Searching for Saleem: An Afghan Woman's Odyssey

By Farooka Gauhari

Book Overview

Searching for Saleem is a first-person account--written by a wife, mother, and professional--of a national tragedy that interrupted daily life in Afghanistan after?the communist coup of April 1978. Farooka Gauhari tells of her desperate attempts to find out what happened to her missing husband, Saleem, and her gradual, painful decision to leave the country with her three children. In a broader sense, her story reflects the harrowing experiences of countless Afghan families: their sufferings and their struggles to maintain their identities under totalitarian rule. It typifies the kinds of human rights violations practiced against scores of Afghans who disappeared into dark cells or were executed without trials by successions of communist governments.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803221568
• ISBN13: 9780803221567
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 251 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Searching For Saleem: An Afghan women's Odyssey

I have read this book last year and now I read it for the second time. I ejoyed it more this time. It is a wonderful book based on events after Communism take over of Afghanistan and it brings sense to our present day events. In the Forword section of the book, Nancy Dupree indicates that ..." years of discord have stretched taut the fabric of this society (Afghanistan) and left many lingering effects. National traits once respected, honored hallmarks of Afghan character, are in jeopardy. Tolerence for others. Forthrightness. Aversion to fanatics. Respect for women. Loyalty to colleagues and classmates. Dislike for ostentation. Commiment to academic freedom. All has been compromised. Thankfully, the spirit of courageues determination, amply evident in the pages that follow, is still strong. There seems no reason to doubt, therefore, the reconstruction can be astnishingly rapid."

Searching for Saleem

This is a gripping story of one woman's attempt to cope with a world that suddenly and ominously changed around her. She and her family were living in Kabul when a coup de etat by a group of Afghan Communists plunged the country into civil war. The immediate consequnce for her was the disappearance of her husband. Along with that the social world she had known was dramatically changed. New and strange demands were placed upon her in her university job. Ordinary social and commercial concourse in the city broke down as military checkpoints interrupted traffic. Reliable information on what was happening became impossible to come by. Rumors abounded. Her children brought home communist propaganda. As Mrs. Gauhari searched for her husband friends and colleagues in official places told contrary and implausible stories about his whereabouts; some of her relatives withdrew support; mysterious visitors for unknown reasons offered empty promises of help. The book could be read as a woman's experience in a male-dominated world. But it is much more: this is what it is like to be plunged without warning into civil war. The presumptions of ordinary life give way to the confusion, suspicion, and terror resulting from the suddend explosion of violence among neighbors and associates. In that sense this is one woman's account of life in the midst of a ferocious civil war, an experience that many peoples around the world have had in the last decade: in Rwanda and Burundi, for instance, where repeated massacres have taken hundreds of thousands of lives; in Yugoslavia where Serb, Croat, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians have sought to cleanse each other from their respective enclaves; in Sri Lanka where Tamil separatists and Ceylonese nationalists have murdered each other for a generation; in Chechnya where a war of secession has destroyed the country.