In 2001 journalist Åsne Seierstad arrived in Kabul. One of the first people she met was a bookseller. She was fascinated by his stories about his battles with the different regimes and their censors, how he hid books from the police and lent them out to others. Over the weeks she got to know him better and eventually asked if she could write a book about him and his family. In 2002 he agreed, and she moved in to stay for four months.
The Bookseller of Kabul is both captivating and deeply moving. The surface part of the book concerns the man of the title. He is fascinated by knowledge and making money. From a very early age he discovers that his engineering textbooks cannot be found locally, so he travels, discovers a source, and then sells them to fellow students. With little regard for copyright he has built up large business selling and reprinting.
In one sense he is a hero. He has a passion for helping people discover the literature and history of his own country. He has endured the communists, the Taliban, the civil war, and the liberation. From time to time he has gone to jail and has learned to hide his books throughout the city. He sometimes has had to stand by while illiterate guards burnt his books because they contained pictures of living things (prohibited by the Taliban), or because the contained something banned by the particular regime in power at the time.
But although the bookseller is passionate and liberal and brave, he is also ruthless and brutal. He rules his family with a rod of iron. Relatives are summarily dismissed out of his household. His sons are often denied education and made to work twelve hours a days seven days a week in his shops, even when they were children. He shows no mercy to a carpenter who stole postcards from him in order to feed his starving family. In his mid-fifties he decides to take another sixteen year old bride and then comes home and announces the wedding date to his existing wife of thirty years. Seierstad does not idolize her main character.
If the bookseller provides the surface of the book, the heart is undoubtedly with the women. It is worth reading the book just to gain a deeper understanding of their plight. Despite Kabul being one of the sunniest cities on earth, many of the women suffer from vitamin D deficiency. They are virtual prisoners in dark houses, and when allowed out, are entombed in their blue berkas. Many of them continually bear children from an early age, desperately hoping for sons and despairing if daughters are borne.
In addition to their physical confinement and endless domestic labour, the book also movingly portrays their mental and emotional restrictions. Few dare ask for an education, though they long for it. If they ask, it is often denied, and the cultural trauma of having to sit in mixed classes is too great for some to even consider going to school.
Their fate is determined by their families. They are not allowed feelings or choice. Sometimes they are married to men twenty or thirty years their senior. If a young man sends them a letter expressing affection they fear being called a prostitute if they accept it. One of the women describes their fate: they are condemned to go on “eating dust”.
In addition to being moving, the book is also fascinating in the details of Afghan life that it describes - and these provide the volume’s fabric. We are given a history of the berka, and a detailed description of what it is like shopping in a busy market in great heat with restricted view (Seierstad wore the Afghan clothes during her family stay). The tortuous rules concerning who can look at whom and when and for how long once the family have arranged the engagement are explained, and the detailed wedding preparations (including arrangements for proof of virginity) are described. We are taken into the mind-set of the mother who planned the honour killing of her daughter for bringing ‘disgrace on the family’. We catch glimpses of the prostitution (including child prostitution) that has grown on the back of grinding poverty and the large number of war widows without social support. We read the lists of amazing restrictions that the Taliban ruthlessly enforced. Paradoxically, we also learn about the nomadic tribal women who endure far less restriction on dress and movement, and of the homosexual and bisexual war commanders and their boys.
This book will stay with me a long time. It has opened a closed window and allowed me to see inside. What I saw was disturbing. It is a beautifully written account, closely observed, and affecting.
See also: There Must Be Violence Against Women
See also: Books, Oppression and Women
We might see the 20th century as the time when books and films such as David Attenborough’s landmark series taught us that animals are not “little humans in furry suits”, not robots made of flesh, but wonderful organisms every bit as amazing as human beings, imbued with a logic and beauty of their own.
Perhaps the 21st century will be remembered as the time when we began to understand that other cultures are not merely deformed or contorted versions of our own but complete human systems with a logic and beauty - and sometimes ugliness - of their own.
It has always been my contention that to rush in and impose “democracy” on people for whom this is an alien and evil concept is a mistake. We may see much wrong with other cultures but, if we are honest, we will readily admit that there is also much wrong with our own culture and that when we impose it on others we inevitably impose the bad along with the good. We could do a lot worse than cure ourselves before seeking to cure others.
To my mind, the inescapable foundation of all processes of improvement is understanding. It is outrageous arrogance to blunder in and sweep away an ancient culture in complete ignorance of it. A culture is created to solve the problems of life but once established it in turn creates needs in those who participate in it. Taking it away and replacing it with an alien culture leaves those needs untended, like open wounds.
Books like The Bookseller of Kabul are valuable - more than valuable - because they teach us about other cultures, lead us to understand them, to see what is good in them and what is bad. If we are wise, we will compare them with our own and learn something about ourselves in the process. Belief leads to arrogance, understanding to humility. Arrogance destroys in order to render all in its own flawed image. If we are to make a better world it is only through humility and understanding that we shall succeed.
I want this book and I want it now!
[...] See also: Behind the Berka [...]
I do now have the book in my possesion. I have only read the foreward so far but I know this is going to be a compelling read. I will come back here with my thoughts and will also be writing my own blog on it in the future. Thanks for bringing this book to our attention.
I loved A Thousand Golden Suns by Khalid Hosseini which is similar to what you are describing and also takes you through decades of Afghan struggles which really gives you a grasp of how complicated Afghan history is. His book is fiction but he has spent much time in Afghanistan, listening to the stories of women and his book was dedicated to them. I’m looking forward to reading this book as well.
[...] would like to acknowledge athinkingmans own blog on this book, and am grateful for his review in bringing this work to life and to my [...]