Category Archives: Afghan

May 30, 2013 · 2:22 pm

The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village by Anna Badkhen

World Is a CarpetWhen you Google journalist Anna Badkhen, the one repeating line you’ll encounter is this: “Anna Badkhen writes about people in extremis.” To do so, she’s “spent [her] adult life in motion of one sort or another in the war-wrecked hinterlands of Central Asia, Arabia, Africa.”

Badkhen professes, “I did not have a home,” although she’s been making prolonged journeys to Afghanistan with regularity. Her fascination with the country – and her sojourns there – began “before American warplanes dropped their first payload on Kabul in 2001.” Her latest extended residency finds her based in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif, prompted in 2010 by a visit one afternoon to the tiny neighboring village of Oqa.

Populated by “forty doorless huts” and 240 residents, Oqa does not appear on any map; no roads connect the village to any other. Officials in Mazar-e-Sharif insist that Oqa does not exist. But Badkhen knows otherwise. Oqa is the place where she witnessed the creation of “the most beautiful carpet I have ever seen.” It is that experience – blended with Badkhen’s account of the cultural and political landscape of a people and region in extremis – that forms the basis of her transporting new book, The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village.

Commuting from a working-class neighborhood in Mazar-e-Sharif, Badkhen became a frequent visitor to the home of septuagenarian Oqan patriarch Baba Nazar; his wife, Boston (Turkoman for “garden”); his son; daughter-in-law; and their two young children. The Nazar family are Turkomans – members of the Afghan ethnic group known for their remarkable skills in carpetmaking.

In the case of the Nazar family, their survival hinges on the deft fingers of daughter-in-law Thawra, who spends seven months out of every year “squat[ting] on top of a horizontal loom built with two rusty lengths of iron pipe, cinder blocks, and sticks” to weave a single annual carpet. The necessary wool costs just over $60; the carpet will sell for $200 to a dealer who will send it out in the world where a wealthy consumer (perhaps in the United States, which is “the single largest purchaser of carpets on the world market at the time of this story”), will pay somewhere between $5,000 and $20,000.

“Wherever her carpet ends up, for her work Thawra will be paid less than a dollar a day,” notes Badkhen. That precious payment will need to last the family another year, until Thawra’s overworked body begins the creation process once again. “Of all the Afghan carpets, those woven by the Turkomans are the most valued,” Badkhen explains. In Afghanistan, carpets remain big business. “[A] million Afghans,” writes Badkhen, “one out of thirty – were believed to be weaving, buying, and selling carpets.”

In Oqa, where remoteness offers only illusory reprieve from the latest marauders – government militia, warlords, Taliban – Badkhen cannot safely stay even a single night. Life here is often cruel. In Baba Nazar’s own family, his daughter – mangled as a teenager by a land mine that left her, most important, unable to weave – had no choice but to marry an elderly and nearly toothless sharecropper. Baba Nazar’s son, like most of Oqa’s men, dreams of escape, yet lacks the means to do anything but survive another day. Circumscribed daily by deprivation, men and women use readily available opium as a substitute salve because “[f]ood … could cost five times as much.” It is not uncommon for infants to die of overdoses. Only Baba Nazar seems to know enough to forbid its use in his own family.

And yet even in this harshest of environments, Badkhen is able to capture kinship, laughter, and merriment, especially among the women. She tells their stories with an exacting vocabulary (her prose is dense with evocative words like filamentous cirri, sibilated, alluvial, and eldritch). Beyond her words, Badkhen includes her own ambient sketches that capture the villagers’ daily lives; the active curiosity her drawing initially aroused eventually gives her the opportunity to become an invisible observer. Badkhen was able to watch village women take companionable turns in sharing Thawra’s work (“[i]t took a village to weave a carpet”), giggle over bawdy jokes in the kitchen, and indulge in joyous women-only revelry during wedding festivities.

These are the daily details that each woman works into a carpet: “her future autobiography, her diary of a year, her winter count, with its sorrowful zigzags, its daydreamy curlicues, loops of melancholy, knots of joy.” At the risk of spouting clichés (but don’t they become such because of the universal truths buried within?), Badkhen weaves her own literary magic. For now, the stories of these women (and men and children) will travel to places that none of them could even imagine, to places, ironically, that many of their carpets already call home.

