World Is A Carpet: Four Seasons In An Afghan Village

Product Description

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 opium 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 needed care, to the interruptions in pattern where the women traded sex jokes or filled 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.

Praise for The World is a Carpet

'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, with 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