Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (41 page)

For family reasons, Ghaznavi could not flee Afghanistan during
the Taliban rule. Life was incredibly difficult for anyone whose whole life was music, and he became depressed because of unsatisfied yearnings. He went to a doctor and said he would go crazy without music in his life. The doctor suggested that he listen to the one kind of song that even the Taliban couldn’t make illegal. So he bought his first birds and fell in love with them. He now has more than fifty pigeons in a coop behind his house. When I called on him one afternoon, I was ushered into his light-purple living room to sit cross-legged on the floor and eat candy while Ghaznavi and a friend tried out some new harmoniums they had just acquired. The sound of the multiple harmoniums playing in this lavender room in which many pigeons were flying around was surreal, and the weirdness was not mitigated by the presence of Ghaznavi’s son, the all-Afghanistan weight-lifting champion, who sat in his
shalwar kameez
, traditional tunic and trousers, flexing his stupefying biceps when he was not refilling our teacups.

The practice rooms at the television station are always full, despite being unheated and without amenities. When I went there the first time, Ghaznavi directed me to some particularly talented musicians. A few had recently returned from Pakistan and Iran, but others had spent the Taliban years in Kabul. One, Abdul Rashin Mashinee, caught by the Taliban playing a sarinda, was told that they would cut off his hands if they ever found him playing again. He spent the dark years working as a butcher, but, he says, “I practiced my instrument diligently, every night in my dreams.”

The group kept breaking off to apologize to me for the cold and for not having their full ensemble present. “There should be eleven of us, not six,” they said. They said that I seemed to appreciate music, and wondered if they could find their friends and get together so I could hear them all. I said I’d be delighted and invited them to my place for the next afternoon at five.

My Dinner in Kabul

I was living for the time being in an old al-Qaeda house that some friends had rented in the fashionable Wazir Akbar Khan area, where we had full-time
translators and drivers. I had heard that we would have a cook, but dinner my first night in Kabul was a lovely surprise. We had spicy little meatballs in rich sauce, a wonderful rice dish, crisp fried potato cakes, and fresh Afghan bread. When I expressed astonishment, a friend explained that we had nabbed the best chef in Kabul, and that everyone who came to dinner at our house tried to poach him away. Qudratullah arrived every day at 7:00 a.m. to make us breakfast, produced a hot lunch for us at midday, and prepared dinner for us every night.

One wonder of wintertime Kabul was the markets. In this ruined city, the stalls, surrounded by Taliban-era graffiti on bullet-pocked walls, held a profusion of local foodstuffs: pomegranates and oranges, all sorts of nuts and dried fruits, fresh meat (sometimes disorientingly fresh), spices and grains in sacks, a lot of cauliflower, the largest and most vividly colored carrots I’ve ever seen (some nearly purple), eggplants, onions, potatoes, and different kinds of sweets. While the greatest assortment could be found in the food bazaar near the river, I saw rich displays even in the poorest neighborhoods. People had no electricity, no plumbing, no heating, sometimes no roof, but they had food. Qudratullah was able to get the best ingredients, and when friends would stop by, there was always enough to eat; he had an Afghan capacity to expand meals to accommodate whoever came. So it seemed natural when I’d invited the musicians over to offer them dinner at our house, where we had not only excellent food, but also that rarer Kabul commodity, heat—in this case, from a woodstove.

I had stopped by UNESCO that day and met with its living-culture expert, who was planning a music festival but had yet to meet any musicians, so I invited him to our concert. I checked in with Marla Ruzicka, the blonde liberal who was staying at the Agence France-Presse house, and I invited her and her translator, who had done a favor for me the day before. I invited all the people who worked at our house—translators, guards, and so on. Scott Johnson of
Newsweek
said he thought Antonia Rados from German TV might like to come, and I was pleased. When some people from the
Washington Post
stopped by, we thought it would be a mistake not to include them. I invited a filmmaker I’d interviewed the day before. And so the numbers began to creep up.

When I told Qudratullah we had company coming, he said he’d need some extra money to buy food and some more extra money to buy plates and a bit of further extra money to get someone in to help in the kitchen. I said I thought there would be about thirty of us, and he asked for $200.

