Tales of Afghanistan

April 2008

So I just finished reading The Places in Between by Rory Stewart, Kabul Beauty School by Deb Rodriguez and Opium Season by Joel Hafvenstein.

The Kabul Beauty School deals with an attempt to give Afghan women access to an income and some degree of independence economically through providing basic training in hairdressing and esthetics. My ambivalence about the book may in part be the economic project selected. In some ways it makes sense to provide women with training and access to these services as, after years of being targeted by the Taliban religious police who wanted to ensure that women were not wearing any visible make up such as nail polish or lip gloss etc, all the beauty salons had closed and the skills required to reopen these types of business were no longer in the City. In addition, as with all memoirs these days, there is some controversy around the publication of the book in terms of the potential danger that the author may have created for the Afghan women that are woven into the story and there is some controversy around the degree to which the author may have exaggerated her own role in the process.

Leaving all of that aside, it does provide an interesting if very skewed picture into the world of women in Aghanistan that the other two authors don't provide. In part, I presume that Stewart and Hofvenstein have a more limited view into the world of Afghan women as it would have been dishonourable for their male Afghan counterparts to talk about their wives with other males.

I read Stewart's The Places in Between next. I think it is fair to say that Rory's writing style is sparse. The narrative tends to have a very matter of fact almost terse approach to storytelling - a sort of "then I went here and then this happened and then I saw this".

I've listened to interviews that Stewart has given and he is thoughtful, funny, articulate and has a really good storytelling approach as an orator but weirdly that doesn't translate, at least for me, in his written word. Perhaps it is that I am spoiled by the lush storytelling traditions of authors like Pat Rothfuss or Juliet Mariller but there just didn't seem to be much of the author in the book beyond the recounting of his presence and I'm kind of used to my heroes/protagonists being a bit more emotionally present. :)) I don't know that at the end of either of his books (the one on Afghanistan or the book that describes his time with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, The Prince of Marshes that I really had any understanding of how either country had impacted him emotionally. This even after an incident where he had been shot at and realizes that Mullah Mustafa, who has tried to shoot him, has just entered the dwelling that Stewart took refuge in, along with the rest of his armed gang.

At another point in the book he describes sitting down to write a "long letter" to his parents in case he was killed but there is no emotional context about the issue of mortality or the distance between him and his kin. Instead he talks about the content of the letter in terms of telling his parents how the walk has related to other parts of his life and reflects that perhaps his walk is like the Dirvish dancing and he was happy and went to sleep.

WHAAAAT ... As a reader that just leaves me hanging in the wind. I want to know how did his walk relate to other parts of his life. Why did thinking that his walking was a form of mystic connection like Dirvish dancing make him feel peaceful [And I'm really stretching that one because it's not actually what the author said]. ARRGHHH ... I HATE hanging in the wind. It makes me GRUMPY.

I don't know ... maybe it's some weird stoic Scottish Highlander thing - mmm ... except I think he might be a lowlander, Perth somewhere or other - are they stoic emotionally too - I'll have to check with my Mum.

The entire book is about his walk from Herat to Kabul and yet in some weird way in 297 pages he is almost not there.

I also found the narrative a bit disjointed though this is probably a reflection of the disconnected nature of Afghanistan's rural villages. Stewart uses the reflections of the ancient emperor Babur as a narrative construct through the whole book, by weaving in Babur's reflections about the places that the author was in to bind the book as a whole. But in the end the style irritated me enough that I turned it into a sort of "Where in the World is Rory" quest and went to find other things that he had written to see if I could figure out what in the world drives this guy and stumbled across an article he wrote for Prospect magazine (UK political mag) in 2005. More on that in another note.

... [A little later - Editorial Addition: Ahhh crap - now I'm feeling guilty. I don't really know what it is about the way that Stewart writes that makes me want to grab him by the shoulders, shake him and say "yes, but how did that make you FEEEEEL?" But there you have it. The books are still definitely worth reading and his perspective is interesting and informed re what went wrong in Iraq and the lessons that can be applied in Afghanistan. And if you listen to his interviews on You Tube or TVO's Big Ideas he really is funny!]

