We shot the scene about twelve times. It would be easy to now claim that it was the tigerish Roya who ruined every take, with her giggling and chatting and innocent refusal to look suitably terrified. But, in truth, I flunked more takes than she did. It was the bloody burqa. The mesh eye-panel afforded me little more than a blurry, blinkered view of my surroundings and, when I was moving, it had a tendency to slip away from my eye-line.
But it was running in the thing that really did me in. I tripped; I fell; I stumbled to the doorway. Take after take after take. There was talk at one stage of putting our sound assistant into the burqa, before I finally got it right. My respect for Afghan women grew enormously that day.
My next appearance on Afghan TV was as a blood-soaked corpse in a driveway; I was mother to another six-year-old girl, Rita. Rita was as patient and focused as Roya had been lively and rambunctious. The actress I understudied for did actually turn up for the shoot and was happy to film the scenes where she picnicked in the garden, chatted with her husband and hurried her daughter inside the front gate when the baddies turned up with guns. But when it came to lying on hard concrete for two hours in the scorching midday sun, she decided that acting wasn’t really for her.
I patiently explained that she was under contract, and therefore professionally bound to finish shooting her scenes. I threatened not to pay her, and she just looked at me like I had four heads. She was going home, and there was nothing I could do to stop her.
Fortunately, she and I were around the same size. So I was able to slip into her outfit, turn my veil-covered head away from the camera and convincingly play her part. It was brutal. Rita and I were covered in sticky, sweet, fake blood and the flies just couldn’t get enough of us. Also, I had to take regular breaks to shake out a sleeping foot or bend an aching elbow, but gorgeous Rita, enveloped in my bloodied arms, didn’t move a muscle.
I think my favourite performance was as a Kuchi woman because it was just so inappropriate and absurd. Kuchis are traditional Pashtun nomads from southern and eastern Afghanistan, although many of them have now become farmers or settled in cities. In Kabul, Kuchi women can often be found in the bazaars selling bangles.
One of the storylines in Eagle Four centred on a group of bangle-sellers who also did a thriving sideline in child trafficking. We were shooting the scenes in the yard of a house on the outskirts of Kabul. Our main Kuchi actress turned up on time and was fully across her lines, but her three bangle-selling cohorts failed to show. They didn’t have dialogue but they were essential to the set-up, as a solitary woman could hardly be held to constitute a criminal gang.
Our director, Sayed, suggested that Muffy, Shakila and I could fill out the posse. Muffy and I thought this was hilarious, and instructed him to come up with an alternative solution, but he failed to see what the problem was.
‘Darling, we don’t look like gypsy Afghan women,’ I said.
‘We have outfits for you to wear,’ he replied.
‘Even so, I mean, our skin . . . it’s too pale. It will never work.’
‘Trudi Jan, I can put brown make-up on your face,’ Shakila chimed in.
The thought of going blackface on national television was simply outrageous, and yet nobody in our team could understand our reluctance to get on board. We finally agreed, on the proviso that they would only shoot us in extreme wide or side on. So Shakila daubed our faces in thick, muddy foundation and drew tiny Kuchi tattoos on our chins. With our headscarves and traditional dress, everyone agreed we looked perfect.
I had to ditch my glasses, so the next few hours were literally a blur, and when there was a commotion at the gate towards the end of the shoot, I had no idea what was going on.
‘Muffy, Trudi, come with me. Quickly!’ Shakila hissed as she scrambled to her feet.
We followed her inside the house, where Aleem soon joined us. ‘The local mullah is outside with some men,’ he told us. ‘He knows there are foreigners here and is complaining that we didn’t ask his permission to film.’
‘Well, do we need his permission?’ I asked.
‘Not really—I think they just want money. I have told him to return to the mosque, and I will go there now and speak with him. But you must leave—you are not safe here.’
I didn’t imagine that a couple of western women parading as Afghans would go down terribly well with the neighbours so, flanked by our local crew, we covered our faces, bowed our heads, bustled past the crowd gathered on the street and dived into an idling van. We laughed all the way back to work and spent the rest of the afternoon posing for photos as an endless line of amused kids filed into our office to check out the Kuchi queens.
Over the years in Kabul my TV roles included a foreign journalist, a terrified westerner in a suicide attack and the wife of an ambassador. My brother once asked me whether I was taking a huge risk, appearing so often on television, but whatever risks I was taking were nothing compared to those taken by the courageous Afghan women I worked with every day.
A lot of us in the expat community referred to people in Nilu’s situation as ‘Half-Ghans’, a cute, catchy label that conveniently summarised their tale—born in Afghanistan then raised overseas before travelling back to their birthplace to help in its reconstruction. It was only when a heartbroken Nilu announced her intention to leave that I grasped how wholly inadequate the Half-Ghan tag was—how it failed to capture the constant struggle that people like Nilu faced in their attempts to straddle two worlds.
Nilu felt she could no longer stay in Afghanistan but didn’t really want to go back to the States, and despaired at once again having to remould herself and adapt. I realised then that my fearless, extraordinary friend would most likely forever be a woman caught in limbo.
