Afghan Stand by Me: "Nights in Logar" by Jamil Jan Kochai

Between this year's Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Anthology, and now the O.Henry winners, there have been a lot of stories from writers with recent origins outside the country. BASS gave us "The Art of Losing," about a Korean-American family in Philadelphia, "Unearth," about a Canadian first nations woman connecting with her roots, "Everything Is Far from Here," about immigrants on the American/Mexican border, "A Big True," about an Iranian musician and his daughter," and "What Terrible Thing It Was" about a Chinese-American girl. That's 25% of the stories in the collection. I can't find my Pushcart right now, but at least "The Whitest Girl," Guerrilla Marketing," and "The Bar Beach Show" qualify.

So far in O.Henry, there's already been "Nayla, "Lucky Dragon," and "Past Perfect Continuous" that draw on the author's rich immersion in something other than mainstream American culture. Now, we get "Nights in Logar," which probably goes more off the map for most American readers than any of the other stories I've just mentioned.

American readers looking for the best literature are going to be reading a lot of this from now on. There are more English speakers in India and Pakistan than the rest of the former English colonies combined, and many are excellent writers. Nigeria contributes a good number of top-rate authors in English as well.

But even if we restrict our writers to just those within the United States, as BASS does, we still have a lot of writers whose families have come to the U.S. in relatively recent memory. When they write their stories, we not only read about the trials of moving to the U.S. from some other place, but also of the fraught realities of American involvement elsewhere. Our current literature is the literature of our post-9/11 attempt at enlightened empire. 

When Kochai writes about Logar, a remote province in east Afghanistan, most readers may not know the first thing about the world our characters find themselves in, but it's a world influenced heavily by the decisions of our government and the presence of our soldiers.

If the sky, that we look upon...

Marwand is an American kid with Afghan parents who has gone back to his family's former home for the second time in his life. He's very much a child of both worlds, as he drops frequent Pashto words into his speech, calling himself a musafir (traveler) from America. There are some words he almost doesn't seem to be able to say in English, but then he also needs to revert to the English "fuck" when he's really flummoxed, and the best reference he can come up with in his head for an attack he participates in comes from a John Wayne movie.

Marwand joins three other boys--Gulbuddin, Zia, and Dawoud--as they leave the safety of the village to go look for the lost dog Budabash. At first, when the story described the boys stepping onto a main road made of hard, dark clay, it made me think of four other travelers stepping onto a yellow brick road (I supposed I was helped in this association by the reference to Afghanistan's poppies). But soon it dawned on me that this was much more like Stephen King's Stand by Me. The boys are in early adolescence, heading out into a world of danger with a MacGuffin to go find.

That MacGuffin is a dog. Well, sort of a dog. Budabash is described as more some kind of crazed, primordial beast than dog. It's never really stated why the boys want to go get him. It might be because they are worried the dog will hurt someone else. It might just be a sense of adventure. But if we read a little closer, we might find a key to unlocking much of the story.

Marwand would never again have friends like he did when he was twelve. Wallah! Does anyone? 

In Marwand's first trip to Afghanistan, he beat up the village dog, which he called "Mr. Kareem." But after going back to America to get a proper education, he learned that "dogs were supposed to be hugged and petted and neutered, but never beaten or tortured." So when he got back to Afghanistan, the first thing he wanted to see was the dog, so he could make up for his former bad behavior.

But Mr. Kareem wasn't there anymore, and in its place was "not a dog at all, but something more like a mutant." When Marwand tries to befriend it, Budabash bites off Marwand's fingertip.

So why is Marwand chasing the dog? Is it because he thought he had learned, after having first treated a wild thing in a cruel way, how to behave rightly? Has he not come from America wanting to apply his modern ideas of virtue and goodness? Doesn't he think it will be different this time? And has he not been shown the error of his thinking, and paid a price for it? And doesn't this all fit with everything America has done in Afghanistan since 2002?

Marwand needs to find the dog so he can correct the seeming contradiction in his theory. It is right to pet dogs. He has petted the dog, and yet it did not go as planned. It is not unlike America's now almost 20-year stay in the country, much of which can be seen as the refusal to admit that our theories about benevolent empire have gotten us nothing but a mangled hand (to say nothing about what it has done for Afghanistan).

