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HEATHER
THOMPSON Atiq
Rahimi SYNGUE
SABOUR Pierre de
patience 154pp. POL.€15. 978 2
8468 2277 0 According
to Le Nouvel
Observateur, Atiq Rahimi's first act on arriving in France in 1985 - as
a young
Afghan raw from his flight across hundreds of kilometres of snow, ice
and
landmines - was to spend his refugee stipend on a copy of the previous
year's
Prix Goncourt winner, L 'Amant by Marguerite Duras. It is fitting,
then, that
Rahimi not only entrusted his three novels to POL, Duras's final
publisher, but
also, in November last year became a Goncourt laureate himself. Syngue
sabour: His
debut, Terre et cendres
(2000; Earth and Ashes, 2002), which he later turned into an
award-winning
film, grew out of Rahimi' s distress at the civil war that culminated
with the
Taliban's rise to power in 1996. It tells of an old man, his son and
his
grandson - three generations of Afghan men deprived of their wives,
mothers, daughters.
Rahimi has remarked that this dearth of femininity was intentional:
Afghan
society, he said, renders women invisible. They are "absent". Syngué
sabour provides a
magnificent reply to this observation. The novel opens with an image of
wifely
devotion: in a bare, brightly colored room, a middle-aged mujahideen
lies
unconscious while a woman crouches next to him, one hand on his heart
and the
other on her rosary. For sixteen days, she has been making her way
through
Allah's ninety-nine names, in cycles of ninety-nine rounds per name -
it is the
only way, the mullah told her, to revive her husband. Shamed by his
condition
(the coma resulted from an internal squabble), his family abandoned
them. The
war, fought nightly in Kalashnikov fire and random beheadings, means
nothing to
the woman: when asked whose side she is on, she answers "yours, I
suppose". Driven to near-madness by the helplessness of her situation,
she
begins to treat her silent husband as a confessional. Like the Black
Stone at While
Rahimi, a filmmaker as
well as an author, certainly writes cinematically, Syngue sabour also
borrows
its style and rhythm from the theatre. A handful of characters come and
go, yet
the spare, poetic narrative never leaves the one room. The
protagonist's disclosures
come in a series of impassioned monologues; the sounds she hears
through
shattered windows illustrate the horrors outside more evocatively than
any
explicitly evoked action. Syngue sabour is a painful novel, but it is
also a
lyrical one.
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