Moving Video of Afghanistan by Augustin Pictures
For more than half my life, I've been a self-appointed one-woman ambassador for Afghanistan, pointing out to anyone who would listen that there is more to Afghanistan than kalashnikovs, burqas and poppies. In no doubt sometimes irritating persistence, I've tried my level best to convey to fellow outsiders the Afghanistan that I know, a country where resilient, brave, complicated people just go on living their lives amidst the calamities that have befallen them, when our media in the West tends to focus more on their victimization, their hostile deviants, or the spectacular break-down of their state. Both pictures are valid parts of the story, but the shrouding of Afghanistan's beauty as embodied in its people, landscapes, history, arts and rich culture, is a deficit in our understanding of Afghanistan, and it's one of some consequence. It's an imbalance I believe has helped fuel indifference towards a people we can more easily then say, hardly exist.
War is woven into the fabric of everyday life in Afghanistan, but so are dinner parties, over-the-top weddings, giggling school girls, men on the street bickering over endless cups of chai sabz, students bustling in and out of university classes, families watching generator-powered Bollywood soap operas together in the twilight, rubab concerts, and love-stricken teenagers sending each other flirty text messages. It's often easy to forget the violence pervading the country, when one is so swiftly absorbed into the rhythm of the daily life that must go on, in wartime as in peacetime.
But the violence sometimes sharply and suddenly penetrates the ilusory seamlessness of everyday life, with painful reminders of the demons still looming over this society trying so valiantly to move on. When this happens, my enthusiastic descriptions of the 'other Afghanistan,' the beautiful and brave Afghanistan, feel fabricated, somehow fraudulent. The increasing frequency of bombs going off closeby, of assassinations, kidnappings and 'complex attacks' on places one frequents casually and often as in 'normal life' like hotels, grocery stores, malls, restaurants, embassies, and offices causes a slide towards the mindset of being in a warzone. The requisite constant state of alertness and often well justified paranoia, the fretting anxiety for the safety of oneself and others, can start to subsume the assertion that Afghanistan is also a place of good and of beauty.
In October 2008, in Kabul, one of those chilling reminders came to call. It was a beautiful October morning, when Kabul is still warm and sunny into the autumn. I was between meetings in a taxi, and an American friend called, breathless and frantic: "Where are you right now?" I explained, and he said, "A foreign woman walking on the sidewalk has just been shot by men on a motorbike. She's dead. Don't know who it is yet."
The woman turned out to be Gayle Williams, a British-South African aid worker. She was 34. She had been working for two years with Serve Afghanistan, a Christian charity. The Taliban promptly and proudly claimed responsibility, saying they murdered her for "spreading Christianity." Her organization denied any involvement in proselytizing. Gayle was buried in Kabul, as she had wished to be in the event that anything happened to her in Afghanistan.
Lukas Augustin, who lived in Afghanistan from 2006-2008 has just made a short video, called Afghanistan - Touch Down in Flight dedicated to Gayle Williams, and to the Afghan people. In the course of honouring someone lost to an instance of the violence that threatens to drown Afghanistan and our perceptions of it, the video is yet moving evidence to the competing narrative: that Afghanistan is indeed a land of sublime beauty, its people compelling and their story more meaningul and more enduring than the latest chapter of political tragedy in which they live.
Lauryn Oates is a Contributing Writer for The Propagandist.