It was March 2012 and the hot topic at our weekly supervisors’ meeting was racism. It seemed that our music show, a singing competition generally fashioned on the Idol series, had managed to divide the nation. It was ironic because the program was originally devised as a way of connecting Afghan to Afghan. By featuring singers from all across the country, it was intended to unite the people through song.
But this particular season, its seventh, had proven to be a pernicious affair. Two Hazara singers and a Tajik made it to the top three and in that week’s elimination round the Tajik was voted off. The clip of the elimination was posted on YouTube; before it was taken down, it attracted five hundred comments, the bulk of them threatening and ugly and frightening in their ferocity. There was common agreement amongst my team that the Tajik singer was, by far, the best and it seemed his backers were incensed about the Hazara voting bloc that saw him off.
On top of that, one of our best floor managers, Akram, had lost his job. One of the Hazara singers complained that Akram had made racist comments to him and, despite the fact that this poor Pashtun kid had a faultless record with the company, he was instantly let go.
There was now a zero tolerance policy in place regarding racism, and that day HR sent an email to everyone confirming this. Akram stood in my office that afternoon, choking back tears as he said his goodbyes.
There are four main ethnic groups in Afghanistan—Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks—together with a handful of smaller minority groups scattered across the country. Managing the bar had given me a pretty solid insight into the ethnic divisions that prevail in Afghanistan. My first experience of it at my current job had come just a month into my tenure, when I was called in to break up a physical fight between two of my writers.
I was at lunch at the time and it was a frantic phone call from Allie, one of our project managers, that alerted me to the melee. I raced into the writers’ room to see Ramin, a hulking, bear-faced Pashtun man, holding a chair over his head, poised to smash it down onto the skull of Yosuf, a slight, bespectacled Tajik fellow who was yelling and flailing his arms about like a lunatic. I marched into the room, clapped my hands and yelled ‘Hey! Hey! Hey!’ As ineffectual as that sounds, it actually worked.
As I stomped ins
ide, I momentarily wondered why a tiny western woman was stepping into the fray when at least half a dozen Afghan men were inside the room witnessing the violence, while another dozen spectators stood outside the door. I never quite got to the bottom of what the fight was about. Someone called someone a ‘dog’ . . . an insult about a mother may or may not have been thrown into the mix. The only fact that I could clearly establish was that the Dari and the Pashto writers no longer wanted to sit together in the same room. Tough titties. Space was a valuable commodity and they would just have to learn to get on as far as I was concerned.
Then, only a month or two later, as we were planning for our auditions in Jalalabad, Raouf confided to me that he didn’t want Zahra along on the trip. I just couldn’t comprehend Raouf’s resistance. I was pleased and amazed that Zahra’s parents were even letting her go—it is almost unheard of for an Afghan woman to be allowed to travel anywhere without being accompanied by a male relative.
She was a good worker, I argued; she was smart and well organised and I needed her there. It was then that he reached up and stretched back the corners of his eyes with his forefingers and declared, ‘She too Chinesey.’ I smilingly accused him of being a racist pig and then spent the next half-hour explaining to him through diagrams and charades exactly what that meant.
As the international carnival winds down, ethnic conflict is becoming more obvious and brutal. Hamid, who boldly declared that there is a little bit of Talib in every Afghan, explained it all to me as if to a child. Now that the ‘foreign oppressors’ had stated their intention to pull out, the power grab had begun in earnest. History had repeatedly demonstrated the difficulties in merging the tribal societies with a central government. In the vacuum that would inevitably exist once foreign troops withdrew from the country, Tajiks, Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Nuristanis, Sunni Muslims. Shi’as, conservatives, moderates . . . would all be staking their claims.
In our supervisors’ meeting that day Christof was distraught. He made a long, desperate and, at times, rambling plea to our senior Afghan staff (an ethnically diverse bunch) to unite for the future of Afghanistan. He was close to tears, constantly clutching at his head, and his sincerity could not be doubted. But at times I found it hard not to laugh. His genuinely heartfelt speech was delivered in English and at least a third of the people in the room could barely speak the language, if at all. Even for those who spoke good English, his western perspective was undoubtedly lost on them.
‘If you go to a disco or nightclub in Germany, you do not ask a woman if she is Catholic or Protestant! Imagine going up to a woman at a discotheque and your first question is “Are you Catholic or Protestant?” She would look at you and think: Cuckoo! You’re crazy! Goodbye!’
I was pretty sure the scenario was beyond their imaginations. There were no discotheques in Kabul. Apart from in the workplace, there were very few opportunities for young Afghan men and women to mix freely. There were no Catholics. There were no Protestants. Christof’s well-intentioned analogy—of a man not being able to pick up a chick at a nightclub because of his religious bias—fell on confused ears. Like so many other western initiatives that had occurred in Afghanistan over the past eleven years, it was all just a little bit wrong.
One week later, an episode of one of our serials was rejected for broadcast. Our foreign client, who had funded the show since its inception, had taken issue with the fact that a small Afghan flag that sat on a desk in two office scenes and three scenes at the police station was hanging upside down.
It had been brought to our attention two days ago. I then sat through endless edits as we attempted to cut around it and instructed our graphics department to slightly blur the flag in scenes where we couldn’t.
