It's the Thursday before Christmas, and that are incredibly busy at the Book Café. It's taken me a long time to get this interview set up and to properly prepare. For me, it is one thing to read a book for pure pleasure and quite another to gather the details I need to do an interview. I've been going through 'Opium Nation' again, immersing myself in Nawa's complex and intense journey of discovery.
"Journey of discovery" does not fully describe the book, nor Nawa's complicated process of putting it together. For me, the intertwining of her opium industry reporting and the personal journeys back home and how the two become tangled as she becomes involved is a perfect example of how an attempt to realize one goal often leads to another. This is where I want to take the conversation, even though there is another laden with the politics of the present hovering at the door. Those politics are subject to change without notice, and I want to explore with Fariba how she managed to capture so much story in so few words.
Nawa and I talked about the genesis of the book, in her reporting for a magazine story that came to be titled, "Afghanistan, Inc." This article did not paint a pretty picture, but it lead to more reporting, and in the course of doing the work Nawa found herself back at home and immersed in memories of the past as well as the egregious mistakes of the present. At that point, the stories started becoming personal.
Still, she fond herself with two separate stories and separate books, as it were; one about drugs and corruption in Afghanistan, the other, a look at her own experiences as a girl leaving the country and then returning home again as a young woman. It was when she met Darya, the 12 year-old child bride that she found the stories were indeed one in the same.
For this interview, I concentrated not on the politics. Afterwards, she seemed surprised that I had not asked her to offer her opinion on what was going to happen in 2014, when as we are told, the troops will be gone. That's a different discussion, and one that interests me, but it's not germane to this reportage, so to speak. I have some ideas about getting her to come back for a second round. In the interim, readers can hear us talk about how Fariba Nawa managed to write such a damn good book by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
New to the Agony Column
01-07-13: Commentary : Fariba Nawa's 'Opium Nation' : Home Pages
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Agony Column Podcast News Report: Ken Scholes, Andrew Mayer, and Tad Williams Discuss EPIC Fantasy Moderated by Terry Bisson on October 12, 2012 : "...you could spend your entire career not having a career by going back and re-working the same five chapters..."-Ken Scholes
12-05-12: Commentary : Lee Child Hits the 'Killing Floor' : "No laws to worry about"
Agony Column Podcast News Report: Ken Scholes Reads at SF in SF on October 12, 2012 : "There was a time when I used to get up and preach..."
12-03-12: Commentary : Justin Cronin Counts 'The Twelve' : The Tropes of Christmas Past and Future
