Often in the past months I would stand on the rooftop of the villa alone. I climbed up one night for a last smoke before bed. The rooftop was deserted, except for the silent Afghan guards perched in their towers. I walked over to the edge of the roof and watched the city. I was listening to its rumbling and rumor of movement and night life, pulsations and lights in the night. It occurred to me how unnatural is the habit of the predatory bipeds to be awake at hours when one does not hunt.
But there were boys outside at hunt. The battle cries subside at night, and the passionate restlessness silently begins to burns, ungratified, in turmoil, tossing and turning awake in wine and secret deeds. These young men who met in each other’s houses, womanless, the shenanigans, the unpunished sins sweetened by the shared secret misdeeds.
Here, like in many prohibitive cultures, love among the men is at the forefront. These boys dress up and put on make-up for their male friends. They do not have girl friends. They get married to procreate, for family and political reasons, but keep loving men as their mates and comrades, and lovers. In the same time, the unmarried boys dream Indian soap music, the roses drop from the foreheads into water, the sleeve embroidery flows in the air, the dark eyes cry for the desert lovers - city dreams on the dusty streets and white flesh under the young beard. A people at love and war, where every death and love is a sharing and a ripped off veil. But the blood keeps silent, heaves dangerously at every wound, until it heals. No love or death inflicts something that the next boyish kiss will not wipe off; and the blood will mean yet again.
Sensing these images in the distance, under the anonymous rooftops full of crimson passions, unrecorded ecstasies and despair, I found myself a woman, a non-woman, manless and fleshless, floating behind the walls of a fortress. I was full with unadmitted and uncommitted passions, chest-full for man’s kisses, hidden behind my own invisible walls, protected with heavy weapons and harsh vigil. I would have given myself softly to nocturnal fingers, my body would have yearningly risen to meet the heat of pure male skin. That was a secret I had to deny and pace on. I stood above the rooftops of Kandahar like a fortress within a fortress protecting nothing but the desire to love.
Everything that meets us is set in motion a long time ago. The desires, the fantasies, the little openings and soft spots in the being - they tear into major doorways for life’s blessings and disasters to enter. We summon what brings out our true nature, and it is in the nature of this world to bring out the best and the worst in us. Our destinies are already made within our hidden recesses. We know our destiny insofar as we know what is hidden inside us.
We, made of drives and dams of which we know so little. Our knowledge of our selves blindly flickers like reflections on the ocean. Nothing new happens to us. We happen to ourselves. We just don’t know ourselves. What can a reflection know of the oceanic depths?
My hidden nature, I concluded that night, was a sea of passion fenced by a desert of fear - and the pleasures and the disasters that were coming my way, I knew, would be their exact replicas.
The moment ended, and I did what I had to do: I went to sleep.
(This is the sixth segment of Chapter 1 of the White Book of Feathers, which will be reproduced here in parts in the future. Please refer to the previous five posts on this blog for Segments 1-5 of the Book)
July came with heat increasing to hurt, but the humid shades in the garden provided a softer embrace. Sometimes sandstorms would rise and continue throughout the night. We would wake up snowed up in sand. Everything then pales under the summer sun which rises to hammer down on the world with naked force. The sun upon the fragile, defenseless sky, its innocence disemboweled by the sword of the rays. The sun is our ruling priest: it blesses and kills, it gives birth and discards us like yesterday’s dream.
That’s what we seem in our perishable form. Dreams of yesterday, lost in the nakedness of the flat day. We, on the compound, were strangers to this world. We had almost no connection to life, we were lost. We cried long and in secret of each other on the shoulders of the trees, we hid in the shallows of the noon. We waded, tracking the thin threads of dreams which disappeared as soon as one set a foot on them. We were lost, and in the morning we might not exist. But butterflies were being born each day.
Perhaps the gold is still asleep under the pillow where no one shall ever find comfort again. Perhaps there is gold, like the sun, we leave behind. After Kandahar, I knew I would never dream again of what I used to dream. When one loses a longing,no matter how obsolete, the gold which could have shone on us is a gold unborn. Dust.
I was tired. I wished that those hard times of overwork and conflicts to be past. Time is where the gold separates from the sand, and lush rainbows shed colors on the memories. I wished all to end so I could become a new beginning. A fresh new wind smothering me in golden sand and a new sun blinding my forehead. I dreamt I was a fragile giant, a statue in a desert without oases, and aeons passed before the hand cold reach the forehead to rub off the disturbed thoughts. Eternity seemed so long that to make a single move appeared senseless, however, it is the movement that creates the meaning of being alive. That’s how I dreamt.
Days quietly went by under the heat like tender beads strung on a steel chain. The air was in embers, the pale sand dust glittered in the rays. Prior to the Hamkari operation taking sway, there was neither sound nor sight of the American military presence on the Kandahari streets in our neighborhood. After the attack on the Chemonics compound in the vicinity, our team was the last one standing in the city. I felt a siege enclosing on us from one day to another, gradually, almost imperceptibly. We could have believed that we were at peace with the world if there wasn’t for all the intelligence of assassinations, attacks, land mines, closing onto the compound.
