books

Shortly after the war in Afghanistan ended, I came upon a news photograph that I will never forget: young girls, freed of their heavy burqas, lining up for their first day of school. No matter what one's political misgivings about the war might be, the sight of those girls came as a thrilling shock. For too long, Afghani women had been consigned to the shadows, viewed as one-dimensional victims hidden in the rubble of a war-torn country.

Now, in "Women of Afghanistan," Isabelle Delloye has further brought these women into the open. Delloye lived in Afghanistan from 1974 to 1978, teaching at the Lycée Francais while her husband held a post at the university. She and her family came to love the country, and left reluctantly soon after the Soviet invasion. At the time, she was collecting the stories of Afghan women, a project she was never able to complete, although she did publish a slim volume of her findings in France in 1980.

This new Ruminator edition, translated for the first time into English, has been expanded from the original, with new sections that were written in light of recent events.

The book consists of Delloye's own recollections, written with exquisite care and sensitivity, her appreciation for the land and culture seeping through every sentence. There also are her renderings of women's lives, done with the same fine, novelistic eye for detail, along with testimonies from the women themselves.

The book has a slightly lopsided quality, with Delloye's leisurely, well-crafted opening set off against the women's raw oral histories.

Delloye serves as the sympathetic anthropologist and social historian, carefully guiding us through the culture of Afghanistan, in a lovely mix of poetic insight, reportage and scrupulous attention to custom. Here we get a taste of the sheer ambition of her original project, when Delloye aimed to "discover the hidden face of Afghanistan and enter the interior world, really cross the threshold of the family home, where, as a woman, I would be admitted. I quickly understood that this is where the inner life of the country lay."

She dwells on every detail of women's lives -- from the bread they must make every day in the tandour, to their backbreaking work in the fields and home, to the codes of honor that govern their lives.

The women's own stories are riveting. There is Nour Khanom, who survives abuse by a stepmother and husband, being buried in an avalanche of snow, and the deaths of several of her children. There is Trina Kokcha, an ob-gyn educated in Poland, who tells of the frustrations of practicing medicine during the Soviet occupation, when cronyism and politics ruled. And there is Chekeba Hachemi, a young woman with an unusually modern upbringing, who represents the generation that went into exile as children. Chekeba tells of how, when she was 11, the family fled Kabul and headed for Pakistan, disguised as Pashtun peasants. At a border check, her city roots were quickly exposed when she smiled at a stranger (atypical of a peasant girl). She took off on foot, chased by the gunfire of soldiers. "In one night," she says, "I became a grownup."

"Women of Afghanistan" is a book that was interrupted, and yet this is appropriate for a story of so many lives interrupted and destroyed. The voices of these women come across, full of lament, grace, wit, pride and self-reflection. As Chekeba notes: "With a veil on her head, no Afghan woman has ever stopped herself from being heard, and frequently it is she who has the last word."

Marina Budhos is the author of the novels "House of Waiting" and "The Professor of Light," and the nonfiction "Remix: Conversations With Immigrant Teenagers."