Written by
ariel
February 26, 2010
Shar-e-Naw street, across from the Safi Landmark building, is scented with pine. Branches litter the street under the tall pine trees that grow at the edge of the park. The street is crowded with curious onlookers, watching the armed guards clean the glass from the entrance to the mall, as cars drive past over a downed police line. This morning’s bombing shook me from my bed around 6:20. As in the past, I rolled off my bed away from my shattered window thinking “how close was it this time”. Gunshots and more explosions quickly followed. It was hours before they slowed down, and hours more before they stopped. I walked out to the courtyard to speak to the guards. They showed me a twisted piece of metal from a car door that had landed in courtyard, blown there from the morning’s first suicide bombing. Black and shiny with rain, it looked vaguely like a dead crow. The fighting was just down the street. I found this time I had no desire to venture out for a photograph or a quick look. I went back to bed. Though one side of my room was now open to the cool air, I didn’t bother to light the sawdust heater. With the curtains closed, I pulled the blankets over my head and fell asleep. When I ventured out, hours later, the streets were crowded. The scene after a bombing is surreal, everything changed, people walking the middle of the street as though a festival were underway. I followed the crowd to the blast area, shattered glass everywhere. Kabul’s window sellers will do a lively trade. For days there will be panes of glass moving down every street on the backs of pickup trucks and balanced precariously on bicycles. At the local grocery, all the shop boys were busy picking up glass and righting shelves. I got a laugh, then a shrug (”why not?”) when I asked if I could buy groceries. I found only dollars in my wallet but the calculator wouldn’t work. I wondered if something inside it had snapped in the blast. I settled for an estimated afghani to dollar conversion, not caring that it was a little on the high side. Back at home the power had come to life, so I finally got around to reading the news. 17 dead. Every article crowded with comments. Armchair pundits weighing in with delight, indignation, disgust. I’ve reached the conclusion that it’s easier to comment the further away you are. Nobody in the street was talking politics.
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Tags: Afghanistan, attack, Kabul, suicide bombing
Written by
ariel
December 11, 2009
Last week I saw my grandfather for the first time. A picture of him only, but still, it was something. Despite all the stories I had heard from my father, I still couldn’t imagine what he looked like. In fact there were no pictures of the old country at all when I was growing up in Canada. But knowing that photographs existed of my father during his university days–left behind in an attic in Kabul–gave his student years and the years some kind of reality. I’d never been to Afghanistan. But if I’d never see the photographs from my father’s past, at least I knew they existed, and that was something. I’d looked at them many times in my mind’s eye–enough to wear the edges and fingerprint the surface of the imagined images. But of my grandfather there were no photographs at all–not even in my imagination–until last week.
My grandfather, a tribal leader, lived in a time and place made up of stories. For me, the era in which he lived was akin to medieval Europe. His home was a castle in the Afghan province of Herat, with a great hall and a prison. He had a guard made up of forty men who rode white horses across land where the farmers owed him fealty. It was a time and place in which a camera might seem out of place. But apparently there was at least one. I am guessing the camera that captured his image was housed in the provincial government offices of Herat. Because that is where I saw the picture. I wasn’t looking for a picture of my grandfather. I was there to find my fathers name in the birth records.
Today in Herat, the provincial government offices are housed on the outskirts of the city, in a series of plain white buildings, arranged in rows. The air of regiment, however, falls away as you enter. Walking into the wide, bare hallway of the third building on the left, we were pointed to a small office. Inside, the walls were lined with sports lockers. Inside these lockers are the record books, holding the birth dates and names of Herat’s native sons. These record books are not just inside the lockers, they spill out onto the floor and, as I realized with a sense of the surreal–they comprise a large mound under the trestle table behind the clerk’s desk. Torn and crumpled yellow pages rest against the dirty floor like the rare books collection of a library that has been hit by a hurricane.
