It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (9 page)

But because the Taliban had banned TV, foreign media, and newspapers—any publications aside from religious documents—most Afghans knew the images I shot would never make it back into their country. They did not have to worry about Afghans seeing their women in, say, the
Houston Chronicle
. Much to my surprise, many Afghans, male and female, were open to being photographed.

We drove for hours over the skeleton of a road, a patchwork of stones and gravel and dust, alongside herds of camels, and made our way into the provinces. Mohammed’s prayers rose above the hum of the engine as he fingered his
tespih
—Muslim prayer beads, similar to a rosary. I still didn’t take out my camera. On occasion I was so enraptured by the gorges and rivers and sharply sloping green hills that I allowed my scarf to slip from my forehead back to the nape of my neck, my sleeves down from my wrists to my forearm. When I refocused, I sensed Mohammed’s obvious discomfort with the sight of the skin on my wrist.

Our first stop was a house in Logar Province; Mohammed wanted to show me normal family life in Afghanistan. A young child stood in the weeds in front of a clay compound built to house an entire Afghan family of forty or so. Mohammed sent for the man in charge. There were no telephones, and our visit was unannounced. Mohammed introduced me as a foreign journalist, interested in the state of Afghanistan and its people following twenty years of war, and soon the kettle for tea was lit.

The man of the house gave me permission to join him and the other men in their meal, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to partake in an experience off-limits to Afghan women. As a foreign journalist I was exempt from all the norms and rules that applied to the women here. I was androgynous, a third, undefined sex. We spent the first twenty minutes of lunch in tangible discomfort. Clearly no man in the room had ever eaten with a foreign woman present, save for the occasional four-year-old girl or elderly aunt.

I brought up the one subject everyone in Afghanistan could speak freely about: family.

“How many children do you have?” I said.

Most Afghan men prided themselves on having many children, and their faces gleamed as they rhapsodized about their eleven kids.

“How many children do you have?” they asked me, perhaps assuming that at twenty-six years of age I’d be well on my way to the double digits.

“None,” I answered.

There was silence. I ate my meal quietly. The question of how many children I had would plague me throughout this trip—and for years to come. I was too shy to ask to take a photo.

After lunch, Mohammed took me to a secret school for girls. The Taliban had banned girls’ schools, but some Afghans so desperately wanted to educate their daughters that they established makeshift pop-up classrooms in private basements. The father of the house greeted us at the door. Because there were young women inside, Mohammed was prohibited from entering, but the father led me through three rooms where young female teachers held classes in cavelike spaces for swarms of colorfully swaddled girls—in greens and purples and oranges—from the surrounding villages. One teacher, no more than twenty-five years old, held a baby in her arms as she conducted a lesson with one chalkboard and some handwritten posters. The children sat on a dirt floor. Only a handful had books.

The children seemed surprised by the sight of a foreigner; the teachers, I suspected, were stunned that a foreigner would take the risks I was taking. I was still afraid, too. I managed to take out the camera concealed in my bag but could barely get off a decent shot. Half of my pictures were out of focus.

Mohammed before prayer, 2000.

We headed out again through the countryside, then up a narrow road carved into rock-spattered mountains until we reached a small plateau between two peaks. There was a pond of oddly still water and a silence that beckoned prayer. Mohammed and our driver had forgone prayer all morning and had twitched anxiously as we drove. Before Mohammed began to pray, I dredged up the courage to ask if I could photograph him. He agreed. I was happy to watch them in the open air going through the graceful motions of their devotion. Mohammed looked so serene as he stood against the backdrop of sharp mountains and a crisp sky and began his prayer, raising his thumbs to his ears. We were far from the Taliban’s grip here. From then on, I knew to search for moments like that—more intimate, more private, when Afghans were so enveloped in thought that they forgot to worry about whether the Taliban might be lingering nearby. We drove again, and I watched the sandy brown mountains fold like rumpled bedsheets into layers of vegetation, and clay houses fade into the land.