My estimate, it turned out, was wildly off. Between the musicians and the house staff and some other people we’d met, we had a good twenty or so Afghans, and the foreigners had all brought friends. By the time we had dinner at about seven thirty, there were between fifty and sixty people. Qudratullah, praise be upon him, produced enough food so that all were fed. We had
qabili pilau
, Afghanistan’s national dish, a sweet rice pilaf; roast leg of mutton, cooked until it was falling off the bone; roast chicken;
borani
, a flavorful eggplant dish made with yogurt and garlic;
sabzi qorma
, an Iranian dish of meat stewed with spinach; salad; and
firni
, an Afghan pudding made with cornstarch. Of course we had flat Afghan bread.

My plan had been to hear the musicians for an hour or so, but they were so happy to have an occasion and an audience that they played on and on and on. We all danced to this exotic music and ate and danced and ate. Ghaznavi sang for us. In Afghanistan, women and men don’t socialize together; even at a wedding, women and men celebrate in separate halls. Our Afghan guests, all men, showed us how they dance in a circle. The Westerners joined in, and showed the Afghans how Western men and women dance together. The music got more and more exuberant.

“My goodness,” said the UNESCO operative. “There
is
music in Afghanistan after all. I will have a festival, I will!”

“Why not eat more? There is more!” said my translator, Farouq Samim. “Let’s eat until every plate is clean!”

“Do you think this is getting out of control?” asked Scott Johnson, who had official responsibility for the house. I had to admit it was.

At nine o’clock, someone showed up with a bottle of whiskey, which in a Muslim country, where the law forbids alcohol, was the equivalent of showing up with pot at an American party. There was a lot of giggling, and a few of the Afghans made rapid progress toward inebriation. The next morning, I was to teach Farouq the word
hangover
.

Kabul has a 10:00 p.m. curfew, so the party guests began filing out at nine thirty, but the musicians lived too far away to make the curfew and so stayed over. They played and played, and at 2:00 a.m. we were all still sitting together, and the sitar and the tabla were diverting us with gentle, lyrical late-night music. The brief performance we’d planned went on for more than ten hours.

Under the Taliban or during the first phase of the American-led invasion, it would have been unthinkable to throw a party in Kabul. The situation was sober and sad. But though the city bears the terrible scars of its recent history, it is full of people longing, at last, for a little bit of pleasure. Afghan hospitality is legendary, and one thing that was painful to many Afghans about their country at war was that they had no opportunity to extend their hospitality to foreigners. I went to Afghanistan ready for hardship, and I did see horrible things. But I also felt a warmth and a sense of pride that lay not only in the reform of government but also in the return to small satisfactions, so long denied, now so easily and openly and generously shared. There is a kind of joy that can be known only by people who have grieved deeply; happiness is not only a quality of its own but also an effect of contrast. The Afghans were so pleased that we liked their food and music; it seemed that we were accomplishing a diplomatic purpose simply by sharing
pilau
and
borani
, by dancing together to the sarinda and the
rabab
and the
richak
. Our evening was in its own way as ecstatic as the Sufi ceremony. Every note was swollen with fulfilled longing. I have never heard anything else like it.

Innumerable Afghan and some twenty-five hundred American lives have been lost and hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent in the Afghan War. At this writing, nearly ten thousand American troops remain on Afghan soil. Dominic Tierney wrote in the
Atlantic
in 2015, “The popular narrative was once about saving Afghans. Now the focus is on getting American soldiers home, and Afghans have disappeared from the story.” That abandonment is cruelly felt in Kabul. When I recently saw Farouq, we talked about our experiences
in 2002, and he said, “Yes, you were there in those beautiful days—in the time of hope. All of that is gone now.”

Zakia Zaki and Sanga Amach, television journalists, and Shaima Rezayee, a music video show host, are among the female artists murdered because they appeared on television, hoping to liberalize attitudes toward women. When the performance artist Kubra Khademi strolled through Kabul in a suit of armor with exaggerated breasts and buttocks, she received death threats and had to go into hiding. Some women artists have fled the country. But many others have been emboldened. In 2006, several women artists founded the Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan. Munera Yousefzada, who founded Shamama Contemporary Arts Gallery in Kabul, said, “Before I opened the gallery, I felt like I was trapped at the bottom of a well and nobody could hear my screams. Now they can hear me, and they can hear the other women whose paintings hang on the walls.”