There were days when even the air seemed agitated. Ready for escape; it would take flight under an attack, it would leave us alone and airless to finally entwine with the real violence pressing on our skin. Our security bubble would burst leaving a vacuum of breathlessness. In my mind, I saw naked white bodies dressed in crimson, limbs mingled in our last expression of love, our loyalty to each other. Our trust would lay exposed like a museum.
I saw our spirits there, hovering above our garden, slightly confused, trying to discern the bodies in the pile of generous flesh. It wouldn’t hurt any longer. We would be finally a-flight, beyond the thoughts of good or evil. At last we would be fearlessly gentle to each other. We had not known anything beyond our shrunk selves, our slightly sad thoughts lingering abandoned in the bones. Confused by the intercession in time. Mild, like dewdrops.
And then, a gentler expanse would open in the unforeseen sky, between the twilight of the worlds of the living and the dead. In a flicker, an oceanic presence would come forth, the ancient embrace, our true heart would open to call us back. Sparkling specks of dust were dancing in the air of this city which has seen thousands of generations bury its dead. We are simply mortal.
That is what I saw one morning in a vision. I wonder whether accepting these seen visions diverted them, or they were perhaps merely figments of a weary, agitated imagination.
Such thoughts were reserved for the dawn. The workday was discipline. I preferred to leave the office and work in the garden. There were dignified trees summoning doves in their branches. Birds pecked in the grass daringly approaching our feet. The roses scented the air, and I was alone on the lawn, amidst our armed Afghan and expatriate security and service personnel. My heart was in that garden. Peace and life dwelled there and no stress was stressful enough to resist the beauty of this surrounding.
In March 2010, I was deployed to Kabul where all company headquarters in Afghanistan usually are. It was a rainy and muddy spring, heaving with vapor. We suffocated in the dust under the sun, we choked in the suspicious humidity evaporating from a soil long used to pounding by the fist of the sun. Just like the soil, we were taken aback by the cold showers. So much blossoming moisture in the sickly air, hidden floods and avalanches erupting, while the rugged summer laid in lethal ambush down the road.
After the previous years in the rainless southern deserts, I found myself confused to waddle through the mud on the Kabul streets. I stood at the rooftop balcony of the villa where I stayed, alone and foreign, while the mud water flickered on the ground. I was longing for the South. The distant horizons were as tender as always. The massive mountains descended through space like an unchallengeable curtain. I watched the silhouettes on the Kabuli streets, their sleeves and skirts flowing.
In this country, people walk with strength; the pace is simple, and everything leads to everything else. The feet are in concordance. In Afghanistan, of all places, I felt in concordance with myself. This country, hell and heaven within the same flicker of the eye. I was longing for the South, the regions of stark contrasts between light and shade, between heaven and hell, between one’s hidden depths and heights. The place on earth where one may be blessed with a true challenge. Nearly unendurable. Nearly enlightening. That was South.
A month after I arrived in Kabul, I indeed went to Kandahar, to be close to the desert I loved and to the front-lines of the project I was hired on. Perched on the rooftop in the heart of the city, surrounded by protective barriers and guns, and yet vulnerable, I felt the exposure and loved it. We were positioned like a heart on the chest, put forward for an embrace, guardedly open. I deeply inhaled and imbibed the spirit of Kandahar flickering in the air, carried by the sounds of the markets and busy traffic. It did not matter that the city could kill me. Fair enough. The beauty of its ancient spirit was truer than my sparse human life.
That year, I arrived in Afghanistan in early March 2010. It was a home-coming to this country of stern landscapes and severe beauty. Despite the harshness of the environment, I deeply enjoyed every minute of it. I greeted the snow-covered mountains in the clear morning air with a slight bow. They greeted me back. Powerful, solemn mountains, indifferent to the flicker of human life, and yet aware of us. “I am home, I am home,” my heart sang. A veil lifted from my forehead struck by the endless depth of the sky.
It was freezing beneath the turquoise blue I waited for our security personnel to pick me up from the deserted Kabul airport and I felt happy again, as happy as I hadn’t been since the last time I left the country two years before. The hidden warrior, the adventurer, the curious tomboyish child, the spiritual seeker in me - all were on the move once again, hands and boots in the dust, just where I like them. No way to tell what’d happen next.
