The Storyteller's Daughter: return to a lost homeland Saira Shah Michael Joseph, 320pp, £16.99 ISBN 0718145623 The Bookseller of Kabul Asne Seierstad Little, Brown, 245pp, £12.99

The conflict between liberal western values and centuries-old Afghan traditions inevitably runs through two memoirs written by the journalists Saira Shah and Asne Seierstad. Typically, the burqa plays an important part in both books: the authors describe not only its loathsome, claustrophobic effect but its almost magical quality as a weapon of disguise and protection. Indeed, without this garment, often dyed cobalt blue, and its crocheted grille, Shah would never have been able to enter Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to make her acclaimed documentary Beneath the Veil. Wearing a burqa, she was able to travel through the Khyber Pass to the border at Torkhan, and cross through the checkpoint unhindered.

Reading The Storyteller's Daughter, I found myself feeling rather envious of her, not because she managed to sneak in and out of Afghanistan without getting caught (unlike me) but because of her rich family history, stretching back almost 2,000 years. For an Afghan, a person's past is just as important as their future. Although Shah grew up in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, her father never let her forget her exotic heritage and fed her imagination with stories about their ancestors and the Afghan way of life. Her childhood curiosity about this mystical land of beautiful gardens, heroes, conquerors, warlords and villains develops into a desire to retrace her family's footsteps. Finally, Shah achieves her ambition; pursuing her work as a documentary film-maker for television, she makes this journey of self-discovery.

Naturally, Afghanistan proves to be quite different from the land she dreamt about as a child. But, even after nine hazardous journeys to the land of her forefathers, she manages to hang on to her idealised vision of the country.

Shah is torn between two cultures: her "Tunbridge Wells side" is often in conflict with her wilder Afghan streak. "Two people live inside me," she writes. "Like a couple who rarely speak, they are not compatible. My western side is a sensitive, liberal, middle-class pacifist. My Afghan side I can only describe as a rapacious robber baron. It revels in bloodshed, glories in risk and will not be afraid." Her book will appeal especially to anyone who has dreamt of following their raw instincts.

Another fascinating Afghan story, the bestselling Bookseller of Kabul, comes from the Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad, who was also in Afghanistan in 2001. She was sent there to cover the war, but a chance encounter with an Afghan bookseller led her to undertake her own journey. Seierstad spent four months living with the bookseller, whom she calls Sultan Khan, and his family in their Kabul home. As a member of the third sex (Afghan men's term for western women), she was able to move freely between the men and women in Khan's household. Normally the sexes rarely mix, leading quite separate lives, but both tolerated her presence. Seierstad herself remains in the background, although she was undoubtedly at the centre of family dramas, squabbles and (often dreary) everyday lives.

The result is a book about Khan, a man passionate about Afghan literature and women; he has two wives, three sons, two daughters and scores of relatives. But the heroic bookseller, who defied the Taliban for years by hiding his books, turns out to be a brute himself. A mini-despot, he rules his family tyrannically, yet he professes to be desperate for change and modernisation. Ironically, he refuses to let his son go to school to be educated; he treats his unmarried sister, Leila, as an unpaid slave whose hopes of marriage - her only chance of escape - are dashed; and he despatches his first wife to a refugee camp in Pakistan while he takes a child bride.

Do not expect a happy ending with the fall of the Taliban. Afghan culture, as Seierstad makes clear, is a great deal more complex than is portrayed in the western media. When the Taliban were routed from Kabul, television stations across the globe broadcast images of women burning their burqas and men shaving off their beards. Unfortunately, the truth was not so straightforward and thanks to such books, we are better able to understand why Afghan women are still struggling for any sort of real freedom.

Both memoirs are desperately sad in places; there are no fairy-tale endings, although plenty of dreams in the making. In their accounts of living among the Afghan people and the rare insights that the experiences provide, these are two of the most valuable books to have come out of Afghanistan in a long while.

Yvonne Ridley is the author of In the Hands of the Taliban (Robson Books)

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website