Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  AFGHANISTAN

  * * *

  An Awakening after the Taliban

  New York Times, March 10, 2002

  I was in New York on September 11, 2001. Having often rushed headlong toward danger, I found myself hiding out in my house for a week and then taking the first plane out. I had grown up in New York, and a physical attack on the city wasn’t among the fears I nurtured into adulthood. When it happened, I felt like Samson after the haircut. Later, I was ashamed of my paralyzed disengagement. It was too late to volunteer in lower Manhattan, but it was not too late to help understand the war in which we’d entangled ourselves.

  The most successful piece of modern diplomacy is the Marshall Plan, and I believe that if we had invested the money squandered on a pointless invasion of Iraq on rebuilding Afghanistan, we would now have a secure ally in Central Asia. Remember that 1960s Afghanistan was a center of liberalism where women wore miniskirts. Of the many brief upsurges of buoyancy on which I have reported, no other has seemed so exalted or has been so swiftly and brutally dashed.

  This article, though based on the Times story I had been assigned, also includes some details from a story I did for Food & Wine about our final dinner.

  * * *

  The reopening of the National Gallery in Kabul in February 2002 took place in the dark. The electricity was out again, a casualty of war, and no one could get the gallery’s generator to work. A certain grimness lingered in the air. More striking than much of the art was a special display of the ripped-up drawings and broken frames left by the Taliban, lest anyone forget. Yet the mood was hopeful, victorious, even joyful. Presiding over the ceremony, Hamid Karzai, the leader of Afghanistan’s interim government, spoke emotionally of the gallery as the locus of “great hope and brightness,” where Afghan culture could come out of hiding. “This is more, so much more, than the reopening of a museum,” he declared, toasting the moment with a cup of tea. Then, with great delight, he watched Dr. Yousof Asefi perform an act of sweet triumph.

  Asefi is an artist who, at great personal risk, had disguised the figures of human beings in eighty oil paintings at the gallery by applying a veneer of watercolor paint over them. He had thus saved the pictures from destruction at the hands of the Taliban, who had forbidden representations of the human form as sacrilege. Now, as an assortment of ministers, journalists, artists, and local intellectuals looked on, Asefi, scrubbed up in a starchy new suit, approached a painting, dipped a cloth in water, and began washing the watercolor away, revealing the original figures beneath, still intact. There was applause all around.

  I had come to Afghanistan to see what remained of the country’s culture after the depredations of the Taliban and the devastation of war. I was astonished to find, amid the bombed-out ruins of Kabul, an artistic community that was not merely optimistic but exuberant. Everyone I talked to had extraordinary stories to tell about the Taliban era, but members of this community had survived that time surprisingly well and were taking up much where they had left off. You would think from the Western news reports that Kabul is populated only by desperate peasants, many of them warlike, and government bureaucrats and soldiers. In fact, Kabul also has a population of cultured, soigné Afghans, some of whom stayed through the Taliban years, some of whom have flooded back into the country from self-imposed exile.

  But the beginning of a renaissance is not taking place only among a small elite. The Union of Artists, closed by the Taliban, quietly reopened three months ago and has already attracted more than three thousand members countrywide, including two hundred women. “Our future depends on these people,” Karzai told me. “We need to save our culture and bring it forward, make a new culture of Afghanistan. This is at the top of our agenda.”

  Afghan women have been slow to give up the enshrouding burka, to Westerners the most potent symbol of the Taliban’s oppression. During a two-week visit to Kabul in mid-February, I spotted no more than a dozen women showing their faces on the streets, and none showing their hair, despite the lifting of the ban. Their clinging to the garment points to a deep cultural basis for this concealment. But while the emergence of women has been slow and ambivalent, the recent proliferation of art—high, low, traditional, new, Western, Eastern—shows how suddenly free urban Afghans now are.

