Review of Ali and Ava (2021 British film)

Given the round-the-clock news misery of the last month/last two years, I’m really pleased to be able to recommend an involving, big-hearted film that many people will warm to.

On limited release, Ali and Ava follows happy-go-lucky Ali, played by the always watchable Adeel Akhtar (I guess he had to be an actor with that surname), as he forms an unlikely relationship with the older Ava (played by Claire Rushrook).

Ali is a 40-ish, puppyish, washed-up raver and former DJ who collects rents for his family’s letting business. His marriage to the much younger, very attractive Runa, a student, has broken down, although he has shied away from telling his close-knit British-Pakistani family about their estrangement, and they continue to miserably share a property when the film opens.

Ava is a middle-aged single mum and youngish granny, who works as a teaching assistant in a local primary school and feels that her best years are behind her. She’s swept up by Ali’s effortless ebullience and gentle enthusiasm, but the frictions and insecurities that come hand in hand with their family ties threaten to cause insurmountable obstacles.

This isn’t a miserable film though at all. There are emotional ups and downs, but ultimately it is a warm, optimistic and sometimes very funny watch, that comes with the added bonus of an excellent 1990s rave-influenced soundtrack. Set in northern England, in Bradford, there are also some beautifully shot cityscapes of an urban landscape that is not usually exactly renowned for its gorgeousness.

The movie is directed and written by Clio Barnard, and it reminded me of a Ken Loach film that’s had all that relentless misery squeezed out of it. Maybe you can tell that I really loved it. Perhaps take a tissue to wipe away a little sentimental tear, if you’re that way inclined.

Review of Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi (Albania)

“I never asked myself about the meaning of freedom until the day I hugged Stalin. From close up, he was much taller than I expected. Our teacher, Nora, had told us that imperialists and revisionists liked to emphasize how Stalin was a short man. He was, in fact, not as short as Louis XIV, whose height, she said, they – strangely – never brought up. In any case, she added gravely, focusing on appearances rather than what really mattered was a typical imperialist mistake. Stalin was a giant, and his deeds were far more relevant than his physique.” (p. 3)

You might imagine that Free would be the driest of books. Lea Ypi is around my age, but the parallels stop there, as she is also an intimidatingly successful Professor of Political Theory at the LSE, who speaks about seven languages fluently. Her other books have titles like The Architectonic of Reason: Purposiveness and Systematic Unity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Free is much more accessible (I assume: I can’t say I’ve attempted the Kant book!), a 2021 memoir of Ypi’s childhood and adolescence growing up in Albania, one of the most isolated former communist states in Eastern Europe, during the ’80s and ’90s. It was on many “best of” lists at the end of 2021, as well as being shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction (basically the non-fiction Booker).

I was always going to be drawn to this memoir, since I hoover up life writing like an addict and I’ve been compiling, commissioning and editing books on South-Eastern European politics for the past 20 years. This personal account has wide appeal outside my corner of niche nerdery though, as the young Ypi is hugely engaging and often very funny, while as political events unfold from a child’s-eye viewpoint she becomes gradually aware of the contradictions of socialist dictator Enver Hoxha’s political ideology.

The governments and international financial institutions that jumped in to advise on Albania’s “shock therapy” transition to capitalism and Western-style democracy don’t come away scot-free. There is a great passage flagging up the way that communist jargon is replaced almost overnight by a similar breed of essentially meaningless IMF-ese:

“‘Civil society’ was the new term recently added to the political vocabulary, more or less as a substitute for ‘Party’ … It joined other new keywords, such as ‘liberalization’, which replaced ‘democratic centralism’; ‘privatization’, which replaced ‘collectivization’; ‘transparency’, which replaced ‘self-criticism’; ‘transition’, which stayed the same but now indicated the transition from socialism to liberalism instead of the transition from socialism to communism; and ‘fighting corruption’, which replaced ‘anti-imperialist struggle’.” (pp 215-2016)

Effortlessly mixing bathos, humour and tragedy with intimate personal history – Ypi’s family are fully-realised, well-rounded people, with all the affection and exasperation that implies – and wearing her enormous erudition lightly, this is an endlessly informative and most importantly, perhaps, incredibly enjoyable account. Given current events though, it may be that Ypi was growing up not at the end of history, but at the beginning.

Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine (Northern Ireland)

I’ve not been reading much as I’m either working or doom-scrolling Twitter and foreign affairs news – refreshing the websites of the BBC, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Kyiv Independent, The Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian and The Times. I have too many subscriptions, plus my work is foreign affairs orientated, but being well-informed doesn’t make me any less powerless. However, I was determined to participate in Cathy’s Reading Ireland month, and here it is.

Wendy Erskine’s latest collection of short stories, Dance Move, appeared earlier in 2022, and I’m yet to read it. I have read her debut collection of short stories, Sweet Home, however, which was first published in 2018 by The Stinging Fly press. The Stinging Fly literary magazine and press has attracted lots of interest over recent years, largely due to Sally Rooney’s role as editor. Rooney’s debut novel Conversations with Friends won widespread praise and enjoyed big commercial success (though I didn’t love it), and her addictive and emotionally resonant second novel Normal People was Booker-longlisted, while the subsequent TV series was pretty much perfect (with some fab outfits). I’m not big on tortured millennials, but I did love Normal People, though I never get why people don’t just tell each other how they feel in relationships, so that part maddened me – and that aspect of Rooney’s storylines is basically her USP. I’ve always gone all in, personally! Anyway, I’m really not here to talk about Sally Rooney – I gave up on her third and latest novel, and I’m so over endless self-indulgent whinnying and whining by privileged, educated people who just need to make a bloody decision or decide to trust someone for once. Wait till they’re my age, then they’ll have something to moan about – ha! pah!

Deep breathes and back to Sweet Home, which was later picked up by Picador – it published it for a less niche audience in 2020. The 10 stories that make up Erskine’s collection are Belfast-set, and tell tales of ordinary people’s lives, in a way that transcends the everyday to reveal moments of strangeness and profundity. The opening, and longest story, To All Their Dues, is an enormously assured three-hander, which reveals the insecurities and emotional baggage underlying the unknowingly interconnected lives of a beauty salon owner, a local thug and racketeer, and his long-suffering girlfriend. Another particularly great story is coming of age tale Observation, in which a teenage girl becomes increasingly obsessed with her best friend’s tales of illicit sex with her mother’s much younger boyfriend. But, really, they’re all more or less great.

Erskine mentions Lucy Caldwell in her acknowledgements, and her style is reminiscent of Caldwell’s work in its setting and perspicacity, without ever being derivative. Erskine has a dry wit and a very humorous turn of phrase that lightens these stories. I’m not usually a big fan of short story collections, but Sweet Home is a really enjoyable collection of fiction, which manages to entertain while packing a real emotional punch.

Servant of the People (Ukrainian TV show)

Over the last couple of weeks we in the West have been shunted into an unwelcome parallel reality, with the spectre of World War 3 hovering in our peripheral vision. The Russian double-speak drives me to distraction: “What, hospitals? No, we didn’t bomb a hospital. Those pictures are fake.” “The Ukrainians are deliberately bombing their own civilians.” I can’t read books any more, I just refresh news sites. Meanwhile my brother messages me to say he’s been watching videos of beheaded Russian soldiers on Twitter. Quite likely these invaders were conscripted boys. It feels like the end of days. Perhaps if Ukraine had not relinquished its nuclear weapons in 1994, in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the UK and the USA, then – ironically – this conflict might not have happened.

Ukraine’s populist President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has emerged as a war hero. His charismatic, groomed, witty appearances prior to the conflict contrast with his wartime khaki shirt, grizzled face and defiant rhetoric. As everyone now knows, he was first a TV executive and comic actor who voiced the Ukrainian version of the Paddington movies, and who, in 2015-19, produced and starred in a TV series, Servant of the People, about an ordinary man who becomes the unlikely President of Ukraine. Zelenskiy’s real life political party, established in 2018, shared the name of the TV series.

At the time of writing, the first three episodes of Servant of the People can be watched on All 4 in the UK. It’s a discombobulating and poignant watch, given the circumstances. As depicted in the series, Kyiv is of course an attractive, modern city, not a war zone: pristine, bustling, people go about their lives in schools, cafes and shops.

