Afghanistan: a personal view of the traumas

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A rich boy grows up with a terrible sense of shame for a childhood act of cowardly betrayal, and only decades later redeems himself in a punishing campaign requiring great courage. This is the story thread for a book that is really about the traumas of Afghanistan, in its several stages: from the almost feudal stability under the king (overthrown in 1973), when the narrator's widowed merchant father and others in the dominant Pashtun ethnic group could live very comfortably at the expense of the despised Hazara servant caste, to the Communist government where the push for rapid reforms and the rise to power of other ethnic groups (including Hazara) roused violent resistance, to the triumph of the Taliban, celebrated as liberators but then quickly become far worse tyrants than any of their predecessors. The descriptions of how such a rapid chain of disasters affected the urban, educated Kabul élite are vivid and memorable. Also closely observed and moving is their struggles to cope with their sudden plunge of status as exiles in California, the narrator's once-powerful father as a gas station attendant, an ex-general living on his pride and the dole, and both of them trying to sell junk in a weekend market. All this makes the book worth reading — though the story is too melodramatically neat, every punishment exactly fitting the crime. There's also a movie, which is much weaker and insipid, because it leaves out all that makes the book's episodes scary in order to focus on the thin story of redemption.

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The book should be a stimulus to find out more of what's behind the current disasters of that country. Hosseini does not pretend to any political acuity, that is, he does not attempt to evaluate or explain these huge events, but he may lead the reader to try to find out more. The conditions of the Hazara people , for example, have been a major part of the nation's drama but little discussed outside the country — or even among Afghans, because it's a source of shame. We really need to re-examine the Communist period, which began to accomplish many good things, especially in reforming ethnic relations and opening opportunities to women, before the resistance by patriarchal tribal leaders, abetted by the U.S., escalated the violence and the Soviet army invaded with all the usual clumsiness of invaders, causing the violence to escalate even more, and so on. There were some missed chances for creating a freer society. 

Spain's conflicted immigration policies

The incoherence and contradictions of Spanish immigration practices are among the more serious consequences of the disunity of Spain that I've been describing here lately, the multiplicity of governmental authorities with overlapping powers and conflicting agendas.

For the past 15 years and up until recently, almost all those goverment authorities, from the national ministries of social services and foreign relations down to municipal mayors and town councils were doing everything they could to encourage immigration, for different but convergent reasons. The local authorities were in many cases pressured by local builders and agriculturalists who wanted cheap man- or womanpower, to build homes or pick olives and strawberries. The lefties in the Socialist party exulted in Spain's ever greater diversity, and the righties -- the same folks making money on the cheap labor -- enjoyed making a display of their Christian generosity toward the newcomers.

But then, just a few months ago, the bottom fell out of the housing market. No more demand for cheap unskilled labor. Fewer buyers for industrial goods, and thus fewer jobs. And the local governments, which had been financing themselves mainly by licencing construction projects and collecting tax on rising real estate values, were suddenly strapped. The immigrants were the first to be "let go", but there they were, still needing to eat, their kids needing school, all of them needing medical services at least occasionally.

To qualify for public services in any town in Spain, all you need is proof that you live there. You do this by showing your national ID if you are a citizen or your passport and proof of residence, such as a light bill, if you are not. The process is called empadronamiento, registration in the municipal padrón or registry. This according to a 1997 law signed by the then Minister of Social Services, Mariano Rajoy.

But lately the mayors of some towns have invented new requirements for empadronamiento -- such as proving that you have more than 20 square meters of living space per member of your family, or (in one town) that you are not here on a tourist visa (which is the way many immigrants start out, until they can find a job and get more settled). Their rhetoric is obfuscatory, involving peculiar (perverse) interpretations of clauses in the law, but they appear to believe they can save money by denying school and medical services to immigrants. But they also lose money, because the central government gives financing to municipalities according to their registered (empadronado) population, regardless of immigration status. The net result is just to make life a lot more difficult for immigrant families, already in bad straits with no jobs.

A lot of this anti-empadronamiento agitation is coming from mayors and even regional presidents of the opposition Popular Party, whose head is that very same Mariano Rajoy -- who deals with the contradiction by not dealing with it, saying vague things about guaranteeing everybody basic education and medical rights "just for being human beings" and at the same time that probably the law on immigration ought to be changed in some unspecified, but presumably more restrictive fashion.