It’s not a highly respected character attribute, but I live for challenges. People like me, slightly dislocated at the basis, push ourselves too hard, beyond our limits, because we do not really know where out limits are. Our boundaries of self-preservation have never been set or they’ve been breached long ago. Now we do not know when and how to stop. We feel fully alive only when this breach is reenacted, a pleasure beyond pleasantness or pain. We go far too inside, far too outside seeking the intensity of total exposure. With our silent secrets, we are driven to throw ourselves naked at the non-human World, into the Wild. Passionate and vulnerable, we move through our own breach beyond the set defenses, across the borders of the deserts, scorched and moving. We are shaken together with the Wild. We are nowhere under shelter because the Wild has taken abode in us. We break up and break down. We know that we can survive damage.
In 2007, in the deserts of Helmand in southern Afghanistan, far away from mental comfort, I wrote the following: “It is deluding to think of the human being as something naturally wholesome and solid. A breakdown closer to the essence of living, to the heart of Life, both soft and ruthless. The way we are, broken, we flow over. But we are all alone, unwhole, incomplete, useless and clumsy in the community of the wholesome people, of the perfectly rounded up, of the socially desirable ones, of the maintainers of order. We are outside and beside every order – at the margins, under water, above the waves, all at once. But we never resemble the perfect squares of sunlight on the surface.
We resemble life, dirty, strong, vulnerable, worn out, overflowing, from day to day, from hour to hour, we roll on without a destination, as if not by our own will. We let the waves roll us, kick us, leave us sometimes immobile for years in the forgotten straits of the world. We live with the invisibility of existence. We do not strive to emerge into daylight. We belong not. We sink and rise as if by some alien watery hand. We are not skilled at staying.
We cannot remain, not without losing our essence, our single, useless, untranslatable knowing. Simply, we are not good at it. From the fractures, however, and from the healing, rarely, something precious, something that may remain, is born.”
I had learnt to accept this. And now, three years later, something was stirring to be born, something different. For better or for worse, I couldn’t tell.
On that particular August morning in Kandahar, in one of the worst summers in Afghanistan, I had enough. Enough of a seven-day work week, late night tasks, urgent emails, lack of sleep, and most of all, enough of fighting off my colleagues.
My job was a communications manager of a major stabilization-aid project operating in nearly all provinces of Afghanistan. Kandahar is the Taliban’s pride and spiritual center, now overtaken by the Afghan President Karzai’s allies of often dubious honesty and by foreign military forces of often dubious success, both contested by the native Taliban, a motley array of their supporters and independent criminal gangs.
Unlike the military and civilian personnel encased in military bases, we, the handful of foreign civilians lived and worked in the city observing in the colorful side of Afghans, their complexity and humanness, for better and for worse. We lived amongst them, in an environment in which they outnumbered us. We were relatively and voluntarily vulnerable. Part of our exposure was based on the guarantee of well-armed private security company and part was based on trust. Having survived thus far, it seemed that we’d had a good reason to trust our Afghan neighbors and employees. Or luck. Probably both.
Afghans are extraordinary people and I have enjoyed it tremendously many times to examine them about their lives, customs and beliefs. Most of them are proud, admirably resilient and ingenuously adjustable characters. I admire their culture and traditions, although I don’t necessarily agree with every aspect of it. I don’t agree with many aspects of the Western culture either. I have been in Afghanistan on four assignments thus far, mostly in the Pashtoon South. A single Western woman, I’ve always treated my Afghan colleagues with sincere respect and have been regularly humbled to receive nothing but warm generosity, protection and respect from them, unlike the demonization of the Pashtoons in the media.
(continues)
My book on Mewlana Rumi in Macedonian, with an introduction (book attached).
Skapoceniot kamen na vodata - Rumi Izbor stihovi - Ana Pejcinova 2010
This course was designed and delivered in the Fall Semester 2009 for the postgraduate students of the Faculty of Communication and Media / Public Relations major, at the New York University - Skopje.Use the attached files in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence.
1. Course Handbook
3. Reader
A large part of Iraq is constructed and padded now with T-walls. A T-wall is a concrete block over three meters high, in the shape of an inverted ‘T’. It serves as a protection against explosions, indirect fire, and regulation of movement. A mobile wall, for the games of the masters of fire.
The bars at the top of a T-wall block enable it to be lifted and moved around like a Lego0cube. Whole cities can be made thus in the middle of a desert, or smaller cities within larger ones. The T-walls can be a grave, or a shelter. Concrete. Unfortunate matter for both life and death. Baghdad is a labyrinth of T-walls constructed by the masters of murders and the masters of survival.
The Mansoor Compound is such a city within a city, outside the Green Zone, relatively quiet. Ten months of Mansoor life marked by T-walls. The gaze shipwrecks onto the concrete barriers, ugly and towering monuments of the trouble we brought, we found, we kindled and unleashed.
To open the eyes wide one has to raise the gaze above the edges lining the blazing sky with green embroidery of the palm leaves. The heat is a murder where people move dreamily, as if burdened by an invisible, heavy veil. They are kind, nevertheless. The sun batters the skin with heavy mauls.