Review: Christian Science Monitor, May 20, 2013 [print edition]; May 30, 2013 [online edition]

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Afghan, British

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

May 16, 2013 · 1:13 pm

The Blind Man’s Garden by Nadeem Aslam

Blind Man's GardenWho needs films when writers like Nadeem Aslam can create such eloquent canvases that no celluloid could ever hope to project? Blind Man’s Garden takes you deep into the tragic ‘war on terror’ and shows you the very lives of the individuals who must live through (or not) the shattering decisions of faraway leaders, governments, and regimes.

Mikal and Jeo grow up as brothers in a small town in Pakistan – Jeo is the son of former schoolmaster Rohan who takes in Mikal and his older brother Basie when they lose their own parents. When Jeo, training to be a doctor, secretly decides to go to Afghanistan in hopes of caring for the human collateral damage from the post-9/11 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Mikal immediately decides to join him.

Both young men leave behind their shared family, including the same beloved, Naheed – she who loved Mikal first, but married Jeo at last. The brothers embark on a Odyssean journey to nowhere fueled by a fierce hope to return home. With all their fates unknown, Naheed mourns and waits, her mother Tara desperately fights what she believes is inevitable, and Rohan attempts to save another man’s young boy as he was unable to save his late wife from eternal damnation. The family, splintered by ideologies and violence gone awry, will never be the same again … and yet somehow, a much-transformed new family will inevitably survive …

In spite of needing to finish Aslam’s fourth and latest novel because of a looming interview deadline (I know, lucky me!), I lost all my usual reading alacrity as I approached book’s end, so as to avoid actually reaching that final page. Now as I ready myself for the authorly exchange, I’m bereft that that preparation cost me any lingering comfort of knowing I still had more Aslam to read. Alas, I must settle into waiting mode for his next novel; and patience was never, ever my virtue.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013

1 Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Fiction, Afghan, British Asian, Pakistani

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

March 27, 2013 · 11:00 am

The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam

Wasted VigilIn both content and form, The Wasted Vigil is a book of extremes. For readers who have experienced Nadeem Aslam before (and the apt word really is ‘experience’), you’ll recognize (and be awed by) his mesmerizing prose … allow me a moment to share this early quote about books and reading (of course): “Each beloved book has more than one copy – some small with the text crowded into perhaps too few pages, others where the print and the page are both generously proportioned. … Sometimes there is a need to take pleasure in a favourite book for its story line alone, and the smaller editions facilitate this because the eye moves fast along a closely printed page. At other times one wishes to savour language – the rhythm of sentences, the precision with which a given word has been studded into a phrase – and on such occasions the larger size helps to slow one down, pause at each comma. Dawdling within a landscape.”

Here in his landscape of extremes, Aslam wields his language like a weapon, his mellifluous prose in cutting contrast to the horrific acts witnessed in the name of god, patriotism, honor, truth, and even love. Each of Aslam’s main characters experiences that all-encompassing sort of love, even as that love is destroyed – or, at the very least, fatally shattered – by the most inhumane atrocities.

Vigil weaves in and out of the neverending turbulent decades of Afghanistan’s modern history, its citizens brutalized by the British, Soviets, Taliban, and the Americans. Outside Jalalabad, by a lake believed to be haunted by angry djinn, in a remote house filled with the spirit of missing loved ones, four lost souls gather – their lives criss-crossed and overlapping with tragedy. The home belongs to Marcus, a British ex-pat doctor now 70, who lost his Afghan wife and his hand to the Taliban. He welcomes a Russian woman Lara, recently widowed, who searches for answers to her soldier brother’s disappearance during the Soviet invasion.

While Marcus is out on yet another possible search for a grandson he has never met, he unexpectedly runs into David, a former CIA operative whose life once evolved around Marcus’ only daughter Zameen, now dead. The trio grows into a temporary foursome when an injured young fundamentalist Muslim, Casa, is saved by the very westerners he has been taught to abhor, and trained to destroy.

