An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir

by Chesler, Phyllis

  But Mernissi is clear that the women were confined: They had to ask husbands and fathers for permission to leave. Women were not allowed to do their own shopping; they had to describe the purchases they wanted to a male servant. As a child, Fatima was bothered by the separation of the sexes. One of the wise harem women explained it to her: “There are two kinds of creatures walking on Allah’s earth, the powerful on one side, and the powerless on the other. I asked [Mina] how would I know on which side I stood: Her answer was quick, short, and very clear: ‘If you can’t get out, you are on the powerless side.’”

  Both Fatima (as a child) and I (as an adult in Kabul) were definitely on the powerless side.

  At least Mernissi grew up loving these harem women who in turn loved her. I have come here as a feared stranger, knowing only one person, unable to speak the language, cherishing opposite values.

  Abdul-Kareem refuses to acknowledge that this is so and that our living conditions are wrong, unacceptable, intolerable—for me and probably for most Western women.

  He will not—he cannot—free me.

  Five

  My Mother-in-Law

  Some of the most daring adventurers to the Orient fainted in the bazaar, spent feverish days in bed retching and dragging themselves to whatever passed for a bathroom, endured vertigo, nausea, dysentery, tuberculosis, jaundice, and malaria.

  The Arab Middle East and Central Asia implacably assault the Western traveler’s gastrointestinal and nervous systems with germs and parasites to which those of native inhabitants are usually inured. A traveler knows that she is really in Afghanistan when she becomes deathly ill.

  I am in awe of those nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western travelers, especially the women, who crossed deserts without enough water or food; who rode horses and camels right into sandstorms; who faced danger with daggers and pistols at their sides; who survived the kind of heat and humidity that make breathing difficult and the kind of cold that leads to frostbite or death; who went without sleep, privacy, soap, or a change of clothing for weeks or months.

  As for me, I am not that kind of hale-and-rugged traveler.

  I was and still am a soft city-bred American who never learned to ride, shoot, hunt, navigate by the stars, or speak ten languages. My immune system and my gastrointestinal tract are simply not ready for Kabul.

  The hygiene leaves everything to be desired.

  Even though I have a picture-perfect modern bathroom, the city’s sewage system consists of open irrigation ditches that run alongside the streets. These ditches are used as a public bathroom—they are also used for bathing, doing laundry, and washing fruits and vegetables.

  Long after I leave Kabul, I speak to an old Afghan hand, an American who lived and worked in Kabul for a few years. He describes “getting desperately, violently ill” after ordering precooked sauced meat at the Khyber Restaurant. In fact he soon “passes out cold.” He tells me:

  I had dysentery several times in my first six months in Kabul. You could eat kebobs right off the fire in the filthiest little village and be safe, but anything that grows low and near the ground is totally unsafe unless you cook the hell out of it. Corn and oranges are safe. Anything you peel is okay.

  If you are thirsty and you don’t know if the water is safe, you can eat a watermelon or cucumbers or drink tea, which has to be boiled. Bread is okay only if you eat it right out of the oven; otherwise it’s been sitting there, and the flies have been landing on it, the dust blowing on it and you don’t know who’s been touching it.

  Why did Abdul-Kareem not prepare me for what would inevitably happen to my stomach? I would have packed antibiotics and medications for diarrhea and dysentery.

  Like everyone else, I come down with “the Kabul trots,” a terrible form of dysentery (either bacillary or amoebic, which is more serious) to which foreigners are prone. I have no advance warning and gain little sympathy once I am afflicted.

  If anything, I am a source of some mild, perhaps good-natured, amusement. Maybe my family feels that I am beginning to become a real Afghan. To an extent Afghans view foreigners as weak because they succumb to germs so quickly—without even putting up a fight.

  Afghans are more fatalistic about illness and are not used to interfering with God’s will. With so few doctors, hospitals, and surgical supplies, including medicine, and with so little money, this attitude may be a rather dignified and psychologically sound way of submitting to a fate that one cannot change.

  When my health worsens, I beg for a real doctor to diagnose and treat me. I have no idea what kind of hospital culture I am up against.

  In the 1920s the Scottish Afghan traveler Saira Shah described Afghan nomadic (Kuchi) attitudes toward modern doctoring: “The doctor is not usually called until everybody’s advice has been taken. . . . The doctor, they will tell you, is but a human being. Allah is above all. Besides, why does he cost so much? And why, if he costs so much, does he work at hospitals where treatment is free?”

  Before I became ill, I wanted to visit a hospital in Kabul. I specifically asked to see a maternity hospital. My visit shocked me. I write about it some years later:

  The corridors and courtyards of this long, low series of wooden buildings remind me of nineteenth-century Russia—a kerchiefed woman slapping a sheet to wash, a samovar in the doctor’s private waiting room. A man, wearing a turban and a long quilted coat, is pacing barefoot, back and forth.

  The doctor, educated in Germany, greets us first, then turns to the man and speaks brusquely, with annoyance.

  “You brought your wife here too late. The baby is already dead. Your wife, not long, maybe a few hours more.”

  Turning back to us, his guests, he smiles and offers us tea.

