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Living Section of the San Bernardino SUN February 1, 2004 Issue 
The Bookseller of Kabul By Asne Seierstad 
Life in Kabul Now Listening to the seductive soundtrack of "Henry & June," a film about Henry Miller's life in Paris based on Anais Nin's diaries, brought to mind the rush and thrill of reading illicit literature. The scandals created by the unorthodox treatment of sex and morality in Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" or Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" or by the political exposes in Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago" leave us cold today. Are we so jaded as to not have produced of late any controversial literature? Or are we so afraid of controversy that we dare not speak of some truths and instead camouflage them with political correctness? Fortunately for those who are weary of political correctness, books that make us rethink accepted ideas and beliefs and stir up arguments are still being published. One such highly controversial book is the international bestseller "The Bookseller of Kabul" by Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad. Sultan Khan, the bookseller of Kabul, was one of the first people the author met and befriended in his bookstore when she arrived in the city with the Northern Alliance in November 2001. She was impressed by his collections of books, by his love of the written word and by the enormous personal risks he'd taken to save these books. "First the Communists burned my books, then the Mujahedeen looted and pillaged, and finally the Taliban burned them all over again," he tells the author. When Seierstad expressed the wish to write a book about the Khan family, she was invited to live with them. She slept on a mat on the floor next to Sultan's youngest sister. She spent hours, days and weeks crouching on the floor, drinking tea with the women of the household, gossiping with them and listening to their stories, frequently heart-wrenching for a Western woman. She ate dinners with them, went to the bazaars with them and wore the burka along with many of them. But as a Westerner she also had an entry into the world of men. The publication of the book first in Norway and then in England created a scandal. Sultan Khan objected furiously to the way some ugly truths about life in a Moslem country were exposed. As one familiar with Western thought, Sultan realized that the truth revealed in the book could be damaging. After numerous threats, portions of the book were deleted from the American publication. Nevertheless, even censored, the American version is still disturbing. Sultan rules his household with total despotism. There is a terrible discrepancy between the literary man, the liberal lover of books and the tyrannical head of the family. When the author moves in, the first wife is living in exile in Pakistan. She yearns to return home, but cannot until Sultan gives her permission. He won't allow his eleven-year-old son to go to school and instead sends him to work twelve-hour days seven days a week. Sultan is quite enamored with his teenage second wife and does not allow her to do work. So it is the youngest sister's lot to cook, serve, clear-up, sweep the floors, heat the water for the men to wash their hands and faces, polish their shoes, press their clothes. She is a slave. Leila despairs, for her culture does not allow her to deviate from her predestined role in life. Privacy is an unknown. Girls and women are not allowed to go out alone or just be alone. They have no right to meet boys or men that are not their own family. They have no right to love or to make choices about whom they marry or what to do with their lives. "Love can be interpreted as committing a serious crime," writes Seierstad, "punishable by death." Jamila, a beautiful eighteen-year-old is married off to a forty-something expatriate. When the groom goes back oversees to arrange for his bride's visa, someone claims to have seen a man crawling into her room through a window; the marriage is dissolved, she is sent back to her family and within three days she is dead from some sort of an accident. But it is not an accident that kills her. Jamila's own mother had sent her three brothers to smother her with a pillow. Girls and women are not allowed to have desires, dreams, opportunities. They are "above all objects to be bartered or sold." They can go to school or take a job outside the home only if the male head of the family permits it. The dreams of the youngest sister Leila to teach English are thwarted by the bureaucracy and her faint hopes of marrying an enlightened man and thus escape a life of enslavement are destroyed by the selfish men in her family. Sultan is not ruthless only to the women of his family. When an emaciated and destitute carpenter steals some postcards that provide the most lucrative part of Sultan's business, he goes after the thief relentlessly. Never mind that the carpenter has done this out of desperation - to feed his starving family and get medicine for two of his children suffering from polio. Never mind that Sultan gets his cards back and that the carpenter is beaten repeatedly and jailed. "Under the Taliban he would have had his hand cut off," the chief constable reminds everyone. In view of that, Sultan believes that the carpenter got off lightly by spending only three years in prison. The book is not about Afghanistan on the rebound from Taliban rule. It is about a part of the world where women have no human rights. How absurd to speak of democracy and self-rule in such countries when a large segment of the population has no right to make a democratic choice. Ophelia Georgiev Roop Library Director San Bernardino Public Library |
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