Book review: A handmade carpet is the thread that runs through Anna Badkhen's latest book

Anna Badkhen's book about Oqa, Afghanistan, weaves the ancient tradition of carpet-making into her account of the year she spent in the poor, isolated village, writes Fran Hawthorne

Hazara children wash a carpet on a hillside in Band-e Amir, Bamiyan province, about 200 kilometres north-west of Kabul, Afghanistan. Anna Badkhen's latest book, The World is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village, based on the year she spent in a remote Afghan village, has as one of its central themes the region's famous tradition of carpet-making, for which they rely upon heavily for survival. Massoud Hossaini / AFPShow less

The World is a Carpet
Anna Badkhen
Riverhead

The award-winning Russian-American journalist Anna Badkhen writes from a rare and intimate vantage point: for one year, she lived in northern Afghanistan and regularly visited a village so isolated that it can't even be found on Google Earth. With the help of a translator, she ate, cooked, took walks, rode the bus, went to market, shared the "brackish and murky water", and gossiped with the women and men of the village of Oqa. The children tried on her shoes, and the author tried to cook curry for a Ramadan meal.

From that experience, Badkhen has produced her fourth book, The World is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village.

When it is good, this book is very very good, with insights into Afghan life and carpet-making as finely detailed as the most intricately woven rug designs. A carpet, Badkhen points out, is the weaver's "future autobiography, her diary of a year, her winter count, with its sorrowful zigzags, its daydreamy curlicues, loops of melancholy, knots of joy".

The major problem is that there is too little of this wonderful description. Barely four dozen of the total 288 pages talk about the carpet, the supposed fulcrum of the book.

Luckily, Badkhen, who was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and now lives in Philadelphia, has a lot to say about daily life in the village.

Another unusual touch is that she drew about 20 sketches of Oqa and its inhabitants, which are scattered throughout the book. However, she includes too much wasted filler, about topics such as the workings of Google Earth, various types of sand, and the different clothing worn by Alexander the Great and British explorers. She also has an annoying habit of turning nouns into verbs ("We thanked the driver and farewelled the Uzbeks").

In writing The World is a Carpet, Badkhen joins what seems to be a group of journalists and emigrés - mostly women - who set up temporary residence in Afghanistan and then use a particular piece of everyday life as a metaphor to explain that mysterious nation.

This trend was apparently begun by Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul (2004), but also includes Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords, and One Woman's Journey through Afghanistan (2011) by the emigré journalist Fariba Nawa; Badkhen's previous books, Afghanistan by Donkey: A Year in a War Zone (2012) and Waiting for the Taliban: A Journey through Northern Afghanistan (2010) and Roberta Gately's novel, Lipstick in Afghanistan (2010). Another title is due out in June, The Afghan Queen: A True Story of an American Woman in Afghanistan, by Paul Meinhardt, although this one takes place back in the late 1970s.

With so many writers exploring "real life" in Afghanistan, Badkhen's special contribution this time is the carpet - a tradition for which the women of Oqa have been famous for centuries.

Badkhen homes in on a small carpet being made by one particular Oqan housewife, Thawra, and her mother-in-law, Boston.

The carpet's life begins when Thawra's father-in-law, Baba Nazar, sets out to purchase yarn in the market town of Dawlarabad - "a drab provincial grid of straight grey streets" but a booming mega-mall compared to Oqa. With only Dh5 worth of Afghanistan's worn, frayed currency in his vest pocket, Baba Nazar can't afford enough yarn for a full-size, three-by-six-émetre carpet plus the carrots, onions and potatoes his wife has requested. So Thawra will have to settle for making just a one-metre-wide runner, and Boston will have to forgo the potatoes.

