From Yasmina Khadra aka Mohammed Moulessehoul’s 2002 novel translated in 2004 by John Cullen:

In a country where cemeteries and wastelands compete with one another for territory, where funeral processions prolong the military convoys, war has taught him to not get too attached to anybody whom a simple caprice, a change of mood, may take away from him. Atiq has consciously enclosed himself in a cocoon, where he’s exempt from making futile efforts. Acknowledging that he’s seen enough of those to be moved by the plight of his fellowman, he’s wary of his tendency towards sentimentality, which he looks upon as a sort of ringworm, and he limit’s the sorrows of the world to his own suffering.

There are no birds in this dark, terrifying tale set in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Not much of anything really lives there, including the harrowing characters that cross The Swallows of Kabul’s less-than-two-hundred pages. I think swallows are a poetic reference to the women in Kabul who must wear ghoulish burqas whenever they venture outside their homes. The book not only follows two of them, one who despises it, but their lost and despairing husbands who love their wives in spite of how burdened they are by them. One of the men is introduced in the book excerpt above, whose wife is slowly, inexorably dying of disease, while the other man starts to lose his mind after their house was bombed and his wife lost her magistrate position.

Actually all of them are swallows, living precariously in the shadow of war and the Taliban thugs that would rather knock your head off than hear you laugh in the streets. Usually the thugs would pull any men off the street and into a mosque to listen to a war-hungry, America-hating mullah whether they want to or not. This happens when one of our couples recklessly go out for a lover’s stroll and she must wait hours in her burqa with the sun burning down on her for hours until he returns. She, Zunaira, can never forgive him for the horror of that humiliation.

Since the other man, Atiq, keeps a women’s prison where he helps to load them up for a public stoning, the paths of Atiq and Zunaira cross when her husband has an accident in their ramshackled house. Atiq has been feeling resentful of his job for a while and it’s sad when he and an old man talk about how the old man keeps insisting he’ll leave for the mountains as soon as he feels better and Atiq points out that he’ll never feel better. Without telling anyone that old man does leave with great effort, but he’s the only one in the book who seems to have a happy ending. Or maybe it’s not so happy to go off and die alone.

You could say that The Swallows of Kabul describe how people there, if they’re not in the Taliban, are compelled to die. Will the men go insane and get beaten to death? Will the women die by disease, by “sinning” and getting stoned, or by another way that was done in love for her husband? Perhaps, like swallows, they will find a way to free themselves of their burdens and fly away.

The author is actually a man in the Algerian army, but he used a female pseudonym “to avoid submitting his manuscript for approval by military censors…” I’m so glad he did so. It’s a window into a part of the Muslim world most of us have never seen up close that unflinchingly reveals the mentality of Islamic radicals while letting us know that many good-hearted Muslims struggle with the inhumanity around them that threatens ever more disturbingly to engulf them. The couples feel they only have each other; their relationships are their only reason for living. But The Swallows of Kabul is no fairy tale. In a world like this, love may be discovered - or rediscovered - when it’s too late.

Khadra/Moulessehoul focuses quite a little more on what the men are doing and thinking, so I wondered what Zunaira was thinking and doing in the climactic end. Maybe I was supposed to feel Atiq’s frustration more that way, but I felt deprived. In general I enjoyed the complex characters, the thoughtful dialogue and the beautifully-written story. I was reminded of Franz Kafka a little too much, though. It may be a short novel, but it wasn’t a quick read I can easily forget.

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This has been another entry in my Operation: Muslim Outreach all this month. See my profile for more entries.

Recommended: Yes