The women behind Kabul's bookseller

The Bookseller of Kabul. Asne Seierstad. Ingrid Christophersen, translator. Little, Brown. [pounds sterling]12.99. 245 pages. ISBN 0-316-72605-2.

In most capital cities, a bookseller would be no extraordinary thing, certainly not remarkable enough to warrant biographical documentary (albeit with some 'literary' licence). But in a city physically and culturally desecrated by decades of brutal feuding and fundamentalist tyranny, where art and literature are deemed taboo, and free-thinkers 'enemies of society', a bookseller is a rare find indeed. A sultan amongst men. The Norwegian journalist, Asne Seierstad's, international bestseller, The Bookseller of Kabul, tells the, slightly fictionalised, story of her four-month stay with Sultan Khan, the bookseller of the title, and his family, during the spring of 2002. Shortly after the fall of the Taliban, when the Western world was just 'discovering' Afghanistan through shocking media images of death and devastation, Asne Seierstad was living the mundane actuality, behind the headlines, and beneath the burka. As it was for all Afghan women since the Taliban came to power seven years ago, the veil was the cloak of invisibility under which the author experienced the oppressive suffocation of a patriarchal regime. It enabled her to 'step back from the page' and become subsumed in the reality, in the lives of Sultan Khan and the family he rules.

Although the 'middle-class' Khans could not be considered representative of the average Afghan brood (they are 'privileged' in that they don't go hungry or lack the basic essentials), their familial structure nonetheless provides a vivid portrait of the rigid patriarchal system which still prevails in Afghanistan, where 'tradition is all--the men decide'. The politically liberal Sultan rules his family as a dictatorship. His sons are denied schooling and must work twelve-hour days in their father's bookshops. Sultan's business is his mark of honour, and in a society which values honour above all else, he will go to any lengths to protect it, however brutal. This is demonstrated ferociously upon a poverty-stricken carpenter who steals postcards from the bookshop in order to feed his starving family, and is persecuted relentlessly by Sultan.

Women in Afghanistan remain hidden, anonymous, identifiable only as 'burkas', their value determined by their pre-marital purity; and then by their ability to bear sons. This would seem to be the fate of all of Sultan Khan's female relatives including Bibi Gul, his mother, given away at eleven to a man in his thirties; Sharifa, his 'pensioned-off' wife; Sonya, his sixteen-year-old second wife; Feroza, his pretty and hard-working older sister who was sold at fifteen to a rich man in his forties in order to fund Sultan's own education and finally his younger sisters, including Leila, the Cinderella slave who must wait on the Khan family single-handedly.

Leila, who is contemptuously tyrannised by her younger male relatives and pursued by suitors who would offer her the same life of drudgery under a different roof, dreams of 'a way out', a career as a teacher, or a husband who would whisk her off abroad (with no extended family in tow). But both these dreams are thwarted by a 'system ... rooted in centuries-old tradition'. A system which 'paralyses' women who still have the shadow of fundamentalist rule in their hearts. Their rebellions remain personal and their comforts small; painted toenails beneath a billowing burka and rancid cream toffees imported from Pakistan.

For the women of Afghanistan, for the poor and the needy, for 'the family', little has changed. Despite political restructuring and some economic development, the country remains ominously divided; just as the Khans eventually become divided, fractured by the constrictive rule of Sultan Khan. But Asne Seierstad's story ends not without hope. A birth is imminent. Sonya prays to Allah for a boy; a girl would of course be a disaster. Tradition hangs heavy and one hopes it will not suffocate Afghanistan's future as it has been used to stifle its recent past.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
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