Book rec: Kabul in Winter
Kabul in Winter: Life without Peace in Afghanistan by Ann Jones.
Many of you probably heard about the young woman who was attacked and seriously hurt at goth convention in New Orleans by a fellow con-goer. (And if you are in NOLA or Auburn or Birmingham Alabama, you can keep an eye out for the perpetrator, William Hamlet Hunt.) On her MySpace, and until some jerks showed up and she disabled comments, on LJ, the young woman was getting hundreds of comments that tended to share common themes: people were sorry this had happened, her attacker was an [expletive of choice], and he would get what was coming to him. A fair number included perhaps more-than-half-serious threats of retaliatory violence against him.
What does all this have to do with Kabul in Winter? The response of people on LJ put into stark relief for me the differences in attitudes towards violence against women in the U.S. and Afghanistan. Imagine living in a place where, instead of the vast majority of your community rallying around you, supporting you, and blaming the guilty party after you'd suffered a vicious attack, they blamed you and treated you as contaminated and ruined. Ann Jones writes about self-harm as the only answer many Afghan women can find to being - yes, still - virtual slaves with subhuman social status. Afghanistan makes the sexism and "blame the victim" culture we have in the U.S. look insignificant by comparison.
In 2003 reporters noticed that women in Herat were setting themselves on fire.... [T]he news stories focused less on the girls' reasons for setting themselves on fire than on the curious question: Why Herat? My Afghan colleague Salma thought the question was laughably obtuse. "It's not Herat," she said. "They found suicide in Herat because Herat is where they looked."
...
Later, human rights investigators surveyed Herati men and women at random about acts of violence against women - women who were beaten, locked up, raped, forced into marriage or thrown out of it. In every case they asked, "What advice would you give a woman in this situation?" The most common answer, from men and women of all ages, was: "She should suicide."
(Kabul in Winter pp. 169-170.)
This excerpt makes Kabul in Winter sound like a depressing read, and in some ways, it is, but it's also an amazing book. It's not a history, or a treatise. It's her answer to questions she kept getting: "What's Afghanistan like? Is it better?" Reading it is a bit like reading a blog, in that it's personal, witty, insightful, and honest. It contains much necessary history about Afghanistan, but from an unabashedly opinionated and intimate perspective. It's vehemently anti-Bush, but conforms to no orthodoxy or agenda at the expense of candor. There's no bullshit here, and little patience for it. In the course of the book, Ann Jones spares nobody her judgement - not Americans or Afghans, not women or men, not herself or her work. She's unflinching. But she finds compassion in unexpected moments, as well. And throughout she demonstrates a penetrating insight, a dry humor, and a storyteller's deft touch.
Among other things, working at a NGO in Kabul, Jones experienced the surreal disjunct between the rhetoric and the reality in Afghanistan, and how that false rhetoric was used to promote us going into Iraq.
One evening we chanced on Fox News and the official American spin: Afghanistan, now at peace, had been rebuilt. For hours we cursed and swore at the TV set, but for once we couldn't change the channel...
...
Fox News went on describing a mission accomplished in a place they called Afghanistan, a country utterly unlike the one in which we lived. One night, as we sat in the dark to save generator power for the TV set, we heard some no-name right-wing think-tank prowar neocon talking head explain that America could speedily repair any incidental damage to Iraq's infrastructure, just as it had done in Afghanistan. Security, water, electricity - all those things Kabulis had learned to live without - he said had been restored in Kabul "in no time." Even in the dim glow of the TV, I could see that Helen was weeping. "Please can we go back to the BBC?" she said, and we never watched Fox News again.
(Kabul in Winter, p. 84 and p. 87)
It's easy to forget about Afghanistan, with the quagmire in Iraq and the prospect of the U.S. bombing Iran (side note: noooooooo! ::whimpers::). But this book is a powerful reminder that we can't go around imposing "democracy" or indeed any set agenda on other countries. They're not blank slates to be written on at our will. And our history of trying, even in the "success story" of Afghanistan, is unpromising at best. Read this book.
