In conversation with Teresa Rehmanwith focus on her non-fiction, Bulletproof: A Journalist’s Notebook on Reporting Conflict and a brief introduction to her book. Click here to read.
Translations
Robihara(Sunless)by Kazi Nazrul Islam has been translated by Professor Fakrul Alam from Bengali. Clickhere to read.
Four of his ownMalay poems have been translated by Isa Kamari. Click here to read.
Narrative by Meredith Stephens & Photographs by Alan Noble
Bridge in Hoi An
The tour to the Mekong Valley had finished. Rather than return straight to our hotel, we left our luggage from behind the counter of the tourist office so we could explore the nearby markets unencumbered. Later, after we retrieved our bags and headed outside to wait for the taxi, our guide emerged from the office and smiled at us.
“Where are you going next?” he enquired.
“To Hoi An, and then Hanoi,” Alex informed him. “What’s it like up there?”
“I don’t know. When I was a uni student I went with my friends to Hanoi, but I didn’t have any money, so I just walked around the town rather than going anywhere. Now that I have a two-year old child I can’t travel anyway.”
“Does your wife work?” I asked.
“Yes. She works in a shoe factory.”
“Who looks after your daughter?”
“My mother does. Both my wife and I need to work to pay the bills so we can’t really go on holiday. I work seven days a week. Paying the rent, the bills, and our daughter’s education, are very expensive.”
Our taxi arrived, so we carried our luggage and put it in the boot. Our guide stood by the car, smiled at us, and waved us off. There was one piece of advice he had given us that stood out in my mind.
“If you need to cross the road, raise your hand to let people know and cross confidently!” he had advised.
We had alighted from the taxi too early to visit a cathedral, but it was closed, so we decided to walk the rest of the distance to the railway station. After all, it was only just over a kilometre. Or so we thought.
Cathedral at Ho Chi Minh CityTraffic in Ho Chi Minh City
It turned out to be just under three kilometres. The footpaths were blockaded by motorbikes and rubble, so we had to detour via the street to make our way forward. What was much more challenging was crossing the intersections. The pedestrian crossings were disregarded. Instead, you had to make eye contact with the motorcyclists, raise your hand, and stride ahead. Alex and I stood helplessly on the footpath watching hundreds of motorcyclists slowly turn the corner. A young motorcyclist looked at me as he slowly turned along with hundreds of others and gave me a wry sympathetic smile. The traffic turned to gridlock, so Alex held up his hand and weaved his way through the stationary traffic, with me following. Finally, we safely reached the other side. One of our tour guides, referring to traffic lights, made light of it saying that the drivers were colour blind. We did witness a minor accident, so there is no way I can advise how to safely cross the road in Vietnam.
We continued to pull our luggage along the footpaths, veering onto the road whenever the footpath was blocked, which was frequently. Then Alex decided to provide some relief by heading down a narrow lane, which he thought was a shortcut. Residents gave us surprised looks. A grandmother handed her grandson a lettuce which he placed in his bicycle basket. We greeted each other. At the end of the lane, we arrived at another main road clogged with motorcycles. We paused wondering which way to go. I saw something dark scurry towards me and brush across my sandals. It turned out to be a rat which rushed behind me under some buildings.
“Oh no!” Alex exclaimed. “My phone’s run out of battery and I’m not sure of the way to the station.”
I looked around for someone to ask, but the few people who weren’t on motorcycles appeared to be intent on whatever they were doing. More importantly, I didn’t have the Vietnamese language skills to ask them. Alex and I were stranded in rush hour and unable to find the station. Would we miss our train? We looked up and saw the sign Ga Sài Gòn. The first word sounded like it might have come from French gare, meaning ‘station’. We followed the signs and within a few hundred metres we reached our destination, the station. Alex’ phone had expired at the very moment that the sign had appeared.
We were in good time for the sleeper train and headed towards our carriage, fifteen minutes before departure. There were four beds in each cabin, and we had secured all four beds for just the two of us to ensure our privacy. The train departed exactly on time. My favourite cure for insomnia is lying on a train sleeper. Soon after the train had departed the gentle motion of the train rolling over the tracks, and accompanying sounds, sent me into a comforting sleep.
