Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Happy New Year!
I was slightly dreading returning to Afghanistan after my little holiday in Central Asia. But having carried my ridiculously heavy luggage across the Russian built ‘Friendship Bridge’ from post Soviet Termez (or Tirmidh if you are used to the Arabic transliteration) into Afghanistan, I was picked up by our friendly young driver and he set off with his foot on the pedal, amidst clouds of dust, weaving perilously in and out of other carts, street vendors and children crossing the road, and it made me feel happy to be back. It has been a jolly time since I have been here, boding well for the next month before I repatriate myself for a little while. Another great Afghan festival in Mazar-i Sharif – Nawruz, the pre-Islamic Persian new year which of course has taken on a Muslim edge in Afghanistan.
I arrived in Mazar on Nawruz eve tired from travel, and so had mixed feelings that we had a bonanza party planned at our organisation’s guesthouse, but in fact it was great – a good chance to drink and dance with the local staff. Kebabs on the grill and hired musicians in the garden. I discovered yet another of the seemingly endless supply of Afghan plucked instruments, all subtly different. This one was the Tambour, with a long neck and a ridiculous number of strings, and unlike the rubab, you have to play all of them. It is also a pretty quiet instrument with a nice jangly quality that does not really come across on microphones, so we were very lucky to have the local Tambour star right before us, playing requests, just him and a tabla player. And the Afghans really got into it. The musicians came at 10 o’clock, and before then our resident DJ of Complex Ethnicity routed a few phat choones from his laptop to the Hi-Fi speakers. The Afghans weren’t really into the NY beats he spun. Though a bunch of neighbours’ children came and stood on the roof of our outbuildings and watched the funny foreigners – and danced along with us from their eminence.
But when Bahaudin the Tambour player came along with his tabla accompanist, things really started to get going. A fair few Heinekens had been sunk by then, and so the foreigners were properly fuelled, but the Afghans did not need it so much, except for the shyer mujahedin types, who were either too tough, too disapproving, or two leftfooted. The Friendly Young Mazar Driver was tireless though – arms out jiggling and joggling two and fro and constantly importuning the venerable musicians for requests of his favourite tunes. He was a happy sight to see, dancing up a sweat in the chill evening air, and particularly so as he was wearing a pleasantly incongruous T-Shirt with something like ‘Whispering Willows Christian Camp’ on the front and ‘Jesus saves, I mean REALLY SAVES!’ on the back. The dancing went up a notch when our Finance Officer joined in. He is a real good-time boy, and mixes a western hedonism with his Afghan chutzpah (not really sure what that word means, but it seems appropriate). But his dancing is all Afghan, and totally abandoned. I am not sure how to describe it really – words fail me now that I have embarked on this. He was appealing to the musicians a lot as well, but he was so outrageous in his moves that he almost seemed like he was on his own – his dancing had a flavour of air guitar in front of the mirror when no one is watching. And he would put his hands on the tabla to quiet the skins when he was particularly transported by the Tambour playing. Added to this was the Wild-Eyed Tajik who had found a Tajik doira (like a huge tambourine, with heavy metal rings to make a noise) and he was banging the life out of it, and shaking the rings along to the music with his head going back and forth as if he were a rag doll being shaken by a huge little girl. It was very good in fact. If I am that drunk, I am sure that I lose most of my sense of rhythm. Or at least my ability to translate my sense of rhythm into an accurate signal which will govern the movement of my limbs.
I was dancing up a storm too, it has to be said. I really like Afghan music, and the dancing is similar to what I was doing in Tajikistan, though in Tajikistan I would generally dance with women. Sigh. And Tajiks tend to pick up their feet more, kicking them out to the back. In Afghanistan too they do this funny thing with the feet where you cross one foot over the other and sort of tiptoe back and forth, with your arms stretched out. An old skinny black-bearded guy, I guess one of the support staff, a cleaner or a guard or something (I haven’t got my finger on who everyone is yet in Mazar) had a particularly sweet version of this – his boney frame facing forward with arms stretched out, a quizzical expression on his face, tottering from one foot to another.