  Contrary to the Taliban’s propaganda, the prohibitions against art were never based in Islam. “The very idea is ridiculous,” said the minister of information and culture, Said Makhtoum Rahim. “There is no religious justification for such laws.” Nancy Hatch Dupree, a leading Western expert on Afghan culture, calls the restrictions “total claptrap, entirely political.” Abdul Mansour, director of Afghanistan television and former president of the cultural ministry, said, “They said it was religion, but it was just a combination of thuggery, profiteering, and fulfilling the agenda of the ISI.” He was referring to Pakistan’s intelligence service, then underwriting the Taliban. The ISI, he said, “wanted to see the weakest possible Afghanistan.” He continued, “And Pakistan is jealous. Pakistan is a new country, a fake country, with no history. While we—we have a splendid history.”

  Rahim said, “Afghan culture has been destroyed many times. By Alexander the Great. By the British army. In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan attacked Herat and killed everyone. Sixteen people were out of town for various reasons, and they returned to find that their city no longer existed. First, they wept. But then they decided to rebuild, and though they were just sixteen, Herat rose from the ashes. We will do it again. We want to export a message of love and cooperation for all the world, and to show our great art, so that people understand this is not just a country of warlords and battle.”

  Strikingly, in its early days the Taliban supported art and was involved in programs of cultural preservation. Only later in the regime, when the terrorist group al-Qaeda and foreign agents had begun to wield most of the power, were the anti-art policies established and many of the most beautiful objects in the country, some two thousand national treasures, wantonly destroyed. The Taliban’s purpose was to wipe out Afghan identity so that nationalist resistance to the new regime would be weak. Unlike Soviets or Maoist Chinese, who interfered with the arts in an effort to eliminate whatever history could not be used to construct patriotic propaganda, the Taliban worked toward annihilation. The whole idea of being an Afghan was to be eradicated. This program required interference not only with intellectuals and artists but also with ordinary people and their ordinary pleasures. “They succeeded in destroying about eighty percent of our cultural identity,” Rahim says. “The Soviets had already done their damage; they wanted to turn a thousand years of history into nineteenth-century Marxism. But the Taliban wanted to destroy everything.”

  Gathering Round TVs

  Television, illegal under the Taliban but reborn in early 2002, is the most popular means of disseminating new ideas and values, though the country’s only station’s equipment is dilapidated and many shows have to be shot several times because of poor-quality video and cameras that fail. Mansour has brought in professors for programs about the history of Afghanistan stretching back to 1000 BC. There are also music and art programs, showings of old Afghan films, and recitations of new Afghan poetry. Afghans are hungry for this material; after five years without television, large groups of viewers in Kabul gather around sets that are often hooked up to car batteries when power fails, as it does most nights.

  Guardians of Art

  Many of Afghanistan’s best artists use traditional media, such as painted miniatures, which originated in Afghanistan and are central in the country’s artistic history. The leading miniaturist, Hafiz Meherzad, encloses figurative scenes within exquisite borders of gold leaf and ground-rock pigments. Meherzad said he had been “too tired to emigrate” after the mujahideen took over in the post-Soviet power vacuum and thought that he could continue his work quietly during the Taliban’s reign so long as he didn’t show it publicly. But when his neighbors cried out that the Taliban were searching ev
eryone’s house, he panicked and buried all his work. It was largely destroyed by the earth’s moisture. His sense of cultural responsibility is acute. “I do not believe in innovation in this field,” Meherzad said. “If you make changes in this work, you will destroy even the past. You in America can innovate because your past is safe. Here in Afghanistan, we need to secure our past before we begin to create a future.”

  The Taliban found it hard to attack calligraphers, whose work was holy; but it held them in considerable suspicion, and men such as Ismail Sediqi kept a low profile. He stopped making beautiful images of his own poems, with lines such as “I am a treasure within a ruin.” Instead, he became “a simple scribe” who wrote verses from the Koran. Even here, however, he found room for sedition: he often copied out the opening verse of the holy book, which announces—contrary to the restrictive practices of the Taliban—that God is the God of all men. “Innovation?” he said. “Well, I sometimes put modern makeup on the beautiful face of the classic forms.”

