Afghanistan - A Curse on Dostoyevsky et. al.

Country: Afghanistan         
Book: A Curse on Dostoyevsky
Author: Atiq Rahimi
Publication Year: 2011 (English translation: 2013)
Genre: Fiction

Country: Afghanistan         
Book: Raising My Voice
Author: Malalai Joya
Publication Year: 2009
Genre: Autobiography

Country: Afghanistan         
Book: The Kite Runner
Author: Khaled Hosseini
Publication Year: 2003
Genre: Fiction

Some countries can’t (shouldn’t) be represented by a single book or a single writer. When thinking about Afghanistan, the easy thing in Reading the World would be to pick The Kite Runner, a book I have long been meaning to read, and move on. One more country ticked off the list. But this has always been about more than the mere act of reading.

As a citizen of both Britain and the west, Afghanistan has been engrained into our history, like a stain that won't wash, for two hundred years. It can’t be glossed over.

Moreover, Afghanistan is a country more than any other in which the experience of women should not, cannot, be ignored. A single male author simply won’t do. I did state my aim to read women writers wherever possible (see: Introducing the Project). Nowhere is that more important than here, beyond the Khyber Pass.

There are also the same old arguments about not reducing a third world country to ideas and images that conform to western stereotypes of war, famine, disaster and suffering. Unfortunately, these things can’t be avoided when discussing the last forty five years of Afghan history. Not when it has lurched from one political disaster to the next; moving from the Soviet invasion, to the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, 9/11, the US invasion and its puppet government of former warlords, to the US withdrawal and the return of the Taliban.

If you’re looking for a fairytale among the bombed out buildings and unexploded landmines and cluster bombs, you will be looking a long time.

Instead, I decided to chose three books, two fiction, one autobiography, to represent Afghanistan: A Curse on Dostoyevsky  by Atiq Rahimi; Raising My Voice by Malalai Joya  and, yes, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. Still too few, I know, but with 197 countries and their dependencies to visit, I would be reading non-stop for a decade and more to get through every book that deserves my attention. That said, there are many countries to which I will return long after this project is concluded. 

All three writers under consideration were directly affected by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1978. Malalai Joya was born days before the invasion. Her family later fled to Pakistan, as did Atiq Rahimi’s. Khaled Hosseini’s family lived in Tehran and then Paris in the years leading up to the invasion and were unable to return to Kabul afterwards. Like Amir and his father in The Kite Runner, Hosseini’s family emigrated to the US and settled in California. Rahimi and Joya later returned to Afghanistan.

A Curse on Dostoyevsky is perhaps the simplest book of the three. It begins like the eponymous Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and ends more like Kafka’s The Trial. Set in the years immediately after the Soviet withdrawal, Rassoul, like Raskolnikov, murders an old woman with an axe to protect his fiancée from a life of prostitution. Yet the guilt of his actions causes him to lose his voice, which triggers the farce that propels much of the rest of the novel.

Rahimi’s book gives the reader a window on an era of Afghan history we don’t often hear about. The Kite Runner sweeps from Kabul in 1975 to the eve of 9/11, but the middle passages are set exclusively in San Francisco, amongst the city’s émigré population. Raising my Voice mainly focuses on the country in the years following the US invasion. A Curse on Dostoyevsky shows us Kabul as it was after the Russians left and in the years before the Taliban assumed control and imposed their extremist version of Islamic law.

Atiq Rahimi

Kabul here is still a city of chaos and ruin; military occupation and public hangings. Yet there is also the semi-acceptable drinking of alcohol and smoking of hashish. At its heart, A Curse on Dostoyevsky is a comic novel in the tradition of The Third Policeman or The Year of the Hare (see: Finland). Rassoul’s various transgression overshadow his actual crime. When he tries to confess to the murder, the woman’s body has been moved and there is no evidence of a crime having been committed. Indeed, it is not entirely clear if the slaying of the woman wasn’t all a figment of his imagination.

Like Vatanen (see: Finland), Rassoul is convicted of spurious crimes based on circumstantial evidence. Yet A Curse on Dostoyevsky has been nicknamed, Crime Without Punishment, and as the novel ends, it seems Rassoul will soon be released from prison. Though he has hardly escaped punishment in the meantime.

As I seem to say on every stage of this journey, these narratives are universal across the human world (I believe Joseph Campbell said something similar). As well as comic literature, A Curse on Dostoyevsky knows well its reference material. The Kafkaesque elements at the end of the novel play out like the best Russian novels and short stories; those of Dostoyevsky and Gogol; of individuals trying to live under the monolithic gaze of the state. Whether it be the Mujahedeen's Mullahs or the Taliban; Tsarist spies or Joseph Stalin and his assassins, all tyrannies are ultimately the same.

Malalai Joya knows a thing or two about tyranny. While the Taliban were blowing up statues of Buddha and beating women for speaking above a whisper in public (not to mention public stonings, as depicted in The Kite Runner), Joya was defying their will by teaching Afghan girls to read in secret school lessons.

Later, when the Taliban were overthrown by the invading US Army, aided by the Northern Alliance, Joya set up her own hospital and orphanage in the city of Farah. All while still in her 20s.

You won’t find many fairy tales or fairy tale characters in Afghanistan (outside of The Arabian Nights or S. A Chakraborty’s Daevabad Trilogy). But if you want a force of nature; someone kickass and who continues to speak truth to power, you could do worse than turn your attention to Malalai Joya. She won’t be the last real life firebrand campaigner we meet on this road. However, Joya might just be the bravest.

Shortly after Hamid Karzai was installed as interim President by the US administration, delegates from the various provinces of Afghanistan were invited to Kabul. Joya alone spoke out about the number of warlords who had been placed in key positions within the interim government. Men who had committed atrocities every bit as sadistic as the Taliban.

