Still Bookin' It!

I realize I've been missing in action here for several weeks. If you've wondered where I've been lately, I have a simple alibi: I moved mid-February.  I haven't quit reading. Of course not. But I've spent far too much time unpacking boxes, along with a great deal of pleasant time exploring all there is to do in Nashville.

Through my college roommate Susan, we were invited to join a supper club, and one of the members asked if I wanted to join her book club. (Picture me smiling.) During the time I was in Hickory, my book club was composed of people who had known me before joining the group. Some knew each other, but they all knew me. We made up our own rules (and very few of those) as we went along, so we were low on structure.

On my first meeting with my new group, I arrived at the hostess's home in Franklin in a beautiful area of this charming town. I knew only Gail, and I had met her only twice, but I liked her already.  The rest of the group was diverse. One former book club member returned after a long absence, so I didn't feel like the only newbie. A couple were from South Africa and have arranged a trip for some of the group to go there this summer.

The book they had chosen for March was When the Moon Is Low by Nadia Hashimi. The story begins in Kabul, Afghanistan, told from the perspective of Fereiba, who loses her mother at  birth and is raised by her rather disconnected father and a self-centered  stepmother, who attempts to arrange a marriage for Fereiba that will be in the stepmother's own best interest.  Nevertheless, Fereiba ends up in a happy marriage where she blossoms until the Taliban brings about changes that eventually shatter her happy home, leaving her no choice but to take her three children and to flee her home country.

From this point, Hashimi moves back and forth from the perspective of Fereiba and her son Salem, forced to grow up quickly in order to help the family slip across borders into Turkey then Greece, until they are separated and have to make their way separately to England, where they hope to rejoin family who left while the Taliban's threat level was still low.

This beautifully told story is a stark reminder of the dangers and challenges that so many refugees face while fleeing war-torn countries. As the daily news presents the current wave of Syrian refugees in terms of massive numbers, Hashimi reminds readers of their humanity.

Just a couple of evenings before the book club met, I attended a concert by Abigail Washburn and Wu Fei at a local coffee shop. The show was free, but donations to Nashville International Center for Empowerment (NICE) were encouraged.  This group helps refugees in the resettlement process, finding work and educations, as well as addressing health concerns. I was once again reminded of the power of literature to encourage empathy through individuals' stories.

Still Bookin' It!

It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

I've always been fascinated by people who make a living as photographers.  With the exhibit of Steve McCurry's startlingly beautiful photographs from National Geographic on display at the Hickory Museum of Art, I try to imagine the lifestyle of professional photographers who travel the world, breaking into the bigger media markets against what must be overwhelming odds.

Lynsey Addario's story, however, is more than a glamorous travelogue, since she made her mark in some of the most dangerous areas of the world. In her memoir, she describes traveling first to Afghanistan before the rest of the world paid much attention, then returning after 9/11, eventually as an imbedded photojournalist for the New York Times. 

She reveals a side to the Middle East conflict from a rarely told perspective, particularly as a female trying to do her job without attracting too much attention. She describes harrowing experiences, at one time caught in a fire fight while working with another female reporter who was trying to disguise her pregnancy.

Addario doesn't try to editorialize as much as she simply presents the details she witnessed and experienced.  Through the course of her narrative, she introduced readers to her own family, to men she loved, and to the man she eventually marries, one secure enough to let her do her dangerous job.

At times her story is as dramatic as any adventure movie. Knowing she had survived to write her own story at least gave me some ease as I read about a period of time when she and her colleagues were held captive, fearing for their lives and enduring assault stopping just short of rape.

Just as reading Becoming Odyssa made me admire Jennifer Pharr Davis but did not make me want to hike the Appalachian Trail, reading Addario's experiences as a "conflict photojournalist" inspired admiration for the guts she has to advance into dangerous parts of the world in order to tell the stories of civilians there, but she did not motivate me to follow in her footsteps. For now, I'll keep my camera right here with me at home.

 

It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

A Cup of Friendship

This week as bombs have blasted the U. S. Embassy and NATO headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, I was finishing Deborah Rodriguez's novel A Cup of Friendship. I haven't yet read her first book, The Kabul Beauty School, a memoir which, I learned, came under some criticism and claims of exaggeration. I'll leave that kind of controversy to Oprah. This book introduced me to some aspects of life in Afghanistan, not only for the locals, but for expats and for Americans and Brits working there.

Sunny, the protagonist of the novel, who has come to the country with a boyfriend who spends much of his time away on furtive missions, runs an American-style coffee house. This setting is a perfect backdrop for a variety of employees and patrons whose lives intertwine. They all have back stories: most sympathetic is Yazmina, recently widowed and pregnant, who manages to escape from drug lords to take her as payment for debts her uncle owes.

An older uneducated widow and her son also work for Sunny, and they are at odds over the old and new ways. She hides a secret romance with a tailor she loved before her marriage, a man who has been writing her letters for years, letters she can't read and has to hide from her son, now the man in the family, in control of her life. A female journalist from Britain and a recently divorced wife of a diplomat from Beacon Hill by way of Missouri grow into an unusual friendship and partnership with Sunny as they see egregious injustices toward women.

Throughout the novel, bombs go off, affecting the characters directly or indirectly, and I'm reminded of the lesson I learned when I read Reading Lolita in Teheran: The citizens are victims of politics and religious extremism. Though lighter reading than A Thousand Splendid Suns, this novel touched on similar issues, particularly related to human rights of women and to some of the destruction wrought by the Taliban in the country.

Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts." As travel becomes at times more dangerous, vicarious travel through the pages of a books--novel or memoir--can perhaps provide the kind of fatalities the world needs right now.

A Cup of Friendship