produced Sesame Street in New York since 1969.