A Bed of Red Flowers, Nelofer Pazira

I just finished reading one of my Christmas presents (my mother always sends me a huge pile of used books for every holiday) -- A Bed of Red Flowers, a memoir about Afghanistan by Nelofer Pazira. Pazira grew up largely in Kabul, and her family escaped first to Pakistan, then as refugees to Canada toward the end of the Soviet occupation of her home country.

The book started out slowly enough (despite the tale of the child Pazira visiting her father in prison) that I had serious doubts about whether it was going to be any good or not. Too many factual paragraphs about who was in charge and how they came to be there, too little narrative that kept my imagination with her. But I kept reading because I thought it would at least be educational, and the book, rather than keeping up a tedious tone, suddenly opened out into a real story -- a childhood of love, fear, anger, repression, countrywide violence and war, and a simmering resentment against Afghanistan's occupiers, Soviet soldiers.

Pazira grew up hating the Soviet Union and anything to do with Russia. She watched Soviet tanks rumble through her streets and Soviet planes fly overhead, and the sight of them nurtured loathing, anger, and patriotism in her heart. From before she was ten years old, she had learned to love the mujahidin, the brave men who were fighting for her country's freedom from the hated occupiers. When she got older, she joined an underground resistance movement that supported the holy soldiers, fighting for liberation.

What's important about the book is not just the historical detail of the proxy war fought between the United States and the Soviet Union on the land of this tiny, poor country, but also the striking picture of modern Afghani life before the Taliban came to power. We in the West are used to knowing only what we see on television. So after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan, we were shown pictures of women in burkas and told they had no access to education or health care. What we weren't told is that, only ten years ago, before the U.S.-backed mujahidin came to power, women dressed 'normally' (including mini-skirts and make-up), and went to school just like the boys did. Pazira grew up in a modern Afghan culture that knew little of these ultra-repressive quasi-religious practices.

But she did grow up knowing the fear of attack and the rage of an occupied land. A point came when it was almost certain that Pazira's father and some other relatives would be arrested for suspicious activity, or perhaps suspicious thought. Her father, who had many times said he would never, ever abandon his country, finally, in weariness, agreed to her mother's begging that they leave. So they did, traveling with a smuggler to a refugee camp in Pakistan.

And it was here that Pazira's illusions about her heroes the mujahidin were crushed. Her very first day in refugee lodging, she peeked out a garden gate and was shot at -- not to injure, but to warn. "Never, ever go outside," said her frightened hostess. "If they see you without your hair covered, or without a man, they'll shoot at you." Pazira was enraged. In Kabul, she had gone to school, studied -- rebelled against memorizing Marx and learning Russian, sure, but her education was never limited because she was a woman -- and she had dressed as she pleased. Most important, she had believed in the holy war, the mujahidin, the people who, like her, loved her land and fought for it. And she found, in the end, that not only were they narrow, cruel people, but that they considered her a second-class citizen, hardly a person at all.

When she was growing up, says Pazira, "I was fascinated by the word 'mujahidin.' Because they were fighting the Russians, I supported them all, unconditionally. Now it appears that, like so many of my friends and classmates, I was staring at a looking glass. The mujahidin I believed in are no longer a reality. I'm beginning to see a different face of jihad."
Pazira learned about bickering warlords, about the U.S. backing and arming of some of the worst, most inhumane men fighting the Soviets. It was these people who later took over her country. After fleeing to Canada, she received infrequent letters from a friend still in Kabul. Even before the Taliban came to power, women were forced out of schools and hospitals, under severe head coverings, and into their homes. The warlords fought among one another and, just like the Soviets, killed the innocent people in between.

This is an important book, not for its literary quality, but for the delicacy with which it shows the force of two competing outside powers pulling a country to pieces. The Soviets tugged at one end of the rope, and the American-backed mujahidin at the other. Between them, they pulled a knot so tight that they left a country full of innocent people gasping for space to think, to breathe, to live. As the Soviets pushed themselves into Afghanistan, the other side took further refuge in more extreme religion, to mark themselves as truly holy warriors, and it they who the Americans supported almost unconditionally. In 2001, they pointed to the Taliban as evil enemies, but neglected to mention that it was the American government that armed these people, put them in power, and then turned a blind eye to their extreme religious oppression and moral corruption.

There are no easy answers in this book, except perhaps one. A friend of Pazira's, an older man, points out that, while historians try to make war a story of strategy, of battles won and battles lost, those facts are simply the window dressing, something to make sense of war. What war actually is, is destruction, despair, death, and the anger of those caught between -- a story of lives lost and destroyed, of a land ripped apart.