Straddling the Cultural Fault Lines

East of New York, West of Kabul

By Tamim Ansary

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

293 pages, US$ 22

ISBN 0-374-28757-0

It was in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 9/11 that an obscure Afghan-American writer from California penned down an e-mail to his twenty odd friends. In the e-mail he poured out his heart and his emotions about the utter insanity of the barbaric act and the mindset of those who perpetrated it. Like a rapidly spreading forest fire the simple e-mail bounced back and forth across the globe between friends and friends of the friends. What started out as an emotional response to a terrorist act has now resulted in an absorbing and fascinating autobiography.

Tamim Ansary grew up in the pre-revolution Afghanistan in the sixties. His father, an academic, while studying in the US had married an American girl and returned to Afghanistan to an uncertain future. The rules excluded such people from jobs both in the government and the university.

Ansary and his sister lived in a hybrid American and Afghan cultural-mix. This book is as much the narrative of the author’s life as it is an effort on his part to peel away the layers of his complex persona that is not at ease in either culture. While straddling two diverse worlds he, in the end, seems to opt for the one that is not Afghan. The process is not easy or comfortable but the author narrates the story with sensitivity and clarity.

The story starts in the posh Wazir Khan neighborhood in Kabul where the large Ansary clan lived a life of privilege in the upper crust of Afghan society. While the government and academic circles shunned his father, the family accepted his American mother as an honored member in the clan.

The father’s fortunes changed when the government, in response to many young Afghans coming home from abroad with foreign wives, changed the law. This permitted his father to land a government job as head of a huge hydroelectric project on the Helmand River in the north of the country. It was there living in the artificial surroundings of an American colony that his Afghan and American identities clashed. Those experiences would stay with him and shape his life as he made his way to America at age sixteen to finish high school. The rest of the family followed him to America.

The identity crises - an Afghan Muslim versus an American secular - is the central theme of the rest of the book. This carries him on his journey of self-discovery to the Middle East and Africa in search of the religious underpinning of his Afghan persona. During this quest from Egypt to Morocco to Algeria all he discovered was the same parroting of the old religious texts, bizarre twisting of the sacred literature and an uninhibited desire on the part of many otherwise pious and sincere men to convert him to their version of a true faith. Here one finds echoes of the East Indian writer V. S. Naipal when he wrote about his observations in his 1980 book ‘Among the Believers.’ Towards the end of the book, Ansary seems to have abandoned his Afghan Muslim identity in favor of an American secular one but still he leaves the door between the two extremes a little ajar.

His two siblings were spared those crises. The sister cast aside her

Afghan cultural-religious identity and transformed herself completely into a westernized academic. His younger brother went diametrically in the opposite direction to become an orthodox Muslim in the same mold that gave shape to the Taliban and militant Islam. The father who had opted to return to Afghanistan died in Kabul while still trying to be a good Afghan and an enlightened Muslim. The mother lives a lonely life of a schoolteacher in Virginia.

The clash of diagrammatically opposite cultures often leaves much turmoil in its wake. In this story everyone lost some parts of their identity. Somewhere along the way the most precious of the Afghan tradition of honor and pride (nang-o-namoos) was cast aside for the convenience of American secularism with all the mythical ambiguity of a cultural chimera. It is indeed hard for divided souls to continue to straddle cultural fault line.

The story that Tamim Ansary narrates is, in many ways, the story of immigrant experience in this country and elsewhere in this world. However, he tells his story convincingly and with considerable sensitivity and flare.