05.04.09
The Bookseller of Kabul
A few weeks after baring my own Lilliputian bookshop, I decided to read The Bookseller of Kabul believing it would provide me a panorama of what the love of books and bookselling would be like in this far-off war-stricken country. It did, although it is much, much more than just that.
What I did not suspect was an exhaustive and copious account of what day to day life is like for a middle class family in Afghanistan – and already it is difficult, especially for women. Now I can understand why the bookseller Sultan Khan (or Mohammed Shah Rais in real life) would want to burn Åsne Seierstad’s book and sue her. There is too much truth in it.The Bookseller of Kabul summarized Afghanistan’s complicated history for me and also opened my eyes to the various characters’ struggles in the confines of his and her own geographical, religious, educational, social, and personal sphere.
The hate that the Taliban regime inculcated in first-year schoolchildren’s alphabet shocked me: “I is for Israel, our enemy; J is for Jihad, our aim in life; K is for Kalashnikov, we will overcome;…M is for Mujahedeen, our heroes;… T is for Taliban…”
War was the central theme in math books too. School-boys – because the Taliban printed solely for boys – did not calculate in apples and cakes, but in bullets and Kalashnikovs, something like this: “Little Omar has a Kalashnikov with three magazines.There are twenty bullets in each magazine. He uses two-thirds of the bullets and kills sixty infidels. How many infidels does he kill with each bullet?
Moreover, the book is surprisingly akin to Reading Lolita in Tehran in the sense that it bemoans the rights of women, or the lack of it. This follows a scene after a public bath in a hammam; The women’s own smells are soon restored. The smell of old slave, young slave. Various passages concerning the low treatment of women is what pierces me each time, including these closing sentences when the women in Khan’s household speak of the bookseller’s pregnant second wife:
“What if it’s another girl!”
Another little catastrophe in the Khan family.
It is not exactly what you would expect from an initial glance of a book about a certain bookseller. It is indeed as Denver Post’s Steve Wineberg declared, “A compelling book… Seierstad infiltrated a world most readers will never see.”
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Through it all, what really kept on nagging at my thoughts was this; There was no music, thanks to past Soviet and Taliban governments. Despite that, Afghanistan seems to beckon to me. One cannot help the urge to bring music in such a place (no matter how insignificant I am as a musician), and if it be God’s will, share His Love there, too.
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grace said,
May 4, 2009 at 2:52 pm
hello ate mira, i’ve had this book on my shelf for ages, but like what happened with Kite Runner, somehow I can’t bring myself to read it. Maybe now I will. Thanks for letting me borrow Kite Runner, it was painful to read, but it taught me a lot. :)
PS: Have you read Book Thief by Markus Zusak? :)
karlo said,
May 4, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Thanks for talking about this relatively controversial (at least in certain circles) book… Would love to read this one sooner or later. :) And quite an interesting selection of quotes too… The educational ideological apparatuses in our supposedly less barbaric societies are less blunt in the (subtle) preaching for the acceptance of the same logic:
Miracle ♪♫ said,
May 5, 2009 at 11:02 am
Hi Grace! It’s always a pleasure to lend books to my beloved cousins. =)
I haven’t really read The Kite Runner yet but the pages I’ve scanned so far tells me that it could surpass The Bookseller of Kabul in a novelistic sense since The Bookseller of Kabul is more of a journalistic account (an outstanding one, however). It may not be as painful as Kite Runner, but it could also be very unsettling.
The Book Thief and The Kite Runner are waiting for me on my shelf. Wah! So many books, so little time! Haha
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Karlo, I’d lend you this book if only you lived somewhere closer. Yes, other educational systems are indeed less blatant… (but remain fatal in their own ways, nonetheless. hehe) What’s more shocking is how they define the word “infidel”: Someone who is not Muslim. It pains me to think how violence and hatred are openly instilled in such tender minds.