Culture of shame

I really thought I had made it when I went to give a talk at my old Oxford college. But when I got there I discovered that there had been an attempt to have me banned. I was accosted by a dusky beauty in the quad who, practically incoherent with indignation, told me that this was because I produced ‘the worst kind of neo-colonial travel writing’. In other words, I had once described an arranged Afghan marriage between a 14-year-old girl and a 38-year-old man as ‘legitimised rape’. I thought I had rather understated the horror of it.

My thought-crime was ‘Orientalism’, the depiction of eastern cultures as strange and inferior to the West, rather than portraying them as both equally bad. In future I will give any cultural relativist this book. It explains what it is like to be an Afghan woman. The answer is that it is even more ghastly than I had supposed.

This is one of the most interesting and original books on Afghanistan I have read. Asne Seierstad lived for three months as a member of an Afghan family with the access of a fly-on-the-wall documentary- maker. The book is a family saga, a catalogue of births and marriages like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. It is written like a novel by an omniscient narrator who can see inside her characters’ heads. Their contents are so grotesque that there is no need for her to comment.

Seierstad is a formidable writer. She confines herself to describing what she sees, like a camera, and the detail is always completely convincing: naked in the hammam she notices the stretch marks on the bodies of girls who have had babies too young. She knows the way in which men can judge the attractiveness of a woman, despite the burqa, by looking at her hands and the way she walks.