I love heat. We laugh with the Iraqi friends because I seek the sun on the terrace in front of the offices, while they seek shade, their women longing for paler tan. Friends. We share the same sense of black humor and shameless political incorrectness.
The view from the terrace is limited by T-walls. A fierce accusation of the human passion to murder each other. Is there anything else in nature that has plagued humanity more than the people themselves? People with faces, like you and me, like the neighbor and the foreigner.
I know. I am human too. A part of this massive suicide and rebirth. Nearly as a T-wall, I observe without a blink. Horrendous, speechless witnessing. And then the hand moves and I start to exist again as the urge contrary to destruction. The fragile and suspicious care for the other, the instinct to be close to those suffer, perhaps to help somehow, in any manner, any way, it doesn’t matter, just to be there, with them, somehow.
To see the other from inside. To see myself. To observe and participate in the great and downcast human drama.
The irony lies in the fact that we are so kindred. This could have happened to any of us. It could have been us.
Each one of us, in different circumstances, or in an alternative life, could have accepted to be a self-interested raving tyrant, a privileged and cruel instrument of devastation. Each one of us could have been born to thirst and fight, a widow and a killer, a beggar and a fanatic, a cunning robber and a silent soldier, a prisoner and a headman, a powerless witness and an indifferent withdrawer, a hidden string-puller and a vulnerable spokesman, a rebel and a defender, brave and reasonable, excelling and indecisive, proud and invisible, dead and alive.
These are all interchangeable roles that the shackles of circumstances bring forth from within us. Both mortal and lethal role which, once brought forth, seems like the only possible choice in the given circumstances. It appears as if it represents necessity and choicelessness…. The illusions of necessity, freedom and choice.
Some say that everyone opens their life to these possibilities, and that the role they chose to play, no matter how painful, is a decision.
Who can choose other than one’s self?
In the end, is survival an overrated achievement?
The bottom line is that the bullet puts an and to all such questions, follies and illusions.
Some people mistake their personal frustration for courage. They often attack their brethren for reasons of pain, and gloat in illusions of grandeur in their solitude. This is not courage.
Courage is to create something. Courage is to express something fruitfully. Courage is to have an idea and actualize it, with one’s own effort, and then to move on.
It’s not courage to destroy. It’s not courage to blacken and criticize others’ deeds . True, every person commands that freedom, but such words are worthless without a deed and a face behind to support them. To a meritless person everything seems free of merit. Everyone sees his or her denied face in the Other.
Courage does not seek an enemy. It does not seek recognition and an audience. It seeks accomplishment. The essential solitude of the being is the source and the measure of courage.
It’s not courage to put one’s life at risk. This is a decision. It’s not courage to throw one’s self into the unknown. This is curiosity, or love for questions. It’s not courage to stay and persist. This too is a decision, one of perseverance. It’s not courage to say ‘goodbye’. This is inevitability.
Courage is to stand behind one’s words and deeds before the others. Courage is to suffer the fellowman’s opinions of one’s self, invited and uninvited, pleasant and unpleasant, and to differentiate between the clear and true thoughts and the ill meant, calculated, and blinded ones, and also from thoughts that stem from friendship.
Courage is to change one’s self and in the new shape to say again, “This is me, this difference and novelty,” and express that change through humble actions.
However, the greatest courage is to stand before the mirror and deeply look into one’s self, one’s road, one’s heart and conscience, deeds and relationships, and into one’s end - as if from an infinite distance.
This gaze hurts and appeases. It’s a good beginning. It changes the past and this change opens up a future. This internal gaze is the start of an unprecedented day, unprecedented distance and space, and unprecedented changes, words and deeds. This internal gaze is courage.
For days I’ve been waking up to the sound of car wheels splashing through pools of water in the streets. Clouds lie heavy on the mountain, touching the rooftops in nearly solid whirlpools of grey and white. It’s been raining for days.
It’s warm.
And the child will reach out toward my cased flight as if it wants to keep me. I’ll look into its eyes, it’s all sad and tearful, but I don’t feel like crying. My flight ends here. I’ll alter into something else, perhaps into something similar to the tear upon the child’s eyelashes. I cannot help it, and neither I want to. I cannot help the child’s eyes. I’ve seen so much, but one can only be the shine, not express it. I was the harmony of the shine. I fell and ended. That is well.
Why travel?
I could, as I have done before, list a dozen reasons: the destination, the exoticism, the adventure, the money (ha! - this one makes me laugh the most), the insufficiency, the career (whatever that might mean)….
I could say so and lie, as I have done before.
There is no reason to travel. There is a cause, many of them, any lie would do. Traveling is a drive to set everything on movement. Oneself, in the first place.
The voyage is something created deep inside the core far before the emergence of the thought or the circumstances that beckon travel.
Traveling is an invisible but real stroke of movement between two inner poles of the being. The tension between them is the strength with which the bow of being launches the traveler amidst the distances.
