The Photography of Ahmad Issa
Guest post by Noal Amir
It was the summer of 2015 and I hated Uzbekistan. I didn’t want to be there. The country felt inhospitable compared to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, where I’d been traveling and working just before.
In Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, we had research, film projects, and obligations. In Uzbekistan, we were just tourists. We had traveled overland from Tajikistan and been held at the border. The guards sifted through every item in our bags: clothes, books, toiletries... They opened every file on our memory cards and screened every song from new acquired mp3 CDs containing popular Tajik music. They tried to get into our laptops, hard drives, and phones. At least half of their rigor probably came from curiosity but they had the authority to search; they must prevent propaganda from entering the country. Uzbekistan is ruled by a strict dictatorship. Bookstores are restricted. Islam is suppressed. The call to prayer, growing a beard, and covering the face are all banned. After taking us eight hours across the desert, our driver tried to cheat us when dropping us off. He succeeded in at least leaving us stranded on a random street corner, late at night. Most of all I hated Uzbekistan because my grandfather had just passed away and I was thousands of miles from home. I planned to share this trip with him the way he shared his life with me. Now it was too late.
My grandfather grew up in Afghanistan. His family hailed from Kandahar. He led a relatively privileged life traveling around and beyond Afghanistan. Throughout his life he enjoyed horseback riding, camping, and hunting. He and my grandmother both cherished the companionship of dogs. He brought back dogs from Europe for family members. Before handing them over, he trained the dogs to be obedient and well-behaved.
Long before I was born, my grandfather had a stroke that paralyzed his ability to speak. Despite this, he taught me a lot about his life in Afghanistan. He instilled in me a sense of place and belonging to a country and a region I did not know. Instead of language, he communicated with me through his meticulous and extensive collection of photographs.
Producing a collection of photographs in 1950s, 60s & 70s Afghanistan was no easy feat. He had to ship his rolls of film to Europe to be developed. When he took his family (including my mom) and fled Soviet occupied Afghanistan, my grandfather managed to transport his photographs with him, across Europe, the United States, and finally to California. Few Afghans had the good fortune and privilege to retain such possessions. Afghan refugees continue to lose their memories and keepsakes as they flee the country decades later.
Some of my most cherished childhood memories include looking through these albums together and watching my grandfather play slideshows with his projector.
Had my grandfather not brought his collection of photographs with him, they may well have been destroyed, if not during the Soviet invasion, perhaps when the Taliban came to power. The Taliban banned photography. They confiscated and destroyed family archives and jailed people for taking photos.
Some Afghans continued photographing anyway. Najibullah Musafer was one. He even established a training center to teach students in photography and studied in secret with a BBC correspondent, Kate Clark, one of a few Western journalists in Afghanistan prior to the fall of the Taliban. In Frame by Frame, a film profiling Najib and other leading Afghan photographers, he explains his motivations for continuing to document Afghanistan’s struggles despite the danger:
“If a country is without photography, without historical, artistic, and cultural photos, that country is in fact without identity.”
I wonder what happens to a family without photography, without a visual record of its history, its changes, it narrative.
My grandfather never stopped taking pictures. He documented me, my brother Yama, and my cousins Maya & Adam, as we grew up. His pictures were his narration of his life, past and present. To this day I go through his photos each time I return to my parent’s house. I keep his albums in my room.
Growing up I knew two different Afghanistans: the one presented to me through my grandfather’s pictures and my family’s stories, the other presented to me on the television screen. The alternate version began with mutterings of the Civil War in the early 90s when I was in elementary school and then middle school, 9/11, and the overwhelming narratives of the Taliban, terrorism, and a site of America at War. Throughout my life I tried to use my grandfather’s photographs to illustrate how Afghanistan used to be; not the war-torn country I saw on TV, but a country where some semblance of peace once existed, where people living in the capital city dressed in a fashion that could be mistaken for 1960s America. The proxy wars between competing ideologies of Soviet communism and American democracy brought that to an end. As the Soviets supported communist Afghans, the U.S. backed the independence fighting Mujahideen, arming what would inevitably become the Taliban. The battle amongst foreign empires on Afghan soil infused political instability in the country and a fight over which group would rule Afghanistan once both empires withdrew. The fighting and the imperial activity continue, without an end in sight.
My trip to Central Asia was meant to be a way for me to bring back a piece of our heritage to him. I wanted to show my grandfather that I appreciated all that he taught me. I wanted to show him that I understood. I saw Afghanistan as a place more than a site of war. Though I did not formally cross the border into Afghanistan last summer, I was there.
Almost a year later, I am heading back to the U.S. from Canada to visit my family and celebrate my cousin’s graduation. Although I have crossed the border between the U.S. and Canada a dozen times by car over the past year, this is the first time I am traveling between the two countries by air. At the U.S. border, housed in Vancouver’s airport, the agent flips through my passport. He sees my Tajik and Uzbek visas. He also sees an unstamped Afghan visa next to my Canadian study permit. The agent asks me about my travels. I explain my reasons for visiting Central Asia and why I wanted to go to Afghanistan but ultimately did not. Finally, he asks me what my ethnicity is. I pause. Should I tell him I am Caucasian? Half as a joke, but half-serious, Although “Caucasian” is technically considered a racial classification, I wanted the agent to realize the absurdity of his question. The Caucasus were part of the Persian Empire and, historically, often incorporated into the Iranian world.
Plus my dad was born in Manhattan (my other grandfather was an Afghan diplomat; my grandmother gave birth to their second child while my grandfather was working in the U.S. in the 1940s). If the agent asked where my parents were born, I could give an answer that would further confuse him. I refrain from making any thoughtful and political statements, afraid of getting myself into trouble with only an hour before take off. I answer “Afghan” knowing full well my response is inadequate. “Afghan” is a nationality, not an ethnicity. I want to take it back, to challenge him on the inappropriate nature, illogical framing and slightly racist undertones of his question. The problem is, I’m distracted by colonial boundaries, confusions of nation-states and ethnicities, questions of cultural and political heritage, while he’s just worried about an Afghan-American who wants to visit the ‘stans, the places her family came from.
He sends me to secondary. There I sit with a group of black and brown people. A white woman is brought in for attempting to smuggle a banana across the border. They confiscate the contraband and send her on her way. I sit and watch a U.S. border guard harass a Nigerian woman while searching her bags. Originally from France, she’s been visiting Canada for some time and is now headed to Los Angeles to visit her cousin. “How old is your cousin?” the U.S. border agent barks. The woman shakes her head. “You don’t know how old your cousin is?” the agent asks incredulously. I, too, couldn’t tell the age of half my cousins if asked, only approximations. I have friends from West Africa who do not even know the year they were born. They didn’t get birth certificates. They don’t bother to keep track of birthdays or aging. When I ask them why not, they ask why worry about it? It’s liberating not to know.
He presses on: “So you left your children in France for six months?” He possesses a tone that is supposed to make the woman feel guilt, shame and intimidation. His intention is to simultaneously question her motivations for traveling while eroding her legitimacy as a woman and a mother. If a man was standing before the guard, would he have asked the same question?
I wait with the “others”. People who came in after me are called up. I become anxious. A young man comes into the room. He sits down across from me and lets out a big sigh, expressing what all of us in the room are feeling. He is stressed. He’s also black. Possibly African. I say hello to him and make a joke about the U.S. border patrol’s conspicuous racial profiling. We exchange names. I ask him where he’s traveling to and where he’s coming from. He’s on his way to the States for a conference but studies Economics on the island at U Vic. I tell him I am also studying in Vancouver.
I want to ask ‘where are you really from?’ only because I am curious to know what part of Africa he’s from. On the chance he happens to be from a country I have been to, I want to chat, and surprise him, in hopes of easing the tension in the room for a moment and allow for the opportunity to refocus our attention elsewhere, somewhere familiar, but I refrain. I too, deal with this question: “Where are you really from?” Because of how I look, saying I am from the States often doesn’t suffice.
I am especially proud of my family’s culture and background, even after 9/11 when being perceived as Muslim makes you a target for racism, or even worse, hate crimes and violence. But “Where are you from?” is loaded with assumptions: that if you are a person of color, you must have originated from elsewhere. That nationality is second to ethnicity based on the color of your skin. Asking the young man “Where are you really from?” could make me as rude as the agent that offended me: You are a person of color, therefore you’re not truly Canadian or American, or even worse, you’re a potential terrorist.
As I continued to wait, I began to dwell on the border agent’s question. Being “Afghan” is not a static identity of single origin. Afghanistan is home to people of a number of ethnicities. Foreign empires have, in part, constructed Afghanistan’s borders. In another way, Afghans constructed their borders in response to imperial encroachment. Afghanistan’s ethnicities include Uzbek, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Pashtun, Hazara, Baloch, Turkmen, and more. These ethnicities overlap and traverse colonial constructions of nation state and borders. They also intersect — I am an amalgamation of ethnicities that comprise contemporary Afghan identity, mostly Tajik & Pashtun.
But even as I try to categorize myself into these discreet classifications, the origins and boundaries of said ethnicities are hard to pinpoint, like a moving target. The term “Tajik” was a pejorative until recently, and vaguely describes Persian-speaking people of Iranian descent. Pashtun describes “ethnic Afghans”, people living in what is now Afghanistan since perhaps the first millennium BCE. I continue to wonder: How could I have answered the border agents question in a way that wouldn’t depict me as a threat?
When I worked with the Pamiri people living in the Wakhan valley of Tajikistan, they didn’t recognize me as “Afghan”. The Wakhan is shared by Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The Panj River bisects the valley and separates the two countries. Our hosts recognized me as one of them. They said: “You are us. Our grandmother was born across the river, then came over to get married.” One’s identity becomes dictated by the side of a river, not common ancestry.
My grandfather’s photo albums do not make these connections readily apparent.
Neither do history books (written by outsiders), maps of the world, or current organizations of the nation state. As a suffix, ‘istan means place, or land of. Land of the Tajiks, Land of the Kyrgyz, Land of the Kazakhs. Pakistan means both Land of the Pure and a clever acronym of Punjab, Afghania (the North-West frontier region), Kashmir, Indus (some say Islam, others say the added “I” is for ease of pronunciation), Sindh, and even Baluchistan for the “tan”. Afghanistan is supposed to be the place of Afghans but we’re a motley crew.
Without clarity of identity and heritage from nationality or ethnicity, I turned to family. My grandfather, and all my grandparents, taught me who we are and where our family comes from. Visiting Central Asia and spending time with people living on the edge of Afghanistan helped further articulate that identity.
Albums are the way my grandfather carried culture and memory across oceans.
Photographs are the way he communicated with me.
Storytelling is a part of his spirit and tradition that I now carry on.
