Print“What the fuck are you doing here?” the American soldier said as a smile of disbelief spread across his weary face.
It was the summer of 2007, just before I began my first year at Columbia. We were in the Kapisa province of Afghanistan, about 100 miles north of Kabul.
I was traveling to a family wedding. The groom and three of his friends were in our car while our mothers and siblings trailed behind us in a second car. When we arrived at Tagab Valley, we realized that the road was blocked by American soldiers. In some village in the valley, insurgents had opened fire on a passing convoy, then disappeared deep into the village, or up into the mountains. The Americans were out to get them. To avoid the possible flow of other insurgents into the valley, the troops had blocked the road that passed it.
For the first hour, we sat in the car, listening to music, teasing the groom. As the traffic in front of us remained immobile, the groom became increasingly nervous. He was to exchange vows in less than two hours. ”What if I miss my ceremony?” the groom joked, but the look on his face was one of worry.
I walked out of the car to approach the American convoy. I was the natural choice, for I was the only one in the party who spoke English. Dressed no differently from the locals, I realized I could be perceived as a threat. So I returned to our second car and asked to carry my six-month old cousin with me. This way, I would not come across as dangerous.
As I approached the first armored vehicle, baby in arm, the sniper turned his attention toward me. I got closer, passed through the Afghan forces that were accompanying the soldiers, and stood right next to the first American vehicle.
“Is there someone I could speak to, please?” I asked. The soldier looked at me, befuddled. Amidst the dust, amidst the chaos, he heard someone ask a question in English. Without much of an accent. He simply pointed me to his commanding officer.
“Sir, I am traveling with a wedding party,” I said. “ I would like to know when the road—”
“Whoa, whoa” the officer interrupted me, “before you go on: how the fuck do you speak English like that?”
As I explained to him that I was a student in the United States, I forgot about where I was for a moment. I had recently graduated from Deerfield Academy, in western Massachusetts, and I was to begin my first year at Columbia College in the fall. The officer turned out to be from Worcester, Massachusetts. He had traveled down to Deerfield several times.
With the number of “fucks” and “mans” and “likes” exchanged, for a moment it seemed like I was back at boarding school. We were having a conversation I had had several times towards the end of my days at Deerfield: about leaving the valley behind, about moving to the crazy city. But his helmet, his uniform, the dust around us, and his question reminded me that we were far from there:
“What the fuck are you doing here?” He asked with a kind smile. A smile that I could swear I had seen in Western Massachusetts, a voice that I could swear I had heard before.
“I am here for a wedding,” I said. “The groom is nervous that he will be late for his bride!”
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For the past eight years, I have shuttled back and forth between the dust of Kabul and the comfortable bubble of American academia. In this time, I have learned two unique ways of living that scarcely overlap.
For nine months of the year, I speak English day in and day out, and horse around with girls, as well as my elders, without filtering myself. I blend in seamlessly—for the most part—into American society. Then, for the three months of the summer, I return to my hometown north of Kabul, where a strict code of social manners and gender segregation rules every aspect of life. I’m forced to leave carelessness at JFK, during the hours of questioning and searches by customs officials. As soon as I set foot in Kabul, I pretend to be the old Mujib, the polite 14-year-old who always respected every social custom. Eight years of living in “Amrika” has not westernized me, they say. But I try hard to impart this impression. Otherwise, I would be the hot topic of gossip around town: in such a short time, I forgot who I was, and where I came from, completely. The fact that I was only 14 and totally malleable when I left for boarding school would not factor into such conversations. I have either lost it or not. And I try my best to make sure I have not.
These eight years have also been a struggle to form a unique identity of my own, one divorced from maintaining social graces in countries thousands of miles apart. An identity separate from the one prescribed to me as simply a child of war, a product of violence.
I grew up in the darkest period of Afghanistan’s history where, for most of my life, I bore witness to the crumbling of a society from within. I watched the politics of civil war, extremism, and then the introduction of democracy play out in the country and shape the daily lives of ordinary citizens. War was our national identity, and as a citizen of the country, I was a product of war.