Zelenskiy plays his role for laughs. He’s Vasyl Petrovych Goloborodko, a hapless history teacher, who makes a sweary, impassioned off the cuff speech about political corruption that is surreptitiously filmed by a student and then goes viral. A crowd-funded electoral campaign and an unexpected electoral success later, and the series presents us with the perfect fish-out-of-water scenario, and Vasyl’s sudden presidential power and influence is bemusing for both him and his family. The jokes are funny, a mix of satire and slapstick, while the three episodes that I’ve seen give a sense of the overt Western orientation of Ukraine – which has evidently become intolerable for Putin. The current reality means the comedy is infused with pathos and a new dystopian slant. Realistically, Zelenskiy may have only a short time to live. I hope he survives the conflict.

Music of Afghanistan

I’ve been unable to read fiction for the past week, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – I just can’t concentrate, or it seems flippant and irrelevant. I have to follow events in the conflict for my work, so turning away isn’t an option. It also feels like we need to bear witness to what is happening, and it feels increasingly that security across the whole world is under threat as a result of Putin’s barbaric recklessness.

On a personal level spending time reading and researching the culture of another country ripped apart by war – over decades – feels more and more like unpalatable misery tourism, but I’ve done a fair amount of research into Afghan musical culture over the past weeks, and it seems irrational not to write it up.

We know that the Taliban is anti-music; it doesn’t fit in with its religious ideology. However, a musical scene in Afghanistan has existed over the years, pre- and post- the first Taliban regime, and has no doubt simply now been forced underground. I listened to an interview on BBC’s Radio 3, Music under Restriction, with Aryana Sayeed, the country’s biggest pop singer, who is now recording in exile in Turkey. She claims that even Talibs listen to her music in their personal lives, albeit clandestinely. Her most streamed track on Spotify is Bache Kabul, which has a distinctly Afghan feel, even while her look is very Western-influenced:

Afghanistan’s National Institute of Music (ANIM) has received a lot of press interest recently, due to its ground-breaking work, and the tragedy of that work being unceremoniously halted last year. It was founded in 2010 by Ahmad Sarmast to create opportunities for young people, especially girls, to play and compose music. His work was – perhaps unsurprisingly -controversial in Afghanistan even before the latest Taliban takeover, and he was seriously injured in a suicide attack in 2014. Members of the ANIM have sought asylum abroad since the return of the Taliban, and its work is currently suspended, although Sarmast hopes that one day it can resume.

A singer mentioned in passing in both of the books that I’ve read recently by Afghan writers is former Prime Minister’s son Ahmad Zahir, the ‘Afghan Elvis’, who remains popular more than 40 years after his death in 1979 – some suspect that the fatal car crash that ended his life on his 33rd birthday was no accident. His most streamed song on Spotify is this, Baz Amadi Aye Jane Man:

Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World – extraordinary objects from 2200 BCE to 200 CE

In 2011 a major exhibition came from Afghanistan to the British Museum in London, although I didn’t see it. However, I recently came across the exhibition catalogue in a charity shop, and was stunned by the beautiful photographs in it.

On display, and pictured in the book, were objects from over 2000 years of history, found at four historical sites in Afghanistan, which was a major location along ancient trading routes.

Most fascinating to me were the images of artifacts recovered in 1978 from the ‘Bactrian Hoard’ at Tilya Tepe in northern Afghanistan, where six nomads were found buried alongside their possessions. But war broke out in the same year, and these items were confirmed to have survived the ensuing decades of repeated conflict only in the early 2000s, after the Taliban had been routed. You can get an idea of the opulence and craftmanship of the haul from the picture below, of a gold belt buckle from the 1st century BCE, which was found buried alongside its owner, and which brilliantly depicts a carriage driven by dragons:

Other treasures include a gold ram that may have been used as a head ornament, a wide variety of ornate gold jewellery, pendants fashioned from fossilized shark’s teeth and soles made from thin sheets of gold, and thought to signify high status – an aristocratic way of life meant that your feet rarely touched the ground, living mounted on horseback or seated on carpets.

It is a miracle that these things have survived. I hope that with the return in 2021 of the Taliban regime, which in 1996-2001 led to a draconian interpretation of Islam and the destruction of works of art depicting any living being (and the banning of television), the security of these historical treasures is not threatened. Many remember the destruction of the enormous 6th century Bamiyan Buddhas. For now, at least, the National Museum of Afghanistan is open, and the Taliban pledged in August 2021 to protect it and the cultural heritage it contains.

Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to her Son by Homeira Qaderi (Afghanistan)

Translated by Zaman Stanizai

Oh dear, my month of Afghan culture is nearly over, and I’ve still got quite a lot to write up and have read less than hoped because of work commitments plus half term with the kidlings.

Dancing in the Mosque is a memoir by Homeira Qaderi that was first published in the UK in 2021 by Fourth Estate. Qaderi is a formidable and fiercely intelligent woman, born in war-torn Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, and living for a while as a refugee in Iran.

“Afghanistan is the land of invisible bullets and the land of a death foretold, the land of doomed destinies, and the land of dejected and disgruntled youth, waiting forever for dreams that will never come true. This is how Madar, my mother, Ansari, and Nanah-jan, my grandmother, Firozah, described my homeland to me when I was barely four years old.“

Returning to Afghanistan, she spent her teenage years living under the brutal, deeply repressive regime of the Taliban (1996-2001). At the time of writing the book, Taliban rule had long been overturned, although attitudes to women were alarmingly restrictive. Of course now, tragically, the Taliban are back. It seems certain that Qaderi is no longer teaching at universities in Kabul or a senior adviser to the Ministry of Education, as stated in her bio.

However, one thing that is clear from her book is her incredible resilience. She was sexually assaulted repeatedly by men who theoretically represented religious purity. At the age of 13 she began illicitly schooling local girls, and she helped establish an illegal girls’ writing group, although all books but the Qur’an had been banned.

Unexpectedly, she tells movingly of a teenage flirtation with a reluctant Talib. She also writes of the time after her marriage, when she and her husband moved to Iran, where she found the culture liberating (although Iran certainly wouldn’t top my list of countries offering freedoms to women), and where she was able to pursue a post-graduate education, to eventually become a professor of Persian literature.

The book’s title alludes to her greatest trauma: the loss of her infant son Siawash to her husband’s family on the breakdown of their marriage, after they had returned to the culture of conservative Afghanistan – and after her husband expressed his wish to take a second wife. As she writes, “Siawash has taught me that mothering in Afghanistan often amounts to running on the sharp edge of a sword”.

Review of Flee: Oscar-nominated, Danish film

Flee is a 2021 Danish animated documentary feature that focuses on the life experiences of a young, gay Afghan academic named Amin, who has received asylum in Copenhagen. Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, I noticed Riz Ahmed (of whom I’m a huge fan) is one of the executive producers.

The movie (sub-titled) has been nominated for the upcoming Oscars in three categories: best international film, best animated feature and best documentary feature. I went to see it at my local cinema, which had literally one showing of the film, as part of its Tuesday night ‘Discovery’ strand. It really deserves to be shown more widely!

The film opens with Amin’s innocent childhood in Afghanistan, blighted by the disappearance of his father by the mujahideen, followed by years of living with his family as illegal immigrants in hostile Russia, and their gruelling and traumatic attempts to find sanctuary in Western Europe. Amin’s experiences were complicated by his homosexuality, coming, as he says, from a culture that did not even have a word for it.

Animation is a useful tool for painting Amin’s subjective experience. I’m no expert on animation techniques, but different artistic styles and colour palates artfully reflect the various elements of his experience, from carefree days in Afghanistan to moments of pure terror as an illegal migrant in a pathologically corrupt Russia. Aesthetically the film is often beautiful to watch (such as a Kabul-set scene that unfolds to A-ha’s 1980s banger Take on Me and evokes elements of that groundbreaking music video), while the reliance on drawn images rather than a camera recording seems to facilitate drilling down and focusing in on intimate elements of Amin’s personal experience. No doubt it is useful for protecting Amin’s identity, too. Mixed in are scenes using archive footage and news reports that bring home the wider context and bitter reality of Amin’s experiences.

It is a moving film, which highlights the discrepancies between complacent Westerners and desperate people who are driven to put themselves in the hands of seemingly psychopathic traffickers. In one scene, Amin and his family have been working frantically with other migrants to keep afloat in a dangerously unseaworthy boat, which they have been bailing out for days. Exhausted, terrified, suddenly they find themselves in the path of a massive cruise liner, and rows of impassive Western tourists gaze down at the depersonalized refugees, drinks in hands. The border guards have been notified, they tell them.

