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Overview
Part travelogue, part historical evocation, part personal quest, and part reflection on the joys and perils of passage, this acclaimed synthesis of description and insight remains as relevant today as when it first appeared. Jason Elliot's An Unexpected Light is a remarkable, poignant book about Afghanistan and a heartfelt reflection on the experience of travel itself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312622053 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 08/02/2011 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 512 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Prologue
Wiltshire, England
Dear Ropate,
So much has happened in that part of the world where our paths first crossed that it's hard not to think of our time there, and of the time in which it was contained, as an island, now submerged. Perhaps the same is true of any journey you begin to look back on. But if comfort and distance have given this recollection of events the flavour of a tideborne dream, the essential trouble remains. Once snared, as you so well know, one never fully leaves; a portion of one's heart is forever woven into the fabric of that place.
Here as promised is the account of the journey on which we met: an incomplete attempt to be true to that time. I have not been able to find any other way, given the nature of that journey, than to make it very personal. If what follows is now hampered by the clumsy thud of description, the recollection behind it is both fleet and fond. I need hardly say how much I cherish the memory, among many others, of our midnight strolls through the moonsilvered streets of the capital, or those light-filled days spent dreaming of the unclimbed summits of the Wakhan. Not only because to repeat such luxuries is for the moment so unthinkable, but because it was then, and with such satisfaction, that I discovered I was not the only outsider to have felt so at home among strangers, or so at peace amid the curious exigencies of war.
You ask me how the whole thing began. I am not sure if it is right - or even possible - to begin at the beginning. There are two reasons. One is that I'm reluctant to slow down the process with the weight of reminiscence. I'm as curious as you about what originally set things in motion, but now that this albatross is finally ready to be flung overboard, it seems hardly to matter. The other is this: a seed, once it begins to grow, breaks from the shell that enclosed it and is lost - it's hard to find lasting traces. I've come to the conclusion that journeys are sparked from small and unlikely things rather than grand convictions; small things that strike a note which resonates beyond earshot of the rational. They wait quietly for the season of their birth until some correspondence in the visible world falls eventually into place, and after that, neither love nor money has much to do with it.
Did you ever read Thesiger, who, when the desert summers of Iraq got too hot, would tramp through the Hindu Kush and the Afghan Hazarajat for the pleasure of it? He put his wanderlust down to the thrill of seeing, at the age of three, his father shoot an Abyssinian oryx.
What would ye, ladies? It was ever thus. Men are unwise and curiously planned.
This from one of your favourites, Recker.
I've never seen an oryx, and admit I hadn't even discovered Kipling at the time of my first visit. In fact I'd read next to nothing about Afghanistan, which makes the impulse for that first journey seem so obscure. But there's one book I had read - which brings me to the oxen.
Perhaps I never told you.
If I must look for a beginning, I have to go back to when I was twelve years old, my mind spinning from a turn-of-the-century account I'd just read of an explorer's travels through what was then Turkestan, to which the northern portion of what is now Afghanistan belonged. The names meant very little to me then, but I felt the living image of them nonetheless, and longed to know if the descriptions I had read were real. In this spirit I had asked my father if he would be able to find such places.
`Perhaps,' he had mused. Then added, enigmatically: `I know which way the oxen go.'
My imagination vaulted at this improbable intimation: the oxen! And a man, watching and waiting . . .
From then on I didn't have to try too hard to see, somewhere in a high and tangled tributary of the Paropamisus range, a man lying in wait beneath the incandescent lapis dome of a central Asian noon, watching from his hiding place a shimmering trail in the valley far below. I had followed him there in my mind's eye, in disguise, from the desert shores of the Amu Darya to the forests of Kafiristan, along a route of great hardship, danger and, I fancied, unutterable solitude. It led over windhaunted passes where there was no sound but the fluttering of votive pennants tied to withered sticks, through echoing gorges on a raft buoyed by inflated skins, and across slatted bridges no wider than a man, which swung, horribly high, over furious mountain torrents.
He had no map or compass but was waiting for a rumble of hooves to lead him to his destination: he was listening for the oxen. At the sight of them he would follow the course of their annual migration towards a hidden breeding-ground and thence to a mountain-shrouded temple, where his trials would be rewarded with the gift of secrets known to few other living sots...
