Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (40 page)

Gathering Round TVs

Television, illegal under the Taliban but reborn in early 2002, is the most popular means of disseminating new ideas and values, though the country’s only station’s equipment is dilapidated and many shows have to be shot several times because of poor-quality video and cameras that fail. Mansour has brought in professors for programs about the history of Afghanistan stretching back to 1000 BC. There are also music and art programs, showings of old Afghan films, and recitations of new Afghan poetry. Afghans are hungry for this material;
after five years without television, large groups of viewers in Kabul gather around sets that are often hooked up to car batteries when power fails, as it does most nights.

Guardians of Art

Many of Afghanistan’s best artists use traditional media, such as painted miniatures, which originated in Afghanistan and are central in the country’s artistic history. The leading miniaturist, Hafiz Meherzad, encloses figurative scenes within exquisite borders of gold leaf and ground-rock pigments. Meherzad said he had been “too tired to emigrate” after the mujahideen took over in the post-Soviet power vacuum and thought that he could continue his work quietly during the Taliban’s reign so long as he didn’t show it publicly. But when his neighbors cried out that the Taliban were searching everyone’s house, he panicked and buried all his work. It was largely destroyed by the earth’s moisture. His sense of cultural responsibility is acute. “I do not believe in innovation in this field,” Meherzad said. “If you make changes in this work, you will destroy even the past. You in America can innovate because your past is safe. Here in Afghanistan, we need to secure our past before we begin to create a future.”

The Taliban found it hard to attack calligraphers, whose work was holy; but it held them in considerable suspicion, and men such as Ismail Sediqi kept a low profile. He stopped making beautiful images of his own poems, with lines such as “I am a treasure within a ruin.” Instead, he became “a simple scribe” who wrote verses from the Koran. Even here, however, he found room for sedition: he often copied out the opening verse of the holy book, which announces—contrary to the restrictive practices of the Taliban—that God is the God of all men. “Innovation?” he said. “Well, I sometimes put modern makeup on the beautiful face of the classic forms.”

Asefi, who has become a potent symbol of cultural rebirth in Kabul, was unable to leave Afghanistan during the Taliban period, which started in 1996, because of family obligations, and he made only landscapes, bare of human or animal figures, and “unrepresentative
in any way of life in Afghanistan.” The pressure and the fear gave him psychiatric problems that continue to haunt him. Now he is returning to those works and adding the figures he always envisioned. “If the Taliban had lasted five more years, they might have destroyed our culture,” he said. He is grateful for the American military intervention: “By liberating us, you saved our history as well as our present lives.”

Underground Poets

Afghanistan is a country of poets. Shir Mohammed Khara ran an underground poetry movement under the Taliban. He met with other poets who had memorized their poems so that they could discuss them without running the risk of being found carrying them. Whenever they gathered, they carried copies of the Koran so they could tell Taliban agents that they were having a prayer meeting. A number of poets have allied themselves with the newspaper
Arman
(
Hope
).

“We could not mirror our Taliban-era society,” the poet Mohammed Yasin Niazi said. His colleague Abdul Raqib Jahid added, “Under the Taliban, I tried simply to write poems that would relieve people of their tension.” Their new poetry is enthusiastically nationalist.

Niazi wrote:

We saw the results of the work of the ignorant.

Now we should be rational.

It is time for open windows

Through which the sun shines.

Jahid wrote:

Communism and terrorism wanted to swallow Afghanistan

But the knife of liberty cut their throat . . .

I just want to tell you the story of liberty

As politely as possible.

Other poets, however, express deep bitterness. Achmed Shekib Santyar wrote:

Epitaph

On the biggest escarpment,

On the sharpest peak,

With bold letters,

Etch this,

The message of a futureless generation:

That in childhood, instead of mothers’ mercy, we received the rough talk of soldiers;

And in youth, instead of pens, we got guns in our hands;

And in age, instead of rest, we went out begging.

Don’t blame us.

We could do nothing for you.

