How Afghanistan before Taliban, US during 9/11 embrace in Nadia Hashimi's book

• Afghanistan is a major character in New York-based Afghan-American writer Nadia Hashimi ’s book, Sparks Like Stars
• In the novel, an Afghan-American woman returns to Kabul to learn the truth about her family
• The author talks about her book, recreating Afghanistan of the 1970s, grim times in America during and after 9/11
• A conversation from the Times Literature festival 2021

Few countries have captured the global discourse and simultaneously been shrouded in mystery as much as Afghanistan since the late 20th century. For decades, the country has witnessed tragedy after tragedy, strife after strufe. And Afghanistan is a major character in New York-based Afghan-American writer Nadia Hashimi’s book, Sparks Like Stars.

In the novel, an Afghan-American woman returns to Kabul to learn the truth about her family and the tragedy that destroyed their lives. Nadia spoke to HarperCollins executive editor Swati Daftuar at the Times Literature Festival 2021. The writer spoke about her book, recreating Afghanistan of the 1970s from second-hand memories, the grim times in America during and after the 9/11 attack, and the lives of the common Afghan people.

Swati Daftuar: The biggest character in this book, especially in the first half and a lot in the second, is also Afghanistan itself and the country and the context and and how you've kind of travelled back in time. You were born and brought up in America, but your parents were in Afghanistan in the 1970s before the coup. So what was it to recreate this country that you maybe at that time, you hadn't grown up in, but you would've had lived experiences? I've seen the kind of research you put into it. So how was it to travel back to a place and time that, you know, you didn't know about, but suddenly you had to kind of create from your memory and second-hand memories. So how was that – to visit Afghanistan in the 1970s.

Nadia Hashimi: It was a joyful ride. It was a joyful journey because I was stumbling upon so many different surprises. And it is just a happier time to revisit, you know, rather than going into some of the darker periods, the bleaker periods, like to the previous Taliban period. I was still struggling to know what to call that time period. But, you know, with that age, the sixties into the seventies. There was the joy of just going back and discovering through the eyes of some of these European wanderers. So I would spend time online looking at these travel diaries that people have now dug up their old photos and they've posted.

And I share a lot of the research that I did on my website so that people can get lost down these rabbit holes. The way that I did. And, you know, just discovering the guidebook that they had written for each other, the details with which they were describing, where in which country you could get the best massage, where to avoid the checkpoints, because people were tighter on drugs you know, the dreams that people were having of walking naked through a field of opium and, and you know, what that might have felt like. And so just some like really colourful and rich descriptions. I spent a lot of time reading through the, uh, interviews that were conducted with American foreign service officers who'd been stationed in Kabul. And so one of the characters is a woman named Chilli in the story. And she was inspired by an interview that I read by a foreign service officer who said that at the time of the coup they'd been stationed in Afghanistan, in Kabul and the person's mother had happened to visit. And the day of the coup she actually was on the rooftop of their apartment having cocktails. She watched jets fly overhead and thought, “Hmm. I wonder what that is; what's going on here?” And it's just imagining that the city on the brink really where it's idyllic, there's such a mix of people.

It just has such a different aura than what we would imagine of it. And so going back and stepping in and, and kind of going crawling through these photographs and going back to imagine, where my parents would've been at that time, if they had stayed in the country. My parents had left in the early seventies, but then I had family members too, who would say it was great but there was also a lot of protests going on at the universities because there was a political tug of war happening. And, and yes, there were Peace Corps teachers teaching us English, but then there were also the Soviets who were opening universities. So there was like a tug of war happening in the country. There was also a lot of concern about who you could say what to, about your political beliefs. And some people were hiding themselves. I remember my uncle saying that the day of the coup he was watching from behind a curtain, he didn't want people to know that he was watching. So that's a very rich atmosphere and that's one that I enjoyed going back into because it made everything much more clear as to how the country walked into what would be the next 40 years of disarray.

The moment I found out in the book that Sitara was going to be a doctor. I wondered about the idea. So there, you know, sometimes what happens with, I guess sometimes a little bit of you kind of leads into the book without the conscious choice of it happening. And then there are those conscious choices of going down the path of making sure that Sitara is going to be a doctor in the book.

I wanted to know your decision because it was something I was curious about. I wanted to know why Sitara would be a doctor and was it to do with the fact that part of this book is, you know, you are in this book. Or if there was another reason that you chose to go down that road for her?

So I think Sitara will probably become a physician. Again, everything has a few different reasons, right? For one, it's really not uncommon that an Afghan family would aspire to have their children grow up to become a doctor. And I know that you understand cultures are very, very fluid and very connected. I know from so many of my classmates when I was in school, that there's a lot of pressure to become a doctor or engineer. If you're not one of those two then, oh my God, what are you doing with your life? And so even when I was starting to write stories, I did not tell my parents until I knew I was going to actually have a book published.

And even when I told them that a book was going to be published, one of the first things that my dad said was, “Oh, wow, that's wonderful! You'll still be a doctor. Right?” There is a cultural element of that. But also I knew that she would be a person. I think some of the strong characters that I've seen around me, that's where I draw my inspiration. Some of the strongest women that I've seen around me specifically, and actually in the African community, and then even the general community have been women physicians because you know, now less so, but historically it has been a male dominated field. And, and then even within the realm of medicine, the surgical fields have been very male dominated.

