When Fariba Nawa’s family left Afghanistan in 1982 she was 9 years old; her American childhood didn’t erase the Afghan identity her parents imparted, her pride in her native land, or memories of her grandfather’s farm, with its “mulberry, cherry, pomegranate, walnut, apple, peach, and orange trees.’’ When she returned to Afghanistan in 2000, the beginning of a seven-year quest to report on, understand, and live in her former homeland, she found her beautiful memories overshadowed by grim realities. The ruling Taliban had crushed people’s social, intellectual, and artistic aspirations, and decades of conflict left the country scarred and impoverished. The following year brought the attacks of Sept. 11, and Nawa next went home to cover the war.
A journalist whose work has appeared widely, Nawa deftly sketches the geopolitical nightmare that is today’s Afghanistan, but the book’s real strength is her detailed, sensitive reporting of individual people’s stories. Focusing on those whose lives have been affected by the country’s opium trade - which is to say, nearly everyone - Nawa interviews drug smugglers, addicts, widows, and prepubescent “brides’’ whose families have pledged them to husbands a generation their senior. About one such child, Nawa writes, “I was immediately attracted to the young girl because she was a mystery and a victim who needed to be saved from barbaric traditions. I thought it was my job as an outsider from the West to rescue her.’’ She’s not alone in the impulse; what makes this book so rewarding is Nawa’s clear-eyed reckoning with a country and a people who are beyond her help.
