Afghanistan

If you are interested in understanding Afghanistan, I highly recommend the following memoir and three novels.

Tamim Ansary, West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story (2002). Born to an Afghan father and an American mother, Ansary grew up in a stable and loving Afghanistan and emigrated to the United States when he was a teenager. As a young adult he traveled the Islamic world (coincidentally, right after Iranian students took the American embassy hostage) and then settled into an American life of work, family, friends, and home-ownership. He gave little attention to Afghanistan until the reports became too disturbing. On September 12, 2001, he sent a passionate email to twenty friends, discussing the attacks of the day before from his perspective as an Afghan American. That experience led to this memoir. Ansary’s description of his changing perceptions of the Taliban, in a final chapter titled “Hanging On,” is especially compelling. “Growing up bicultural is like straddling a crack in the earth,” Ansary says. Members of the Taliban grew up in a world disrupted by war, many of them in refugee camps. They could not absorb the full richness of Afghan culture as their parents had, but instead grabbed onto a thinned-down version that was stark and harsh and made them feel less small and powerless.

Tamim Ansary, The Widow’s Husband (2009). This novel starts in a small village in Afghanistan in 1841, the year the British occupied Kabul, but then as now ruling Kabul was not the same thing as ruling the countryside. This is a story of love and yearning. It is a story of religious mystery. It is a story of how ordinary people’s lives are touched and sometimes transformed by big historical forces. The characters tend to be a bit one-dimensional, and it’s clear that Ansary constructed this novel as a medium for communicating his understanding of a key time in the history of Afghanistan. But if you’re interested in Afghanistan and you like historical fiction that helps you understand how people of another time and place understood and experienced their lives, you should know about this book.

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (2004). This gripping novel is both a coming-of-age story and a political/cultural history of Afghanistan during the tumultuous years when the Taliban came into power. It tells the story of the relationship between Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy Kabul businessman, and Hassan, the son of his father’s servant and a member of the Hazara ethnic group, a Shiite people who have long been oppressed in Afghanistan. Their story is intertwined with the story of their changing world. The novel explores the tensions within Afghani society, but in a way that deepens the novel’s psychological insight rather than burdening or detracting from it. Complex, illuminating, and at times quite disturbing, The Kite Runner is one of the most memorable novels I have ever read.

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007). Hosseini’s second novel, also set in Afghanistan and also alert to how history plays out in the lives of individuals, tells the stories and Mariam and Laila, the two wives of their husband Rasheed. All too often facing the brutal realities of misogyny and war, Laila and Mariam nevertheless refuse to be dehumanized. I personally don’t think A Thousand Splendid Suns is quite as good a novel as The Kite Runner, but others feel differently, and it is certainly a novel worth reading.