At one point the girls were dancing with the Toothy-grinning Ustad with his grey-yellow walrus moustache. The Ustad was getting into it as you could tell by his cackling wheezy joyful laugh, spinning La Petite Anglaise round and round (I am surprised she managed to stay upright in fact – hat off there). The Boney Bearded one was coaxed on to dance and did his thing facing outwards, arms spread, I thought rather unnerved by the female presence in his dance space, but was almost immediately abandoned by the girls. I felt a twinge for him, but he was possibly relieved. It is not every Afghan who can handle one of these foreign girls, particularly on the dance floor.
It is interesting though – I guess it must be a little strange if you are just never used to dancing with girls (not that I know this to be the case – I haven’t been here long enough yet, but I haven’t heard of it yet). It is a possible reason for the slightly ungendered dance styles I see Afghan men adopting. I mean, a lot of the moves out there are ones that a self-respecting European male would not try on except in jest (which covers many occasions, it has to be admitted) because they are too ‘girly’. But if you are used to dancing just with other men, then I suppose it makes sense that the scope of means of expression becomes wider. If there are no occasions where men and women dance, then possibly there are no roles specific to men and women on the dance floor. I will have to follow this one up.
The next day was Nawruz and we made good use of our precious time by lying on the terrace in the sun. As a result we missed the famous raising of the red banner, which goes on at around sunrise. (This banner business is the centre of the celebrations, but don’t ask me what the banner is all about – I did ask several people, but most of them didn’t know, and a few said vaguely that it is something to do with Ali.) But we did go and see some buzkashi, the forerunner of polo, where a dead calf is dragged around a stadium by men on horseback, in order to win a prize of some kind. I did not concentrate on the game that much, which is well nigh incomprehensible unless you have a pair of binoculars, or are willing to risk your life by getting really close. I did lap up the atmosphere though, and got into a few chats with some old men. One asked me whether I was an Inlander or an Outlander, and I was very tempted to try and pose as an exotic type of Afghan and see how far I got. Instead though I just said that I was from ‘Belgique’. It seems a good country to come from in Afghanistan. I usually come clean and tell them that I am from ‘Englistan’, but somehow I don’t like to admit that when there is a large crowd surrounding me as on this occasion. Mind you there was a nice atmosphere – a holiday atmosphere indeed.
I got a couple of photos of people on horses with my spy camera. Afghans pretty much always look good in photos - it is a photographer’s dream this country.
Clockwise from top left: buzkashi horseman, spectators, milling around after the game, buzkashi horseman at rest
Otherwise I went to the mosque again and had a wander round. There were all sorts of queer attractions surrounded by big circles of people all shoving and pressing to catch a good view – fortune tellers, wrestling matches, quacks and charlatans and religious demagogues. One man was wielding an enormous metal axe, and asking a small boy a series of question. Well, bellowing a series of questions in fact, so that the very tendons on his neck stood out beneath his salt-and-pepper beard. They mainly revolved around points of Islamic dogma and the names of the Prophets and the Imams. He would first always ask the little boy ‘Do you know such and such?’ or ‘Do you understand such and such?’ or ‘Can you tell me the names of so and so’, and the boy would bellow in his hoarse voice ‘I know!’ or ‘I can!’ Then the boy would recite the names of the 12 imams or whatever and the man would congratulate him on his remarkable memory and tell him and the crowd that he was ‘A Pure Child.’
Another man demonstrated how he could set alight to a piece of paper using only faith. He took some clear holy oil from somewhere or other, and some reddish holy dust mixed from the soil of such and such holy place, and smeared the oil on the paper, then dusted the dust and folded the paper over, and low and behold – it caught fire! I don’t know whether the crowd swallowed this one.
It all reminded me of the Canterbury Tales or something like that – this mixture of religion and entertainment that seems to have largely disappeared from Europe, but you get a flavour for in medieval writing.
