Opium Nation

by Fariba Nawa

  In 1989, with 15,000 Soviet soldiers dead and 1.5 million Afghans killed, the Red Army pulled out the last of its troops. Najibullah continued to rule the country, opening it up economically and socially. The war still raged in the countryside, though, with Afghan forces fighting the rebels. The mujahideen wanted power, and Najibullah’s new nationalist rhetoric still sounded like secular hypocrisy to them. Najibullah agreed to step aside, and in 1992 the rebels marched to Kabul and declared victory.

  After the rebels take over Kabul, my family in Fremont monitors the Afghan news regularly. The relatives who wanted to return to Afghanistan have gone back to their American jobs, to paying their mortgages. I see my father listening to the news on the Afghan diaspora radio program. He shakes his head at the report of the ensuing civil war he predicated.

  “You were right, Agha. It’s no time to go back,” I tell him, sitting next to him to hear the news.

  “I wish I had been wrong,” he replies.

  The Soviet enemy that had united Afghanistan’s various ethnic and political factions was now gone, and these groups turned against one another for control of Kabul. The United States stopped aiding rebel groups, but those groups now had a stockpile of weapons to kill one another with, and a downtrodden population. The civil war among the mujahideen was the bloodiest time in the capital, which had been left intact during Communist rule. In the four years Hekmatyar, Massoud, and other commanders pummeled Kabul, casualties rose to sixty thousand. In other cities, the commanders looted homes and businesses and terrorized the civilian population. In Herat, however, Commander Ismail Khan began rebuilding the city and brought some level of security, albeit under an authoritarian theocracy similar to that in Iran. In the north, Abdul Rashid Dostum also brought order. But most of the country fell into general chaos.

  The Islamist mujahideen now in power countered the country’s traditional tribal structures; the heroes now became the enemy. Afghans waited for yet another savior. It came in the form of the Taliban, who, like the Islamist mujahideen, emerged from a modernist revolutionary movement that focused on a radical pan-Islamist vision. Although the next heroes in the epoch of Afghanistan, the Taliban also terrorized. They had no real education, no expertise, and no skills to run a country—but they did not need those. They had God, guns, and opium.

  Chapter Three

  A Struggle for Coherency

  The few passengers on the British Airways plane keep getting up to look out the large window near the bathroom at the back of the plane. I watch some of the passengers staring with suspicion at the man or woman sitting next to them. A collective fear weighs down the aircraft. Even the flight attendants seem on edge, making more rounds than usual to check on passengers. The summer sky is an ocean of blue, no clouds to dream upon. I close my eyes, trying to catch up on a week of lost sleep. Seven days ago, the demons of Afghanistan struck New York City and Washington, D.C.

  After my trip to Afghanistan in 2000, I return to the United States to attend graduate school at New York University, to further my studies of the Middle East and journalism. Classes have just begun when, on the morning of September 11, 2001, a loud knock wakes me up. I look at the clock. It’s 9:05 am.

  I lift my head up from under my pillow. “Yes?”

  Osama, my roommate Rona’s cousin, opens my bedroom door a crack. Osama is visiting us temporarily in our Brooklyn brownstone near Atlantic Avenue. “You need to come to the roof,” he says urgently.

  The tone in his voice tells me something is very wrong. I jump up and sprint to the stairs in my pajamas. There is a billow of black smoke across the East River, blocking our enviable view of the city.

  “Was there a fire?” I ask Osama.

  “No. Two airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center.”

  “Oh my God!” I gasp for breath. I hold my hand over my forehead to block the sun and look as far as I can see across the river. The sky is all blackness and smoke. Our television is not working, so the three of us go to a bar and join a crowd of dozens watching the TV there. The cameras zoom in on the people trapped and jumping to their deaths from the top floors of the two towers. On the ground, a storm of debris and dust covers a mass of people running in all directions. Fleeing New Yorkers cover the Brooklyn Bridge, some crying, others looking frightened and confused. The news report shows President Bush cursing enemies of the United States.