When I was ready for my first day of school, my older sister took my hand and dropped me off. She was in sixth grade at the time. Soon after that, the Taliban took over and millions of women in Afghanistan were confined to the house for six years, completely away from the public sphere. My sister was one of them. The boys continued to go to school, but their curriculum too was dominated by religious subjects. When girls’ schools resumed again in 2001, after the United States intervened to defeat al-Qaeda, my sister and I ended up in the same grade because of the disruption in her education. But in separate schools. Something as ordinary as a co-educational institution no longer seemed possible. Society had to begin from zero again.
With this new beginning, I had an opportunity to attend a three-week conflict resolution camp in Maine called Seeds of Peace, where teenagers from Israel, Palestine, India, Pakistan and other countries at war gather for dialogue. Since Seeds of Peace had no office in Kabul, they sent an invitation to the newly established government’s Ministry of Education to recruit six boys and six girls for the camp. I passed several rounds of testing and interviews without knowing why or for what I was being tested. It wasn’t until a few days before the date of departure that we were notified that we had been selected for a delegation that would travel to the United States. And so began my introduction to America.
While the purpose of Seeds of Peace for Israelis and Palestinians was to sit down for dialogue and to discuss their conflict, for us Afghans it was entirely different. It was an opportunity to exercise the most ordinary things, such as having an opinion, which teenagers in the rest of the world take for granted. Coming from an oppressed society, this was not easy for us. But over the course of the three weeks, as we shared our stories and broke down several times in the process, we grew comfortable expressing our thoughts.
Subsequently, with help from Seeds of Peace, I acquired a scholarship to Deerfield Academy and began as a freshman in 2003. I did not speak much English. There were no SATs or TOEFL in Afghanistan for me to prove my skills, but I didn’t have many. The only thing I had to show for myself was my energy, my passion to make best use of the opportunities I was given, and my ability as an artist.
I learned to draw under the Taliban, when art and music was completely banned. During this time, the first image that one encountered upon entering Afghanistan through the famous Khyber Pass was destroyed drums and broken film tape hanging from a dry mulberry tree. “Welcome to Afghanistan,” read a blue sign right next to the tree. For six years, there was no music, no television, and no art. When I grew tired of practicing calligraphy, which was allowed, I wanted to move on to drawing. So I took secret classes, where one of us would take turns patrolling outside the classroom to make sure no long-bearded, turbaned man was approaching. In 2002, when I returned from Seeds of Peace, intoxicated with desire to study in the United States, my art was really the only thing I that could show for my potential.
But I would still be in Kabul, doing God knows what, had I not been lucky enough to have people believe in me and take a chance. For a competitive school like Deerfield, my application would probably not have even made it to the second round, because I had filled most of it incorrectly, and did not understand most of the questions on the forms. I did not know what the word “essay” meant, and I had never written an essay on anything other than the old cliché: “Afghanistan is a mountainous country, with beautiful weather.” But Jen Marlowe, a Seeds of Peace employee who visited Kabul, saw something in me and put tremendous effort towards convincing Deerfield admissions that I had the potential to survive at their school.
Because of her belief in me, I have gone through an eight-year journey that I wouldn’t have been able to even dream of otherwise. Had I stayed in Kabul, it is possible that I would have lived my entire life without ever reading or hearing the words: “Columbia University.”
For a long time, war has been my only identity, and I played it up whenever I got the opportunity—often as a convenient way to avoid the enormous challenges I was facing in a competitive academic environment. Distinguishing myself as an individual, with a unique set of talents and skills, has been a challenging process. At high school, I was too preoccupied with mere academic survival to ponder issues of identity. But during my time at Columbia, this issue has been the driving force behind the decisions I have made, particularly, in declaring a history major, and then exploring the field of oral history with the help of Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program and the Oral History Research Office.
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In the spring of my sophomore year I had an encounter with an old lady during one of my shifts at Butler that made me think about my decision to study history.
It was an early Friday evening. I had just begun my shift at the Circulation Desk, when she walked up and asked for help. We began to casually chat. We were constantly interrupted by other patrons waiting to check out a book.
