I just finished reading The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra. I picked it off the shelf a few days after I had a weird dream that I was visiting a foreign country where they stuffed playdo in womens mouths to prevent them from speaking. The author is a guy but he used a feminine pseudonym to write the book in order “to avoid submitting his manuscripts for approval by military censors while he was still in the army.”
Here are some quotes from the book that I particularly liked.
Nobody believes in miraculous rains or the magical transformations of spring, and even less in the dawning of a bright new tomorrow. Men have gone mad; they have turned their backs on the day in order to face the night. Patron saints have been dismissed from their posts. Prophets are dead, and their ghosts are crucified even in the hearts of children…
And everywhere-in the squares, on the streets, among the vehicles, or around the coffee shops-there are kids, hundreds of little kids with snot-green nostrils and piercing eyes, disturbing, sickly, on their own, many barely old enough to walk, and all silently braiding the stout rope they’ll use, someday soon, to lynch their country’s last hope of salvation.
Here is something I learned:
Burqa - “The burkha or burqa that the Taliban required women to wear in public is a tent-like garment that covers the woman from head to foot. The part covering the head is tight, to keep in place a mesh panel, out of which the woman sees; the rest is voluminous, gathered in back in pleats that allow freedom of movement.”
This is a burqa.
Zunaira shakes her head. “I don’t feel like coming home heartsick, Mohsen. The things that go on in the streets will just ruin my day, to no purpose. I can’t come face-to-face with horrors and just keep on walking as if nothing’s happened. Furthermore, I refuse to wear a burqa. Of all the burdens they’ve put on us, that’s the most degrading. The Shirt of Nessus wouldn’t do as much damage to my dignity as that wretched getup. It cancels my face and takes away my identity and turns me into an object. Here, at least, I’m me, Zunaira, Mohsen Ramat’s wife, age thirty-two, former magistrate, dismissed by obscurantists without a hearing and without compensation, but with enough self-respect left to brush my hair every day and pay attention to my clothes. If I put that damned veil on, I’m neither a human being nor an animal, I’m just an affront, a disgrace, a blemish that has to be hidden. That’s too hard to deal with. Especially for someone who was a lawyer, who worked for women’s rights. Please, I don’t want you to think for a minute that I’m putting on some sort of act. I’d like to, you know, but unfortunately my heart’s not in it anymore. Don’t ask me to give up my name, my features, the color of my eyes, and the shape of my lips so I can take a walk through squalor and desolation. Don’t ask me to become something less than a shadow, an anonymous thing rustling around in a hostile place. You know how thin-skinned I am, Mohsen. I’d be angry at myself being angry at you when you were only trying to please me.”
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