Hardened hearts and a glimmer of humanity

Once in a great while, a work of fiction comes along that somehow eclipses what I believe to be true from my reading of non-fiction news articles and my viewing of TV documentaries and "60 Minutes"-style magazine pieces.

"The Swallows of Kabul" rises to that level, imbuing its characters with the emotions, insights and epiphanies that are sometimes harder to convey in conventional step-back pieces. It's the internal dialogue of the characters in Yasmina Khadra's 2005 novel that illuminates the depth of despair and brutality of modern-day Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban.

Khadra is a pseudonym for a Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian Army officer who's written four other books. In "Swallows" he traces the lives of two couples and the unlikely events that twine their lives together: Mohsen and Zunaira, unemployed, frustrated members of the educated middle class; and Atiq, a disillusioned jailer, and his wife, Musarrat, who is dying of terminal illness.

Mohammed Moulessehoul, the real 'Yasmina Khadra'

The book has been compared to Khaled Hossein's "The Kite Runner" for providing a window into the lives of Afghan people. For all the harshness and misogynistic oppressiveness that it depicts, the novel also reveals a glimmer of humanity, built around Atiq's long-deadened soul and his realization that not every shred of tenderness and love has been stripped from him.

Here I yield to the words of one reviewer, who describes the book's essence in a way I can only admire:

The Swallows of Kabul is a scathing indictment of a world turned to stone, where the worship of a fundamentalist God makes life uninhabitable. The softness of women has been extracted from society; due to that separation, men’s hearts have hardened. What is left beside despair and madness?
This small book is a journey, a rapid descent from a nagging discontent straight into hell. Like the missing swallows, the bearers of hope have been sentenced to endless days of mourning, covered in the colors of “fever and fear.” 
-- Luan Gaines, Curled Up With A Good Book


And here I quote from the book itself as an example of the inner turmoil felt by its characters, in this case Atiq Shaukat, the jailer in charge of guarding prisoners before their executions.

Something like a sob constricts his throat. He has to squeeze his fists bloodless to keep from collapsing. He's tired, tired of going in circles, running after wisps of smoke, tired of these dull days trampling him down from morning till night. He can't figure out why he has survived two consecutive decades of ambushes, air raids, and explosive devices that turned the bodies of dozens of people around him into pulp, sparing neither women nor children, neither villages nor flocks, and all to wind up like this, vegetating in a dark inhospitable world, in a completely disoriented city studded with scaffolds and haunted by doddering human wreckage -- a city that mistreats him, damages him, day after day, night after night, whether he's in the company of some wretch condemned to die and awaiting her fate in his stinking jail or watching over his tormented wife, doomed to an even crueler death.

Exquisite writing and a simple, powerful story make me agree with the San Francisco Chronicle: "The Swallows of Kabul will stay with you long after you've finished it."

 Photograph by Guardian/Graham Turner