BLOOD AND GIFTS - Lincoln Center Theater Review by Lincoln Center Theater

Fall 2011 Issue No. 56

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Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Fall 2011, Issue Number 56 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor Lincoln Center Theater André Bishop Bernard Gersten Artistic Director Executive Producer The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary

Theater. While researching the play, he encountered brilliant journalists interested in the CIA and in the Soviet invasion and American intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s, among them Lawrence Wright and Steve Coll. After consulting their excellent books, my colleagues and I began to wonder about other voices. Where were the Russian versions of the great novels and journalism that recent wars have produced ingly unknowable Afghanistan—and I discovered many friends who led me inside this hidden world. This edition features a range of pieces that arc across time and borders. We have Rosita Forbes’s gor-

BLOOD AND GIFTS W

geous travelogue from Afghanistan in the 1930s, just as this rugged country (so poor and so mountainous that even today there are no railroads) was opening to the West. Tamim Ansary brings to vivid life the

Inside Our Walls by Tamim Ansary

John B. Beinecke Linda LeRoy Janklow Chairmen Emeriti

Come, Whoever You Are by Rumi

John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Anna E. Crouse, Ellen Katz, Ray Larsen, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

a fascinating play, and he tells us how he came to write Blood and Gifts and how it came to Lincoln Center

in the West? What was life like in Afghanistan for Afghans? So we began circling the mysterious, seem-

John B. Beinecke Jane Lisman Katz Dorothy Berwin Kewsong Lee André Bishop Memrie M. Lewis Debra Black Robert E. Linton Allison M. Blinken Ninah Lynne Mrs. Leonard Block Phyllis Mailman James-Keith Brown Ellen R. Marram H. Rodgin Cohen John Morning Jonathan Z. Cohen Elyse Newhouse Ida Cole Elihu Rose Donald G. Drapkin Stephanie Shuman Curtland E. Fields Howard Sloan Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. David F. Solomon Bernard Gersten Ira J. Statfeld Marlene Hess Tracey Travis Linda LeRoy Janklow Robert G. Wilmers William D. Zabel

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

Each issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review leads us on a different path. J. T. Rogers has given us

beautiful and private world of family life in 1950s Kabul. An excerpt from Larry Heinemann’s introduction to Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievich, about the Russian soldiers who fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s, compares the Soviet war in Afghanistan with the Vietnam

Then and Now: An Interview with Two Afghan Women

War. John Rockwell, a former editor and arts critic for The New York Times, ponders the export of American culture and its effect on the First and the Third Worlds. The reporter and political adviser Sarah Chayes

Talk About Pop Muzik by John Rockwell

takes us to Kandahar in the midst of the current war and shares the story of a friend who has been caught

in the force of history, between the Taliban and the U.S. soldiers. I interviewed two remarkable Afghan pediatricians, women of keen insight and empathy, who discuss their childhoods and the tumultuous decades that followed. During the interview one of the pediatricians said that, for her, the thirteenth-

The World in a Play: An Interview with J. T. Rogers

century Persian poet and mystic Rumi is Afghanistan, so we’ve included one of his poignant verses in these pages.

Caught in the Crossfire by Sarah Chayes

As we went to press, our friends the doctors, though practicing safely here today in the West, asked us not to print their real names, which drew my attention to the fact that Sarah Chayes’s friend appears in our pages unnamed. All the Western voices in these pages are identified, and all our friends from

Afghanistan are veiled. This is a travesty—one I’ve never faced in twenty years of editing the Review. Must we be content to comfort ourselves with the vision of Rumi, the soul of Afghanistan, who counsels patience and the spiritual quest for peace? —Anne Cattaneo, Co-Executive Editor

The Fallout by Larry Heinemann

Forbidden Road by Rosita Forbes

The Rosenthal Family Foundation is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor. Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review. TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—www.lctreview.org. © 2011 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

Front cover © Tamar Cohen. Back cover photograph © Chris Steel-Perkins/Magnum Photos.

THE PL AYLIS T The music references in Blood and Gifts encapsulate the particular way that Western pop music resonates with young people around the world, regardless of nationality, religion, or political persuasion. In Blood and Gifts, Abdullah says, “My son love this music. This music hurt my heart. [He shrugs.] But this what children for.”

Here is the music in the play: Duran Duran, “Hungry Like the Wolf” The Eagles, “Hotel California” Olivia Newton-John, “Let’s Get Physical” Rod Stewart, “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Tina Turner, “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”

BLOOD AND GIFTS W

Inside Our Walls by Tamim Ansary

John B. Beinecke Linda LeRoy Janklow Chairmen Emeriti

Come, Whoever You Are by Rumi

John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Anna E. Crouse, Ellen Katz, Ray Larsen, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

a fascinating play, and he tells us how he came to write Blood and Gifts and how it came to Lincoln Center

in the West? What was life like in Afghanistan for Afghans? So we began circling the mysterious, seem-

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

Each issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review leads us on a different path. J. T. Rogers has given us

Then and Now: An Interview with Two Afghan Women

Talk About Pop Muzik by John Rockwell

takes us to Kandahar in the midst of the current war and shares the story of a friend who has been caught

The World in a Play: An Interview with J. T. Rogers

century Persian poet and mystic Rumi is Afghanistan, so we’ve included one of his poignant verses in these pages.

Caught in the Crossfire by Sarah Chayes

The Fallout by Larry Heinemann

Forbidden Road by Rosita Forbes

Front cover © Tamar Cohen. Back cover photograph © Chris Steel-Perkins/Magnum Photos.

WINSIDE OUR

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by Tamim Ansary

In 1948, when I was born, most of Afghanistan might as well have been living in Neolithic times. It was a world of walled villages, each one inhabited by a few large families, themselves linked in countless ways through intermarriages stretching into the dim historical memories of the eldest elders. These villages had no cars, no carts even, no wheeled vehicles at all; no stores, no shops, no electricity, no postal service, and no media except rumors, storytelling, and the word of travelers passing through. Virtually all the men were farmers. Virtually all the women ran the households and raised the children. Virtually all boys grew up to be like their fathers and all girls like their mothers. The broad patterns of life never changed, never had as far as any living generation could remember, and presumably never would. People lived pretty much as they had eight thousand years ago. That was the countryside. The big cities, such as Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif, were living in the fifteenth century or so. And the biggest city, Kabul, where my family lived, had made it to the twentieth century, but just barely. Cars were few, roads were unpaved, and public transportation consisted mostly of gadis—horse-drawn two-wheeled carriages. Electricity was scarce, too. Most of us used kerosene lanterns at night. There was no running water. We all had wells. There was no garbage service. We didn’t produce any garbage. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in the city, but the houses had no numbers and the streets had no names. If you didn’t know where you were going, you probably had no business going there. A postal service existed, but it didn’t deliver to private homes unless the mailman felt like it, and he felt like it only if he knew you or had heard of you. Yet even with hundreds of thousands of people in the city, the postman very possibly had heard of you. Oh, not you in particular; you were just a leaf, a bud. He’d know the branch, the trunk, the tree itself: your people. Everybody in the city lived in a compound, a yard surrounded by walls that divided the world into a public and a private realm. That’s the main fact I want to get across about the lost world I grew up in: It was not divided into a men’s world and a women’s world; the division was between the public and the private. Visitors never really knew us, because they never saw the hidden world inside our compounds. Those who came from the West didn’t even know our private universe existed, or that life inside it was warm and sweet. And in a way, we Afghans didn’t know we had this realm either, because we didn’t know it was possible not to have it. In the compounds, people spent all their time with the group. As far as I can tell, none of my Afghan relatives was ever alone or ever wanted to be. And that’s so different from my life today, here in the West. Because I write for a living, I spend most of my waking hours alone in my basement office. Oh, I jog, do errands, see people I know—but mostly, it’s just a man and his thoughts in a blur of urban landscape. If I’m too much with other people, I need to balance it with some downtime. Most of the people I know are like this. We need solitude, because when we’re alone, we’re free from obligations, we don’t need to put on a show, and we can hear our own thoughts. My Afghan relatives achieved this same state by being with one another. Being at home with the group gave them the satisfactions we associate with solitude—ease, comfort, and the freedom to let down one’s guard. The reason for this is hard to convey, but I’m going to try. Namely, our group self was just as real as our individual selves, perhaps more so. I don’t know what term properly applies to this type of group. Family doesn’t cover it. Even extended family feels too small. Tribe, however, is too big. I’m inclined to hijack the term clan from anthropology, although even that is not quite right, because the type of group I’m talking about was not a formal entity, had no organization, no name, no recognized Photograph © Steve McCurry, Baghdad, Iraq, 1984.

chief, and no exact boundaries. It was more like a loose network of extended families tied together by a mutual sense of having descended from a great someone in the past—or a string of great someones. Our group, for example, looked back to Sa’aduddin, a landowner who lived in the nineteenth century and wrote mystical poetry under the pen name Shuri Ishq—“Turmoil of Love.” He was my great-great-grandfather. Of course, Americans too might have a sense of identity based on a famous ancestor, but the Afghan experience differs from the American one, because Afghans prefer to marry their relatives. In America, hardly anyone actually seeks to date their kin, but in Afghanistan, the ideal marriage is between first cousins. Therefore, in Afghanistan, the lines of descent from an important man tend to keep curling back toward the center, endlessly weaving a coherent entity through intermarriage. And that’s the entity I’ll call a “clan” from now on, because “network of extended families descended from a great someone” is too cumbersome.

