A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear

I’m terrible about starting book clubs and reading challenges and never finishing them. But the idea of a “reading around the world” challenge has been going around the internet for a few years and it really appeals to me. So the last time someone’s Reading Around the World book list popped up in my feed, I looked at it a little closer.

Afghanistan

Reading around the world alphabetically has you starting in Afghanistan, one of the few countries I probably will never even try to visit. I’ve already read one book that I know of by an Afghan (Afghani?) writer: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. As part of a past year’s children’s Global Reading Challenge, I read the book Saving Kabul Corner by American N.H. Senzai about refugees from Afghanistan living in America.

Atiq Rahimi

Part of the appeal of this particular challenge was that it offered a recommended selection alongside several choices for each country. Even better, it didn’t rely on the go-to for Afghanistan, Khaled Hosseini. I wanted to stick with novels for this challenge, so I chose the main selection by Atiq Rahimi.

I had not heard of Atiq Rahimi before. He was born in Afghanistan in 1962, and fled the Soviets in 1984 and ended up in France. There he became known as a writer and filmmaker, writing in both Dari and French. Since the fall of the Taliban he has worked in France and Afghanistan, creating films and television.

I wanted to find a female writer, since the voices of women from Muslim countries are so seldom heard. But I was glad to see that Rahimi’s book, despite having a 21-year-old male protagonist, was very much about women. It was a refreshing and surprising bit of stereotype-busting to read a book by a Middle Eastern man that focused on the theme of how women suffer under patriarchy and political repression.

In one powerful scene, the protagonist observes a rug very closely. Through that rug, he realizes the anger of the oppressed women – like his own mother – and children who have no other outlet for their feelings than to weave them into the rugs whose sale they will not profit by.

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear

A glossary in the back of the book says “a thousand rooms” is a direct translation of a Dari expression that means “labyrinth.” Labyrinth of dream and fear is an apt description of the book, despite its brevity.

The narrative, insofar as you can tease out a narrative, is about 21-year old Farhad, who lives in Kabul in 1979. He is caught outside and drunk by soldiers after curfew, and beaten unconscious. He awakens hours later in the home of a young woman widowed by the coup. As he learns more about his rescuer, he begins to fall in love with her and to empathize with all the women who are doubly victimized by traditional oppression and the new political occupation. But he is in danger himself, and must flee Afghanistan alone.

The book is unlike any other book I’ve read. It is cinematic in it’s documentary-like hard scene cuts and unspoken context. Tiny little episodes, almost like flash fiction, reveal both dream and experience as the narrator moves in and out of consciousness, but it is not always clear which is which. The middle of the book becomes a bit more coherent, and for a while you start to think you know what’s going on. But by the end, you’re not quite sure if the whole thing hasn’t been a dream after all. Maybe the soldiers really did beat him to death by the side of the road that night after all.

Conclusion

At their best, reading challenges open new doors to works and entire literary traditions we might otherwise have missed out on. I doubt I would have ever discovered Atiq Rahimi if I hadn’t decided to try this challenge. But now I’ve read a wonderful writer in a work translated from Dari, a language whose name I didn’t even know before.

Rwanda, Cambodia, and Serbia have shed their nightmare connotations from my childhood. But Afghanistan has remained a part of the world that evokes only images of war and privation. Reading Rahimi reminded me that brilliant, creative minds can be found anywhere in the world. And it makes me wonder how many of them have been silenced or have gone unheard because of the violence that has wracked that region for longer than I have been alive.

Details

A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear
Atiq Rahimi
Translated from Dari by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari
Other Press
147 pages