The celebrations went on well into the night. I went to a rowdy concert with classical Afghan musicians and jokes from the audience in between, and energetic but not always effective crowd control from the young policemen who seemed obsessed with trying to get the audience to squat down on the floor instead of stand. Every now and again one of policemen assigned to the concert would run at the crowd with his stick and get them to sit down by pretending to hit them. Then he would turn round and watch the concert again, and they would get up in time for a repeat. It was all very jolly and good-humoured though. Even the policemen seemed to be enjoying it, and as well as the music and the jostling to entertain, there was a series of pubescent boys who came out of the crowd spontaneously to dance. Oh- that is another thing I forgot to tell about Afghan dancing. You do solos a lot – sometimes dance in pairs, but a lot of the time you have a circle of people and one person dancing in the middle. As well as this spectacle, I was also transfixed by a man who squatted right at the edge of the stage wrapped in a white blanket, with a beanie on his head, and would at intervals hawk up a bogey and launch it across the stage before the audience, with a little shower of phlegm illuminated by the strong stage lights. He was completely calm and self-possessed – he even seemed a little self important, as if he had been especially requested to sit on the edge of the stage and gob for the delight of all.
The journey back today was rather less fun than the whole new year bonanza. We got up unpleasantly early, and spent a good deal of the time sucking up car fumes in the Salang tunnel on the way to Kabul. There were some beautiful scenes on the way though. When I left for central Asia, everything was brown still, but now the hills are beautiful and green – nawruz really has something to celebrate – regeneration, new life and that.
Afghanistan, green and pleasant land
I shared the car with one of my Afghan colleagues, and a couple of Afghan TV guys who were up in Mazar filming the festival. I was lost in thought most of the way, with little chats to the TV guys. They were a sweet pair, taking delight in capturing the sights on video as we went down. On the way up to Salang they got very excited by the cloud formations standing almost solid against the blue sky. On one side of the car they could see the word ‘Muhammad’ and on the other they could see ‘Allah’ written in the clouds. In fact I could vaguely see the 'Allah'. For myself though, all I could come up with was a pair of breasts, a cock and balls and a head with an enormous mullet. I did not share this with the group though. Anyway, I don’t know how to say ‘mullet’ in Dari.
Can you see God's name?
I arrived in Mazar on Nawruz eve tired from travel, and so had mixed feelings that we had a bonanza party planned at our organisation’s guesthouse, but in fact it was great – a good chance to drink and dance with the local staff. Kebabs on the grill and hired musicians in the garden. I discovered yet another of the seemingly endless supply of Afghan plucked instruments, all subtly different. This one was the Tambour, with a long neck and a ridiculous number of strings, and unlike the rubab, you have to play all of them. It is also a pretty quiet instrument with a nice jangly quality that does not really come across on microphones, so we were very lucky to have the local Tambour star right before us, playing requests, just him and a tabla player. And the Afghans really got into it. The musicians came at 10 o’clock, and before then our resident DJ of Complex Ethnicity routed a few phat choones from his laptop to the Hi-Fi speakers. The Afghans weren’t really into the NY beats he spun. Though a bunch of neighbours’ children came and stood on the roof of our outbuildings and watched the funny foreigners – and danced along with us from their eminence.
