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Swallows of Kabul: A Novel

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"The Swallows of Kabul," by Yasmina Khadra, is a novel that has been translated from the French by John Cullen. The book's dustcover notes that Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian army officer who used the feminine pseudonym in order to avoid censorship.

"Swallows" is a gripping tale that takes place in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. The story revolves around the lives of the men and women who endured life under this religious fundamentalist regime. The author vividly depicts the cruelty and violence of the regime. The main characters include a jailer who guards the Taliban's victims and a female lawyer who chafes under the regime's sexist oppression.

The book is full of memorable details and scenes, such as a colorfully portrayed group of disabled war veterans who congregate around a mosque. Khadra's prose is at times grotesque, at times poetic. We see the hopes and frustrations of the individual characters. And we also see the possibility of compassion and redemption in a world of brutality, suffering, and injustice. As an American soldier, I served in Afghanistan and was deeply touched by the tragedy and beauty of that land and its people; I thank both the author and translator of this book for bringing this moving tale to life.

The reference to swallows in the title of this remarkable novel is to the burqa-clad women of Afghanistan during the years of the Taliban. Swathed in fabric from head to toe, they have been forced from public life and, as much as possible, rendered invisible, to preserve their "purity" and the honor of their families. The French-Algerian author, Khadra, heightens the incomprehensibility of this kind of faith-based segregation of genders even further by beginning and ending his story with the public executions of two women, one for alleged adultery and the other for the alleged murder of her husband.

Between these two incidents, the story follows the daily lives of several characters living out lives of soul-crushing misery in the doomed and ruined city of Kabul. There is a jail keeper, a university-educated man, an aged man who dreams of escape, and a Kalashnikov-carrying militiaman who turns a blind eye to the inhumanity he witnesses and looks only for opportuniies to advance his own career. It is a violent, Orwellian world where empathy has died and only the self-serving survive.

Both spare and unsparing, Khadra's writing brings to mind the stark, unsentimental vision of Camus' "The Stranger." The book is a bleak portrayal of exteme Islamic fundamentalism and as such seems intended as a heart-rending call of compassion for those in war-devastated regions, who are trapped by its worst excesses.

Khandra's books are simple with multiple levels of perception. More importantly, they are masterfully wordsmithed (the over-used term is well earned in this case). These are the kind of books that haunt you for years as they become part of your psyche.....and you see parallels to the writing all around you.......the writing truly provides you with a new perception of your own life.

Here are all the books to date, with a bit of info on each:

Swallows of Kabul (2004)
A bit hit in France, this story of 2 couples and their attempts to cope with the rule of the Taliban is mesmerizing.

Wolf Dreams (2003) 3rd of an Algerian trilogy
A story of a Moslem Jihadi, from sweet boy to fanatic fundamentalist has been recommended for insight into the driving force of suicidist youngsters.

Morituri (2003) 2nd of an Algerian trilogy
An Algerian kidnaping story that provides a compelling look at the definition of crime in a permanently impoverished society.

In The Name Of God (2000) 1st of an Algerian trilogy
A look at the phenomena of Moslem fundamentalism in Algeria, this book has strong parallels to Camu's "The Plague." In some ways it is a more modern variation on a theme of Camu's work.

Where Khalid Hosseini's THE KITE RUNNER reads like "Afghanistan lite," a tale of privileged, upper class life lost, Yasmina Khadra's THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL wallows in the street dust, beggar children, and Taliban whips of Kabul. Khadra's tale is terrifying in its immediacy, creating an atmosphere in which every word and action must be chosen carefully, where being in the wrong place at the wrong time can lead to anything from two hours' imprisonment in a mosque listening to a raving mullah to a beating or even death. The first three pages set the tone magnificently, depicting a near hell on earth.

THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL intertwines the stories of two married couples whose lives cross randomly, first in small ways and then in hugely fateful ways. Atiq Shaukat is a taciturn war survivor (versus the Soviets) turned jailer for prisoners being held pending public execution. His wife of twenty years, Musarrat, was the nurse who saved him from his wounds and helped him recover. She has always known that Atiq married her out of a sense of obligation, and now she is suffering from a fatal degenerative disease. Another young couple, Mohsen Ramat and his beautiful wife Zunaira, are well-educated, a handsome and ideal match who have lost their professional jobs and comfortable lives to the ravages of war and the worse ravages of religious fundamentalism. They struggle to maintain their identities and sense of purpose in the face of irrational and capricious Taliban zealotry.

Khadra follows Stendahl's dictum of character development: put them in difficult situations and then give them brains so they can suffer. And suffer his four main characters do, terribly, each in his own way. Atiq feels nothing for anyone, having hardened himself to stone in order to deal with the chaos around him and his role in the feeding frenzy of the Taliban's public executions. He wanders the streets like a ghost, devoid of feelings and resenting his helplessness. His wife Musarrat suffers the painful physical debilitations of her disease along with her inability to help her husband. Mohsen shares Atiq's sense of purposelessness, compounded by the recognition of how close he exists to depravity when he joins an unknown woman's public stoning and believes he actually hit her in the head. Finally, Mohsen's wife Zunaira suffers the loss of her professional identity and selfhood, having to muzzle her former activism for women's rights behind the walls of her home and the veil of a burqa.

That Yasmina Khadra is a woman's pen name adopted by an Algerian man, Mohammed Moulessehoul, is fitting. Although THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL focuses on its male characters (apropos of a Taliban society), it is the women Musarrat and Zunaira who provide the emotional heart and dramatic punch in this story. They suffer nobly and seek active resolutions to their plights while their respective husbands seem only to wallow in their own misery.

The author surrounds his four main characters with an intriguing supporting cast, from the ocean-seeking old man Nazeesh to Atiq's friend Mirza Shah to the ambitious Qassim Abdul Jabbar, who hopes to leverage his skills in organizing public executions into a position as head of the largest prison in Kabul. Khadra also creates a cleverly twisting plot in which the fates of Atiq, Musarrat, Mohsen, and Zunaira converge on a single event. The climax is both tragic and elevating, with an unsolved mystery to leave readers speculating what happens after the story ends. All in all, THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL is a gripping and horrifying story of life under the fanatical whip of religious fundamentalism, a tale of lost hope and lost souls succumbing to the irrational forces surrounding them. Anyone interested in learning about life under the Taliban will shudder at the knowledge they gain from this book.

In the wild emptiness of the Afghan countryside, "erosion grinds away with complete impunity"; this is the land of the Pashtuns. After the Russian invasion, war comes to stay in Afghanistan, filling the skies with death and decay. This terrible episode is followed by the terrorist reign of the Taliban, continuing the brutalization of the Afghani people, rendering the streets of Kabul joyless and unsafe.

Grown used to frequent executions under the Taliban, Mohsen Ramat's conscience no longer bothers him. The few women on the streets at any given time are specters, existing at the fringes of the crowd. Ramat and his wife have lost everything, their comfortable home and lifestyle, their freedom to wander through a marketplace that no longer exists. He wanders the city, while Zunaira stays inside, rather than endure the violence of the streets. Seduced by earlier, happy days, she agrees to walk with her husband. Accosted by the Taliban while on their walk, Zunaira is humiliated beyond endurance, her shame more painful because she understands the enormity of her loss.

After the incident, Zunaira looks upon her young husband as the enemy, those who roam the streets with whips, attacking passersby indiscriminately. Mohsen is, like them, a man. Zunaira refuses to remove her burqa inside their house, although her husband begs her, "Your face is the only sun I have left." Implacable, Zunaira cannot forgive. When he tries to remove the burqa, she resists and they struggle. Tragedy ensues and Zunaira's fate is sealed by the dictates of the land.

