Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

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.

JAPAN

Museum without Walls

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.