But when Bahaudin the Tambour player came along with his tabla accompanist, things really started to get going. A fair few Heinekens had been sunk by then, and so the foreigners were properly fuelled, but the Afghans did not need it so much, except for the shyer mujahedin types, who were either too tough, too disapproving, or two leftfooted. The Friendly Young Mazar Driver was tireless though – arms out jiggling and joggling two and fro and constantly importuning the venerable musicians for requests of his favourite tunes. He was a happy sight to see, dancing up a sweat in the chill evening air, and particularly so as he was wearing a pleasantly incongruous T-Shirt with something like ‘Whispering Willows Christian Camp’ on the front and ‘Jesus saves, I mean REALLY SAVES!’ on the back. The dancing went up a notch when our Finance Officer joined in. He is a real good-time boy, and mixes a western hedonism with his Afghan chutzpah (not really sure what that word means, but it seems appropriate). But his dancing is all Afghan, and totally abandoned. I am not sure how to describe it really – words fail me now that I have embarked on this. He was appealing to the musicians a lot as well, but he was so outrageous in his moves that he almost seemed like he was on his own – his dancing had a flavour of air guitar in front of the mirror when no one is watching. And he would put his hands on the tabla to quiet the skins when he was particularly transported by the Tambour playing. Added to this was the Wild-Eyed Tajik who had found a Tajik doira (like a huge tambourine, with heavy metal rings to make a noise) and he was banging the life out of it, and shaking the rings along to the music with his head going back and forth as if he were a rag doll being shaken by a huge little girl. It was very good in fact. If I am that drunk, I am sure that I lose most of my sense of rhythm. Or at least my ability to translate my sense of rhythm into an accurate signal which will govern the movement of my limbs.
I was dancing up a storm too, it has to be said. I really like Afghan music, and the dancing is similar to what I was doing in Tajikistan, though in Tajikistan I would generally dance with women. Sigh. And Tajiks tend to pick up their feet more, kicking them out to the back. In Afghanistan too they do this funny thing with the feet where you cross one foot over the other and sort of tiptoe back and forth, with your arms stretched out. An old skinny black-bearded guy, I guess one of the support staff, a cleaner or a guard or something (I haven’t got my finger on who everyone is yet in Mazar) had a particularly sweet version of this – his boney frame facing forward with arms stretched out, a quizzical expression on his face, tottering from one foot to another.
At one point the girls were dancing with the Toothy-grinning Ustad with his grey-yellow walrus moustache. The Ustad was getting into it as you could tell by his cackling wheezy joyful laugh, spinning La Petite Anglaise round and round (I am surprised she managed to stay upright in fact – hat off there). The Boney Bearded one was coaxed on to dance and did his thing facing outwards, arms spread, I thought rather unnerved by the female presence in his dance space, but was almost immediately abandoned by the girls. I felt a twinge for him, but he was possibly relieved. It is not every Afghan who can handle one of these foreign girls, particularly on the dance floor.
It is interesting though – I guess it must be a little strange if you are just never used to dancing with girls (not that I know this to be the case – I haven’t been here long enough yet, but I haven’t heard of it yet). It is a possible reason for the slightly ungendered dance styles I see Afghan men adopting. I mean, a lot of the moves out there are ones that a self-respecting European male would not try on except in jest (which covers many occasions, it has to be admitted) because they are too ‘girly’. But if you are used to dancing just with other men, then I suppose it makes sense that the scope of means of expression becomes wider. If there are no occasions where men and women dance, then possibly there are no roles specific to men and women on the dance floor. I will have to follow this one up.
The next day was Nawruz and we made good use of our precious time by lying on the terrace in the sun. As a result we missed the famous raising of the red banner, which goes on at around sunrise. (This banner business is the centre of the celebrations, but don’t ask me what the banner is all about – I did ask several people, but most of them didn’t know, and a few said vaguely that it is something to do with Ali.) But we did go and see some buzkashi, the forerunner of polo, where a dead calf is dragged around a stadium by men on horseback, in order to win a prize of some kind. I did not concentrate on the game that much, which is well nigh incomprehensible unless you have a pair of binoculars, or are willing to risk your life by getting really close. I did lap up the atmosphere though, and got into a few chats with some old men. One asked me whether I was an Inlander or an Outlander, and I was very tempted to try and pose as an exotic type of Afghan and see how far I got. Instead though I just said that I was from ‘Belgique’. It seems a good country to come from in Afghanistan. I usually come clean and tell them that I am from ‘Englistan’, but somehow I don’t like to admit that when there is a large crowd surrounding me as on this occasion. Mind you there was a nice atmosphere – a holiday atmosphere indeed.