On our fourth day we arrived at Mohammed’s home late in the afternoon, when the light was a velvety gold and the sun cast long shadows along the snaking road. I had been curious about his family. We entered his sparsely furnished home, and no one greeted me. The women lowered their eyes, and out of respect the men barely acknowledged my presence, except for the common polite greeting of placing the right hand on one’s chest with a slight bow forward. Mohammed walked me across the outdoor courtyard and up three stairs to my room, then disappeared. I knew it would have been improper for me to go out into his home and try to communicate with his family. Earlier he had made it clear that he didn’t feel comfortable with me photographing “his” women. It was as if he were scared to take me on a tour of the house, as if I would sneak photos anyway.

Yet his nieces and nephews, sons and daughters, and eventually even his wife peered into my bedroom window from the courtyard and stared at me. I motioned to them to enter, thinking it was a futile effort; nothing could break a barrier constructed by years of humility and privacy. Finally a girl in her early teens with big-boned, dirty hands barged in to greet me and extended her hand. Without a shared language, the conversation ended with the handshake. I felt like a terminally ill patient, quarantined to a room where people just come and stare through the glass and pity me.

It had been a mere four days since I’d arrived, and I wondered what the world had been doing since I’d left it. Afghanistan hid in a time capsule of war. Many Afghans had no idea how the rest of the world had advanced technologically. There were no foreign newspapers; there was no television news, and very little electricity, for that matter. I felt claustrophobic. Anxious. I hadn’t bathed once, and the stench of my sweat—a layer of filth—seeped through my clothes. I missed my dawn runs through Lodhi Gardens in New Delhi, passing the rotund Indians fixed in yoga poses. I missed my swims at the American Club and a frothy, cold beer at the end of the day at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. I missed all the things I hadn’t realized I had grown to love. The things I hadn’t even been aware of before. Like my freedom.

But as I stretched out on the thin mattress, I also considered the benefits of being a female guest in Afghanistan. I would always have my own room—this one was a big, carpeted, empty space with a huge bay window—separate from the men. I did not think about my appearance, or looking sexy, or male-female attraction. In America I expended an incredible amount of energy on things that in Afghanistan seemed vain if not pointless, and it was refreshing to submerge myself in an unfamiliar perspective and ideology, to assimilate in both mind and dress.

In fact, during the last few days, as I walked through the streets and into people’s homes, I had started to welcome the cover and anonymity of the thick cloth I wore draped over my head and around my shoulders. I understood the urgency of wanting to be covered at all times. As I awoke the next morning and prepared for my day, I realized that I had even grown to appreciate the constant presence of my
mahram
, the unfamiliar peace I found when I surrendered control to Mohammed, to our driver, to a man.

 • • • 

K
ABUL WAS GRAY
and lonely in June 2000. Its monolithic, graceless buildings, as well as its aura of paranoia, betrayed Afghanistan’s heavy Soviet influence. Parts of the city looked as if they’d been half-buried beneath a giant dust storm: Hills of dirt faded into rusting cars, which faded into the broken clay buildings. The mood starkly contrasted with the lively, sun-dappled countryside villages that had been relatively free from the Taliban’s watch. In Kabul everyone was cautious of where he stepped and with whom he spoke. The United Nations workers—typically Afghans, Pakistanis, or people from other Muslim countries—were welcoming inside the UN compound, but I rarely saw them outside on the streets of Kabul. Locals avoided conversation with foreigners entirely in public.

I finally had to face the Taliban at the Foreign Ministry, where foreign journalists were required to check in upon entering the country. This was the Afghanistan I had been warned about. Everything I wanted to do had to be approved with a letter handwritten in Dari, stamped by the government ministry responsible for the issue I was covering, and signed by a man named Mr. Faiz.

