Kabul Carnival. Julie Billaud
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shoulders. Climbing a short hill on the outskirts of the village, I see a mullah with a billowy white turban seated in the chair of a two-barrel Dashika antiaircraft gun. The Dashika is a Soviet design, but markings on the gun indicate that it is of Chinese manufacture. These guns are shiny and new and only recently arrived by camel caravan across the Pakistani frontier. The mullah is young—late-twenties—and he scans the sky for signs of Soviet MiGs. Only a few weeks before, mujahidin gunners had brought down a MiG-23 not too far from here, and there is fighting going on not too far away; so the mullah is keeping careful watch. As he does so, he listens to a cassette on his Japanese tape recorder of an Egyptian muezzin chanting verses from the Qur’an….
Later in the day, I meet another ex-soldier, a Persian-speaking Tajik from the Kohistan region just north of Kabul…. Unlike most of the other mujahidin I have met, he has little time for Islam and openly admits to me that he had been a follower of a famous leftist guerrilla leader named Majid Kalakani who had been captured and killed by the government some years before. He talks proudly of his time with Kalakani and tells me of the American sniper rifle that he used to own. It had a scope on it, and once he killed four Soviet tankists as they drove in a convoy down the main road toward Kabul. The beauty of the American rifle, he says, is its small bullets and its silent action. (Edwards 1994, 347–48)
The Egyptian muezzin singing on a Japanese tape recorder, the Dashika antiaircraft gun designed in the Soviet Union and manufactured in China, the American sniper rifle—the material details Edwards provides in his description are revealing of the intricate translocal dynamics in which the resistance movement was entangled. Descriptions like these demonstrate that the mujahideen stood at the crossroads of modernity, technological innovation, and global conflicts.
The policies some of the most radical mujahideen groups implemented in the refugee camps they ruled were a direct reflection of the global interconnections that provided the background upon which an “authentic Afghan culture and tradition” were reinvented. Constraints imposed on women’s movements and public appearances in the camps directly answered state-sponsored women’s emancipation programs taking place in the country. In this sense their policies were performative, reinscribing in a dramatic manner a naturalized tradition in the social fabric in order to assert its difference with the Soviet project. As Homi Bhabha argues in The Locations of Culture (1994, 2): “Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.”
The current “reconstruction” project presents similar trends with “modernization” efforts conducted under the Communist regime: a focus on centralized instances of governance to carry out important social reforms with the military support of foreign troops. In this project, like in the Communist one, women’s public visibility is the benchmark upon which “progress” is measured. Despite the fact that the political jargon used to foster “modernization” is apparently less ideologically connoted, the neoliberal agenda associated with it is far from being value free.
In the Afghan postcolony, women are obliged to subscribe to norms and ideologies whose social effects further diminish their dignity and exacerbate their inequality. Women cannot make choices that do not show—at least partly—their adhesion to these norms without fearing the social sanction reserved for those who are considered as traitors. These norms take a variety of forms: some have to do with family honor and feminine modesty; others have to do with the glorification of motherhood and feminine virtue indexed on women’s capacity to endure. Reading in these norms the expression of a fixed “Afghan culture” is misleading simply because the terms of participation are constantly negotiated in everyday practice. It is through the ambivalent work of “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 2005)—whereby aspects of Afghan cultural identity that are considered a source of international criticism for the state are nevertheless used to provide insiders with a sense of national comfort and ontological security—that women creatively transgress (and to a certain extent, reproduce) nationalist ideologies.
Women, far from being the powerless victims of identity politics, mobilize Afghan cultural imagination in order to render audible claims pertaining to their position in the family, the community, or society at large. They are neither simple dupes nor secret revolutionaries. What they often seek tactically (even without a theory to dress it up) is to optimize the terms of recognition in their immediate, local lives. As Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold demonstrate in their work on women’s oral performances in North India, if women frequently speak from within the dominant discourse, it is important to “begin to recognize the discontinuity, the interpenetration between the hegemonic and the subversive, and their varied deployments, from moment to moment, in everyday life” (1994, 16). In their quest for a “voice,” women have to express themselves in terms of actions and performances, which have local cultural resonance. Women’s “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai 2004) is therefore not disconnected from the cultural regime within which their lives are entangled. And by taking part in the complex dynamics of identity politics—in often ambiguous and ambivalent ways—they also transform the dominant norms that frame the terms of culture.
Carnival of War
Let me now return to the metaphor of the “carnival.” Shortly after the bombings over Afghanistan abated, a humanitarian theater was added to the military one. The use of the term “theater” to describe such interventions needs to be further examined. In general, theaters are premises that host plays, which can be played and replayed in various locations. The theater provides a stage for the recitation of a scenario that has been written somewhere else. The theatrical dimension of the humanitarian intervention in Afghanistan is perhaps best exemplified by a project called “We Believe in Balloons,” an initiative aimed at promoting peace, which was carried out in May 2013. The U.S.-based artist Yazmany Arboleda, with the support of a half dozen internationally financed aid groups, set out to distribute pink balloons filled with helium and peace messages all over the capital city. His intention, as he explained to a reporter at the New York Times, was to “create a stream of shared instances of unexpected happiness” (Nordland 2013). This example together with a myriad of other projects conducted since 2001 (such as the Kabul Kids Circus, Skatistan, the Beauty Academy of Kabul, and others) demonstrate that the stage of the Afghan theater hosts a carnivalesque act in the sense that it provides a space where a world of utopian freedom can be imagined.
Here I am referring to the “carnivalesque” as defined in Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary work Rabelais and His World (1984b). Bakhtin describes the carnival as a moment when rules are turned upside down and everything is permitted. It is shaped according to a pattern of play. It is a type of performance that is communal, without boundaries between performers and audience. The “Pink Balloons” project with its objective to bring happiness and peace to the war-torn country illustrates the inherent utopia that lies within the promise of postwar reconstruction.
The transition toward democracy in Afghanistan has triggered many apparent reversals that to a certain extent remind one of medieval Europe’s “carnival” as described by Bakhtin (1984b). During the carnival, ordinary life, rules, and hierarchies are temporarily suspended and overturned. Slaves may be “crowned” as kings just as kings are “decrowned” as slaves. The suspended moment and upside-down world of the carnival presents some commonalities with the transition period in Afghanistan where “masked games” hide the continuity of injustice. Even though the current context is immune from and devoid of the carnival’s liberating laughter, a number of inversions that work as leverages to reinforce the status quo can be identified in the same manner as the carnival offers a safety valve that ultimately sustains the dominant order.
First, in contrast with the religious edicts enforced by the Taliban, a new vision of “law and order” is being promoted, based on constitutional populism and a fetishized “rule of law” agenda destined to bring Afghanistan into the fold of “civilized nations.” But the blinding screen of the law poorly hides the endemic disorder that constitutes its twin and inseparable