My Afghan staff all agreed that the blurring was quite acceptable and that, due to the flag being folded over, its orientation was indiscernible anyway. But the client was still not satisfied and demanded that we reshoot all five scenes where the wretched flag appeared.
The reshoot would put us hopelessly behind schedule—for this particular program, we had to film fifty-two thirty-minute episodes per year. Yet we had no choice but to do what we were told.
This problem would have been nothing more than a tiresome affair except for the fact that the client’s representative (who had only been in the job for six weeks and had never visited our offices, let alone the set) was inexplicably claiming over email that the flag had been deliberately placed upside down by one of our Afghan staff. It had now developed into a veritable scandal.
Eugene, who was managing the project and whose mother is Afghan, had taken great offence on our behalf. He had replied to the man and cc’d his superiors:
If you do not have any evidence to support your opinion, this comment is irrelevant, unprofessional, and extremely disrespectful to our entire Afghan staff and crew. Just as it is unfair for Afghans to accuse international peacekeeping forces of wrongdoing and harming Afghanistan, it is equally unfair for international peacekeeping forces to do the same of Afghans. Our Afghan staff and crew treat you with this respect—I ask that you treat them with the same.
Furthermore, I am not aware of your background so I do not know how much you know about Afghan cultures and sensitivities, but to even allude that an Afghan would deliberately hang his or her national flag upside down is unfathomable. It is a very revered national and Islamic symbol that is ‘never’ handled inappropriately on purpose. If you do not believe me, please verify with your Afghan advisors.
In response, there were numerous apologies made by the client, together with an assurance that the individual concerned would be receiving ‘counselling’ over the incident. Eugene was now my #1 hero.
Merzad couldn’t have cared less about all this and informed me that the flag had probably been upside down for the last two seasons. The money the client gave us to make the show barely covered the wages of our cast and a skeleton crew, so nobody had the time or concern to notice the alignment of a crumpled, handkerchief-sized flag on a desk. We laughed about it, but I told him to keep this information to himself. Having leverage with a difficult client was a rarity and it was nice being on top for a change.
Most of our client reps were delightful people, who openly acknowledged their lack of understanding about drama production and were happy to leave it to the experts. A few of them even became close personal friends. What we called our ‘show briefs’ (consisting of a synopsis, episode outlines and character biographies) were often quite long documents, running anywhere up to forty pages, and we often wondered how carefully our clients read them. I once colluded with a very funny junior PSYOPS officer to tape together all the pages inside the perfectly presented folder of a particularly extensive show brief before handing it on to his superiors for approval. He laughed when he informed me that the series had been approved and fully funded—with the pages all still sticky-taped together.
But there always seemed to be the odd one or two who, for whatever reason, were intent on tearing us down at every turn. And even with great clients, their ideas about appropriate formats for delivering messaging could sometimes be a little out of whack.
One of them asked us to write a proposal for a thirteen-part drama serial on fistulas. I warily googled the term, a little uncertain as to what I’d find. I discovered that an obstetric fistula is an injury to the birth canal that leaves the woman constantly leaking urine. It is a devastatingly common problem in Afghanistan, often attributable to child brides bearing babies when they are not fully developed; communities routinely stigmatise women who suffer from the condition. While readily acknowledging the need for education around the problem, I wasn’t entirely sure that seven-and-a-half hours of soap on the subject was the best way to go.
I also wrote proposals for a comedy show about a zany, likeable census collector and a twenty-five-part drama series based on the UK show EastEnders (kind of tricky when the action on that particular show centres around a London pub).
At the information sessio
n for the EastEnders series (where the client outlined its creative vision of the show for all the broadcasters and production companies interested in bidding on the project), the Afghan attendees sat in stunned silence as they viewed a clip from the UK original featuring a gay couple kissing.
We ultimately won the contract but had to decline it as the tender, based on a one-page synopsis, was offered in August and they wanted us to be on air by mid-September. A small Afghan production house ultimately received the funding; a friend who was writing for the series reported numerous breakdowns, showdowns and endless creative disputes as they scrambled to get the show up in time.
I sat in meetings and patiently explained why an Afghan version of Doctor Who was simply beyond our technical capabilities, and debated the feasibility of a local version of Glee, given that we couldn’t actually show women dancing on Afghan TV.
But for every ill-conceived idea, there were many more great ones, and enough smart, dedicated clients to keep me sane and hopeful. And any initial reservations I had regarding the nature of my job had long since dissipated with the knowledge that we were preaching for positive change, and that hawking propaganda was keeping my wonderful team in work.
Eugene, Merzad and I had a meeting with Flag Man the following week and intended to play our hand for all it was worth. We would no doubt be punished for our smugness further down the track but the opportunity to bask in a brief moment of glorious self-righteousness was just too appealing to resist.
I was finishing up lunch with Nilu on 15 April when the attack began. It was our Last Supper together, in the Italian restaurant directly across the road from work where we’d sat so many times before, picking over life. I had arranged it only that morning, suddenly realising that we were running out of time to say our private goodbyes.
Making Soapies in Kabul Page 18