Close Call for Filmmakers

In 1968, with support from Hollywood, Afghan Films was established. It made a dozen or so films a year—documentaries and features—until the Soviet invasion and the mujahideen, when things slowed down. Under the Taliban, they stopped entirely. The Taliban burned more than a thousand reels when they took Kabul. “They started doing it here in the office,” said Timur Hakimian, head of the company, waving a hand in front of his face. “You can’t imagine the smell. Since it was asphyxiating them as well as the rest of us, they went to the stadium and made a public spectacle of their bonfire.” Fortunately, Taliban censors didn’t know the difference between prints and negatives; what they burned was mostly replaceable, and the negatives, hidden elsewhere, survived. “Unfortunately, we were unable not only to use our equipment during these years, but also to clean or maintain it,” Hakimian said. “Much has been destroyed not by abuse, but by neglect. If we could get the equipment, we’re ready to roll again.”

Hakimian is a drily humorous and sophisticated man who has
traveled to film festivals around the world. He served for many years as president of the Union of Artists, a position he has now reclaimed. Because he had made a film whose narrator accuses the Taliban of being against culture and Islam, he went into hiding during their ascendancy. “There was good reason to be afraid!” he told me. “If these people could blow up your World Trade Center, they could blow up little me! I feel lucky to be alive at all.” He got a friend who worked as a cleaner in the security department of the Taliban to remove and burn his file, and he attributes his survival to this act.

Dozens of men and three women have approached Hakimian about playing in films again. The great actress of pre-Taliban films was Zamzama Shakila, usually just called Zamzama, a gorgeous woman whose physical presence was particularly alarming to the Taliban. She wanted to stay in Afghanistan despite the Taliban; she gave up acting, and her husband (also an actor) sold clothes in the street. But Taliban agents hunted them down, and in one attack by fundamentalists she took five bullets and he took seven, one of which is still embedded in his skull. They survived and fled to Pakistan. For years she managed by singing for weddings in Peshawar. The day Kabul was taken, they came back. “I was so thirsty for my country,” she said.

She wore the burka for her trip back into Afghanistan; when she arrived in Kabul, she took it off and burned it in the street. She is one of the few women to go without cover today. “I hear women talking as they pass me, saying they admire my shedding my burka,” she said. “I confront them and say, ‘Take yours off. Nothing terrible will happen.’ Sometimes they throw off their burkas there, and we walk in the street together. Someone has to start this tendency.” Zamzama complains that while Afghan men stare, American soldiers in the Special Forces units are the ones who are obnoxiously aggressive. “I say to them, ‘You are worse than the terrorists. You are making life impossible for Afghan women. Cut it out.’ ”

In the dilapidated offices of Afghan Films, Zamzama explained, “The old crowd is coming together. Of course, actors are more liberal than others, and in these offices we meet each other and shake hands.” She became emotional, held my arm. “In our happiest dreams we didn’t see this.” Since Afghan Films has no equipment, Zamzama keeps
her family going by acting in two weekly television programs. “I’m ready to do comedy now,” she said. “Romantic comedy.”

Hakimian is skeptical: “The women newscasters on TV still wear head scarves; the country barely accepts that they show their faces. If you can’t show a woman’s hair, how can you show her in a boy’s arms?” But Zamzama countered, “No fighting films. We’ve seen enough guns in our real lives. People should enjoy the new Afghan films.” She gestured extravagantly. “It’s time for fun, fun, fun.”

Music Breaks a Silence

While cultural resurgence in all the arts is strong, it is most striking in music. A long-silenced country, where women could be arrested for humming to their babies, where it was illegal even to clap your hands, is suddenly full of every kind of music in every place.

I went to a wedding where the band was playing in a very un-Western “Western style”—what for Afghanistan would have been Top 40 if anyone had been counting. A member of the groom’s family had died a short time earlier, and there is supposed to be no music after such a death; but the bride protested that there had been enough years of silence to cover a thousand family deaths. The band included an electric guitar, a drum machine, and a Soviet-era synthesizer; the irregular electricity meant that all the instruments kept going on and off, and the performance was undistinguished, but people were overjoyed by the music. They spoke of little else. My favorite song had these lyrics:

Sweetheart, put on your makeup and perfume.

Be beautiful.

