THE WORLD IS A CARPET

An unforgettable portrait of a place and a people shaped by centuries of art, trade, and war. Afghanistan is not only a country constantly in turmoil and constantly in the news. It is also a place of mystery and intrigue that outsiders long to better understand. As one of the few women traveling in a difficult part of the world, Badkhen is able to provide a rare look at the little-seen lives of Afghan women who suffuse her story with intimacy, humor, and humanity.

In the middle of the salt-frosted Afghan desert, in a village so remote that Google can’t find it, a woman squats on top of a loom, making flowers bloom in the thousand threads she knots by hand. Here, where heroin is cheaper than rice, every day is a fast day. B-52s pass overhead—a sign of America’s omnipotence or its vulnerability, the villagers are unsure. They know, though, that the earth is flat—like a carpet.
Anna Badkhen first traveled to this country in 2001 as a war correspondent. She has returned many times since, drawn by a land that geography has made a perpetual battleground, and by a people who sustain an exquisite tradition.Through the four seasons in which a new carpet is woven by the women and children of Oqa, Badkhen’s writing immortalizes their way of life—much as the carpet does, from the petal half-finished where a hungry infant needed care to the interruptions where the women trade jokes or go out to fill in for wedding musicians scared away by the Taliban. As Badkhen follows the carpet out into the world beyond, she leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of fates woven by centuries of art, war, and an ancient trade that ultimately binds the invaded to the invader.

ANNA BADKHEN is a distinguished war correspondent who has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, Ms., and The Boston Globe. She has reported from the Middle East, Central Asia, East Africa, and her native Russia and the Caucasus. Her wartime reporting won the 2007 Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility. She is the author of Peace Meals (Free Press, 2010) and an e-book collection of her reporting, Afghanistan by Donkey (Foreign Policy, 2012).