  Two days before, two Arabs had assassinated the mujahideen leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, the only challenge to the Taliban’s final victory in Afghanistan. It is clear to me that the Taliban will protect al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, who allegedly masterminded the attack on the United States. In exchange for the Taliban’s cooperation, Bin Laden sponsored the killing of Massoud. I predict the next chapter in Afghanistan’s history: it will be bombed again, and more names will be added to the list of three thousand American lives lost in the September 11 attacks as U.S. troops gear up to head east.

  The two countries that form the basis of my dual Afghan American identity, the identity I have been struggling to merge, will finally go to war. I am numb.

  Osama, Rona, and I walk along the Promenade by the Brooklyn Bridge in a daze. We hear people cursing Arabs and Muslims.

  “It’s the clash of civilizations!” one man shouts. “It’s time we show these bastards who’s the winner.”

  What clash? Believers of scholar Samuel Huntington’s theory that conflicts in culture and religion will dictate future wars are now vindicated. Huntington wrote that the Islamic and Western civilizations will collide due to the differences in Islam and Christianity and in the identities that arise from those religions. The Bush administration invokes these ideas to push its war on terror. But the theory dismisses the fact that culture is fluid and multifaceted. It ignores the interdependence and harmony of cultures and religions in various parts of the world, such as among Muslims in the United States. It dismisses identities such as mine—mixed, mired, and myriad. I am constantly struggling to combine Afghan and American, but that struggle has created a stronger individual in me, and it has allowed me to see the world from a more nuanced perspective. It’s scholar Edward Said’s response to Huntington that considers identities like mine. Said posits in his “clash of ignorance” theory that current conflicts are based on misinterpretations of religion, and he recognizes the complexities of identities and cultures.

  Atlantic Avenue is in the most well-known Arab neighborhood in New York. I fear a backlash; our friend Osama has already asked us to call him Aziz instead. I can blend in because I have blond hair and fair skin; no one can tell I’m Afghan.

  Afghanistan becomes hot news—a month before I’d had to explain to a woman that Afghan is also a nationality, not just a breed of dog. Now I hear on TV and from people on the street explanations of who we Afghans are and what we believe—a simplified version of our country. After I write an article about a possible backlash against Muslims, there’s a barrage of journalists at my house to interview me about Afghanistan. I’m a white face Americans can trust. They want me to be the speaker for the disenfranchised Afghans, but I want to tell my own story as a journalist.

  In the journalism department at NYU, students have no context or history of Afghanistan. In the Middle Eastern studies department, professors and students dissect and analyze, but they have no solutions. I feel useless sitting in a classroom. A friend who works with Agence France Presse in Islamabad calls and offers me a temporary job covering the expected Afghan–U.S. war from Pakistan. I take leave from school to fly to Islamabad once again. The only person who knows I’m leaving is my brother, Hadi. My parents cannot know, because they will worry. They gave up everything in their country to make sure their children were safe, and now I am headed straight into the war my mother and father risked their lives to take me out of nearly twenty years ago.

  On June 14, 1983, my feet touch American soil. After two days of traveling on three airplanes, my family and I finally land in Dallas, Texas, home of the U.S. nonprofi
t that sponsored our journey. The couple who works for the nonprofit drives us to a garage behind a house in a suburban area in Fort Worth, which becomes our home for the next three months. One of our few possessions is a black-and-white TV. When I turn it on, I watch—for the first time—a man and woman French-kissing. My mother is mortified and turns off the television.

  “How can they show such dirty things so openly!” she shouts.

