Stories from Afghanistan

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the outstanding online literary journal Words Without Borders, every month they publish English translations of world literature, usually a different country each month, although they are occasionally arranged thematically. This month's issue covers contemporary writing from Afghanistan, and I'm in the process of making my way through it. There's some wonderful, magical stuff in there.

In "The Idol's Dust" by Zalmay Babakohi, the Talibs in charge of demolishing the colossal Buddhas at Bamiyan find that each pebble of the destroyed statues is itself a small sculpture of the Buddha... before realizing that they themselves are being transformed into stone statues.

"Dasht-e-Laili" is an intense piece about the massacre of Taliban troops in the Dasht-e-Laili desert during the American invasion in 2001, where hundreds or thousands of Taliban prisoners were loaded into shipping containers and suffocated to death before being buried in mass graves. The subject matter and storytelling style are strongly reminiscent of Polish holocaust writing like The Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. The story is in some ways more shocking, though, as it's an event that has not been widely reported in the American press.

My favorite so far, though, has been "To Arrive" by Asef Soltanzadeh, about the arrival of an old Afghan man in Copenhagen airport, where he has come to join his son in in Denmark.  The first paragraph gives you a clue of the languorous, winding style of the story:

When you get off the airplane, it will not be like Kabul airport, or like other cities of Afghanistan for that matter, where they drive stairs up and attach them to the door and then take down the passengers one by one. These days, there have been improvements everywhere, old man. But we, we are lagging behind, and war has taken us further and further back. The only thing we think of is devastation, and not creation . . . they will drive the bridge up and attach it to the airplane door, and when you have passed through, you will arrive in the airport’s waiting room.

As it dawns on the old man that his son is not at the airport waiting for him, he sets off to find his way, not knowing where he is going or knowing any Danish other than the words "yes", "no", and "WC". The slow pace of the action belies a gripping suspense, as his confusion and disorientation are interlaced with memories of his life back in Afghanistan, where his wife's recent death left him with no one to take care of him and prompted him to move to Denmark, where his son sought asylum after deserting from the army during the Soviet invasion. "To Arrive" is what short stories are all about - it's note-perfect. Anders Widmark, the issue's editor and translator of many of the stories, says of Soltanzadeh that he "will become the next great storyteller of Afghanistan." If so, I hope I will have the pleasure of reading more of his writing in the future.