Many of you probably heard about the young woman who was attacked and seriously hurt at goth convention in New Orleans by a fellow con-goer. (And if you are in NOLA or Auburn or Birmingham Alabama, you can keep an eye out for the perpetrator, William Hamlet Hunt.) On her MySpace, and until some jerks showed up and she disabled comments, on LJ, the young woman was getting hundreds of comments that tended to share common themes: people were sorry this had happened, her attacker was an [expletive of choice], and he would get what was coming to him. A fair number included perhaps more-than-half-serious threats of retaliatory violence against him.
What does all this have to do with Kabul in Winter? The response of people on LJ put into stark relief for me the differences in attitudes towards violence against women in the U.S. and Afghanistan. Imagine living in a place where, instead of the vast majority of your community rallying around you, supporting you, and blaming the guilty party after you'd suffered a vicious attack, they blamed you and treated you as contaminated and ruined. Ann Jones writes about self-harm as the only answer many Afghan women can find to being - yes, still - virtual slaves with subhuman social status. Afghanistan makes the sexism and "blame the victim" culture we have in the U.S. look insignificant by comparison.
In 2003 reporters noticed that women in Herat were setting themselves on fire.... [T]he news stories focused less on the girls' reasons for setting themselves on fire than on the curious question: Why Herat? My Afghan colleague Salma thought the question was laughably obtuse. "It's not Herat," she said. "They found suicide in Herat because Herat is where they looked."
...
Later, human rights investigators surveyed Herati men and women at random about acts of violence against women - women who were beaten, locked up, raped, forced into marriage or thrown out of it. In every case they asked, "What advice would you give a woman in this situation?" The most common answer, from men and women of all ages, was: "She should suicide."
(Kabul in Winter pp. 169-170.)
This excerpt makes Kabul in Winter sound like a depressing read, and in some ways, it is, but it's also an amazing book. It's not a history, or a treatise. It's her answer to questions she kept getting: "What's Afghanistan like? Is it better?" Reading it is a bit like reading a blog, in that it's personal, witty, insightful, and honest. It contains much necessary history about Afghanistan, but from an unabashedly opinionated and intimate perspective. It's vehemently anti-Bush, but conforms to no orthodoxy or agenda at the expense of candor. There's no bullshit here, and little patience for it. In the course of the book, Ann Jones spares nobody her judgement - not Americans or Afghans, not women or men, not herself or her work. She's unflinching. But she finds compassion in unexpected moments, as well. And throughout she demonstrates a penetrating insight, a dry humor, and a storyteller's deft touch.
Among other things, working at a NGO in Kabul, Jones experienced the surreal disjunct between the rhetoric and the reality in Afghanistan, and how that false rhetoric was used to promote us going into Iraq.
One evening we chanced on Fox News and the official American spin: Afghanistan, now at peace, had been rebuilt. For hours we cursed and swore at the TV set, but for once we couldn't change the channel...
...
Fox News went on describing a mission accomplished in a place they called Afghanistan, a country utterly unlike the one in which we lived. One night, as we sat in the dark to save generator power for the TV set, we heard some no-name right-wing think-tank prowar neocon talking head explain that America could speedily repair any incidental damage to Iraq's infrastructure, just as it had done in Afghanistan. Security, water, electricity - all those things Kabulis had learned to live without - he said had been restored in Kabul "in no time." Even in the dim glow of the TV, I could see that Helen was weeping. "Please can we go back to the BBC?" she said, and we never watched Fox News again.
(Kabul in Winter, p. 84 and p. 87)
It's easy to forget about Afghanistan, with the quagmire in Iraq and the prospect of the U.S. bombing Iran (side note: noooooooo! ::whimpers::). But this book is a powerful reminder that we can't go around imposing "democracy" or indeed any set agenda on other countries. They're not blank slates to be written on at our will. And our history of trying, even in the "success story" of Afghanistan, is unpromising at best. Read this book.