Often this string trembles without the person consciously sensing it. He believes, “I want to be there,” and this rational belief makes it easier for him to stretch himself across the strained abyss of the being. He starts, but after the first uncertain step, the bow in him lets go: he resounds and the sound dazzles him. The arrow never hits the target, as there is no target. There is dissolution of the outer peels of the being, consumed by the deterrent of the inessentials. The resistance of the slow faith in permanence, in perpetuity, in promises and necessities.
Once the arrow dissolves its body, the sound remains, below hearing and shattering, to tremble through space, in the mind’s core.
There is no arrival.
Aging. I do not have a feeling of lost time; no youthful age is dearer than the peace, the harmony and the exercised, skilled life-fulness of these years. This is experience: the art of living, both visible and invisible.
As we make a difference between ‘to love’ and ‘to be in love’, so we should make a difference between ‘to live’ and ‘to be in life.’ To live and to be in life is not only a qualitative change, but a change of perspective as well: in love and in life, to observe the world from within and experience from under the gush of love and life. However, to love and to live is to have these as attributes of another existence, whose essence is neither love nor life. There is something beyond which escapes speech.
So, aging? I lived, I was alive, I was not so much “in life” then, and certainly I was more naïve and more unaware. More fundamentally ignorant… Time passed more quickly then, it fleeted. Now I can stop it and dwell within a single moment. Wonder within it.
Sometimes I watch the reflection in the mirror, especially when I lack sleep or have passed through a number of time zones all too quickly. It looks as if the wind of time had been blowing straight into that face and it had been lashing it with streams of sand. Yes, the freshness of transience is here, it makes the eyes water and these may wash themselves in the reflection of the dawns passing us by, the dissipating ones. But the sand trail remains as streams rutted around the eyes. They call them “raven claw prints”. I have them, some from laughter, some from the sun, some from the habit to check what the sky is doing, to look into some shining imaginary or real arch.
Somebody stands still, a dark silhouette amidst the streams of time; mild is the stream so long as he stands facing it. When he averts his gaze, the stream strikes at his knees, breaks them, he may even fall. But he gets up, out of habit. His figure has become sharper, bruised and faceted by the flowing sands. Dust gathers in the folds of his sleeves, and he brushes it off, but new waves arrive. Here they are, these words, grains of incessant dust. Fertility or futility, what are they?
I know we stand thus, weightless in the world of sand and time. The sand glimmers golden under the eyelashes. To age, to mature, to face up, to pass by, to let go and to let oneself go. Humbleness in the midst of time.
We shall all become sand and wind one ordinary, mortal day.
All of us here are alone. Each one of us bears a void that drives us away from home, and something overmuch that demands to be passed on. We have all been fractured and, this way or another, put together again. It is doubtful if we are wiser or better hardened for that. Perhaps the broken shape enables us to move more smoothly in this fractured, scattered world of shapelessness. The true face of the world is rugged and ruffled.
The fractured and the broken people are not the same. The fractured ones carry the basic experience that breakdowns are survivable. The broken ones could not survive their fractures, and they still walk the world with a rift whose drought is felt by everyone but themselves.
It’s an illusion that the human being is whole and solid. The breakdown is closer to the essence of living, to the heart of Life, both soft and ruthless. The way we are, we can flow over. But we are all alone, un-whole, incomplete, and useless and clumsy in the world of the “wholesome” people, of the perfectly rounded up, of the socially desirable ones, of the maintainers of order. We are outside and beside every order – at the margins, under water, above the waves, all at once. But we never resemble the perfect squares of sunlight on the surface.
We resemble life, dirty, strong, vulnerable, worn out, overflowing, from day to day, from hour to hour, we roll on without a destination, as if not by our own will. We let the waves roll us, kick us, leave us sometimes immobile for years in the forgotten straits of the world. We live with the invisibility of existence. We do not strive to emerge into daylight. We belong not. We sink and rise as if by some alien watery hand. We are not good at staying.
We cannot remain, not without losing our essence, our single, useless, untranslatable knowing. Simply, we are not good at it. From the fractures, however, and from the healing, rarely, something precious, something that can remain, is born.
It is one of those rare moments, when all have left and stayed away so long that solitude solidifies. I desired it so during these work-worn months. Now that I can finally approach it, I find my soul in a more dreadful state than the last time I paid a visit to it.
It gurgles, it boils. Dark tentacles swirl beneath the heaving surface. Solitude is so full of, oh… unpromises.
There is no grandeur, no scales to measure the dark space inside. No broom and no carpet to swipe the unwanted desires beneath. Barren hands, pale and fragile.
But ride one can and ride one does. Every fear, every pain, every malice and shame desire to be lived throughout. With no return. With no witnesses to the reckless ecstasy of brimming restlessness. This desperate explosion of no end or effect. This uselessness, these life twitches and turns, this gamelessness, this praylessness, this victory-free courage… to be… on one’s own.
