On the Frontier of Apocalypse, Hope Survives in the Bravery of Teachers, Lovers, and Storytellers.
“Tali Girls,” Siamak Herawi’s 13th novel and the first in English translation, is a sweeping adventure spanning the lives of three girls—Kowsar, Simin, and Geesu. The book begins in 2002. It’s been a year since Laura Bush’s calls for the U.S. military to save the Afghan women and children, a year into the U.S. War in Afghanistan, and a year since the U.S. occupation replaced Taliban rule.
By the time Kowsar, Geesu, and Simin start school in 2006, Taliban control is still in full effect across the country. Tali, the fictional village where the girls live, begins as a remote, verdant paradise where beautiful girls "stitch and seam and sing together," and grow up to "fall in love with the sunburned boys who wear their skullcaps cocked to the side and play their reed flute as they scale the mountains shepherding goats and sheep."
Outside of Tali, crooked mullahs--religious men with Taliban ties--remain the ruling elite over a lawless land. The rich subjugate the poor, men murder with impunity, women and children are property and no one hears their cries as they die. U.S. intervention hasn’t changed much for the average Afghan girl.
Kowsar, our unlikely hero, is weakened by fainting spells, consequences of an unusually active imagination. She’s like an Afghan Anne of Green Gables, except where Anne sees trees and imagines marble halls and wedding dresses, Kowsar sees greasy men and imagines her blood splashing on their beards as they tear her limbs apart. Debilitating as it can be, her imagination doesn’t hinder her studies, and she quickly stands out as a precocious student.
Teacher Sadeq is so impressed with Kowsar that he leaves the village, traveling with the eight-year-old and her father to the provincial capital to meet with officials who might cultivate Kowsar's talent. Instead of advancing her education, the trip endangers Kowsar's life as she, and eventually her entire village, become a conquest for Mullah Khodadad, the Director of Religious Education, an evil, omnipotent clergyman.
The book’s action is gripping. It flies by like a relay race—once one girl’s life is destroyed, she hands the baton to another girl or woman to share her story. Moving from one horror to the next without much reflection feels surreal, yet, taking into account the persistence of brutality under gender apartheid, it favors reality.
“Tali Girls” is passively enjoyable without requiring much effort from the reader. This feels especially important as a work of fiction for an audience that might not have a long history of reading. (Illiteracy rates in Afghanistan are higher than in most countries, and among Afghan women they are some of the highest in the world.) As a relatively recent literary form in Afghanistan, the novel is heavily influenced by the other more established arts, like film and TV. The “black-hat” and “white-hat” characters and ostentatious storylines in "Tali Girls" carry the escapist influence of the Bollywood and Turkish dramas popular across Afghanistan and the diaspora.
Like any good drama, there are many comedic and otherwise joyful moments to provide much-needed emotional relief. For instance, when the village gains approval to build their first school, the local clergyman Mullah Sikhdad is fervent in his refusal. His mood changes when they make him principal and give him a salary.
The cast list is long in a relatively short book. Herawi meets this challenge by spotlighting characters, giving each a paragraph to divulge their back story to a sympathetic character who appears, at the right place at the right time, to listen. There is no shortage of evil in the book and no shortage of sympathy either.
As in film, we only hear what the characters hear, which gives their speeches the overheard quality of a Shakespearean soliloquy, without the complications of inner turmoil. Characters tend to take after the minibus driver in the final chapter who talks “only to console himself.” People’s internal workings often get buried under the story’s action as every detail they share pushes a moral or the plot forward, supporting the trope that suffering defines Afghan people and their relationships.
Beyond the divide between “the good guys” and “the bad guys,” the characters can be hard to tell apart. The three main girls are most discernible by their hair color—Geesu, the tragic lover, has light chestnut hair; Kowsar, the resilient smart one, has auburn hair; and Simin, the child bride, resembles Cinderella. The overall fixation on the girls’ looks and their bodies feels like a reminder of the author’s gender.
