An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (6 page)

But what does a real wedding here mean? I will have no family and no Afghan ancestors or living relatives at my side. And who will perform this rite? A mullah? I am not a Muslim. Will I have to convert to Islam in order to obtain my next edible meal?

That’s what’s missing. There is no Jewish sense of humor here.

Three

Burqas

W
hen I was in Kabul, I had no idea that I was living at the center of the universe—at least that’s what it was, back when the world was flat. I was at the crossroad where the East literally met the West. Traders traveled the Silk Road right through Afghanistan as they moved their precious gems, spices, skins, and silks back and forth between China, Russia, Persia, India, Turkey, and Europe.

Looking at the tattered diary that I began in Kabul, I am amazed by how much I understood at so young an age and by how carefully I observed everything around me. As a writer, I am also embarrassed by it. Sometimes I can’t even understand what I am trying to say.

One thing is clear: I was writing about the punishment of free thought and free speech in Afghanistan—almost twenty years before Khomeini’s Islamist revolution and more than forty years before critics of Islam—even Muslim critics, especially Muslim critics—would be demonized as Islamophobic, threatened with death, and censored. I used the word
patriarchal
long before feminism arose again in America. Now, fifty years later, I cannot imagine how or where I found this word. It certainly allowed me to accurately describe the treatment of women in Afghanistan.

Years later, back in America, I often wanted to say: “You think that
we
are oppressed by patriarchy here? Please allow me to describe the lives of Afghan women.” For a long time I never said this publicly. I am saying it now.

But I also want to add something: American women are far more privileged and much safer than Afghan women, but that does not mean that we do not live in a patriarchal culture. We do.

There. Now I have offended everybody.

I continued my little diary for nearly a decade, trying to make sense of what had happened in Kabul. Here I am, uncensored, the day after my twenty-first birthday. The title page looks like this:

A Record of Unhappy Events

Or

My Afghan Sojourn

Or

Marriage is for One

Or

Notes for a cynical novel to be written by a thirtyish woman impersonating a woman long since dead.

I am nearly seven thousand miles away from home and centuries backward in time. Afghanistan is conservative on the outside, corrupt on the inside. And Abdul-Kareem is drinking that cup of tea, the cup that never ends but that weighs the stomach down so that it need not raise itself up until tomorrow or the day after tomorrow
(pas fardah)
or the day after that.

The fabled dirt and dust are real. So is the unexpected elegance. But I am surrounded by grinding, deadening apathy and passivity. I do not think that anyone reads books. The servants are illiterate. My mother-in-law and brothers-in-law are cruel to others. They are also surprisingly vain and act as if they are superior to other living beings.

I have no freedom at all. No opportunity to meet anyone or go anywhere. His family watches me suspiciously. Am I getting paranoid? No, they are afraid that if I am not brought to heel, tamed, that I will ruin their family’s reputation. I was a fool to believe that I could have a cultural or intellectual life here. Maybe Abdul-Kareem, if he is allowed to travel, will have such a life. Not me. I am an Afghan wife now.

My two sisters-in-law are warm and charming and dress like Europeans. They always kiss me on both cheeks each and every time we see each other, even though we are living together.

But my mother-in-law, Bebegul, is very strange. Sometimes she just stares at me. It feels hostile, judgmental. Sometimes she barges in when I’m undressing or changing, as if the sight of my
nakedness helps her live over in her imagination my—or perhaps her own—deflowering.

In our first real conversation (which we held partly in French, partly in English, partly in Farsi/Dari, partly in German, partly in pantomime, and with the help of an interpreter), Bebegul told me, over and over again, about her long friendship with the Sharbans.

Her point was that they are Jews and their leaving Afghanistan for Israel and America made her very sad. She cried out: “Sharban,” pointing at herself, then at me, smiling and mock-sighing to emphasize her feeling of loss.

She immediately followed up this information with a request that I convert to Islam. She told me:

“There is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet and Moses—
Moses is also his Prophet.”

This last sentence she offered up with such hope, such sudden mad friendship, that I impulsively told her I would think about it. She kissed me, then went and dragged her prayer rugs out, demanding that I choose one.

When I tell Abdul-Kareem that his mother has begun a conversion campaign he says nothing. He pretends not to hear me. He leaves the room.