Atiq Shaukat, the jailer in charge of guarding prisoners before execution, nurses his own discontent under the deadening rule of the Taliban. Atiq drifts between his dingy office and home. The boredom of his daily life leeches out all feeling and memory, all desire. When Zunaira is brought into the prison, Atiq falls in love. Atiq is so warped by unhappiness that he doesn't realize the agony he is experiencing is love. It falls to his ailing wife to explain the meaning of his strange new emotion.

The Swallows of Kabul is a scathing indictment of a world turned to stone, where life has become uninhabitable. With women's compassion extracted from their society, men's hearts have hardened, left with only despair, arrogance and religious extremism. This small book marks a rapid descent from discontent into hell. Like the missing swallows, the bearers of hope are sentenced to endless days of mourning, covered in colors of "fever and fear". (The author, Mohamed Moulessehoul, an Algerian army officer, used a pseudonym to avoid the oversight of his manuscript by the military censors.) Luan Gaines/2004.

The World is a terrible place. What makes it even more horrible, is that the world is clearly more terrible in some places than in others. Kabul, (and presumably, all of Afghanistan), as painted in this book, is a hell on earth, where not just prosperity and liberty have been done away with, but dignity as well. Educated people have been forced to become little more than beggars, and society has become just a stage to display a bizarre code of morals which deems public murder a fitting way to wash away crimes of desire. Women have been entirely reduced to shadows, who cannot show their faces or speak in public.
Khadra shows us dignity is not dead, however; the characters are seeking a way out of this misery, wanting to speak out. The terminally ill wife of the part-time jailer eventually rises above their hellish life, to redeem herself and her husband with love. There is no happy ending to this tale, for how can there be joy in a place where it has been outlawed? It is a hard story to tell, but Khadra does it unflinchingly. I am grateful to him for reminding us of the trials that some of our fellow human beings must go through. This book is an excellent read, and one that will make you think and re-evaluate your own principles.

This short novel called The Swallows of Kabul was originally published in French by an Algerian writer (he published under the name "Yasmina Khadra" while still in the military to avoid censors). The novel's setting is the hyper-fundamentalist Taliban regime, where public executions were commonplace. The story follows the intertwined lives of an older prison guard and his sickly wife, and a younger, university-educated, middle-class couple. Both of the couples, in different ways, struggle with the daily effects of the repressive Taliban regime, questioning their sanity and desire to go on living. It all comes to a very tragic end after the younger man's wife ends up under the watch care of the older man in the prison he is responsible for guarding. This story is not a happy one and leaves the reader with a classic Central Asian tragic ending which serves to accentuate the despair and plight of its characters.

The author's writing style (and the translation) is notable, at times feeling more like poetry than prose. His sentences are densely packed with powerful and evocative imagery, painting pictures that leave a lasting impression on the mind. Notice the various techniques of metaphor, alliteration, and carefully chosen (loaded) words used in this early passage of the book which I feel needs to be quoted in length:

"In the middle of nowhere, a whirlwind spins like a sorceress flinging out her skirts in a macabre dance; yet not even this hysteria serves to blow the dust off the calcified palm trees thrust against the sky like beseeching arms....The Afghan countryside is nothing but battlefields, expanses of sand, and cemeteries. Artillery exchanges shatter prayers, wolves howl at the moon every night, and the wind, when it breathes, mingles beggars' laments with the croaking of crows. Everything appears charred, fossilized, blasted by some unspeakable spell. Erosion grinds away with complete impunity, scratching, rasping, peeling, cobbling the necrotic soil, erecting monuments to its own calm power. Then, without warning, at the foot of mountains singed bare by the breath of raging battles, rises Kabul, or rather, what's left of it: a city in an advanced stage of decomposition."

