Before he fled the country in 1975, ahead of the Soviet invasion, Nasir Shansab was Afghanistan’s leading industrialist. After a short period in Europe, he finally settled in the United States, where he was granted political asylum. It was not his first time in exile. In the early 1950s his family had sought refuge in Germany after his father, the minister for agriculture, publicly criticized the Afghan government in an underground communist paper. He was only 11 at the time.
Shansab’s debut novel, Silent Trees: A Novel of Afghanistan, depicts political oppression in Afghanistan during the 1970s and 80s. As the son of a prominent family, Shansab’s experiences were by no means average. Nevertheless, he is able to paint an uncommonly insightful picture of the absurdity that was Afghanistan at the period. And, as he told Diplomatic Courier, not all of it is fiction.
Silent Trees reveals the Big Brother atmosphere that then pervaded the country. The novel’s protagonist, Habib Dhil, is a wealthy, independently minded businessman whose character is based partly on an acquaintance of the author who was imprisoned in the 1970s for promoting democracy and human rights. His life starts to fall apart when the government arbitrarily accuses him of treason, triggering a series of events that Shansab feels he would have experienced himself had he “not known the right people” and escaped. In this respect, the novel is a “what if” fiction containing glimpses of Shansab’s own life and the lives of those he knew. The “corruption and lack of freedom the novel portrays is not an Afghan problem,” Shansab said, but “a human problem, something universal.”
The novel also explores human psychology, which is shown to be more complicated than the relationship between the individual and the state. Friendships are destroyed by money and power. Simple misunderstandings come between unlikely lovers. Happy childhood memories traumatize rather than comfort. Different people may respond differently to authority, but personal relationships always remain far more complex, involving emotional intricacies that transcend shared political, cultural, religious, and ethnic ties, which lends the novel greater depth than its familiar political themes might suggest.
Shansab, who read Goethe as a child, compares a character from his novel, Colonel Alam Gol, to Faust. “In authoritarian countries rife with corruption,” he said, “those who work with the system are trapped like Gol, who has sold his soul to the state as Faust sold his to the devil.” Shansab explains that there is no way back from such a path, particularly in Afghanistan, where corruption means a loss of freedom and individuality. Freedom, for Shansab, is living with dignity, love, kindness and wisdom—in other words, with humanity. Silent Trees reveals the struggle against oppression as the struggle of humanity against self-seeking authority.
Shansab also compares his novel to Kafka’s The Trial. His protagonist experiences the “ultimate helplessness” as a remote, inaccessible authority intrudes on his life in the form of irrational persecution. Unlike Joseph K, however, who is arrested on his thirtieth birthday and later executed for an unnamed crime, Habib Dhil struggles on in life against the shadows of absurdity that ordinary people are forced to endure in a corrupt society, implicitly raising the same questions concerning the function, role, and fairness of state authority.
Afghanistan is predominantly Muslim, and one would expect Islam to play a central role in the novel. Silent Trees, however, is remarkably secular, like the author himself. “A Muslim cannot doubt the existence of God,” Shansab pointed out during our interview. “So as soon as you doubt the existence of God, you’re already a non-believer. I am agnostic. I hope that the God is there but I’ve seen too much misery and suffering in life to take it on faith anymore.”
For Shansab, there is no middle ground in Islam, which calls for unquestioned belief in Allah and the words of the Quran. There is room in the novel, however, for cases of distorted Islamic belief, each involving its own form of corruption, including murder, prostitution, intoxication, bribery, and exploitation. These “sins” are committed by authority figures ostensibly “in the best interests of our country.” Surprisingly, the most sensible and virtuous people in the novel are non-Muslims, but not because they doubt the existence of God. Instead, they question the faith of immoral characters claiming to be Muslim.
Silent Trees implicitly calls attention to the gender inequality that exists in many Islamic countries. The majority of the novel’s characters are male, reflecting the patriarchal nature of Afghan society. Female characters, when they appear, are seen mostly at home occupying traditional roles in the household. The protagonist’s American lover, Maggie, is free from the typical gender constraints that oppress other Afghan women in the novel. While not a feminist or civil rights activist, she attempts to help mistreated Afghan women simply in the spirit of humanity.
Silent Trees: A Novel of Afghanistan is an enthralling political and personal fiction that gives the reader what Shansab calls “a glimpse inside the soul of Afghanistan and the dangers of the unchecked pursuit of power.” Written in English for a Western audience, its themes are as much about the human condition as they are about Afghanistan. And if “fiction is the best tool” to convey them meaningfully to a wide audience, as Shansab argues, then the author has succeeded wonderfully.
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Book Review: “Silent Trees: A Novel of Afghanistan”
Photo by Sebastian Rich for Diplomatic Courier.