  “These provincials always come when it’s too late.”

  The husband has resumed his pacing, the doctor is stirring sugar into his tea. Suddenly the husband is yelling, the doctor yelling back. Quietly Abdul-Kareem translates for me.

  The man is refusing to pay any hospital fees because not only will he have to pay to bury both his wife and child, he will need that money to buy another wife to cook for him and take care of his other children.

  And where in the name of Allah did the doctor think he’d be able to get this kind of money? He has already paid for a car to transport his wife all the way from their village, which clearly was a waste of money. Why should he have to pay the doctor for killing his wife and child?

  I left the hospital as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to hear the screams of women as we sipped our tea. Now, on the way out, the smell of blood was unmistakable on some of the drying sheets.

  Afghanistan is not safe for wives—or for anyone who might need medical help.

  Long after my several bouts with dysentery, I discover quite by accident that my mother-in-law, Bebegul, has instructed the servants to stop boiling my drinking water and to stop washing my fruits and vegetables in boiled water.

  Perhaps she thinks I am already “Afghan enough” to withstand any and all germs. Perhaps she wants me dead.

  No one tells me anything. One day I happen to observe what the cook is doing. I bring Fawziya over to question him and to translate for me. It seems that he stopped doing anything considered special for me some weeks ago.

  I assume that Bebegul is behind this. Of course I could be wrong. The cook might simply have gone back to doing what he always does—and no one told him otherwise.

  There are many things Abdul-Kareem has not told me. His father’s polygamy is only one item on a growing list. He did not tell me that his mother is mentally ill—or has suffered so much that she now persecutes any woman who is in her power—or that the culture empowers her to do so. He did not explain that I would have to live with her and spend all my time with her, that I would be at her mercy, and that he would not be able to interfere. />
  In Kabul I am told very little about my mother-in-law, but what I am told is scandalous, hardly believable.

  Apparently, after her husband had taken his second or third wife, Bebegul had been found in a compromising position with a male servant.

  Were they merely alone? Did they simply seem too happy in each other’s company? Were they holding hands, was he trying to comfort her—or were they actually embracing? I cannot imagine things could have gone any further than this—but I hope they did.

  Had Bebegul once been a woman of rare spirit? Had she been crushed, driven mad?

  In any event someone had witnessed the transgression and had run screaming from the women’s quarters. Bebegul had committed a killing offense. If her husband had shot her or had given orders that she be stoned to death, he would have been praised, not arrested.

  Maybe he really loved her.

  Maybe he was bound to her through their common ancestors. After all she was a member of his extended family of origin. Perhaps he did not want to kill the mother of his five sons and three or four daughters.

  Therefore Ismail Mohammed condemned Bebegul—but to life. He never lived with her again. He rarely visited. I never saw him speak to her.

  And he had eight more children with his new young wife.

  Worse: Bebegul’s sons blame her for having to share their inheritance with their new half-brothers. They do not blame their father for anything.

  Many years later I ask Abdul-Kareem about his father’s death. He looks somber. He speaks slowly and sonorously. “My father died in a car accident in 1976. He was behind the wheel. It was not his fault. The whole country came out to mourn him. He had the biggest funeral. Half the country came to pay a condolence call.”

  He goes on in this fashion for quite some time.

  “And what about your mother, when did she die?”

  “Oh,” he says, almost offhandedly, “she died, too.”

  And he changed the subject right back to that of his father’s death.

  My father-in-law has sons and daughters who range in age from infancy to men and women who are in their thirties. His first two wives are celibate and lead lives devoted to their children, lives devoid of sexual affection. Their husband remains sexually vital and active in his midsixties.

  In 1918, when Edith Wharton visited Morocco, she was troubled by exactly this phenomenon, which she observed in an imperial harem in Rabat and in wealthy harems in Fez and Marrakesh.

  Wharton meets many perfumed and fluttering concubines who are locked up for life. In Fez, in the home of a “chief dignitary” (a plump, middle-aged, much adored man), she observes how the youngest baby boy is cradled tenderly by his father—even as they all wait for the arrival of the “majestic bearded gentleman” who is the patriarch’s firstborn son. Here is Wharton on this harem: “The redeeming point in this stagnant domesticity is the tenderness of the parents for their children. . . . One would suppose children could be loved only by inert and ignorant parents . . . but the sentimentalist would do well to consider the lives of these much-petted children. Ignorance, unhealthiness, and a precocious sexual initiation prevail in all classes. At eight or nine the little girls are married, at twelve, the son of the house is ‘given his first negress.’”

  I applaud Wharton’s clarity about slavery and women’s rights. She too finds the existence of slavery—and the absence of any guilt about it—unsettling, abhorrent, especially among the educated Moroccans. Wharton knows that the Caid (an important dignitary) is “enlightened, cultivated, a friend of the arts, a scholar and diplomatist”: “He seems, unlike many Orientals, to have selected the best in assimilating European influences. And yet when I looked at the tiny [African female slave] creature watching him with those anxious joyless eyes I felt once more the abyss that slavery and the seraglio put between the most Europeanized Mahometan and the Western conception of life. The Caid’s little black slaves are well-known in Morocco, and behind the sad child leaning in the archway stood all the shadowy evils of the social system that hangs like a millstone about the neck of Islam.”