As wonderful as the writing in the book is, I felt at times that there was a lack of authenticity in some of its descriptions of the setting. I was left with the feeling that the writer has never actually been to Kabul or Afghanistan, and that he simply cloaked his North African experience with a Taliban setting. Even in the passage quoted above, which I feel is very evocative of Afghanistan in general, the author mentions "palm trees," as though they are to be found everywhere across the country (as they are in most of the Middle East). There were also other Arabic word choices that indicated the writer based his setting on a middle eastern foundation ("coffee houses," chilam smoking, "La hawla," and even the names of many of the characters).

Nonetheless, the book is worth reading and is very powerful in its imagery depicting the conflicts and hopelessness and despair that descended on people as a result of the Taliban's extremist policies.

This is one of those books that's hard to read, though the prose is constructed to make it easy. Yasmina Khadra is actually a man, an Algerian army officer who wrote under this nom de plume originally to avoid censors. In this book he recreates the city of Kabul under the Taliban, complete with gangs of thugs wandering the streets whipping people into temples, assaulting women for the slightest infraction, and generally making themselves more obnoxious. The book has two sets of married couples for its main characters, and they form the heart of the plot.

Atiq and his wife have grown apart. Atiq is a jailer for the Taliban, and though he doesn't fully subscribe to their beliefs, he goes along to get along, and is brutalized by the process to the point that he's essentially uncaring in the face of the suffering he witnesses. His wife is his one bond to sanity: many years before, she nursed him back to health after a grave wound he suffered during one of Afghanistan's innumerable wars. Now she's dying, and he doesn't know what to do with the rest of his life. One of his friends suggests that he divorce the wife, in favor of a more healthy woman who will properly run his household.

Mohsen is a middle-class something-or-other who has a beautiful, educated wife who was a magistrate pre-Taliban, who now languishes in a house not his own (a bomb blew up the house they owned) while waiting for something in his life to change. He's so depressed and downtrodden by the Taliban that he temporarily loses his sense of morality, and takes out his frustrations by participating in the stoning of a woman branded a prostitute by the Taliban. His wife, of course, disapproves very strongly, and this sets in motion a set of events that impact all four of the main characters.

The latter part of the plot turns on a plot twist that, while it's a bit much, is believable. It's a dark, harrowing, depressing book, though, and I would only recommend it to those who are interested in the literature of things. A good book though.

Khadra's novel is sensitive and stark. The heartbreak of lives broken by Taliban rule is present on every page. Good men and women turn to violence and irrationality in a culture bent on denying all human rights. However, the final irony is that the burqa both suffocates and shields. It protects a woman from sexual advances yet turns her into an object of such mystery that her female form is a cause for intense arousal. While a woman's identity is lost under the burqa, the final act of sacrifice that allows Zunaira to live is only possible because two women can trade places anonymously. The stoning and execution of burqa-clad women both dehumanizes and intensifies the agony of the bound and helpless victims. The novel is haunting.

This short, easily read book written in present tense is a poetic tragedy exposing a country most of us know little about. Written by a man, it is particularly sensitive to women suffering in Afghanistan under the Taliban rule. The beautiful Zunaira, an intelligent lawyer, has lost her career and freedom, and her value as a human being in that culture has been reduced to nothing - except in the eyes of her doting husband, Mohsen, to whom she is the only light left in their world. The dying Mussarrat would do anything to make her undeserving husband, Atiq, happy. Western women, at the least, will be appalled at the prevailing attitude of men towards women here. The book also paints a picture of the two very different men both losing their minds as the Taliban rule twists their lives into hopeless nightmares.

Since I have not heard many personal experiences of Afghanistan's people today or under the Taliban rule, I can't tell if this book is very representative of their thoughts. The author spins a desperate mind-shattering story enlightened only in the end by the jailer's vision of paradise on earth. I found the ending to be very unrealistic and felt the most tragic figure was the jailer's wife, Mussarrat, sacrificing all she had left for her husband - who did not notice.

While I felt the storyline was a bit contrived and the depression endless, this book offers artistically descriptive prose and a rare personal look into a world we ought to know more about.