Well, for several years that was that, until I took up the trail more diligently myself, and realized I'd misheard my father. There are, as you know, no oxen in central Asia. There are yaks and camels and fattailed sheep and ibex and snow leopards, bears, caracals, corsacs, rhesus monkeys, markhors, wild pigs, long-eared desert hedgehogs and three-toed dwarf jerboas, but no oxen. My father had said Oxms, the old name for the Amu Darya river, which runs all the way from the Pamirs to the ailing Aral Sea and for a thousand miles or so forms the northern border of Afghanistan. Conceivably, the direction of its flow might help a lonely traveller find his way about, but not much more than the knowledge, say, that it gets hotter as you approach the equator; a map and compass would have been more useful after all. If my imaginary explorer had set off for his temple knowing only which way the Oxus flowed, he would have had a rough go of it.
But that is not really the point: the seed was already sown. To give you the gist of what happened next: it was the Russians' fault. They invaded Afghanistan a few years later and I remember hearing about it while I was still in school. The Afghans seemed to belong to a different world, for which I was developing an inarticulate hunger; a people of prototypical human dignity with Old Testament faces, who with guns almost as ancient as themselves were trying (and with some success to shoot down the latest in helicopter gunships. From reports at the time it was difficult to know whether, at the one extreme, the Afghans were indeed born fighters inured to bloodshed and somehow managing to hold whole armoured divisions at bay, or, at the other, whether the Soviets were pretty much slaughtering anyone who put up a fight.
The exile of nearly a third of the country's population pointed grimly to the latter. But the whole idea of a modern army invading that poor and dusty country disagreed with me deeply (I had older brothers, and a certain sympathy for the oppressed. I knew I had to see the place for myself.
I was nineteen. When you told me about your own efforts at the same age to track down Che Guevara, I knew you'd tasted that same blinkered confidence, which, looking back at it, is fairly baffling. In my case it led, as soon as the orbit of my summer holidays was finally unrestrained, to Peshawar, not far from the Afghan border. I filled out my university application forms on the night train from Lahore.
Life had never changed quite so swiftly, and I remember feeling even then that it would never really be quite the same. A few months earlier my worst fear in life was being made to stack chairs after class; now I was trying to get myself smuggled into what had become one of the most inaccessible countries in the world. Within a week or so I had met, and explained myself to a bemused but kindly Massoud Khalili, whose difficult job it was at the time to sort through the foreigners hoping for 'picnics' with the mujaheddin, and steer the more deranged supplicants towards more fitting pursuits. I have no words to describe the thrill at hearing him approve my first trip 'inside'. He was a great charmer. "Who knows?" he said. "Maybe one day you'll write a book about Afghanistan."
I killed time learning backgammon with an Afghan carpet dealer called Jamal, and gambled away half my possessions in the process; there came a sinking moment when I returned to his shop with an armful of my things, and laid them out in front of him. It was only then I learned how much the Afghans like to play.
He chuckled and said he didn't want my things but my friendship - and shook the dice for another game. When I told him I was going to Afghanistan, he said I'd need some Afghan clothes, and took off his shirt - a silk-embroidered shahvar that had taken his wife three months to make - and tried to give it to me. I thought: if this is how Afghans are, I will get to like the place.
Afghanistan was barely forty miles away. Rumours from the war buzzed through the streets like shrapnel, and the lure of the place was irresistible. I got to know my first Afghans in the smokewreathed alleys of the old city: mujaheddin who had come to Pakistan to wait for shipments of arms or to visit their relatives among the three and a half million Afghans who had been given refuge there. They looked a stern but beautiful people - almost unapproachable at first - but after I'd discovered how astonishingly companionable they were, I felt quickly as though I was among friends. They would uncover their wounds with all the glee of schoolboys showing off grazed knees. I can never forget the Pushtun fighter, nearly seven feet tall, who showed me three oliveshaped scars from Russian bullets: one from a bullet that had passed neatly between the bones of his wrist, one in the fleshy part of his thigh, and another, barely healed, from a bullet that had gone cleanly through the very edge of his waist. He put his thumb and finger like a pair of calipers over the entry and exit wounds and, when I asked if he was afraid to go back to the fighting, roared with laughter.
