Published 2003 / Length 276 pages
This fictionalized account of Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad’s four-month stay with a Kabul family in spring 2002, just months after the start of NATO’s war in Afghanistan, is an engrossing read. The author insists that the family of our aptly named protagonist, Sultan, is not ‘typical’; she resists giving Western readers a template for ‘understanding’ a country that appeared on the radar of most only after the US-led invasion. The label of ‘fiction’ slips somewhat, though, when Seierstad inserts, through the voice of one unforgettable character, the full text of a Taliban radio broadcast banning music, dancing, the education of women and (bizarrely) pigeon-rearing. Meanwhile, her anger at the subjugation of women in Afghan society comes through loud and clear. She is adamant that the Taliban are not responsible for this remorseless, everyday oppression. Women suffocate in domestic spaces, she argues, because of Afghan tradition: the combination of commercial necessity and ingrained structures of familial obligation make marriages into ‘business deals’ in which women are bartered for. Her reflections on the roots of female victimization are deeply serious, but the book remains insightful, simple and often humorous.
‘The power and transparency of the reportage made me feel as if I, rather than Asne Seierstad, had just spent four months in Kabul with the Khan family. I was gripped by the immediacy of her experiences.’ – CAROLE, 59
• To what extent does Seierstad preserve her journalistic objectivity? How even-handed is her treatment of men and women?
• Why do you think the author uses dust as a central image of women’s oppression?
• Is Seierstad too much of an outsider to examine Afghan culture as anything other than a voyeur? Or does she provide a bridge to an unfamiliar culture?
• Did you spy any hope for change in the book?
• Sultan insists that he wants to preserve Afghan culture and heritage. Given some of the more problematic sides to that culture that we see in the book, do you agree that preserving tradition for its own sake is a good thing?
• The real-life bookseller, Shah Mohammed Rais, has threatened to write his own account of events, telling the world’s press that Seierstad’s depiction of Afghanistan was ‘false and salacious’.
• A war journalist by training, Seierstad has also written With Their Backs to the World (2000) about Serbia, and A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal (2005) about life in Iraq immediately before, during and after the US-led invasion in 2003.
• The book was selected for the 2004 Richard & Judy Book Club.
• Fahrenheit 451 by RAY BRADBURY – describes a regime that burns books, and its contempt for learning and imagination.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by GEORGE ORWELL (see here) – depicts a controlled society where covert love affairs are conducted through notes and barely perceptible signs. The Ministry of Love echoes the surreal Ministry of Morality.
• The Handmaid’s Tale by MARGARET ATWOOD (see here) – set in a dystopia where gender is used as a basis for social control.