This post is a proposal for Matter’s International Reporting Fellowship.
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“This is the story of Afghans leaving home in hopes of crossing over into a richer world. This is the story of a mother wanting a better future for her daughter, or a young man wanting to improve his prospects in life. This is the story of us.”
In Flight
On a flight home last summer, boredom and fatigue aligned into a Hollywood blockbuster-watching mood. And so I began watching Elysium, intending to drift into sleep. Instead, something about the Dystopian world on screen gripped me, and I continued watching. I was struck by the parallels between the fictional setting of Elysium and Afghanistan, where I had been working as a freelance writer since January 2013.
Elysium is set in the year 2154, long after earth has become a kind of mass ghetto besieged by threats of poverty, war, and other man-made calamities. The chosen few live in a gated community in the shape of a literal pie in the sky. Elysium is the name of the habitat; it is within sight but out of reach for residents on Earth. This does not stop them from embarking on perilous journeys bound for Elysium, however. It is also an endeavor the protagonist, played by Matt Damon, carries out with unbending zeal.
I recognized that monomaniacal focus in Damon’s eyes. It was something I had seen in many Afghans, nearly all who said they wanted to leave Afghanistan. The same logic that made Elysium the Valhalla for Damon’s character was the thing that made the First World a short hand for a better life for so many Afghans.
Seeing the movie as a critique on the state of migration today gave shape to the endless conversations I have had over dinners in Kabul, where we would sit around sharing one incredulous story after another. Afghans were risking their lives for things we took for granted: for a secular, Western education; for the freedom to love who you love; for the chance to live out your beliefs. And then the slightly insane calculus that made Afghans take out loans for tens of thousands of dollars on blind faith that they could cross into a richer world.
Reason for leaving varied. Three decades of unrelenting war has reduced the economy to rubble. An escalating civil war continues to rage on in vast swaths of the country. Despite the billions of dollars donors had spent in the past thirteen years, the country still lacked basic services and infrastructure, never mind a functioning government — the stuff of a middle-class existence.
Earlier this summer, photographer Kiana Hayeri and I met a cinema student at a coffeehouse near Kabul University, beloved among the city’s beleaguered intellectual class. He told me that he was planning to leave for Spain, a country he had chosen on a whim. “Anywhere is better than here,” he said. The liberal promise of his father’s generation had been destroyed by the onset of war. He was a Hazara, an ethnic group that had historically been subjugated. The Hazaras had done well under the US-led invasion, but that also meant that they had the most to lose when the foreign troops withdrew.
Over a pot of green tea, he explained how he was in the process of hiring a smuggler who would take him into Iran, to Turkey, to Greece, to Italy, then, with some luck, onwards to Europe proper. (Italy does not count as “proper Europe” to many Afghans.) Those with means were paying $20,000 to $40,000 for travel documents that would get them into Europe by air, or Canada even. These transactions were as common as breaking bread, he said. Most ordinary travel agencies around the city also ran a separate smuggling arm that dealt with procurement of visa through illicit means. These days, many of them were a bustling hub of activity.
My partner Kiana Hayeri and I will begin our research in Kabul. Here, we will do a kind of casting interview among the many Afghans who are preparing to leave. When we have selected our subjects, we will follow them in their journey West, from the day they set out of their houses, kissing their mothers goodbye, to the day when they arrive at their final destination, wherever that may be. We struggled with the travel estimates, but a rough guess is: fixer ($1,000), room and board ($1,000), flights ($2,000), and others including visas, food, and incidentals ($1,000), for a total of $5,000.
We are interested in the story of human migration because both of us come from immigrant families. My grandfather fled the authoritarian regime of North Korea on foot, heading south, where my father was born. He, too, unmoored himself from the comforts of home so that his children could grow up in a world better than the one he had known. Kiana immigrated to Canada when she was a teenager. Her parents had wanted to give her and her brother a better education and a better environment to grow up in. In short, a better shot at a better life. “For the very same reason why Afghans leave Afghanistan,” she explained to me once. She landed in Canada without speaking a word of English, and has always been fascinated by what drives people to go toward the unknown.
Her two previous work echo this obsession. “May god be with you my daughter,” is a photo essay that captures the journey of four 17-year-old girls who all immigrate out of Iran, some with their families, others without. Another is “Jense Degar,” or, “The Other Sex.” This ongoing project depicts the underground gay subculture in Iran, where homosexuality is gravely punished. Kiana follows her main character as he leaves for Turkey and seeks asylum there.
I have been writing about Afghanistan for the past two years. Some stories I’ve worked on with great pleasure are about Kabul’s TV Hill (I scaled the iconic hill and wrote about its sociological sediment); Afghanistan’s telecom industry, with photos from Kiana; and about the country’s soccer mania. My other writing can be found here, and the rest of Kiana’s luminously beautiful pictures can be found here.
To want better things, to want to improve a situation deemed hopeless, is one of the most basic human conditions. The story of a mother wanting a better future for her daughter, of a young man in search of better prospects in life, are universal ones. And yet, migrants are often whittled down to a statistic. We never learn about the emotional accounting behind the decision to leave. Kiana and I hope to bring a more nuanced understanding to this issue. We will tell their stories from beginning to end, unfettered and unvarnished.