As I stamped the book with the day’s date, desensitized it, and handed it to the customer, my eyes remained focused on her withered, but elegant appearance. She was standing out of the way, to the left of the costumer.
“Here you go, Sir. Due June first.”
“Thank you.”
I leaned over the counter to give her my full attention. A purple hat—like a beret—covered her gray hair. The bags under her eyes almost matched the purple of her hat. Her face was wrinkled with experience, cross-hatched by the pencil of time.
“Your family is where?” she indulged her curiosity.
“In Afghanistan,” I told her. I am the only one here, going to school.
“Nobody here?”
“No.”
She hesitated for a moment, and I could sense that she wanted to pass judgment. I’ve learned to anticipate judgment.
“That’s good. You study, you become a man. You—what you study?”
“History, I think,” I said.
She leaned forward, focused her gaze at me with disbelief, and perhaps even disgust.
“Why?” she said, “Can’t you read history on your own?”
Here we go. This was the question I had dreaded ever since I decided on history. Surely, I would be asked this question several times. Certainly by my father, who still, deep down, believed I would eventually find my way to medicine or engineering. Perhaps by my grandmother, or even a barber in Kabul as he clipped my hair and the conversation found its way to my area of study—after covering politics, of course. But not here, not at Columbia University.
“It’s... it’s more than just reading,” I said. And I knew that was not convincing. I looked at her with a nervous, shaken smile while urgently searching for a better way of explaining myself.
“I read history books all the time,” she responded with a condescending simplicity. “On my own. I take it, I sit down, I read it. And you are from Afghanistan, why don’t you do something more useful?”
I just looked at her, not knowing what to say.
“You know, I go to Iran, I see Afghans everywhere—we had a maid, and she was awful, not good at what she did. I just say ‘Go back to your country, we don’t need your thing here in Iran.’”
I was really ticked off now. I tried to swallow it and not react.
Each time I see a Persian name on an ID during my work in Butler, or when someone checks out a book about the languages or cultures of South Asia, my eyes light up with excitement. It was no different with her. Just ten minutes or so ago, she made her way to the desk and asked if I could look up the phone number of a professor. I politely agreed. “Profaisoor Kamaly,” she asked. Right away, I thought I had something common with this old woman.
Kamaly is a well-known professor of Iranian literature, and from her pronunciation of the name I could clearly tell she was of Iranian descent, and so we had something in common. Once again, I longed for a taste home, a conversation like I could have at home. Afghans are hard to find in this part of town, so an Iranian, a Pakistani, or an Indian is quite enough. But in this case, she harbored inverse sentiments toward me.
“They are everywhere,” she continued in her rant about Afghan refugees in Iran, “and this one time I saw a young boy, seven, eight, in Tehran. He is alone, sitting there. So I go ask what are you doing, you know. He says, ‘blah blah blah.’ And I say where is your Madar, Pedar? And you know what he said? You know? He said something bad about Iran! With me, an Iranian there, he said something bad about Iran! That piece of shit—‘We don’t need you here, go to your own country,’” she said, looking down at the floor, imagining the little boy there. The story did not add up, but I listened. And I felt rage building up inside me.
“But you know, Afghanistan’s been destroyed, it has gone through so much trouble,” I found myself saying, “Don’t you think Iran can help a little? I mean, we are neighbors—”
“May I help you, sir?” I turned to helping a patron. I smiled, scanned, stamped, desensitized. In the meantime, she’d forgot my question. Or ignored it.
“Iran,” she said with a majestic wave of the hand, “ Seven thousand [years] of civilization! And he says shit about my country?”
With her rolled-up plastic bag, she drew a map on the counter, to emphasize her point. “Iran,” she said, “seven thousands of history!” She gathered herself, and returned to the topic at hand.
“You should think about it,” she said. “Study something more useful, I am tell you.”
I wanted to ask my question again, about what she said. About the maid. The young boy. About going back to his country. But she continued.
“Study something that is important... that is useful!”
“But there were historians who wrote the seven thousand years of civilization,” I said, smiling with triumph. “Don’t you think that people should study history, to preserve that kind of important civilization?”
Clearly, I thought to myself, this would shut her up.
