No Space for Further Burials

You don’t have to know the political history of the many conflicts in Afghanistan to understand Feryal Ali Gauhar’s novel, No Space for Further Burials. In fact, the meaninglessness of politics in such a place is one of the key themes Gauhar explores. In an environment where survival is day-to-day—even minute-to-minute—and cruelty and suffering come from a myriad of conflicting sources, politics is the last thing on anyone’s mind.

You don’t have to know the political history of the many conflicts in Afghanistan to understand Feryal Ali Gauhar’s novel, No Space for Further Burials. In fact, the meaninglessness of politics in such a place is one of the key themes Gauhar explores. In an environment where survival is day-to-day—even minute-to-minute—and cruelty and suffering come from a myriad of conflicting sources, politics is the last thing on anyone’s mind.

The harrowing narrative is told by a U.S. Army medical technician captured by rebels and thrown into an Afghan asylum. The asylum houses a motley collection of the insane, the disfigured, and the abandoned. Key figures include Bulbul, a young man who always wears a bright red scarf and wants the narrator to get him clothes from a decades-old Sears Roebuck catalog; Waris, the asylum’s caretaker; Noor Jehan, Waris’s wife; Sabir, a one-eyed, one-legged former professor disfigured by an acid attack; Anarguli, a beautiful young pregnant woman with a terrible head wound; and Hayat, a seemingly crazy, tattooed old woman with a long gray braid, into which she weaves all manner of debris.

As repeated attacks on the asylum (both from rebels and U.S. bombs) make food, shelter and other provisions scarce, the inmates must work together for their survival. The narrator is wary of the others at first, but gradually learns their stories, most of them tales of heartbreak, abuse, and suffering. Some of this suffering is a result of war, and some is due to strict codes of “honor” that, once violated, become a rationale for cruelty and abuse. The suffering in this country has become a fact of life, and the source of it is of less concern than the task of surviving it.

Gauhar’s writing varies from straightforward reporting of facts to more lyrical passages. Much of the lyricism occurs in the stories told by the other inmates. For instance, in this passage, Bulbul describes how his father was crippled by a landmine:

There was so much blood that even the thirsty earth did not absorb it. It was like the blood of the sheep the elders of the village slaughtered for the Festival of the Sacrifice. But this was my father’s blood, my own father, Sangeen Khan, a man made of hardest rock, broken into pieces like a crushed fruit.

Likewise, when a very old man the inmates call Noor Kaka tells of a journey he made with his father, he says: "At a certain place my father told me to drink long and hard, for we were about to enter the valley of shifting sand, the Reg Ruwan, where the earth is soft and the sky far, and water just a thread in a madman’s dream."

The tales of the inmates are often moving, but Gauhar goes a step too far when she tries to weave in tales of Mexican immigrants to the U.S., farm workers in the Depression, and various people the narrator assisted as an EMT in the United States. Compared to the histories of the people in the asylum, most of these stories fall flat, and slow down the pace of the novel. And since a large part of what the novel describes is the maddening monotony and tedium of captivity, the plot already moves slowly enough as it is.

Often the most effective passages are those that matter-of-factly report the horrors of this place. When a U.S. bomb lands on the asylum, killing twenty-three people, the survivors must face the task of burying them:

We did not dig separate graves for the dead. There was no time—burials have to take place here before sunset, and in winter the sun sets early. . . . There is no need for separate graves since many of the bodies were not even whole when we managed to pull them out from under the rubble.

Throughout the novel the narrator reminds us that madness, for all the people here, is just a thought away. Indeed, in the final pages of the book, the narrator’s tone changes from contemplative and despairing to acerbic, hateful and irrational. Reality and delusion converge as he hatches a ludicrous plot to escape the asylum. Like his original mission in coming to Afghanistan—to “liberate” the people—it is doomed to failure. Gauhar’s novel, on the other hand, succeeds: it illuminates the futility of this war, and the dignity of those who have endured it.