We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“ZEN UNDER FIRE – A New
Zealand Woman’s Story of Love and War in Afghanistan” by Marianne Elliott (Penguin, $NZ34:99)
Marianne
Elliott is a New Zealand lawyer who went to Afghanistan in 2006 as part of the
United Nations Assistance Mission. Her role was to investigate and report on
human rights abuse and to contribute to the process of reconciliation between
communities. She had already been part of a Middle East mission in Gaza. She
tells us candidly that when she arrived in Afghanistan, she had been looking
unsuccessfully for a boyfriend and had an unsatisfactory emotional life, in
which she tended to bury herself in work:
“My romantic history to date had taught me to
be wary of placing too much value on a relationship. My work had generally been
a more reliable source of fulfilment and passion than my boyfriends.”
(Pg.47)
Zen Under Fire is her story of some of
her time in Afghanistan and of her official role. But it is also about her
emotional life there and her relationship with an American. Out of tact and
delicacy, she identifies him by the pseudonym “Joel”.
After
six months in the capital Kabul, Elliott was sent to the provincial UN office
in Afghanistan’s third largest town, Herat. An anecdote in the opening pages
tells us that, upon her arrival, the senior site officer took off on a vacation
and left her in charge, saying blithely “You’ll
be fine… so long as no one kills Amanallah Khan.” Whereupon, of
course, somebody did kill this particular village leader
and Elliott was thrown into the painful and painstaking process of negotiating
with village elders and trying to reconcile feuding tribal and ethnic factions.
She
rapidly discovered that more people have died in tribal feuds in Afghanistan
than in the Taliban insurgency. As a human rights lawyer, she at first wanted
to make her top priority prosecuting those who violated human rights. It took
her some time to accept that reconciliation was her major role, and that
ensuring continuing peace between groups sometimes meant allowing malefactors
to remain unpunished. The lesser evil had to contribute to the greater good.
Implicit
in much of what Elliott writes there is a strong sense of personal values. She
is anti-materialistic, declaring of her legal career in New Zealand: “Working on cases in which business partners
fought ferociously over financial losses taught me the perils of coveting money.”
(Pg.21) She had high hopes for improving the world by means of an essentially
pacifist creed, but she admits that her ideals were sometimes dashed. When
offered work elsewhere, she was momentarily tempted to toss in her job in
Afghanistan. She writes:
“I am reluctant to leave Afghanistan just
yet. Why? Because what brought me to Afghanistan in the first place was my
belief in the possibility of a safer, fairer world, and in my ability to play a
role in bringing that world about. Somewhere in that muddy courtyard in
Shindand, or in the weeks of sadness that followed, I lost that belief in
myself and in the possibility of a better world. I want to recover it. I need
to. I’m not willing to leave Afghanistan until I have. I’m determined to find a
real way to be of service to Afghanistan, despite the challenges of the past
weeks.” (Pg.79)
She
does find satisfaction in such service, but there is throughout the book a
sense of unease about how well the civilian (UN) and military (NATO) components
of the peacekeeping mission work together in Afghanistan. Elliott sometimes
openly expresses scepticism about the quality of military “intelligence” (she
usually puts the word in inverted commas – see Pg.238). She tells an anecdote
of a macho US intelligence officer asking about “Hezbollah” (rather than
Taliban) activity in the area where she is working, apparently not caring that
Hezbollah is a Lebanese Muslim group which has nothing to do with Afghanistan.
She also notes the major difficulty that, in the minds of many Afghans,
humanitarian aid is paired with military action, especially as US forces use
humanitarian aid as a means of pacifying villages. Hence those are the very
villages that the Taliban target. Elliott argues with a colleague in the UN
Political Affairs unit who says that human rights can wait until there is
stability in Afghanistan. Elliott ripostes that there can be no stability for
Afghans who continue to suffer from crooked or violent political leaders
(pp.172-173).
In
spite of all this, most of her stories about colleagues (military or civilian)
are positive, with some people showing special fortitude. After diplomatic
pressure, a French aid worker is released, frail and starved, by his
Taliban captors. Despite his
condition, he still insists on telling TV cameras surrounding his stretcher
that his chief concern is with his Afghan fellow-workers who are still captives
(Pg.157).
It
is inevitable that there is a certain feminist angle to this book. Especially
in her encounters with abused women and children, Elliott confirms that sexism
is built into such a patriarchal society. There are frequent reports of rape
and other atrocities practised against women; of women and girls kept in
slavery by tribal leaders; and of routine intimidation. Elliott interviews a
young woman who has burnt herself after being jailed for the crime of zinna [adultery], which really means
running away with her boyfriend rather than undergoing a forced marriage. She
also reports on an Afghan woman official being investigated for [petty]
corruption when it is clear that her male superiors are more on the take than
she is. Elliott’s view is that the woman is really being targeted for her independence,
unorthodox dress standards etc.
