| A Review of: The Bookseller Of Kabul by Gordon PhinnDigging up apposite quotes and learned theories on the Middle East,
Islam and those brave crusaders for democracy is a less than onerous
task these days. Any bookstore or library of even modest means can
be relied upon to supply volume after volume of erudite geopolitical
analysis. They literally fall from the bulging shelves. Stephen
Schwartz will fill you in on the history and insidious significance
of the Wahabist movement in Islam; Daniel Pipes will advise on the
pernicious influence of militant Islam in mosques under our very
noses; Jessica Stern will remind that terrorists come in all the
ethnic shades, including white and Christian; Chalmers Johnson will
insist it's all the result of unchecked American imperialism; Bernard
Lewis will make disentangling the various manipulative rhetorics
seem like child's play; and Abdelwahab Meddeb will describe the
Malady of Islam as the resentment over the gradual wearing away of
Islamic hegemony from the ninth century onwards-as the action, in
what could be conceived as the "world capital", moved
inexorably west, from Baghdad to Cairo to Venice, thence to Amsterdam,
London and New York.
While scholars and intellectuals whittle away at their pet models,
perfecting angles and attitudes for the ongoing and perhaps endless
debate, front line reportage remains the most reliable barometer
on the fates of poor humans besieged by forces beyond their control.
There's nothing quite like living with the victims. Norwegian
journalist, Asne Seierstad, after months in the mountains with the
Northern Alliance, not only managed to spend three full months
sequestered with a family in the wreckage of post-Taliban Kabul,
but so successfully ingratiated herself to the clan that many, if
not all, of the gossipy secrets and scandals of theirs and their
neighbours lie open and bleeding for even a casual reader of The
Bookseller Of Kabul.
In Seierstad's pointedly candid chronicle, we follow the daily
fortunes of the extended Khan family, eavesdropping not only on the
family meals and sibling squabbles but also the most anguished of
personal trials. Like many western observers Seierstad is outraged
by the Afghani treatment of women. Despite being personally well
treated and accorded as much respect as she would have wished for,
she tells us she has rarely quarreled as much and never so often
had the urge to hit anyone as she did there. The provocation:
"the belief in man's superiority, so ingrained it was seldom
questioned."
When later family arrangements prove this comment to be deeply,
uncomfortably true, I was not only saddened but quickly reminded
of Eric Newby's travel classic A Short Walk In The Hindu Kush (1955),
wherein, before leaving England with his wife for the fantasy
mountain climb of their lives, they are informed by cable to be
careful; since "The Nuristanis have only recently been converted
to Islam; women are less than the dust." When a further
consultation with The Imperial Gazeteer of India informs them that
"Kafir women are practically slaves, being to all intents and
purposes bought and sold as household commodities," wife Wanda,
determined to drop the kids with her mother in Trieste and go
mountaineering, insists that she is practically a slave married to
him, and that the buying of Kafir girls sounded "just like the
London season." Although she leaves the reader with a picture
as true and uncluttered by assumption and prejudice as could be
reasonably expected, Seierstad rarely feels the need to employ such
cross-cultural ironies, despite drunkenness and family violence
being no strangers to the social fabric of Scandinavia. One can't
in her exercise of righteous outrage.
Certainly the rendering of her willing imprisonment in the burka
leaves no doubt as to its radical discomfort, despite the anonymity
it offered, and its being the perfect disguise for such a querulous
interloper. Time and again we are given remarkably intimate details
of Kabul life, exactly the sort of thing we used to think was forever
veiled from our gaze, as it slowly reasserts its ancient character
in the freeing atmosphere of renewed foreign aid.
We haven't heard so much Afghani chit-chat since the rash of war
memoirs in the 1980s, when the Mujahedin-many of whom morphed into
the Taliban once the hated Soviets were finally dispatched and the
score-settling civil war was sorted out-were our brave freedom-fighting
buddies and the Soviets the mightily inept Satans of the day.
Sympathies, of course, have an uncanny way of shifting when the
political winds of the day demand new directions, and in the next
decade we were crying for the Kurds. To return to such volumes as
Doris Lessing's The Wind Blows Away Our Words and Peregrine Hodson's
Under A Sickle Moon is to recall tales told by firelight, tales of
exotic adventures in foreign lands where evil attacks good but is
finally repulsed, where suffering has meaning and heroism counts.
Seierstad thankfully avoids such simplicities, preferring instead,
la Isherwood, to be as close to a camera as consciousness permits,
and in the process, unearths many truths about Afghan life previously
tucked away, including the fact that in those remote and unruly
tribal areas where the gender roles are the traditionally prescribed,
"homosexuality is widespread and tacitly accepted." Slender
young men lie seductively entwined while listening to speeches.
Boys adorn themselves with flowers, use kohl on their eyes. Soldiers
flirt and wiggle their hips. Blood feuds are fought over young
lovers who carelessly divide their affections. "On one occasion
two commanders launched a tank battle in the bazaar in a feud over
a young lover. The result was several dozen killed."
Such pictures remind us that, despite the slew of withering details
that would doubtlessly be offered by any disputant, life in Iran
and Afganistan has many unsettling similarities to our own. For
instance: they don't talk about the profits from opium and we rarely
mention the burgeoning trade in hydroponic pot, yet millions are
made from each.
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