An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved The World (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
[A]nd the Mujahideen fired in this long moment that was the reason I came; I don't want or need to say much more about it; they were fighting and I was not; they were accomplishing the purpose of their lives in those endless night moments of happiness near death, no fear in them as I honestly believe; they had crossed their river so long ago that I could not really comprehend them as anything except heroes shining like Erica on the far side of the water; they were over the red hill and nothing mattered.Vollmann, in his first book written and seventh published, calls himself only The Young Man here, perhaps to distance himself from that other foreign country known as the past. Here he is a wee twenty-two years old, with his head full of Wittgenstein and blind idealism, frail of body, speaking no Pashtun and not knowing how to fire a gun. With this set of assets and liabilities, he soldiers off into Afghanistan to try and Save the World. No doubt many timid intellectual types have had feverish misguided dreams of becoming Che or some heroic martyr-general, but here's one foolish devil who tried to make these dreams come true. Vollmann's ironic historical self-awareness starts to bud here. He notes György Lukács and his futile efforts in the Hungarian Revolution, watching politics and force sweep aside the tender debates of the fine points of ideology. What Vollmann does have here are a camera, a 'what-the-hell attitude', forty rolls of film, and a tendency to make friends. Enough material to write a book, but hardly enough to help people.So off he goes. He sojourns from Karachi to Peshawar, and interviews some locals and reliable sources. The refugees - they are easy to find, as the city of Peshawar doubled in size after the war began - tell him their stories, and eagerly buy him Pepsi and Fanta with their little savings. At times, he might be guilty of a feelings of Orientalist exoticism towards the Afghans, making them into Others, but he tries to break down this self-built wall, talking to people first, suffering the heat, eating the food, genuinely listening to them, writing little Pynchonian ditties about the city. To be fair, the Afghans and Pakistanis have their own images of him and America too. They'd like guns. They'd also like to visit America, the promised land of guns, gold, and Cadillacs. They'd most like to be listened to, and ask the Americans for eager help and assistance, with increased bitterness as their pleas are selectively ignored. He talks to a few refugees who were lucky enough to get to America, and they are blandly pleased. And here, Vollmann drifts between the literary to the political. There is a vast chronology in the back of the book, starting from the first Russian conquests against Khiva and the Kazakhs in 1734, and ending in 1989, with the election of Benazir Bhutto, the withdrawal of the Soviets, and the Final Victory over the Evil Empire two years to come. In his interviews with warlords, politicos, NGO workers, and the Muj, Vollmann was able to uncover that the US was giving aid to the Mujahideen via Pakistan by 1982. But of course, there was a real chance that if he had died in Afghanistan and the Soviets could have picked through his camera and his notes, then he could very easily have sabotaged the remaining American efforts there. Another, post-modern fascination of Vollmann's is human perception and how nonobjective our gazes can be, especially decades of war and propaganda have made institutionalized lies about each other. The Soviets believed, or their institutional apparatus did, they they were bringing their own brand of communist liberation to the Afghan people, freeing the women from the veil, teaching children how to write, and molding them into international citizens who appreciated civic virtues of class-consciousness. But we know the difficulty of applying ideology through praxis without a biased viewpoint. Perhaps the first problem with the book is that it was published too late. At this time, Vollmann was something like a respected novelist, and this awkward exploring memoir seemed out of touch in many ways. In 1992, we were already celebrating our Final Victory over the Soviet Union and had announced the End of History, whereas Afghanistan would soon be seized by the Taliban some four years later. In my brief research for this essay, I found one review in 1992 who smugly predicted "the resolution of the Afghan situation" was coming soon. History, of course, will not slow down or disappear because it is ignored by the powerful.Vollmann's little efforts were a total failure, by his admission. The picture exhibitions he set up when he returned barely covered the cost of the rooms he rented. Vollmann, technologically proficient yet morally naïve, is a cipher for those who ape the motions of trying to aid others without understanding the complex circumstances they live in, is only too relevant today. He is an American Abroad, a well-intentioned Ugly American narrative character. His early childhood fantasies, of Alaska, mix with the red hills of Afghanistan and its landscape. His narrative is about failure, and perhaps he hopes his honesty and self-effacing modesty will atone for it. The secrets of Afghanistan and the World do not arise simply because he asked nicely. So whither Afghanistan today? We want so much only to help, but there has been little unity, and there remains little today. Pakistan has its own issues, and justly resents our drone usage, and if their varied peoples are said to have any unified interest, it is survival and peace. The way forward is murkier. The eternal forges of hell burn the corpses of the good-intention, the ideal, the person who wants most desperately to change human nature.
