Afghanistan: Above Us the Milky Way

This week I read Above Us the Milky Way by Fowzia Karimi. Karimi along with her family fled Afghanistan in 1980 at age seven, during the Soviet-Afghan War and ended up in Southern California in the United States. Afghanistan is located in Southern Asia and is bordered by six countries: Iran, China, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

The Afghan-Soviet war lasted nine years from 1979-1989. The war was between the insurgent group the Mujahideen, in Afghanistan, (backed by the U.S., U.K., Pakistan, Iran, and China) and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) and the Soviet Union. This war is considered to be a Cold War-era proxy war and a factor in the fall of the Soviet Union. While many political factors led to this war, it had devastating effects on the country, leading to millions of Afghan refugees and the estimated deaths of 6.5%-11.5% of Afghanistans population. The Soviet Union targeted many civilian populations during this war and the destruction didn’t end with the withdrawal of the Soviets, only leading to the Afghan Civil Wars of 1989-1992 and 1996-2001, the second of which began the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States.

Throughout its twenty-six chapters, Karimi’s “illuminated alphabet” follows the lives of a family who fled Afghanistan, which is only ever referred to as the first land or the first country, to California, referred to as the land of the sun. The book is mostly narrated by the five sisters who ranged from ages one to twelve when the family fled. No one in the story is named, though the author says if we must name them we can call the sisters, “the movable sisters”. While this story seems to be autobiographical its non-linear structure is more reminiscent of a Grimm fairy-tale. The author often calls out the reader directly in her writing and says that the “stories here are memory condensed, not whole or linear, but distilled over the many years of [her] nostalgic life”.

The chapters switch from the girls' murky memories of the first land, to their daily lives in California as they play outside, make friends, and fight over hairbrushes. These sunny memories are interspersed with an unflinching portrayal of war. Flashbacks to the first land show the merciless killings of civilians, retellings of interrogations and torture, and the slow obliteration of their family and friends. We are told stories of children sliced in half, limbs lost by grenades, and mass graves where people are buried alive.

This stark and often times unsettling switch from paragraph to paragraph displays the real turmoil living inside these young girls as they watch their parents receive news of the deaths of their friends and family and at the same time work on their math homework,

“a sister could laugh at a cartoon playing on the television and recite the prayers for the dead, the disappeared, and the imprisoned with the same mouth”. Karimi describes the sisters not as being five, but of ten, one hundred, one thousand different selves. The move cut the sisters into two, now separated from the culture, the innocence and the wholeness of their early memories as the country where they were born descends into war, and they are split into two by this distance and the guilt of survival.

As the chapters move from A to Z we are gifted with childhood photographs and wonderfully crafted illustrations. While the narratives of the girls sometimes seem to be supernatural or fantasy, I saw them as realistic portrayals of imagination. Karimi says that this story “is not the story of [her] childhood as it occurred neatly, chronologically, but of [her] childhood as [she] experienced it internally”. This can be seen in the swirling fantasy of childhood and the disconnectedness one feels as an adult trying to decipher their old childhood drawings and dreams. At one point the girls’ bathroom mirror is described to be a window into the first land, with each sister being able to see themselves as they would have been if they hadn’t left. They communicate with this other-self, updating each other on their lives and their families.

The sister that I believe is the youngest, is often referred to as the dreaming-sister. In her dreams she attempts to remember the first land, trying to put together the puzzle pieces of old photographs with her parents’ memories. While the narration is often playful and whimsical as the sisters communicate with cats and trees, making a make-believe world in their backyard, there isn’t one second where you forget that this is a story about war. This story is about the loss of innocence, not only that of the five girls, but of their entire land and country.

The story gives us a portrayal of war that cares not for a discussion of politics and sides, while the book is inherently political, it gives no names to the armies or soldiers, the girls could be any child as no innocent was left untouched by the war. Karimi reminds us that “though the war started first in the grown man’s imagination, it takes root more readily in the childs”.

For Karimi herself, it took her nearly nine years to complete this book. Nearing the end of the book Karimi reminds the reader that if we felt weary making our way through this chaotic, poetry-esc tale, to think of the author, who had to read it thousands of times and reach deep into her memory, “not to mention the anguish involved in writing with the dead at [her] side”. She leaves us with the question of “Who writes war?” and “ Who tells its story?” It reminds us that while this may have just been a book for us to read, for her it was a kaleidoscope of guilt, confusion, and pain, and at the same time that of imagination, humor, and remembrance, a constellation of feelings and memories laid out for us to discover.