Marwand's three young family members go with him, after they first hold a jirga or council to decide that exactly four people must go. ("'More than four,' he told me and Zia and Dawoud...'and we'll look like a mob, but any less and we might get jumped or robbed.'") These three are responsible for teaching Marwand about Afghanistan. He tries to learn. Marwand really tries. He professes that he would rather be in Afghanistan than America, but when it gets dark out, it's obvious that this is a lie.

The fact is that Marwand can't get away from being American, and that has meaning here in Afghanistan. There is a very funny twenty-one-point list Marwand puts together of the things he sees while walking through Logar. It includes the shocking, like kids stoning a cobra to death, the pathetic, like laborers building a wall out of the same mud they are covered in, and the surprisingly transcendental: "the wheat shaking in the wind" and "One true God." But the list also includes two American helicopters and what he thinks is a drone.

The list, however, does not include Budabash. The boys never find the dog. Unlike Stand by Me, they never make it to their destination, and the boys do not achieve a coming-of-age leap forward by accomplishing their goal. Instead, there is something of a circularity to the narrative.

This short story is part of a longer collection, called "99 Nights in Logar." There are some questions this story left unanswered that are probably answered in the longer work. One is why the boys refuse to allow Marwand's brother Gwora to come along.

There is no redemption for Marwand, but there is--again, recalling Stand by Me--a section that centers around a carcass. The dog has attacked a number of sheep, and one was so torn apart it seems like it has "exploded from the inside out." Or was it the dog? The shepherd who tells the kids about the carcass notes that he was tending the flock when he was momentarily distracted by "the erratic flight patterns of an American helicopter." Has there been some kind of accidental targeting?

Ultimately, looking for Budabash is like waiting for Godot. You cannot redeem imperialist urges, you cannot turn war into something meant to help the enemy. Marwand cannot stop being American, as much as he wants to be Afghan and only Afghan.

There is, however, maybe a note of hope. When Marwand is praying along with the other boys for help in their quest, he prays for a long list of things. He ends with this:

I prayed for the men in the village who took care of their families and prayed all their prayers and watched over their neighbors and worked all day in the sun and never beat their wives and never sold their daughters and never snitched on their people and never joined the Americans and never hurt anyone they didn't have to hurt, because I swear to God those sorts of people existed in Deh-Naw, in Logar, in the country. I swear to God. 

The most noble thing Marwand notices are those who maintain some sense of independence from the great political powers of the time, the Americans and the Ts (Taliban). The closest Marwand can come to reconciling his two halves is not to fuse them, but to show some level of indifference to both, preferring a simple life of private goodness, rather than the kinds of lofty ideals that make someone turn his back on those closest to him in favor of some grandiose political ideal.

But even when he is thinking these thoughts, he betrays his Americanness. His concern for the welfare of women is very Western, and when he swears to God it is the only place in the narrative where he swears in English instead of using the colloquial "Wallah!" for "Honest to Allah."

There is savage beauty in the landscape and nobility in the people, but in the end, even the hope of religion is somewhat taken from them. Zia, the child who manages to attract a congregation at one point with his beautiful recitations of prayers, falls asleep in the dark with Marwand, "and for the first time in a long time, Zia forgot to pray."

This story is likely to stay with me longer than some of the others in the collection, I think. It's not exactly anti-American. U.S. adventurism in Afghanistan isn't the main subject of the story; it's always a whispered danger on the fringes of reality, but then so are half a dozen other things. Marwand's discovery of his uncle's resting place brings up the past colonial adventurism of the Russians, making the current U.S. experiment less unique. What makes this story effective for me is that it isn't focused on Americans in Afghanistan, like so many war movies we've seen, nor is it a fully Afghan view of American occupation, which would be worth reading, but wouldn't then belong in an American-focused anthology. Marwand's unique heritage allows for a translation of Afghan experience that has a note of authenticity, putting the experience of Afghanistan's people in the center while still speaking in a way American audiences can understand.