No Space for Further Burials

by Feryal Ali Gauhar

Overview

"In No Space for Further Burials, Feryal Ali Gauhar has crafted a novel of unrelenting truth held in transcendent prose and an exquisite grace. There is no easy redemption here, but there is light and more light."—Chris Abani, author of GraceLand and Song for Night

"In writing through the eyes of an American captive in Afghanistan, Feryal Ali Gauhar has fashioned a fascinating two-way mirror in which we see the author creating an Other confronting Otherness. As in Richard Powers' hostage novel Ploughing in the Dark, the mask of character reveals as much as it conceals."—Stewart O'Nan, author of Songs for the Missing

"An unbearably beautiful book, one you will not soon forget. . . . What Gauhar shows us is that in a war there are only those who die and those who survive, and sometimes even those lines get blurred. And that's what keeps you hungrily turning the pages."—Radhika Jha, author of Smell

Set in Afghanistan in late 2002, No Space for Further Burials is a chilling indictment of the madness of war and our collective complicity in the perpetuation of violence. The novel's narrator, a US Army medical technician in Afghanistan helping to "liberate" the country from the Taliban, has been captured by rebels and thrown into an asylum. The other inmates are a besieged gathering of society's forgotten and unwanted refugees and derelicts, disabled and different, resilient and maddened, struggling to survive the lunacy raging outside the asylum compound. The novel becomes a powerful evocation of the country's desolate history of plunder and war, waged by insiders and outsiders, all fueled by ideology, desperation, and greed.

This astonishingly powerful story unfolds the tragedy of Afghanistan, as told by the captive narrator in hauntingly beautiful prose. While the characters try to cope with their individual destinies, the terrible madness of war is counterpointed with the poignancy of their lives and the narrator's own peculiar predicament—the "victor" now a victim, his ambivalence a metaphor for everything Afghanistan symbolizes.

Feryal Ali Gauhar studied political economy at McGill University in Montreal, and has worked as a filmmaker and broadcaster in Europe and the United States. She has been imprisoned by two military regimes in Pakistan for her pro-democracy activism. In 1999 she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund. She lives in Lahore, Pakistan, with fourteen cats, three dogs, a turtle, and four donkeys.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936070602
Publisher:	Akashic Books
Publication date:	09/01/2010
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	8.52(w) x 11.06(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

Feryal Ali Gauhar: Feryal Ali Gauhar studied political economy at McGill University, Montreal, and has worked as a filmmaker and broadcaster in Europe and the United States. Her work as a writer, director, and actor has focus on political marginalization, and she has been imprisoned by two military regimes in Pakistan for her prodemocracy activism. In 1999 she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund. Currently she is engaged in doctoral research in Cultural Heritage and Conservation Management. She lives in Lahore, Pakistan with 14 cats, three dogs, a turtle, and four donkeys. No Space for Further Burials is her second novel.

Read an Excerpt

no space for further burials

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By FERYAL ALI GAUHAR

Akashic Books

Copyright © 2010 Feryal Ali Gauhar
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936070-60-2

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Chapter One

We have begun to dig more graves in the shadow of the walls of this compound. The earth is dry and hard; there are many stones and jagged objects buried beneath the surface, and sometimes I can recognize the remains of a young child or a woman, a swatch of torn fabric, sometimes deep red like a pomegranate, sometimes blue like the sky above. Many times I have felt my hands stroke the severed limb of someone I may have known, the skin cold and layered with the fine dust of this desolate land. It is as if these limbs and the fragments of clothing were the people themselves, the people for whom these graves were dug, hurriedly, before more bodies began to pile up against the wall, waiting for a space for burial.

He comes to me every morning and we begin the day with an effort at conversation. Over the last few days the enamel cup he has kept aside for my tea is left cold and empty, an indication, I suppose, of depleting rations. Or perhaps he is not happy, not happy with me, with my inability to understand him, my lack of imagination, my failure to decipher his drawings on the earthen floor of my cell. He is unhappy at the seeming absence of any effort on my part to crack the code of his language.

He has many tongues, this boy. And fluid hands with which he etches the stories he tells, embellishing his accounts of war with objects found in the courtyard—shards of broken vessels, smashed bottle caps, empty vials, shattered syringes. Once, earlier on, he brought a large catalog to me, passing it through the bars of this cell as if it was a sacred text. I noticed then how nimble his fingers were, long and sinewy, almost with a life of their own. His hands and his eyes danced as he spoke, forcefully, the words tripping over his strong teeth. When he handed me the catalog I was still looking at his mouth as he said words I barely understood. His mouth worked fast, spit forming foam at the edges. I knew that he had probably not had more than the gruel of potato peels which the caretaker's wife passed around in a large bucket, her young son pulling it along on a rickety wooden cart with one wheel missing. Yet he was so alert that morning, eyes darting from mine to the book and then to the four corners of the crater-filled courtyard. He urged me in an almost comic medley of sounds and words—I recognized the broad Russian, some German, some French, and even English—he urged me to look at the book, especially at those pages he had marked with feathers and string and even a clutch of matted hair. He whispered urgently to me, like a man crazed, to consider seriously his request to get him the things he craved, the things he knew I could get for him, if only we could find a way to contact the mail-order section of Sears, Roebuck & Company from this deserted bit of hell. As soon as I began flipping through the worn pages of a 1960s collection of American clothing and kitchen gadgets and camping equipment, he turned my attention to a pair of suede hiking boots, fur-lined, an orange parka, downfilled, a pair of goggles, and a pair of yellow corduroys.

I love America, he said, and he smiled, then laughed, his mouth opening wide. Bulbul, he called himself, after the redbreast robin sang to his mother the day his father died. That was many years ago, when the war had just begun.

On most days the waiting is endless, and I find myself actually longing for chaos to hit the compound so that there is something to watch, something to make the hours fly. I have lost track of time, and other than a vague idea of how many months I have spent locked up in this cell, I sometimes think the day is about to begin when it is dusk, and then I am afraid, for none of the people here know the difference, most of them having lost even the memory of their own names. Of course Waris, the caretaker, knows everything, and his wife the cook—they are not from among the inmates here. But everyone else is crazed, even Bulbul, who looks like he is on the edge of sanity, the way he leers at me sometimes, his eyes gleaming and his lips wet with saliva. What is he thinking? What are they all thinking in this valley of the dead? What am I to think when the sun disappears behind those godforsaken mountains and night falls over the compound like a shroud? What am I to believe in when there is no one to whom I can tell my story, when there is no one who will believe it?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from no space for further burials by FERYAL ALI GAUHAR Copyright © 2010 by Feryal Ali Gauhar. Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Editorial Reviews

This nearly unreadable debut novel tells of the captivity and descent into madness of an American medical technician captured by rebel soldiers and held prisoner for several months in a defunct mental asylum in Afghanistan. Housed in a sealed-off compound in the desert, the unnamed narrator describes his own hardships and his strange fellow residents through a series of diary entries. There is Bulbul, a former kebab vendor who dreams of going to America and owning the objects he sees in an old Sears catalog, and Hayat, an ancient medicine woman covered in tattoos and hair. Waris and his wife, Noor Jeha, are caretakers who have been in charge of the asylum since the death of its Canadian director. These characters, and others, eventually speak in their own voices, revealing pasts that have been uniformly marred by war and violence. The intervening pages are filled with the narrator's blandly gruesome descriptions of visits from rebel soldiers, looters, bombings, hunger, and his own frustration at the unlikelihood of escape. But the novel lacks a compelling plot and moves from one horror to the next with a numbing lack of logic and a repetitiousness that will set readers' teeth on edge. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly