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A society and its women Not too long ago, a friend, hearing about the current situation in my country, turned towards me and told me, point blank “You know, I tend to complain a lot about my country but when I think about yours, I always feel better because at least we don’t have it half as bad as you guys do”. I remember looking at her, perplexed, unsure whether I should be offended or simply…

The Water Carriers: A glance at Atiq Rahimi's most political novel

By Ali Jeihoon

This Farsi Dari translation is an excerpt from the original February 2019 article posted on the BBC Farsi service website.

While the Taliban still control large parts of Afghanistan and the fear of their ever-increasing power, Atiq Rahimi, the most famous Afghan-French writer, recently published a novel concerning Afghanistan during the Taliban period, creating a shocking and broken reflection of that era.

Atiq Rahimi's novel "سقاها" "The Water Carriers," recently published in Paris, tells the story, in thirty chapters, of two Afghans: one named Tom, an Afghan immigrant living in Paris, whose real name is Tamim. He leaves his wife and daughter and goes to Amsterdam to join his mistress.

And the other is Yusuf, who lives in Kabul is a water carrier. His job is to bring water for the mosque's worshipers; otherwise, he will receive "ninety lashes on his back."

Yusuf inherited this job from his father but has a more important purpose: taking care of Shirin, his brother's wife, who went into exile; we do not know where he is. Yusuf falls in love with the woman and does not know what to do with this forbidden desire.

Rahimi tells Tamim and Yusuf's story spanning over one day. Although the chosen day to narrate the lives of the two is not an ordinary day. At the beginning of the novel, the author writes a brief note: "On March 11, 2001, the Taliban destroyed two Bamiyan Buddhist statues in Afghanistan."

The "The Water Carriers" is a "roman choral"—in the sense that it tells several stories at once: the story of Tamim, the story of Yusuf, and the story of two destroyed Buddhas.

Rahimi wrote about Afghan society's oppression of women in his novel "Patient Stone," which won the Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award in 2008. In this book, the author narrates the destruction of history and the disappearance of Afghan society's identity and roots.

"Patient Stone" takes place at the beginning of the Taliban era in Afghanistan. While the story of "The Water Carriers" is the last days of the Taliban rule— six months after the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhist statue, 9/11 led to the US military intervention in Afghanistan and the fall of the Taliban.

Three incidents further magnify Rahimi's emphasis on history at the end of the book, all of which took place on March 13: the discovery of the body of a water carrier in Kabul, the stoning of a woman to death for adultery with the execution of her Hindu lover and the killing of a forty-five-year-old Afghan-French man in an accident on the Paris-Amsterdam highway.

Perhaps with these informed choices, Rahimi, as a shrewd witness, wants to testify to all the atrocities and tragedies of the Taliban era. But he did not need to count every day to show to this period, but sometimes the story of a day, an hour, a moment is enough.

"The art of storytelling has accustomed us to read the story of a century in three hundred and four hundred pages, and we are not in the habit of reading the story of a day in six hundred pages," Rahimi said in an interview. "But when we think about it, the amount we live within a day is enormous."

The author emphasizes: "If you write every moment of your life, every thought you have in a day, every emotion you experience in a day, it's all a novel. Every second is a story for me. In the novel "The Water Carriers," I tried to tell how each step depicts our destiny...we are here, following in our footsteps."

Rahimi refers to Yusuf, one of the two characters in the novel: before a human is born, he is a footprint on the earth, and after birth, he takes his footsteps, with every step to some extent, to reach the last step, death.

The author, who spent part of his youth in India and was inspired by Hinduism in his earlier works, is strongly influenced by its philosophy in "The Water Carriers"— in both theme and form.

However, the characters are not subject to fate. Although the two's stories seem to have nothing to do with each other, they have one thing in common: they want to profoundly influence and change their destiny.

The subject of love is also one of the main themes of the novel. Love in this novel is manifested not only in the hidden and virtual love of the narrator (or writer) to the Buddha statues but also in the overt and genuine love of the two characters in the story.

Although not narratively and dramatically related to each other, the love stories of Tamim and Yusuf are rhetorically linked. Because Yusuf is in the initial stage of love and Tamim is in the final.

Rahimi emphasizes the "language and literature of love" by creating Yusuf as an illiterate lover in this novel.

"If I had not gone to school in Afghanistan, I might have been like Yusuf," Rahimi said in an interview.

Yusuf is uneducated. His passion has no words. He does not know how to express his romantic feelings and cope with love. The novel raises the question in the mind of the reader whether there is love without words?

But Rahimi is also consciously influenced by Hinduism and dealing with the ruined Buddha statues; perhaps even beyond that, a "political action" by a seemingly apolitical writer who does not speak much about politics.

For Atiq Rahimi, Afghanistan is not the country of the Taliban or other Sunni and Shiite clerics. What constitutes Afghanistan's historical identity is its ethnic and religious diversity. Rahimi also refers to the Jews of Kabul in this recent novel.

The destruction of the Buddha statues was not just the destruction of a historical (albeit universal) monument, but the destruction of the past and the history and identity of a nation without which it has lost its way to the future.

Earth and Ashes: Book Review

By Nadia Ali Maiwandi

From the November 2004 issue of Aftaab Magazine  Nadia Ali Maiwandi provides a complete book review of Atiq Rahimi's novel Earth and Ashes. 

We meet Dastaguir and his grandson, Yassin, by the side of the road, dirty, sullen, exhausted. They have a bundle of sour apples tied in a scarf, the tattered clothes on their backs and each other. One is an old man, grief-stricken and hardly able to think straight; the other screams and wonders why the world has lost its sound. These two are the only survivors of a village-leveling Soviet bombing in Atiq Rahimi's debut novel, Earth and Ashes.

Dastaguir left the decimated village with his grandson to deliver the news to his son, Yassin's father, who works in a nearby mine. As they wait out the morning for a passing car, the old man is haunted with flashbacks of the bombings, jarring dreams, and hallucinations. Dastaguir's solitude cripples him with thoughts of powerlessness, immense grief, and survivor's guilt. He fears what he has come to tell his son will kill him-- that his wife, mother, and brother have been slain, and Yassin, his only child, has become deaf from the bombings.

In a time where Afghanistan's vast history amounts to six years of Taliban rule in the eyes of the world, Rahimi takes us back 10 or 15 years earlier to the Soviet invasion. History shows the decade of Soviet occupation is one of the appalling consequences-- 1.5 million Afghans dead, and millions more fled the country, making Afghans the largest population of refugees in the world for the next 25 years. Recent images of bearded men with black turbans, throngs of women silenced in sky-blue chadaris (burqas), and the attacks of 9/11 have obscured Afghanistan's past. The victim has become perpetrator in the post-9/11 world-- "freedom fighter" is now "warlord," "rebel" now "terrorist." As Rahimi says, we cannot understand Afghanistan's Taliban or civil war eras without first understanding its predecessors and the terror done to the Afghan people.

Soviet soldiers enter the small community of Abqul, Dastaguir's village, to forcefully seize boys and young men for war. The boys in the village flee or hide, and the military promptly takes to looting the homes. Subsequently, Mujahideen from a neighboring village come to Abqul and ambush the soldiers. Seeking bloody vengeance, the Soviets return with fighting jets and heavy armory and wipe out the entire village, except for our two lone survivors who manage to survive.

Earth and Ashes, originally Khakestar-o-Khak and written in Dari, explores the aftermath of war and terror using very few characters and almost no action in real time. Minimalist in style but gripping in its pain, Earth and Ashes helps paint a more complete picture of what happened in Afghanistan. The account is a study in grief and its many shapes. Dastaguir's only real company while waiting for the passing car in the desolate surroundings is a shopkeeper, Mirza Qadir, who serves as a voice of reason to the bewildered old man. Mirza explains the effects of sorrow upon hearing Dastaguir's story:

"Sorrow can turn to water and spill from your eyes, or it can sharpen your tongue into a sword, or it can become a time bomb that, one day, will explode and destroy you…." The horror is so fresh, Dastaguir concedes to himself that his grief has not yet taken shape.

The author evokes ancient Farsi/Dari poetry in his prose, from the heavy symbolism to his exclusive use of the second person. The effect is one that puts a Western reader off balance initially:

You take an apple from the scarf you've tied into a bundle and wipe it on your dusty shirt. The apple just gets dirtier. You put it back in the bundle and pull out another, cleaner one, which you give to your grandson, Yassin, who is sitting next to you, his head resting on your tired arm…. The voice offers an air of surrealism: You don't quite know if the author is placing you in Dastaguir's exhausted old body, or if he's talking directly to the main character-- and at which point the narrator becomes the character, or takes on the knowledge of Nature, Fate, God....

It's a shift that most any creative-writing instructor in the United States will instinctively forbid, yet the shift of narrator, along with the voiceover (another no-no in Western writing), presents another dimension to the story. Knowing Dastaguir in such an intimate way gives war a face that telling a story alone cannot do. As several pages pass, the reader begins to find Rahimi's flow and sees his clever switch of the narrator and audience, which are nearly seamless.

The novel makes subtle commentary on some of the socio-political issues that still plague the country. Women are present only in Dastaguir's dreams, where much of this story takes place. Rahimi explains this shows the patriarchy of Afghan society and how women, who had been gaining rights steadily since the 1950s, found themselves pushed into the background and out of society.

Earth and Ashes adds to today's dialogue of the country's misfortunes. Because of recent headlines that explore Afghanistan's issues with such a microscopic approach, old information has been abandoned. Rahimi's draws his scope back to show us when the atrocities began. It is a chapter in Afghanistan's history that is crucial to understanding the Afghanistan-- and the world --of today.

The novel has been translated into 20 languages, winning the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and top reviews. Rahimi, a documentary filmmaker, crafted this novel with a film in mind. From a book that is so literary, steeped in symbolism, internal dialogue, and poetry of past, it is difficult to imagine it as a film. But it was released with great success, as the film has been a buzz in international film festivals this year, taking home Best Film at Osian Cinefan and Cannes. Earth and Ashes will be showing in the United States at various film festivals, although the film has not yet been scheduled for wide release in the U.S.

About Nadia Ali Maiwandi  

By Nadia Ali Maiwandi 

From the November 2004 issue of Aftaab Magazine 

[caption: Atiq Rahimi on the set of his film Earth and Ashes in Afghanistan.]

Atiq Rahimi was born in Kabul in 1962. He fled the country in 1984, living in Pakistan for a year and then receiving political asylum in France. Rahimi studied film at Sorbonne and made several documentaries about his native land. Earth and Ashes is his first novel, and subsequently his first film in fiction. He currently lives in Paris.

Nadia Ali Maiwandi spoke with Rahimi in October 2004 about Earth and Ashes, the novel and film. The interview was conducted in English, and despite language barriers -- Rahimi was nervous about his English skills -- he was profoundly articulate and poignant, even funny.

Nadia Ali Maiwandi: So much of what's written about Afghanistan lately revolves around the Taliban and their oppressive rule. Earth and Ashes was published in 2000, before the world's awareness of so much of these atrocities. What inspired this tale, and its setting during the Soviet invasion?

Atiq Rahimi: I wrote the novel in 1996 when the Taliban had just come to power. I thought, "Why? Why this violence? Why so much destruction?" During the Soviet war, there was a lot of vengeance, much catastrophe. The Taliban came from this catastrophe. It is important to know where this came from. Also, I wanted to show the three generations of Afghanistan. Dastaguir, the old man, represents Afghanistan's past, its traditions, its customs, its honor. This is the older generation. His son is the present, my generation. He works in a mine; he is the mujahideen generation, the chaos. Yassin, the grandson, is the future. He is deaf, handicapped by war. It is always true that communication between generations does not exist. My generation, the generation of Mujahideen and Communist, has no communication with the past or future.