Iced Coffee on the Train
There was no dining car on the train. Instead, hawkers would board the train at the various stops. The next morning, we couldn’t start the day without coffee so we bought one from one of the vendors. A few hours later, we looked across the train tracks while the train was stopping at a station. We made eye contact with an elderly lady on a distant platform. She was holding two cups of iced coffee in plastic bags and calling out urgently to us. Normally, hawkers who are too insistent have the effect of turning me off, but not this woman. We nodded, and she ran across the tracks and held the coffees up to us. We took the coffees but were unsure of how much to pay. We held some cash out, and the conductor happened to be standing next to us. Unable to communicate with the vendor, we looked at the conductor. She took 20,000 duong from us ($1.00) and handed it to the lady. She took it and made her way back to the platform. The train departed and we returned to our sleeper compartment. The ice was in one cup and the coffee and condensed milk mixture in another. We tipped the ice into the coffee and savoured this new taste.
When we alighted at Da Nang many people touting for business made eye contact and called out to us. We looked for the driver we had booked. Finally, we found him, and followed him back to the taxi, from which he drove us to our destination, Hoi An. We briefly relaxed in our hotel room before walking the streets to the market. We crossed the streets in the same manner as we had in Saigon, making eye contact with motorcyclists and raising our hands, before making a show of confidently striding across. This remained stressful but instead of hundreds, there were tens of motorcycles.
Lanterns in Hoi An
We reached the river, alit with colourful lanterns. The streets were lined with throngs of fellow tourists speaking multiple languages. Touts and hawkers would stand directly in my path, call out ‘hello’, and try to engage me. I looked straight ahead and stepped around them. There were too many choices of where to stop, and the throng of displaced westerners, like us, was disconcerting. The westerners outnumbered the locals, but it was not a group of westerners with a shared culture, but a mixture of visitors from far-flung locales. When we decided on a place to stop for dinner, we shunned the ones who were standing in our way pressing us to stop, in preference to a stall-holder who did not even make eye contact with us.
There were two locals who stood out in my mind during our first few days in Vietnam. One is the lady who called across the rail tracks from the platform to sell us some coffee. Other hawkers, standing in my way and behaving like they are my best friend, I confess to have found annoying, but Alex and I completely dropped our guard down for this lady prepared to go the distance to sell a drink to strangers on a train that was passing through.
The second person was our tour guide in Ho Chi Minh. The tour itself was informative and fascinating, but the impression that lingers was our brief conversation after the tour when we were waiting for the taxi. The next time I purchase a well-priced and crafted product that is made in Vietnam, I will recall those who have brought it into my hands, maybe working seven days a week, paying exorbitant rents, and having others look after their children.
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Meredith Stephens is an applied linguist from South Australia. Her recent work has appeared in Syncopation Literary Journal, Continue the Voice, Micking Owl Roost blog, The Font – A Literary Journal for Language Teachers, and Mind, Brain & Education Think Tank. In 2024, her story Safari was chosen as the Editor’s Choice for the June edition of All Your Stories.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Title: August in Kabul: America’s Last Days in Afghanistan and the Return of the Taliban
Author: Andrew Quilty
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
I had been thinking about a book set in Afghanistan since late 2020. The Doha Agreement, signed that February, was already working to the Taliban’s advantage. Thousands of their prisoners had been released, and battlefield commanders were capitalising on the ‘active defence’ posture the Americans had pushed Kabul into adopting while being careful not to overextend and cause the Americans to stall their withdrawal. I saw the Doha Agreement as a death knell for the Afghan Government, but I never anticipated it would come so quickly.
The book I wanted to write would follow the theme I’d been following for several years. I would chart how the United States’ refusal to reconcile with the ousted Taliban regime, and the ensuing occupation, ignited the insurgency, just as it had in Iraq.
I would follow the lives of rural Afghans whose experience of the war, unlike those in Kabul who, while also encountering horrific violence, were given an array of new opportunities, was one of deprivation and disaffection—a story less often told.
Admittedly, the fascination with those living behind Taliban lines was amplified because their lives were virtually off-limits to journalists.
An unspoken race for access among writers, photographers and filmmakers began, intensifying in recent years as the prospect of a Taliban return to power became increasingly likely.
After the signing of the Doha Agreement, with US air support curtailed and the Taliban enjoying a wave of international recognition, some commanders began to open the doors to their districts. I had already been reporting on the ruthless exploits of the CIA’s Afghan proxies from the 01 National Strike Unit in Maidan Wardak—albeit from the relative safety of Kabul and the provincial capital, Maidan Shahr—when opportunities to visit the villages where they occurred began to arise from the middle of that year.
