Gauhar uses the captive narrator’s journal -- ostensibly kept to fight the loneliness of imprisonment -- as a literary device with which to draw in the reader. It is not a particularly unique approach, but it works remarkably well in No Space. The journal is simple, sometimes poetic and almost always haunting. The gravity and cliché of war are subtly conveyed through the myriad lives within the asylum. The personal stories together provide a reflection of the collective complicity so often present in the perpetuation of violence. The inmates’ tales of displacement (including the U.S. medic’s own) mirror the dislocation of oppressed and war-stricken people in Afghanistan and, indeed, throughout history.
Readers are asked to empathize with the narrator as he strives to cope with his dire circumstances; the irony is almost heavy-handed. For it is the American “liberator” who is confined within “a tomb for the living.” We find out that the medic aspired to be a writer before he was sent to Afghanistan; but in recounting the miseries of war, he loses the ability to truly communicate. Instead, his language is the language of the asylum, a language that cuts across nationality and culture. Gauhar’s novel indeed has an element of magical realism, for the ability of people to understand their suffering signifies the characters’ ultimate humanity.
Yet there is also a darker message here – one that insists humanity is unable to heal itself. From the colonial Great Game in Afghanistan to the brutalities of the Cold War, violence seeps into the collective conscience through generations, eventually becoming a part of Reality. It is a curse endemic to the human condition, Gauhar stresses. It does not matter if you are an external or an internal victim.
If anything, No Space is too heavy. By book’s end, it has been hammered in that war has no victors; there is only a destroyed country and its people who have withstood the madness of it all. Still, Gauhar and her novel step out of cliché and articulate a global voice. In the age of the constructed “Islamic Threat,” the novel deftly attacks the myth. War, violence and suffering in Afghanistan have had little to do with Islam. Even the “victor” is in effect a victim, and the narrator’s predicament becomes a metaphor for all that Afghanistan and a war-ravaged world stand for.
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