And so on to my favourite of the three, Opium Season, at least - on to that after Battlestar Galactica. Back in an hour :))

Can I just say on a complete tangent that Battlestar is fracking ROCKING so far this season. Gaius is turning into a weird and mental prophet. Starbuck is losing her marbles. The President is dying again and the Cylons are having arguments about the higher and lower life form rights of their own species - without any sense of irony. And I am back to loving Six - she is one COOOOLD yet sensitive mamma :) - and I love her alliance with the Eights and Leoben - those three always were my favourites :))

... back to the regularly scheduled note ...

Now Joel, on the other hand, is a storyteller's storyteller. His story is not happy in terms of outcome as 11 of the staff of the project were murdered in Helmand Province. But as an author he has a created a story where he invites the reader to travel with him and emotionally experience Afghanistan through his eyes and fall in love with it as he did before the tragedy and hardship at the end make you cry.

(at 47) "I had been looking forward to the Shamali scenery and was disappointed at first to find the foliage almost entirely hidden by walls ... The patches of green we did see were visually overwhelmed by the parched brown mountain ridge that towered on the western side of the plain. We sped through drab terrain until mid-morning, when the road dropped precipitously away into the valley of the Ghorband River and the landscape was transformed. From this height we could see over any wall, and the broad river basin running away to the east revealed itself as an unbroken expanse of fields, trees and vines fed by a silver skein of canals. I had never lived in a desert before, and I was caught off guard by the intense pleasure of being suddenly immersed in green.

Now there is lots of intensity packed into that paragraph. It is filled with colour, action and emotion and I'm right there with him as a reader. I can vicariously feel the pleasure that fills him as he sees the lushness of the green valley below after the seared desert.

And sorry but I'm back to picking on Rory again but by contrast here is the paragraph describing his arrival in the Bamiyan valley close to the end of his journey. It is the place where the immense statues of Buddha were blown up by the Taliban.

(at 253) The caravans dispersed around the remnants of the baazar, which was a new kind of ruin - not with solid walls and blackened rafters but with craters and shattered silhouettes that mark an aerial bombardment. A pale brown sandstone cliff hundreds of feet high rose sheer from the northern edge of a valley broader and more fertile than any I had seen since Herat. Cut into the cliffs to my left were two niches, two hundred feet tall, with rubble at their bases. For fourteen hundred years, two large Buddhas stood in the niches. But seven months before I reached them, the Taliban dynamited the figures. This valley of Bamiyan, at eight thousand feet, was once the Western frontier of the Buddhist world.

From a descriptive perspective they are not that different, but I know what Joel experienced - anticipation, then disappointment and then a renewed and more intense pleasure at the unexpected. Rory ... man I'm still trying to figure him out. I know what he saw. I just don't know if it made him feel anything and so as a reader I'm left feeling a little like I am reading a tourist brochure description.

Okay - I now solemnly swear that I will not unfairly compare these two authors anymore. And I reiterate that both The Places in Between and Opium Season are both in their own way, well worth reading and provide timely and insightful perspectives on Western involvement in Afghanistan at different points in time.

Kabul Beauty School ... I'd wait for the movie - and I'm actually not kidding - I think I read a rumour somewhere that it was being turned into a movie. It's okay - but it's a bit light in terms of understanding Afghanistan within its broader historical and cultural context.

Postscript, April 14, 2008

I am laughing hysterically because I have just found out that Italy was given responsibility for building Afghan capacity in its court system and Germany is responsible for police reform :)))

It's all coming clear to me now ...

The Germans and police - meh. But the Italians and the court system - are they fracking out of their minds. The Italian governments are notorious for corruption and problems with their courts. Seriously WTH were they thinking. On the other hand, ... :) ... maybe that's WHAT they were thinking :)