My cousin fished through these books, bound in coloured cloth, faded with age, until he found the year we were looking for–the year my father was born. Opening the book, I noticed for the first time that they are beautiful things. Their paper is thick and yellowed to a warm golden colour. The long columns of text are hand lettered in back ink, in the flowing cursive of a true scribe, precise and elegant. In Dari (the Afghan dialect of Persian) I am close to illiterate. I watched with anticipation as my cousin leafed through page after page, quickly reading the names. I focused on the pictures, not knowing whether I would recognize my father when I saw him. And then there he was. There were two pictures instead of one, above his birth certificate number. In the first he was wearing a tall traditional karakul hat. In his early twenties, he had the look of someone who dares the world to try and beat him. He was smiling, slightly, a gleam in his eye. In the second he was a small child, ten or perhaps thirteen years old. He looked uncertain and wore a turban on his head.
Beside these two pictures there was a picture of an old man. Skinny with age, his eyes looked different from my father’s. There was no glimmer or smile in them. There was only a look I’ve seen a few times before, always in the eyes of the elderly. It’s a look I don’t understand, and behind which I cannot imagine any doubt or irony. An impenetrable look. Comparing the pictures of my father with the one of my grandfather, I wondered if the difference in their eyes was the difference between a person whose life will be lived in a time where the rules are known, and a person who will live through upheaval and change. But then I knew it was a fanciful thought. At that young age, my father had no idea of the troubles that were coming for Afghanistan. And besides, cameras do funny things sometimes. Like, for example, in the picture of myself that I carried with me, pasted to a government form. In that picture, I look like I have always lived in Afghanistan. Maybe it’s the blue faded blue background that does it, or the cheap digital camera the photographer used, in a tiny shop in a crowded Kabul market, but I look like a native son of this country I’ve only recently come to.
The government form, with it’s picture of me, is the reason I was in the provincial office of Herat. It is a form for my Afghan citizenship, and all that was missing was the birth certificate number of my father. And now that we had the number in front of us, I should have been overjoyed, but my happiness was tinged with uncertainty and regret. Regret that I would have to leave this book and these pictures behind on the floor of this office and head back to Kabul, and maybe never see them again. Regret that I hadn’t brought a camera with me to photograph these photographs and show them to my siblings. But above all, a sense of uncertainty. Because there was no practical reason for me to get my Afghan citizenship. I was going through the process for another reason: I’m not sure how to put it, but it has something to do with taking my place beside my father and grandfather and passing this on to any future sons or daughters of my own. And now, looking at these pictures, and at this office strewn with decaying record books, I wondered if the gesture had any meaning at all.
Later, as I stood waiting in the Herat airport, shunted off overbooked flight after overbooked flight, I could feel the fresh document in my coat pocket. This document, and a copy of it filed away in the chaos of the provincial office, are the only record of my Afghan citizenship. There is no computerized database where the details can be called up, and my new status is unlikely to accord me any special privileges. Remembering the look in my grandfather’s eyes, I keep thinking about the great divide between our worlds. The picture of him is still vivid in my mind. I try to place his face now, at the head of the great hall in his castle, or astride a horse surrounded by men, but I don’t feel any closer to him than I did before. His house, his land, and even the record of his birth in a crumbling old book have been worn away to almost nothing by the years of war. So what does it mean to reconnect with his legacy?
I think this first, and then I think–maybe this feeling is exactly what it means to be a citizen of the new Afghanistan.
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Category : Uncategorized
Tags: Afghanistan, Herat, Kabul, photographs
Written by
ariel
October 20, 2009
This blog is about Afghanistan. As an Afghan Canadian, a documentary film maker, and full time resident of Kabul, I field a lot of questions from Canadian friends who want to know exactly what is going on “over there”.
Afghanistan is a difficult place to understand–particularly from afar. I know this because I have listened to stories about my father’s country since childhood, and I am still trying to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together. So as I continue to learn about Afghanistan–sometimes first hand, sometimes through the media–I will share some of my gleanings, musings, and scribblings with you, by way of this blog.
Please enjoy and don’t hesitate to post your comments.
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