For over two and a half years the stories came in from creative writing workshops I offered in Kabul. It was, for many young writers, the first time they had been asked to compose a story: their own or someone else's, someone they'd only heard about, a lost relative, someone born before their time – the choice was theirs. And so the project The Gifts of the State: New Afghan Writing emerged.* The stories stuck with me, sometimes quiet, pastoral narratives detailing how villagers cooperate and sacrifice together, and sometimes how villages unravel under the burden of tradition. There were, of course, stories of ethnic violence, a city carved with checkpoints, militia affiliations, and boundaries that are crossed out of love and hunger. The stories frequently show little affect in the telling. The Taliban and mujahideen were more prominent in their stories, more problematic than Americans or Russians, their legacies more contested.
History, even when fictionalised and written by former refugees, is inevitably contradictory, coloured by countries of origin, places where writers spent most of their formative years. Some wrote of the martyrdom of the mujahideen; others, of their petty brutality. They wrote of marginalisation suffered in Pakistan and Iran, and despite this, they also wrote of falling in love in exile, relationships broken off by their return to Kabul once the Taliban fled. Stories of disappearances under the Russians, of Afghan communists now quiet about their former lives, and of successful battles that ultimately routed the Russians are all equally weighted.
In Afghanistan, suicide bombers, the abuse of women and drugs are not seen to be the result of people falling through the cracks, or signs of mental health issues. Even the term 'mental health problems' is part of a new lexicon. Communal guilt cuts both ways; it enables societies with weak civil law to keep crime low (everyone is responsible for everyone), but it also hampers the open discussion of such things as extremism, sexism, child or spousal abuse. Rather than the violence of a few marginal zealots, it is believed to reveal something at a culture's bedrock. In other words, Afghans haven't yet found the separation between the country's fringe and its tolerant majority, so it's harder to configure what is or should be acceptable, what is a personal failure or a cultural one. And then, of course, Afghanistan's conservatism has drawn scholars, but more often jihadists, who imagine the country's enemies easy to identify. I think of the young John Walker Lindh and his Arab and Chechen compatriots making their trek to Afghanistan, pursuing what they imagined were abuses against the Taliban. If morality – the 'right' war, the right belief – was only that easy, we would never have seen an Afghanistan ground to rubble, or talk of the Bamiyan Buddha 'shells'. Collective shame over extremism is one reason to encourage individual voices of conscience. I imagined my job was to gather from a few aspiring writers the larger possibility for voices in a country too easily collectivised by frontline reports, historians who make Afghans seem like undefeatable warriors incapable of love, humour, heresy, let alone creating peaceful homes or democratic assembly. Too often we disregard the individual experiences of Afghans for the historical narrative. I can think of no other country where this is so tragically engaged.
Afghanistan in its present form is new to many Afghans. The mass exodus of so much of its population during the wars makes it hard for Afghans to ascribe blame for the dissolution of their society, or to imagine how to rebuild it. In vogue now (in Kabul at least) is blame towards Pakistan, its intelligence service (the ISI), or the 'backward' provinces. None – or at least very few – of the writers mentioned Unocal's pipeline deal with the Taliban, the neo-conservative impact on the militarisation of the region, the Islamic revolution in Iran, the policies of Afghan president Hamid Karzai, or the Americans, despite the news reports in which a few thousand Afghans burn effigies and shout "death to America." Destabilisation by either Pakistan or the American departure can return Afghanistan to the fundamentalism that failed them before. Afghans know they will not be left alone, that there are still proxy wars to be fought, regional advantages, and mineral wealth to exploit. Now, with Afghanistan again foisted onto the geopolitical stage, the writers wondered how soon before the interest from the outside world wanes, and just what outside interest means in the shaping of their country.