19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A girl's ankle, October 25, 2005
This review is from: Love & War in Afghanistan (Hardcover)
Laying in my hammock, warm from the late August sun and surrounded by the sounds of bird songs, waves lapping against the beach and children playing, I found myself pulled, fascinated, into Love and War in Afghanistan. The contrast between my comfortable, summer surroundings and the world of hunger, fear, displacement and pointless brutality served up by the book couldn't have been starker.
Love and War in Afghanistan is a collection of life stories from people in Northeastern Afghanistan, individuals and, in some cases, families, who have lived through invasions by Soviets, the mujahedin, the Taliban, and now the American and Northern Forces. The book introduces us to women who are covertly heading households while their husbands are off fighting; professors forced to make a living through manual labour; school teachers caught in the ideological tug of war between invading forces; a Soviet soldier who converted and joined the mujahedin in the 1980s; and a returned refugee who had lived in Iran during the worst of the fighting and moved back to his hometown only to realise that his family has been spread around the world. Their descriptions of how they experienced a continual ebb and flow of armed conflict during the last twenty years - and in some chapters their longing for the modern society they had experienced briefly during the 1970s and despair that their children have grown up in a society so strikingly different from it - paint a vivid picture of how devastatingly all-consuming simple survival becomes when a country is thrown into war. Each chapter is an individual's account of life during wave after wave of invasions, and how life does go on despite war, one simply learns to live according to the new rules and the new local commanders who have come to power - give a deeper, personal, understanding of how the international conflicts in Afghanistan play themselves out at the local level. And the narrators don't mince their words. One of the men in the book sums up the years of war by telling us, "What most people don't understand is that most of [the victims of war have] died as a result of personal vendettas. Everything else - being a communist or a Taliban or a mujahedin or whatever - that was just a pretext. Those who had power used their authority to murder their enemies, their family's enemies, their friends' enemies, and their neighbors' enemies. And then when the survivors got power, they in turn seek retribution. This is how the cycle of violence perpetuates itself."
Rather than resorting to the stereotypical images of women in burqas, men with Kalashnikovs and children with dirty faces that we are usually confronted by in the media when a story about Afghanistan appears, this book lets us read first hand how people make sense of their lives when most of the last twenty years have been a struggle that demanded both ideological and practical pragmatism. Thanks to Gulchin's cultural background, language skills and gender, she was able to collect stories from women in rural Afghanistan who otherwise are seldom heard from, only spoken about. Often, when the authors would be invited into one of the family compounds where their interviewees lived, Alex would be served tea in the men's guestroom and Gulchin would be brought into the women's quarters. Because of this, parts of the book give fascinating insights into how rural women carve out space to manoeuvre as individuals in a system which repeatedly treats them as objects to be traded between families, with bride prices, travel restrictions, guarded chastity, and distinct restrictions on their presence in the public sphere. At the same time, perhaps inadvertently, the book shows how men experience the women in their surroundings, both at home and on the street.
The topic of the burqa, which has received so much attention in the West, comes up as well. Some of the men and women - those who were educated in the cities before the Soviet invasion - talk about how wrenching it is to be forced to wear it and be forced to make their daughters put it on. Others - women who have only lived in the rural areas - speak instead about how embarrassing it was to be seen without their burqas when their homes were invaded by bands of soldiers. And interestingly, one of the interviews Alex conducted belies the whole idea that the burqa hides its wearer from public view when the man told him, "When I drive my taxi around town, I get to see many girls. You might think it's hard to tell them apart because of the burqa, but it's actually quite easy. You can tell if a girl's young or old, beautiful or ugly by the way that she walks, by her shoes, her hands, and her ankles. Actually, everything you want to know about a girl can be seen in her ankles."
Apart from the fascinating glimpses into daily life in rural Afghanistan, the tales of the conflict in Love and War are chilling. Yet, the stories of heartbreak are even more gripping. The narrating women and men understand that what they are saying is terrible, but they seem to have become almost numb to the horrors they are relating. Almost. As I worked my way through the twelve different accounts in the book, I gradually understood that this book differs from others on the Afghan conflict because it shows that the real pain of war comes when the violence hurts those one holds dear. Though, I suppose, this is a result of who is doing the telling. The authors confess in their introduction that they were concerned the stories they were hearing would be too depressing to read. One of their Afghan friends, however, assured them the opposite was true. "These are happy stories," they were told. "These people survived. I'm sure that many of the millions of people who didn't survive the last twenty-five years would have had much worse stories to tell!"
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