WINSIDE OUR

WALLS W

by Tamim Ansary

We tended to feel more at home with others of our own large group than we did with strangers, and the Afghan tradition of living in compounds deepened this tendency. Once we stepped into one of our compounds in those days, each of us had a different name from the one we used outside. These names were called luqubs and were all constructed of the same few words—flower, lion, sugar, lord, lady, sweet, and so on, combined with uncle, aunt, papa, mama, and the like. My mother’s name, for example, was Khanim Gul, meaning “Lady Flower.” In a compound, the old, young, and middle-aged—men, women, girls, and boys—all shared the same space. Living quarters weren’t divided into your space and his space and my space. People didn’t have places to keep their possessions— few, in fact, had much in the way of possessions: It wasn’t a thing-centered world. By day, thin mattresses arranged along the perimeters of the rooms served as furniture. At night, blankets were pulled out of closets and those same mattresses were rearranged in the center of the floor as beds. At mealtime, any room could become the dining room. A tablecloth would be spread on the floor. Everyone would wash their hands thoroughly and eat with them from a common platter, packed together so tightly around the food on the tablecloth that their oneness was a physical experience, a circle of people who were all touching. Instead of television, we had genealogy. The elders, the white-headed ones, spent endless hours with one another or with us youngsters, tracing connections. So-and-so married so-and-so, and then their progeny got sorted into these other branches through marriage, so actually your cousin Saliq is your second cousin through Sweet Daddy—and so on. It might not sound exciting, but remember that genealogy was the warp and family stories the woof of the fabric that made us one entity. We didn’t spend much time pondering Islam. We didn’t have to. Islam permeated the life of the compound like the custard that binds a casserole together, hardly separable from ordinary daily life. Five times a day, some of us did our ablutions and moved into the prayer ritual, one by one, at our own pace. Prayer divided a day into five parts and gave a sort of rhythm to the household, like breathing in, holding for quiet, and then breathing out, releasing back into noise and activity. There was no Ministry of Vice and Virtue. No one was under the gun to pray; it was not an obligation, just a custom and a way of life. At prayer call, those who didn’t pray lowered their speaking voices out of respect for those who did, and we youngsters learned not to be doing our naughtiness near a person who was praying, so that we wouldn’t embarrass them by seeing the undignified sight they presented when they got on their hands and knees and touched their forehead to the floor. In winter, the intervals were shorter; in summer, longer. Some men went to the mosque on Fridays, but that wasn’t

THEN AND NOW :

the locus of Islam in old Afghanistan: It was everywhere. The rhythm of prayer suffused the city, the whole society, all the villages, all the world, as far as we were aware. With so many people praying at once, at home, in the courtyards, in public buildings, five times daily, prayer became the respiration of a whole society calming down at intervals in a rhythm set not

AN INTERVIEW WITH TWO AFGHAN WOMEN

by any clock but by the light of nature.... As a little boy, I never felt hemmed in by our compound walls. To me, the compound felt like a universe. At age five, I was still discovering places in it I had never seen. Besides, ours was just one of several compounds in our family network. Ansarys

adults, but for the youngsters, the boundaries were somewhat fluid. If you went to another of the compounds for the day, you did not necessarily go home with your parents that night; you might stay on. It didn’t really matter so much, here or there: It was like an American’s choosing between the dining room and the family room in his own home. In short, the many compounds of a clan like ours formed a sort of secret urban village. Women lived freely within the compounds, but they wore veils and traveled with male escorts to get from one compound to another. And each of these secret villages was connected to an actual village outside the city, in the nearby countryside, a village that felt like the soul of the extended family network. Going back to the ancestral village meant going home to a warmth and belonging that today, in my basement office in San Francisco, I can only imagine. In this Afghanistan, this lost world, no one left the home village, or wanted to, and the concept of “dysfunctional family” had no meaning. Oh, quarrels and disagreements abounded, and they were never really buried; they were hashed and rehashed till they had been thoroughly mulched into the clan soil. Tamim Ansary, who has written numerous books for children, is a columnist for Encarta and author of West of Kabul, East of New York. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two children.

Photograph © Tamar Cohen, 2011.

but my grandfather had four wives, so there were various half brothers kicking around. Each compound had its core of

had other compounds in the city, each one anchored by a different patriarch. Not only was my father one of five brothers

Co-executive Editor Anne Cattaneo spoke with two Afghan pediatricians, now practicing in the West, who asked us not to use their real names. We spoke with Awesta, the sister-in-law of Anne’s close friend, who moved from Kabul to the West in the mid-1980s, and Arya, who emigrated just after 9/11 and is a colleague and family friend of Awesta’s. The interview was conducted in English and Farsi, with Awesta translating some of Arya’s longer statements. Editor: When you were a child, was there a Russian presence in Afghanistan? Awesta: Yes. Beginning in the 1950s there were Russian teachers and Russian projects throughout Afghanistan. Awesta and Arya: Arya says that they built schools, they built the highways. The Russians had invested a lot in building and modernizing Afghanistan. People were op-

timistic at the beginning. We weren’t, like, the Russians are coming to occupy us; the Russians were helping us. Ed: How did you feel about the Russians? Aw: Well, for me it was a little bit different, since my family was in politics. Both my dad and his older brother worked in the government of President Daoud Khan. But it was generally known that Afghanistan had asked America for help modernizing and was told no. So Daoud went to the Russians and, of course, they agreed. At first, it was an educational relationship. There were thousands of scholarships every year, from medical to military to music—you name it. Russia was the only friend who was willing to help us. Ed: And was there an international community besides the Russians? Aw: There was a small international commu-

nity in Afghanistan, and they were not as visible as the Russians. But my father and uncle were educated in the United States in the 1950s and I have an aunt who is American, so we had some American friends. When I was a teenager, in 1975 and 1976, before the Russians came, I went to the USIS [United States Information Service] center to study English. But of all the international people, no one looked as sympathetically toward Afghans as the Russians did. No one was as helpful as the Russians. And, besides, only people with money or connections, like my family, could afford to go to the West. The majority of people in Afghanistan didn’t have either, so if they had the opportunity to be educated in Russia then why not? Ed: While you were growing up, did your family live in a compound?

THEN AND NOW :

AN INTERVIEW WITH TWO AFGHAN WOMEN

Photograph © Tamar Cohen, 2011.

but my grandfather had four wives, so there were various half brothers kicking around. Each compound had its core of

had other compounds in the city, each one anchored by a different patriarch. Not only was my father one of five brothers

to modernize Afghanistan. And he actually did; we had the greatest military that we have ever had. Ed: When did you begin to see that things were going wrong? Aw: I was fourteen years old, but I remember some things about that time vividly. Toward the end of President Daoud’s period in office, in 1978, there was a lot of chaos in Afghanistan and especially in Kabul. There were the kidnappings and killings of prominent people. These atrocities were believed to be carried out by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and their fundamentalist puppets, just like it is done today by the Pakistani-supported Taliban. In March of 1978, President Daoud seemed to have had enough of the lefties, so he put some important members of the People’s Democratic Party [PDP] in jail. One or two weeks after the imprisonment of those people the anti-Daoud coup of April 27, 1978 happened with the help of Russian-educated generals in the army. Ed: Were you afraid, or was the trouble hidden? Aw: Well, it wasn’t so hidden. We were very afraid; we had a feeling that something was going to happen and we were not sure if it was good or not. No one at that time would have guessed that the Russian Red Army would invade us within two years. Aw & Ar: Arya says it wasn’t difficult for those of us living in Kabul when the Russian soldiers

family as well, she says her relatives started migrating, they started going into exile. In my family, when the Russians came they put my uncle, who was Daoud’s cabinet minister, in jail, and his wife, who was American, couldn’t even go to the stores; she couldn’t go anywhere. So my father helped her and two of her children get out of Afghanistan. Ed: At that time, did you have any awareness of American involvement? Aw: Most people didn’t, but we listened to BBC even though we were fearful that someone would report us and we’d be thrown in jail. Ed: In the early eighties, did you see an increase in support for the various rebel groups? Aw: When I was in high school in Afghanistan, thousands of high school and university students in Kabul protested against the Russian occupation. Still, I don’t know if it was Russians or the Afghan police firing on

us. A few were killed and many were imprisoned, and some are missing to this day— they were never listed as executed and they were not freed. There were rumors that they were taken to Siberia. The killings were not reported because the media was controlled by the secret police of Afghanistan, just like the Russian KGB. But people have shared their stories and pictures, so the reaction to the demonstrations is well known. We hated the Russians’ guts even more after that. When I was in Kabul at university, I absolutely adored this guy Ahmad Shah Massoud; he was known as “the Lion.” He was my symbol of resistance against Russia. He was a student turned military leader who played a key role in driving out the Red Army. But when I went to Pakistan in April of 1985, it took no time for the two faces of the mujahideen to become apparent to me. At that point, for me, there was no joy in the fight against the Russians and definitely no trust

We were very afraid; we had a feeling that something was going to happen and we were not sure if it was good or not. No one at that time would have guessed that the Russian Red Army would invade us within two years.

Photographs © Tamar Cohen, 2011.

