By: Ann Jones
Soon after the bombing of Kabul ceased, award-winning journalist and women’s rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city, determined to bring help where her country had brought destruction. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends so much upon our own.
Henry Holt and Co.
hardcover/336 pages
0-8050-7884-3/$24.00US
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Excerpt:
On Thursdays, the Ministry for Martyrs and the Disabled gives out stipends to certifiable war casualties. Early in the morning, they make their way to the Ministry: women in faded, tattered burquas and men wrapped against the cold in pattus of military brown. They come singly or in twos and threes, assembling into a grave procession of the lame, the halt, and the blind. One-legged men, victims of land mines, hobble on their Red Crescent crutches. This is the country of one-legged men.
Officially disabled, they drag their shattered bodies over the rough pavements, stopping traffic at every crossing. They press on amid the honking horns, seeking no miracles, merely the wherewithal to make it through another week. Every day, the mines that salt the roadsides and the dead orchards and the fallow fields explode to create new martyrs and new casualties. Every New Year’s Day, thousands of Kabulis visit a hillside shrine and somebody steps on a mine -- this year, it was an eighteen-year-old boy who lost both legs. And every week, the Thursday procession grows longer and more belligerent. They are Kabul’s most aggressive pedestrians.
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A sharp and arresting people’s-eye view of real life in Afghanistan after the Taliban
Soon after the bombing of Kabul ceased, award-winning journalist and women’s rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city, determined to bring help where her country had brought destruction.
Here is her trenchant report from inside a city struggling to rise from the ruins. Working among the multitude of impoverished war widows, retraining Kabul’s long-silenced English teachers, and investigating the city’s prison for women, Jones enters a large community of female outcasts: runaway child brides, pariah prostitutes, cast-off wives, victims of rape. In the streets and markets, she hears the Afghan view of the supposed benefits brought by the fall of the Taliban, and learns that regarding women as less than human is the norm, not the aberration of one conspicuously repressive regime. Jones confronts the ways in which Afghan education, culture, and politics have repeatedly been hijacked -- by Communists, Islamic fundamentalists, and the Western free marketeers -- always with disastrous results. And she reveals, through small events, the big disjunctions: between U.S promises and performance, between the new “democracy” and the still-entrenched warlords, between what’s boasted of and what is.
At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends so much upon our own.
Author Biography
Ann Jones is the author of Women Who Kill, Next Time She’ll Be Dead, and Looking for Lovedu. An authority on women and violence. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Nation.