Basil Sands’ excellent narration breathes life into four disparate characters – and others, as well – as they attempt to find, if not the truth, then a sense of peace with what has happened to family, friends, an entire country. But the house and its occupants are caught between two vicious warlords – one sanctioned by the U.S. government – and they cannot prevent imminent destruction from reaching their doors …

In various interviews, Aslam, who is Pakistani-born, UK-domiciled and educated since his teen years, has spoken about traveling extensively through Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to write Vigil, as well as interviewing some 200 Afghan refugees living in Britain. His international, peripatetic background places Aslam simultaneously on both ‘sides’ of incomprehensible conflict; surely, that unique dissonance imbues Vigil with its unfathomable opposites – its terror and beauty, its deception and truth, its abhorrent hatred and unconditional love.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2008

1 Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Afghan, British Asian

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

September 27, 2012 · 11:00 am

The Sky of Afghanistan by Ana A. de Eulate, illustrated by Sonja Wimmer, translated by Jon Brokenbrow

“I look at the sky, I close my eyes, / and my imagination begins to soar …,” so begins this beautiful, but bittersweet picture book – bittersweet because for now, the little girl can only imagine, dream, wish for peace in her war-torn country of Afghanistan. For decades, her country has been decimated by violence, which means this little girl (and her entire generation and more) can only know peace in her sky-high dreams.

That said, buying this book is an immediately doable easy step towards peace because author Ana A. de Eulate and illustrator Sonja Wimmer are donating all proceeds to Fundacíon Cometa, a Spain-based organization that promotes educational projects, especially as a means “to empower women to be the vehicles that convey those egalitarian values of respect and human rights to their children.” Women and girls will be the ones to break the cycle of violence and war.

To move from dreams to making a new reality, never underestimate the power of a determined little girl. She dreams of a time when “the sound of war has truly gone forever.” Surely that must be a birthright for all children? Her unwavering convictions are testimony that she ”can make this dream come true, / a wonderful  dream in which we all hold hands, / and we are all given a new opportunity / to leave our footprints for all eternity.” How impossible not to be touched by the book’s final thought, the longing for “A place – please forgive me if my eyes fill with / tears – that leads us towards PEACE.”

But before you close the book, go back and linger over the pictures. Beyond de Eulate’s inspiring words, Wimmer’s illustrations – from the smallest details to swirling, sweeping scenes — surely add volumes: a caged dove flying to freedom; the children’s various smiles, from the uncertain to the bursting; the women’s heavy blue burqas drawn over grid paper as if to show them to be the cages they are, and the daring few who momentary lift their veils to witness the little girl being lifted up (and away) by her high-flying kite before she, too, is caged; the (vibrantly colorful) intricate toys as the little girl plays on top of (dingy monotone) garbage and rubble, the bright lily bursting forth larger than life from a shrinking tank’s gun, the young girls at their desks with books and pencils in hand, various pieces of Afghan maps as if waiting to be reassembled back together, the cancelled Afghan stamps as reminders of the need for communication near and far.

Go ahead, enter this dreamy world … then help make it reality.

Readers: Children

Published: 2012 (United States)

1 Comment

Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, .Translation, Afghan, European

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

September 20, 2012 · 10:04 am

My Name is Parvana by Deborah Ellis

What delighted anticipation I felt when I heard that Deborah Ellis‘ multi-award-winning Breadwinner Trilogy (The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and Mud City), after almost a decade since its completion, was becoming a tetrology! I adamantly hoped for such at the end of my Mud City post: “Although the trilogy is seemingly finished, adding a final fourth which captures Shauzia and Parvana’s reunion would surely be welcome … “

I swear, I didn’t know a thing back then … but if the book gods are feeling ‘ask-and-you-shall-receive’-sort of generous right about now, might I put forth a request that an octology might be in order for the future? If I’m gonna ask, I might as well ask big!