And so here is this person who is carrying a lot of trauma and, um, carrying a lot of hurt and a lot of loss and a lot of grief and still kind of finds her way to a path of healing. Even if it's not for herself, it may be, you know, for others. But then there's also, you know, that the one element that I wanted to introduce is in the Afghan-American story, the event of 9/11 is a really big one. It's a very big one in the American story, but in the Afghan American community, it's big in a different way because previous to 9/11, we were rather anonymous.

After 9/11, the country became acutely aware of our presence; questioned a lot of things. There were a lot of misconceptions, a lot of knee-jerk reactions, a lot of hot-headed reactions. I was in medical school in New York on 9/11 and experienced it both as a New Yorker. And then also experience this acute change in the identity of an African American in terms of, you know, how our identities were reflected back on us by the outside world.

So that's why I wanted to, you know, explore. I wanted her to be there. I wanted her, I needed her to be there, to have that moment to have that experience and be able to, you know, share that with people. Otherwise she's really not me. She has been through things that I cannot even imagine going through, or I guess maybe I did try to imagine going through them.

And she is, I can't imagine myself actually picking up and doing what she has done and that's intentional. She's not supposed to be me, but I, I can, I can see other people who have done this. I know other people who have endured real trauma and then have gone on to do things and they don't, they don't wave it around like a flag, right? It's not written on them. You can't see it. You don't know it. But if you get to know these individuals, you see what they've overcome, what they really still carry. And, yet what they've been able to accomplish. And, and to them, it's not like, no, look at me, I've overcome my trauma. And now I'm off to do this today, but, but rather it's kind of fluid. It happens quietly and yet it is there and it's all around us.

Coup is in your head when you're writing. And I know your books have been called in book clubs, etc, educational in the sense that, you know, they're literally teaching you about this country, but is that something that you're looking to do? Is that something that happens organically because you're telling the truth about, like you said, about the political scenario…. You've got your facts there. So it automatically becomes educational.

No, it is intentional. There are a few things that I wanna do with stories. One is to educate, another is to entertain. I want to intrigue, I want to engage. So I want this not to be a very flat experience. I wanted people. I love when people tell me that, oh, I finished the book and then I started Googling or I was halfway through the book and I had to start Googling, ‘cause I wasn't sure. Was this real or is this not real?

You know, I love when people tell me that, “Oh, I, I thought this was a memoir.” Because it means they were really there. And I love when people ask me, “Are you gonna write a sequel?” I'm not gonna write a sequel. But if you ask me that, it's because you want to know what happens next time.

Yeah. And I love when people say, “We read the book and my book club really enjoyed it. Can you tell us how we can help? What can we do? Is there a charity that you can point us to?” And all of those are really powerful… that's where it's magical because we're able to create a space where people define for themselves… I got something out of this story that didn't just, you know, entertain me for a day. And even if it does that, fine. That's exactly what I hope some stories do for me too, sometimes I just need entertainment. But I think that with these stories, I've been really, really privileged to be able to talk to people who have taken a next step from them.

I've been in a virtual space in a book club where one person was not from Afghanistan, who was from a Southeast Asian country. And she said, “This reminded me of my mother's experience and how she was separated from her brother because of conflict.” And she was just opening this up for the first time to share with people.

And we create these sacred bonds between people where they understand one another a bit better. We open up a bit of our hearts… that's what book clubs do, right? When people gather. They don't just talk about the story. They talk about how it relates to their own lives and their own experiences. “Oh, this reminded me of my mother. This reminded me of my uncle” or whatever it might be. That for me is the magic of what happens when these stories are shared.

How much of what's going on in Afghanistan right now? Do you see yourself channeling that into maybe your next book or is this the one of those things where you need distance, you need to kind of be able to take some time to kind of read and then look back and see what had happened? Because most of your books are like that. Do you see yourself being able to write about it right now?

That's a good question. It's a tough question. I think people are asking me that question by the end of August, you know, or late August. It was very, very fresh. You know, we were just, we were literally every day watching videos of people swarming the airport and hearing about people dying trying to get into the airport.

And at that time. No, I cannot touch this. This is too fresh. This is actively happening. How do we look at a wound and, and start to, you know, just, just look at it without doing something about it. At that time, it was more, you know, what do we fix? I think that this is a really important moment in Afghanistan's history. It's also really an important moment in the history of the countries that border Afghanistan, and the United States. And the impact will be felt later in the same way that we saw something as horrific as 9/11 happen. Now we've got the documentaries that trace the steps back, and we understand how we came to have to receive that moment.

We're gonna see the impact of this moment as well on the people who have fled, who are now here in the United States starting new lives, the people who were stuck, left behind. And then just nationally, what is going to happen to the character of the country? What does it offer its citizens? I probably will write about this moment, but I hope not to do it in a way that focuses just on the pain. And that's what it felt like when the question was being asked, you know, so, so early, yes, we do need that journalistic eye to document the pain of the people, to document that trauma. But I think that with stories we have a lot more space to explore. Not just those moments that are really harrowing and painful, but just the complex layers. The rise and fall of people were not just all about the fall.

Anchor: Jasleen Bhalla

Audio production: Basant Singhal

Note: The podcast was recorded on Sept 10, 2022