Åsne Seierstad - The Bookseller of Kabul

‘Like the wedding,’ they said, ‘a wonderful funeral.’

The family’s honour had been salvaged.

Sharifa had a video from the wedding, but Jamila’s brother came to borrow it. She never got it back. Nothing would remain to suggest that a wedding had ever taken place. But Sharifa keeps a few photos. The bridal couple look formal and serious as they cut the cake. Jamila’s face betrays nothing and she looks lovely in the innocent white dress and veil, black hair and red mouth.

Sharifa sighs. Jamila committed a serious crime, but more from ignorance than a wicked heart.

‘She did not deserve to die. But Allah rules,’ she mumbles and breathes a prayer.

However, one thing bothers her: the two days of family council when Jamila’s mother, her own mother, agreed to kill her. She, the mother, it was, who in the end dispatched her three sons to kill her daughter. The brothers entered the room together. Together they put a pillow over her face; together they pushed it down, harder, harder, until life was extinguished.

Then they returned to the mother.

In Afghanistan a woman’s longing for love is taboo. It is forbidden by the tribes’ notion of honour and by the mullahs. Young people have no right to meet, to love or to choose. Love has little to do with romance; on the contrary, love can be interpreted as committing a serious crime, punishable by death. The undisciplined are cruelly killed. Should only one guilty party be executed it is invariably the woman.

Young women are above all objects to be bartered or sold. Marriage is a contract between families or within families. Decisions are made according to the advantages the marriage brings to the tribe – feelings are rarely taken into consideration. Throughout the centuries Afghan women have had to put up with injustices committed in their name. But in song and poem women have testified about their lives. The songs are not meant for publication, but the echo lingers on in the mountains and the desert.

‘They protest with suicide and song’, writes the Afghan poet Sayd Bahodine Majrouh in a book of poems by Pashtoon women.* He collected the poems with the aid of his sister-in-law. Majrouh was himself murdered by fundamentalists in Peshawar in 1988.

The poems or rhymes live on in popular sayings and are swapped by the well, on the way to the fields, by the baking oven. They talk of forbidden love, and without exception the beloved is someone other than the one the woman is married to; they talk of loathing the (often much older) husband. But they also express pride and courage. The poems are called landay, which means ‘short’. They are of few lines, short and rhythmical, ‘like a scream or a knife stab’, writes Majrouh.

Cruel people, you can see the old man

On his way to my bed

And you ask me why I cry and tear my hair.

Oh, my God, yet again you have bestowed on me a dark night

And yet again I tremble from head to foot

I have to step into the bed I hate.

But the women in the poems are also rebellious; they risk their lives for love – in a society where passion is prohibited and punishment merciless.

Le suicide et le chant. Poésie populaire des femmes pashtounes, by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, Gallimard 1994.

Give me your hand, my loved one, and we will hide in the

meadow

To love or fall down beneath the knife stabs.

I jump in the river, but the current does not carry me away.

My husband is fortunate; I am always thrown back on to the

bank.

Tomorrow morning I will be killed because of you.

Do not say that you did not love me.

Nearly all the ‘screams’ deal with disappointments and life unlived. One woman asks God to make her a stone in the next life, rather than a woman. None of the poems are about hope – on the contrary, hopelessness reigns. The women have not lived enough, never tasted the fruits of their beauty, their youth, or the pleasures of love.

I was beautiful like a rose.

Beneath you I have turned yellow like an orange.

I never knew suffering.

Therefore I grew straight, like a fir-tree.

The poems are also full of sweetness. The woman glorifies her body with brutal sincerity, sensuous love and forbidden fruit – as though she wants to shock, provoke men’s virility.

Lay thy mouth over mine,

But let my tongue be free so it can talk of love.

Take me first in your arms!

Afterwards you can bind yourself to my velvet thighs.

My mouth is yours, eat it up, do not be frightened!

It is not made of sugar, dissolvable.

My mouth, you can have it.

But why stir me up – I am already wet.

I will turn you into ash

If I only for one moment turn my gaze towards you.

The Business Trip

It is still cool. The sun’s first rays have touched the steep, stony mountain cliffs. The landscape is dust-coloured, brown turning to grey. The mountainsides are all stone; boulders threaten to trigger crushing avalanches, and gravel and bits of clay crunch below the horses’ hooves. Thistles growing between the stones scratch the legs of smugglers, refugees and fleeing warriors. A confusion of paths cross and disappear behind rocks and mounds.

This is the route used by smugglers of weapons and opium, cigarettes and Coca-Cola cans between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The paths have been trodden throughout the centuries. These are the paths the Taliban and the Arab al-Qaida warriors crept along when they realised the battle for Afghanistan was lost and they fled into the tribal areas of Pakistan. These are the paths they will use when they return to defeat American soldiers – the infidel who has occupied holy, Muslim soil. Neither Afghan nor Pakistani authorities control the area around the border. Pashtoon tribes command their particular districts on each side of the state boundaries. The lawlessness, preposterously, has found its way into Pakistani law. On the Pakistani side the authorities have the right to operate on tarmacked roads, and up to 20 metres beyond on both sides. Outside the 20 metres tribal law reigns.

On this morning the bookseller Sultan Khan makes his way past the Pakistani border guards. Less than 100 metres away are the Pakistani police. As long as humans, horses and laden donkeys keep their distance, there is nothing they can do.

But if the authorities cannot control the stream, nevertheless, many of the travellers are stopped and ‘taxed’ by armed men, sometimes just ordinary villagers. Sultan has made his provisions; Sonya has sewn the money into the sleeves of his shirt and he carries his possessions in a dirty sugar bag. He is wearing his oldest shalwar kameez.

As for most Afghans, the border to Pakistan is closed to Sultan. It matters not that he has family, a house and business in the country, nor that his daughter goes to school there – he is not welcome. Following pressure from the international community, Pakistan has closed its borders to prevent terrorists and the Taliban from hiding away in the country. A fruitless gesture. After all terrorists and soldiers do not turn up at the borders passport in hand. They use the same paths as Sultan when he travels on business. Many thousands enter Pakistan daily in this way.

The horses struggle up the steep slope. Sultan, broad and solid, sits astride the saddleless horse. Even in his oldest clothes he looks well dressed. As always his beard is newly trimmed, his small fez fits perfectly on his head. He looks like a distinguished gentleman who has taken a trip to the mountains to admire the view – even when, terrified, he grabs the reins tightly. He feels shaky. One false step and they’ll be at the bottom of the abyss. But the horse trundles calmly up the well-trodden paths, effortlessly, unaffected by the man it is carrying. The valuable sugar bag is tightly wound round Sultan’s hand. It contains books he wants to print for his shop and the draft of what he hopes will become his life’s work.