For generations Spain, impoverished after the loss of the remnants of empire in 1898 (Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines), then torn by civil war (1936-39) and finally suffocated by a dictatorship that was both oppressive and economically stagnant, was a net exporter of people -- until the 1973 petroleum crisis wiped out jobs in the countries they'd been migrating to, slowing the outflow almost to nil. Finally, the death of Franco and the dismemberment of his system, the reforms begun by his successor Suárez and carried further and with greater energy by the Socialist government of Felipe González turned Spain into a country to come to, not one to flee from. By the year 2000, Spain's rapid economic growth and reputation for civil liberties turned this fountain of emigration into one of the countries with the highest rate of immigration anywhere -- 8 times greater than neighboring France, which was where so many Spaniards had been looking for work in earlier decades.

France and other industrialized countries already had a large proportion of immigrants, but Spain's post-2000 rate of attraction has been so great that it has now surpassed France in percentage of foreign born: 12% of Spain's 47 million people (as compared to 8% in France).

More than 36% of these come from the 20+ countries of "Iberoamerica," mostly Ecuador (11.13%) and Colombia (6.40%), though we also know several Argentinians and Uruguayans and Peruvians. About as many (nearly 35%) come from other countries in the European Union, including nearly 10% from Rumania (where the language is distantly related to Spanish). Others face a far greater linguistic and cultural hurdle, including the nearly 15% from North Africa (mostly Morocco) and another 4% from Sub-Saharan Africa; the ones we know here in Carboneras are mostly from Senegal or Mali.

Now that the housing boom is over and unemployment in almost all industries is at record highs, Spain is no longer so welcoming. But conditions in the source countries of most of those immigrants continue to be even worse, and Spain (as well as other countries of Western Europe) are going to be increasingly dependent on young foreign-born to take care of their aging native populations and to do the jobs that have to be done.


Las claves del empadronamiento de 'sin papeles' -- ELPAÍS.com
Inmigración en España - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
EUROPA: Inmigrantes entre la expulsión y la muerte - IPS ipsnoticias.net
Immigration en France - Wikipédia

In Colorful Bouts, Hint of Deeper Struggles - NYTimes.com

And here we have the dramatization of my book Hispanic Nation! Or at least of a couple of the book's themes, "identity" and "media." In Colorful Bouts, Hint of Deeper Struggles - NYTimes.com

If you click on the link lucha libre or Vampiro you get the flavor and the sound, without the strong smell of sweat. Don't miss!

Work Under Way on ‘Virtual Fence’ - NYTimes.com

This note, Work Under Way on ‘Virtual Fence’ - NYTimes.com, reminded me of an essay by Borges, "The Wall and the Books." The essay, first published in 1950, is a reflection on Chinese emperor Shih Huang Ti, who commanded the building of the Great Wall and ordered the destruction by fire of all books prior to his reign.

"Burning books and building fortifications are normal tasks for princes; the only thing unique about Shih Huang Ti was the scale of his work," writes Borges. (Quemar libros y erigir fortificaciones es tarea común de los príncipes; lo único singular en Shih Huang Ti fue la escala en que obró.)

He speculates that perhaps for Shih Huang Ti, building the wall to conquer space and burning the books to destroy past time were magic barriers meant to stop death.

Shih Huang Ti, según los historiadores, prohibió que se mencionara la muerte y buscó el elixir de la inmortalidad y se recluyó en un palacio figurativo, que constaba de tantas habitaciones como hay días en el año; estos datos sugieren que la muralla en el espacio y el incendio en el tiempo fueron barreras mágicas destinadas a detener la muerte.

The "virtual fence" is a magical barrier in both space (the "fence" part) and time (it's "virtual" character is its transmission of signals that someone or some force has transgressed the barrier). Its magic would surely have puzzled Shih Huang Ti, though, because it is not directed against death, but against an even more powerful American obsession: the invasion of aliens. And its magic is as futile as the other. The Chinese emperor could not stop death and could not even stop fretting about it long enough to enjoy life. And the virtual fence is futile, because the aliens are already among us in space and their virtual incursion in time is, virtually, unstoppable.

Here's one place to find Jorge Luis Borges' 1950 essay, La muralla y los libros. And here it is in English, translated by Gaither Stewart: The Wall and the Books.

