Travel: Afghanistan, always

From The Australian:

This is an edited extract from The Honey Thief by Najaf Mazari and Robert Hillman (Wild Dingo Press, $24.95).

IN my country of Afghanistan, everything is arranged in such a way that your heart is broken again and again.

It is not only wars that break your heart; it is the arguments that last a thousand years, the age-old jealousies and, of course, the poverty.

Not that Afghanistan is without beauty; not at all. I could take you to places in the north close to the Oxus River that would steal your breath away; places that you would not believe could exist as I lead you through an arid landscape of broken rock and red sand and stunted bushes.

Then you would suddenly find yourself gazing down from a mountain pass on the river shining under a blue sky and a green carpet climbing up the slopes. And you would think, "Ah! This is paradise!" I could take you to Faryab in the spring; to the plain of Dasht-e-Laili and show you wildflowers of a hundred colours spread so densely over the sand that it would only be the giant dunes rising above the flowers that would make you believe this was a desert.

Or I could take you to Kandahar in the early morning, approaching the city from the west, and the sky would be so broad above us and the air so crisp that you would believe what I had whispered to you: that the walls of mud-brick coming into view were built only a generation after Adam and Eve left Eden.

I could show you many other types of beauty: the smiles and laughter of children who might have little to smile about, nothing to laugh about; the courage of women who gather their children about them and teach them what they will need to know in life, even when the rice bag is all but empty and the sheep are bleating in hunger.

I could show you 500 feasting at a wedding in Mazar-e-Sharif, toasting the groom, singing in praise of the bride, and not one of the 500 confident of lasting through a further year of war.

We are a people who should never have survived our history of 5000 years; we are a people who should no longer exist.

And yet we do, and there is beauty in that fact alone.

Most importantly, what of the mystery of our Afghanistan? Is there not great beauty in the mystery? For we are a very mysterious people, we Afghans.

We come from the long ago, our roots go down so deep in the sand and soil and rock that we can be said to be as much a part of the land as the gundy trees and marsot bushes; we are both wild and gentle, full of anger and full of love.

This is where the world began, in Afghanistan. The world of townships, at least, and I say it was an Afghan who first put brick on brick, and an Afghan who first sowed soil with wheat.

But when you are an Afghan, you want your land to flourish, and instead you are faced with arrangements designed to break your heart. I am about to speak of the food of Afghanistan, and since food comes from the land, let me first speak about land. Few Afghans own any land, or few as a proportion of the total. Most farmers are what we call gharibkar, or sharecroppers, who are permitted to cultivate a few jeribs that are owned by another, keeping one-fifth of what they produce. Another type of sharecropper, a baz kar, may be allowed to keep one quarter of his crop by a more generous bai, or landlord.

A tenant farmer of another sort, a khistmand, keeps 50 per cent of his crop but has to provide the seed, the oxen, the plough and, of course, all of the labour. Many landowners in Afghanistan have never laid eyes on the soil they own. The land came to them as gifts from powerful people or as rewards for deeds done. Their land is handled by an agent, while the owners sometimes live far away.

Oh, the oxen and the plough. Afghanistan is a country in which the most up-to-date weapons have been employed over the past 30 years by the Soviet Union and by the US; weapons worth billions of dollars. Aerial bombardment in some provinces has created huge craters in the soil.

But in 1990 in Faryab province, to single out just one region, the soil of the fields was turned by the oxen and the plough, and by one tractor. One tractor in the entire province. The cost of a single 2000kg bomb of the type dropped on Herat and its outskirts in 1984 -- and hundreds of such bombs were dropped on Herat -- would have paid for nine tractors, while the total cost of aerial bombardment over the period of the war against the Soviets could have provided 800 tractors for every province in Afghanistan.

Do you see what I mean about heartbreak? No nation on earth knows more about modern munitions than Afghanistan. And hardly any nation knows less about modern farming practices.

I am a man who hates waste in all its forms: the waste of soil that is turned not by ploughs but by bombs, the waste of clean water polluted by dead bodies, the waste of energy in murderous bickering.

The most frustrating thing of all for me is knowing what plenty the soil of Afghanistan can produce when it is given the chance. Our fruits are among the finest grown anywhere on earth, our grains are full of sunshine, our vegetables grow plump to the point of bursting. The 7 per cent of land in which things can grow in Afghanistan could feed the population many times over and still leave surplus to sell overseas. And is that not the first task of any nation's people: to grow the food that feeds them?

It is the eggplant that the Hazara praise; that all Afghans praise; or the tomato, the potato, the pomegranate, not so much the dishes that employ them. If a woman of a village in the Hazarajat is able to prepare delicious badenjan, she will be congratulated, of course, but the eggplant that forms the basis of badenjan will be considered to have made the greater contribution to the success of the dish.

When I eat badenjan, I do not pay my wife the sorts of compliments you hear on television cooking programs. Instead, I congratulate her on a successful visit to the market and on having a good eye for eggplant.

OK, for her cooking too, but in few words.

Let me explain. In the West, cooking is spoken of as an art, and art itself is considered something borrowed from God. But it is different among the people of my faith. For us, art is something people do. It has nothing to do with God, who may watch and applaud but does not whisper suggestions into the ear of the artist. God made the eggplant, God made the capsicum, God made the plump ear of corn. What act of creation by a man can compare with the creation of the eggplant?

The eggplant in its beauty is but one of a billion of God's creations. This is a world of such beauty and such diversity that God can well leave to us what we call art, including the art of cooking.

Article found here:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/travel/afghanistan-always/story-e6frg8rf-1226131233831

Any thoughts?