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Petra Procházková: Frišta (Freshta))
It may seem odd for a Czech writer to be writing about Afghanistan but Procházková was married to an Afghani so she knows what she is talking about.
Our narrator isHerra. She is half Russian.(mother) and half Tajik. (father) but was born and bred in Moscow. However, she frequently visited her father’s family in.Dushanbe and it is the and that she met the man who would become her husband and, Nazir, an Afghani
The eponymous Freshta is her sister-in-law. When we first meet Freshta she is pregnant with her fifth child. While Herra is somewhat worried about the curfew,Freshta is not.
This is not the Taliban curfew but the one imposed by the various occupying authorities, primarily British and American. Indeed when she goes into labour it is night and they cannot go out so their neighbour helps and she is finally laboriously taken to hospital when the curfew is over.
Judging by events, the year is 2001. The Taliban had been there had been driven out by the British and Americans. However, while we may assume women suffer more under a the Taliban they are clearly oppressed without the Taliban. For example, women are expected to wear a burka when they are in the presence of a male to whom they are not related. WhenNazir is absent for a while. – he makes a living being a sort of taxi driver and the guide to visiting representatives of humanitarian organisations and other foreigners – he gives her strict instructions that she must not leave the house under any circumstances even in the company of her mother-in-law.
There are various other constraints. For example, the house is absolutely packed and they tend to sleep six or seven to a room. There is, in theory, electricity but it does not work all the time.
It is therefore a great breakthrough when the brother-in-law, very reluctantly, allows his daughter to go to school, obviously a school just for girls. He is not too happy about it but apparently more and more people are doing it so he feels that he has to.
We gradually move into what this novel is about . On the one hand, there is the story of this complicated family living together in a very crowded space and having the inevitable family quarrels. Then we learn about the current changes in the country as the Taliban have been driven away and the Americans and the British on the one hand and Russians on the other hand move in..This has a direct and indirect influence on the family. Finally, perhaps more importantly we learn about the treatment of women in Afghanistan which, by our standards, is awful even though the Taliban are not around. The men, for example, expect unconditional obedience from the women and do not hesitate to use violence to enforce their will. The women are more or less excluded from any decision-making and from meeting anyone accept immediate family. When visitors come they are shunted away though, as we learn, they have a peephole to watch and listen to what is going on. We even learn of a family member who killed his wife because she dared to speak in the presence of visitors without his permission.
One quirk is the arrival Mohammed, known as Mad. He is seriously deformed and it is not clear initially what sex he is and whether he can even speak. We eventually learn that he can speak very well, that he is highly intelligent, and that he is a fourteen -year-old boy who wants to go to university. Perhaps because of his oddity, he plays quite a key role in the family. He and Herra become close, perhaps as two quasi-outsiders.
Things change whenHerra gets a job. Her husband is very reluctant to accept this and insists on driving to work and picking her up, though that has a down side in that he is seen as inferior to her which of course he does not like. The job is working with two Americans in a women’s Centre, helping Afghan women primarily with medical issues, because they have to pay to go to a doctor or hospital and cannot afford to do so. Herra, on the whole., enjoys the job while her husband clearly does not and makes his views known in quite a forceful fashion.
One other key issue is that the fourteen -year-old daughter of Freshshta has had enough of her father’s brutality and runs away.Herra and Mad know where she is but to do not let on as she is clearly happier.
Herra is making progress and even learns how to use the Internet. She even gets an email address . Her husband insists on them sharing an email address that she manages to resist and he has his own his email address.
there are no polygamous relationships but it is discussed and bothHerra and Freshta are seemingly in favour as it would take some of the burden of them with their not always friendly and loving husbands.
There are some lighthearted moments such as the story of theAfghan astronaut, the mobile rabbit cage the story of many happened when a bomb hits the zoo andHeidi, the womanHerra works for learning all the Afghani vulgarities, men the addressed to her.
As a Western reader you wonder whyHerra puts up all that she has to go through and why she does not go back to Russia. However it does seem that when her husband is not behaving badly she is very very fond of him.
It is a different matter regardingQaids, her brother-in-law and husband of Freshta. The woman’s Centre where Herra works has acquired as an American gynaecologist, John, and Freshta seems to visit him on a very regular basis. It is clear that something is going on and they are even considering leaving for the United States. It has all sorts of complications, firstly regarding her children. Her husband has complete control of the children and in this case it becomes more complicated when his family decides it is best that the children live with them. Freshta would be reluctant to leave without at least one or two of them. The other complication is that any Afghan woman turning up as an airport without her husband or official male guardian would be turned away. Exploring ways of getting around this involves Herra and Mad.
While it is undoubtedly interesting to see how the Afghanis live even when the Taliban are not in power, it is also fairly grim to see the very restrictive treatment of women even in a relatively liberal household. They have virtually no freedom until they are very old and are subject to brutality by their husbands.Herra is in a way lucky because her father-in-law her grandfather in law are more or less, at least Aby fghani standards are, in favour of women’s rights. This is not a general attitude. However, seeing the whole picture from the point of view of a woman who is both an insider and an outsider makes for unusual reading.
Publishing history
First published in 2004
First published in English in 2012 by Stork Press
Translated by Julia Sherwood