  By the time Wharton visits Morocco, the West—but not the East—has abolished slavery. In the nineteenth century the valiant and persistent William Wilberforce fought for more than a decade to end the British slave trade. He triumphed. And America fought a bloody civil war that lasted for nearly five years before President Abraham Lincoln was able to abolish slavery.

  Slavery has always existed in the Islamic world. It still does. It is a taboo subject. Few scholars have dared study it. Today, in our presumably enlightened and antiracist times, neither Muslim nor secular Western scholars focus on antiblack racism or slavery among Muslims. Instead both groups focus on and condemn racism and colonialism—but only by Westerners.

  To this day Abdul-Kareem still focuses only on racism in America—and it does exist. He seemingly has no idea about the role that African and Arab Muslims once played in the Atlantic slave trade.

  Encountering gender apartheid and waged slavery shook me to my roots more than half a century ago in Afghanistan. Oh, the women of Afghanistan, the women of the Muslim world. I was no feminist—but now, thinking back, I see how much I learned there, how clearly their condition taught me to see gender discrimination anywhere and, above all, taught me to see how cruel oppressed women could be to each other. They taught me about women everywhere.

  Poor Abdul-Kareem has been away from home for so long that he has no bond with any of his brothers. The oldest brother, Hassan, Bebegul’s firstborn son, is arrogant, cold, and envious. He has not been allowed out to study abroad like his brothers, Reza and Abdul-Kareem.

  Abdul-Kareem barely knows his two younger brothers, Sami and Rafi, who might have been five or six years old when he left for Europe and America.

  Poor Abdul-Kareem—his father, his brothers, his entire society are probably testing him. Would he, could he, fit in? Is he still “one of them”? If so, how could he have made a love marriage with a foreign woman, a Jew, an American? Is he planning to lead a modern Western life in Kabul? Drinking, smoking, parties with foreigners? Has he forgotten where he came from?

  At the time Abdul-Kareem does not discuss any of this with me. I come to understand all this only in retrospect, many years later, when I am no longer in such personal danger. Abdul-Kareem might be ashamed of his country, but he has been taught that he has to be proud of it and is obliged to defend it from all criticism. He probably cannot bear to acknowledge the truth, even to himself.

  But it is more complicated than that.

  Abdul-Kareem has the best chance of rapid advancement only in this country and nowhere else on Earth. He decides to deny the reality of how things are by focusing on the role he will play in changing things from how they are to how they could be. In this he is very much a Westerner.

  When Flaubert visited Egypt in the mid-nineteenth century—or, rather, when he toured the brothels of Egypt—he was struck by the routine and public nature of cruelty. Men cursed at and beat their donkeys and horses. And they insulted, cursed, and beat each other. He writes, “You would scarcely believe the important role played by the cudgel in this part of the world; buffets are distributed with a sublime prodigality, always accompanied by loud cries; it’s the most genuine kind of local color you can think of. . . . All the old comic business of the cudgeled slave, of the coarse trafficker in women, of the thieving

  merchant—it’s all very fresh here, very genuine and charming.”

  In the harem where I live, I am horrified by the way in which our slave-like servants are treated. The way my mother-in-law treats her female servants is criminal, tragic, barbaric, unbelievable—but apparently entirely normal in Kabul, both among the elite and among the peasantry.

  Bebegul takes all her frustrations out on her female servants—and they simply take it, often smiling gamely and shrugging their shoulde
rs between their yelps and cries of pain. Bebegul curses them. She throws things at them. She beats them. The servants take it, they never quit; in fact, if anything, they are terrified of being fired.

  Their pitiful wage—any wage at all—constitutes a fortune to these people from the provinces. They can both help their families and not burden them, which is all that matters to them. Married servant couples spend years living apart, working for different families in the city, hardly ever seeing each other, always at the beck and call of their overlords.

  In the 1920s and 1930s the British traveler Rosita Forbes observed slave auctions, mainly of black African (“Abyssinian”) slaves on their way to the harems of Saudi Arabia. The boys were castrated and, if they survived, could one day become men of wealth and influence. The girls entered harems as concubines and domestic slaves.

  At auction the female slaves remain face veiled but are otherwise displayed naked from the neck down. Forbes observes that female slaves are routinely raped and beaten by their masters. She is shocked that they accept their fate so casually. And then she comes to understand that the slaves “are escaping the starvation of their hills or deserts for a land of plenty, where they will be able to eat as much as they like.” Forbes, with the help of an interpreter, questions one slave girl: “‘You didn’t mind leaving your people?’ I asked. I don’t know if she understood. The Arab translated her reply as: ‘She says she worked like a camel and was beaten like a dog. For her, slavery meant exchanging the mastership of a half-starving father, or husband, for that of a man who would give her food, clothing and a certainty of existence.’”

  In our Kabul household the servants never starve or go to bed hungry. They eat the cold leftover food every day and consider themselves fortunate. They have all the tea, fruit, bread, rice, and yoghurt that their stomachs can hold.