There is a game I played as a youngster with the boys in the schoolyard, and later as a counselor in group homes. This is the game where you put your hands out, palms down upon the hands of an opponent. The opponent then tries to slap the top of your hands before you can pull away. This is repeated over and over until you successfully evade getting slapped, at which point you trade positions. There is no scoring or even a designated end to this game. Bloody knuckles, perhaps, especially if someone wears a ring. What is determined is a level of respect. If you repeatedly connect with your target, or conversely evade the slap, you achieve higher honor. In essence there is never anything to lose in this game, but there is always something to gain. I particularly remember some of my tougher opponents, the twelve-year old son of an unemployed logger in Anacortes, Washington, the sixteen-year old son of an imprisoned drug offender in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the fourteen-year old daughter of a single mother dying of AIDS in Bridport, Vermont;
and then came Frishta.
Frishta, (the singing in the shower bumblebee) about four feet tall, eight years old, is devastatingly clever at this game. She is, needless to say, fast. I have attempted to snatch some honor for myself many times, to no avail. She has of late taken pity on me, and no longer demands that I play every time she sees me. Apparently there is a level at which no additional honor can be obtained from a given opponent.
Another game, again universal, is when the child attempts to block the adult from going up a stairway until an imaginary toll is paid. This is problematic in a house with fifty Afghan girls. They stand shoulder to shoulder on the stairs and ask for payola (a word I taught them). Some of the girls, like Khomari, an Uzbek who knows a little karate, I would not describe as dainty. Regardless, they all contain a reckoning level of ferocity inside their delicately wrapped bodies. These stairway blockades are not predictable. Often I encounter one just when I’ve forgotten about its possibility. I have few choices in the matter. Either I try to joke about it, get the kids to laugh, which endears them to me but will not necessarily effect change, or I turn back down the stairs and disarm them with nothing to oppose, which shames all of us. I could become serious and command them to move, but then I’d be like any other authoritative punitive man. I contemplated the situation last night, because this is becoming rather inconvenient. The kids are not interested in any payola, they want to see what I’ll do to get through. So today without thinking I simply lifted Shagufa and carried her up the stairs. Brute, albeit gentle force. She and all the others screamed with amusement. This will of course not solve my problem navigating the stairs, but it certainly achieved a tiny bit of honor.
A third game we play has to do with the use of the word dewana, which means crazy. I believe that their use of the word, up until my arrival, was equivalent to our use of the word deranged. I do not think they have a word for the kind of crazy that is daring and even a little admirable, but short of heroic or brave. In this respect it is similar to the word woman. (With the oppression of women that accompanied the importation of fundamental extremism, the word evaporated. Women were and still are referred to as “mother of a son so-and-so” or “wife of such-and-such a man”.) The girls of Mehan, having caught on to my version of crazy, now lob the word around at every opportunity. The repercussions extend much further than ever would have occurred to me. What I have unleashed through the meaning, use and validation of a single word is their gumption to rebel, to be in effect crazy. Yes to challenge a man, yes to be physical if necessary, to tease, to express defiance, to go around in western clothes, to go without the scarf. Yes to be free.
My memory of childhood is seven-tenths play. Much of it, from the time I could swing a bat to the time I finally made varsity football, was societal and highly organized. Though I value the discipline, competitive cum team spirit I gained from those experiences, it was the camp games that affected me most deeply. Play. The word intimates improvisation, not rigidity of structure. Keep Away was a simple game. Get the ball and run, dodge, jump as long as you can without losing it to someone else. Spider and the Ants, Murder, Wink, Tag, Cowboys and Indians, Chicken Fighting, Snow Ball Fighting, Charades, Fictionary, Hide and Seek, Truth or Dare, 20 Questions, etc. etc. etc. Three months ago, given this history, my entrance into the lives of the Mehan girls might as well have been a direct flight from Mars. It would be easy to say that the absence of play in their early years is a handicap, but I could easily say that the ethos of play has its not so palatable repercussions. In my later teen years I should have died in the wake of my improvised playful spirit. Two of my friends did; one hit a tree head-on with his car, another got wrapped up in a carpet by drug thugs and tossed into the East River. I still tempt the limits of this spirit. Here I am, after all, in Kabul.