Parvana is 15, and a prisoner who refuses to speak to the American soldiers who question, frighten, even threaten her. Found alone in the bombed-out rubble of a village school, Parvana’s interrogators insist she’s a terrorist and harass her day and night about her involvement. In spite of her fearful silence, for the first time, Parvana has a clean room to herself; someone with a conscience recognizes she’s still a child and doesn’t throw her in with adults, while someone else has a heart and slips her food against orders. And even though her captors insist on piping in Donny Osmond’s cloying “Puppy Love” at ridiculous decibels at all hours, Parvana is still able to slip into her past, and remember her mother’s dedication to educating girls regardless of the growing threats, her fights and quibbles with her older sister Nooria and adopted brother Asif, her decision not to reveal the gatekeeper Mr. Fahir’s secret, the villagers’ chilling reactions to the opening of Leila’s Academy of Hope … and how she ended up an American prisoner.

Reading – and recalling the books she once read – helps Parvana stay sane, from the packaged food wrappers to the Robert Frost poem she remembers with longing. “Who would want to shoot somebody after reading ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening’ or ‘Casey at the Bat’?,” she muses, envisioning how soldiers might stop their fighting to read each other “a great poem,” or swap chapters printed on ration wrappers with one another until whole books were pieced together. While she dreams she could be hired to choose such books, she tries hard not to think about the women who torture prisoners: “Women in the West could do anything they wanted. So why would they choose to do that?”

With still widespread social problems like child marriage and other brutality against women and girls, unpunished deaths, and references to Abu Ghraib, Parvana is a sobering read. Ellis depicts post-Taliban Afghanistan with eyes wide open, sugar-coating nothing. As foreign countries plan withdrawal from an unstable country still mired in poverty and violence, Ellis notes, “the war continues, and it is not clear who might be the winner in the end.”

While governments battle, life goes on for the Afghan people. “Individuals like Parvana, Shauzi, and Mrs. Weera are working to make life better. They, and the many many Afghan women, men, and children like them, are the ones the world needs to support. We owe it to them.” Ellis’s own support is especially inspiring: she’s raised over a million dollars in royalties for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and Street Kid International with the first three Breadwinner titles alone. As Parvana’s story continues, imagine how a few more titles will add to Ellis’ golden giving pot!

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2012

1 Comment

Filed under ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Fiction, Afghan, Canadian

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 16, 2012 · 12:20 pm

The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad, translated by Ingrid Christophersen

Okay, here we go again (see Kabul Beauty School below). We have a (fascinating, allegedly true) story, and then the (disturbing) story about the (now accuracy-challenged) story.

Just after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, an award-winning Norwegian journalist emerges from six weeks of following Northern Alliance commandos all over Afghanistan and moves into (invited!) the home of a Kabul bookseller, Sultan Khan (not his name), for three months in order to write a book about him and his extended family. “A bookseller’s family is unusual in a country where three-quarters of the population can neither read nor write,” she explains. That Khan has survived for decades as a bookseller is near miraculous: “‘First the Communists burned my books, then the Mujahedeen looted and pillaged, finally the Taliban burned them all over again,’” he tells Seierstad. Still, he managed to keep his family “kind of middle class, if you can use that expression in Afghanistan,” with enough money and food to never go hungry. Some were educated and could read and write in multiple languages. [Seierstad herself is fluent in five languages.]

Seierstad chose Khan for his atypical devotion to literature, learning, culture, and history, rare in a society oppressed by fundamentalist Islam and mired in post-war destruction, poverty, and chaos. But by book’s end, Khan sadly proves himself to be “‘very typical,’” Seierstad admits in an accompanying 2003 interview in the book’s reading guide. “‘He’s an Afghan patriarch like everybody else’”: he bullies and rules his family, especially the women; at 50-plus, he takes an illiterate teenaged distant relative as his second wife when he decides his first wife (a qualified Persian language teacher) is too old after bearing him three sons and a daughter; he allows his eldest son Mansur to openly berate and demean any and all of their female relatives; he refuses to support his youngest sister’s desire to continue her education or pursue a teaching career, treating her no better than he would a servant. Seierstad says she did her best to keep her opinions out of her reportage: “‘If I wanted to say, ‘That’s not how we do it in Norway,’ that this is not fair, I would suddenly not get the true story.’”