Aw: Mine did. My two paternal uncles, my dad, my aunt and grandmother all had their houses next to each other in a large complex and we were together all day, only going to our houses to sleep at night. But Arya’s family was pretty modern compared to us. She lived with her nuclear family and her uncles lived near but not next door; they didn’t see each other every day. Ed: What was your schooling like? Did you go to school with boys? Aw: Well, I went to a public elementary school with boys until sixth grade, when we were separated. Then, in college and university, girls and boys were together again. It was the same for Arya. Ed: What did you study? Did you have a religious education? Aw: No, no, no. It was just like you would have here. Religion, Islam, was a mandatory part of it, but it was only one subject. We studied all subjects—algebra, trigonometry, geography, history... Ar: Physics, biology... Aw: We had Dari, which wasn’t just the study of the language but the history of Persian literature. We also had a course on how to read and recite the Koran in Arabic. Ed: When did Russian involvement evolve from aid into something more overtly political? Aw: When President Daoud formed the Republic of Afghanistan in 1973 he had a lot of lefties in his government, people who were Russian-educated. He did not want to sell Afghanistan, he was a very proud man, but he wanted to use the help of Russians

came to Afghanistan, but for the people living in the provinces life became unbearable, and that’s when the problems started. Ed: Did you think of it as an actual invasion? Aw: Yes, we did! There was no mistake about it. I remember people in my family crying and mourning. The feeling of helplessness was incredible. The sight of the Russian troops walking around with their ammunitions in my Kabul remains my worst nightmare. In December of 1979, we actually saw the Russians taking over the country, but the revolution—as the government called it—had already started a year and a half before that. Aw & Ar: Arya made a very good point. After the revolution—it was a coup, but we call it the revolution—in April of ‘78, the government went really radical. They killed Daoud and more than thirty people in his family and declared a new name for the country, the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The leader of the PDP, Noor Mohammad Taraki, became the new president and took people who owned lots of land; took the land and gave it to the poor people, or the people who were working for those landowners. He created mandatory literacy classes in the villages; men were forced to take their wives to be educated and to learn to read and write. And they were very against Islam. If they saw somebody praying, they would put them in jail. They also killed a lot of people. Ed: For praying? Aw: Yes, for performing their Islamic religious duties in public. I remember somebody asked what crime a man committed, and the answer was that they had seen him praying. Ed: After the Russian troops arrived, was your day-to-day life the same? Aw: If you mean going to school without restrictions, then, yes, it was normal. Aw & Ar: Arya says, which is so true, life in Kabul was normal. The only things we didn’t do were go to the cinema or go on vacation to Paghman, a mountain resort town not far from Kabul, because we were afraid that fighting might break out. But Arya said that in Herat it did affect people a lot. She says even her cousins were taken out of school. Because they were afraid of what was happening, many people took their daughters out of school, and the daughters got married and didn’t continue their education. Aw & Ar: Arya is saying, which is true in my

in any of the leaders of the mujahideen. Ed: Tell us a little bit about the relationship of the fundamentalists to the freedom fighters? Aw: King Zahir Shah’s reign in 1964 put Afghanistan on the road to democracy. Women had the kind of rights and freedom that they do not have today. Political parties were free to campaign peacefully, including Hezb-i-Islami, the Islamic Party, which Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was the leader of. They were funded by the Pakistani ISI. The bulk of the aid the Saudis and the Americans gave to the Pakistani ISI to give to the Afghan “freedom fighters” was given to Hekmatyar. No one thought about what would happen to the women of Afghanistan if Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—he threw acid on the legs and faces of women in Kabul University in the 1960s— or any of those mujahideen fighters came to power after the Russians left. The goal was to win the Cold War and defeat the Russians. In my opinion, the cruel and inhumane oppression of the women of Afghanistan after the Russians left is the direct result of the irresponsibility of the U.S. and the West in supporting Islamic fanaticism. When I came to the States in early 1987, my cousin, who had never been to Afghanistan during the war, kept saying, “Ooh, the mujahideen, the freedom fighters,” which is what they were according to the American media. My cousin asked if I was trying to defend the Russians. I told him, “No, but you are in a dream about the mujahideen. They are not as they are portrayed in the media.” Nowadays people know that, but back then they laughed at me. Ed: Tell me about your time at university and demonstrating. Aw & Ar: Arya says it was a dictatorship regime. We did not demonstrate lightly. It was not easy. I was in eleventh grade and was taken a couple of times—not to jail but given an ultimatum by the authorities, the secret police. My father was really mad at me. Ed: Were you seeing, at that point, any kind of material deprivation? Aw & Ar: No, no. The goods were coming from Russia, and even the poorest Afghans had them. Before the Russians came only people in high government positions or rich people had cars, TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, and so on. But the Russians made things available to the common people, especially the ones who cooperated with them

Photographs © Tamar Cohen, 2011.

At one time, Afghanistan was the glory of the Islamic world.

of course. Arya says she and the people she knew weren’t as surprised, but they were really worried about the future. They knew it was going to be bad, the worst time yet. Ed: And what was Arya’s life like then? Aw: She says, “I was finished with university. I was practicing as a pediatrician in a Kabul hospital. And that’s when the situation got really bad. The rockets, the stingers that the United States gave to the mujahideen—they were hitting everywhere. People were getting killed in the capital, which had been safe until then. After the Russians left, things got out of control in Kabul.” Aw & Ar: She says people lost their normalcy in life and they were all really scared and worried. Ed: Did education continue during that time, particularly for women? Aw & Ar: Yes, she says. Arya says that after the Russians left the mujahideen in the city of Kabul started their secret work. They would go up to schoolgirls and put acid on their faces to discourage them from going to school. Ed: Were there any women on the other side? Aw: The mujahideen doesn’t have any women; it’s all men. Ed: Where are their women? Aw: The women were in the house, or maybe abroad. Aw & Ar: Arya says all you would see is a mass of men. That’s just the way it is today with the Taliban, actually. The mujahideen were the precursors. They are very male-oriented and very anti-women. Ed: I can’t imagine what it would be like to have my country and culture taken over by women-hating men. Aw: When I came to America, people were asking me, Did you have a culture shock coming to America? I would laugh at them. I said, do you know when I had a culture shock? When I left Afghanistan and went to Pakistan. That was my culture shock. I swear, I’m not joking. Ed: What was so shocking? Aw: Well, I was only there for one and a half years, but I was twenty-one and I had to cover my head, which I never did in Kabul, where we walked side by side with men. That was a huge change for me. I was in Peshawar, Pakistan, for one day in early 1985, my head and body fully covered, walking in the streets full of men, and I felt terrorized by the look some men gave me. To feel scared and want to hide just because I was

a woman is the most horrifying and infuriating experience of my life to this day! Ed: And that’s the way it remains now in Kabul? Aw: Yes. Ed: Arya, when did you leave? Aw & Ar: Arya says she left Afghanistan on the 7th of September 2001, and went to Pakistan. She says that life under the Taliban became unbearable in 2001, especially when her husband lost his job and there was no school for her oldest daughter, who was turning seven. She was still working as a pediatrician, but even for her life was unbearable, with many limitations and restrictions. She says, “I had no hope of any future, so I had to leave Afghanistan.” Ed: What was it like to be in Pakistan on September 11th? Aw & Ar: Arya says, “I saw it on TV while I was in Pakistan. I was in absolute shock and couldn’t believe something like that could happen in America. Most people had the same reaction—absolute shock. But they were also guessing that Al Qaeda and the Taliban had something to do with it. And people had a feeling that this would be the end of the Taliban.” Ed: Wow. And how long was Arya in Pakistan? Aw & Ar: From the 7th of September 2001 until November of 2010. Ed: Looking back, are there any public figures who you believe tried to do the right thing? Aw & Ar: Arya says that in her opinion the only person who had pure intentions for Afghanistan was President Daoud. Nobody else after him has done anything, or wanted to do anything, for Afghanistan. Ed: What do you think of President Obama’s decision to withdraw American forces? Aw & Ar: Arya says that she hopes President Obama will do what he said he would. We want the foreign troops to leave Afghanistan, but gradually. And we hope America won’t make the same mistake that the Russians did and totally forget about Afghanistan and leave us to the mujahideen. Ed: And your thoughts? Aw: To be honest with you, I’m not for the American occupation of Afghanistan, but I’m for the American presence in Afghanistan. Because I don’t like Iran, I don’t like Pakistan, and I don’t like China. I love India, and I want America to ward off Pakistan and Iran. I don’t want the American soldiers to kill Afghan

Photograph © Tamar Cohen, 2011.

