An Unexpected Light: Travels In Afghanistan
By Jason Elliot
Jason Elliot first traveled from England to Afghanistan in 1979, at age nineteen, during the Soviet occupation. His second journey occurred after the Soviets had pulled out and the Afghans were fighting the Taliban. An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan is a travelogue of three journeys, each ten years apart, interspersed with history and literature from centuries past. “I have to go back to when I was twelve years old,” he writes, “my mind spinning from a turn-of-the-century account I’d just read of an explorer’s travels through what was then Turkestan, to which the northern portion of what is now Afghanistan belonged. The names meant very little to me then, but I felt the living image of them nonetheless, and longed to know if the descriptions I had read were real.”
The adventure of the first trip drew him back again, with the premise of writing a book about the Afghan people. He explained to guide Ali Khan, “I would like to write about your country and its people, something about the Afghan character; their hospitality, for example.” The guide asked how much “your government” was paying him, and Elliot said it came out of his own pocket. Elliot tells the reader, “In my own language this was generally understood to mean I was forking out money on a horribly tight budget. But to Ali Khan the notion of a man paying his own way for a journey suggested almost limitless resources of wealth and leisure.”
An Unexpected Light recounts Elliot’s travels, alone or with guides, on foot and on horseback, via broken-down trucks and buses, and eventually flying in a small plane. Kabul (CAR-bull) serves as the center from where he ventures forth on his explorations. The similarity of his journeys, with months and years seldom mentioned, results in a blur of repetitious events. He does, however, offer the reader the history of each area. For example, he introduces Panjshir as “one of Afghanistan’s most important valleys and a conduit of trade and communication for millennia, it snakes nearly a hundred miles to the northeast from Gulbahar towards a tangle of high peaks near the Anjoman Pass in Badakhshan province.” He then describes Soviet offenses there and compares them to British tactics used just as unsuccessfully a century earlier. A quote from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Young British Soldier” illustrates his point.
The “unexpected light” refers to Kabul’s morning sunshine, which Elliot and an unidentified companion experienced while wandering lost through the streets. He says, “Under its spell the landscape seemed to dance on the very edge of materiality. The light was joined in a gentle conspiracy with the air itself, which whispered in the leaves above our heads, tinged with a faint scent of balsam.”
My expectation in reading this book was to learn about current life in Afghanistan. Instead, it’s a reissue of a 1999 copyright, with the only indication being “With a New Afterword” on the front cover. I read the entire book looking for updates and insights on what has happened in the ten years of United States involvement, but there are none. I expected at least a chapter to bring the reader up to date. What I learned in the six-page afterword was “no end in sight.” Had this been a new volume, my review would have included more about the author’s precise descriptions and political interactions. But I kept wondering what was the point of releasing a new edition with information more than a decade old.
For those interested in a picturesque look at the Afghan people and countryside, along with a history of the country and its literature, it’s a good read. But those who want to know what Afghanistan is like today must search elsewhere.