About this item
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 cant 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 overheada sign of Americas omnipotence or its vulnerability, the villagers are unsure. They know, though, that the earth is flatlike 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 doesfrom 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.
About the Author
Anna Badkhen has spent most of her life in the Global South. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones. Her immersive investigations of the world's iniquities have yielded six books of literary nonfiction, most recently Fisherman's Blues. She has written about a dozen wars on three continents, and her essays and dispatches appear in periodicals and literary magazines such as the New York Review of Books, Granta, The Common, Guernica and the New York Times.
