What Was Lost in the Fire: Writing Afghan Historical Fiction
Author Nadia Hashimi on representing the truth of Afghanistan, past and present, in her novels
When I grew up in the suburbs of New York City in the 1980s, few of our neighbors knew much about Afghanistan. Though mostly anonymous, my parents’ homeland did make rare appearances on our television. Rambo muscled into the country to help the mujahideen beat back the Russians. MacGyver did the same but with more duct tape instead of bullets and far less oil on his biceps. The Afghans on the screen were warriors fighting a noble battle from mountain perches. Some nights, the ever-worsening situation in Afghanistan would occupy a sliver of airtime on the nightly news. The grim expressions on my parents' faces while they watched Peter Jennings or made overseas calls at inconvenient hours kept me from asking questions.
Instead, I probed the few photographs my parents had brought with them for stories. My father’s wild hair and paisley shirt. My uncle, guitar in hand, on a mountainside road. My mother at a family party, crisp suits, pleated skirts, and stylish coifs. Like a child reading a picture book, I invented the narrative. Perhaps that was my first crack at storytelling.
The anonymity of being an Afghan American disappeared after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I was a medical student sitting in a first-year lecture in Brooklyn on that day. In the weeks that followed, the smoke from Ground Zero lingering in my apartment, Afghanistan was on the news round the clock. This time, though, the bearded men weren’t standing next to an American hero fighting off an enemy. This time, they were the enemy. Or protectors of the enemy. A rock shattered the window of our family deli. Who were Afghan Americans? Where did our allegiances lie?
The first work I read by an Afghan author was probably West of Kabul, East of New York, a memoir written by Tamim Ansary in the wake of 9/11. When I slid Ansary’s book on my shelf, it filled a void I didn’t realize had existed. So much remained untold.
I began writing in 2009. My books span over a century of Afghanistan’s history. I’ve resurrected Queen Soraya and imagined a scarred girl orphaned by a cholera epidemic. I traced the steps of a mother and her children fleeing an uninhabitable homeland. I write about brave women and flawed women. I write about gracious men and misogynists. I write about black magic and engineers and forbidden love.
I write to recover what was lost in the fire.
Sparks Like Stars is my exploration of the undoing of Afghanistan. On a spring day in 1978, a faction of the Afghan military staged a coup. Afghanistan's first president, Daoud Khan, and several members of his family were assassinated and their bodies buried in an unmarked grave. Four grandchildren were killed that night, the youngest an 18-month-old grandchild.
Into that moment of history, I inserted a little girl who would lose everything but her life. In Sparks Like Stars, she meets wide-eyed hippies traveling through her homeland and American diplomats for whom Kabul had been a party post until that time. She becomes an Afghan American, an identity that is hard won and, sometimes, hard worn. I spent more hours than justifiable looking at faded pictures of hippies drinking tea with amused Afghans or wandering through bazaars. I browsed redacted CIA documents and read hours of interviews of foreign service officers (and personally interviewed one) stationed in Kabul at the time of the coup.
As a child, I divined our family narrative from a handful of images and scraps of overheard history. In writing historical fiction, I do the same, hoping to fill the voids that only become evident when a book slides onto the shelf and claims its space.
Nadia Hashimi is a pediatrician turned internationally bestselling author. Her novels for adults and children are inspired by the people and history of Afghanistan and have been translated into 16 languages. She is a member of the US Afghan Women's Council, Montgomery County Commission on Health, and serves on the boards of several non-profit organizations with focuses on education, hunger, and civic engagement. Originally from New York, she lives with her husband and four children in Potomac, Maryland.