Apart from the occasional bomb blast, the drug dealers, the spies and the food at the hotel, there was another hazard I couldn't have foreseen - prompted, I was told, by my pale skin and the freshness of my features. A one-eyed kebab seller whose shop I passed regularly let his intentions be known with a single repulsive gesture. Another hoped to lure me to his home with illicit supplies of whisky. Nothing in the world could have been less enticing. A very fat man from the tribal territories with a bulbous neck and lizard eyes who lurked in the lobby of the hotel, trailed by obsequious underlings, pressed me daily to accept a 'local speciality' in his bedroom. I dubbed him the 'lizard king', moved about with extra vigilance, and stopped shaving. Alas, my fugitive behaviour attracted added attention and my beard grew in wispy patches that heightened the ardour of my would-be suitors.
By day it was too hot to wander about, and at night I wallowed in sweat. The air above the city was suffocating, immovable, and reeked of diesel fumes and human waste. I never saw clouds but the sky was never blue; it was obscured by an almost tangible yellow malaise. In the restaurant I found a cockroach embalmed in my breakfast omelette; in the evenings the live ones would scuttle in vigorous circles around the edge of the plate. I caught dysentery, developed a raging fever, and my insides came to resemble a hollow watery tube. For several days I lay in bed nibbling Kendal mint cake and staring at the fan which swung by its bare wires overhead, knowing that if it dropped I lacked the strength to move.
It was a desperate time. The whole of life seemed to be sweating away to the dreadful thud of the fan, and with it all ambition and capacity for action seeping drop by drop, hour after hour, into the dank sheets. I couldn't wait to get across the border, whatever the risks.
On the eve of my departure I staggered into the lobby to answer a phone call. Over the crackle of the line I heard a voice I recognized.
"DON'T GO," it said.
It was a well-meaning friend calling from England. He had just heard the news that a French television reporter venturing across the border had been captured by paratroopers and sentenced to fifteen years in a dreadful Kabul prison. Questioned about the event in Pakistan, the Soviet ambassador had warned that `bandits and so-called journalists' trying to penetrate Afghanistan with the mujaheddin would be killed by Soviet forces. But my mind was made up.
"I'M GOING," I said, little guessing at the troublesome persistence with which that first foolhardy act of trespass would reverberate down the years.
It wasn't the moment to hesitate. They came the next morning. Two stern-faced, booted and bearded guerrillas appeared at my door, handed me a note, and left without a word. Through sleepladen eyes I read: "These are the brothers of Commander A-. They will return at five o'clock. Be ready."
The decision to return twice more in the intervening years grew directly out of that first trip. During those later visits I felt I saw the innocence go out of the conflict and, in some parallel way, out of myself.
This last time was the hardest - comfort and distance again and I agonized for ages. I was tied down in all the usual ways, the flirtation with danger had run its natural course, and with the war over I wondered if the country might somehow not measure up to my hopes for writing about it. I was afraid too, now it was no longer a forbidden place which one had to risk one's life to reach, that my feelings towards it would be correspondingly dulled.
There's an ignominy to modern air travel that I'd come to dread. There's no arousing sense of passage towards your destination: no slowly changing landscape reaches back along the line of your motion, adding usefully to an awareness of where you will end up. The quantitative measure of the distance you are travelling loses all relevance; miles mean nothing as you leap, in a single, stratospheric bound, across the barriers that have guided, ever since humankind stood vertical enough to get over them, the very passage of civilizations.
But I leaped, eventually; and ten years on, I was back again in Peshawar. The lizard king no longer prowled the lobby of Green's hotel, there was a surfeit of Land Cruisers in the streets, satellite TV in my room, and everyone had mobile phones. There were very few Afghans about, and I wandered along the dusty teeming streets of the old city half-hoping to meet up again with friends among the mujaheddin. They were all gone, of course, and I couldn't escape a sense of longing for the electric atmosphere of the days of the war.