Ex-Gurkha Soldiers Denied British Residency - NYTimes.com

Still going on! It was just this kind of betrayal that sparked the rebellion in Kiran Desai's Booker Prize novel. See my more extended commentary on The Inheritance of Loss.

And here's the recent news story: Ex-Gurkha Soldiers Denied British Residency - NYTimes.com

Maybe you can go home again?

That's what several of our foreign friends and acquaintances in Spain are hoping, such as Rumanians who may have had some other profession but in Spain were working in the once-booming construction industry. See As Jobs Die, Europe’s Migrants Head Home in yesterday's NYT. But "home" isn't what it used to be, either. There will be lots of stories to tell, of kids pulled out of school, repatriated and having to function in a language they´re no longer used to (or maybe never learned beyond talking with their mothers), of marriages in trouble because of new economic stresses, and lots more. Maybe the only upside of this crisis is that it is sure to enrich Rumanian (and Lithuanian and other eastern countries') literature.

Uprooted

This week on my birthday, April 3, El País reported that Spain "will need 157,000 immigrant workers a year until 2020". This week in Madrid we saw two foreign films highlighting radically different aspects of the disruptive effects of global migration. The first was Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite (2007) -- literally, "On the Other Side" (oddly translated "On the Edge of Heaven" in the English version), a moving, ambiguous story about suffering and reconciliation of Turks in Germany and Germans in Turkey. There are no really evil people here, just people who hurt (and even kill) others without intending to. Akin extracts marvelous performances from his cast.

Auf der anderen Seite -- that is, on the other side is the evil system exploiting the desperation and vulnerabilities of migrants, exposed in Ken Loach's powerful fictionalized exposé, It's a Free World. Angie, a high-energy single mother who unfairly loses her job at a labor-contracting agency, decides to start her own agency and discovers, first, by playing fairly she can't win competing with the guys who operate illegally, and, secondly, that there are big rewards and little risk for going illegal herself -- hiring workers without papers and then, when convenient, faling to pay them. This is a classic tragedy, in which a victim of the exploiters who starts out with a lot of sympathy for the Poles, South Americans, Iranians and other foreign job-seekers, becomes herself a heartless exploiter of immigrant labor.

Loach has done a tremendous job. But there are still other "other sides" to this story, and we'll keep trying to relate them. Maybe there are some things we can do, as ordinary citizens pressuring governments and companies, to ease the constant churning of families from poorer to more promising lands.

(For more on immigration in Spain, see the many articles from El País at La inmigración en España.)

Catching up on continuing issues

I'm in Madrid this week, again using the connection available to anyone at the Casa Encendida, where things have been -- well, if not exactly "encendidas" (burning), at least hopping, literally. A rock-rap group was performing, and the main hall was filled with people about a third my age, jumping up and down along with the band. It was fun to see such enthusiasm.

I promised a couple of weeks ago to give some thought to two persistent issues in Spain: violence against women, and the peculiarities of the housing crisis, or more accurately, crises (plural), because several different things are at work here.

I start from two assumptions, one modern and the other very ancient. The modern one, still resisted by theocrats and other believers in magic, is that "Everything is the way it is because it got that way." (Which I got from biologist D'Arcy Thompson via Daniel Dennett.) Like Charles Darwin and every other serious scientist since him, I am firmly convinced of this.

The older assumption is that everything is connected to everything else. The connections may be distractingly trivial (the butterfly's wing in one place and a traffic accident somewhere else, for example), but for large-scale social phenomena, probably useful.

Saying that women in Spain get beat up or killed by their partners because Spanish men are especially "machista" (an argument you sometimes hear) doesn't explain anything. Even if it were true, that is, if Spanish men were especially prone to such violence (which they aren't: check out the UN International Violence Against Women Survey), we'd have to ask, What made them that way? And in fact, about half the men involved aren't even Spanish but immigrants from as far away as Russia, or Bolivia, or Morocco, or the Ukraine. So how did THEY get that way?

Part of the answer is no doubt the stress on traditional family structures and expectations that occur in immigration. Great article on this: "No reconocí a mis hijos, ni ellos a mí" by J. J. Áznarez.

Casa Encendida is about to close down my computer (time's up), so I'll leave it at that for now. Thanks. More on this later. Hasta luego. I still owe you a comment on the housing problems, too.