Your eyes are like a deer

Your lips, like a pomegranate flower,

And your height, like a tree.

Oh, I am going to my sweetheart

And I don’t know whether to go

In a Datsun, a minivan, or a Land Rover.

The progenitors of up-to-the-minute Afghan pop are somewhat more urbane. Baktash Kamran is as close to a pop star as you’ll find in Afghanistan—good-looking, twenty-three years old, a bodybuilder, a reinterpreter of music from the seventies and creator of new material. On the several occasions when I met him, he wore a leather jacket with an American flag on the back. During the time of the Taliban, he dug out a secret underground basement room, where he practiced music, far enough down so that they couldn’t hear him. He was an adolescent and a provocateur who was jailed four times: for keeping his beard too well trimmed on one occasion and for having an electric piano on another. He claims he was singing as he escaped.

The first singer to have his own concert on Afghan television after it was reestablished, Kamran showed me the object that he calls his pride and joy: a high-tech Yamaha synthesizer that he brought into the country from Pakistan when the Taliban still controlled the south. “I couldn’t bring it across the legal checkpoints,” he explained, “so I tied it to a donkey and he and I climbed the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan together. Then I wrapped it in a shawl and carried it to Kabul in a taxi.”

Asked about relations between the sexes, the subject of his songs, he said they were getting closer, but added that he had never felt excluded by the burka. “It’s easy to fall in love with a pair of shoes,” he told me. “Or the way someone’s fabric moves.” He has written songs about that.

While this scene is brewing, music is also reentering the lives of people for whom it is a more profound enterprise. On Thursdays, the eve of the Sabbath, the Chishti Sufi people of Afghanistan, Muslim mystics, are gathering once again for the ritual that the Taliban so long denied them. I went to a recently reestablished
khanqah
, a Sufi holy building
,
in Kabul. The ceremony took place in the poorest part of the city, down a long alley of bombed-out buildings. I climbed a small staircase of mud bricks into a hidden upper story where about eighty men were seated on old carpets strewn across the floor. The walls were graffitied with phrases from the Koran, and the light came from candles and one electric light, which went on and off according to its whim.

The men had faces from outside of time: craggy and bearded,
though some were quite young, and aflame with the ceremony. They wore traditional Afghan dress, heavy woolen shawls wrapped completely around them. On a raised platform, about a half dozen instrumentalists were playing strange lyrical music and incanting verses, repetitive and mesmeric. Periodically one would stop, and someone else would take his place. The crowd swayed and shifted to the music, and some intoned nasally with the singers. A young man with a battered teapot crawled around serving everyone tea from the same eight cups. The ceremony went on all night. It was dizzying; time lost its meaning. Sometimes someone would get up and dance or sway ecstatically. The voices would rise and grow thick in the air. Then the tune would become increasingly rapid, the rhythms more urgent, until it broke, and a new tune would make its slow way forward. It felt sacred and as ancient as the seven hundred years that it has been practiced by Sufis in Afghanistan.

I had the fortune to meet Afghanistan’s most distinguished classical musicians, who have been brought together by the enterprising director of music for Afghan television, Aziz Ghaznavi, himself a popular singer of the pre-mujahideen period who has toured in the United States. “Of course, practice makes perfect,” Ghaznavi said, “and during the Taliban period none of us could practice. We lost so much. After five years of not singing at all, I was afraid to hear my own voice, and it was a very scary moment, to sing again for the first time.”

To an untrained ear, classical Afghan music sounds somewhat like Indian classical music, but it uses instruments that are indigenous to Afghanistan—the sarinda, the
rabab
, and the
richak
—as well as the tabla and sitar and harmonium. The Taliban insisted that musical instruments be destroyed, so only those that people managed to hide have survived. One man I met had kept his sarinda in the middle of his woodpile, where it passed for fuel, throughout the Taliban period, knowing that any neighbor who spotted it could betray him, should he so wish. “In recent months, we have been starting over with these warped, broken instruments,” Ghaznavi explained. “There is only one instrument maker in Afghanistan, and he is now fixing all the broken instruments; he has no time yet for new ones.”