The story’s feminism is an inclusive strain; the girls are offered no utopian escape from men’s power à la Begum Rokheya’s “Sultana’s Dream.” Rather, the men are just as present and active as the girls, and their various relationships with the girls operate on a spectrum of extremes; some enter the story to raise them, some to love them, and some to take their lives. Mullah Khodadad, a man, ends up being the most memorable character. His outrageous behaviour and constant presence—his name is mentioned over 200 times, whereas two of the main characters, Simin and Geesu, are mentioned half as often—cements him in memory, even more so than Kowsar, whose childhood and adulthood act as book ends framing everyone else’s stories.
As the girls mature and express the desire for intimate connection, they do so in not-so-subtle ways, with varying degrees of believability. While one character is on a bus filled with onlookers, she tells the boy she loves that she wants him to kiss her on the lips. Moments like these don’t feel realistic in a place where unwed girls face ostracization and corporal punishment for relating to themselves and others romantically. This disregard for subtlety might be an attempt at fantasy—maybe it is like Begum Rokheya’s writings after all. The girls’ overt sexual expression makes space for the impossible—a physical love, a fearless love, not bound by rituals of marriage, on earth, in Tali, and across Afghanistan. Alternatively, it could be another reflection of the author’s gender.
It’s impossible to ignore the parallels between Herawi’s writings and those of Khaled Hosseini. The most obvious example is the repeated wounding of Mullah Khodadad; the character, the act, and the symbolism of the moment recall Assef and his takedown in The Kite Runner. It’s disappointing to note that after over two decades since the publishing of The Kite Runner, there is still so little Afghan fiction published in English. “Tali Girls” stands as an important contribution by Archipelago Books to Afghan literature in translation.
Sara Khalili as translator skillfully maintains an Afghan sensibility in English. Her expertise is in her discernment, as she leaves key phrases untranslated. Translating the formality of Dari poses a difficult challenge since there isn’t an equivalent mood in English. The translation could have broken further from this formal syntax to be more natural in contemporary English. It feels appropriate to reflect the speech patterns of modern native English-speaking youth given the story follows three girls, not middle-aged or elderly women, as they can come off.
When Khalili refers to the Taliban as “rascals” or “ruffians,” images of silent films come to mind; the bandit holds one hand on his lungee and uses the other to aim a gun at a girl. Both run in place while the scroll of scenery flashes forward, creating the illusion of movement. It reiterates the popular understanding of Afghanistan as being distant, stuck in the past, pre-modern, “bombed to the stone-age”. These implications can be dangerous when so few books from Afghanistan are being translated into English, but as the plot flies ahead, the speed bumps in the translation recede. When they reappear, the journey is too engrossing for them to make much impact.
Herawi does allow deeper insight into a character’s psychology occasionally, as with Abdul Ghafoor. Ghafoor is forced out of bed one night to consider the unthinkable—should he marry his nine-year-old daughter to a nearly 70-year-old man who already has two wives? Ghafoor looks up at the night sky and remembers a moment in his boyhood when his father explained who the stars exist for: “The large bright stars belong to the wealthy, the medium stars belong to those of mediocre means, the small fading stars belong to the poor. And those that rip through the sky and burst belong to the dying.” Now aged and having endured a life of poverty, Abdul Ghafoor cries out in desperation, asking his father where his star is: “Am I so destitute that I don’t have one at all?” Rare moments of understanding like this feel like gifts. This decision is not unique to this man, this village, this country, yet it’s a decision most of the world will never have to make.
Characters carry out and bear injustice in a matter-of-fact way that feels honest. Herawi does not sugarcoat Afghanistan’s flaws. He challenges the futile education system, corrupt politicians and clergymen, exploitative marital rituals, and he doesn’t give false hope that things will get better.
Instead, he turns up the heroic moments. When two characters pass through a mountain village exhausted and famished, their condition is restored by a family who sacrifices their daily meal to feed the strangers. The famed Afghan hospitality survives. Even a people trapped in perpetual mourning have much to keep alive.
TALI GIRLS by Siamak Herawi | Archipelago Books | 2023 | 388 pp. | $22.00