Colour by colour - "terracotta, burgundy, beige, ocher, green, blue, asphalt" - Baba Nazar and the yarn merchant heap the wool onto a scale, balanced by "two spark plugs, two smooth granite rocks, each the size of a child's head, and a rusted iron cylinder" to equal 5.4 kilograms. Over the next year, Thawra will tie the 1,116,000 knots of her rug on a loom made of iron pipes, cinder blocks and sticks, perched in a rickety lean-to whose dusty clay floor is speckled with goat droppings. The straw roof had caved in on a previous rug, and this year a set of chickens will hatch on the unfinished wool.

Those bits of dirt and straw will ultimately be cleaned off. But as Badkhen reveals, the flaws that are woven into the carpet actually increase the value.

As she writes, merchants "will be looking for proofs of human fallibility, the prized idiosyncrasies that make each rug impossible to replicate". It could be a spot where the weaver ran out of one colour of yarn and switched to a slightly darker hue, or a petal accidentally omitted from one flower. In Thawra's case, "the bottom sixth of her carpet will be almost imperceptibly queasy", because of morning sickness during the first months of her current pregnancy. Revelations like these could make customers take a closer look at the underside of their carpets. However, such interesting titbits are rare. Of course it's understandable why Badkhen doesn't spend much time describing the actual act of weaving, because it's simply boring: Thawra "picked up the end of an indigo thread and ran it around two warps, and pulled on it, and cut it off with a sickle." How many times can a writer repeat that on a page?

Yet there are many broader and far more interesting questions about carpet-making that Badkhen doesn't touch. Considering how integral this industry is to the life and economy of Oqa, as well as all of Afghanistan, such omissions are puzzling.

For instance, how do the weavers choose the complex designs? Does Thawra always make eagles in an ultramarine sky, with pomegranate trees in rows along the fringes? Do certain patterns or colours have a special meaning, or come from particular geographical areas?

Then there are the travails of marketing. Badkhen describes some of the rather haphazard methods that are used to transport the carpets to dealers, such as the 15-hour journey on a rundown Mercedes bus and the motorcycle ride through a dust storm into Pakistan, bribing the border guards en route. A burlap sack containing five precious carpets, with "a name, a telephone number, and a Kabul address" written in thick black marker on the outside, is unceremoniously "heaved through the open hatch of the baggage compartment" of the bus. In light of such unreliable supply chains, how many carpets never make it to a dealer?

And for all their effort, the impoverished weavers might earn just Dh27 for a full-size carpet (less for Thawra's small runner). It would have been fascinating if Badkhen had contrasted that with the final sales price and the markups along the way.

The book's strong point is the way it weaves the carpet-making into both the history of the area and the rhythm of a year in Oqa today, from the annual poisoning of a flock of cranes, to Ramadan, to a threatening nighttime visit by local Taliban leaders on motorcycles as the war inches closer.

The carpet work has to stop for a full 15 days while Thawra and the other women of the village cook a goat-and-potato stew for hundreds of guests and prepare their own finery, celebrating the first wedding in Oqa in a decade. Why have there been no weddings all this time? Because the traditional bride price is so high, the only way most families can afford a marriage is for their sons and daughters to simultaneously marry the young men and women of other villages, and thus the ceremonies are usually held elsewhere.

Indeed, Oqa's intense poverty breaks through almost every page. At one point, Badkhen accompanies a husband and wife taking their starving, five-week-old baby to the filthy, crowded government hospital a couple of hours away. At first the overworked nurse and doctor want to send the family off, claiming that the baby is too young to be admitted and not malnourished anyway, but no doubt the presence of the western reporter forces them to treat the case more seriously. The main diagnosis: opium addiction.

That's no surprise. Most residents of Oqa, young and old, use the drug. "Opium was much cheaper than rice and it helped stave off hunger and woe," Badkhen writes.

In Kabul today, Afghan and foreign officials are fretting over the changes that will occur next year when Nato forces depart. Will Hamid Karzai's government survive? How much influence will the Taliban have? What will happen to poppy cultivation, to the still-nascent education of girls, and to forced child marriages?

But the reader of this book suspects that in Oqa, where so little has changed in centuries, very little will change.

Fran Hawthorne is an award-winning US-based author and journalist.