The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village

by Anna Badkhen

Overview

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 can’t 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 overhead—a sign of America’s omnipotence or its vulnerability, the villagers are unsure. They know, though, that the earth is flat—like 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 does—from 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. As Badkhen follows the carpet out into the world beyond, she leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of fates woven by centuries of art, war, and an ancient trade that ultimately binds the invaded to the invader.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594632679
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/03/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	1,089,779
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Anna Badkhen has won awards for her reporting from the Middle East, Central Asia, East Africa, and her native Russia and the Caucasus. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, and other publications. The author of Peace Meals and other nonfiction books, she lives in Philadelphia.

Read an Excerpt

The Carpet

At four in the morning a phalanx of black silhouettes set out across the desert: three people and a donkey headed west on a sinuous dustbowl trail. The yogurt bow of the moon had slipped behind the Earth an hour earlier, and the trail wound invisibly through thick predawn dark that arced toward the horizon. All was still. To the south, the Big Dipper scooped out the mountains I could just skylight against the spongy, star-bejeweled
March night.

Amanullah led the way. He skirted the spines of cousinia and the diaphanous spheres of calligonum only he could pick out,
hopped the cape hare burrows he alone knew about, sidestepped the boulders he alone remembered. He never changed pace. He never bent down to check for sheep spoor. He never looked up: he didn’t navigate by stars, didn’t know their names, didn’t recognize the constellations.
What for? Stars were unreliable beacons, nomads that moved about the heavens at will, like the Turkoman forefathers.
Have you never seen one suddenly tear off from its roost and streak across the black, looking for a new home? Amanullah walked the trail by heart, steering from a memory that wasn’t even his own but had double-helixed down the bloodstream of generations of men who had traveled this footpath perhaps for millennia. A memory that was the very essence of peregrination, a flawless distillation of our ancestral restlessness.

We walked single file. Amanullah first, then the donkey, then
Fahim, who taught English at an evening school in Mazar-e-Sharif and was helping me with translation, then I. At a brisk clip, in dry weather, the eighteen-mile walk across the hummocked loess usually took about five hours. Amanullah had made this journey every two weeks since he was six or seven. Now he was thirty.

“If other people in the world walked as much as we do, and worked as hard as we do, they’d go crazy,” he announced. He paused for effect. Amanullah bragged about the unimaginable hardships of life in the desert fondly and often. In the dark, I pictured him smile in sly satisfaction at the gravity of his own pronouncement. But when he spoke again, he sounded surprised.

“But we don’t.”

It was Thursday, bazaar day in Northern Afghanistan. We were walking to Dawlatabad, the market town nearest Oqa, Amanullah’s village. We were going to Dawlatabad to buy carpet yarn for
Amanullah’s wife, Thawra.

For the next seven months, Thawra would squat on top of a horizontal loom built with two rusty lengths of iron pipe, cinder blocks, and sticks in one of Oqa’s forty cob huts. Day after day, she would knot coarse weft threads over warps of thin, undyed wool,
weaving the most beautiful carpet I have ever seen.

If the eastern hemisphere’s carpet-weaving region that extends from
China to Morocco were itself a carpet, and one were to fold it in half,
Thawra’s loom room would fall slightly to the right of the center fold. Prehistoric artisans upon these plains were spinning wool and plaiting it into mats as early as seven thousand years ago. Since then, people here have been born on carpets, prayed on them, slept on them, draped their tombs with them. Alexander the Great, who marched through the Khorasan in 327 bc, is said to have sent his mother, Olympias, a carpet as a souvenir from the defeated Balkh,
the ancient feudal capital about twenty-five miles southwest of Oqa.
For centuries, carpets were a preeminent regional export, a currency,
status symbols, attachés. When Tamerlane, who was crowned emperor at Balkh, was absent from his court, visitors were permitted to kiss and pay homage to his carpet, which they were instructed to treat as his deputy.

Of all the Afghan carpets, those woven by the Turkomans are the most valued. Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, lauded
Turkoman weavers for producing “the best and handsomest carpets in the world.” Six hundred years later, Francis Henry Bennett
Skrine, a retired commissioner of the Indian Civil Service, and the
London linguist Sir Edward Denison Ross wrote that Turkoman carpets were “unrivalled in Asia for beauty and durability.” For their rich palette of reds—mahogany, terracotta, liver, and the atrorubent of the fratricidal blood that soaks their land—the Turkomans are called the Rembrandts of weaving.

Fine clay dust will filter into Thawra’s mud-and-dung loom room as she weaves. Through the scrub-brush lath ceiling there will seep into the room particles of manure, infi nitesimal flecks of gold from nearby barchans, the terrible black cough of her neighbors’ famished children, echoes of the war that jolts the plains and contorts the
Cretaceous massifs of her land. A roadside bomb will go off, and the desert outside her doorless entryway will groan in response with the phantom footfalls of past invaders: Achaemenid and Greek, Mughal and Arab, Ottoman and Russian, British and Soviet. A speck of an
American Navy F/A-18 strike fighter will catch a sudden sunray on its wing and for the instant it pierces the incredibly high azure it will become a ghost of a different glint: on Genghis Khan’s sword before it split the skull of a Bactrian housewife, on the barrel of a guerrilla’s jezail matchlock before it discharged at some subaltern of the Raj. Taliban scouts will appear on the path where Amanullah and I walked for yarn, then vanish again, the way all raiders come and vanish upon this eternal battleground.

