Afghan American Writing: “One Story, Thirty Stories”

If you think of Afghan American literature, chances are good that Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling novels “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” will come to mind.

And your associations might not go much beyond that. Afghan American writing has been growing in depth and richness, though, a fact proven by a new book, “One Story, Thirty Stories.”

It’s an anthology from the University of Arkansas Press that collects pieces of poetry, fiction, essay and, yes, blogging, by contemporary Afghan American writers.

Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi both left Afghanistan when they were young. Muradi’s family moved to the US when she was three, Saed’s left Afghanistan when she was one, moving first to Saudi Arabia and then to the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY.

So for both of them, their early impressions of Afghanistan came from their parents’ stories. Muradi’s father would tell her legends from the country’s past, or stories about working in his father’s knitting factory in Kabul.

Saed’s father would illustrate his stories with photographs and post cards he’d brought with him from Afghanistan.

A Responsibility to Share

These images were a counterpoint to the Afghanistan Saed saw elsewhere.

“For me it was trying to compare these post cards of movie theaters and hotels and a city that didn’t match with the rugged mountain images that I was seeing in the 80s on the evening news with Dan Rather going into the mountains and hanging out with the Mujahadeen,” Saed said.

She said that a lot of the writing in the collection comes from an impulse to provide a sort of counterpoint, particularly after 9-11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Saed said that Afghan-Americans felt a responsibility to share what they knew.

“What kind of answers do we present, when there are so many questions directed at us about Afghanistan; about being Afghan-American?” Saed said. “About living here. Because we were being held accountable for our identities, I think that is when we started answering, and in that answering came a lot of this writing.”

The anthology’s contributors include professional writers, musicians, filmmakers, academics, former ambassadors and doctors. Much of the work deals with how families are stretched and strained by the process of relocating to the US.

Zohra Saed’s poem “Neptune Avenue” speaks of her childhood gang of siblings and cousins in Brooklyn who find their own strangeness both alienating, and exhilarating:

We’d rather stretch our weekends and wrap it across the belly of the year. We’d rather dangle out every day on the fire escapes of the second-floor mosque, spill the Khutba onto the sweating concrete by opening the windows wide. Then jump onto the sidewalk, align our velvet prayer mats next to parked cars and play Imam and Ummah as passerbys gawk at the magic of our ‘flying carpets’ and at one five-year-old brother serious faced, hand over ear, singing out the call to prayer with a sugar-sweet throat.

War “Back Home”

And, of course, war is a constant presence in the collection. It’s the reason families flee Afghanistan, it’s why many are now traveling back there to do humanitarian work.

A poem by Sahar Muradi called, “Of My Mother,” tackles the loss of homeland. In this passage, her family is leaving Afghanistan on a bus bound for Pakistan:

I think of my little bag, my khalta-gac, the pillowcase that I keep all my treasures in — apple seeds and lost buttons and little webs of lint. Your mother said she will keep it safe, for when we come back from the trip, with new treasures. But you, you have so many more things that we do, so your missing is so much bigger. It takes up all the room on our seat. It splits the vinyl, fogs the windows, and spreads to either end of the bus. It’s already hard to be comfortable with the rocks under the tires and the dust in our eyes and our lips sealed tight around the cane, but now your missing is coming off your face like steam, and none of us can breathe.

Zohra Saed said that war has given many of the writers in the anthology a sense of guilt and obligation to succeed because so many of their relatives weren’t as fortunate as they were. She said that it also affects the style of the writing.

“War, you know, of course affects narrative — how we write, the bits and pieces, the fragmented way that some of the writers are writing here is about the fragmented way we’ve grown up,” Saed said.

Regular Life

For all its heaviness, the collection does have plenty of moments of wit and happiness.

For Sahar Muradi, one of the joys of poring through all the work was finding other writers talking about bits of everyday life that were so familiar to her.

“I was just so thrilled to read things that resonated with me — of course all great literature does — but there’s something really profound about reading a story about a mother who goes to 99 cent store and buys the Brucci lipstick for her daughter, and gives them home perms, and all these things that were so particular to my childhood as well,” Muradi said.

In fact it’s the everyday rituals like this — lipstick and home perms and playing with siblings in the street — that seem to make the harder stuff here bearable.

[Audio Available in the Links Below]

PRI’s The World: Afghan American Writing “One Story, Thirty Stories”

Bruce Wallace, Feb 4, 2011

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South Asian Journalist Association (SAJA) Forum

One Story, Thirty Stories: Afghan American Anthology

Sree Sreenivasan, Jan. 14, 2011

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Levantine Center Review: New Afghan American Anthology Brings Kabul Closer

Sholeh Wolpe, Jan. 4, 2011

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Book Dragon (Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program): One Story Thirty Stories an Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature

Terry Hong, Dec. 27, 2010

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University of Arkansas News Wire: University of Arkansas Press Publishes Anthology of Afghan American Literature

Nov. 18, 2010

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America.gov: In a New York Cafe, a Place for New Persian Poetry

Jeff Baron, Nov. 17, 2010

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Gulf News: Afghan American Authors Raise Awareness

Mariam M. Al Serkal, Nov. 5, 2010

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Jaihoon.com: Launch of One Story, Thirty Stories at Sharjah International Book Fair

Nov. 3, 2010

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Lisa Dempster’s Blog: One Story, Thirty Stories (Launched by Lisa Dempster)

Nov. 2, 2010

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Dubai Eye: One Story, Thirty Stories with Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi

Oct. 31, 2010

Yesterday, Sahar and I did an interview on SAJA Webcast. Ariana Delawari and Sedika Mojadidi joined and shared their powerful work. Listen HERE

One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature
Meet the editors and two of the writers
Friday, Jan. 14, 2011
1-2 pm NY time
10:30-11:30 pm Kabul time

Thanks to Sree Sreenivasan for setting this up on the SAJA: South Asian Journalist Association blogradio.

Time to hit Brooklyn with a strong dose of Afghan American literature!

Please join:

Jessamyn Ansary
Naheed Elyasi
Mariam Ghani
Donia Gobar
Khalida Sethi
Sahar Muradi
Zohra Saed

Book Launch at Zora Space
5:30-7pm

(718) 832-4870

One Story, Thirty Stories:

An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature

Edited by Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi

The most comprehensive collection available of Afghan American writers

“One Story, Thirty Stories is exquisite documentary, a kaleidoscope of fragmented lives, losses, and attempts at re-making. The editors have assembled a collection that manages to be both literature and history, both heartbreaking and hopeful, both educational and lyrical. From the daughter of a cab driver to the daughter of an imam, from a crack dealer to a standup comic to an ambassador, the writers in this book offer not only poignant testimony but also form a who’s who of Afghans in the United States. An invaluable, accessible resource for anyone who cares about what America is doing in, and to, Afghanistan.”
—Minal Hajratwala, author of Leaving India: My Family’s Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents

“From a society shredded by violence and a generation caught between Afghanistan and America, Saed and Muradi have sewn together a vibrant patchwork of memory and imagination. At turns raw and affecting, One Story, Thirty Stories is a chronicle of loss and reunion, offering a firsthand look at how communities are fractured and remade, with all the frustration and tenderness that exile evokes.”
—Tara Bahrampour, author of To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America

“An admirable achievement. . . . This is a literature haunted by catastrophe. . . . [These] writers . . . are taking that crucial first step toward absorbing the unique experience of Afghan Americans into the universal themes that inform human experience as a whole.”
—From the Foreword by Tamim Ansary, author of West of Kabul, East of New York and The Widow’s Husband