So the story about that true story, of course, begins with its international bestseller status: first comes fame, then comes controversy. Sultan Khan’s real name is Shah Muhammad Rais. So well known is he in Kabul that merely disguising his name didn’t protect his anonymity. He and his family sued Seierstad for defamation soon after the book’s global success; in July 2010, a Norway court ordered Seierstad to pay Rais’ young wife a substantial sum in damages, but that decision was overturned over a year later. In the midst of legal battles, both wives, fearing for their safety, fled Afghanistan; one lives in Canada, the other in Norway. In 2007, Rais published his own version of his story, Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul (available on Amazon!).

Once again, here is yet another case of ‘she said, he said’ … once more, the oft-repeated literary question looms: in the (countless) cases of an outsider looking into a country, culture, people not his or her own, is neutrality ever possible?

Readers: Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2003 (United States)

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Audio, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, .Translation, Afghan, European

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 14, 2012 · 6:14 pm

Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil by Deborah Rodriguez and Kristin Ohlson

Writing a memoir these days is dangerous business: you can be outed on Oprah as the worst liar, along with your publisher (James Frey, A Million Little Pieces), you can become infamous overnight for breaking the hearts of millions who not only trusted you but even gave up their lunch money to fund you (Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea), and most recently, you can face death threats even before your book was released (Mark Owen who is really Matt Bissonnette, No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden, which, incidentally, finally knocked Fifty Shades of Grey off its #1 bestseller perch just yesterday). Certain memoirs (and, of course, other books – Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses must be the most-unread-best-known-title in the world!) have two very distinct paths: there’s the story, and then the story about the story.

So here’s Deborah Rodriguez‘s tale, which I both enjoyed (Rodriguez is a larger-than-life nutter, and I mean that with all respect) and shuddered through (she’s writing about Afghanistan, where women have experienced continuing violence almost all their lives). Thanks to Bernadette Dunne (who also expertly reads Amy Waldman’s The Submission), the audible version provides the perfect combination of bemusement and shock.

Escaping a dangerous second marriage to Michigan preacher, Rodriguez travels to Afghanistan in 2002, initially with a Christian NGO of professional volunteers (doctors, dentists, nurses) among whom she feels less than useful, but finds her hairdressing skills are in even greater demand.

She gets the crazy idea to start a beauty school in Kabul – vanity and beauty are indeed universal, even in the most oppressive societies – and finds initial funding from longtime Afghan supporter Mary MacMakin, founder of the decades-old successful NGO PARSA. Brash, feisty, do-before-you-think Rodriguez makes her beauty dreams come true, not only reclaiming her own independence (although she marries hubby #3 – a former mujahideen who already has a wife and seven children! – after 20 days!), but provides many desperate young Afghan women – who are more property than human – marketable skills, a career, and even the courage to break the cycle of isolated abuse all too common in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Beyond Rodriguez’s story – which quickly became a bestseller, with film rights sold for a substantial enough sum to merit Sandra Bullock allegedly attached as the star (IMDB lists a 2013 release; not to be confused with the documentary, The Beauty Academy of Kabul) – is, of course, the story about her story. Soon after its April 2007 debut, insider naysayers had convincing evidence as to many inaccuracies and inconsistencies on the school’s founding, funding, and success. While some of that grumbling might be ignored, the more serious consequences of the memoir’s publication – and Rodriguez’s tell-all style – is the life-and-death situation it created for some of her Kabul students and friends. Rodriguez and her son had to flee Afghanistan under threat of violence in 2007; meanwhile, a chilling NPR segment reported “Topekai” was expecting to move to Pakistan, “Baseera” expected her own death. Rodriquez has since published a novel, The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul, in March of this year, and is now living in Mexico.

“Afghan women … have been held in the dark for so long, and during the darkest years they suffered more than even I can imagine.” Rodriguez writes at book’s end. “But the darkness has been pulled back a bit. The light is starting to fall on them now. They need the world to look, watch, and make sure nothing puts out that light again.” Here’s hoping, praying, demanding!

