Interview on Local Kabul TV
Yesterday began with a rare note of civility and pleasantness in this usually angry and oppressive place.
Ariana TV, one of several local Kabul television networks, had invited me to speak about my recently published book, Silent Trees. The station’s studio was the setting for the 8:00 a.m. program. Discussing a book was probably somewhat offbeat for them. Normally they focus on interviews with government officials on political matters or, on occasion, some important private-sector powerbrokers keen to tell the program’s viewers what they do to improve the economy.
So, discussing Silent Trees and why I wrote it and what I hoped to achieve with it was somewhat of a new experience for the station and the programs two hosts.
The male host asked the first question which, I admit, took me by surprise. He knew that I lived in the United States and wrote mainly in English. Yet, he asked why I had not written the book in Farsi—he actually used the word “Farsi.” I should explain. Eager to make a distinction between Iran and their country, most Afghans call their version of Farsi, “Dari.” Dari or Farsi is spoken by about 35 percent of Afghans, Pashtu being the majority language.
Unprepared for the host’s question, I had to improvise a fitting and non-offensive response. I didn’t want to say that it didn’t make much sense to write in a country’s language where 80 percent of the population was illiterate and where, even among a majority of the educated class only a small minority would care to read fiction or would have any appreciation for fictional creations.
So, I said I lived in an English speaking country and I was writing primarily for the American public but added that I would like to see the book being eventually translated in other languages, including Farsi and Pashtu.
The female host, a young attractive woman, her lips and fingernails colored in bright red, held the book in her hands and laughingly said, once she had improved her English, she would translate it into Farsi. It was a deal, I said and we all laughed. From then on everything was smooth sailing.
Their other questions dealt with what I wanted to explain with the book and what had moved me to write it in the first place. I leaped deep into my memory, trying to retrieve some of what I had learned at Johns Hopkins about about the essence of a novel and why authors engaged in writing fiction.
It was easy to say that fiction was essentially storytelling and that it was considered utterly deplorable if a writer of fiction engaged in very much explaining of things. A much more sensitive topic to discuss with my hosts was the subject of creation. While in modern, secular societies it is considered a normal process for a writer to create characters and make them as real to life as possible, in the conservative, Moslem world it could be construed as something offensive, even harmful . For them, only God can create life. Anything else that tries to mimic the process—-no matter how elementary, such as painting a human face or creating an imagined human being—could be construed as blasphemy, with all the horrors that goes along with that judgment.
The reason that motivated me—perhaps even forced me—to write the story was a touchy one But since the answer to the question was outstanding, it needed to be addressed.. So, I said in countries were political power was unchecked and laws were what the powers to be wanted them to be, those who hold power and those who oppose them both get destroyed. The real tragedy, however, was that the process destroys everything, and everybody, including a populace that had nothing to do with the hidden and deadly fight for power. “Just look at this country,” I added. “If there was a message that I wanted the story to show, it was this all-destructive end to dictatorship.”
As I said earlier, the atmosphere was jovial enough that I was forgiven any blunders I may have committed during the interview. My two hosts didn’t object to my critical view of Afghanistan.
The interview must have gone well. When I went out of the studio and walked through the maze of doors and barriers—the numerous doors and the labyrinth of gangways are constructed to render it difficult for insurgents to attack the facility and give the occupants a chance to flee if an attack took place—the many guards and officials who had apparently watched the program, smiled cheerfully when we shook hands.
Leaving the heavily fortified building, I felt elated. It had been a very long time sinceI had seen so many smiles in Kabul. where normally distrust, coldness, and denial governs.
