THE SWALLOWS OF
by
Yasmina Khadra
Doubleday
Hardcover, 195 pages, $18.95
ISBN 0-385-51001-2
Previously published in Bloomsbury Review
When news came out of Afghanistan that 10 million citizens had registered to vote, that women in Kabul had shed their burqas and were running for elected office, that men in the countryside feared being the first to allow their wives to vote, that the Taliban conspired violence to interfere with the elections thankfully the elections came and went with long lines of voters and largely without violence. Was this a milestone in democracy gaining a foothold in the Middle-East? Or a temporary blip on the radar screen before the potential return to the rule of the Taliban, fundamentalists so intolerant they once blew up a towering ancient statue of the Buddha carved in a cliff.
It
was once said that the culture of the Middle-East could not compete with the
West because it keeps half of its population women enslaved as prisoners of their
husbands and unable to participate in a wider role in society. This has not and is not limited to Arabic
culture. Western history until the last
century faced a similar problem, and in the field of Western literature
itself a supposed enlightened area of civilization there are examples of women
who used male pen names to gain publication, recognition, and an audience. We now have the ironic twist of Mohammed
Moulessehoul, a former Algerian army officer, who took the feminine psuedonym
of Yasmina Khadra to avoid submitting his manuscripts to military censors. That he could publish as a female, rather
than a male, in a male-dominated culture, is a fact likely beyond Western
comprehension. That he now lives and
publishes in
But
the repression by Islamic fundamentalism of all humans in general, and more
specifically women, is a fitting study for an author who switched the gender of
his name to avoid censorship. His novel,
The Swallows of Kabul, sears our imagination with the harsh reality of
life under the Taliban. From the
author s depiction,
It is also a city where a murderer is bound to a post so the family of the victim may slit his throat, where a prostitute is buried to her waist and stoned to death by a frenzied mob, where the Taliban force men off the street at gunpoint into a mosque to bear a mullah s sermon, where for many the light of conscience has gone out, dreams disappear from sleep, and one wakes with his head as empty as a jug.
You don t owe her
anything. She s the one who should bow
down before you, Atiq, and kiss the toes of your feet, one by one, every time
you take off your shoes. She has little
significance outside of what you represent for her. She s only a subordinate. Furthermore, it s an error to believe that
any man owes anything at all to a woman.
The misfortune of the world comes from precisely that misconception.
Atiq, bitter and torn, the soul ripped out of him no different from the twenty years of war that destroyed the soul of Afghanistan, lashes out at the hell of Kabul in much the same way he makes his way through the crowded bazaars using a whip to clear a path before him.
In contrast is Mohsen Ramat, a gentle man with shoulders small and thin as a girl s, whose wife Zunaira is as beautiful as the dawn, with enormous eyes as brilliant as emeralds, for which, despite deteriorating circumstances and their hardscrabble life, she has kept their magic intact.
In Khadra s hands, Zunaira becomes the image of what the culture could be but is not the essence of something sublime, not only hidden from view but repressed in such a manner that the potential fruit can never ripen into anything except poison, self-loathing, and self-destruction. This is the antithesis of the Edenic view that knowledge is our destroyer. Here, the subjugation of anything that might provide enlightenment is the snake in the garden. Consider the description of the house of Mohsen and Zunaira:
The windows in his darkened
house are blocked up. Every time a
Taliban passed in the street, he would order Mohsen to repair the broken panes
without delay, along with the rickety shudders, lest the glimpse of a woman s
unveiled face offend some unsuspecting passerby. Since Mohsen couldn t afford these
improvements, he covered the windows with canvas curtains, and now the sun no
longer visits him at home.
Except for Zunaira to whom Mohsen says: Your face is the only sun I have left . . . Don t hide it from me.
To leave the dark hole of their homes, women must wear a burqa, and the flowing blue robes in which they are constricted and sweat in the heat make them the swallows of the book s title. But Zunaira is not just a pretty, uneducated bird. Before the Taliban, her ambition was to become a magistrate. Now she is nothing. Her gentle husband cannot physically protect her from the intimidation of the Taliban. In a quarrel over his manhood she shoves him backward, causing him to fall and strike his head, killing him instantly. Condemned to die, she becomes the prisoner of Atiq, and, in a last, futile protest she knows she can t win, she sheds her burqa in her cell. This is, after all, a land in which music is banned, laughter on the street is forbidden, and a woman can t speak in the presence of a stranger.
In her cell, her burqa gone, her beauty drives Atiq mad. Other than his wife, Zunaira s face is the first woman s face he s seen in years, as if women have become only ghosts, voiceless, charmless ghosts that pass practically unnoticed along the streets; flocks of infirm swallows . . . that make a mournful sound when they come into the proximity of men.
When Atiq tells his dying wife of her beauty, his wife is so loyal, so steeped in fundamentalist culture, she believes her husband has fallen in love, and she offers to take Zunaiara s place masked beneath a burqa so that her husband may live the life he s never lived, reborn by love.
This naivete may seem preposterous, but we don t live behind a veil of religious ruthlessness; we live in an entanglement of materialism. The tragedy of both cannot be denied, though most who can choose would not choose government by religious imprisonment, and the separation of church and state remains a revolutionary idea in much of the Islamic world.
For Atiq, and his symbolic descent into madness, there is only the mystery of the moon, and the story told by his father that the moon is only the sun, which after shining all day gets carried away and tries to violate the secrets of the night. But what he sees is so unbearable that he blanches and loses all heat.
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