  Asefi, who has become a potent symbol of cultural rebirth in Kabul, was unable to leave Afghanistan during the Taliban period, which started in 1996, because of family obligations, and he made only landscapes, bare of human or animal figures, and “unrepresentative in any way of life in Afghanistan.” The pressure and the fear gave him psychiatric problems that continue to haunt him. Now he is returning to those works and adding the figures he always envisioned. “If the Taliban had lasted five more years, they might have destroyed our culture,” he said. He is grateful for the American military intervention: “By liberating us, you saved our history as well as our present lives.”

  Underground Poets

  Afghanistan is a country of poets. Shir Mohammed Khara ran an underground poetry movement under the Taliban. He met with other poets who had memorized their poems so that they could discuss them without running the risk of being found carrying them. Whenever they gathered, they carried copies of the Koran so they could tell Taliban agents that they were having a prayer meeting. A number of poets have allied themselves with the newspaper Arman (Hope).

  “We could not mirror our Taliban-era society,” the poet Mohammed Yasin Niazi said. His colleague Abdul Raqib Jahid added, “Under the Taliban, I tried simply to write poems that would relieve people of their tension.” Their new poetry is enthusiastically nationalist.

  Niazi wrote:

  We saw the results of the work of the ignorant.

  Now we should be rational.

  It is time for open windows

  Through which the sun shines.

  Jahid wrote:

  Communism and terrorism wanted to swallow Afghanistan

  But the knife of liberty cut their throat . . .

  I just want to tell you the story of liberty

  As politely as possible.

  Other poets, however, express deep bitterness. Achmed Shekib Santyar wrote:

  Epitaph

  On the biggest escarpment,

  On the sharpest peak,

  With bold letters,

  Etch this,

  The message of a futureless generation:

  That in childhood, instead of mothers’ mercy, we received the rough talk of soldiers;

  And in youth, instead of pens, we got guns in our hands;

  And in age, instead of rest, we went out begging.

  Don’t blame us.

  We could do nothing for you.

  Close Call for Filmmakers

  In 1968, with support from Hollywood, Afghan Films was established. It made a dozen or so films a year—documentaries and features—until the Soviet invasion and the mujahideen, when things slowed down. Under the Taliban, they stopped entirely. The Taliban burned more than a thousand reels when they took Kabul. “They started doing it here in the office,” said Timur Hakimian, head of the company, waving a hand in front of his face. “You can’t imagine the smell. Since it was asphyxiating them as well as the rest of us, they went to the stadium and made a public spectacle of their bonfire.” Fortunately, Taliban censors didn’t know the difference between prints and negatives; what they burned was mostly replaceable, and the negatives, hidden elsewhere, survived. “Unfortunately, we were unable not only to use our equipment during these years, but also to clean or maintain it,” Hakimian said. “Much has been destroyed not by abuse, but by neglect. If we could get the equipment, we’re ready to roll again.”

  Hakimian is a drily humorous and sophisticated man who has traveled to film festivals around the world. He served for many years as president of the Union of Artists, a position he has now reclaimed. Because he had made a film whose narrator accuses the Taliban of being against culture and Islam, he went into hiding during their ascendancy. “There was good reason to be afraid!” he told me. “If these people could blow up your World Trade Center, they could blow up little me! I feel lucky to be alive at all.” He got a friend who worked as a cleaner in the security department of the Taliban to remove and burn his file, and he attributes his survival to this act.

  Dozens of men and three women have approached Hakimian about playing in films again. The great actress of pre-Taliban films was Zamzama Shakila, usually just called Zamzama, a gorgeous woman whose physical presence was particularly alarming to the Taliban. She wanted to stay in Afghanistan despite the Taliban; she gave up acting, and her husband (also an actor) sold clothes in the street. But Taliban agents hunted them down, and in one attack by fundamentalists she took five bullets and he took seven, one of which is still embedded in his skull. They survived and fled to Pakistan. For years she managed by singing for weddings in Peshawar. The day Kabul was taken, they came back. “I was so thirsty for my country,” she said.

