Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad parachuted into Afghanistan and told the West exactly what it wanted to hear about that nation's women. The truth, as usual, is more complicated.
Nov 17, 2003 | There's only one country foreigners write more self-righteous, intellectually assured rubbish about than Afghanistan: ours. To any American who's been asked overseas whether we all -- depending on gender -- wear miniskirts or carry guns, the lurid colors and broad brushstrokes of most journalism about Afghanistan should look familiar. Afghan men, we've been reminded over and over, are savage warriors, jealous of their honor, harsh to their long-suffering women, fanatically religious. And Afghan women -- forced to wear the burqa and be virtual slaves to their husbands -- deserve our pity.
The reality, when I made two trips to Afghanistan in 2002 to teach English and buy supplies for schools, was otherwise. From schoolboys at play to university students, Cabinet ministers to legendary commanders, Afghans were quieter, gentler and more self-contained than Americans. One young man confided that to him and his friends in northern Afghanistan, Americans' body language and loud voices seemed exaggerated, like the gestures of stage actors.
It was hard to pity the women when I lived with an extended Uzbek Afghan family in Mazar-i-Sharif and Maimana for a couple of weeks. A withered 80-year-old widow sat bala, or at the head of the room, and she was the only person who smoked. The family's resources were lavished on a bright teenage daughter, who had her own room and computer and was preparing for her university entrance exam. And the men were tender with their children and treated their wives, sisters and mothers with dignity. I felt at home more quickly than I ever have in an American household, and the fondness and respect I saw between young and old and men and women gave me new yardsticks for my own life.
Still, I often found myself unable to leave my American ways behind. When I asked my English students what they would buy their mothers if they were given $20, burqas (more properly called chadoris) were the gift of choice; when I asked what improvements the girls sought at Balkh University, they mentioned a changing room to put on their chadoris at the end of the school day. I was surprised at my own vehemence when I suggested that they throw the chadoris out instead. Later, then-deputy women's minister Tajwar Kakar complained to me that the only topic female journalists wanted to discuss was the veil -- not education, not job-training, just the veil. If I've finally gotten beyond this fixation it's because I've started to suspect that it's about projection, and that our deeply divided feelings about our own sexual culture makes Westerners so eager to attack other ways.
Whatever a Westerner writes about Afghanistan is going to be gravely wrong in some respects. But as long as we write with the awareness that we are probably projecting as much as we are describing, we might as well go ahead. After all, the goal of psychoanalysis is learning to recognize the transference and countertransference, not to stop us from ever falling in love again. Or in less specialized vocabulary, we're not OK, they're not OK and that's OK too.
But for the way she nails the physical details, Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad's account of a large, unhappy Afghan family in "The Bookseller of Kabul" would seem to describe another country entirely. Seierstad has an eye for what looms large when you're in a bad mood: the slipshod construction of Afghan houses, with gaping holes in windows and ill-fitting doors, the dubious sanitary arrangements, the grease in some of the food. She's good at details, though either she or her translator never met a cliché they didn't like. But of the many Westerners I know who've lived in Afghanistan, Seierstad seems among the least sympathetic to the country and culture.
In the spring after the defeat of the Taliban, the 33-year-old war correspondent lived for several months in the household of a 50-ish bookstore owner she calls Sultan Khan. She says at the start, "I was incredibly well treated; the family was generous and open," but continues:
"I have rarely been as angry as I was with the Khan family, and I have rarely quarreled as much as I did there. Nor have I had the urge to hit anyone as much as I did there. The same thing was continually provoking me: the manner in which men treated women."
Seierstad doubtless expects her readers to be nodding in agreement -- we already know the truth about Afghan women, don't we? -- and, sure enough, "The Bookseller of Kabul" has broken all records for Scandinavian book sales, with a half million copies sold. This is a concrete demonstration that Orientalism is by no means out of style, even when handled by hands as crude as Seierstad's.
Her choice to narrate from a God's eye viewpoint -- she does not appear in the story -- allows Seierstad to cloak speculation and condescension with a veneer of journalistic veracity. Seierstad delivers the sensationalism she knows Westerners will lap up, describing Khan's courtship of the 16-year-old who became his second wife, together with an obligatory Taliban book-burning, within the first nine pages. Seierstad has used omniscient narration to make it appear that these events, which she did not witness, are as objectively reported as the family's cuisine.
"Seems like things are pretty bad over there," a smart writer friend said to me with a grave look after finishing "The Bookseller of Kabul," and doubtless many Western readers will assume that Seierstad is revealing the (single) "truth" about Afghan marriages and families.
Yes, like most Westerners, I find some of the bare facts Seierstad presents -- notably how Sultan Khan takes a 16-year-old bride, Sonya, without consulting his middle-aged first wife, Sharifa -- appallingly cruel. But isn't it reasonable to think that the first marriage might have had some problems? The middle-aged Afghan men I met had grown old with their wives; polygamy is uncommon. And since Seierstad herself portrays the marriage between Khan and Sonya as relatively happy both in bed and out, Khan might have some good qualities Seierstad misses. Would we let a reporter get away with these sloppy tactics in America?
Perhaps because she deep-down believes that the people she is among are unfathomable savages, Seierstad never tries to find out why they do the things she describes. Sultan Khan himself remains an enigma, a man who endured two prison terms for selling books by immersing himself in Persian poetry, yet pulled his sons out of school to mind his shops. But Seierstad was too busy restraining her desire to hit Khan to find out who he is, or to try to explain his contradictions.
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