October 11, 2007
In the circle of our madness bound by a chain, we mock the others’ chains of madness. In the shackles of our desires, we long for others’ desires. In sixes and twelves bound, as an ill-boding tarot-sowing with senseless murmur lowly rising.
It is a lie that the roads bifurcate endlessly. There is only one road – the one that happens. A mild heresy against will and freedom. Not against imagination though.
What will happen is the road that can concentrate in itself the strongest, most narrowly will run through the stalagmites of pathlessness. The most secret one will burst forth as the front face of the Worm called future.
All our entwined unsatisfied desires and terrors carry together that face wrapped inside in an embryo. The Worm has nearly childlike features, with a mouth cramped from unutterable pain, or joy.
Landing in Kabul again, a view from the air over the scattered roads of this two-million city that dully teems and boils. Dearness and terror simultaneously. The scent of the desert seems to be penetrating the airplane already. Dear, dear dry scent. My heart lies close to the heart of the desert.
I am more at home here than at any other place in the world. And not a few places have been home: Prague, Budapest, Skopje – oh, that city, such a false promise, shamelessly blaming me from failing to belong. But Afghanistan – this is a different home. A moving home, through Kabul, Gardez and now Lashkar Gah: my two backpacks are my home. The view over the familiar dusty roads is home. Recognizing, meddling, belonging – these are home.
In Lashkar Gah, in the South of the country, in the Helmand Province, where we are encircled by the Taliban, enclosed in a translucent membrane of a small Western world whose existence is paid by weapons, cut off by land from the world, here I set up my next home. The gaze lays upon shapes that become familiar so soon. That is the establishment of home. Daily rituals of greeting, of faces I learn to recognize, stories that belong to these faces, this is home. Familiar waking up in a new bed that becomes mine quickly, the rhythmical movement of the day, the familiar fatigue at the end of the day, nights of all too known presence of isolation, silence and solitude. At midnight, the entrance of the unknown steps toward the face of the night and this step draws close. Opening of a piece of time wherein the night rhythmically breathes and penetrates. Home.
In this campus area, wild and free sky beyond us: the treetops wave above the high walls surrounding our little fortress – golden-green on blindingly blue background. A sigh of freedom and movement that we do not posses but in the gaze. This sigh is a home too.
The bright sun of autumn blasts across the dusty concrete and everything melts together in the monotonous clay whiteness. A stream of Afghans flow and pass by with a greeting – the right hand on the chest – incessantly, inside and out, smiles, eyes meet, small bow, incessantly, inside and out. Gates and doors open and close, eyes open and close. Silence – click – silence – clack – pause; silence – click – silence – clack. Silence.
In this place, time is colorless and uncountable. Days so much alike each other flow, by brimming with little human events: battles, explosives, sad news, malicious rumors, petty arguments. Questions of budget and sustainability, practicality, accuracy and measurability – all this in the face of a unforeseeable disaster of unknown nature that each day can gently descend on us and cover us in the golden veil of un-changeability.
Loss of a friend, eyes shut, a tiny beam of life and love is walled in. We are transient here as un-dramatically as the sand.
The Afghans will remain, doubtlessly. They are made to survive everything or to disappear without complaint or record. War. Peace. Famine. Illness. It is all right. Weddings. Festivals. Meetings. Happiness. It is all right. It is all right.
Do you recall those fascinating eyes of the girl from the cover page of National Geographic that became the aesthetic emblem of Afghanistan? How the wind and the time in the desert affected the same visage twenty years later:
How did the long months of work there affect me ? I crossed certain inner borders. It was not planned or intended.
I spent the first few weeks in the UNICA Compound, in the UN Guesthouse - the first job I got in 2004 was with the UN volunteers (no, we didn’t work for free, far from that). Each evening we’d gather at the guesthouse entrance stairs, blown by the dry desert wind, we sipped, smoked strong cigarettes, chatted. UNVs from all around Afghanistan would come to stay a while in the capital. They told stories about life outside Kabul; some were horrifying. The talk about incidents, attacks, explosions, of which no media made any mention, rolled on in a relaxed manner.
I listened to these strange people and shivered. How could they persist for months alone in the desert, in small compounds with only 3-4 internationals, where the accommodation and the offices were merely different entrances of the same house, where a high fence divided the world inside from the world outside, and outside was a no-go zone, for the most part? A prison-style life, isolated and restricted. Little that I knew then that a year later I’d not only become one of those “strange” people, but I’d enjoy it extremely well.
After the first three weeks of scare and wondering what the devil made me go to such a violent country, the security situation relaxed to a degree, and we were allowed to travel outside Kabul. The province I was assigned to that year, Logar, is south-southwest of Kabul, and the road leads through areas which, mildly put, are not always quite friendly toward foreigners or governmental officers.
