August 2001

Afg 3: I Promise

God.

Let me try and tell you what this is like. It’s going to be really hard to get across, but I’m going to try.

Have you ever lain on your back in a car as someone else drives, staring up at the skyscape of blue and fluffy white flowing by your windowpane - watching a river of inverted world? Outstretched tree branches and traffic lights stream by, buildings balconies storesigns swirl confusingly on sharp turns, phone wires hiccup their way across your vision....Reach home, and you have a whole new perspective on how to get there. A whole new way of looking.

So imagine that you have eyes on the top of your head - the wonders you can see! Birds flying, clouds, raintears clearing your vision, twinkling night guides constellating...the heavens above you always...vastness...beauty...emptiness...possibility....

Soulfood.

But then it’s like that awful jarring nightmare - the one where you feel yourself falling, and wake up with a shock before you hit the ground. Only this time you hit the ground for real. (well, you have eyes on the top of your head, girl, of course you’ll trip and fall!) And it hurts (hurts hurts hurts) for real.

So what I’m trying to say is that most of the time I wander about with eyes like normal people. But recently, it’s been happening a lot that I get excited, my eyes move up to the top of my head, I start seeing sky-blue, and then THUD! I’m on the ground dazedly wiping gravel from my face.

Let me give you a recent example of this. We hold a party for a few close friends of the family. The conversation turns to where I’ve been the last while, and I shrug and mutter something about Pakistan dismissingly. But they seem really interested and open to hearing, so I cautiously expand to talking about working with Afghan refugees. They nod understandingly, knowledgably, and I warm up to talking about the incredible opportunity I had of being under the burqa in Afghanistan itself for a week, and talk about what it feels like to be covered-smothered head to foot in the blanket of sad and powerlessness and invisibility of an Afghan woman.

I am seeing shock and anger on their faces (yes yes yes see it feel it be angry) and I am sharing the precious gift of truth that people in Pakistan and Afghanistan have shown me, so so happy that they are seeing it with me. (o vision of sky-blue before my delighted eyes!)

I finish telling one particularly sympathetic woman about blank-eyed war-shocked children in orphanages. I show her my pictures of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul - pictures of its ruins (taken illegally from inside the taxi of a friend), of the stadium where they publicly execute people, of swaggering Taliban walking behind abandoned tanks in the streets. I rush back into my room and return with the burqa I now carry around with me (ironically, an optimistic sky-blue), and put it on, instantly transforming myself into the shapeless nothing of oppressed humanity.

She exclaims over the way I have disappeared, become characterless, faceless, de-personed. How do you see through that tiny little rectangle of net before your eyes? she asks.

I take off the burqa and hold it out for her to try. My goodness! she says, a faint frown creasing her smooth forehead. Thank you, but I can’t wear it, because it might ruin my hair. Then her face brightens and she asks: when will you come to my house to teach my son English? (Read: I like your cooking and credentials and think you’ll make an excellent daughter-in-law.)

My breath leaves me in a rush. (THUD! My face is back in the dirt)

Laughter swirls around me as I sit in a fog. Afghanistan, I realize, has become the momentary talk of a night of festivities - cake and lasagne topped off with the gruesome freak show of faceless blue. And I have participated.

I’m feeling the stone in my gut again.

I’m hurting. I know I know I know I’m being stupid and I really shouldn’t have such unrealistic expectations about other people understanding and caring about the things I do. I know I shouldn’t complain about the protective walls people have around themselves, because just a few years ago I was lacerating people with my merciless perfectionism (I’m so so sorry). My problem, I know, comes from my bad habit of having my eyes move up to the top of my head. Engrossed in the overwhelming beauty of on high, of dancing the sky on laughter-silvered wings (goodness! Just look at how things CAN be!), I forget to put up my hands to protect my face from scraping rough uncomprehending reality.

I know all these things. It doesn’t help.

I have a fight that same night with my father (I’m not even sure what it was about anymore, only that it was really important at the time) and I am amazingly angry-sad with him. I sneak upstairs onto the roof later when everyone else goes to sleep and I cry really hard - I’m not even sure what I’m crying about - I just know it hurts and my whole body is shaking with it.

I try to capture my feelings, this moment, this tantalizing teasing whiff of Important (to understand what the hell is going on with me!?) but when I return to the roof armed with a candle, matches, and my journal, the dark-blue sky mocks me with its inscrutability and my pen is dead in my hand. And as I lie there and shiver in the cool night breeze, in the flicker of candlelight I see strange little fibres glinting in the roofing material beneath my bare arms. I remember that in Iran asbestos is a popular building material despite the fact that it is one of the most widely recognized construction health hazards and a known carcinogen.

And so I go back inside. The romance of anguish loses its bloom when you’re lying on asbestos, I guess.

And now, I sit in front of this keyboard and growl with frustration at my pathetic attempts to communicate my thoughts and feelings to you. I’m trying to put to words emotions and concepts that I barely understand myself. How on earth do other people do this?

I am reminded of a discussion I had with my father a few days ago. He looked at my red eyes and asked what was going on. I told him that I had been crying while he and his wife were out, but that it was good, since before that I had been on a binge of eating and reading useless pulpy books (hello escapism) because there had been a thought that I was trying to run away from. I finally gave in and let the realization come, and that was what led to my tears.

What realization came to you? he asked. I’m not sure I can explain it, I said. It’s that somewhere, somehow, we are all alone. No matter how much I delude myself, how much I make things/people/places important and run around busily after them, how much I fight Void, it remains that we are stuck in our separate little bodies, our isolated imperfect limited little minds - trapped by our thoughts and their voicelessness...mute, unheard, misunderstood, unseen.

I looked at that squarely, I said, and cried over it.

My father said he understood. There was a period of time when I was completely alone with very very bitter memories, he said. And the thing that kept me going through that was repeating this phrase: Calif Ali was alone.

Calif Ali was alone. Surrounded by people and followers, he was isolated by his knowledge and responsibilities and burden. He was alone. Everyone spoke one language, yet nobody understood him, and he was forced to shout his rage and sorrow over his followers and loved ones down a well to let out his feelings.

I am amazed. Calif Ali and others of his caliber have strength at a level that I can’t conceive. And I realize that while I’m no Calif Ali, I can be Stubborn Sarah (just ask my mother about this). I have no idea where I’m going in the future or how I’ll get there, but goddammit, if I have anything to do with it, I’m going to work on solving Afghanistan: the people, the humanity, the symbol.

I wrote a big HOW?! on one of my many scraps of paper that I scribble on when I get into these moods. HOW do you help people to care? HOW do you help people realize? As the poet Sa’di says, "All men are limbs of one body." HOW do you live this fully in all you do?

I don’t know. But I’m working on it.

Calif Ali was alone. I don’t think I want to resort to shouting my grief and frustration down a well, so I’ll write a book instead. This report, I have decided, will be chapter 3. You have read chapters 1 and 2 before this.

And I will fight. See http://afghanistan.unitycode.org/private. I will scream and shout, and I will work so that we build up our own army to counter the inhumanity in this world.

In the meantime, I thank you, thank you, thank you for listening to this pitifully inadequate little voice of mine. And I wish you courage in your enduring beautiful beingness,

Sarah.