As
a Westerner used to more gender equity, Elliott knows she enjoys more rights
than some of her “cases”. Investigating human rights, she comes to see the
necessary interview process as often being an intrusion on women who have
already suffered rape and/or humiliation. This line of thought also leads her
to express some annoyance at those male UN officers have difficulty accepting
her leadership position, or see her as too emotional in her reactions to
things.
As
inevitable as the feminist angle, there is a degree of “First World Guilt”.
Working among people who live in the most wretched conditions, the New
Zealander remarks “I have seen Afghan homes
that make New Zealand prisons look lavish.” (Pg.85). Of one interview subject, she writes:
“The woman tells me she is thirty-four years
old. We are the same age. I am shocked. It is not the first time I realise how
my privileged life has protected me from the ageing process. Once, in a salon
in Kabul, a beautician quizzed me for an hour about my secrets to youthfulness
after she learned my age. I didn’t know how to tell her my secret was to have
all the food and drink I have ever needed, free health care and protection from
the environment in the form of a warm, dry home and gallons of sunblock. Apart
from the sunblock, they weren’t exactly things I could bring back from New
Zealand for her in a bottle.” (Pg.65)
Allied
with this sense of guilt, there is an awareness that too often Western news
media present a simplified view of Afghanistan and its troubles. Toward the end
of Zen Under Fire, Elliott tells of
giving an interview to a New Zealand journalist in the hope that he would
report accurately on the travails of the people among whom she was working.
Instead, the chap merely cranked out the type of clichés about Afghanistan that
Western readers want to hear. It would appear that this dispiriting experience
was one of her reasons for writing this book.
The
reality, as she sees it, is that there are many signs of communal hope in
Afghanistan. One is the receptivity of elders and Afghan officials to ideas on
the proper and correct enforcement of the law, without prejudice. Elliott
records her delight in running, with her friend Kate, workshops on this:
“I watch intrigued as the buzz spreads
through the room. The participants embrace the exercise wholeheartedly and I
hear voices rise in friendly debate. I wish that more people could see the
Afghanistan that I am seeing. This is such a contrast to the version of this
country shown in the Western media: images of a country filled with ruthless
terrorists, corrupt leaders and helpless victims. Instead, here is a room
filled with public servants enthusiastic about learning all they can to do
their best for their country and for the people they serve.” (Pg.108)
As
my trundling and just-the-facts-ma’am review should so far have shown you, I
find much of interest in this book, especially in its reportage and clear sense
of what life is like in a country under much stress. At the risk of seeming to
question a work of such high ideals, however, there are some things on the
debit side.
Although
the book is called Zen Under Fire,
I’m not sure that there is enough Zen here to justify the title.
Elliott
expresses her philosophic convictions clearly once:
“I
find extraordinary power in Pema Chodrin’s simple yet profound Buddhist
practices and teachings and I’ve begun to read other Buddhist writing as well.
Perhaps Afghanistan is the right setting to be introduced to the Buddha’s
teachings on the four noble truths. There is certainly no avoiding the first of
them - that life is suffering. But
I have been struggling to accept the second noble truth – that suffering is
caused by attachments or craving and aversion. I have no problem seeing how my
suffering is caused by these two tendencies. But I struggle to see how the
suffering of a mother who can’t feed her child might be caused by her own
attachments.” (Pg.204)
Elliott
makes frequent references to her yoga instructor and the yoga that helps her
relax tense nerves and centre herself, especially in a dangerous country where
she can’t take the jogs she is used to. In the last pages, she expresses sorrow
that in the four years since she left Afghanistan, the situation there has
degenerated. But she now teaches yoga and learns can now live better with
herself.
Even
so, the book’s title suggests more of a conflict between ideals and reality
than is actually delivered.
Likewise,
I’m not sure I like that subtitle “A New
Zealand Woman’s Story of Love and War in Afghanistan”. It suggests a
novelette, or at least give rise to novelettish expectations. Maybe this is
because I’m not as sympathetic as I could have been to Elliott’s account of her
on-again, off-again (and finally off-permanently) relationship with “Joel”. She
eventually goes completely cold on him (Chapter 38) when he doesn’t even phone
to enquire how she is faring after the Taliban fires rockets at the compound
where she is living. I am sure this was very important in Elliott’s own life.
But as it ends up amounting to nothing, it comes across as a short-term affair
rather than a story of any particular commitment. For this reader at any rate,
the “Joel” passages were unwelcome interruptions to the more important story,
no matter how truthful they may be.
Finally,
there is a odd lack of style and structure to this book. The tentative tone
doesn’t disturb me. The whole book is written in the present tense which (as
every journalist knows) not only creates a sense of immediacy but also creates
a sense of uncertainty about what’s coming next. But I am disturbed by the lack
of dramatic emphasis which a more experienced write may have been able to
create. Zen Under Fire has clearly
been worked up from the diaries and notes kept at the time, and it could have
benefited from more editorial trimming.
Rather
than end on that sour note, however, I emphasize that Zen Under Fire tells us much about Afghanistan that simply doesn’t
appear on the news.
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