By Anna Badkhen
When the world around you is going to hell in a handbasket, eat. Unless you are one of the truly unfortunate, denied even a crust, food is the arch compensation for the brutality of life. Food begets conviviality in the most humble or dire settings.
Wartime is an especially good time to eat, as an act of defiance and cheer, typifying the “brazen, congenial, persistent ways in which life in the most forlorn and violent places on earth shamelessly reasserts itself,” writes war correspondent Anna Badkhen, who did some hair-raising stints in the Middle East for The Chronicle. “Of those, sharing a meal is one of the most elemental.”
Badkhen’s youth is a plus; as a reporter, and a crack one, she brings a green eye to her surroundings, allows herself to be amazed, overwhelmed or bewildered by people, places and events, and in so doing dazzles her readers. She brings a red-haired temper to the gross injustices she witnesses. She is nonpartisan: While Saddam Hussein’s tyranny will get a good raking over the coals, so too will the United States for its mission’s maddening lack of clarity. She takes very seriously her job as our eyes, trudging through war’s debris to find intimate stories of civilians and combatants affected by conflicts.
The stories here are set in Israel, Kenya, Russia (Badkhen is Russian-born, and cut her journalistic teeth in Moscow; she now lives in Massachusetts) and Tajikistan, though mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Violence – actual or the threat of it – fashions the overall mood, but Badkhen creates distinct atmospheres for each of these places: the white smoke of a shepherd’s fire curling over the silvery orchards on the Tigris’ shore; narrow, dim gorges that sponge up the sunlight; a sandstorm coming in “quickly and silently, like an ocher paint roller”; a clay road with the consistency of hot marshmallows; the sun setting over the West Bank in “an agony of green and mauve.” Badkhen is an unself-consciously artful place portraitist; her landscapes, including those in Afghanistan that are little more than worlds of superfine dust, are prismatic.
Food, too, has atmosphere written all over it – a gunman, high on hash and Valium, lifts a doughnut over his tilted head and nibbles at it “like some tropical bird”; consider the elusive therapy of borscht, where “dollops of sour cream melt, starlike, into the deep scarlet” – but it doesn’t always smell like roses, since food is her portal to get under the surface and into the lives of others. What she finds there can be grim. That might be the hateful decision faced by a Somali refugee, who must choose which of her children get fed and which do not, or the street feast commemorating the last act of a suicide bomber.
In war zones, there is no guarantee when the next meal will come. You eat what you find, perhaps some maize plucked from cow dung or the fox caught in your headlights. Badkhen is almost undone by the greens-free diet. She dreams of lettuce, she is beguiled by the rare appearance of a rutabaga. The last is served to her by Mahbuhbullah – turncoat, vodka smuggler, tomb raider and her host in northern Afghanistan, just one of her excellent cast of characters.
For, ultimately, these are stories about people: odes to her bodyguards; testaments to the women who became war trophies of victorious militias; the tale of a dissident who will later be murdered, but for a brief, candent moment was her closest friend; paeans to those who got her safely in and out, as painstaking, thoughtful and generous as the meals they shared.
(from the San Francisco Chronicle)