NAM: What strikes a reader about Earth and Ashes just as much as the story itself is the way it is told. I found the use of second person unusual and with great effect. I wasn't quite sure of your intent, though-- were you looking to draw us into Dastaguir's mind, or distance us from him?

AR: When you are thinking or talking to yourself, you always use "you" [in referring to yourself]. I used the second person to illustrate that Dastaguir is alone. He hasn't another person. This is introspection. Secondly, the use of this narrator creates a disassociation with the reader, but it is subtle. The words are specific, but the use of "you" makes the distance between the reader and the character.

NAM: Yes, sometimes the narrator is Dastaguir's conscience, offering him advice or scolding him. Other times it interrupts and speaks to other characters. It seemed to work as Dastaguir's inner voice at times, and the voice of God at other times.

AR: Yes, it is an experiment in narration, in each context the narrator changes. Anyone who listens becomes one of the characters and the narrator itself becomes one of the characters. It is like when you are writing a letter, you write about yourself and you change the narrator. The events you write are as you narrate them. Also, a lot of our great poetry is written in the second person. It was a tool that many ancient poets used who wrote in Farsi, especially when the poems are directed toward God.

NAM: There are many connections made in the prose to the ancient text of Ferdowsi's Shahnama (The Book of Kings). Why did you choose to include this work in Earth in Ashes and connect it so heavily to your characters?

AR: It is very similar to Shahnama-- Rustam knows his son only after the war. Shahnama is like the Greek story of Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father in the war and then marries his mother. Except in Shahnama, the father kills the son. It is reversed. This illustrates the patriarchal society of Afghanistan. Women are absent.

NAM: I did notice there were no live women in your novel.

AR: Did you notice that? Yes, there is not one woman except for in dreams and in the past. Women are absent. Woman is imagined.

NAM: So you feel that Dastaguir is like Rustam because he has bad news to deliver to his son, which may kill him.

AR: Yes, the connection is made because what he says to his son might cause his own son's death.

NAM: I noticed a lot of symbolism in the story, especially apples. To me, I thought of the apples and the apple-blossom scarf to mean hope-- when you think of blossoms, you think of spring, of new life. Is this what you meant to convey?

AR: There is a lot of symbolism of apples. It is in a lot of our poetry. Apples were the first food of man and woman. The reader can interpret for themselves what these things mean because it means something different to each one.

NAM: I noticed a lot of symbolism in the story, especially apples. To me, I thought of the apples and the apple-blossom scarf to mean hope-- when you think of blossoms, you think of spring, of new life. Is this what you meant to convey?

AR: (Rahimi laughs) It was not at all easy to adapt to film. I worked on the film for two years. I had to find cinematic language, see how to show all these things in cinema.

NAM: How did you find actors?

AR: That was also not easy. All but one had no professional experience. I auditioned over 60 for the part of the old man and about as many children. I took auditions in Kabul and Pul-e Khumri. That's where it was shot, in Pul-e Khumri, northern Afghanistan.

NAM: How was the film received in Afghanistan?

AR: Very well, really. I had two conditions on showing it: One, that is must not be censored. There is a scene where a naked woman is running-- I did not want it censored. It is not pornographic-- it had a reason. Two, I wanted a mixed audience of men and women, no separation.

NAM: And both of your conditions were met?

AR: Yes.

NAM: How were you able to do that..?

AR: (He laughs) I don't rest until I get what I want.

NAM: Congratulations on your many awards. Winning the Cannes must have been exciting.

AR: Yes, thank you. We won Cannes, and also Best Film and Best Actor in the Osian Cinefan Film Festival held in New Dehli.

NAM: Are there any plans to bring the film to the United States?

AR: It is coming to the New York Museum, perhaps around March. Also in Berkeley, California for a film festival there.

NAM: What are you working on now?

AR: I have a new book, One Thousand Houses of Dreams and Terror, which was published two years ago in Europe, and has been translated into many languages-French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, and many others. This one is about the women of Afghanistan-- and love and war and terror.  I'm currently working on translating this novel into a film.

About Nadia Ali Maiwandi