  She wore the burka for her trip back into Afghanistan; when she arrived in Kabul, she took it off and burned it in the street. She is one of the few women to go without cover today. “I hear women talking as they pass me, saying they admire my shedding my burka,” she said. “I confront them and say, ‘Take yours off. Nothing terrible will happen.’ Sometimes they throw off their burkas there, and we walk in the street together. Someone has to start this tendency.” Zamzama complains that while Afghan men stare, American soldiers in the Special Forces units are the ones who are obnoxiously aggressive. “I say to them, ‘You are worse than the terrorists. You are making life impossible for Afghan women. Cut it out.’ ”

  In the dilapidated offices of Afghan Films, Zamzama explained, “The old crowd is coming together. Of course, actors are more liberal than others, and in these offices we meet each other and shake hands.” She became emotional, held my arm. “In our happiest dreams we didn’t see this.” Since Afghan Films has no equipment, Zamzama keeps her family going by acting in two weekly television programs. “I’m ready to do comedy now,” she said. “Romantic comedy.”

  Hakimian is skeptical: “The women newscasters on TV still wear head scarves; the country barely accepts that they show their faces. If you can’t show a woman’s hair, how can you show her in a boy’s arms?” But Zamzama countered, “No fighting films. We’ve seen enough guns in our real lives. People should enjoy the new Afghan films.” She gestured extravagantly. “It’s time for fun, fun, fun.”

  Music Breaks a Silence

  While cultural resurgence in all the arts is strong, it is most striking in music. A long-silenced country, where women could be arrested for humming to their babies, where it was illegal even to clap your hands, is suddenly full of every kind of music in every place.

  I went to a wedding where the band was playing in a very un-Western “Western style”—what for Afghanistan would have been Top 40 if anyone had been counting. A member of the groom’s family had died a short time earlier, and there is supposed to be no music after such a death; but the bride protested that there had been enough years of silence to cover a thousand family deaths. The band included an electric guitar, a drum machine, and a Soviet-era synthesizer; the irregular electricity meant that all the instruments kept going on and off, and the performance wa
s undistinguished, but people were overjoyed by the music. They spoke of little else. My favorite song had these lyrics:

  Sweetheart, put on your makeup and perfume.

  Be beautiful.

  Your eyes are like a deer

  Your lips, like a pomegranate flower,

  And your height, like a tree.

  Oh, I am going to my sweetheart

  And I don’t know whether to go

  In a Datsun, a minivan, or a Land Rover.

  The progenitors of up-to-the-minute Afghan pop are somewhat more urbane. Baktash Kamran is as close to a pop star as you’ll find in Afghanistan—good-looking, twenty-three years old, a bodybuilder, a reinterpreter of music from the seventies and creator of new material. On the several occasions when I met him, he wore a leather jacket with an American flag on the back. During the time of the Taliban, he dug out a secret underground basement room, where he practiced music, far enough down so that they couldn’t hear him. He was an adolescent and a provocateur who was jailed four times: for keeping his beard too well trimmed on one occasion and for having an electric piano on another. He claims he was singing as he escaped.

  The first singer to have his own concert on Afghan television after it was reestablished, Kamran showed me the object that he calls his pride and joy: a high-tech Yamaha synthesizer that he brought into the country from Pakistan when the Taliban still controlled the south. “I couldn’t bring it across the legal checkpoints,” he explained, “so I tied it to a donkey and he and I climbed the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan together. Then I wrapped it in a shawl and carried it to Kabul in a taxi.”

  Asked about relations between the sexes, the subject of his songs, he said they were getting closer, but added that he had never felt excluded by the burka. “It’s easy to fall in love with a pair of shoes,” he told me. “Or the way someone’s fabric moves.” He has written songs about that.