were rewarded by some sort of good. That time, actually, was the best time for the women of Afghanistan—other than when the country was ruled by King Amanullah in the 1920s—because they experienced a freedom they never had in their lives before or after. When the PDP came to power, they raised the marriage age to eighteen and enforced the law; they also made the tradition of the dowry unlawful. Women were not objects anymore. This era, despite all the horrible things that happened, was the best for Afghan women in terms of their rights. Aw & Ar: Arya said that around 1986, when the mujahideen were cutting off the supply of food to Kabul, people did go through some hardship of standing in lines for gasoline or to buy bread. Ed: You said that this was a very good time for Afghan women. Aw: For some educated women of Afghanistan our fathers were standing behind us, making us what we are today. It wasn’t the norm. But during the Russian occupation parents could not deny their children an education, no matter how religious they were, because it was against the law. There was a woman who was working for my family at the time; she was a little older than me and she had never been to school. Under the Russians she had the opportunity to go to adult literacy classes and improve her circumstances. This was true for thousands of other women in Kabul. Women worked in the factories; they were in the army. Ed: When did people begin leaving the country? Aw: It started before the Russian invasion, when the Communist regime started radically changing our society. We didn’t have the kind of Islam that Iran or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia has. We were Muslims, but we weren’t fundamentalists. We hated any extremism. But when the lefties began taking these radical actions people left the country. It was unfathomable that the Russians would leave a place that they occupied. For me, it was unthinkable that I would ever, ever go back to Afghanistan. Ed: So were you surprised when events turned out the other way? Aw: I was very surprised. Ed: And Arya was there when that change happened? Aw & Ar: Arya says something different,

civilians. But in the early 1990s Afghans were killing Afghans and the streets of Kabul were divided, and I don’t want that to be repeated. Actually, it was because of the NATO peacekeeping troops that we Afghans didn’t kill each other. So, given all that has happened, I want the Americans to at least have a hold in there, but just as a peacekeeper. Ed: And do you think Afghans will ever have peace and perhaps democracy? Aw: One really good thing that happened in Afghanistan is that the young generation has a sense of identity and nationalism. The division between all these ethnicities—Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara, Turkman, Aimaq, Pashai, Nooristani, and some other small groups—was promoted by the mujahideen and by Pakistan and Iran. Now I think people, especially the younger, educated generation, think: Who cares? Afghanistan is a small country to begin with, who cares if you’re Pashtun or Tajik or Uzbek. Even in Hamid Karzai’s government and the opposition government, you see Pashtun and Hazara, Tajik and Uzbek all together, which gives me some hope that people have finally come to their senses. I’m optimistic, in that sense. Aw & Ar: Arya says she doesn’t think people will forget about their ethnic or linguistic ties, because Afghanistan is a very poor country and when you’re poor whoever is spending money is going to run the show. Arya says, and I agree with her completely, that the people of Afghanistan don’t think Americans have gone there to help them. They have gone there because of Afghanistan’s position and location. They’re not stupid, those people. They may be poor, they may have little education, but they can see the difference. Arya says that the people she knows in Afghanistan don’t believe that peace will be brought to their country in the near future, nor do they think that America even wants there to be peace in Afghanistan. Ed: These days, as we saw in Egypt, it is very hard to stop the flow of information, given the power and ubiquity of the Internet. Does the Internet figure in what’s happening in Afghanistan? Aw: Definitely, yes. One of Karzai’s advisers was scared enough of the power of the Internet that he told people to never listen to the Internet or Facebook because they’re destroying everything. Aw & Ar: Arya says you cannot compare Afghanistan with Egypt because the literacy

W When I came to America, people were asking me, Did you have a culture shock coming to America? I would laugh at them. I said, do you know when I had culture shock? When I left Afghanistan and went to Pakistan. That was my culture shock. I swear I’m not joking. rate in Egypt is very high and their use of the Internet is more widespread; here it’s only in the major cities, and used by a small group of people. So it does have an effect, but it’s not going to be as dramatic as what we saw in Egypt. But there’s hope for the future. Ed: What kind of future do you see for the women and girls of Afghanistan? Aw: Oh gosh. Okay, I will let Arya answer this first, then I will tell you my thoughts. Aw & Ar: Arya says something that I totally agree with: If things continue as they are, the future will be really, really dark for the women of Afghanistan. She wants to make sure that people all over Afghanistan don’t prevent their daughters from going to school and from participating in social or public life. Ed: And you? Aw: To be honest with you, if I could prevent myself from crying, I would...to see where the women of Afghanistan are now. I can’t tell you how bad I feel about it. Ed: If you could choose a piece of literature that would convey to people in America the essence of Afghanistan, what would it be? Aw: When I was growing up in Afghanistan, literature and Persian poetry were a big

part of one’s life, and Rumi was the biggest influence in my life. Not from the mysticism point of view, just for the love of human beings, the love and the desire to live, and the desire to be and not to harm anybody. This is what I think of my country. I’m not in a dream, I’m talking about my life experiences, people I grew up around—there was love, forgiveness, and a lack of violence. Rumi, to me, is Afghanistan. Aw & Ar: Arya is saying that if you want to know about Afghanistan you shouldn’t look at the Taliban or at the news coming out of Afghanistan today. Afghanistan is much more than what you see there. You should go and read the history books and learn about the culture. Arya is telling me that UNESCO has nominated the province of Ghazni to be the cultural capital of Islamic civilization for the year 2013. And in 2024 Kabul is on the list. At one time, Afghanistan was the glory of the Islamic world and now the United Nations is doing these things so people will get to know the other side of Afghanistan, the forgotten face of Afghanistan.

At one time, Afghanistan was the glory of the Islamic world.

Photograph © Tamar Cohen, 2011.

WTALK ABOUT POP MUZIK W by John Rockwell

New York to recruit American singers (and, subsequently, to teach them to sing their lyrics auf Deutsch). I remember writing about the career of Helen Schneider, who had modest success as a soft-rock chanteuse at home in the 1970s but became a big star in German musicals, and deservedly so. The very notion of “American” pop culture needs a little clarification. The influential styles came in waves, first at home and then abroad, from Dixieland jazz earlier in the last century (the Nazis derided Negroes—they used a ruder word—but prized their jazz 78s in secret) to suave crooners to the electric outbursts of rock and disco and rap after 1955. The pop music that crops up in J. T. Rogers’s Blood and Gifts includes the likes of Rod Stewart and Olivia Newton-John. But both that Englishman and that Australian found their biggest success in the huge American market, and both trafficked in idioms derived from older American popular music, particularly the blues. The Beatles and especially the Rolling Stones would have been unthinkable without the blues and rhythm-and-blues. Similarly, Hollywood film studios may now be partly owned by non-Americans, and nonAmerican stars may appear in their films, from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Bruce Lee. But the films are still Hollywood films, and the French rightly love and envy and resent them. Cross-cultural influences were hardly begun by the United States or limited to American popularity abroad. Colonization played its role (West Africans in Paris, Indians and their subcontinental brethren in England). Military and commercial dominance has much to do

Drawings © Michael Pellew, Jr. LETC /LAND Gallery, Brooklyn, New York.

Get into an airport taxi in any Third World country and the driver is likely to be listening to two kinds of music: American pop or a hybrid of electrified, Americanized modernization of the country’s own traditional music. Either way, American popular culture is right out front or, as the Billboard pop-music magazine used to put it, bubbling under. American high culture hasn’t been exactly shabby since the last century, and after the CIA, as part of its Cold War initiative to blunt Soviet disparagement of materialistic America, underwrote exhibitions and concerts in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, the world began to take respectful notice of our more elevated arts, the avantgarde subset in particular. New York even surpassed Paris as the world’s visual-arts center, not only commercially but also creatively. But few would dispute that it is American popular culture that has been our primary contribution to the world’s artistic conversation. It’s not been just music in taxicabs, straight or mixed, or on the radio or in record stores or via downloads. American films dominate the planet: at one point a few years ago, when I was tracking such matters for The New York Times out of Paris and the French were as exercised as they are today about the American pop-culture monolith, eighty-eight of the top-grossing one hundred films in France came from Hollywood. American television series—especially bad soap operas available on the cheap—swamp TV stations and screens worldwide. Kids in Rio and Karachi wear New York Yankees caps and Kobe Bryant T-shirts. There is such a lively market for American musicals in Germany, sung in German, that there are entire studios and casting calls in

with American influence, as the French constantly complain. Clearly, American English is the de facto international language because of America’s superpower status, and has facilitated the spread of American pop culture (and the common practice of non-English-speaking stars like Abba and Björk singing their hits in English). Our daughter recently attended a topless—they were all very proud of their new breasts—transgender party in a small Thai town at which the music was a constant drumfire of American disco. The notion that American pop culture owes its impact to strongarm marketing and monopolistic suppression is widespread. American pop music, movies, and television recently constituted our secondbiggest exports after aircraft, and maybe in the era of Airbus they’re now No. 1. European high-art snobs once complained bitterly about the American “culture industry” and its imposition of what they dismissed as inherently meretricious. The Francophilic Virgil Thomson assured me (I was then the Times’s rock critic) that any music that made money had to be bad. Virgil was a great critic and a great operatic composer, but on that count he was wrong. Those of us who actually enjoy the best of American popular culture (it being conceded that there’s a lot of swill out there, too) take a rather more optimistic view. Pride, even. American pop culture has swept the world because it’s very, very good. Great art, one might say. One of the pleasures of following popular culture and imposing elitist standards upon it (elitist because any imposition of critical hierarchies is a form of elitism) is the occasional congruence between one’s own taste and overwhelming market success. When films like Star Wars or Titanic or musicians like the Beatles or Michael Jackson or even Lady Gaga sell in the millions and millions and also happen to be wonderful entertainers/artists, one’s faith in pop culture, and in democracy itself, is buoyed. The best American pop music and films epitomize our country without debts to anyone but our own native genius. They breathe the air of our diversity; they’re “mutts like me,” to quote our current president. If British and Australian pop singers owe so much to our

roots music, our popular culture can itself be traced back still further, to African indigenous music, to European Jewish filmmakers fleeing Hitler, to British music hall and vaudeville, to central European operettas, to Italian opera and street ballads. The Nazis sought Nirvana in racial purity; we owe our vitality to our proud mongrel miscegenation. Given the recent instability in the stock market and the loss of American jobs to outsourcing, the blessings of globalization have been called into question. Just as some think we should retreat behind protective trade barriers—like the French, who have imposed their cultural import quotas and provided government stimulus for native films and pop music—so some might question the continued impact of American popular culture on the world. But the idea of economic globalization or free trade, not just in material goods but also in cultural inspiration, cannot be stopped. Electronic communication and the Internet have uncaged the globalized culture beast. As long as American pop culture retains its own vitality, and doesn’t become too blandly corporatized, it will continue to be prized and purchased all over the world, and will continue to influence those hybrid popular forms that are growing so healthily in countries from India to Afghanistan to China to, yes, France. Our divisive politics and military interventions and our continued dominance of the international financial markets may not be universally popular, to put it mildly. But the best American music and films and television are still terrific, and they’re terrific because they draw from the very diversity that has made us (at our best) the envy of the world. John Rockwell was a longtime classical, rock, and dance critic for The New York Times, as well as an arts columnist, European cultural correspondent, and editor. He was also the founding director of the Lincoln Center Festival and has published four books.

