Bjorn
25-Oct-2009, 22:26
Atiq Rahimi: The Patience Stone (Syngu? Sabour: Pierre de patience), 2008
Right. So, remember Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Get Your Gun? The story of all American boy Johnny who got sent off to WW1 and came back horribly wounded, with his face and his hands blown off, to all outside appearances a braindead vegetable... except fully conscious, trapped inside his own increasingly desperate nightmare, unable to communicate with anyone outside?
Whether the similarity is intended by Rahimi, I have no idea. But in The Patience Stone, we have a similar soldier: a man who's spent his entire adult life being a soldier - for the mujaheddin, for the taliban - until a silly and not very heroic altercation with a fellow soldier leaves him with a bullet in his neck, alive but completely paralysed, unable to do anything but stare at the ceiling and breathe. The major difference, of course, is that he's not the protagonist. Instead, in a very effective perspective shift, The Stone Of Patience is Johnny's de facto widow's story. The unnamed woman of the unnamed soldier sits at his side in their house ("in Afghanistan or in some other place"), occasionally walks into the other room to take care of their children, then comes back to change his drip, check if he's still breathing, and recite Koran verses over him as per the mullah's wish: with no medical facilities, only faith remains. Except hers has been wavering for years, and now that her husband can't speak, she finally brings up the courage to speak herself. Occasionally, the war passes by outside or through the house: bombs, tanks, soldiers come and go, kill, take, and move on. The woman remains, putting the Koran aside and asking her own questions.
Rahimi's prose is bone-dry, succinct, reads almost like the stage directions of a one-act play for a handful of actors: man, woman, a few soldiers, a few children. By placing it all in one room, with one character carrying almost the entire story by herself, gradually outlining and trying to break through the confines that the world has placed upon her using nothing but words, the story becomes something more than just two individuals in a specific war in a specific part of Afghanistan. Bit by bit, she finds her voice, finds herself, fand her monologue that may or may not fall on deaf ears becomes ever more furious; wife to husband, woman to man, daughter to father, dispossessed to thief, victim to perpetrator, man to God: "what the HELL?!?" And since he can't answer, she has to find her own answers. For a while.
Like Trumbo, of course, Rahimi finds no happy ending when the questions are finally answered. That's not surprising. The harrowing tragedy isn't to not be heard, but to be heard and ignored. And yet the ending promises more, since the questions have finally been asked and cannot be unasked; it's blowing in the wind. Where it's blowing remains untold.
****0+
Right. So, remember Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Get Your Gun? The story of all American boy Johnny who got sent off to WW1 and came back horribly wounded, with his face and his hands blown off, to all outside appearances a braindead vegetable... except fully conscious, trapped inside his own increasingly desperate nightmare, unable to communicate with anyone outside?
Whether the similarity is intended by Rahimi, I have no idea. But in The Patience Stone, we have a similar soldier: a man who's spent his entire adult life being a soldier - for the mujaheddin, for the taliban - until a silly and not very heroic altercation with a fellow soldier leaves him with a bullet in his neck, alive but completely paralysed, unable to do anything but stare at the ceiling and breathe. The major difference, of course, is that he's not the protagonist. Instead, in a very effective perspective shift, The Stone Of Patience is Johnny's de facto widow's story. The unnamed woman of the unnamed soldier sits at his side in their house ("in Afghanistan or in some other place"), occasionally walks into the other room to take care of their children, then comes back to change his drip, check if he's still breathing, and recite Koran verses over him as per the mullah's wish: with no medical facilities, only faith remains. Except hers has been wavering for years, and now that her husband can't speak, she finally brings up the courage to speak herself. Occasionally, the war passes by outside or through the house: bombs, tanks, soldiers come and go, kill, take, and move on. The woman remains, putting the Koran aside and asking her own questions.
Rahimi's prose is bone-dry, succinct, reads almost like the stage directions of a one-act play for a handful of actors: man, woman, a few soldiers, a few children. By placing it all in one room, with one character carrying almost the entire story by herself, gradually outlining and trying to break through the confines that the world has placed upon her using nothing but words, the story becomes something more than just two individuals in a specific war in a specific part of Afghanistan. Bit by bit, she finds her voice, finds herself, fand her monologue that may or may not fall on deaf ears becomes ever more furious; wife to husband, woman to man, daughter to father, dispossessed to thief, victim to perpetrator, man to God: "what the HELL?!?" And since he can't answer, she has to find her own answers. For a while.
Like Trumbo, of course, Rahimi finds no happy ending when the questions are finally answered. That's not surprising. The harrowing tragedy isn't to not be heard, but to be heard and ignored. And yet the ending promises more, since the questions have finally been asked and cannot be unasked; it's blowing in the wind. Where it's blowing remains untold.
****0+