It would be many decades before I would learn that a conversion to Islam is pro forma for any infidel woman who marries a Muslim.

In the years immediately following the First World War, the Afghan chieftain father of Sirdar Iqbal Ali Shah refused to bless his marriage to the Scottish infidel Saira MacKenzie, unless she converted to Islam and could also “hold the fort if called upon.”

As the daughter of a Scottish Highlander, Saira knew how to use a rifle. And she had already “embraced the Muslim faith with its simple belief in the unity of God and the prophethood of Mohammed.” In the 1920s Saira had no problem with wearing a burqa. She made it sound like a regal, very princessy, thing to have to do.

When I was in Kabul, family members told me many times that in the past certain foreign wives had voluntarily taken to wearing the burqa. These wives were presented as great women: uncomplaining, self-sacrificing, and wise in the ways of what would please their Afghan families.

I will not even wear the lovely long chiffon headscarves discreetly laid out for me. I do not like hats or scarves. They are too establishment,
too grown-up for me. My sisters-in-law wear fashionable European clothing. In terms of appearance I am also something of a disappointment to my brothers-in-law because I do not prize glamorous Western fashion.

I am judged only by my appearance. Next I will be judged on whether I can produce sons. As a dark-eyed, dark-haired Jew, I might have passed as exotic—in Sweden. Here, in the land of the thousand tribes, women (and men) have skins that range in color from brown to gold to olive to fair; hair that ranges in color from jet black to blonde and red; eyes that are green, gray, blue, and black liquid velvet.

Afghan faces are living testaments to the many immigrants and conquerors who have passed through the country. Here I am only a regular, nondescript, could-pass-for-Afghan woman.

Abdul-Kareem’s second-oldest brother, Reza, who has studied in England, tells me quite dispassionately, “I’ve asked Abdul-Kareem many times why he brought you here. Doesn’t he understand that a Western girl could never fit in?”

It is nearly two months without any freedom or privacy. My mother-in-law Bebegul is vicious towards her servants. My father-in-law treats his sons and daughters as servants. The sons all want their father’s money and attention. They are married to him, they are his truest wives. Hassan does not seem to talk to his wife, at least not when anyone else is there.

I blame myself. I fear that I have managed to find another dangerous family. And they keep promising a wedding for us.

I have written “Promised wedding” in the margin of the diary. Clearly, this must have meant something to me. But why would I even want a wedding when it is so clear that I do not belong here?

It is difficult to know the date not only because everyone follows a Muslim, not a Gregorian, calendar but because today is like yesterday, the days melt into each other—no, “melt” is too soft a word. Rather, the days shatter into each other like large rocks, one after the other, along the road of time. Am I dreaming? Am I awake? I am alone. I am lost in a large, dark cave. I cannot find the exit.

I married someone else. I don’t know who this husband is. But I do want to see the city, the camels, the nomads, the men on bicycles,
the stalls, the tea-houses
(choi chanas).
I want to hear the singing birds in the bazaar.

And so I finally escape. Looking both ways, I walk out feeling like a criminal. I pass a kebob stand and a sweets seller. As I walk, the mountains fill me with awe, and the air is clear and fresh. I have no idea how to get to the bazaar so I take a bus that seems to be going in the right direction.

The buses are fancifully painted, riotously emblazoned with designs, sunrises, amulets, colors galore. I board one. The driver stares at me. I smile at him. He jerks his head in the direction of the back of the bus.

At first I think I see only a pile of clothing back there, but eerily the clothing, which is huddled together, is actually moving. Oh, my God! This is not clothing—these are women, all huddled together, wearing burqas, balancing babies and bundles in the female-only section. I am horrified, slightly hysterical.

Women literally have to sit at the back of the bus. This is before Rosa Parks, before the American civil rights movement begins in earnest. At dinner I can talk of nothing else. My relatives look away. Abdul-Kareem insists that I am “prone to exaggeration,” and “overly dramatic.” Then he hisses at me.

“If you are only patient and quiet, you will see changes around here that will surpass anything you’ve ever seen in America.”

He honestly believes that the burqas and the gender segregation (or gender apartheid, as I call it), will, soon enough, disappear. He defends Afghanistan against my “American superiority.”