The scene that got a tear rolling down my cheek, though, was when Amin finally comes out as gay, and shortly afterwards finds himself in a technicolour night club. Something about the acceptance that he found – finally at home in the West – after so many years of gnawing anxiety about what must have seemed his impossible and unacceptable sexuality, was intensely moving.

This is an excellent, ultimately optimistic film, and deserves the accolades surely coming its way. Note though, it’s an animation that’s not aimed at kids.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan)

“I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975 … That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past … Looking back now, I realise I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last 26 years”.

I first read The Kite Runner in, I think, 2005. A friend bought a copy for my birthday after the wife of a Greek oligarch she met at a work do on a yacht told her it was the best book she had ever read. I can only conclude the Greek oligarch’s wife wasn’t super into books.

I’m being a bit unfair. Back in 2005 I gave The Kite Runner a four-star rating. I’m more cynical now, more battered by life and more demanding of books. Yet I still gave it three stars on a second reading.

Its structure, a litany of woes based around a war-torn country, in this case Afghanistan, has since become a familiar genre of Western misery lit, which is aimed squarely at tugging at the heartstrings of complacent readers living comfortably insulated from political trauma and violent personal tragedy in highly developed countries.

In 1970s Afghanistan Amir also lives a comfortable life, with his father, his Baba. He is tended to by staff and spends most of his time with his unquestioningly loyal friend Hassan, the son of their faithful retainer. Amir and Hassan’s uneven relationship is described unsparingly, and Amir is well-drawn as the spoilt princeling, desperate for parental approval, who makes a split-second decision that affects his life for ever. The first part of the novel, culminating in a thrilling kite-running tournament, is genuinely gripping and beautifully evocative.

After Amir and his father flee Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, however, it begins to flag. Baba remains a strong and fascinating character to the end, but once Amir is living independently as an adult he feels less credible.

Amir becomes an author (don’t they all!), and lives a pleasant life in America with his perfect, under-drawn wife Soraya (she is just there to be pretty, forgiving and all-round virtuous – the Victorian-era ‘Angel in the House’ type, albeit one who leaves the house to inspiringly teach small children). But Amir is haunted by his past. Finally, he finds himself returning to his homeland, now Taliban-controlled, in a long redemptive episode that piles horror on horror, ties up some loose ends from childhood and feels utterly implausible and horribly emotionally manipulative.

Hosseini was brought up in Afghanistan until conflict broke out in the late 1970s. He and his family received political asylum in the USA in 1980,  when he was in his teens. Perhaps the earlier sections are so well-handled because he was able to use material from his own past to help bring them to life. The latter part, though, I found descended into mawkishness, while the Talib uber-baddy was just too much, with his extravagantly wealthy family, John Lennon-style sunglasses, penchant for mascara-painted little boys, track marks on his arms and psychopathic monologues.

Massoud Hassani – Afghanistani Artist

Marcel Duchamp famously repurposed and reinterpreted a useful, everyday item and declared it a ‘readymade’ piece of art. Fountain was simply a standard urinal, often exhibited on its back, signed and dated ‘R. Mutt 1917’. His work Bottle Rack (1914) was … a bottle rack.

It feels as though, a century later, Afghan designer Massoud Hassani has done the reverse, by devising something intensely useful, that has nevertheless been displayed in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. His ‘Mine Kafon’ is a mine detonator, but also a work of beauty.

Sadly, with Afghanistan mired in conflict since the late 1970s, war keeps coming up, even in relation to its art and design. As children, Hassani, his brother and their friends made light, wind-borne racing toys from paper. Living near a scene of recent conflict, these toys sometimes blew onto minefields, and couldn’t be safely retrieved.

Later in life Hassani came up with a solution to this childhood problem, using those early toys as inspiration and making something that looks delicate, like a dandelion, but which has the ability to safely detonate buried landmines. The detonator that Hassani designed comprises a core of moulded plastic, with bamboo stems and plastic feet (https://www.moma.org/collection/works/160434):

Once on a minefield, the object is heavy enough to detonate a mine, but light enough to be carried along by the wind. And if exploded by a land mine it breaks into parts that can be reused and reassembled into a new Mine Kafon.

It is an object that can be made available throughout the world at low cost, that is simple to use and fairly straightforward to make. But the Mine Kafon is the result of an ingenious and elegant design, which combines the aesthetic qualities of sculpture with a life-saving purpose. It’s just sad that such a thing should be so useful.