WTALK ABOUT POP MUZIK W by John Rockwell

Drawings © Michael Pellew, Jr. LETC /LAND Gallery, Brooklyn, New York.

W THE WORLD IN A PLAY

AN INTERVIEW WITH J. T. ROGERS

This past summer, our editors spoke with Blood and Gifts playwright J. T. Rogers—whose plays include The Overwhelming and Madagascar— about theater, the CIA, and the particular challenges of writing a play about recent political events.

was about a professor in Stuyvesant Park, in New York City; a lawyer from Brooklyn, who runs a law firm in St. Louis; and a housewife in Fayetteville, North Carolina. They’ve all just gone through a searing experience that has to do with race. Ed: And what was your next play? JR: After that, I wrote two plays that I wasn’t really happy with. And then the first, next, really successful one was a play called Madagascar, which has been done all over the world but not yet in New York. Ed: Do you have a day job? JR: Not anymore. I did for fifteen years. Ed: What did you do? JR: I catered weddings. I dressed as a giant chicken. I worked at a mob restaurant. I drove the trolley car in Central Park. I copyedited

Photograph © Trent Clark/Magnum Photos.

Editor: How did you come upon your canvas? J. T. Rogers: That’s the mother ship question, isn’t it? I spent a lot of time as a young writer off in my room trying to write plays that emulated other playwrights. I was trying to be David Mamet before finally realizing I wasn’t David Mamet. Seeing a student production of Tony Kushner’s Perestroika at NYU in a black-box theater was life-altering, to use a much overused term. It was extraordinary to realize that it was okay to just let people talk. That having smart

characters dig into things was perfectly fine—in fact, quite thrilling. Ed: Did you grow up in New York? JR: I grew up the child of two very smart Berkeley grads. My father taught poli-sci, and as a young boy I lived overseas in Third World countries. Ed: Where? JR: Malaysia and Indonesia, in villages where nobody spoke English. The meat and potatoes of our family dinner talk was politics, and politics that made people argue and scream. (Laughter) During the Reagan presidency, my father would get so apoplectic at dinner I thought he was going to have a coronary. And, ultimately, I think you come back to what you were steeped in. Ed: What was your first play after your Perestroika revelation? JR: I wrote a play called White People that

for House & Garden. But for the last six years I’ve been living just as a playwright. Ed: When you’re not writing, what are you reading? What are your interests? JR: A lot of life now is being a parent. I have an eight-year-old son, and that is maddening and wonderful and consuming, and it does alter your perception, which is the most interesting part about it. Reading-wise, which for me is instrumental to the mesh that the plays come out of, it really depends on what I’m working on. Ed: How did you begin writing your play The Overwhelming, about Rwanda? JR: When the genocide happened, I was embarrassed. I thought myself very knowledgeable about current affairs and geography, but I didn’t even know where the hell Rwanda was, and I knew nothing of the context that the genocide was happening in. And the news coverage was terrible; it was so confusing. The main U.S. news agencies weren’t interested in knowing what happened. What interested them was playing up the horror, without giving any context. The “if it bleeds, it leads” paradigm. When I did read or hear an explanation it was, in essence: “Well, you know, these people do this every once in a while.” Separate from the racist overtones implicit in that, it made no sense. If there’s one thing you know as a playwright, it’s that people don’t just randomly do things. There’s always a reason. It’s buried. It’s hidden. But it’s there. As I learned more, I crossed over, without realizing it, from simply reading up on something to researching a play. Ed: What I’m amazed at, in both plays, is how you surreptitiously supply us with the information that we need. How do you do that? JR: It’s a twofold process—and when you’re doing it you’re pulling your hair out. The first step is to say, “Okay, you’re not writing a play about genocide. That’s impossible, like writing a play about the color blue.” So you’re asking what emotional event can be juxtaposed against these larger historical forces. Then I draw a metaphorical box and say, this is the specific timeline, these are the only locations the play can happen in, this is the maximum number of people. I want as many constraints as I can create. It’s Shostakovich’s maxim: form will set you free. The smaller I make the box, the tighter

I constrain myself, the more liberating it is, because within the given framework I can do anything I want. Ed: Where does the imagination come in? JR: As I’m researching, I’m concomitantly asking myself, What about a character like this? What would they need? So as I’m learning things, I’m also filling up the artistic well, as it were. Ed: What do you use for research? JR: I read probably twenty or thirty books, then I talk to people. Somebody who has been immensely helpful as I worked on Blood and Gifts is Lawrence Wright from The New Yorker, whom I met in a bar in Cairo. I was off doing research for another project and we had the same fixer, and she set us up for a drink. So Larry, who I just think is an extraordinary writer and fascinating guy, turned out to be a big theater lover. And when I wanted to meet Steve Coll, who wrote Ghost Wars, which is the book about the U.S. involvement in the Soviet-Afghan War, I called Larry and said, “Hey, would you e-mail him and say when I e-mail him would he respond?” (Laughter) So he did, and Steve was kind enough to meet me and provide a wealth of specific, colorful details. When I’m talking with someone like that, what I’m looking for is those strange, wonderful details. Ed: When does the narrative kick in? And how many of the questions are you asking in relation to the narrative rather than to history? JR: When I interview people, I try to wait until I have the narrative. When I sat down with Jack Devine, who was the No. 2 guy at the CIA who personally oversaw the Stinger missile program, I didn’t want to talk about the history of the CIA’s covert war. I wanted to hear his personal memories, his jokes, his gripes. He was fascinating. And it was pretty nerve-racking having him watch a reading of the play, I can tell you. (Laughter) Ed: Why? JR: Well, because, among other things, the play is about how the CIA fucked up. Not as a screed but in the sense of, there but for the grace of God go I. But he loved it. I think because it was not yet another reductive tale telling us the CIA is evil and America should beat itself up. And he, like a lot of these guys you meet, whatever your political differences...you know, these guys are smart. They’re thoughtful.

So when I meet someone like Steve or Jack, or the many Afghan and Pakistani journalists, political refugees, and politicians that I talked to, I’m interested in those personal, telling details. What would you eat if you went to a party at the embassy? What are the kinds of things you would do? What would piss you off? The tricky thing about this kind of play is telling a story and not lecturing. It’s got to have surprises. It’s got to be sexy. Ed: Blood and Gifts started as a one-act play? JR: Yes. The Tricycle Theatre, the preeminent political theater in the U.K., programmed a cycle of twelve short plays about Afghanistan. It was a huge undertaking. Ed: Had you worked in the U.K. before? JR: The National Theatre premiered The Overwhelming. It really was a Cinderella experience for me. It’s the moment I went from being a struggling scribbler to making a living as a playwright. I wouldn’t show anyone The Overwhelming, not even my agent, because I thought no one would ever do this play—it has a lot of parts, a lot of it’s in French, and most of the characters are African. So finally my agent said, “You have to go give it to me.” I said, “Well, it’s not finished.” He said, “Give it to me.” So I gave it to him. And to my great surprise, he said, “I love it. I love it. It’s going to be the one, blah, blah, blah.” And so I got all excited, just talking about how we were going to send it to the Manhattan Theatre Club, we’re going to send it to Lincoln Center Theater. So in a fit of arrogance I said, “All right, well fuck it. Send it to the National Theatre. I mean, if we’re going to shoot big…” Three months later, I’m changing my then three-year-old son’s diaper before going to a temp job, and Artistic Director Nick Hytner called: “Could you fly to London tomorrow? I want to talk to you about your play?” And I said (Laughter), “I have a temp job. I could come next Wednesday.” And he said absolutely. And when I got there I realized that they weren’t talking about having a reading. They were talking about going into rehearsal in six months. I was just floored. Ed: Had you ever wanted to set a play in Afghanistan? JR: No. The idea was brought to me. Ed: Wilfred Owen advised writers always to write a poem when you’re requested, because you don’t know what it’s going to open up in you.

W THE WORLD IN A PLAY

AN INTERVIEW WITH J. T. ROGERS

JR: Well, Blood and Gifts is the perfect example. Ed: What did the Tricycle ask you to write about? JR: They offered up a few possibilities as starting points, and I told them, “Well, I’m kind of interested in the 1980s and the CIA, because I remember talking about it as a kid.” I started doing research, and I struggled to write it. It was really, really difficult. I realized, when I’d almost finished writing it, that the problem was I was trying to cram an enormous play into a little play. After the Afghan festival closed at the Tricycle, I started expanding it, and the story just exploded.

