plorentz's Full Review: Yasmina Khadra - The Swallows Of Kabul
Back in one of my old college Shakespeare classes, I was taught by an old man who looked like Colonel Sanders (only with a crusty Vermontian accent), that a comedy, in the classical sense, is a story that begins in darkness, disunity and death but ultimately moves towards lightness, marriage and renewed life; and that a tragedy is a story that begins in life and light and unity and ends in death, chaos and madness. But, what of a story that begins in darkness, disunity and death and only moves towards greater death, chaos, and madness?
Such a story is French-Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra’s 2002 novel The Swallows of Kabul, recently published in an English translation by John Cullen. In the heightened language of a classical tragedy, Khadra (a former Algerian military officer who adopted a female pen-name to bypass military censors) traces the dark intersections in the lives of two couples living in Kabul under Taliban rule. Atiq Shaukat is a jailer, charged with guarding condemned prisoners until the time of their public executions; his wife Musarrat is slowly dying of cancer. Atiq feels increasingly lost and isolated from his life and from his faith, torn between his despair and a smoldering anger that boils ever closer to the surface of his daily life. All around he sees old war veterans telling increasingly tall tales of how they won their amputations, and little boys acting out detailed playtime recreations of public executions with cardboard figures and little wooden swords. When Atiq confides in a friend about the sadness he’s feeling for his dying wife, the friend advises him to divorce her and find a young virgin more willing and able to meet his needs.
Mohsen Ramat is equally lost. Though he and his wife Zunaira, a former magistrate, are both somewhat liberal and well-educated, and once belonged to a sort of economic middle-class, Mohsen finds himself one day, while walking the streets of the ruinous city, getting swept up into a public stoning of a convicted prostitute, hurling stones at her, and getting an electric thrill when one of his stones strikes her head leaving a growing circle of blood on the woman’s burqa (a shroud-like garment which covers a woman’s whole body, with a mesh-like screen for her eyes – under fundamentalist Taliban rule, it was required that all women wear a burqa in public). Afterwards Mohsen is terrified of his own actions and confesses the strange, ugly transgression to his wife. Eventually, Zunaira comes to forgive Mohsen and even sympathizes with him. But, when Mohsen and Zunaira decide to take a stroll the following day, the compulsory joylessness of life in Kabul literally strikes a blow to the couple and their marriage, catalyzing a string of events that will devastate both the central couples, but ultimately change nothing.
In Khadra’s Kabul, stories like Atiq’s and Mohsen’s are mere stones in a catastrophic landslide, a few grains of sand blown off a rock in the centuries-long erosion of a once-great city and society. The city wears futility and stagnation and violence like a burqa of its own. It’s a place utterly devoid of music, where laws banning laughter in the streets are enforced by omnipresent thugs wielding whips and clubs, a place as unknowable and unbearable as it is inescapable, where, as Khadra puts it, violence has become the official language.
Khadra’s language, on the other hand, is that of an existentialist melodrama, the dialogues between the men, their wives and their confidantes delivered with a stagey formality that’s one part Eugene O’Neill and one part Amnesty International. And he narrates the story in the dispassionate present tense of a National Geographic special voice-over. Despite this, the book moves very quickly toward its abysmal conclusion, occasionally flirting with redemption before slashing its throat and smashing it to pieces with the butt of a Kalashnikov.
Needless to say, this isn't a cheery read - at times, it's devastating. On the other hand, the justifiable demonization of the Taliban that became a staple of our news and national discourse in the months following 9/11 by its repitition, its unanimity and its distance tended to leave me cold. It's all very well to read about the injustices of the Taliban regime, to understand on a shallow, intellectual level that they were/are bad people; it's another thing altogether to read a drama that takes place on the Taliban stage, one that gets inside the heart and minds of people for whom that kind of oppression is quite literally the air they breathe; and for a moment, at least, to breathe the air with them.
Set in Kabul under the rule of the Taliban, this extraordinary novel takes readers into the lives of two couples: Mohsen, who comes from a family of w...More at HotBookSale
Set in Kabul under the rule of the Taliban, this extraordinary novel takes readers into the lives of two couples: Mohsen, who comes from a family of w...More at HotBookSale
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