I’ve been reading to Alina. When I was her age, books brought me closer to my father. Alina is from Nuristan, a place that has captured my imagination as thoroughly as The Yearling, Drums Along the Mohawk, and the American Heritage series on the Civil War. There is danger up there. No roads in, no airstrips. Full winter by October, snow through May. Until a hundred years ago there was no Islam in Nuristan. Alina’s grandmother still worships fire, water, elderberry trees, the sky. Her religion is a pantheon inherited directly from ancient Greece, seeded and then abandoned, isolated in a cathedral of mountains like Darwin’s finches on Easter Island. Now there are Taliban up there. By day they live in the folds of those mountains, by night they come down. The villagers are light skinned, blue eyed, lighter haired. They have Mediterranean noses, and they are tough. Some of the Mehan girls from Nuristan are dynamic, outgoing, bold. Some are quiet, they tap on my door with a fingertip. No matter, I’ve seen Mastura go after the older Shogofa (who is a joker and easily provokes) like a mountain cat after an unsuspecting goat. Beside Mastura and Alina, there are Hanifa, Malalai, Zainab, Sunbola and Mahbooba. All are in the top five of their classes, yet Nuristan and its inhabitants are considered uncivilized, second class, quixotically referred to as an experiment for sociologists and anthropologists, a link to the Middle Ages. On the Pakistan side of Nuristan the villages until recently were tourist destinations, a kind of Disneyland for subscribers of National Geographic. The reality is much dirtier, and as I have gotten to know and love the children of Nuristan, I am reminded of another group of people I first learned about when I was Alina’s age, nestled in my father’s lap, listening to the story of Nineteenth Century America? slaves. What captivated me was not the politics or institution of slavery, not the injustice, not the inhumanity; it was the people, segregated, living in those wooden shacks, stirring a mysterious feast in a huge black kettle over a fire under the stars. I stared and stared at the illustrations of slave villages, little girls hauling water in buckets, little boys splitting wood, and there in a rocking chair on a porch was an uncle picking a banjo. The book was not faint of heart. There were depictions of lynching, slave families being sold separately, the whip curling in the sky above the trees, and then the revolts, sieges and the bloodiest of American wars. My father read the entire text paragraph by paragraph, page equal to any other page. I chose to see only and romanticize the people living their lives no matter what the world brought down on them, I suppose no differently than the tourist climbing up to see Nuristanis dance around in a circle of colorful dresses. Alina sits beside me and turns the pages of a book, the same one I shared with the older boys; Frederick Douglass fights for freedom, written by Margaret Davidson in 1968. There it is on page 21, a drawing from the New York Public Library Picture Collection, a slave village on the banks of a river, etched in 1864. It is idyllic, full moon rising, log cabins with stone chimneys, some young men casting off in flat bottom canoes, waving to the women holding their lanterns and their children by their sides. The men are about to become runaways. That word from the moment I first heard it pronounced infected every romantic bone in my body. Not to Alina. She is seven. She has no father, and until now she had no books. She looks at this picture and sees people living in poverty, marginalized, afraid, scorned, unfed, separated in the midst of war. The women stand powerless. It is the men who run for their lives. The only difference she can see is that the river is navigable and the people are black skinned. It is literally a negative for the snapshot of her life. She turns the page. There is something empowering in it. She cannot wait to turn another.
In the tome of news about Afghanistan one topic is skirted, and that is issue of race. There are Pashto villagers who still believe Hazaras have tails. It is what allowed Mul Omar to order hundreds of Hazara men beheaded, Dostum (Karzai’s minister of Defense) to execute hundreds of Pashto men by suffocating them in railroad cars. It is what guides the course of Afghanistan’s present and evolving history, no matter if 42 nations occupy it with over a hundred thousand troops. It is how deals are made; it is how they are broken.
As much as books brought me closer to my father and in a way closer to myself, movies brought me closer to the world. Oddly, the earliest and most affecting movies included Gregory Peck in The Yearling, Henry Fonda in Drums Along the Mohawk and John Huston’s version of The Red Badge of Courage. Whether on the black and white flickering television after school or at the drive-in screen on a Saturday night, movies transported me out of my life; I existed as a spirit might, floating about, ripe for the act of embodiment. I have not watched a television show or a movie since March. This week the orphanage received a generous gift from one of the sponsors, a SONY surround sound system with DVD player. My excitement at the prospect of sharing the movie experience with the kids was only surpassed by an almost physical reaction to feeding my famished cinematic sensibility. We set up in the library, speakers front and back, curtains pulled, candles, a big screen at one end, fifty plastic chairs in rows at the other. Some of the children from Sitara I streamed in to join the Mehan girls, lights were dimmed, and chi was served. Where were we? Who knew? The world awaited our arrival.