Guns. They want guns to kill the Russians. That is what the mujahideen wanted most from Vollmann and America. Not so much the aid to the refugees, food, medical supplies. But guns. What this is most indicative of is the matter of autonomy. Afghanistan was invaded. To the Russian's they were bringing literacy, civic consciousness, infrastructure, elevation of women. This sounds similar to American arguments for their, shall we call them conflicts, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem is their autonomy was violated. Certainly it's within reason for people worldwide to want the world to be healthier, more educated, more widely exposed to the advantages of technology and medicine. And while that line of thinking is often more rhetoric than reality, we still face the cumbersome task of violating a people's right to self-rule. We want them to choose a society in which they have something similar to 1st Amendment rights, but voting people may see that as dangerous. We have a tendency to say, "you're doing it wrong" but to intervene would just produce a faction that wants to strike back at us with a more concentrated fervor. So a double bind presents itself in which we see their self-rule as perpetuating a humanitarian crisis of oppression and our intervention as a bringing about unsolvable chaos and the ire of those we tried to help. This wasn't highly pronounced in the book, but I felt it was always stuck in the jaws of The Young Man. His rote questions come across as earnest, if a little calculated. The book is about failure; failure on his part to provide meaningful help, and failure on the Russian's part to accomplish their goals. But the failure is essential in understanding what is perhaps an unsolvable complexity. The Young Man was propelled by Good Intentions. And of course, we all know proverbially where that gets you. The unfortunate consequence is a feeling of powerlessness; that to solve any one problem or even give a significant portion of aid, one has to start over with Universe and try to pick out the stray atoms that will lead to human immorality. All the same though, Vollmann gives us, if nothing else, textual distillations of humans. In their full authenticity: their sins, their innocence, their desperation to be free (whatever that means), and their boundless generosity. We see men that view women as house pets and a foreign American idealist as a man who must have the very best of their country. It's telling that Vollmann's last scene in Afghanistan is one that depicts the Afghans fighting the Russians, fulfilling a purpose, and he simply watching, sick with dysentery. He is the thinking, capitulating Hamlet, they are the Name of Action. They have purpose, they have identity, they have a freedom he could not: They did not doubt themselves. Post Script:Thought of doing a video review, but for various busy reasons and self-conscious reasons I took the easy way out. I may yet do one because this is the kind of book I like to promote on YouTube. Speaking of YouTube, in the initial blurb about this book I posted this video link. Part 1 of a BBC documentary on Afghanistan. Part 2 can be found on other non-YouTube sites in full. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a7bP...
What do You think about An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved The World (2013)?
I'm not a particular fan of Wm. Vollmann--- I mostly find him obnoxious and tedious ---but this isn't bad. Vollmann went off to Afghanistan at the very start of the 1980s for reasons he couldn't really articulate. Save the World? Help the Oppressed? See something exciting and have an Adventure? His adventures mostly came down to having dysentery and stumbling through other people's lives. It's a bleakly comic look at being a complete naif, I suppose, though the sad part is how little Vollmann actually learns or sees. There are some fine accounts from the early 1980s by writers who went out to report on what was happening in Afghanistan (Peregrine Hodson, Robt. D. Kaplan, Rob Schultheis), but Vollmann's book is...well...not about Afghanistan as such, but more about self-mockery.
—DoctorM
Vollmann went to the Afghan border in 1982 unbidden and unconnected, a twenty-two year old thick with Wittgenstein and the desire as he put it, "to learn if there was a way to help people get across rivers." He found that it was he who needed carrying over rivers on the backs of mujaheddin as he slowed their entry into the areas of fighting against the Soviet occupiers. Overwhelmed by both unceasing demands and unceasing acts of generosity, he clung to his tape recorder, his camera and his self-made version of an empirical method, determined to penetrate the conflict and bring back the data that would yield up his heroes after later analysis. Written between recollections and the time itself, the book is a portrait of intellectual self-consciousness, the knots of First World charity and encounter after encounter with men willing to fight "with their guns and everything" against any new wave of invaders, whatever language of legitimation they might be speaking this time.
—Quinn Slobodian
I can not rate this as highly as "You Bright and Risen Angels", my favorite book by William Vollmann, but this was my first introduction to the author and a really spectacular, complicated, and motivating book to read as an early-twenty something. He recounts his experience post college-graduation, when he packed up his camera and headed to Afghanistan to help the Mujhadeen fight the soviets, and along with this journalistic reportage, mixes in reflections on his own childhood and any number of other fantastic ruminations. He was motivated by a naive sense of idealism, helping the "freedom fighters". This self-criticism woven into this story is so sharp and sweet in light of current American involvement in Afghanistan.
—Robert
