Fermented Mare's Milk

I may have mentioned this in a previous post (I think I have but I'm not up to the task of seeking it out), but our friend Elham has taken it upon himself to educate Erin and me about his home country of Afghanistan. This was all prompted by my honestly telling him that aside from an ingrained image of the Buddha statues at Bamiyan being destroyed by the Taliban and my home country's recent carpet bombing of his, I was fairly ignorant when it came to Afghanistan. Elham happily began a campaign to eradicate that ignorance and I have happily accepted.

The first step on this road was an assignment of Persian poets and authors for me to seek out and read. I have complied as best I can with the internet as my only source for good translations (which are remarkably scarce, it seems). We then moved on to a two hour disquisition* on the political history of the country, delivered over dessert in our kitchen on Christmas. Roya, Elham's girlfriend and fellow Afghan (though she is from Kabul, not a rural village as Elham is from--an important difference when talking about Afghanistan's recent history), was also there, frequently correcting his take on things and offering her decidedly different take on things (think: Gender and the Taliban 101).

In the month or so since then, he has been pressing books on us, pointing out news stories, and telling us tales about his time working as a stringer for the BBC Persian service in Kabul. All of these stories keep coming back to two things: (1) the southern border with Pakistan and how just driving through there fills his proverbial shorts with dread pudding ("It's insane--you can be on a bus on the way into Pakistan, thinking you're getting there no problems, then all of a sudden the bus gets sold to someone standing on the side of the road with a machine gun and you're left standing there with no way to keep going but to walk. And you don't want to walk. It is the most dangerous place on Earth. Yes. Most dangerous.") and (2) how the Pashtoon language is downright offensive to the ears (Elham is from the north-central part of Afghanistan, where a dialect of Persian/Farsi is spoken; Pashtoon is the language spoken by the Pashtoon tribes from the south, the same tribes that spawned the Taliban. Elham is a bit of a snob when it comes to the Pashtoon.*)

Last week I finished reading, at Elham's urging, Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul, a Swedish journalist's account of life with a 'middle class'* Afghan family immediately following the fall of the Taliban. Elham advertised it thusly (I'm paraphrasing): 'While it is written from a tainted perspective and therefore full of holes and while there are some ethically sketchy things reported by the author, it is clearly an honest account of a certain type of life in Afghanistan, one in which I can very easily see my own family and those of families I know.' And so it was. The book is nearly four years old at this point and was a huge international hit when it was published and the topic of countless reviews, articles, critiques, what have you, so I'll save you from too much on the subject. I will say this, however: it is depressing as hell. And infuriating. The level of humanity systematically stripped from the members of the Khan family--male and female both, though certainly not in equal measure--is astounding. I went into the book with a certain sense of understanding for the horrors of life under the Taliban, some outsider's understanding of life as a woman in an [fundamental]* Islamic society, but that sliver of understanding was blown wide open and shown to be just as ignorant as my other confessions in regard to Afghanistan. Yes, the perspective I was getting was equally that of an outsider, but it at least had the weight of having lived there. And the nodding consent of every Afghan student I've met here, all of whom have told me how remarkably honest and true the book strikes them.*

I finished the book on Thursday. On Saturday, we went to the mountains with the Anthropology students (more on that soon...we forgot to bring the pictures with us today and, well, pictures are essential). We hiked, played games, ate, stood around a fire, went sledding, ate some more. It was a long day and very tiring in that way that having a long day of fun outside can be tiring. When we got back to Bishkek and were walking home with Janika (you'll remember her as Elham's German roommate and maker of the best potato salad on earth), we decided that she and Elham would come to our flat for dinner and some movies. It was all the excitement any of us could think about handling that night. Erin made a rather delicious chicken soup with lagman noodles (see her recent post on the NY Times article on Central Asian food if you want to get your lagman learn on) and Elham and Janika brought over a few beers and some movies and we ate and watched. We first watched Equilibrium, starring Christian Bale, a movie Janika loves to which I say, ahn. A bit too on the nose for me, but damned entertaining to watch--the final battle scene(s) rival the end of the first Matrix for all around bullet-riddled good times. After that, though, Elham said, "Let's watch Osama. It is short and it is early. We'll watch it, yes?" Yes, we'll watch it, we all said.

Whereas The Bookseller of Kabul is the sort of depressing/infuriating that makes you want to take to the streets and demand justice of...well, someone, Osama is the sort of depressing/infuriating that makes you want to blow up the whole world and once and for all exterminate this virus with shoes we so affectionately call humans. Or at least the men. At the very least. All of us. Gotta go. Sorry. There's probably enough sperm kicking around in the various donor programs of the world to get through another generation or two and I'm sure someone could devise a program to extract new bits of DNA from the male offspring not butchered upon birth, but otherwise, not needed. If you're not familiar with Osama, as I wasn't, it was the first film made in Afghanistan (by an Afghan, I assume it is worth noting) after the fall of the Taliban. It is the story of a girl who disguises herself (there seems a bit too much agency in that construction, but "forced to disguise herself" also seems wrong) as a boy in order to work to support her family. This comes after the hospital where her mother works is closed by the Taliban. Her father and uncles have all been killed in the decades of civil war that preceded the Taliban, so without a man, well, you know. Needless to say, there is no happy ending here. The movie left a feeling in the pit of my stomach akin to the time I watched a dog get hit by a car on a freeway. Horrible analogy, maybe, but that's what I got. Erin got up and vomited. That may have more to do with her being a bit sick, but I think the sentiment was spot-on.

After the movie I joked to Elham that "I was raised Catholic. I've got enough guilt already. Now with this and The Bookseller, there's no way I don't kill myself soon." "Ah," he said, "but the country is much, much different now. Very safe. And women are, well, it's getting better." And then, as he was leaving, he added, "Except for the south. And the Pashtoon language. So horrible that language."



*For those of you possibly having difficulty following along here, that was a bit of sarcasm. What we actually had was a lively two hour discussion full of give and take and intellectual poking and prodding on both sides. But Elham tends to talk at length whenever he talks about anything. A simple "What did you do for lunch today?" could take him ten minutes to answer. And this has nothing to do with the language issue. He's just a bit long-winded. My going with "two hour disquisition" instead of "two hour conversation" is a stylistic thing. It's funnier to me. Mostly because the word disquisition is ridiculous to my ear. And it's important, from my perspective, that there's laughter here. To quote the great Q-Tip, "...I guess I laugh to keep from crying / So much going on, people killing, people dying..." There have been complaints lately along the lines of my being too negative. So I'm explaining. What to you is negative is very likely to me funny. That's just how I do.

*Seriously. He once generally referred to the Pashtoon as "unevolved barbarians." There's a bit of pent-up hostility is all I'm saying.

*Middle class being, of course, a hugely relative term in reference to Afghanistan.

*The line between fundamentalist and not is a bit blurry, to say the least, especially when looking at societal impacts on family dynamics. That is, nothing is better for the women of the family following the fall of the Taliban. The only real change is that they maybe don't have to wear the burka anymore and they now have dreams of doing something with their lives other than being sold to the highest bidder for a life of slavery in their new husband's house. And, it maybe goes without saying, those dreams are more or less across the board shattered. Which, it would seem, make reality that much more gruesome and oppressive.

*The Kite Runner, on the other hand, seems to be just as equally reviled by the Afghan students we know. As Elham put it, "It's just, you know, an old Afghanistan, completely out of touch with today. And the author is in London or New York or something. Not good."