Journeys: Pieces of a picture

JOURNEYS
Pieces of a picture

The Hindu


`The great game country has always exercised incredible fascination for the explorer, the adventurer, the military strategist and the more ordinary traveller.'


WILD tribesmen, primordial loyalties, tribal wars, the monarchy, ancient forts, inaccessible mountainous terrain and the Cold War. The great game country has always exercised incredible fascination for the explorer, the adventurer, the military strategist and the more ordinary traveller. After 9/11, that fascination has expanded exponentially, spawning a new breed of Afghan watchers and experts. From academic, political assessments about the strategic importance of the region to personalised accounts, almost every week brings a new book — feeding into the apparently insatiable literary hunger about the country.
Acting as a catalyst to the fascination exerted by the "wild east" is the inaccessibility of Afghanistan — geographically, socially and politically. It is not a country that lends itself to instant communication and that which filters out is far removed from its westernised audience. Conversely, the foreign is equally distant to Afghanistan and its citizens. It is this context of mutual unfamiliarity that provides the opportunity. Ordinary details become fascinating and those written about are less likely to sue for libel. That is, ordinarily.
In the instance of The Bookseller of Kabul however, news of the defamation case has preceded its readership, largely. Over a dinner table in Kabul city it spawns a debate on the ethics of the book.
A wonderful personalised account of an Afghan family seen from within, Asne Seierstad's book evoked some controversy when the protagonist of her story, barely disguised in the book, went to court against her. Seierstad, who was travelling with the Northern Alliance commandos in their final sweep against the Taliban, arrived in Kabul in November 2001. Meeting Sultan Khan, a bookseller, on several occasions, she is invited to his home for a meal. While Sultan jokes and shares anecdotes, the women of the family are silent. Seierstad thinks it would make a fascinating story and with the consent of Sultan, moves in to stay with them. The book is a result of what she heard, saw, was told and felt in those months.
The Bookseller of Kabul begins dramatically with the aging Sultan's desire for a second wife, the teenaged Sonya. Through the story of one family, Seierstad documents many lives. All of Sultan's books with "images" (illustrations, drawings and photographs) are either burnt or torn. He is forced to stock the books commended by the Taliban. He sells them, to survive. At home his sons battle against their father's authoritarianism, he brooks no opposition. His older wife keeps house in Peshawar waiting for a visit from her husband; Jamila the daughter of a neighbour is killed by her own brothers for having an affair. The lives of women in an ordinary middle class home in Kabul, the generational conflicts that could be happening anywhere in the world, the intricate social customs, the Northern Alliance and Rabbani, the Taliban and the battle for power, Karzai and Dostum, the smells, the heat, the dust of Afghanistan are evoked in the pages — a vivid account that takes you into the heart of the country. Recounted with the eye of an outsider who has borrowed the status of an insider. While not unsympathetic it is a book in which Sultan emerges warts and all, prompting him to sue Seierstad.


While there is little difference of opinion about its literary excellence, it is on the issue of ethics that opinions clash. Perhaps anticipating this Seierstad goes out of her way to mention in her introduction that she has remained true to facts and wrote the book with the consent of Sultan, has chosen a pseudonym for him and his family. In Kabul however there is no doubt who the man is: there are few such booksellers and this creates a number of questions.
If Sultan gave his consent why should she not have written it? But did Sultan, far removed from the cognizable parameters of a western journalist's curiosity, understand what he was giving his consent to, or that his practices may be seen as less than normal in the cold print of the western press? What about his family? Were their individual consents secured or did Seierstad assume the logic of the patriarchal value system she was writing about and not consider their consent relevant? For that matter, would it not have been more truthful to turn the account into fiction? What about the impact of the presence of this outsider, the westernised woman, on the dynamics of the family? She is nowhere to be seen in the book.
If the absence of the author leaves a sense of disquiet, it is the opposite in Richard Loseby's Blue is the colour of Heaven. The book places the author at the centre of the tale and in this case the narrative suffers from there being altogether too much of the man and too little of the place.
In 1989 Loseby travelled through Turkey, Iraq, Iran and finally entered Afghanistan with the mujahideen as Massoud Mohandaspur. The raison d'etre of the book 13 years later (first published in New Zealand in 2002), is apparent from the book's jacket, which states: "Afghanistan — remote, elusive, infamous since September 11, 2001." While the jacket goes on to talk about the rare glimpse of the Afghani (sic) people, it is not until one reaches page 140 of the 240-page book that Loseby actually enters Afghanistan.
The story begins with Loseby's childhood fascination with Afghanistan arising out of the small boy's curiosity about an Afghan who banked in the bank where his father worked in Australia. Loseby says that when his father died suddenly, of cancer, the unjustness of his death became inextricably linked to the injustice of the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet troops. It is in Afghanistan 10 years later that he finally finds release from the burden of sorrow of his father's death, he says.
While Loseby describes encounters with people, customs, landscapes, bureaucracies, it is the story of Loseby in a foreign land rather than the land itself. A certain overdone facetiousness mars the narrative. "Overcrowding had apparently forced the population to go around ignoring each other", or on being given a bottle of cola bottled in Iran: "This was clearly Islamic cola, without any additives".
However, for all that, it is yet another piece of a picture from a region that is fascinating and Loseby captures some of that. The perilous journeys through immigration controls across the borders, the visa given or rejected on whims or the availability of a black pen of a certain colour, the political discourse or the absence of it in Iraq and Iran, the difficulties of the foreign traveller. In Iran he joins the mujahideen, travelling with them into Afghanistan and it is here that the narrative becomes more interesting, Loseby the traveller finally losing some of the irritating sense of self-importance when forced to share the lives of the soldiers. Sleeping in the rough terrain, eating what they ate, dodging the mortar fire of the enemy, Loseby conveys some of the excitement of their lives.
Yet, post-9/11 this is not quite a new story and Loseby's recollections neither fresh nor revealing compared with other travellers in those regions. At least two contemporaneous accounts in the same region, that of Jason Elliot in An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan and Christopher Kremmer in The Carpet Wars: From Kabul to Baghdad: A Ten Year Journey Along Ancient Trade Routes provide much greater immediacy, vibrancy and urgency to those wishing to travel there through the pages of literature.
The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad, translated by Ingrid Christophersen, Little, Brown, £8.50 (special Indian price).
Blue is the Colour of Heaven : A Journey into Afghanistan, Richard Loseby, Penguin, Rs. 250.
AUNOHITA MOJUMDAR
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