It was then that I saw for the first time the deserts of Afghanistan. They engulfed my eyes. Immeasurable, solid… void. So void that the absence in them pounded the eyes more powerfully than any presence could. Something could be sensed in the air, right above the horizon; as if the earth’s consciousness was rising unobstructed right there, in the desert. I went speechless and something inside moved toward a voiceless summit, almost a joy, but without a smile, almost recognition, but I could not say what inside me recognized that above the horizon.
So, we went our way, from day to day, journeys through dangerous area; the Presidential Elections of Afghanistan were coming closer with immense expectations, for us with desperate expectations, the work accelerated, the days were growing shorter, when suddenly, on a slightly dangerous road toward slightly more dangerous place, in a car, tired and under-slept for days, the carnal convulsion of continual fear wore out. I simply had no more strength to fear. And thus the wave of death rolled over me, leaving me quiet to enjoy the desert.
Ever since, it is possible to die. This world allows that. Death is something pure. A sunset, it does not change the sun. The day is what we have to learn to face.
Alongside time and habit, the very Afghans unconsciously helped me get used to the danger. It is simply a shame to feel fear amongst them, amongst these people born in horrific times, where everyone has several dead or invalidated cousins,. They lead a life in which death is a natural occurrence: death comes and it goes, not needing or heeding questions,; there are only grief and farewells, and then again life and joy. “If they, Afghans, can live so naturally in this environment, I must be able to do that too,” I said to myself and continued saying that to myself - a precarious presupposition that allowed me to be touched by the strange beauty of the land.
It wasn’t courage. Honestly, I’ve never felt courageous. It was more of an acceptance.
Perhaps the fear of death is a habit which one can grow out of, one can forget it, like one forgets the habit of gazing into one’s palms, like one forgets to be fond of only one street, to love a special human being, attachments that all seemed once unchangeable and unique, and then - they are gone. Life after appears quite alright and then, the sky is gently white, while the night is a time for blessed rest. Out of the past loves, memory and the person gain a special gleam that layers and thickens over time, a layer which quiesces and simplifies the being. In such way, silence is made.
There are two ways to maximize security: to maintain either a high or a low profile. Both are far from perfect, nevertheless. High profile means exhibition of fire power. Low profile is to attempt to attain invisibility and also to present yourself as an open, vulnerable, therefore a non-threatening presence.
If you travel with armed accompaniment and hard skin vehicle, for example, with ISAF convoys that exhibit high profile, everybody with a chip on his shoulder will know who to shoot at. The better option, imo, is to keep a low profile. This was practiced with unusual success by the then-unarmed field staff of our private security company which provided security advice to the UNAMA in 2004:
Immediately buy common Afghan clothes, change your clothes according to the region you travel if customs require so (it’s inexpensive goods, anyhow) and – grow a beard and mustaches. The aim, obviously, is to look Afghan. In one word, make yourself imperceptible, travel just like everyone else travels, move in the same manner, and do not open our mouth – let your translator do the talking.
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high profile, ‘think twice before attacking’
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low profile, ‘Who? Me? Nooo… ‘
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Watch out, not so well masked foreigner
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extremely low profile. Prize question: ‘Which one is the man in the picture?’ Although this strategy has been practiced in critical situations by Afghans and foreigners alike, let’s not exaggerate…
Because of the (in)security pressure, you might feel a bit disoriented and as if in the middle of a war zone upon arrival. No wonder – you will be n a middle of a war zone, although it won’t always seem so. Incidents happen on beautiful sunny days when everything seems to be in God-blessed order, basking in loving peace. Still, the stress from being continually under threat stabilizes in time – one gets used to it to a point where it stops interfering with normalcy. Give yourself three weeks and you’ll feel at home. Do not make any rush or critical decisions within these first three weeks.
The North is safer than the south of the country, but do not think it is really safe, it’s only less probable to have an incident. There are regional and provincial offices of the UN and various international development companies and NGOs throughout the country. Feel free to drop by for a visit, they’d love to see a new face, but don’t expect them to be capable of offering you accommodation – it is often against their regulations. They may be able to assist you and offer you at least Internet access, company, beer and field information.
It’s good to learn everything possible about security procedures: what to do, who to call (I hope you’ll have a satellite telephone, but do not rely on it – it’s generally useless, no signal), etc. Most of the country has mobile network coverage, so buy yourself a local SIM card. A first aid kit and knowledge how to use it is a good precaution.
There is no way to avoid landmines and IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices – IEDs) on the road. Don’t stray away from the road into the desert unless you are sure that there are no mine fields there, or deminers have demarcated the field as clean. But mines are planted again on the roads. You’d have to simply accept this philosophically and try to get some sleep while you travel. But stay alert and ready.
The Taliban usually ride motorbikes. If bikers follow you, it’s time to panic (although there is practically nothing you can do but try to escape in such case). If you cannot get away, surrender and do what you are requested. I won’t get into details here, it sounds a bit morbid. Do what is necessary to survive.