Readers: Adult

Published: 2007

6 Comments

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Afghan, Nonethnic-specific

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 9, 2012 · 4:50 pm

Zoya’s Story: An Afghan Woman’s Struggle for Freedom by Zoya with John Follain and Rita Cristofari

Zoya was just a year old when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. By age 4, she made a Russian woman soldier cry when she refused to accept her proffered chocolate. She was raised mostly by her devout grandmother, while both parents worked to free their homeland. When Zoya was 8, her mother finally revealed her work: “to help women and to bring peace to her country” through RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the local warlords moved in, bringing more violence than ever before: “… my people were exhausted after suffering war for so many years. They had thrown out the Russians, but they no longer had the strength to rise up against the fundamentalists.”

In 1992, both Zoya’s parents disappeared in quick succession. With RAWA’s help, Zoya’s grandmother took Zoya and fled Kabul for Pakistan, to finally give Zoya a “proper education.” Just two years later, at 16, Zoya committed her life to RAWA. Putting her own safety and comfort aside, she joins a growing legion of committed, brave women – and a few men – to empower Afghan women and girls, to voice their struggles, and to work ceaselessly to reclaim their country from the suffocating Taliban. By just 23, Zoya is an international presence, fighting for the basic human rights for every Afghan woman and child.

Zoya is not her real name. Ironically, while she adamantly refused the chocolate from the Russian soldier, years later, she unhesitatingly accepted a Russian writer’s parting request that she take her dead daughter’s name: ”I did not even think of the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan – I knew there was a huge difference between a country’s government and its people.” Her chilling, unembellished memoir, as told to two award-winning journalists, is a mixture of utter horror (how do human beings even imagine such heinous tortures, much less actually commit them??!!) and unflagging courage. The book’s back cover of the original hardcover simply lists just some of the “restrictions and mistreatment of women under the Taliban,” including bans against medical treatment of women by male doctors, bans against laughing loudly, wearing brightly colored clothes, washing clothes next to rivers or public places, and wearing flared wide-leg pants even under a burqa. That burqa-wearing woman, Zoya observes, “is more like a live body locked in a coffin.”

Again and again, the clearest message is the need for education, especially of women and girls: “the children of Afghanistan were allowed to carry a Kalashnikov but not their homework,” she wryly observes. Education saved Zoya, and she works tirelessly to educate other girls and women, knowing that only true knowledge will bring lasting power.

Readers: Adult

Published: 2002

Leave a Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Memoir, .Nonfiction, Afghan, Nonethnic-specific

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

September 7, 2012 · 2:36 pm

Kids of Kabul: Living Bravely through a Never-Ending War by Deborah Ellis

Mega-award-winning author Deborah Ellis‘s active interest in Afghanistan began in 1996 when she heard about the Taliban takeover of that country “and the crimes they perpetrated against women and girls.” She became involved with the Afghan communities in her native Canada, then traveled to meet Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Russia, and most recently returned to Kabul just last year. In a land ravaged by decades of neverending war, “[t]he real losers are the Afghan people, especially the women and children.”

By giving voice to the Afghan community in numerous books – Women of the Afghan War for adults, and the ever-popular middle grade/young adult Breadwinner Trilogy (The Breadwinner, Parvana’s Journey, and Mud City) – Ellis has single-handedly raised over a million dollars in book royalties for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and Street Kid International. Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan benefits again with all royalties from Kids in Kabul, Ellis’ latest title. [Take note: be patient a little longer ... that memorable Breadwinner trilogy is about to grow, with a brand new sequel, My Name Is Parvana, hitting U.S. shelves next month!]

Post-9/11, Afghanistan remains a war zone; even after the Taliban government was officially ousted, the Afghan people have not had peace for the past 11 years. “The billions and billions spent on the war, which might have been spent on education, health care, housing and rebuilding a civil society, have been spent on weapons,” Ellis soberly writes in her “Introduction.” Although more than half of Afghan children don’t have access to education, they’re making every effort to better their lives, as best as they can amidst violence, corruption, repression, and worse. Ellis traveled for a week in Kabul (because of security reasons, she couldn’t move beyond the dangerous capital) in early 2011 to talk to children.

