Last night I sat on the rooftop and watched the first full moon of autumn rise higher and higher above a jagged mountain. I watched the lights of mud homes twinkling, many of them halfway up the side of the mountain; an impossible life, it seems, to haul water up and down every day. At 9:00 pm the city was quiet, so quiet I could hear crickets down by the trickling Kabul River, a singular catfight several blocks away, a man shutting down the metal door of his shop on Puli–surkh (Red Bridge). Summer came to its closure as that moon rose and I felt time as I have only felt in moments of my life, the time I stood behind bars, a scared and stupid sixteen year old, or for the first time on the side of an open highway with my thumb sticking out, the time I could not climb higher on the Boulder cliff, nor lower myself from danger, the time I watched life depart from my mother’s body. I watched that moon and the planet beside it, the same moon, the same planet I had watched all those other times of my life, when my life could have ended, in some cases should have ended, jumping from a plane, a cliff, or a bridge, a six-pack of Mexican rebels with shotguns in the back of a pickup under yes, a full moon, a gale force wind on Christmas eve piloting an 18-foot skiff across an open channel, driving drunk, swimming deep, running fast. Time has changed for me. Before, I always felt caught up in it. I no longer have this feeling. I never would have predicted it. I feel that person I was under all those moons, no longer a continuum but one singular inkblot with all its fingers and toes in all directions or none at all. Time has lost its linear quality. I no longer wonder about the people I love who have died as a loss to me, whether or not they are “looking down” on me, or even have the slightest bearing on that moon, only what they would say if they were here by my side. I recall the very first night in Kabul, April of 2009, the night I was told security was such, in all probability I would have to turn around and go back home. It was a culmination of a series of losses that felt like death in life to me. It was also the last time I felt time as a personal journey. So as I reflect upon this week, I must say it has been yet another culmination I could not have foreseen, like this moon or that, the ones that compelled me to love, or to write a poem, even though all of them are one.
If you have the opportunity, write these words down on a blackboard, in the sand on a beach, anywhere they can be erased:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
These are the words that greeted the fifteen girls in my Leadership Workshop on Tuesday. I’d written them on the board beforehand, alone in the room. Just writing them sent some electricity through my body. It wasn’t only their weightiness, but the anticipation of sharing them with a group of young people who had never seen or heard the words before. I had no plan. I’d downloaded a variety of things from the Internet onto my computer, I’d sketched some subject areas, some vocabulary words. How to begin to talk to my Afghan students about my country, its history, its people and ultimately its role in their own lives and the lives of every Afghan?
We walked through Thomas Jefferson’s declaration word for word. Unalienable was difficult to explain. God given, natural, universal, unalterable? Rights is another word not easy to explain. Then self-evident and pursuit of Happiness. Just try and figure out what he meant by happiness. I know enough now to go over and over a word, to hear the students relate its definition back to me convincingly before moving on. We read the sentence out loud together. Talk about your moments! I then asked this question: “There is one thing odd, one thing that seems it may be wrong, out of place in these words. What is it?” The girls jumped at the challenge, but were on the wrong tangent; they assumed I’d meant some sort of grammatical error. (Always the English teacher.) I shook my head. They were certain it was structural, because the sentence is odd. They kept trying to stab at word order or usage. I was about to give up when Pashtana said one little word from the very end of the table, a word I almost missed beneath the din.
“Men.”
“Wait, wait everyone. Nako!” I waited until it was quiet. “What was that Pashtana?” The other girls looked at her as if she had won some sort of prize.
“Men,” she repeated a little more confidently. “All men are created equal.” Pashtana is Pashtun, she lived in AFCECO’s Pakistan orphanage in Peshawar for many years and moved to Kabul about the time I returned last March. Friendly, outgoing, but until now not a serious student. I’d recently asked the class to memorize a poem that had been taught to me by a Japanese Zen master in Kyoto. It was Pashtana who recited it without hesitation, without a single error in pronunciation. Each day in life is training, training for myself. Though failure is possible, living each moment equal to anyone, ready for everything, I am alive, I am this moment, my future is here and now.
“Men!” I repeated Pashtana’s revelation. All the girls smiled and nodded. They offered some replacement words such as people, humans, and even animals. Then Sitiza wanted to discus the meaning of humanity. She has been showing real desire these past weeks, to reach beyond what her very restrictive family dreams for her. I think her good friend Maria is rubbing off on her. So we went down the road of humanity, and if I wanted we could have spent the two hours on this one word. But I felt the urge to begin our journey into America. Pilgrims and such don’t hold much water with me as a beginning. I suppose a bunch of misfits seeking their own way of life is appropriate enough, but to me there is only one place where America begins as a force, and in light of the words we had just learned I could not avert my gaze: slavery.
I wrote five dates on the board: 1619, 1776, 1862, 1963 and 2008. The first two dates were there for emphasis on time, a juxtaposition of a hundred and fifty years of slavery and Jefferson’s words. I then took a chance. I’d downloaded a scene from Spielberg’s film about the slave ship Amistad. It is an unflinching and, I believe fairly accurate depiction of the brutality of capture and transit to America on board the ship. There are naked women and men, there is a whipping, and a mother who commits suicide with her baby. There is the horrifying mass drowning by virtue of a pile of stones chained to a string of not so healthy product. I wasn’t worried about the shock, after all to these girls there would be nothing particularly new about this sort of inhumanity. It is in their fiber, it is behind every story told across Afghanistan. No, I was worried about the nakedness. I had a hunch though, that the girls would not even flinch. It was a good hunch. They were fixed, not “wowed”; fixed as you might be when discovering you are not alone, that there are others in the world, people who are so very different and yet, in a strange sort of way, just like you. The class wanted to see the rest of the movie, but I had to move on to the third date I had scribbled on the board.