  My family finds Texas lonely and hot. After three months there, the four of us take a Greyhound bus to the San Francisco Bay Area, where my dad’s cousin Uncle Turfa resides. Uncle Turfa helps us rent a two-bedroom apartment in a Mexican neighborhood in Union City. My father goes out and buys a Mazda station wagon with money my brother sends us from Germany. My parents enroll in English-language classes, Faiza takes classes at the local community college and works in retail full time, and I’m placed in the local elementary school. I’m ten years old and incredibly curious about the new world we’ve entered. Unfortunately, I know how to say only “thank you” in English. The garbled rs and vs of English words hurt my tongue when I try to pronounce them. My mother tongue is genderless. Everything is an “it,” and when we refer to a girl or boy, we actually say the Farsi word for girl or boy. But English has the “he” and “she” complications I must learn. When people speak to me, it sounds like baby gibberish. I nod my head as if I’m mute.

  I like my teachers but not the students. They’re rude and disrespectful. A few weeks into the fourth grade, I make an observation. “How come they don’t wear uniforms here?” I ask my mom.

  “I don’t know. They should, though,” she says.

  “Well, I will from now on. I can choose one of my dresses that you made me and wear it every day. That will be my uniform,” I decide. I feel more organized and focused with a uniform. It just seems like the right thing to do, since that’s what we did in Herat. Besides, we don’t have the money to buy the stylish clothes my classmates wear.

  I choose a simple blue-and-red-checked dress with white socks and black shoes. My hair is always in twin braids. The second week I wear the outfit, Sarah, a loudmouthed classmate, tugs on my sleeve. “You must be really poor, because you wear the same outfit every day. Is your family homeless?”

  My English is good enough now for me to understand this, and her words prick me. Tears well up in my eyes, and I go home and throw the dress in the garbage. From that day on I wear a different outfit every day, selecting from the sundry dresses my mother has sewn for me. I am out of style, but at least no one will think less of me.

  As the years go by I often think back to those first weeks at my unfamiliar American school and how my ill-fated attempt to impose order there would eventually have meant social suicide. Throughout my adolescence, I try to fit in as a misfit. I want to make up my own rules for conformity. I’m disinterested in and critical of the kids who are popular and apathetic. In my middle school, it seems half of the boys are on drugs and many of the girls become pregnant before going to high school. They are in gangs called Norteños and Sureños, and they wear red or blue to mark which gang they belong to. One day in the sixth grade, I’m doing my homework in the school library when I see an eighth-grade boy pull up his sleeve to scratch an itch. I glimpse red marks scarring the inner part of his arm.

  I ask my friend Carmela, who’s sitting across from me, if the boy’s sick.

  “He’s shooting up heroin,” she explains. “I guess that means he’s sick, ’cuz he’s an addict.”

  “What’s heroin? Doesn’t heroine mean the woman character in a book or movie?” I am sure I read that in Webster’s dictionary.

  “No, silly,” Carmela says. “It’s a drug that makes you high and then you die if you take it too much. I heard that worms come out of your brain and spirits take over your heart if you inject heroin.” Her eyes are wide and she gestures emphatically.

  “That’s so scary. What’s it made of?”

  She shrugs her shoulders. “Bad stuff, I guess.”

  I look up heroin in the encyclopedia and am fascinated by the drug. Its base is opium—I know the Farsi word for opium is tariak. My parents used to talk about our neighbor Mr. Jawan in Herat and his forays in opium smuggling.

  “Mr. Jawan is trying to get his family out of Afghanistan,” my mom informs my dad. “He lives such a comfortable life that I’m not sure he would be happy outside his country.”

  “Well, he works in the international business of illegal narcotics. I’m sure he could transfer his business to wherever he goes with the contacts he has,” my father jokes.

  Another person my parents reminisce about around the dinner table is the gypsy musician Ozra, a legendary beauty and opium addict who left her husband to marry another man of status and wealth in Herat.

  “I was a young boy and had trouble with pain in my eyes,” my father recalls. “When Ozra came to our property to sing, she always brought her opium pipe. She would light up the opium, take a whiff, and then blow the smoke in my eyes. The pain went away.”

  “I remember her eyes were magical, but always yellowed from the drugs,” my mom says. “Men fell in love with her. Good thing you were a young boy then,” she jokes to my dad. “She was famous in Herat for her music, beauty, and opium. She would go into an empty room, draw all the curtains to make it dark. She preferred to smoke her opium alone.”