Thawra’s will be a yusufi carpet, a diamond pattern her mother and her mother’s mother wove before her, on the backdrop of wars past. Under her thin fingers, almond-size flowers with ogival petals will shine in a field of ocher and deep maroon. Each fl ower will bloom from two hundred and forty knots she will tie by hand the way her foremothers did; each knot will be a temporal Möbius strip that ties past and present.

Once the carpet is finished it will take flight from this fantastically brutalized land that clings to the violent tectonics at the thirty-fourth parallel. Amanullah will roll it up and cram it into his donkey saddlebag, and his father will take the familiar footpath across the desert to deliver it to Dawlatabad. A middleman there will sell it to a dealer from Mazar-e-Sharif, the largest city in
Northern Afghanistan, the modern capital of Balkh. After that,
perhaps, Thawra’s carpet will be jabbed into the back of a beat-up taxicab, then tossed into the bed of a truck painted with dreamy pastorals, in which it will journey across Afghanistan’s war-racked landscape and over the border, through Pakistan’s implacable tribal areas, to the rug markets of Peshawar and Islamabad. Or maybe it will travel west, past the mass graves of Dasht-e-Leili, across the
Karakum Desert, to the bazaars of Istanbul. Or else it will trundle in the trunk of a bus bound for Kabul, from where it will fly to
Dubai, and from there, across the Atlantic Ocean until it alights at a dealership in the United States, the single largest purchaser of carpets on the world market at the time of this story. A wealthy patron will pay between five and twenty thousand dollars for it.
Wherever her carpet ends up, for her work Thawra will be paid less than a dollar a day.

But first, she will weave. After each knot, she will cut weft yarn from its ball with a small, sweat-darkened sickle. Thk, thk, thk, the sickle will go, measuring time between dawn and dusk, birth and death, peace and war, measuring life immemorial.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Like so many pieces of yarn, [Badkhen] weaves the words of Persian poets, Western explorers, contemporary journalists and scholars into her narrative, enriching her own account with those that came before… a powerful, unsentimental study of life persisting in extreme conditions. Perhaps the greatest testament to her success is that, upon reading the final page, the reader wonders how the people populating her narrative are faring, and desperately hopes that they are all right." –The New York Observer

“Capture[s] the fatalistic ambience of a place where opium addiction is rampant, mobile phones are an impossible luxury and the Taliban lurk in the shadows.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Transporting… even in this harshest of environments, Badkhen is able to capture kinship, laughter, and merriment… At the risk of spouting clichés (but don’t they become such because of the universal truths buried within?), Badkhen weaves her own literary magic.” –Christian Science Monitor

“Intrepid… Season by season, rite by rite, encounter by encounter, thread by illuminating thread, Badkhen weaves a glorious prose carpet that poignantly captures the surface and the soul of life in Oqa, and in all the Oqas that grace the loom of Afghanistan.” –National Geographic

“This book will leave you entertained, informed and heartbroken. It will allow you not only to imagine another place but also to bear witness to a community of cultural producers and preservers of the highest skill whose women are able to create objects of beauty amid poverty, hardship and bloodshed.” –Toronto Star

“Anna Badkhen is the latest chronicler to show how great beauty can come out of great deprivation… borders on the sublime. The World is a Carpet is a well-spun tale of a remote world we rarely see.” –Financial Times

"The World Is a Carpet will give readers a better understanding of this mysterious land and the courageous and determined people who live there… gorgeous… a lovely treasure unearthed from beneath those shifting desert sands." –Dayton Daily News

"Badkhen makes friends and shares their stories, drawing readers into this small village where the dream of wealth is hope for a life without suffering… A beautifully written book of eternal heartbreak." –Booklist (starred review)

"Badkhen gains astonishing access… More travelogue than reportage, her prose is rich and unhurried, evoking the harshness of the desolate landscape. Oqa's isolation means Osama bin Laden may be unknown, but the Taliban is not; their presence an inescapable fact of life, one that propels Badkhen's story to a simple yet chilling dénouement." –Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A fearless author regards the Afghans on their own terms… Enormously detailed and moving…­ a dense, intimate portrayal of an ancient people.” –Kirkus

"In an age when writers too often see Afghanistan from behind guarded compound walls, Badkhen places herself alone, for a year, in rural Afghanistan. This perspective—animated by her love of the country, and her hosts—yields a remarkable account of the rhythms, the wit, and the energy of village life." –Rory Stewart, author of The Places in Between

"Nearly a hundred and eighty degrees around the globe, and even farther from our imagining, Anna Badkhen captures with an unerring eye—and just as powerfully, in the haunting cadences of her narrative—the strange, harsh beauty of an unvanquished way of life." –William Langewiesche, author of Sahara Unveiled, American Ground, and The Outlaw Sea