I got a couple of photos of people on horses with my spy camera. Afghans pretty much always look good in photos - it is a photographer’s dream this country.
Clockwise from top left: buzkashi horseman, spectators, milling around after the game, buzkashi horseman at rest
Otherwise I went to the mosque again and had a wander round. There were all sorts of queer attractions surrounded by big circles of people all shoving and pressing to catch a good view – fortune tellers, wrestling matches, quacks and charlatans and religious demagogues. One man was wielding an enormous metal axe, and asking a small boy a series of question. Well, bellowing a series of questions in fact, so that the very tendons on his neck stood out beneath his salt-and-pepper beard. They mainly revolved around points of Islamic dogma and the names of the Prophets and the Imams. He would first always ask the little boy ‘Do you know such and such?’ or ‘Do you understand such and such?’ or ‘Can you tell me the names of so and so’, and the boy would bellow in his hoarse voice ‘I know!’ or ‘I can!’ Then the boy would recite the names of the 12 imams or whatever and the man would congratulate him on his remarkable memory and tell him and the crowd that he was ‘A Pure Child.’
Another man demonstrated how he could set alight to a piece of paper using only faith. He took some clear holy oil from somewhere or other, and some reddish holy dust mixed from the soil of such and such holy place, and smeared the oil on the paper, then dusted the dust and folded the paper over, and low and behold – it caught fire! I don’t know whether the crowd swallowed this one.
It all reminded me of the Canterbury Tales or something like that – this mixture of religion and entertainment that seems to have largely disappeared from Europe, but you get a flavour for in medieval writing.
The celebrations went on well into the night. I went to a rowdy concert with classical Afghan musicians and jokes from the audience in between, and energetic but not always effective crowd control from the young policemen who seemed obsessed with trying to get the audience to squat down on the floor instead of stand. Every now and again one of policemen assigned to the concert would run at the crowd with his stick and get them to sit down by pretending to hit them. Then he would turn round and watch the concert again, and they would get up in time for a repeat. It was all very jolly and good-humoured though. Even the policemen seemed to be enjoying it, and as well as the music and the jostling to entertain, there was a series of pubescent boys who came out of the crowd spontaneously to dance. Oh- that is another thing I forgot to tell about Afghan dancing. You do solos a lot – sometimes dance in pairs, but a lot of the time you have a circle of people and one person dancing in the middle. As well as this spectacle, I was also transfixed by a man who squatted right at the edge of the stage wrapped in a white blanket, with a beanie on his head, and would at intervals hawk up a bogey and launch it across the stage before the audience, with a little shower of phlegm illuminated by the strong stage lights. He was completely calm and self-possessed – he even seemed a little self important, as if he had been especially requested to sit on the edge of the stage and gob for the delight of all.
The journey back today was rather less fun than the whole new year bonanza. We got up unpleasantly early, and spent a good deal of the time sucking up car fumes in the Salang tunnel on the way to Kabul. There were some beautiful scenes on the way though. When I left for central Asia, everything was brown still, but now the hills are beautiful and green – nawruz really has something to celebrate – regeneration, new life and that.
Afghanistan, green and pleasant land
I shared the car with one of my Afghan colleagues, and a couple of Afghan TV guys who were up in Mazar filming the festival. I was lost in thought most of the way, with little chats to the TV guys. They were a sweet pair, taking delight in capturing the sights on video as we went down. On the way up to Salang they got very excited by the cloud formations standing almost solid against the blue sky. On one side of the car they could see the word ‘Muhammad’ and on the other they could see ‘Allah’ written in the clouds. In fact I could vaguely see the 'Allah'. For myself though, all I could come up with was a pair of breasts, a cock and balls and a head with an enormous mullet. I did not share this with the group though. Anyway, I don’t know how to say ‘mullet’ in Dari.
Can you see God's name?
# posted by Ed @ 8:20 pm 
