Decades of imperialism have left Afghanistan and its people devastated. But the fall of the Taliban and the much touted “liberation” of Afghanistan has produced a new spate of novels, films and other artistic media dealing with the “Afghan victim.”
And when I say “Afghan victim,” I mean a nauseating overdose of burqa-oppression, Taliban brutality and other “Oriental” tragedies. Not only are these subjects sexy -- they tie into the global imperatives of terror and Islamism -- but they also artfully exonerate the “aggressor,” whether it is the Soviets, U.S. imperialism or NATO. As such, the bulk of this new subgenre of fiction addresses the Western, English-speaking world; writing about reluctant and not-so-reluctant fundamentalists sells “Over There.” Meanwhile, literature is turning into a grand extravaganza of marketing, prizes, commoditization and short-lived shelf lives.
Feryal Ali Gauhar’s second novel, No Space for Further Burials, attempts to break free of many of these stereotypes. A trained economist, filmmaker and former UN Goodwill Ambassador, Gauhar opts to publish her book in India , not a Western outlet. More importantly, No Space inverts the oft-hackneyed themes of displacement, war, America and the suffering Afghans, ultimately treating these grim motifs by focusing on the sanity -- and insanity -- implicit within personal narrative.
Gauhar’s protagonist (and narrator) is not the radical Muslim torn with existential dilemmas, as might typically be expected. Rather, he is a small town U.S. army medical technician who has been captured by Afghan rebels and locked up in a local insane asylum. The asylum is a microcosm of Afghanistan itself.
It is September 2002, one year after 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The narrator, an American who like millions of others has been disempowered by the war machine, has no particular ideological pretences about the war for “freedom.” As his captivity drags on, he realizes the word means nothing to him at all. “No one knows which is outside and which is inside, sister. No one knows which is the earth and which is the sky,” the narrator tells a woman at one point.
When the novel begins, the reader is given no hints as to who the asylum inmates are. Refugees or derelicts, fugitives or simple folks declared insane, we don’t know. All that is certain is that the asylum has imbued upon its tenants a constant state of loss – their personal, civic, and political lives have all been violated. As the story progresses, we find out how each inmate has landed in this dilapidated, sub-human institution, which acts both as a clever device to keep the plot and action taut and a comment on the sheer lunacy of the world and Afghanistan’s place within it.
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