West of Kabul, East of New York

An Afghan American Story

Growing up bicultural is like straddling a crack in the Earth, especially when the two cultures are as vastly disparate as America and Afghanistan. The memoir is an account of just such a life. My father was an Afghan who was sent to the United States to study in the 1930s. My mother was the girl he met and married there in Chicago, the first American woman to live in Afghanistan as an Afghan. I was born in Kabul in 1948, the second of three children, and we lived in Afghanistan until 1964. I was 16 when I won a scholarship to a high school in Colorado and came to this country to study. My mother, sister, and brother moved at the same time, but my father stayed behind in Afghanistan, and except for a brief stint as press attache at the Afghan embassy in Washington D.C., there he remained until he died.

Here I depict the world in which I grew up, a complex private world of Afghan family life, one never seen by outsiders. Here too I tell the story of moving to San Francisco, and then launching on a journey to the Islamic world, just as the Iranian revolution erupted, Khomeini’s minions took American embassy personnel hostage, and the world east of Morocco went up in flames. Here too I tell the story of Afghan expatriates in America after the Soviet invasion of their country, a community sustained by the dream of returning to Afghanistan– until the dream was dashed, by Soviet bombs, by a civil war that followed their departure, and finally by the rise of the Taliban. West of Kabul is my account of the struggle to reconcile two great civilizations and to find some point in the imagination where they might meet.

The New York Times says…

In the weeks after Sept. 11, when the television screens were filled with the certainties and chiseled uncertainties of the talking heads, a round-featured and bespectacled head would occasionally pop up. It did not so much talk as question and remember.

For those moments, Tamim Ansary delivered us from text into context, from crisis into history, from isolation into geography, from a worid shattered to one that, having lived through millennia of shatterings, stays mournfully round, and around.

Born and brought up an Afghan, he could tell of a country that was something other than a cause and a target. A longtime American, he could speak to a country that never thought much about anywhere else, until anywhere else flattened part of Manhattan. His college basketball coach, observing an oddly inflected movement or two, once demanded: “Where have you been all your life, Afghanistan?” Having thought to suggest the figurative moon or ultima Thule, the coach was taken aback to hear: “Yes.”

Ansary, a California writer and editor, has put this and much else into “West of Kabul, East of New York,” a book that steadies our skittering compass. Pointing east and west it signals not galactic opposites but two ends of a needle we can hold in our hand. Ansary loathes Osama bin Laden and fears what he stands for, something lucidly set out at the end. But it is part of himself that our bombs hit, as well. No windy feeling, this, but as homely as his reaction to a talk-show caller who suggested nuking:

“I saw my grandmother K’Koh, elfin soul of the Ansary family. Oh, she died long ago, but in my mind she died again that day, as I pictured the rainfall of bombs that would be coming.”

“West of Kabul” is Ansary’s effort to ponder and set down what he had improvised in those post-September television interviews: “The dissonance between the worid I am living in now and the world I left behind.”

It speaks with modesty of tone and is all the more resonant for that reason; it searches by sifting. Its unforced findings are at times inconclusive, and glitter at times.

The beginning depicts Tamim’s fIrst 16 years, spent in the Afghanistan of the 1950s where his father, member of a distinguished family, was a poet and literature professor and later a government official. He’d met Tamim’s Finnish-American mother while studying in Chicago and taken her back to live in the Ansary family compound in Kabul.

The second part tells of Tamim’s move with his mother and sister to the United States in 1964, of his counterculture years at Reed College in Oregon, and of settling down as an editor in San Francisco, and marrying.

In the eariy I 980s the Iran revolution awoke memories of his Islamic childhood; he

took a kind of roots-seeking trip through North Africa and Turkey, talking to fundamentalists and painfully discovering how alien they were, not just to his adult American life but also to the Islam he remembered from prewar Afghanistan.

Perhaps it is the childhood memories that are most revealing; Ansary, who can be rather flat writing about the United States, makes the lost ways of the Ansary compound magically familiar. He evokes a virtually medieval Kabul: unpaved roads, little electricity, no running water. No garbage service because – ecologist’s dream -“we didn’t produce any garbage.”

He writes of religion unforcedly practiced: prayers by most, kneeling and facing Mecca-ward in the common room, while a few quietly occupied themselves otherwise.

It was a very different Islam, rigid and punitive, that he encountered later, in his travels. He writes suggestively and with alarmed understanding of the radical fundamentalists he talked to (among them his brother, now estranged). In the Taliban followers he sees a generation of displaced children, their zeal armed and instructed in the Pakistan refugee camps and untempered by the social context of the prewar Afghanistan they never knew.

It is not Islam that is the threat, he writes, but Islam deracinated by poverty, war, and social and economic displacement, and finding its strength and justification in a Manichaean view of history.

Once out of his teens, the half-American boy couldn’t wait to shake the venerable golden dust off his feet and get to the United States. He is firmly planted there, but in one respect he grows a little higher than the rest of us. His book sees things we cannot make out, and need to.

Reviewed by Richard Eder

The Seattle Weekly says…

… I never encountered Ansary’s talking head during his moment in the spotlight. To judge from West of Kabul, East of New York, he must have disappointed interviewers looking for either grand generalities or emotional raw meat. Everything about the book is modest: its length, its structure, its tone. Ansary’s authorial voice is so unemphatic, so over-a-beer conversational that you’re surprised to find tears rising or rage beginning to choke you as you learn about the interminable geopolitical catastrophe that is the author’s birthplace.

Ansary’s strategy is as simple as it is rare. He speaks of the world and its grand events entirely through the spectrum of his own experience. He doesn’t lecture us on Afghan history; he tells us as he learned it, growing up among the poor but privileged half-Westernized elite of royal Kabul in the early years of the Cold War. He doesn’t analyze the Afghan clan system or the intricate patterns of class, wealth, and sex that underpin it. He introduces us to the whole, huge, turbulent Ansary family: poor, proud, poetry-spouting descendants of the first followers of the Prophet himself, surrounded by their innumerable wives and children and servants and poor relations.

… The first of the three parts of Ansary’s book ends with the family–sans father–departing for the U.S., permanently as it turned out. Fourteen years of Americanization, deracination, and happy countercultural living followed before Ansary ever met another Afghan or spoke a word of Farsi. Then a chance assignment from the left-wing Pacific News Service took him on an awful journey across North Africa that prepared him unwittingly to understand, as few Americans can, what motivates the radical Islamists who form the ranks of Palestine’s suicide squads, medievalizing fascists like the Taliban, and the mad but practical ideologues of Al Qaeda.

Among their uncounted number was and is Ansary’s younger brother. And it’s that agonizing connection that renders Ansary’s life, dead ends and all, ideal material to introduce previously immune Americans to how it feels to be a target of the world historical process. West of Kabul, East of New York is one of those rare pieces of journalism–Rebecca West’s dispatches from Nuremberg come to mind, and John Hersey’s Hiroshima–that don’t just record history but make it.

Reviewed by Roger Downey