In parallel, Turquoise Mountain was established to revive traditional crafts such as woodworking, calligraphy, miniature painting, ceramics, jewelry, and gem-cutting. Berang Arts was founded in 2009 by participants in the first Afghan Contemporary Art Prize competition to support contemporary artists in Kabul; they transformed a Kabul apartment into a contemporary arts center. Professor Alam Farhad, director of fine arts at Kabul University, said that in 2001 his department had eight students; it now has over seven hundred and has to turn away applicants. The artists grapple with complex questions of identity. One, Ali Akhlaqi, said, “In my opinion, Kabul is a cursed city of night, which has no comfort, and its day enjoys no light. There is nothing real here.” But Shamsia Hassani, a graffiti artist who often paints on semidestroyed buildings in land mine–infested neighborhoods, described Afghanistan as a “newborn baby” and said, “I want to color over the bad memories of war on the walls and erase war from people’s minds.” Azim Fakhri said simply, “My feeling is accept what you can’t change, but change what you can’t accept.” Kabir Mokamel has made an “artlords” project (the name is a play on “warlords”) and paints on the barricades outside government buildings in Kabul. In 2015, he put a gigantic
pair of eyes on the walls that surround the National Directorate of Security, to remind government agents that they, too, were being watched.

Marla Ruzicka, who did such brave work for disenfranchised people and who was my friend, founded the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), then died in a suicide car bombing on the Baghdad Airport Road in 2005.

Travel + Leisure
, June 2002

By the time I traveled to Benesse Island, I had chronicled the infiltration of Asian art into Western consciousness. If Americans and Europeans had begun to appreciate contemporary Chinese art, how would people in the Far East make sense of the art being produced in the West? They had acknowledged our influence sooner than we’d acknowledged theirs, but there were sure to be issues of translation in either context.

M
odern art has its pilgrims. As soon as I could, I went to Bilbao to see Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim. I have driven across the desert to visit the Chinati Foundation, set up by Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas, and I have even dragged myself to Târgu Jiu in southern Romania to see Brâncuşi’s
Endless Column
. I hope to visit Roden Crater in Arizona, where the light and space artist James Turrell has spent more than twenty years transforming a natural volcano. My most recent such voyage was to Benesse House on Naoshima Island, a spectacular art complex in southern Japan that seems to invite intellectuals on honeymoon, Zen souls seeking tranquil inspiration, and passionate idealists ready for a moment’s quiescence.

To get there, you take a train from any southern Japanese city to the Inland Sea and then board the ferry that plies an archipelago
known as the “thousand islands.” This is some of the least developed land in Japan; fishermen live the same way they have lived for hundreds of years—rowing out each morning to try their luck, worshipping at unremarkable yet lovely shrines (which I could see from the ferry’s deck), hanging out their nets to dry overnight.

After about an hour, we reached the island of Naoshima and the simple village of Honmura, where we were met by a driver from Benesse House. As we traversed the island’s scrubby landscape, it was hard not to notice here and there some strangely anomalous things: a gigantic fiberglass pumpkin at the end of a dock, or a forest of carved rocks surrounding a hot tub, or a sort of enormous salad bowl on a brick plinth down by the sea. We ascended a steep incline to find a building so cleverly integrated into the landscape that one could drive by without seeing it. This is Benesse House, the center of the Benesse Island complex, and home to one of the world’s great private art collections.

Tetsuhiko Fukutake, head of Benesse Corporation, a large textbook-publishing company, fantasized about building a museum where he could share his collection with people who genuinely wanted to experience it—but he did not like crowds or ostentation. So he came up with the implausible idea of building his museum on an island in the Inland Sea. After his death in 1986, his son set up a campground furnished with yurts, which is still in use, and recruited one of Japan’s leading architects, Tadao Ando, to design a museum that would incorporate ten guest rooms. Ando visited in the rain, fell in love with the site, and set to work, half carving and half constructing the building into the face of the island. In 1992, the doors of Benesse House opened, and in 1995, the Annex, with an additional six rooms, was completed.