AFGHANISTAN
The Afghans: Three Lives through War, Love and Revolt
Asne Seierstad
Virago, $34.99
Once upon a time, long ago, a Norwegian journalist, Asne Seierstad, wrote a non-fiction book about life in Afghanistan during the so-called War on Terror. The Bookseller of Kabul became a global bestseller. Now, almost a quarter of a century later, and having written several well-received tomes about extremism of various kinds, including One of Us – about the Norwegian right-wing mass murderer Anders Breivik – Seierstad has returned to where it all began with a new book, The Afghans.
A Taliban fighter and women lined up for food rations in Kabul in 2023.Credit: AP
Last time she wrote about the country, the Taliban were fleeing for their lives. Now, they own Afghanistan, where power still grows from the gun-barrel, and women’s right to education and work are circumscribed. In the interim, the intrepid reporter has pursued important questions in dangerous places, from Iraq to Chechnya.
Seierstad’s mission now is to expose the disappointments and contradictions of life under Taliban rule by focusing on three main individuals. The first, Jamila Afghani, is a widely respected disabled advocate for the rights of women and children under the new regime. The second is a young female law student, “Ariana”, struggling to complete her degree under the Islamists’ corrupt and incompetent rule, while being forced into an unwanted arranged marriage. The third main character is “Bashir”, an Islamist militia leader.
The Afghans is a deeper book about Afghanistan than The Bookseller of Kabul.
This is a deeper, more considered book than The Bookseller of Kabul, which was a somewhat opportunistic project in which the author moved in with an Afghan family and proceeded to catalogue the inherent misogyny of the eponymous bookseller, Shah Muhammad Rais. He disowned Seierstad’s version of his life, sued for defamation and later fled Afghanistan for fear of his reputation and life.
In The Afghans, the diversity of the interviewees provides a more nuanced portrait, in which women are not exclusively portrayed as victims. The story opens with the birth of a girl who later could not walk, just another victim of polio. But Jamila would eventually will herself to walk, and for the rest of her life she would struggle against the ignorance of those who considered disability a punishment by God.
She would ignore the jibes of “langak” (cripple) in a country where only one in 10 people were literate. She would demand education when her own parents could not see the point, and eventually, she would marry, even though a disabled woman in Afghanistan carries no bride price. And as her status grew, she would be recognised as an Islamic scholar who could correct the Taliban mullahs on matters of theology.
There is much lovely writing in this book, facilitated by Seierstad’s empathy with and access to Afghan women, who are severely oppressed by a combination of tradition, ignorance and violence. However, the structure of three central characters spawns a swamp of many offshoots that is, at times, hard to follow, a problem compounded by the translation from Norwegian into English. Too many lengthy compound sentences had me re-reading the text to make sense of it.
