BOOKS
Afghan American author's take on Sept. 11 touches many
By Deborah Kong
Associated Press
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| Afghan American writer Tamim Ansary responded to Sept. 11 with a widely circulated e-mail and expanded on his dispatch with a memoir.
Associated Press • • • "West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story" by Tamim Ansary, Farrar, $22. |
SAN FRANCISCO — A day after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, writer Tamim Ansary — like many other Americans — listened to talk radio. He heard callers advocate bombing his homeland "back to the Stone Age."
Ansary hadn't seen Afghanistan, the country in which he was born, in more than 35 years. But the ghosts of his family stirred to life.
Too shy to respond on the radio, he typed an emotional e-mail describing the plight of Afghans: "When you think 'Taliban,' think 'Nazis,' " he wrote. "When you think 'the people of Afghanistan,' think 'the Jews in the concentration camps.' "
He sent the e-mail to about 20 friends, who forwarded it to their friends, who in turn passed it onto others. Suddenly, Ansary found himself an unofficial spokesman for Afghans, "putting 'World News Tonight' on hold to take a call from Oprah Winfrey's people."
He expands on his electronic dispatch in a recently published memoir, "West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story." In it, Ansary, 53, recalls growing up in Afghanistan, the son of a secular, Finnish American mother and a Muslim Afghan father.
Ansary still straddles the two cultures. He reacted, for example, to the terrorist attacks and military action as both an American and as an Afghan.
"I'm an American, and it was devastating to think of that happening to people who look and act and feel, have a culture like you," Ansary said in an interview at his San Francisco home. With the Afghans, "I knew who these people were. They were human beings to me."
When he was 16, Ansary moved to the United States to attend Colorado Rocky Mountain School. In his early 30s, he traveled to Asia to explore his Muslim roots. When he returned, he built a career for himself writing and editing children's books from his San Francisco basement office.
As Ansary settled into his American life with his wife, Debby, and their two daughters, Jessamyn, 19, and Elina, 11, Afghanistan receded from his consciousness.
All that changed after his missive landed in the inboxes of countless strangers — from a conservative Christian woman in Tennessee to anti-war activists to the man who told him his fingers should be broken after writing such an e-mail.
"Afghans in Afghanistan don't know who I am, and hadn't heard of me, but I'm speaking for them," Ansary said, by emphasizing in the e-mail that the Taliban and Osama bin Laden were not Afghanistan.
In his book, Ansary recalls life in Kabul behind the walls of the clan compound, surrounded by the warmth of his extended family. Instead of television, elders entertained youngsters with genealogy tales.
"Islam permeated the life of the compound like the custard that binds a casserole together," Ansary writes. "Yes, I learned to say my prayers from my Afghan grandmother; yes, I know the flavor of sundown on the first day of Ramadan," the Muslim holy month.
More than a decade after he left Afghanistan, Ansary traveled to North Africa and Asia researching a story on Islam and, as a "lapsed Muslim," searching for his roots. In Morocco, Algeria and Turkey, he spoke with Muslims who believed in a strict interpretation of Islam. Many expressed contempt for practices such as drinking alcohol and wearing short skirts, he writes.
But his efforts to understand Islam became more personal when his younger brother traveled to Pakistan — "a longhaired, intellectual college guy, serious about art, serious about environmental issues" and returned, embracing "an orthodox interpretation of Islam," Ansary writes.
The brothers argued about one another's beliefs in the early 1980s. Since that fight, "Riaz has often used the word 'brother,' " Ansary writes, "but never again in reference to me."
Ansary hoped to return to Afghanistan in February to deliver blankets and clothing to Afghan refugees, but he was only able to make it to neighboring Pakistan. Undaunted, he plans a trip to Kabul this summer.
When he visited the refugee camps outside of Peshawar, he found the area mostly populated by Afghans. It was "familiar in a way that was almost startling," said Ansary, a bespectacled, gently humorous man. "Although it was so different from this world, San Francisco, even after 36 years — it was like your eyes were getting used to the dark. Almost immediately it seemed ordinary to me."
At one camp, a young boy dressed in rags told Ansary his mother and father had just been killed. "I had to turn away because tears were coming from my eyes," the author said. "You could not do anything."
Since his widely read e-mail, Ansary has continued to write in the hopes that Afghanistan and its people will not be forgotten.
"The world should stick around and be compassionate and help Afghans out," he said.
