The Swallows of Kabul

The World is a terrible place. What makes it even more horrible, is that the world is clearly more terrible in some places than in others. Kabul, (and presumably, all of Afghanistan), as painted in this book, is a hell on earth, where not just prosperity and liberty have been done away with, but dignity as well. Educated people have been forced to become little more than beggars, and society has become just a stage to display a bizarre code of morals which deems public murder a fitting way to wash away crimes of desire. Women have been entirely reduced to shadows, who cannot show their faces or speak in public. Khadra shows us dignity is not dead, however; the characters are seeking a way out of this misery, wanting to speak out. The terminally ill wife of the part-time jailer eventually rises above their hellish life, to redeem herself and her husband with love. There is no happy ending to this tale, for how can there be joy in a place where it has been outlawed? It is a hard story to tell, but Khadra does it unflinchingly. I am grateful to him for reminding us of the trials that some of our fellow human beings must go through. This book is an excellent read, and one that will make you think and re-evaluate your own principles.

The reference to swallows in the title of this remarkable novel is to the burqa-clad women of Afghanistan during the years of the Taliban. Swathed in fabric from head to toe, they have been forced from public life and, as much as possible, rendered invisible, to preserve their "purity" and the honor of their families. The French-Algerian author, Khadra, heightens the incomprehensibility of this kind of faith-based segregation of genders even further by beginning and ending his story with the public executions of two women, one for alleged adultery and the other for the alleged murder of her husband. Between these two incidents, the story follows the daily lives of several characters living out lives of soul-crushing misery in the doomed and ruined city of Kabul. There is a jail keeper, a university-educated man, an aged man who dreams of escape, and a Kalashnikov-carrying militiaman who turns a blind eye to the inhumanity he witnesses and looks only for opportuniies to advance his own career. It is a violent, Orwellian world where empathy has died and only the self-serving survive. Both spare and unsparing, Khadra's writing brings to mind the stark, unsentimental vision of Camus' "The Stranger." The book is a bleak portrayal of exteme Islamic fundamentalism and as such seems intended as a heart-rending call of compassion for those in war-devastated regions, who are trapped by its worst excesses.

Where Khalid Hosseini's THE KITE RUNNER reads like "Afghanistan lite," a tale of privileged, upper class life lost, Yasmina Khadra's THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL wallows in the street dust, beggar children, and Taliban whips of Kabul. Khadra's tale is terrifying in its immediacy, creating an atmosphere in which every word and action must be chosen carefully, where being in the wrong place at the wrong time can lead to anything from two hours' imprisonment in a mosque listening to a raving mullah to a beating or even death. The first three pages set the tone magnificently, depicting a near hell on earth. THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL intertwines the stories of two married couples whose lives cross randomly, first in small ways and then in hugely fateful ways. Atiq Shaukat is a taciturn war survivor (versus the Soviets) turned jailer for prisoners being held pending public execution. His wife of twenty years, Musarrat, was the nurse who saved him from his wounds and helped him recover. She has always known that Atiq married her out of a sense of obligation, and now she is suffering from a fatal degenerative disease. Another young couple, Mohsen Ramat and his beautiful wife Zunaira, are well-educated, a handsome and ideal match who have lost their professional jobs and comfortable lives to the ravages of war and the worse ravages of religious fundamentalism. They struggle to maintain their identities and sense of purpose in the face of irrational and capricious Taliban zealotry. Khadra follows Stendahl's dictum of character development: put them in difficult situations and then give them brains so they can suffer. And suffer his four main characters do, terribly, each in his own way. Atiq feels nothing for anyone, having hardened himself to stone in order to deal with the chaos around him and his role in the feeding frenzy of the Taliban's public executions. He wanders the streets like a ghost, devoid of feelings and resenting his helplessness. His wife Musarrat suffers the painful physical debilitations of her disease along with her inability to help her husband. Mohsen shares Atiq's sense of purposelessness, compounded by the recognition of how close he exists to depravity when he joins an unknown woman's public stoning and believes he actually hit her in the head. Finally, Mohsen's wife Zunaira suffers the loss of her professional identity and selfhood, having to muzzle her former activism for women's rights behind the walls of her home and the veil of a burqa. That Yasmina Khadra is a woman's pen name adopted by an Algerian man, Mohammed Moulessehoul, is fitting. Although THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL focuses on its male characters (apropos of a Taliban society), it is the women Musarrat and Zunaira who provide the emotional heart and dramatic punch in this story. They suffer nobly and seek active resolutions to their plights while their respective husbands seem only to wallow in their own misery. The author surrounds his four main characters with an intriguin

"The Swallows of Kabul," by Yasmina Khadra, is a novel that has been translated from the French by John Cullen. The book's dustcover notes that Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian army officer who used the feminine pseudonym in order to avoid censorship. "Swallows" is a gripping tale that takes place in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. The story revolves around the lives of the men and women who endured life under this religious fundamentalist regime. The author vividly depicts the cruelty and violence of the regime. The main characters include a jailer who guards the Taliban's victims and a female lawyer who chafes under the regime's sexist oppression. The book is full of memorable details and scenes, such as a colorfully portrayed group of disabled war veterans who congregate around a mosque. Khadra's prose is at times grotesque, at times poetic. We see the hopes and frustrations of the individual characters. And we also see the possibility of compassion and redemption in a world of brutality, suffering, and injustice. As an American soldier, I served in Afghanistan and was deeply touched by the tragedy and beauty of that land and its people; I thank both the author and translator of this book for bringing this moving tale to life.

Khandra's books are simple with multiple levels of perception. More importantly, they are masterfully wordsmithed (the over-used term is well earned in this case). These are the kind of books that haunt you for years as they become part of your psyche.....and you see parallels to the writing all around you.......the writing truly provides you with a new perception of your own life. Here are all the books to date, with a bit of info on each: Swallows of Kabul (2004) A bit hit in France, this story of 2 couples and their attempts to cope with the rule of the Taliban is mesmerizing. Wolf Dreams (2003) 3rd of an Algerian trilogy A story of a Moslem Jihadi, from sweet boy to fanatic fundamentalist has been recommended for insight into the driving force of suicidist youngsters. Morituri (2003) 2nd of an Algerian trilogy An Algerian kidnaping story that provides a compelling look at the definition of crime in a permanently impoverished society. In The Name Of God (2000) 1st of an Algerian trilogy A look at the phenomena of Moslem fundamentalism in Algeria, this book has strong parallels to Camu's "The Plague." In some ways it is a more modern variation on a theme of Camu's work.