“Who is my favorite President?” I asked.
“Abraham Lincoln!” they yelled unanimously. I forget how much the children talk to one another about everything. It is one thing for them to gossip about a story I told in regards to something juicy, but Lincoln? I’d mentioned Lincoln only once to a small group. The first thing several of the girls pointed out is his Moslem name. (The entwined stories of Jesus and Islam are not broadcast over the airwaves very often. Perhaps it would be a good idea to let it be known.) I wrote a few more words on the board: emancipation proclamation. At every juncture I related back to Afghanistan. Racism in particular, and none more than the inflamed hatred between Pashtun and Hazara. As I look around the classroom each day I am reminded of this radical departure from myth and hatred, children of every tribe and region and race learning together.
Talking about Lincoln’s proclamation led us to a discussion about the difference between Law and Will, that a proclamation can begin the turning of will, or visa versa. This led me to the next date on the board, 1963, and how the will of America to change had taken yet another hundred years to affect the law of the land. This was the year when a man named King showed the nation the extent to which words can exercise power. I once again turned out the lights and turned on the projector. I sat in the back of the room as the girls watched Dr. King deliver his speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I had the notion to write down the key phrases he repeated, as a Reverend will. One hundred years ago today… We will not be satisfied… Now is the time… I have a dream… Free at last. The class was silent and still through the entire sixteen minute, twenty-one second speech. The enormity of the moment swept over me. I cried, quietly, privately.
There was one last date on the board, and of course this is the year Obama was elected president.
It may have been this class was merely preparation for the next. I did not tell the girls what I had planned for them. A special guest was going to give them a few hours of her time, at great risk. Four times there has been an attempt on her life. She must travel under cover of burqa. She must have a bodyguard and as a rule never make plans in advance⎯ there would be a call, she would or would not come that moment, and that would be that, all to avoid a premeditation to kill her. When I contacted her she did not hesitate to break this last precaution. Meeting these girls was too important a crossroad. She would come to my Thursday class.
Her name is Malalai Joya, former member of parliament who was banished from that body for speaking out. She is young, self-educated, humble. She is self-conscious about being short. She is just a person. But so, I imagine, were many if not all of the signatories on the Declaration of Independence. Afghanistan is full of such people. This woman has been thrust onto the stage and has chosen not to flinch from leadership. Malalai is a name that comes with built-in lore, as it was the name of the heroine who rallied the Afghan forces against the British in the Battle of Maiwand. The children have known of both Malalais since they were five or six or seven. I remember when I first heard her name; it was in a class with the boys of Sitara II early in 2009. The presidential election was heating up and I had asked them who they would vote for. Unanimously, it was Malalai Joya.
We had tea and cake and exchanged stories for a while before going down to meet the girls. I was struck by Malalai’s humility. She was almost shy, but every now and then her eyes flared up and her voice assumed a command that indicated here is someone to reckon with. I was eager to get her into the classroom, but this was an Afghan way to begin, and I summoned patience. I got to share some of my enthusiasm for AFCECO. I asked her if she might share her experiences around the world, her thoughts on Americans, her book and her immediate plans. The energy from downstairs must have been rising up, as the girls waited in their seats circled around the great table in the center of the classroom. It was time.
Malalai spoke for an hour and a half. She explained about the various networks of power in Afghanistan, the history of these networks and the crimes that were committed. Of course everything was spoken in Dari, but I gleaned as much. My emotions once again overwhelmed me. I disallowed my eyes to blink. Finally, time had its way and class was almost finished. The girls uncharacteristically seemed hesitant to ask any questions. Who, I wondered, would be the first. I recalled the visit from Bashardost, and how the children engaged him with a series of probing questions. It was Manizha who impressed me then, with her pencil tapping on a notepad and her demeanor and tone of voice as if she were at a White House press conference. So I wasn’t surprised when she was the first and only to raise a question for Malalai. “How does it affect you, when you see the people, especially the people of Farah, and they come to you with hope, and they shower you with their love?”
Malalai looked at me and said in English, “Oooh, you were right. She asks a very difficult question.” She then went on to answer Manizha in Dari, but later confessed that it was impossible for her to describe in words, her appreciation but also the weight of such confidence and adoration. When it was over I snapped a photo of the class with their teacher and mentor. As I look at this photo now I smile in noting that the girls are wearing their jerseys and sweat pants. Soccer was to follow, and there would be no time to change dress.
There was something strong pulling on me yesterday, surely this historic meeting in a basement classroom, fifteen girls penciling words into their notebooks, words taken directly from the lips of a woman so fatefully tied to her country and her people. Or maybe it was later, assisting the coach on the field, the same girls scrambling for a soccer ball, the ruined Darulaman Palace on the hill to the west, and to the east a great big Harvest Moon peeking just above the mountains. Or was it the air itself, the ending of summer, time radiating forward, backward into the corners of my life, what was and could have been, and where it will end. The sun and the moon acted together in that moment, and the twilight seemed to emanate from every direction.
Whatever the case, it is the freedom to pursue this happiness that I most cherish about my life as an American.
Leadership Workshop with Malalai Joya
Leadership Workshop 2010, with Malalai
Tea before class
To see Malalai’s historic moment in Parliament, go to:
