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Four Seasons in an Afghan Village
Riverhead
June 2013
On Sale: May 30, 2013
288 pages
ISBN: 1594488320
EAN: 9781594488320
Kindle: B00AFPVS9C
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
An unforgettable portrait of a place and a people shaped
by centuries of art, trade, and war.
In the
middle of the salt-frosted Afghan desert, in a village so
remote that Google can’t find it, a woman squats on top of a
loom, making flowers bloom in the thousand threads she knots
by hand. Here, where heroin is cheaper than rice, every day
is a fast day. B-52s pass overhead—a sign of America’s
omnipotence or its vulnerability, the villagers are unsure.
They know, though, that the earth is flat—like a
carpet.
Anna Badkhen first traveled to this country
in 2001, as a war correspondent. She has returned many times
since, drawn by a land that geography has made a perpetual
battleground, and by a people who sustain an exquisite
tradition there. Through the four seasons in which a new
carpet is woven by the women and children of Oqa, she
immortalizes their way of life much as the carpet does—from
the petal half-finished where a hungry infant needs care to
the interruptions when the women trade sex jokes or go fill
in for wedding musicians scared away by the Taliban. As
Badkhen follows the carpet out into the world beyond, she
leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of fates woven
by centuries of art, war, and an ancient trade that
ultimately binds the invaded to the invader.
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