The 27  girls and boys included here range from ages 11 to 17, most with photographs revealing their thoughtful young faces (which, I admit, makes me worry about their safety now that they are so easily identifiable). Each of their stories is introduced with relevant, contextual, cultural details from Ellis’ sharp observations. Most of the children are fatherless, many are orphans. Some are going to school, some will never have the chance. All have survived horrors no child should, including watching loved ones murdered, the brutality of child marriage, loss of home, safety, basic rights, even limbs.

“I want to be a doctor, of course. This the dream of many Afghans because we have seen so much death and suffering,” says 16-year-old Aman.

“At school I have learned that there are better ways to do things than all this war, war, war all the time. It’s the younger generation that will change that. My generation. Me,” says Mustala, 13.

“Sometimes we play on the big field at the stadium, the same stadium the Taliban used for all the terrible things they did – the shootings, cutting of people’s hands, the executions and torture. When we play there … it is like getting some justice for all those women who were hurt. We play for them as much as ourselves,” says 16-year-old Palwasha.

“I am happiest when I am in this library. All of our problems can be solved with these books,” says Sigrullah, 14.

Against challenging, sometime inhumane conditions, these children manage to thrive: “It is good to be hopeful,” Ellis reminds, “and if the future could be in the hands of this generation of young people, with their eagerness, openness and determination, then Afghanistan could indeed be a garden again.”

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult

Published: 2012

1 Comment

Filed under ..Adult Readers, ..Middle Grade Readers, ..Young Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, Afghan, Canadian

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 16, 2012 · 10:30 am

The Wooden Sword: A Jewish Tale from Afghanistan by Ann Redisch Stampler, illustrated by Carol Liddiment

“One starry night in old Kabul …” a curious shah ventures forth from his palace dressed in servant’s clothing. Wondering if his subjects are happy, he stops at the home of a poor man and his wife, who readily invite him in to share what little they have.

The poor man turns out to be a shoemaker who makes a modest living, but always trusts that God will provide enough: “‘If one path is blocked, God leads me to another, and everything turns out just as it should.’” Impressed by the man’s faith, the shah decides to test its strength, throwing one obstacle after another against the poor man’s efforts to make a living.

Arbitrarily banned from shoemaking by the shah, the poor man becomes a water carrier, a woodcutter, then even a palace guard. Each night he’s visited by the royal-in-disguise; each night he warmly shares what little he has with his anonymous guest. But when the poor man’s salary temporarily eludes him, he must figure out how he and his wife will eat … not to mention their nightly visitor. The poor man’s wise, unwavering faith soon enough teaches the questioning shah that indeed “‘everything will turn out just as it should.’”

Described as a “passionate proponent of folklore for children” in her bio, Ann Redisch Stampler’s “Author’s Note” at book’s end offers an illuminating look at the origins of this Afghan Jewish tale. Because Stampler grew up with a “mean-spirited European” version, she was thrilled to discover this “beautiful” Afghan retelling.

In spite of today’s violent, uncertain climate in Afghanistan, Stampler’s adaptation is evidence of a time of “intermingling of Jewish and Muslim neighbors in Afghanistan through the centuries.” Her story reminds us that with wisdom and faith – regardless of religious origins, rules, regulations – such peace might someday return once again, with the Kabul night skies lit up with nothing more than shining stars …

Tidbit: As was pointed out to me (rather vehemently) by an Afghan American professor/scholar/author friend, “Afghani” is the name of the official currency of Afghanistan. When referring to people, by noun or adjective, the correct term is “Afghan.” Alas, that would mean “Afghani” is used incorrectly on the inside book cover and the ending “Author’s Note” … so hopefully this inspiring Afghan Jewish shah’s tale will merit a second printing sooner than later!

Readers: Children

Published: 2012

2 Comments

Filed under ..Children/Picture Books, .Fiction, Afghan, Jewish

Tagged as , , , , , ,