The Storyteller's Daughter: One Woman's Return to Her Lost Homeland [Paperback]

Saira Shah (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 12, 2004

Imagine that a jewel-like garden overlooking Kabul is your ancestral home. Imagine a kitchen made fragrant with saffron strands and cardamom pods simmering in an authentic pilau. Now remember that you were born in London, your family in exile, and that you have never seen Afghanistan in peacetime.

These are but the starting points of Saira Shah’s memoir, by turns inevitably exotic and unavoidably heartbreaking, in which she explores her family’s history in and out of Afghanistan. As an accomplished journalist and documentarian–her film Beneath the Veil unflinchingly depicted for CNN viewers the humiliations forced on women under Taliban rule–Shah returned to her family’s homeland cloaked in the burqa to witness the pungent and shocking realities of Afghan life. As the daughter of the Sufi fabulist Idries Shah, primed by a lifetime of listening to her father’s stories, she eagerly sought out, from the mouths of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the rich and living myths that still sustain this battered culture of warriors. And she discovered that in Afghanistan all the storytellers have been men–until now.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Born in England and raised on her father's fantastic stories of an Afghanistan she had never known, Shah spends her adult life searching for a mythic place of beauty. "Any Western adult might have told me that this was an exile's tale of a lost Eden: the place you dream about, to which you can never return. But even then, I wasn't going to accept that." What she finds is a place ravaged by decades of war, poverty and, later, religious puritanism. Shah first visits Afghanistan in 1986 as a war correspondent at the remarkable age of 21 and later returns as the documentary producer of Beneath the Veil, an expos‚ of life under the Taliban that predated the national interest in the embattled country. Her journey forces her to reconcile the vast disparities between fact and fiction, the world she has pieced together from her father's tales and the reality she glimpses from behind the grille of the Taliban-imposed burqa. Shah weaves legends and traditional sayings into her text, lending a greater context to her expectations and experiences. She also offers a piecemeal history of Afghanistan to accompany the accounts of her travels, but for readers unfamiliar with the many years of political tumult Afghanistan has suffered, the history may not be thorough enough. Most compelling are the characters she encounters and their indomitable spirit, including a woman with 10 children who asks her about a "magic" pill to prevent pregnancy, and her husband, whose intense machismo is not enough to save him from the war.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

In April 2001, Shah, a journalist, traveled to Kabul to secretly document Taliban atrocities in Afghanistan. The result was the documentary film Beneath the Veil. But this was not Shah's first visit. Raised in England, her vision of her father's homeland was nurtured by romantic legends of pleasure gardens and noble mujahideen. When she made her first trip in 1986, a harrowing journey from Peshawar through the Hindu Kush to the front lines in the war with the Soviet Union, she was "chasing a myth." But by the time the Taliban took over in 1996, the disintegration of the myth was almost complete. Beneath the Veil shows the suffering, in particular, of three young sisters, and Shah's trip to do a follow-up report after U.S. air strikes began was also a personal mission to rescue the girls--efforts defeated as much by domestic exigency and centuries-old habits of mind as by larger forces: "Afghanistan had confounded me, just as it has always confounded the West." In this very personal inside-outside account, Shah is our eye on a culture and set of conditions that are much more complex than what we see on the nightly news. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 253 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (October 12, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400031478
• ISBN-13: 978-1400031474
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #631,595 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Opening Western eyes to an Eastern Culture, December 5, 2004

By 

Ursie "Ursie" (Central United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Storyteller's Daughter (Hardcover)

As an American curious as to what exactly is going on "over there" where our boys (and girls) are fighting, THIS book has helped me most, with insights not just into the facts of the centuries-long fighting in Afghanistan, but also insight into Afghan culture--heart understanding.

The author writes a narrative, but skillfully weaves in Afghani tales of old that help to clarify the viewpoint of those of a culture foreign to most Americans....foreign to most of the West. The author is the daughter of an Afghani father and Indonesian mother, and was raised in England. It is apparent, as she reveals to us her own struggle of East versus West, that she is attempting to be as fair as she can to both viewpoints, and even more than that...she is trying to carve out the truth between the two.

Sometimes the truth hurts. The myth of the Afghani Mujahidin, the Northern Alliance, the "rescue" of the Afghani people by the West...all is revealed. It would seem that such a thing would leave the reader in dispair, but instead the author leaves the strand of hope for the future.
Anyone who is interested in understanding Afghanistan or simply understanding other cultures will find some insight in this wonderfully written book.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Multifaceted Jewel of a Book, January 16, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Storyteller's Daughter (Hardcover)

Saira Shah's stunning new memoir is one of those rare and wonderful books that's hard to classify because it touches the reader in so many different ways. A jewel of many facets -- from high adventure to geopolitics to the wisdom of the ages -- it takes us on a journey of the human spirit as compelling as it is rewarding. The setting of the book is Afghanistan, a country that, despite its recent prominence on the world stage, remains for most of us little known and much misunderstood. Shah opens up Afghanistan for the reader, revealing it to be far more complex and culturally rich than the evening news would lead us to believe; and in so doing, she opens up much, much more. An acclaimed London-based journalist whose powerful television documentary "Beneath the Veil" exposed the horrors of the Taliban to the world just prior to Sept. 11, Shah comes from an accomplished Afghan family of ancient pedigree. Her brother, Tahir Shah, is a celebrated travel writer, and her father, Idries Shah, who died in 1996, was a well-known Sufi philosopher whose 30-plus books have been translated into a dozen languages. But growing up in England, where her family had settled, Saira Shah's main contact with her Afghan heritage was through the stories her father told her and her siblings -- timeless stories of fairytale mountain landscapes peopled by proud and fearless warriors upholding a centuries-old code of honor. THE STORYTELLER'S DAUGHTER is built around her search for her own identity as she attempts to reconcile the romantic Afghanistan of her father's tales with the country's reality after years of devastating civil war. In gripping fashion tempered with gentle humor, it recounts her clandestine forays into Afghanistan with the mujahidin as a fledgling reporter in the mid-1980s, as well as her equally risky trips there in 2001 to film "Beneath the Veil" and its follow-up documentary, "Unholy War." In the process, it sheds considerable light on the conflict that has ravaged that country for decades, as well as on the upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism -- quite alien to Afghanistan's moderate, Sufi-influenced tradition -- that has given rise to al Qaeda. But the book goes far beyond those things in scope and appeal and, like the very best literature, serves as a lens through which the reader can gain a greater self-understanding. Thought-provoking, moving and beautifully written, THE STORYTELLER'S DAUGHTER is, among many other things, a timely reminder that we can rarely fit the world's complexities into the narrow confines of our own preconceived notions and oversimplifications.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A thrilling story, January 9, 2005

By 

T. Hooper "thdizzy" (Osaka, Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Storyteller's Daughter (Hardcover)

Saira Shah, raised in Britain far from her ancestoral homeland, Afghanistan, attempts to rediscover the Afghanistan of her father's stories. At a young age, she becomes a journalist, and heads to Afghanistan to cover the war against the Soviets. Traveling secretly with the mujahidin, she enters Afghanistan and gives us a view of the war from the point of view of the people living through the war. The adventures that she relates in this book are quite exciting. It provides an excellent idea of what the situation in Afghanistan is like. It's interesting and the writing style is easy to read. I really recommend this book.