  “Well, it must have been that beauty that convinced Said [the wealthy man] to marry a drug addict from a lower class,” my dad says, then chuckles. “Or Said was also smoking opium.”

  The next day in school I tell Carmela that heroin is refined opium and that opium comes from my country. I’m somehow proud. Heroin is something about Afghanistan that she can relate to, even if it feeds addicts like the boy I saw in the library.

  “That’s cool,” she says. “Are there a lot of people with worms in their brains and spirits in their hearts in your country?”

  “I don’t know.” We both go back to doing our homework.

  I stay away from the gangs, the drugs, and trouble; my role models are the nerds, who, like me, do not fit in. In high school, I choose a group of culturally eclectic girlfriends—a Nicaraguan, an African American, and a Caucasian—and we indulge in being different from our classmates and families. We talk about boys, sex, politics, race, and our families and conflicts. But I wish I had an Afghan friend with whom I could share my duality, someone who could feel the warm sensation when the word Afghanistan was mentioned, someone who listened to the famous deceased Afghan pop singer Ahmed Zahir and who ate shiriakh, the creamy Afghan ice cream. But I also want that friend to be someone who can discuss existentialism or feminism and enjoy partying like I do.

  Sixty thousand Afghan refugees have made their homes in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of the refugees receive public benefits. They’ve moved from other states to California partly because of the government resources, but also for the area’s rolling green hills, small lake, and large streets, which are reminiscent of Kabul’s landscape. We live among the largest Afghan community in the United States, followed by Washington, D.C., and Virginia, then New York City. Despite the diverse members of the community, I feel poles apart when I socialize with Afghans in high school. My ideas are too liberal—I believe in gay rights, women’s liberation, and the freedom to choose one’s religion.

  My beliefs are markedly different from those of mainstream Afghans. Even the Afghans in the San Francisco Bay Area believe that gays are sick and must be treated for their illness; women should learn how to cook and clean in order to find good husbands, their most important goal in life; and Islam should be the only religion everyone follows. The Afghan girls I know have to go home after school and tend to guests. The Afghan boys, however, can loiter in the school courtyard and whistle at pretty girls. They can even bring their (non-Afghan) girlfriends home, while the Afghan girls are not even allowed to have male friends.

  Lina and I are opening our lockers in the school hall one day when two openly gay boys pa
ss by. Lina is an Afghan girl who was three when her family immigrated to the United States. She sees the gay boys and sneers. “They gross me out, damn coonies !” she says, using one of the most offensive Farsi expletives, the equivalent of faggot; the word is meant to emasculate a man and shame his honor.

  I’m angry and make sure she knows it. “You’re so prejudiced and ignorant. They have the right to be and love who they want. They don’t hurt you, so why is it your business? Lina, get your head out of your ass and look up the word equality.” I slam my locker shut and run off to class. Lina refuses to acknowledge me for the rest of our high school years.

  My family’s social life revolves around dinner parties, funerals, and weddings. Guests are a daily disruption in my life, and my mother wants me to spend time with the countless relatives and friends who drop by from the next block or fly in for seasonal visits from Europe.

  “Badeh, it’s improper,” she says, “when you walk in and say a cold hello and go to your room. You need to be respectful, Fariba.”

  “Why? All your guests do is sit around, eat, and gossip. They haven’t earned my respect. I hate the fake kissing and pleasantries. We’re so fake, I hate it!” I shout and throw myself on my bed, burying my head under a pillow.

  “Whatever we are, we are Afghan, and even if you don’t believe in the customs, you need to do it for me. I care what the guests think, even if you don’t,” she says in her usual calm, pleading tone.

  “And I wish you wouldn’t wear such short skirts,” she adds. “It’s sinful for a Muslim girl—”

  “Go away, please,” I cut her off in an American teenage voice. The double standard regarding girls and boys also frustrates me, and I argue with my mother when she demands that I follow the rules and be a good Afghan girl.