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Afghans are afraid that the Taliban, who have reigned terror in their country, will return to power. To understand what this past looked like, read Under the Kabul Skyline, which brings together twelve new Afghans. These stories that give voice to Afghan women tell the story of war, desolation and especially their intimate experiences of a patriarchal society ruled by the sacred, where women had for horizon only the confinement and forgetting of desires.
They are called Nâzboo, Bahar, Femme Khamiri, Pari ... Young girls in love, battered women, mothers who are worried about their sons forced to go to war, they are the protagonists of an unforgettable volume of contemporary Afghan news, published recently in French. Under the skies of Kabul , published this summer by Le Soupirail editions, is a poignant and intense collection written by 12 Persian-speaking Afghan writers, living between Kabul, the United States and Canada. These authors belong to different generations, but they have in common the darkness of the war that never ends.
They also share their imaginary world of men and women in mourning, mothers lamenting the fate of their lovers or their sons sent to the front never to return, " women who light the fire " despite everything, like the mother of the protagonist Hamad in the ultimate news of the collection, hoping to see one day return his favorite son. The news of this collection plunges us into the cruel reality of contemporary Afghanistan , but the magic of writing transforms these dives in the heart of a brutal and traumatic story into catharsis exercises, worthy of the greatest literatures.
"They have a long beard like that"
In " L'eau dormante", one of the most successful novels of the volume, it is through the eyes of a teenager that the author gives us to see the layers of human tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan at war. The girl has been weaving mats since her early childhood to help her mother, abandoned by her polygamous husband, to provide for her family. She speaks less of war than of the threat posed by the return of the Taliban to the freedom of women in her country, their joy of living, the role they are entitled to play in society.
She wonders " what do they look like, the Taliban ? The neighbor replies, " They have a long beard like that. They have a big turban like that, their clothes are dirty and they walk barefoot. The neighbor's response, where panic mixes with fantasies, worries, but the teenager suddenly realizes that this description of the Taliban strangely overlaps with her childhood traumas, when her mother's tears woke her up in the middle of the night. " That night, my father's shadow hitting my mother was projected onto the wall. It was a terrifying shadow, wearing a turban and a beard ... "Recalls the protagonist, bursting into tears.
The collection opens with the lamentations of a mother sentenced to remove her son from the village so that the anger of men does not fall on him. " Two shots" refers to a society caught in hatred and whose main victims are women. " The cry of the river always looks like the lamentations of women. The women who light the fire, "exclaims the son who flees by fleeing through the hills where his shots cost the life of his brother. This is the story of Abel and Cain revisited, but the real victim here is the mother.
In her short story " Number Thirteen", author Batool Haidari presents the monologue of a woman killed in an attack, remembering the last moments of her life. Out of the house to get news of her husband, mobilized by government agents to be sent to the front, she is a victim of a bomb that explodes as it passes. A strong explosion and the young woman is killed on the spot. Kept in the morgue until her husband comes to identify the body, the deceased worries, imagine the author, for his newborn daughter left alone at home. " This is my new favorite, " says the translator of the collection Khojesta Ebrahimi. She remembers having chatted with the author of the short story who is a psychologist and admirer of Sadeq Hedayat, the famous writer born in 1903 in Tehran and died in Paris in 1951 , which is called the Iranian Maupassant. For Ebrahimi, who admits to having translated this news, with as much happiness as pain, " Haidari's great success is to have been able to tell with clinical coldness the dismay of the mother, the brutality of death that sow terrorist attacks , the war ... "
A narrative practice old as civilization
Told with a consummate sense of the economy of means and translated with talent, the twelve stories gathered in All of Kabul's sky are part of a narrative practice as old as human civilization. Reputed to be the grave of the conquerors, Afghanistan is also a land of poetry, tales, fables, folk tales and proverbs. It is the birthplace of Rumi and Ahmed Shah Abdali, the founder of modern Afghanistan and poet himself. Afghan women writers are no less talented and loquacious than their men, as the voices that resonate in the pages of the collection presented here remind us.
The tradition of female writing in Afghanistan dates back at least to the eighth century, when the voice of the talented Rabia-e-Balkhi, princess arrested and then put to death by her brother, the king, dared to publicly declaim his love for his slave. Baktash. According to legend, she wrote her latest poems plunging her kalam in her blood. Undaunted by the dictates of autocrats, the daughters of Rabia continued the tradition, continuing to enrich the Persian-speaking literary corpus with their often subversive readings of life, readings that are especially " peculiar to their experiences of oppressed women and dominated within patriarchal societies , "says the translator.
The silence to which Afghan women have been reduced for too long probably explains the urgency that the twelve authors of Under the Sky of Kabul suggest. Nothing translates this urgency better than the fall of the last story of the collection. " I have so many things to say that I would like to write days and days, but my hand fails me. My feather falls and ... "The words certainly attributed to a man in the news in question, but that the Nazboo, Bahar, Kamiri Women and other Pari could very well pronounce them, if only they could all go to the school like their male counterparts.
At the start of the school year last July, girls were only 3% of the 9 million Afghan children who returned to school this year. This is dramatic for the future of women's writing in Afghanistan.
Under the skies of Kabul , news of Afghan women. Translated from Persian by Khojesta Ebrahimi. Editions Le Soupirail, 228 pages, 21 euros.