I never pursued a career, not like these girls will once they graduate. The world they see is so very different than the world I saw at their age. A career to me meant a ball and chain. To Sosan and Farzana it is saving their people. It was better if I lived an improvised, consequently free life on less money, rather than assure such a life for some day when I supposedly retire. This did not, in my view cancel out the possibility of family. There were plenty of people who shared my idea of the good life. Traveling around with naught but a satchel, homesteading a deserted Alaska island, flitting from coast back to coast, taking the time to build a house with stone, hopping from planes in parachutes and bicycling the maritime, my free-form living built a strong argument. In the end life, or maturity catches up. Where once I may have been the envy of my career born friends, I now envy them more than they would believe.
As a child I was fortunate, as an adult lucky. I’ve seen people in squalor in the streets of Manila, Madras, and Jakarta. I’ve been confronted with the purposely gouged-out eyes of a child begging for pennies. I saw a gypsy woman beaten by a baton wielding policeman in western Russia, girls picking through the dump-heaps left by sex-trade tourists in southern Thailand, and boys playing baseball with a stick and a can in the open sewers of Central America. I made a living for years helping kids who lived in trailers with drunken fathers who spit on them, beat them, raped them, boys and girls. But until I moved into the orphanage, I never truly cared. Empathized, sure. Ached for even. Most effectual was the extent to which I perceived my experience as “real” life, ethical enough to satisfy an ironic need to feel selfless. I was merely building my resume. What about Mehan is pushing me over the fence? I don’t know. I feel it, though.
A friend of mine is now confronted with cancer. I recently wrote her a short note to express my concern. I related to her the effects of exclusively reading Afghan history and Afghan poetry. Woven into the fabric of both is what I perceive to be a strange amalgamation of Lao Tzu-like paradoxical but ultimately peaceful submission to nature (death) and Aristotelian infatuation with man’s potential to submit nature to his will (life). I watched my mother battle cancer. It is a disease that uniquely thrusts a person onto a teeter-totter between both urges. Like their poets the children of Mehan seem not to find one in opposition to the other, but in harmony.
It is as treacherous to attempt a fabrication of this harmony as it is to battle against it. I could sit in a cave and meditate for ten years and come out old and as ignorant as ever. A sage could buy a television, don alligator shoes and fill a liquor cabinet and become enslaved by his controlled environment. The girls here astound me the way they naturally pick up western notions of play, individualism and the belief there is such a thing as an ideal life, without in the process losing their souls. This smacks in the face of a decades-long trend wherein agrarian people throughout the world are losing their children and consequently what is good and sustainable in their cultures to the bright lights and fast money of the cities. The girls here seem to be able to separate out and keep what is sustainable such as an appreciation of beauty, the strength of family and tribal support, rules of hospitality and respect for the elderly, while rejecting what is unsustainable: oppression of women, religious intolerance and an almost superstitious aversion to technology.
I sat down with Farzana and asked her how she felt about leaving for Italy on Tuesday. She will stay with a host family and go to school, maybe for the rest of the year. This will be her third time there. Will she one day leave Afghanistan for good? No, she says. Not a chance. At first I admired her commitment to her homeland, but I was compelled to point out a theme in her book of poems. The various translations of Rumi all agree on one thing; home is not where we are, it is where we are on our way to. It is how, without knowing it, I so quickly fell in with the orphanage, from eating on the floor to living a life restricted in freedom to roam the streets as I please. I had essentially come home the day I first walked through that door, and one day I will get on a plane again, and again I will be going home. Farzana understood exactly what I meant. For me it is a way to be happy. For her and her people it is a way to survive war, displacement, racism and poverty.
Until now I did not realize that to play is not so much about feeling free any more than it is about winning. It is practice in gaining honor, moving beyond obstacles, encouraging a healthy rebelliousness and yet simultaneously inhabiting the space we are in. The world, for the most part, has forgotten how to play.