RAHIMI, Atiq 1962-

PERSONAL:

Born 1962, in Kabul, Afghanistan; immigrated to France, 1984; father, a provincial governor; mother, a teacher; married. Education: Attended University of Kabul; University of Paris, Sorbonne, Ph.D. (audio-visual communications).

ADDRESSES:

Home—Paris, France. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Harcourt Trade Publishers, 15 East 26th St., New York, NY 10010.

CAREER:

Novelist and documentary filmmaker. Worked as a film critic in Afghanistan. Organizer of writing center in Kabul, Afghanistan, with Bernard-Henri Lévy.

WRITINGS:

Khākistar va khvāb, translated into French by Sabrina Nouri, Éditions Khavaran (France), 1999, translated by Erdağ M. Göknar as Earth and Ashes, Harcourt (New York, NY), 2002.

Also author of a second novel.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Adapting Earth and Ashes for film.

SIDELIGHTS:

Atiq Rahimi left his native Afghanistan five years after the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics invaded that country in 1979, and since age twenty-two has claimed France as his second home, graduating from the University of Paris and embarking on a career as a documentary filmmaker. He has sensitively woven the memories he retains of his home and family into a compelling, moving, and oddly optimistic first novel, published in English as Earth and Ashes. Praising the novel in Booklist as a "richly nuanced and broadly illuminating tale of one father's grief," Donna Seaman added that Rahimi provides readers with a timely look into "the hearts of innocent people who bear the brunt of terrorism."

Rahimi was raised in a literate home: his mother was a teacher, and his father was a provincial governor under King Zahir Shah. After a military coup dethroned Shah in 1973, Rahimi's father was imprisoned for three years, after which he and Rahimi fled to India. After the Soviets ousted the military government, the two returned, and Rahimi attended the University of Kabul and studied literature. His family connections eventually threatened his safety, however, and in 1984 he joined twenty others in fleeing Afghanistan and seeking asylum at the French Embassy in neighboring Pakistan. Rahimi, who wrote his novel in the Afghan dialect called Dari as a way of coming to terms with his own experiences fleeing on foot through the mountains into Pakistan as a college student, tells his story in the second person, narrated by an elderly man overcome by the loss of his family.

In Rahimi's novel, five-year-old Yassin and his grandfather, Dastaguir, are on a journey inspired by a vision the old man had. The village these two inhabit lies in ruins, smoke still rising from the bombing it received at the hands of Soviet troops. The pair are the only local survivors of their family. Yassin, deaf as a result of the attack, now depends on the heartsick Dastaguir, who is determined to make the difficult trip to the remote coal mine where his son, Murad, works, telling him of the tragedy and of the death of Murad's wife, Yassin's mother.

As the old man and his grandson wait at a post on the Afghan border in search of a truck willing to take them to the mine, the old man chews tobacco, tosses stones, talks with those around him, but is detached from his surroundings. Dastaguir's "strained" narration is poignant, "both inviting the reader to share his experiences and insisting on his own detachment from them," according to Guardian reviewer Rachel Aspden. "The cumulative effect is one of shocked numbness."

A brief book at just over fifty pages, Earth and Ashes reads more like a short story, a short story that "remains unfinished," in the opinion of Times Literary Supplement contributor Tim Glencross. References to Afghan history and Persian epic poems are threaded subtly through Rahimi's text, but, as Aspden pointed out in her Guardian review, "if these go unnoticed, most of [the novel's] … resonance is lost." Glencross noted that "the fate of the boy and his grandfather [remains] still hanging in the air" by the story's end. "With this brevity," Glencross continued, "Rahimi seems to be suggesting that grief and loss cannot be filled out with language, that the writer must attempt to conjure a void." Calling Earth and Ashes "a parable of familial dysfunction," Independent writer Gerry Feehily thought that its author "has compressed ten years of Soviet occupation into less than sixty devastating pages." Interviewing Rahimi, Feehily gained a sense of the author's purpose: to give a voice to the many children whose lives were devastated when the Soviet troops entered Afghanistan and destroyed their families in 1979. Many of these same children grew up to join organizations such as the Taliban, gaining a new family within the terrorist network and also gaining an outlet for the violence that marked their lives. "Many Taliban were war orphans," Rahimi explained to Feehily. "Having never had a mother, having never had relationships with women, knowing only the Koran and the fear of hell, they were psychically crippled. Although I set Earth and Ashes during the Soviet occupation, I was really trying to find a way to explain to myself the roots of [the Taliban's] … ascendancy."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 15, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of Earth and Ashes, p. 389.

Guardian (Manchester, England), December 14, 2002, Rachel Aspden, "Short and Bitter."

Independent, December 7, 2002, Gerry Feehily, interview with Rahimi.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2002, review of Earth and Ashes, p. 1069.

Publishers Weekly, November 25, 2002, review of Earth and Ashes, p. 44.

Times Literary Supplement, October 18, 2002, Tim Glencross, "A Road in Afghanistan," p. 25.

World Literature Today, April-June, 2003, Ali Nematollahy, review of Les mille maisons du reve et de la terreur, p. 91.*