The smaller I make the box, the tighter I constrain myself, the more liberating it is, because within the given framework I can do anything I want.

vice couldn’t conceive of militant Islam as a political force. Ed: Just Ayatollah Khomeini. JR: Well, I’ve become fascinated by Shiism and Iran. I’ve been reading all this stuff to see if there’s a new play for me there. Ed: In this particular play, the guilt belongs to the Americans. JR: Yes, but to me there’s a very clear difference between expressing guilt and wallowing in self-loathing. But the two do seem to get conflated. For example, all of my plays have been well-received by the English press, but they’re viewed as scathing political indictments of the American system. The praise has nothing to do with the plays I’ve written (Laughter), but that’s the lens through which they’re seen in England. Ed: Have you ever been to Afghanistan? JR: I’m haunted by the fact that I haven’t gone. My wife jokingly says I’m the Stephen Crane of playwriting. He wrote The Red Badge of Courage, the great Civil War novel, but he hadn’t fought in the war so, after it was published, he went and joined (Laughter) the Union Army. I went to Rwanda after I’d written The Overwhelming. Ed: Did it match up to your reality? JR: It did, in terms of the events in the play. But the current reality was far more traumatic than I was prepared for. The visual presentation of the first production of that play arose out of our trip. So I had a similar urge to go to Afghanistan after writing Blood and Gifts. Howard Davies and I were going to go—he is quite the adventurer, you know, traipsing around the world for a month in Nepal and stuff at sixty-five. But the British ambassador said no. I think because the National has such a symbolic political stamp on it. Bart and I floated the idea of going, but our spouses asked us not to. Then a friend of Bart’s who’s very high up in the U.N. sat him down and said, “You are stupid. You cannot go there.” So I was forced to admit that my desire to go was not really about serving the play but about my longing to experience Afghanistan. I still want to go, very badly. Recently I came across the fact that Babur, the great Mughal emperor, loved Afghanistan so much he had himself buried in Kabul. The inscription on his tomb is “If there is paradise on earth, it is this. It is this. It is this.”

Ed: What is the relationship of the one-act to this version? JR: They share the same title. The play we’re doing here is an epic play covering ten years; the one-act really is the CliffsNotes version of just the central relationship in the full play. Ed: Then how did it come to the National? JR: I had a commission from André Bishop here at LCT because he had wanted to do The Overwhelming and the timing didn’t work out. I decided to do it at the Roundabout, and André said, “Great. But I would like you to write a new play for us.” JR: At the same time as André was reading the play, I sent out an e-mail to my friends (this was right before all of life was on Facebook (Laughter)) inviting them to a private reading just for me at New Dramatists, here in New York. Ed: Was the reading of the longer version? JR: Yes. I wanted to hear it. And, for the record, what we’re doing now at LCT is half as long as what we did at that reading, which was like the second coming of the Mahabharata. (Laughter) It was about four and a half hours long. So this is the much shorter version! Ed: And your friend from the National Theatre got the e-mail?

JR: Yeah, he’s on my “buddy list.” And he asked if he could read it. I said, Yeah, great, sure. I was naïve, and didn’t think much about it. Then I get a call three days later saying, “Hey, we want to do this play, too.” I said, “Well (Laughter), that’s amazing.” So then I was very uncomfortable. I felt terrible, as if I had gone behind André’s back. So I went to André, very embarrassed, and he was so classy. He said, “That kind of stinks. I totally understand. How can I not let you do it? We’ll let them do it first.” And we started rehearsals at the National six months later. Ed: Who directed it in London? JR: Howard Davies did. Ed: And who’s doing it here? JR: Bart Sher, which I’m thrilled about. Ed: And what changes have you made because current events in Afghanistan are changing so dramatically? JR: None. Ed: None? JR: If you’re going to write a play that wrestles with great historical forces, you’ve got to set it enough in the past, even if it’s only ten years in the past, that you’re not upended. Ed: The play, on one level, is about hindsight. JR: The difficult thing about a play set against a historical background like this is avoiding telling the story in a way that allows the audience to project their own hindsight onto it. If the audience at Lincoln Center watches the show and says, “Oh well, I’d never have made those mistakes,” then I’ve failed. Because that means I haven’t written an interesting play. Ed: What about the failures of American policy in Afghanistan in the 1980s? Where do you lay the blame? JR: I wrestle with this all the time. I came away from writing this play thanking God that someone other than me had to make these decisions. I mean, my certainty in the evilness of our actions in Afghanistan has been diminished. One, by speaking with the people involved, but more by really getting an understanding of the staggering horrors the Soviet Army perpetrated. Millions of people murdered. Thousands and thousands of children bayoneted. Ed: But still, wasn’t there an American diplomatic failure? JR: With hindsight, absolutely. It’s very hard for us to wrap our minds around the fact now, but in the 1980s our foreign ser-

Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, idolator, worshipper of fire, come even though you have broken your vows a thousand times, Come, and come yet again. Ours is not a caravan of despair. — Rumi (1207-1273)

The smaller I make the box, the tighter I constrain myself, the more liberating it is, because within the given framework I can do anything I want.

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by Sarah Chayes

Outside a village near Kandahar there was a telephone tree. Cell phones, their cases cracked, missing batteries, festooned its dusty branches. It must have looked like the sacred trees that grow by every saint’s shrine here, fluttering ribbons and shreds of cloth knotted to their branches, each tattered strip the relic of some heartfelt desire. Except this tree signaled fear, not hope. By design. A group of Taliban had their checkpoint there, frisking passers-by for contraband: cell phones, ID cards that might link them to a government office or an international organization, even national identity cards. Anyone caught carrying such a thing was interrogated, beaten, sometimes shot. A friend of mine lives in this place. His grapevines lie like corded muscles against their thick supporting walls; earth on earth, his house of the same earth that stretches out, flat and arid, broken only by a bony ridge of bare rock rising in the distance. Once I thought grapes were only grapes, raisins raisins; was sure nothing could surprise my tongue, which had sampled French varietals, had delighted since childhood in bursting our local Concord grapes out of their blue-black skins. I’d chew the thick skins first, then strain the seeds with my front teeth as I sucked down the firm and luscious flesh. What could be better? Then I tasted Kandahar’s harvest. Round Girdak, white or black Toran; oversized Ayta, treated and dried by way of an age-old process to obtain raisins like small dates. And my favorites, Kishmish, delicate as the nail on your pinkie, their color a jewel-like golden green, the flavor inside sweetness almost to the point of pain. I learned that, millennia before Rome made a name expanding cultivation of the vine, for wine, across its Mediterranean world, Kandahar was sending tribute to Babylon in the form of crates of grapes. But grapes are perishable. So, to store year-round for serving guests with tea—in a special glass dish no Afghan house would be without, with separate spaces for almonds or walnuts, dried mulberries or roasted chickpeas—and especially for export, Kandaharis make raisins of their grapes. They’re green. The finest Afghan raisins are willow-green. This color, their producers‘ pride, is achieved by shielding the grapes from sunlight as they gently dry. Long, fortlike buildings rise amid the vineyards; yard-thick earthen walls keep the inside cool, while slits cut in them like medieval castles’ meurtrières let the bone-dry outside air circulate. The grapes are tied in bunches to lengths of mighty wood thrust into sockets in the walls. These old buildings are called kishmishkhanas—“raisin houses.” They are extremely solid, and are built among the vines, apart from the village and its life, its women with their head scarves askew hurrying to take some fresh yogurt to a friend, toddlers splashing in irrigation canals in the shade of centennial mulberry trees. So some commanders, during the decade-long fight against Soviet occupation, chose these buildings for their headquarters. In places around Kandahar, broken kishmishkhanas are stark reminders of that war, their domed endrooms blasted to pieces, years of wind and rain softening the contours of the ruins till they look like wrecked sandcastles, partly washed away by the sea. Not my friend’s. The kishmishkhanas his grandfather built decades ago stood strong. Until last fall. The Taliban began moving back into the area around 2006. For a few years afterward, my friend’s village broke their front line. To the west is Sing-i Sar, where Mullah Mohammed Omar used to lead daily prayers. To the east is Pashmul, also Taliban heartland. But my friend and his neighbors are members of the Popalzai tribe, and so kinsmen, in their eyes, of Afghanistan’s president. While they have their complaints about the man—as almost all Afghans seem to—they stuck by him. So the Taliban made them suffer. They broke their cell phones and hung them from the telephone tree. They used a tree in the village schoolyard as a human gallows, hanging suspected “traitors” or “spies” from its boughs, with notes pinned to their threadbare clothes: “Anyone who cuts this body down before three days will suffer the same fate.” The victim’s mother, his brothers, would have to walk right past his swollen, bluing body. The Taliban would plant improvised bombs in a dense minefield, leaving only narrow paths along which farmers picked their way to irrigate their land. Dogs and donkeys would blow up at night; mothers trembled for their children. A few times, after international troops mounted an operation in the area, the Taliban laid hands on my friend and accused him of passing information. Only his remarkable gentleness, his manifest earnestness, saw him through. Last fall, U.S. troops moved in, determined to flush the Taliban out. They set up camp within some roofless walls on a hummock, the remains of an old strongpoint where my friend’s paternal uncle had based his unit of resistance fighters in the ’80s. My friend came into town to tell me about it. How the U.S. troops had verged off the village road and cut a new