Joya’s remarks were broadcast around the world, though her remarks were cut short by shouty, overemotional men. She was subjected to the first of many death threats and threats of rape and reminded under armed protection for the remainder of her political career.

When Joya later became an MP in the Afghan lower house, she was rarely allowed to speak without having her microphone turned off. As well as countless other threats against her life, including several assignation attempts, she was also attacked by fellow MPs without anyone being sanctioned or punished for those acts.

Yet Joya was suspended for the remainder of the parliamentary term when she referred to certain members of the house as animals in a zoo. Her comments were largely taken out of context, but it was clearly the excuse the Karzai government was waiting for.

Malalai Joya

An Amnesty International report published 2003, 18 months after the US invasion found that little had actually changed under the occupation. In fact in many cases they had become much worse. Women who under the Taliban were severely beaten for showing any flesh under their burqa were now just as likely to be raped.

As Joya writes, while some things did change in Kabul, under the gaze of western media; out in the provinces, where the camera crews rarely visited, Afghani life remained just as grim as ever.

Then the US invasion was never about improving the lives of the Afghani people, despite the usual empty rhetoric. Nor was it about responding to the September 11^th attacks, given the impending invasion had already been announced in May 2001.

Anyone alive and aware at that time surely remembers the sheer amount of propaganda being generated in news outlets across the world over the summer in preparation for the invasion of Afghanistan. Many of course see this as evidence of the 9/11 attacks being an inside job. Which is patently absurd. The more prosaic truth might be that the final approval for the attacks on New York and Washington DC was given as a pre-emptive response to the coming invasion of Afghanistan. The attacks might well have happened anyway. We will probably never know.

Lapis lazuli (Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi)

Afghanistan is a country rich in mineral resources. It is said that countless trails in the country are littered with gem stones of varying quality. Most of the lapis lazuli that is used to make blue pigment still comes from Afghanistan, as it has for centuries. Its resouces are usually the main reason for invasions. Why else would so many countries have spent so much time and effort trying to control it?

Yet there is an obsession with conquering Afghanistan in the mindset of empires and superpowers. The British couldn’t manage it. Neither could the Russians. Even America with its drone bombers and wedding massacring missiles couldn’t tame the country. In 2021 the US retreated from the advancing Taliban just as they had from the Vietminh fifty years before.

No one, it seems, can tame Afghanistan, not even her own people. The Taliban remain in control, but for how long? The country’s history over the previous four decades suggest they will only be able to consolidate power for so long, before the next faction takes over. Whoever it is, you can be sure someone will find a way to do business with them, because moral relativism is a movable feast for those who care only about the control of Earth's swindling resources. The Clinton Government were due to meet representatives of the Taliban in 1998 before Al Qaida bombed US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and put an end to any naive hopes of cooperation.

Raising My Voice was published in 2009. Since then, Malalai Joya has continued to speak out against the government, as well as making public appearances around the world. Since the return of the Taliban, she has apparently been granted political asylum in Barcelona, along with her family. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her back in Afghanistan sooner rather than later.

It’s easy to forget, or be unaware, that prior to the Soviet invasion, Afghanistan was a relatively progressive country. Like much of the Middle East, the Cold War and the relentless thirst for oil turned democratic Islamic countries into repressive theocracies, usually with a lot of assistance from the CIA or the KGB.

This is the version of Afghanistan we find at the beginning of The Kite Runner. There is still a lot wrong here. A primitive caste system. Sexual abuse. Yet compared to the dystopias created by the Russians and imposed by the Taliban and maintained by Karzai and the US, it is a paradise.

Indeed, like John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, The Kite Runner is in many ways informed by allusions to both the Garden of Eden and Cane and Abel. To sin and redemption. To a character who is finally dragged over Campbell’s mythical Threshold as he digs his heels into the ground against the Call to Adventure.

The September 11^th attacks cast a shadow across the narrative, especially when Amir is forced to return to Kabul in the weeks leading up to the attacks. Yet I assume Hosseini was well into the planning stage, if not the actual writing, of The Kite Runner when the attacks took place, as they actually have little bearing on the story.

The book was published in 2003, so he must have been working on it long before then. I wonder how the book would have changed if Hosseini had started writing it any later. He couldn’t avoid talking about 9/11, but he is to be commended for not making it more central to the plot. As it is, it is no more than an afterthought. It is the utter brutality of the Taliban that is front and centre in the novel’s final act.

It is hard to contrast and compare the three books we have chosen to represent Afghanistan. Raising My Voice is obviously the odd one out for all kinds of reasons. It is also the most important. A Curse on Dostoyevsky is well written, but also a Kafkaesque farce that could take place under any number of regimes.

Of the two novels here, The Kite Runner is perhaps the more ‘worthy’ in a traditional literary sense. It is one of those books, like Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s, The Shadow of the Wind, which is extremely popular, but also extremely well written (compared to, say, The Da Vinci Code, or Fifty Shades of Grey). Both novels here are very good, but if I had to recommend one to a general reader looking for an entry into Afghan literature, The Kite Runner is the one I’m always going to choose. As so often, first thought is best thought.

That said, both Hosseini and Rahimi have published a number of other novels and I will definitely return to read all of them in the next few years. Malalai Joya has contributed to  a number of other published works, but unfortunately, Raising My Voice remains her only book to date. 

Khaled Hosseni

There are no fairytale endings for Afghanistan for now, but anyone without a heart of stone hopes the country might one day live happily ever after: That all three writers we have highlighted will be able to return to the country of their birth in peace and prosperity, without risk of death or injury, and with the freedom come ro go as they please. We should all hope for so little.

Afghanistan, of course, is not the only place where the Taliban operate. We will return to their poisonous influence when we turn to Pakistan and Noble Laureate, Malala Yousafzai.