A few things hadn't changed. The air was still chokingly thick with diesel fumes, and the taxi drivers still offered you heroin with the same cheerful smiles. And there was still that improbable range of foreign visitors, all hoping vaguely to get across the border. At the hotel I met a beautiful Japanese girl called Keiko who wanted to photograph desert flowers inside Afghanistan (I suffered a momentary impulse to throw up earlier plans and help smuggle her into the country, a pair of Polish film-makers following the trail of a young compatriot who had disappeared in Nuristan during the war, an ex-SAS parachutist with a limp who was hoping to jump with what was left of the Afghan Air Force, and a Dutch journalist who taught me Japanese swordplay on the roof at dawn.
Soon things were gathering delicious momentum. Two of my biggest worries - how to get inside the country, and where to stay - were quickly solved. With the kind permission of Peter Stocker,* I was allowed to join a relief flight across the border. And on it I was lucky enough to meet an American photographer on assignment to the capital, who offered to put me up at his agency's headquarters in Kabul.
I left Peshawar in high spirits and flew to Bagram airport just north of Kabul - where it's about time I threw you into the story = a few days later, on a brilliant November morning. It was the strangest thing, but as soon as we'd stepped out of the little plane onto Afghan soil, I felt as though some inner clock of mine, which had stopped since I had last been there, began to tick again: it was like going into a room which has stayed locked while the rest of the house has been lived in. I realized then, with a familiar mixture of longing and relief, I had a lot of catching up to do.
With love,
J. *Director, at the time, of the delegation in Afghanistan of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Interviews
An Interview with Jason Elliot
Barnes & Noble.com: While your parents obviously planted the seed for your interest in the country, what was their reaction to your first trip to Afghanistan?
Jason Elliot: My parents, thankfully, were blissfully ignorant of what was involved in my first trip. But as the youngest of a family of six children, there was probably little I could do to surprise them. They knew that my trip was something not to be interfered with, and today, as a parent, I can only marvel at their understanding. I did not talk much about the experience afterwards; it had in a sense gone too deeply into me.
B&N.com: What prompted your decision to write a book about your travels? Why not just travel and take pictures?
JE: The origins of a decision to write a book are many and, in the end, mysterious. I don't pretend to understand them! It has to do with one's experience as well as one's disposition: these provide the soil in which the book takes root. If it does, it may eventually become bigger than you: then you begin to wrestle with it. In my own case, I felt the experience I was granted in Afghanistan could only be addressed in a book; whoever said that the reason you write a book is because you have to had a point.
B&N.com: Were there any books which you looked to as a model for yours, about Afghanistan or travel in general?
JE: Not really. The moment you have a model you face a kind of danger -- whether to imitate or to go against a certain trend -- and this diverts you from the integrity of your own story, which you have to discover for yourself. Certainly I looked to see how others had tackled the challenge of writing about a journey, and drew strength from their successes. In the case of writing about a journey in Afghanistan, I was lucky enough to have little by way of recent precedents. But the model came out of the journey itself; to be true to this was the difficult thing. In the end this is what you struggle with. For the technical business of writing, you look to all writing of a certain caliber, not just writing which describes travel.
B&N.com: Looking back on your adventures with the mujaheddin, why do you think they were so predisposed to taking care of you, to sharing their supplies and keeping you out of danger?
JE: It has to do with hospitality, which runs so very deeply in Afghan culture. You have to encounter Afghan hospitality to really know how impoverished one's own definition of hospitality really is! They take it very seriously.
B&N.com: Obviously, in many ways, a travel writer must depend on the generosity of the subject he writes about. Yet do you think in third world countries, there is an extra edge to this dynamic? Meaning, in return for their generosity to you, do you feel responsible to portray the plight of the mujaheddin?
JE: You cannot help but feel indebted to people who have taken such trouble on your behalf. I have written about what I experienced. I'm not sure if this makes me feel responsible or not. If I had been treated badly by Afghans, I would have described it; but this was not the case at all.
B&N.com: You wrote a little bit about the spirit of discovery, and how we have this notion that there is nothing left on the world to be uncovered. What parts of your journey really made you feel like you had completely left the known world behind and were on uncharted territory?