May 27, 2014
Before he fled the country in 1975, ahead of the Soviet invasion, Nasir Shansab was Afghanistan’s leading industrialist. After a short period in Europe, he finally settled in the United States, where he was granted political asylum. It was not his first time in exile. In the early 1950s his family had sought refuge in Germany after his father, the minister for agriculture, publicly criticized the Afghan government in an underground communist paper. He was only 11 at the time.
Shansab’s debut novel, Silent Trees: A Novel of Afghanistan, depicts political oppression in Afghanistan during the 1970s and 80s. As the son of a prominent family, Shansab’s experiences were by no means average. Nevertheless, he is able to paint an uncommonly insightful picture of the absurdity that was Afghanistan at the period. And, as he told Diplomatic Courier, not all of it is fiction.
Silent Trees reveals the Big Brother atmosphere that then pervaded the country. The novel’s protagonist, Habib Dhil, is a wealthy, independently minded businessman whose character is based partly on an acquaintance of the author who was imprisoned in the 1970s for promoting democracy and human rights. His life starts to fall apart when the government arbitrarily accuses him of treason, triggering a series of events that Shansab feels he would have experienced himself had he “not known the right people” and escaped. In this respect, the novel is a “what if” fiction containing glimpses of Shansab’s own life and the lives of those he knew. The “corruption and lack of freedom the novel portrays is not an Afghan problem,” Shansab said, but “a human problem, something universal.”
The novel also explores human psychology, which is shown to be more complicated than the relationship between the individual and the state. Friendships are destroyed by money and power. Simple misunderstandings come between unlikely lovers. Happy childhood memories traumatize rather than comfort. Different people may respond differently to authority, but personal relationships always remain far more complex, involving emotional intricacies that transcend shared political, cultural, religious, and ethnic ties, which lends the novel greater depth than its familiar political themes might suggest.
Shansab, who read Goethe as a child, compares a character from his novel, Colonel Alam Gol, to Faust. “In authoritarian countries rife with corruption,” he said, “those who work with the system are trapped like Gol, who has sold his soul to the state as Faust sold his to the devil.” Shansab explains that there is no way back from such a path, particularly in Afghanistan, where corruption means a loss of freedom and individuality. Freedom, for Shansab, is living with dignity, love, kindness and wisdom—in other words, with humanity. Silent Trees reveals the struggle against oppression as the struggle of humanity against self-seeking authority.
Shansab also compares his novel to Kafka’s The Trial. His protagonist experiences the “ultimate helplessness” as a remote, inaccessible authority intrudes on his life in the form of irrational persecution. Unlike Joseph K, however, who is arrested on his thirtieth birthday and later executed for an unnamed crime, Habib Dhil struggles on in life against the shadows of absurdity that ordinary people are forced to endure in a corrupt society, implicitly raising the same questions concerning the function, role, and fairness of state authority.
Afghanistan is predominantly Muslim, and one would expect Islam to play a central role in the novel. Silent Trees, however, is remarkably secular, like the author himself. “A Muslim cannot doubt the existence of God,” Shansab pointed out during our interview. “So as soon as you doubt the existence of God, you’re already a non-believer. I am agnostic. I hope that the God is there but I’ve seen too much misery and suffering in life to take it on faith anymore.”
For Shansab, there is no middle ground in Islam, which calls for unquestioned belief in Allah and the words of the Quran. There is room in the novel, however, for cases of distorted Islamic belief, each involving its own form of corruption, including murder, prostitution, intoxication, bribery, and exploitation. These “sins” are committed by authority figures ostensibly “in the best interests of our country.” Surprisingly, the most sensible and virtuous people in the novel are non-Muslims, but not because they doubt the existence of God. Instead, they question the faith of immoral characters claiming to be Muslim.
Silent Trees implicitly calls attention to the gender inequality that exists in many Islamic countries. The majority of the novel’s characters are male, reflecting the patriarchal nature of Afghan society. Female characters, when they appear, are seen mostly at home occupying traditional roles in the household. The protagonist’s American lover, Maggie, is free from the typical gender constraints that oppress other Afghan women in the novel. While not a feminist or civil rights activist, she attempts to help mistreated Afghan women simply in the spirit of humanity.
Silent Trees: A Novel of Afghanistan is an enthralling political and personal fiction that gives the reader what Shansab calls “a glimpse inside the soul of Afghanistan and the dangers of the unchecked pursuit of power.” Written in English for a Western audience, its themes are as much about the human condition as they are about Afghanistan. And if “fiction is the best tool” to convey them meaningfully to a wide audience, as Shansab argues, then the author has succeeded wonderfully.
