I n February 1978, almost twenty-three years ago, I visited Afghanistan with my spouse, Graeme Gibson, and our eighteen-month-old daughter. We went there almost by chance: we were on our way to the Adelaide literary festival in Australia. Pausing at intervals, we felt, would surely be easier on a child’s time clock. (Wrong, as it turned out.) We thought Afghanistan would make a fascinating two-week stopover. Its military history impressed us—neither Alexander the Great nor the British in the nineteenth century had stayed in the country long because of the ferocity of its warriors.
“Don’t go to Afghanistan,” my father said when told of our plans. “There’s going to be a war there.” He was fond of reading history books. “As Alexander the Great said, Afghanistan is easy to march into but hard to march out of.” But we hadn’t heard any other rumors of war, so off we went.
We were among the last to see Afghanistan in its days of relative peace—relative, because even then there were tribal disputes and superpowers in play. The three biggest buildings in Kabul were the Chinese embassy, the Soviet embassy, and the U.S. embassy, and the head of the country was reportedly playing the three against one another.
The houses of Kabul were carved wood, and the streets were like a living Book of Hours: people in flowing robes, camels, donkeys, carts with huge wooden wheels being pushed and pulled by men at either end. There were few motorized vehicles. Among them were buses covered with ornate Arabic script, with eyes painted on the front so the buses could see where they were going.
We managed to hire a car to see the terrain of the famous and disastrous British retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad. The scenery was breathtaking: jagged mountains and the Arabian Nights dwellings in the valleys—part houses, part fortresses—reflected in the enchanted blue-green of the rivers. Our driver took the switchback road at breakneck speed since we had to be back before sundown because of bandits.
The men we encountered were friendly and fond of children: our curly-headed, fair-haired child got a lot of attention. The winter coat I wore had a large hood so that I was sufficiently covered and did not attract undue notice. Many wanted to talk; some knew English, while others spoke through our driver. But they all addressed Graeme exclusively. To have spoken to me would have been impolite. And yet when our interpreter negotiated our entry into an all-male teahouse, I received nothing worse than uneasy glances. The law of hospitality toward visitors ranked higher than the no-women-in-the-teahouse custom. In the hotel, those who served meals and cleaned rooms were men, tall men with scars either from dueling or from the national sport, played on horseback, in which gaining possession of a headless calf is the aim.
Girls and women we glimpsed on the street wore the chador, the long, pleated garment with a crocheted grill for the eyes that is more comprehensive than any other Muslim cover-up. At that time, you often saw chic boots and shoes peeking out from the hem. The chador wasn’t obligatory back then; Hindu women didn’t wear it. It was a cultural custom, and since I had grown up hearing that you weren’t decently dressed without a girdle and white gloves, I thought I could understand such a thing. I also knew that clothing is a symbol, that all symbols are ambiguous, and that this one might signify a fear of women or a desire to protect them from the gaze of strangers. But it could also mean more negative things, just as the color red can mean love, blood, life, royalty, good luck—or sin.
I bought a chador in the market. A jovial crowd of men gathered around, amused by the spectacle of a Western woman picking out such a non-Western item. They offered advice about color and quality. Purple was better than light green or blue, they said. (I bought the purple.) Every writer wants the Cloak of Invisibility—the power to see without being seen—or so I was thinking as I donned the chador. But once I had put it on, I had an odd sense of having been turned into negative space, a blank in the visual field, a sort of antimatter—both there and not there. Such a space has power of a sort, but it is a passive power, the power of taboo.
Several weeks after we left Afghanistan, the war broke out. My father was right, after all. Over the next years, we often remembered the people we met and their courtesy and curiosity. How many of them are now dead, through no fault of their own?
Six years after our trip, I wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, a speculative fiction about an American theocracy. The women in that book wear outfits derived in part from nuns’ costumes, partly from girls’ schools’ hemlines, and partly—I must admit—from the faceless woman on the Old Dutch Cleanser box, but also partly from the chador I acquired in Afghanistan and its conflicting associations. As one character says, there is freedom to and freedom from. But how much of the first should you have to give up to assure the second? All cultures have had to grapple with that, and our own—as we are now seeing—is no exception. Would I have written the book if I never visited Afghanistan? Possibly. Would it have been the same? Unlikely.