Storytelling, Myth, and the Afghanistan Wars in Spozhmai Zaryab’s Antiwar Short Stories

Abstract

Spozhmai Zaryab and Her Narrative WorksBorn in 1955 in Kabul and holding a BA in French language from Kabul University and an MA and a PhD in comparative literature from Montpellier University in France, Spozhmai Zaryab is one of Afghanistan's major authors. She has published two collections of short stories, Sharang Sharang-i Zang-ha [The Jingling of the Bells] and Dasht-i Qabil [Cain's Desert], and a novel, Dar Keshwar-i Digar [In Another Country]. It is not the quantity but the artistic merit of her works that has established her reputation. Zaryab has been writing fiction since the early 1970s, but she emerged in the 1980s as one of the country's leading writers. She writes in a variety of genres, but her contribution to modern fiction in Afghanistan lies mainly in her anti-war works; she is considered the godmother of Afghan anti-war literature (Bezhan, Women Causes 264). This type of fiction emerged with the outbreak of war after the 1978 Leftist coup and the invasion of Afghanistan by Soviet troops in late 1979. Neighboring countries, Iran and Pakistan, and the West chose to channel financial, military, and political aid to the armed opposition groups, known as the Mujahideen, or freedom fighters. Soon the war escalated and involved many players, from domestic to regional to international superpow- ers. To the present day the war has undergone many stages. But the peak of the war was in the 1980s, when Afghanistan became a battleground for internal, regional, and superpower forces. Although the protagonists changed, the misery of the people did not. As the conflict ground on, each side accompanied their military efforts with fierce public relations campaigns to promote the righteousness of their cause and to vilify their opponents.The significance of Zaryab's works lies in the ways that they give voice to the ordinary people who have no stake in the war. They demonstrate the impact of war on the population in general and women in particular. Her account of the war is from the victims' perspective. An essential element of this strategy involves bringing elements of oral storytelling, the people's medium, into her narrative frameworks. Zaryab incorporates two types of traditional stories into her works: epic and religious folktales. They represent literary, religious, and folk heritage and assume value in being the collective residue of the past. As well, they are the most popular types of storytelling across a wide spectrum of society, from the educated elites to illiterate groups. By using these types of stories, she also undermines ideological representations of the war by the warring partisans.The Leftist government and the Mujahideen had striven to create mas- ter narratives of the conflict that would serve to uphold their own political/ ideological outlooks. The Leftist regime portrayed it as a nationalist struggle, defending the homeland from the aggression of foreign powers who would install the Mujahideen as their proxy. The support of the Mujahideen by the regional governments and the West was proof of their intention to compromise Afghanistan's sovereignty and keep it a backward country. The regime's invitation to the Soviet troops simply served to defend the national sovereignty and the southern, eastern and western borders and to sustain socioeconomic and cultural progress. For the Mujahideen, Russian troops represented an occupying power that would transform Afghanistan into a satellite socialist state. They believed that the Russians would destroy not only the country's sovereignty but also its sociocultural and religious character. The war was fought (and is still being fought) not only for the liberation of the homeland from invaders but also for the liberation of Dar ul-Islam, the land of Islam, from the grip of infidels. Zaryab's use of epics and religious folktales had the intended effect of countering both sides' warring narratives.Storytelling in AfghanistanStorytelling has a rich tradition among women and men in Afghanistani culture, from courtly palaces to popular meeting places where ordinary people gathered. …