In the ministry compound prepubescent boys with layered turbans stacked on their heads sashayed in and out of the high-ceilinged building. I waited for two hours, drinking sugary tea and improving my chances of developing diabetes. Once nervous about the prospect of meeting a Talib, I now knew the rules. By the time Mr. Faiz called me in, my nervousness had disappeared.

He was a burly press minister no more than twenty-eight years old, wearing the customary turban and beard. He welcomed me to his country. Our words ricocheted off the twenty-foot-high ceiling. Intricate patterns danced on the tattered carpet beneath our feet. I thought of the men and women who were shot and stoned to death for adultery and murder in the soccer stadiums across Afghanistan on Fridays.

“Thank you,” I said, eyes lowered. “It is an honor to have the opportunity to come here. To see Afghanistan with my own eyes. I am doing a story on the effect of twenty years of war on Afghanistan.”

I did not mention that I had already spent almost a week in the provinces of Ghazni, Logar, and Wardak and that I had spent several nights in the homes of warm, generous Afghans who all reinforced my belief that Afghanistan was much more than a terrorist state governed by unruly, women-hating Taliban, as much of the media portrayed it.

“Your country is beautiful, Mr. Faiz. I am grateful you approved my visa.”

Through an interpreter, Mr. Faiz and I discussed what I was interested in seeing in Kabul. He showered me with questions about my background and intentions, each one eliciting a purposeful response from me. I thought I had won him over.

“I want you to move from where you are staying at the Associated Press house,” he said, “to the Intercontinental Hotel.”

 • • • 

T
HE INFAMOUS
I
NTERCONTINENTAL
was where most foreign correspondents met their dreaded fate: isolation and scrutiny by loitering and watchful Talibs who gathered in front of the hotel. High on a hill overlooking the city, the Intercontinental was the one hotel still functioning in the city, and the Foreign Ministry racked up large sums of money from the few foreigners, many of them journalists, who passed through Kabul and were sent there.

The lights flickered and the lobby remained dark most of the time. The elevator did not run during the day. A chipped enamel plaque announced the directions to the pool and the spa—a harsh joke for those who remembered a time when visitors could actually wear bathing suits. Stores sat eternally locked in the lobby, their interiors lined with dust. Half the hotel had been destroyed by repeated rocket attacks during fighting between mujahideen factions, leaving one side partially collapsed, though no one paid attention to the rubble. Only the bookstore and a restaurant stayed open to serve the few guests. There wasn’t a single other guest while I was there.

I browsed the bookstore and found a tattered 1970s edition of Ernest Hemingway’s
Islands in the Stream
, George Orwell’s Penguin Classics, inaccurate histories of Afghanistan, and glowing chronicles of the Taliban movement. There were a couple of discarded books from departing guests in German, French, Italian, and Russian, along with a few English-Urdu and “Learn Dari in a Day” handbooks for ambitious journalists who thought they might actually get that much access to local Afghans without a guide. Later the same bookseller grew confident with me and offered up an entire selection of books banned by the Taliban—his secret stash.

I returned to my room, disheartened by the prospect of reading as my sole option to pass the time until I fell sleep. Everything was silent. I took off my clothes and stood naked on the balcony of my lonely room, under the stars. A woman. Naked. Outside. Under the Taliban. Definitely grounds for a public execution at the soccer stadium on a Friday. But I couldn’t resist. The air was chilly. We were hours deep into the public curfew across the city, and people were at home, asleep, dreaming of or dreading sunrise.

I crawled into bed and stared at my meager collection of books.

 • • • 

O
VER THE NEXT WEEK
I managed to visit a women’s hospital and a neighborhood bombed out by the Soviets and widows begging for money on the street. I shot fully clothed women in labor hitched up on rusting old-fashioned gynecological chairs, and Afghans traipsing through the postwar rubble. When I stopped the car where begging widows crouched all day, they got up and swarmed the window, thinking I had money. Dirt and poverty had faded their brilliant blue burqas into a sad powdery gray.