LITERARY READING: Afghnistan: a Promise

The author in this story engages in creative non-fiction work and starts to tell her story of her second trip to Afghanistan in 2008. She travels as an academic and is critical of the US foreign policy and invasion of Afghanistan from a post colonial feminist perspective. The story is about how her disappointment with negative Western stereotypes about women inspires her to produce and direct a documentary on Afghan women. The story starts with the writer’s disappointment with the disasters of the war against Afghanistan in the name of freeing women from the Taliban, and takes the reader to Afghanistan on the author’s second journey, this time however, along with a Montreal based non-for profit for a project on women’s micro enterprise. The undercurrent of the story is the author’s unsettledness and “homelessness” (Adorno 1984.) She finds moments of being at home ironically in a country which has become a war zone. The glimpses of home comes to the reader through the author’s affection for Kabul which reminds her of her childhood. The story reveals the author’s exhilaration by the possibilities of what might she be able to do for women in the war zone. As the short story unravels, the author discovers others and connects with other aid workers. Yet the trip terminates by a suicide bombing in 2008, which led to the death of four UN workers concurrent with another suicide bombing in Pakistan where hundreds are killed.