one, diagonally through fields and vineyards. As he talked, I started sketching a map. Here’s the American base; here’s his field. These two fields behind it belong to two brothers. The six mulberry trees the Americans blew up over here to improve their line of sight were on a cousin’s property. The maneuver alley the Americans made for their armored personnel carriers cut slantwise through my friend’s vineyard, meaning half the vines would surely die, since the flow of water in the irrigation ditches opposite each row of vines was interrupted. Coils of razor wire surrounding the little base cut the village road. And the troops demolished my friend’s kishmishkhana. They set charges along its foundations and blew them, on ten minutes’ warning. Afterward, Afghan National Army soldiers stripped the wreckage of its precious wood. The troops blew up every kishmishkhana and all the empty houses they could see. Many of the buildings had been booby-trapped by departing Taliban, and anyway, the thick-walled buildings made potential hiding places. I asked the battalion commander if he’d like to meet my friend to hear the villagers’ perspective. Lieutenant Colonel Tom McFadyen is a lanky border-stater with sunlit hair, the kind of insightful, innovative officer who immediately stands out from his peers. He was delighted at the prospect, thrilled that someone would venture out to the badlands where his men spent their days and stomach-clenching nights. I met him at the district center and climbed aboard one of his lumbering, dinosaur-plated personnel carriers. Our little convoy plowed into the sea of dust. At the “combat outpost” near my friend’s village, I found heartbreak on both sides of a frightened standoff. McFadyen’s men—a platoon of youngsters full of energy and a craving to do right in this unfathomable place, whose watchful eyes were never still, always darting to the surrounding fields, separated from them by only that slender coil of razor wire— slept in miniature pup tents sunk in three inches of talcum-powder dust. Soldiers and their Afghan National Army partners, sleeves rolled up, were furiously sawing lumber to build a roof before the winter rains turned that dust into viscous glue. We sent an ANA officer out to fetch my friend. It had to appear to his neighbors that he had been summoned, that he had no choice in the matter. He sat on a bench, hunched over a cup of tea, elbows in his gut, hands shaking with fear. Taliban are still abroad, and who could protect him at night if they saw him talking with the Americans? We discussed how the troops could “make it right,” as they so badly wanted to do. The complicated forms that had to be filled out, requiring birth certificate, property deed, photographs, national identity card—all things the Taliban beat you for under the telephone tree if they found them on you. The ten-inch pipe that would be needed to carry water under the maneuver alley, the future years of raisins blown up with the kishmishkhana. As we stood to leave, my friend pointed out his fields once more. “That’s my land,” I translated for him, “and see those grapevines over there? Those are mine. Please, don’t shoot me if you see me out there watering them, OK?” His smile was a little lopsided. McFadyen reassured him with a squeeze of his bony shoulder. A few weeks later, McFadyen let me know his men had arrested my friend, with two others—who proved to be his nephews—when some rounds were fired from near his vines. McFadyen had not been consulted and was mortified. He was also switched on enough to order his men not to release my friend alone, but to wait till they had cleared the two others, so the Taliban wouldn’t suspect favoritism and go after him. “That was such a smart move,” said my friend, gratefully. It almost made up for having to sleep on a cement floor for three nights, bound for the first twenty-four hours. As autumn set in, my friend was safe, but he still had no kishmishkhana for his grapes. “The people are perplexed,” his brother told me. “What to do with their grapes? Should they sell them by the side of the road, or give them away as alms? Throw them in the dust?” And so my friend keeps wending his way between two parties to a conflict that seem equally hostile to him. Just as Afghanistan has, for so much of its history, been caught up in others’ quarrels. As America prepares to reduce its presence there, and as some of us prepare to throw up our hands and blame Afghans for the predicament in which we leave them, it is worth pausing to think what it must do to a person to be caught in such withering crossfire. Sarah Chayes lived in Kandahar from the fall of the Taliban through 2008, and still travels there frequently to see to the cooperative she founded, Arghand, which manufactures luxury skin-care products for export (www.arghand.org). She is a former reporter for National Public Radio, the author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, and served as an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

by Sarah Chayes

WTHE FALLOUT

by Larry Heinemann

If the war in Vietnam was a benchmark of American history, then the war in Afghanistan can rightly be called an equally dramatic watershed for the Russian empire. In 1989, while the fighting continued, I was fortunate enough to travel to the old USSR with a group of Vietnam veterans and psychologists expert in post-war trauma. We were going to meet and talk with young veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan—Afgantsi, they call themselves. We flew into Moscow airport through 10,000 feet of solid overcast. I was on the trip because I’d been a soldier once, in Vietnam. I had written about that war, and have since become intimate with the personal reverberations of what being a soldier means. And, too, I’d heard that the Afgantsi had to endure the same military grind as American soldiers in Vietnam, and would no doubt have to endure the same personal reverberations when they got home. I wanted to see for myself what effect the war had on them, and perhaps save them some of the grief I have had to endure. They met us at the airport with astonishing warmth and hospitality, and told us more than once that finally, finally, they had someone to talk to who would understand. I was surprised and gratified to hear the Afgantsi say, after we’d hung out together for the better part of two weeks, that the only difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam was that Afghanistan was brown and Vietnam was green. We met and talked many times in those weeks, the conversations lasting well into the night, lubricated by liter bottles of vodka (so icecold it poured like liqueur). More than a few talked as radically as any angry, bitter, pissed-off Vietnam GI. They took us to a “private” museum, where among the military artifacts were booby-trapped rag dolls with plastic hands and faces. Who would pick them up? Children, of course. Who would make such a thing? KGB or CIA? Who, indeed? What came through most forcefully was that no matter the nationality—Americans fighting in Vietnam, Soviets in Afghanistan, South African conscripts in Angola, British troops in Northern Ireland, Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East—the reality of being a soldier is dismally and remarkably the same: grueling and brutal and ugly. Regardless of the military or political reason (always decisions made by politicians and “statesmen” far removed from the realities of the field), for ordinary everyday grunts the results are always the same; it is soul-deadening and heart-killing work. The similarities of the United States’ war in Vietnam and the Soviet war in Afghanistan are striking and ironic, and prove to me that we as people have a lot more in common than we might think. Both wars were fought without the full support or involvement of their country’s citizens. Indeed, before 1985 the Soviets were told their troops were in Afghanistan fulfilling their “international duty”

building hospitals and schools, planting trees, and generally helping the Afghans build a socialist state. Letters were heavily censored and photographs were not permitted. Indeed, so thorough was the censorship that few battlefield photographs by the soldiers survive. The Afgantsi mustering out of the army were told bluntly and firmly not to talk about what was going on. The corpses of Soviet soldiers were sent home in sealed zinc coffins, accompanied by military escorts with orders that the coffins not be opened. The families, in their bottomless grief, could never be positively certain that their sons and brothers and husbands were actually dead and their bodies actually present in the coffins. No explanation for the deaths was given; the funerals were conducted at night to keep down the crowds; and the tombstones were inscribed with the words “Died fulfilling his international duty,” which became the euphemism for Killed-in-Action. Both wars are now clearly understood to be foreign policy disasters, regardless of the considerable revisionist thinking about Vietnam. Both were civil wars fought by uninspired and lackluster government troops (the “host” government itself bought and paid for) with the help of main force battle troops from a powerful (if not overpowering) ally. The Soviet veterans spoke of the Afghan troops with undisguised derision in the same way Americans spoke of South Vietnamese ARVN troops—the last to join the battle; the first back at camp when it was over; plenty of nap time in between. Both wars were fought against well-armed and supplied, highly motivated guerrillas. In Afghanistan it was the mujahideen, whom the Afgantsi called bandits. Both the Viet Cong and the mujahideen were absolutely committed to national liberation and used classic guerrilla terror tactics of hit-and-run fire fights, ambushes, road mines, and booby traps; utilized the safety of abundant border sanctuaries; and obtained plenty of military aid from supportive foreign governments. Both the American and Soviet veterans were overwhelmingly “working class.” In the United States, if you didn’t have the money or the savvy for a leisurely college deferment or the family influence to obtain a slot in the National Guard (or some other artful dodge), you were likely to be scooped up in the draft; not for nothing was it called Selective Service. In the USSR it was the children and grandchildren of ordinary working stiffs and outright peasants who served—not the sons of intellectuals, high-ranking executives, or Party officials. ’Twas ever thus. In Afghanistan and Vietnam the medical evacuation by helicopters and advances in frontline medical care saved many lives, but has produced thousands of bedridden and disabled veterans who need

WTHE FALLOUT

by Larry Heinemann

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serious, lifelong medical care—prosthetics, wheelchairs, and treatment for alcoholism, drug abuse, and psychological problems. These are the inevitable and virtually irremediable results of the ordinary horrors of everyday life among soldiers in war. In the 1960s and 1970s the Veterans Administration in the US was ill-equipped to deal with Vietnam’s GIs. American GIs have come to understand that the VA is not an advocate of their health. But the Soviet Union has no VA, and their medical facilities are appallingly inadequate and woebegone—there is not enough of anything. There are no special facilities for wheelchairs or the blind, and the engineering for artificial limbs—prosthetics—is abysmal, not to say medieval; though this has changed for the better in recent years. If you’ve had your leg blown off and are fitted with a lousy

W They met us at the airport with astonish-

ing warmth and hospitality, and told us more than once that finally, finally, they had someone to talk to who would understand.