“Yes,” she said. For a second, I thought it was over: we had come to an agreement. But she went on. “But you are from Afghanistan,” she said, “You should study something... something more useful.”
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In Afghanistan, now more than ever, there is a need for archiving and memorializing. Recently, a top official at the Ministry of Education admitted that Afghanistan is at risk of not having an accurate account of the atrocities of the past four decades. He told the BBC that those who committed the atrocities are still in positions of power, and would not let such accounts surface. What is essentially a history of a people’s suffering risks being lost, as the generation who suffered most remains silent. When the time is right for that history to be written, the detailed personal accounts will not be available to make it a rich and accurate history.
This fact, more than anything, has led me to decide on pursuing oral history and journalism, despite the reality that archaic perceptions about the field of social sciences exist in the region. Medicine and engineering still hold prestige. Being a historian or a social scientist is not considered a profession.
As a student trying to decide on a career path, it is difficult not to let such perceptions affect me. After all, social prestige is highly desirable. But for me it is a question of identity. In oral history—and in incorporating oral history in journalism— I have found a wonderful medium, where I can stay close to my roots, work in an area that is of urgent importance, and establish something unique of my own.
There are the stories of suffering and resilience of four decades that need to be recorded, shared with a wider global audience, and archived for future generations. But there are also tremendous stories of hope, and it was one of these stories that led to oral history.
The summers that I have gone back home, I have come across incredible desire for change. I have met people who are doing inspiring work with little resources, trying to take best advantage of an opening that Afghanistan has been given after four decades of bloodshed. The principal of one of the largest schools in Kabul was one of these people. He rebuilt a ruined school that had turned into a makeshift bathroom for local shopkeepers into one of the most beautiful, thriving institutions. All this with no government or NGO resources, only with highly creative leadership, the will of his student body, the support of the local community.
The fall of my sophomore year, I came back to Columbia, crazy about bringing the man to speak here, and to share his experience. It would be an exchange: he would share his experiences with audiences, and in return he would get a chance to visit American schools and observe the educational model here. The man has never been outside Afghanistan; everything he had done was his own innovation. I wanted him to see other models and draw inspiration.
For two years, I worked with Dean Lavinia Lorch, director of the Scholars Program, to raise the funds for his visit, but we couldn’t come up with the money. As the trip no longer seemed possible, I started looking for alternative ways that I could get his story out there.
One of the days towards the end of my sophomore year I attended a presentation by Mary Marshall Clark, the director of Columbia Oral History Research Office. As she explained the purpose and method of oral history, I knew right away that was the answer to my search. In oral history, I saw the fulfillment of my short term goal: of getting the man’s story out. But it was also an opportunity to record his life in detail and make sure his inspirational story of how he adapted to difficult circumstances stays around for future generations.
Under Clark’s guidance, and with the help of the Columbia Scholars Program, I spent the subsequent summer conducting extensive oral history interviews with Afghan educators. The principal spoke on tape for six hours straight, from his childhood memories to the present, giving me a complete picture of his life. Through his detailed personal narrative, one gets a vivid picture of Afghanistan’s turbulent recent history.
I shared the story, in its complete form, to a wider audience through a website of Afghan oral history that I have set up. But more recently, I was able to publish a feature on the inspirational work of the principal in Al Jazeera English. And for this piece, I drew heavily on the oral history interviews.
Getting the principal’s story out through Al Jazeera means several things for me. First, that I am at peace with myself now, having been able to get his story out. Second, that I have found two mediums that highly satisfy my needs and go hand in hand: oral history and journalism. And finally, it has made me realize that my four years of reflection at Columbia have led me to a clear direction.
In these four years here, I have realized that rather than distancing myself from war, I need to accept it as a factor shaping who I have come to be. But I can certainly move on from letting it be my only identity. Conducting oral histories—and incorporating oral histories in writing and journalism—has given me that opportunity: to express the experiences of war but to also show my own talent and creativity as a writer and thinker. I am a product of war, no doubt about it, but I also have a story different from others. At Columbia, I have found the passion and acquired the skills to help others also share their stories, that are unique, and that need to be preserved for the generations to come.