“You Americans are so quick to criticize. But we are not savages. In many ways we are far more advanced than you are in America. Here we do not throw our elders away. Here we do not divorce our wives. Here we know things about life, about hospitality, that you Americans will never be able to emulate.”

He has a point. But have I become an American so that Abdul-Kareem can again become an Afghan? Am I his necessary foil, his sacrifice, so that he can reenter the Middle Ages and rise?

I think that Abdul-Kareem is scared. He is a different person. What have they done to him?

T
wenty years later Abdul-Kareem and I are talking in my Manhattan apartment. He insists that the moment I left Kabul—well, perhaps five years after my departure—a “goddam revolution” had taken place
and naked-faced Afghan Muslim women walked the streets of Kabul just as women did in Paris or New York.

“C’mon, my second wife worked at an embassy and drove around Kabul in her own convertible. She was never veiled. There were women wearing miniskirts on the streets. The Russians ruined all that.”

I say: “Abdul-Kareem, your second wife may have been born a Muslim, but she was not an Afghan woman. And the Russians were the ones who insisted on female literacy and education. They were the ones who’d indoctrinated Afghans with such beliefs. And, as for the miniskirts: I don’t think of them as a sign of women’s liberation.”

Fifty years later I am sitting with a very knowledgeable woman who once lived in Kabul. She too insists that the late 1960s–1970s was a time of women’s liberation. Maybe it’s true, maybe for one bright and shining decade some social progress was made.

As proof she shows me a government publication from the early 1970s that has photos of women wearing only headscarves (hijab), or work-related headgear like nurses’ caps, rather than burqas. I laugh. Then I say, “Most of these photos look carefully posed. They are meant to make Afghanistan look modern. The government was backing modernization at the time. But look how little spontaneity there is, especially in the street scenes.”

She pressures me. I relent. “Okay,” I laugh, “the rules regarding female dress codes were relaxed for educated city women in the late 1960s and 1970s, but that’s it. Then the Soviets invaded, and the mujahideen and the Taliban returned women to the back of the bus and to their ghostly sheets.”

Maybe I resist acknowledging this early and genuine Arab Spring (so to speak) because I regret having missed it. But with the knowledge of hindsight I also know how fragile and short-lived this progress was.

I am now looking at an online photograph taken in Kabul in 1972. It depicts women in burqas on Jadi Maiwand, one of the main streets of the city. Perhaps some women were indeed naked faced in Kabul. Others, like the women in this photo, were not.

In 1969 Kodansha published a book of photos taken in Afghanistan as part of its
Beautiful World
series. In 1967 the author, Masatoshi Konishi, and the Tokyo University Group spent two months in the country; they took 106 beautiful photos of mosques, ruins, and holy sites; 67 photos depict people—mainly Afghan men. The public space still seems rather womanless.

Only fifteen photos (22 percent) show female children, teenagers, and one elderly woman. Most, even the children, are wearing hijabs; many are wearing burqas. Konishi misidentifies what is clearly a child bride as a “seventeen year old” posed with her “twenty six year old husband.” The child, who looks twelve, is smiling, wearing a headscarf, but she is sitting on a bench, perhaps to disguise their too-obvious height difference.

Perhaps there was a golden time, when some Afghan women wore short skirts and went out on dates and had boyfriends in Kabul. . . . Somehow, I still find this hard to believe, given my own experience and given what I now know about the history of Afghanistan.

In 1928 the Afghan king, Amanullah Khan, scandalized his own people when he urged Afghan women to uncover their faces. That same year Amanullah had his queen, Soraya, remove her light veil in public. According to the American journalist Rhea Talley Stewart, the king personally advocated the removal of the face veil and condoned the “shooting of interfering husbands.” He said that “he would supply the weapons for this himself.” He also promised that “no inquiries would be instituted against the women.” Once, when he saw a woman wearing a burqa in Kabul, he personally tore it off and burned it.

Ah—a king after my own heart.

Religious Muslim scholars and other experts disagree about whether the Qur’an obliges women to wear burqas or face masks. Both men and women are advised to dress modestly; women are told to cover their bosom. As early as 1899, in his landmark book
The Liberation of Women,
the Egyptian intellectual Qasim Amin argued that the face veil was not commensurate with the tenets of Islam and called for its removal.