This excerpt originally appeared in Rosita Forbes’s book Forbidden Road: Kabul to Samarkand (1937).

Larry Heinemann served a tour of duty with the Twenty-Fifth Division in Vietnam. He is the author of three novels: Close Quarters, Paco’s Story, and Cooler by the Lake, as well as a memoir about his return visits to Vietnam since 1990, Black Virgin Mountain.

by Rosita Forbes

artificial leg, then by the time you’re forty you’ll probably need the stump trimmed a couple of times, and at the very least might well wind up with a bad back in a wheelchair. Is it any wonder that the Afgantsi were bitter towards the Communist Party and their endless bureaucratic jive? Several weeks before I arrived in Moscow eighty wheelchair Afgantsi gathered in Red Square, that area by Lenin’s tomb between the GUM Department Store and the Kremlin wall, to protest the lack of decent health care and handicapped access. They were beaten up by the cops. Both American and Soviet veterans have experienced prolonged emotional problems in the years following military service—PostTraumatic Stress Disorder, delayed stress, or what used to be called battle fatigue and shell-shock (after the American Civil War it was called “soldier’s heart”). Simply put, because of the destructive nature of armed combat the effects of delayed stress are irresistible and irremediable. The list of important symptoms includes: recurring dreams and nightmares; a survivor’s guilt that is most often expressed as an unshakable, debilitating depression; hyper-vigilance and an exaggerated startle response; and a purposeful self-destruction that might take the form of out-and-out suicide or the more punishing form of drug and alcohol abuse—what the VA refers to as self-medication. (Though 58,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam, an equal number have since died by their own hand, most through alcohol or drugs.) Before 1980, meaningful, sensible treatment for PTSD by the VA was simply unheard of. If a veteran went to the VA he was diag-

nosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, invited to enter the Psychiatric Ward and join the Thorazine shuffle. Until 1988, Soviet psychologists had never heard of PTSD, until American psychologists expert with post-war trauma visited and told them. Up till then their answer was behavior modification with drugs— the way Soviet psychiatry had always dealt with mental illness. Soviet government policies dictated that local communities conduct “Welcome Home” ceremonies, no doubt to the bafflement of officials since the troops in Afghanistan were engaged in “public works.” The Afgantsi I spoke to called these largely meaningless, empty rituals the “false face of welcome.” The “Welcome Home” parades and monuments for Vietnam veterans that have become fashionable in the last ten years are, basically, a day late and a dollar short. But of all the comparisons between the American GIs who fought in Vietnam and the young Soviets who fought in Afghanistan, perhaps the most remarkable and consistent is their bitterness towards their governments. Both groups of men feel profoundly betrayed, and it is having been lied to that most sticks in the craw. If we can metaphorically speak of the government as a “father”—who you assume loves you and wishes you only the best—then being betrayed by your father not once but day after day after day is a powerful, unforgettable lesson. It is the sort of reverberating resentment that will soften over the years, but will never be ameliorated. In 1971, it showed itself on the Capitol steps in Washington, DC, when one Vietnam veteran after another stepped up to the hastily erected fence and threw his medals back at the government that awarded them. In the autumn of 1991, young Afgantsi gathered from all over Moscow, Russia, and the rest of the former Soviet states to defend the Russian parliament building (called the “White House”) and the emerging leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. The Afgantsi quickly organized to prevent provocateurs, just plain drunks, and hotheads from starting trouble with the armored personnel carriers and tanks that surrounded them; to isolate conflicts and minimize casualties to the death. The night that an attack by the coup leaders was expected, and priests were baptizing Afgantsi wholesale, there were Afgantsi by the thousands ready, willing, and certainly able to fight back, and they were not helpless or unarmed. The presence of the Afgantsi helped prevent a blood-bath. After the danger of the coup had passed, one of the Afgantsi leaders said, “We don’t think that democracy has yet been won.” But the Afgantsi I met and talked with impressed me as being capable and savvy, young and tough enough not to take no for an answer.

KABUL Kabul has a beauty like nothing else on earth. The Afghans do not appreciate their capital because it is not sufficiently modern. They long for the traffic of London, the buildings of Paris, and the inconveniences of every American “burg.” With an infinity of charm they explain that Kabul is only beginning and they are so sad about it, and at the same time so proud, that one dare not draw their attention to the mountain setting or tell them that Kabul has only one rival—Santiago in the Andes. “We are building schools and hospitals—” they say, and it is true. There are a number of modern buildings, simple in design and well placed beside the river or at the end of long avenues. In fact the new Kabul, clean, quiet, spacious, has a good deal to recommend it. There is a Nordic air about the canals, the shorn white trees in winter, the unbroken line of the walls, the white paint or the grey, and the orderly restraint which applies to the demeanour of the people as well as to the style of their architecture. But this is an acquired effect. It is not yet Afghanistan. The country is so individual that it merits more original expression in its capital and this it finds in the great walls which fling themselves over the hills above the fortress of Bala Hissar. In the contrast between the plain where Kabul lies, an earth-coloured city splashed by the new white buildings, the new grey roofs of barracks, palaces, and colleges, and the mountain ramparts so much more brilliantly white which enclose it, in this sharp insistence on change where for thousands of years men have dwelt too near the earth to need anything else, lies the challenge which contemporary Afghans fling at Afghanistan. The plain holds a lake delicately blue. It is shadowed with a mist of poplars. In Spring the villages, each surrounded with smooth splendid walls, stand deep in fruit blossom. It is a flood of red and rose-colour spread-

ing over the earth. Only the watch towers rise out of it, and the broken bastions from which the last rebel, Bacha i Saqan, shelled the town. Around the plain there are mountains and they are not feather-smooth like the Sierra near Granada, which reminded Osbert Sitwell of the “wings of angry swans.” They are rugged under the snow. Clouds add to their height and shadows deepen their ice blues and greens into the purples of a storm-driven sea. But on a clear day they are white, and I have never looked at them without surprise. They are nearer to the city than most mountains, and more final. The country needs no other defence and certainly no further justification. The Afghans, perhaps, have ceased to see their mountains except as barriers to invasion, and to the mechanized civilization they long to impose upon a land familiar to Alexander, Genghis Khan, and Akbar. But in moments of relaxation they pay tribute to their orchards, to the foam and froth of blossom breaking against the poplars. The bazaars present a more difficult problem. They may be dirty. They are certainly old-fashioned if the term can suitably be applied to Abraham or Mohammed. But they are, as surely, beautiful although the Afghans who know Paris or London refuse to acknowledge it. Instead of an ancient tapestry in which each figure has its value, they see tribesmen who will insist on wearing too many garments and all of them the wrong shape. They see townsmen who will sit on their feet instead of on chairs. Instead of a diapason of sunshine falling through torn roofs upon the street of carpets, they see beams out of alignment and walls reaching for mutual support. They talk of poverty and age as if no beauty could be found in them, yet the bazaars at Kabul satisfy every sense. They are full of smells, strange exciting smells, whose origin I long to know. They echo with an amusing—and for that matter most modern—cacophony of sound, but the

singing of birds predominates. For in every cupboard shop, with the merchant tucked away on a shelf among his canes of sugar wrapped in brilliant paper, his furs, knives, striped rugs, long-necked bottles, fat stomached pots, his books of large squiggly lettering, his silver bracelets and gold-embroidered caps, there is a cage or half a dozen cages full of the smallest imaginable birds. And they all sing. They never stop singing. But the place where I can never refrain from that quick intake of breath which means delight, and an always-surprised delight as well, is that very street of carpets with the broken roof. One comes to it from the dimness of the covered bazaars, from the raw scarlet of silk and chemists’ labels. The sun is spilled between the beams so that there is a lovely pattern of light and shade. The shops are heaped one upon another, each warm and rich with colours that have come from Merv, Isfahan, Samarkand, the legendary towns where men went to their looms as an artist to his easel. Dust turns to gold in the streams and spears of light that fall all ways across the darkness and the calm faces of the merchants, leafbrown, leather-brown, framed in beard and turban, acquire a distinction that is in itself an emotion, like the sudden discovery of a new effect in a familiar masterpiece. I shall never forget that street. I shall never be able to describe it. Rosita Forbes was born in 1893 and later married a soldier, with whom she traveled to India, China, Australia, and South Africa. During the First World War, she worked as an ambulance driver and received two medals for her war services from the French government. Her travels took her around the world—from Morocco to Syria, Iraq to Russia, and Kenya to the Gold Coast. Forbes lived and mixed with the locals, frequenting bazaars and making friends with the people she encountered. She was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society.

W They met us at the airport with astonish-

ing warmth and hospitality, and told us more than once that finally, finally, they had someone to talk to who would understand.

This excerpt originally appeared in Rosita Forbes’s book Forbidden Road: Kabul to Samarkand (1937).

by Rosita Forbes

Lincoln Center Theater Review Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Lincoln Center Theater 150 West 65 Street New York, New York 10023

Tamim Ansary John Rockwell J. T. Rogers Rumi Sarah Chayes Larry Heinemann Rosita Forbes Tamar Cohen Marc Riboud Steve McCurry Michael Pellew Trent Clark Fred Tomaselli Chris Steel-Perkins

Non-Profit Org. U.S. Postage Paid New York, N.Y. Permit No. 9313