Out of the vault of possible films that could have woven their way to an orphanage in Afghanistan, how and why it turned out to be a Stanley Kubrick film about a slave leading a revolt against the devolving, corrupted Roman Empire can only be left to mystics or existentialists to explain. Spartacus! It was in a pile of twelve scraped together, including Zoro and Superman and a pirated, scratched up Jungle Book. The kids, knowing nothing about the movie, must have been at the very least intrigued with the leather bound, dimple-chinned Kirk Douglas staring at them from the case. The movie was released in 1960, the year I was born. It is three hours long, full of heavy hitters. Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov, John Galvin, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton and Tony Curtis share the bill. There is an overture of theme music, and an intermission. Both times the kids continued to stare at the blank screen, as if the movie were somehow trailing along to the music. No need here for popcorn. Every frame was gobbled up. There are three moments I could not tear my eyes away from watching the kids watching the movie. First was when Douglas as the gladiator trainee Spartacus, paired with the slave-girl Varinia (played by Simmons) in his prison cell, raises his arms and screams, “I am not an animal!” followed momentarily by the stolid Varinia adding not for the benefit of the guards but for the ears of Spartacus that she, too, is not an animal. The second time was when Curtis as Antonius recites a poem for the slaves, Spartacus among them, around a campfire. (Inexplicably, everyone in the scene refers to it as a song when there is indeed no singing.) “Sing us a song,” says the noble warrior Spartacus, who has just been fooled in an egg trick by Antonius. He is, after all a good sport. Antonius is his alter ego, conduit of the Muse, and visa-versa, the two unknowingly doomed in the end to fight to the death out of love for one another, to be the one to spare the other an impending, excruciating crucifixion. “Sing,” Spartacus insists. Antoninus finally obliges.
When the blazing sun hangs low in the western sky…
when the wind dies away on the mountain…
when the song of the meadowlark turns still…
when the field locust clicks no more in the field…
and the sea foam sleeps like a maiden at rest…
and twilight touches the shape of the wandering earth…
I turn home.
Through blue shadows and purple woods…
I turn home.
I turn to the place that I was born…
to the mother who bore me and the father who taught me…
Iong ago, long ago…
Iong ago.
Alone am l now, lost and alone, in a far, wide, wandering world.
Yet still when the blazing sun hangs low…
when the wind dies away and the sea foam sleeps…
and twilight touches the wandering earth…
I turn home.
The third time I watched the children was just after the climactic battle and the horrific, classically unblinking Kubrick depiction of carnage, women and children and grandfathers piled on top of one another. In this scene Olivier as the complex almost Byronic Crassus demands to know who among the survivors is Spartacus, or they will all be crucified. One after another the slaves stand up. “I am Spartacus!” rings over and over across the valley of death, until the disgusted Crassus kicks his horse and rides away.
Each time I watched the children I sank deeper into bliss. The younger ones sat around me on the floor in front of the screen, upon their knees, backs straight, their blue-lit faces transfixed. There among them was feisty, tom boyish Alina. How much she understood is left to conjecture, but of what matter is it? Besides, Spartacus is not such a difficult story to follow, even without the words. There are the men who choose not to kill, those who do. There is, at least for three-quarters of the movie, unrequited love. There is even mirth, wine swigging, all the misfits dancing, helping one another in a kind of communal utopia where possessions do not matter, only the urge to go home. Inevitably though, as the movie wore on and on several of the kids succumbed; like a litter of weary little soldiers they leaned to the floor, curled their knees and fell into that deep, dreamy, vibrating, content sort of sleep I remember so well. Like a song linked to a vivid moment in my life they reminded me of all the movies I myself succumbed to. The only difference here is there was no father to lift them up to bed. The lights came on and the children, dazed with half lidded eyes straggled out of the library and to their rooms. Alina had found a corner where not even the sudden commotion woke her. I had been wallowing in the experience. Still, the sleeping Alina begged to be attended to. I pulled myself up and, just as I was about to bend toward the little girl from the remotest village in the highest of mountains, it was Susan who obliged herself to do the deed. She came up beside me, knelt down and took Alina into her arms. As she floated away, a Hazara cradling a Nuristani, she looked over her shoulder and smiled at me. “Too long movie,” she said, and disappeared into the dark hallway.
What will Alina remember about her first big movie, or the time a forty-eight year old man from America read her a book? Will one draw her toward the world, the other toward realizing herself in it? I have to believe even if her world is awash in racism, in poverty, in segregation, in greed, in hate, in corruption and in bloodshed, it is not those parts to the story swimming in her dreams.
