He pledges, after seeing children learning their lessons in the open air, to return someday and build the village a school. The book recounts how he fulfills his promise, goes on build other schools, and eventually comes to direct a non-profit, the Central Asia Institute, dedicated to promoting community-based education and literacy programs, especially for girls, in the region. Mortensen sets out to help the impoverished mountain villages, not to encourage international understanding or fight extremism, but his story suggests that aiding local communities and providing meaningful educational opportunities in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan may offer a road towards all three. I don’t mean to make the book out to be more than it is -it’s an uplifting personal story, and a good light read – not a polysci treatise – but as we deal with the fallout of recent years’ confrontational neocon policies, the book’s central ideas about the importance of education and how to engage with conservative Islamic societies make it much more than just another memoir or travelogue.
The Bookseller of Kabul, by Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad, recounts her experiences living with the family of a bookshop owner in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban. The bookseller endured repression and prison under the Communists, looting by the Mujahedeen, and finally censorship and book-burning under the Taliban. Seierstad at first admires and is inspired by the bookseller. Yet she discovers, after living with his family, that despite his freethinking and liberal (for Afghanistan) political convictions, he rules absolutely in his own household, taking a young illiterate second wife over the objections of his mother and his educated first wife, putting his sons to work in his shops rather than allowing them to attend school, and tyrannically directing the lives of his younger siblings and relatives. Seierstad recalls the family’s openness and generosity and how she soon came to feel at home among them, while at the same time admitting how infuriating and provoking she found the ingrained belief in male superiority. She wears a burka, like the women of the family, to avoid unwanted attention in the streets, but unstintingly details its physical discomfort, smells and constrictions of vision. This book is a set of stories about one family, but it also reveals the wide gulf between western and Afghan cultures. Women are not free to choose a spouse, a livelihood or a home. But neither, often, are the young men, who also remain profoundly dependent on the patriarchal family order. The society Seierstad portrays is deeply traditional – a place where not only our ideas of political liberty are foreign, but also our western concepts of personal autonomy and freedom.
My final read of the holiday was a second book by Seierstad, A Hundred and One Days, a chronicle of the journalist’s stay in Baghdad during the run up to the Iraq war and through the fall of the city to American troops. Seierstad is a ten-year veteran of reporting from war zones, including Chechnya, Serbia and Afghanistan. But she admits that she never worked in more difficult conditions than in Iraq.
Before the war, the problem was elementary: no one said anything. Iraqis used empty phrases and banalities for fear of saying anything wrong or betraying their own thoughts…I tried to move around in the landscape between deafening lies and virtually silent gasps of truth.
Seierstad recounts the challenges of reporting on Saddam’s Iraq under the supervision of the mandated Ministry of Information interpreters and “minders.” Hoping to understand how ordinary Iraqis feel, she instead is told only the official line by the people she is allowed to interview. Gradually, however, she begins to catch glimpses of the hidden reality: a child who confesses to fearing that the Americans will bury her house in sand and everyone will be smothered; a boy who advises her, amid the farewells of friends to a student whose family is leaving for Jordan, that no one can say what they really think; the newspaper editor who admits, in offices adorned with twenty-three pictures of Saddam, that he is waiting for the government to provide the text for the day’s paper; a Chaldean priest who sees seething fanaticism barely held in check and fears for Christians in Iraq if the government loses control; a literary critic who would welcome being freed from tyranny, but worries it would lead to civil war. As the American invasion begins, Seierstad reports from the Palestine hotel on the destruction and horrific civilian casualties in the city, as well as the increasingly surreal attempts by the government to spin events for the media and its own population as the city falls.
One day, the minders were gone. Then I tried to discover what happens to people when the dam bursts. What do they choose to say when they can suddenly say what they want?
Her Sunni driver reacts to the famous toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad with anger while his Shia friend feels that he, and the country, have been liberated. Never before able to safely speak of politics, they find, once freed to do so, that they, like their counterparts across the country, cannot agree. Her interpreter, who grew up looking up to Saddam as a national father-figure, slips into a sad disillusionment.
This book has no answers for how to put the shattered pieces of Iraqi society back together, but it helped illuminate for me the origins and the depth of the divisions.
