Afghans authoring an uncertain future

For over two and a half years the stories came in from creative writing workshops I offered in Kabul. It was, for many young writers, the first time they had been asked to compose a story: their own or someone else's, someone they'd only heard about, a lost relative, someone born before their time – the choice was theirs. And so the project The Gifts of the State: New Afghan Writing emerged.* The stories stuck with me, sometimes quiet, pastoral narratives detailing how villagers cooperate and sacrifice together, and sometimes how villages unravel under the burden of tradition. There were, of course, stories of ethnic violence, a city carved with checkpoints, militia affiliations, and boundaries that are crossed out of love and hunger. The stories frequently show little affect in the telling. The Taliban and mujahideen were more prominent in their stories, more problematic than Americans or Russians, their legacies more contested.

History, even when fictionalised and written by former refugees, is inevitably contradictory, coloured by countries of origin, places where writers spent most of their formative years. Some wrote of the martyrdom of the mujahideen; others, of their petty brutality. They wrote of marginalisation suffered in Pakistan and Iran, and despite this, they also wrote of falling in love in exile, relationships broken off by their return to Kabul once the Taliban fled. Stories of disappearances under the Russians, of Afghan communists now quiet about their former lives, and of successful battles that ultimately routed the Russians are all equally weighted.