JE: It depends what you mean by the "known world." In the physical sense, Afghanistan is still one of those places where you can very readily experience all the awe of remoteness, a feeling of having escaped from time itself. Such places do exist, and much of Afghanistan is uncharted in this sense, at least by outsiders. But there is a qualitative aspect too; a sense of remoteness from the ideas and values that make up your habitual inner landscape, and this is where the journey gets really interesting. Outside the country's cities, I felt this many times.
B&N.com: What gave you the courage to leave behind your various European cohorts, from Tim to Guillaume?
JE: In Kabul, in particular, I had the luxury of meeting friends and knowing certain comforts, albeit of a relative sort. But I would have learned little about Afghanistan if I had stayed in familiar surroundings, and these were pleasures that had to be traded in. This exchange is implicit in a journey. It is just an equation that you have to relinquish something in order to receive something else, and a journey amplifies this equation. I am not sure if it can be called courage to recognize it.
B&N.com: You seemed to get by with a remarkable ease on smatterings of Persian and English. What were some of the hardest barriers -- cultural and otherwise -- during your travels in the country?
JE: Language is one thing; you can learn a language, more or less. You can grasp customs, traditions, and manners with a little practice. A far greater obstacle to the traveler is time, for which there is no substitute. Only with time can you be granted a deeper understanding of things, especially in a culture that reveals itself gradually.
B&N.com: Besides the mistranslation of so many aspects of Afghan culture, why do you think the West has so much trouble understanding Afghanistan and its various peoples?
JE: Plenty of Western people have understood Afghanistan, so I would hesitate to generalize. But it doesn't seem too much to suggest that one of the peculiar ideologies of the West -- if we admit to it -- is that other countries and cultures that appear not to conform to our own ideas are in some manner inferior. It does not help much that most reporting from the country tends to be negative in its emphasis, because we are so much at the mercy of journalism for our opinions, and liable thereby to build up a skewed impression of places. If policy makers were obliged to spend some time living among the peoples whose lives they influence from afar, it would be a fine thing.
B&N.com: Seeing how they have become both the demon and scourge of the West, and now control 80 percent of Afghanistan, why did you spend so little time writing about the Taliban?
JE: Much more has been learned about the Taliban since the period I have described in An Unexpected Light. At the time of my visit, they had not yet entered Kabul and no one could have predicted the extent of their territorial gains ('control' is a problematic term). I simply did not spend time traveling in Taliban-held areas, and did not feel qualified to write about the movement. Had I undertaken to write about the Taliban as well, it would have made the book much longer than it already is, and made my editor's life even more difficult.
B&N.com: Since you had the benefit of being there during both Soviet occupation and the rise of the Taliban, how do you feel these two influences have shaped the future of Afghanistan? Do you believe one influence will eventually triumph over the other?
JE: Many complex influences are at work in Afghanistan, and the most pernicious of these originate outside the country itself: the present conflict in Afghanistan is more international than is generally realized. It is difficult to isolate the influences, because they affect each other. To some extent, the excesses of the Taliban can be better understood in terms of the excesses committed by the Soviets, during a conflict that left over a million Afghans dead. But there are many other factors. The West -- America in particular -- could play a vital and positive role in Afghanistan's future, but its present isolationism towards Afghanistan can serve no purpose but to increase the country's difficulties.
There is something worth mentioning in this connection. One of the poorest, neediest, and now demonized countries in the world has been subjected to sanctions by the world's most prosperous country. Yet foreign visitors, Americans included, are in general received and treated with the same magnanimity as always. If anything could be said to be a triumph, it is probably this.
B&N.com: Do you believe the Afghan people have truly been accidentally enmeshed in violence? Do you think in a country as multicultural as Afghanistan, that peace is ever possible?
JE: Peace is possible in Afghanistan as much or as little as it is possible anywhere.
B&N.com: Obviously it's very difficult to move freely and safely throughout the country, but would you recommend it to anyone who reads your book and becomes, as you once were, enchanted with the country?
JE: Where there is enchantment, danger and difficulty are never far away. To anyone who is aware of the connection between them -- of course I would recommend it. There is nowhere else like Afghanistan.