- Talibs on a motorbike -
After the translator, the second issue you’d need to decide upon is the means of travel: either a local taxi or a rented car.
A taxi will take you wherever you want to in the country – for a price. If you rent out a car, see that your translator can drive. In a country without much traffic police, a driver’s license is redundant, but a true art of driving is not – the roads are deteriorated, going across vertiginous curves and cliffs, there are no recognizable traffic regulations and traffic accidents are the second cause of death in the country.
– and then….
If you are renting a car, choose the most ordinary type on the market, nothing new, and certainly not technologically perfect or gleaming. If possible, something old, whitish (the most common colour there), scratched and dusty. This due to security, read further please.
Illustrated transport options:
– not too fast, not too comfortable
– a bit faster, similarly uncomfortable
– medium slow, medium uncomfortable, skilfully spitting
– A bit bulky, rings, raises dust, cheers one up
– taxiiiiii! It drives indeed!
– slightly too perceptible
– ’shoot me’ – rather uncomfortable
– ‘I’m loaded, rob me and abduct me’ – not too desirable
– fast, noisy, falls, good for ground-air missiles
– haughty folks, in convoys, do not let anyone join them
So, in my opinion, the option ‘old, dusty, ordinary’ is the most desirable one. So decide for yourself!
19
Dear Pieter Jan
Unfortunately, I left Belgium last weekend and we did not meet. Our friend Dorian mentioned that you would be travelling to Afghanistan, so I gladly accepted to offer any kind of observation I may have, which would help you enjoy your journey – and even survive it.
I am only partially joking about survival. Security is always the first and the last theme of the everyday work and life there. At this period of time, it is much worse, especially for a foreigner travelling alone.
I’m glad you’ve been to Palestine for three months, so you already have some experience in living and working outside Europe. However, Afghanistan is slightly different, a bit harder – until you get the hang of it.
The first thing you’d need to do is to find yourself a translator (man) wiling to travel with you. The rest of this email will elaborate why the translator is of key value for your journey. Seek a translator from the region where you would be heading:
Dari and Pashto are the two main languages spoken there, but it is not wise to take a Dari-speaker to a Pashtoon area, or vice versa. It is a heterogeneous people, with numerous ethnic groups: Pashtoons, Tadjiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Nooristanis, Baloochis, Turkmen, Kuchis, and more. Although nearly entire Afghanistan is Muslim, there are small enclaves of Sikhs, Hindus and Jews.
- Hazara women -
The Kuchis are nomads – fascinating folks. They travel on a north-south route, crossing the borders with Pakistan to the south and Uzbekistan to the north, and are renown smugglers of illegal goods, arms, opium and people.
- Kuchi caravan -
It is said, if you want to disappear, to hide in Afghanistan, join a Kuchi caravan. This concealment/transport service is paid. Although the country also offers other options how to disappear without a trace, unfortunately, most of them are irreversibly unsurvivable.
It’s difficult to begin… not where to begin, but who will begin. The one then, or the one now?
I’ll begin as if there is a Now, as if there haven’t been so many Now-s in-between. Life comes in crushing through the gates of each shattered Me that is trying to hold off the flood and persist into maintaining some, any kind of perspective, long enough to write down a single word: I.
Where did it all begin? Dreams say that it all began in a knot. It began unfolding. It’s still not done its work of the day yet. A work of undoing mirrored into a work of weaving of a great tapestry of a world. A World.
I shall never begin like this. But I cannot move forward when all that moves is in that massive embroidery shifting like a sea. A sea.
I’ve had the sea many times on my mind. Not thought about it, not imagined it. I have been lying as one with it, carefully letting it weave the outskirts of my mind. Fingers and foam. A line of defense belonging to an earthquake, defense against stillness. It moved me.
The sea has plenty to do with what I’ve become. I’ve meant the sea. It meant me. The one hidden in the Now, the sea underlying the tapestry.
There. I’ve said it. There is no Me to tell a story. There are quilting knots in the tapestry. But I am not. I’ve lied myself down between the sea and the tapestry and there we float. That was the end of me.
But you want a story. You want me to stand still long enough to be able to draw a line connecting any number of quilting knots. At least one for now and for good. Believe me. I’d like to do that myself.
The sea does not have connecting lines but mere playful reflections of upward light. They move. Any point in the sea can be connected to any other at any time. Then the surface changes and a different weaving shows its brow. The previous points darken and sink. A different story of the same sea. But we long for the sea. We belong to the sea. Don’t you?
I’ll freeze for a moment and begin, anywhere, anyhow. Just begin. I won’t lie, but I won’t tell the truth either. A glance thrown over shifting water. Glittering. Life.
I’ll take a deep breath, hold it and start at the nearest peak of awakening. What do I see? Not a sea…. A desert. The Desert…