Those trips, which, for security reasons, lasted one night at most, were indeed as fascinating as I had expected. They also vindicated the hypothesis that the punitive neglect of the rural class— particularly those in predominantly Pashtun districts—and the violent ordeals they’d endured living among—and, often in cahoots with—the Taliban, were creating an increasingly unbridgeable gap between rural Afghanistan and the central government. The lack of accountability for their suffering was self-defeating for the aggressors, and, for journalists, I believed, the war’s essential theme.
It must be said that the Taliban’s military victory would never have come without the ineptitude and malfeasance of successive administrations in Kabul and their armed forces, and the hubris of the American-led international military coalition. The Taliban’s readiness to seize the advantage after the signing of the Doha Agreement did, however, expedite the eventual collapse that the agreement ensured. The realisation that the Americans were leaving, along with the military support and air power that had given Kabul a lifeline since 2015, was the final straw.
Aside from the almost daily guerrilla-style attacks by the Taliban and other anti-government groups in Kabul—‘The years long fears of the vehicle in front of you blowing up or the guy on the motorbike opening fire,’ as a friend who read an early version of this book reminded me—the war in Afghanistan had been fought largely in remote districts since the early 2000s. As I wrote in the prologue to this book, once the momentum swung decisively in the Taliban’s favour in the spring of 2020, and areas under government control started shrinking to virtual islands accessible only by air, many rural battlegrounds fell silent. The lives of those who had gained the most since the Taliban’s fall in 2001—lives that had overcome hardship and flourished, which I’d rarely been compelled to write about—were all of a sudden under threat. While their physical safety may not necessarily have been at risk, their personal liberty, the simple freedom to choose the trajectory of one’s own life, certainly was. For them, life without choice was no life at all.
If the threat of such loss had instigated a change in what I felt was pertinent to write about, 15 August completed the about-face.
With the Taliban’s victory came a level of scrutiny and critique that no insurgency warrants, no matter the wrongs of the government it was trying to overthrow nor the infringements on human rights it would institute once in power.
Amid the chaos of that day, I hugged farewell a tearful Aziz Tassal, a journalist with whom I’d worked for years and grown to love for his gentle company and care for his wife, three cheeky young daughters and everyone with whom he’d worked. I’d spent a week sharing a room with him in Uruzgan earlier in the year, reporting for an article published by The Monthly where we traded stories about our mutual friend Aliyas Dayee, a journalist from Helmand who had been assassinated three months earlier (the article won the 2021 Walkley Award for long-form feature writing). He’d calmly taken control when the car he was travelling in with Nanna Muus Steffensen, a journalist and my housemate, came under fire during a Taliban ambush in Maidan Wardak some months before. But on 15 August, he was inconsolable. ‘They betrayed us,’ he sobbed, before undertaking his own harrowing journey to the United States with his family.
The next day I photographed Noorullah Shirzada, a photographer with Agence France-Presse, carrying his baby into the French Embassy. The photo was published the day after by the French newspaper Le monde. Farshad Usyan, a friend who I also consider Afghanistan’s best photojournalist, was also there. His passport was inside the embassy awaiting a visa, but the Taliban weren’t allowing him in. Phone calls were made and eventually someone called his name. He disappeared behind the gate before we got a chance to say goodbye.
That day, 16 August, was also when BBC correspondent Kate Clark was flown out of Kabul.
Extracted from August in Kabul: America’s Last Days in Afghanistan and the Return of the Taliban by Andrew Quilty. Published by Speaking Tiger Books, 2022.
About the Book
As night fell on 15 August 2021, the Taliban swept into Kabul, capital of Afghanistan. After a twenty-year conflict with the United States, its Western allies and a proxy Afghan government, the Islamic militant group once aligned with al Qaeda was about to bury yet another foreign foe in the graveyard of empires. And for the US, the superpower, this was yet another foreign disaster. As cities and towns fell to the Taliban in rapid succession, Western troops and embassy staff scrambled to flee a country of which its government had lost control. To the world, Kabul in 2021 looked like Saigon in 1975.
August in Kabul is the story of how America’s longest mission came to an abrupt and chaotic end, told through the eyes of Afghans whose lives were turned upside down: a young woman who dreams of a university education but whose family now want to give her up to the Taliban in exchange for security; a presidential staffer who works desperately to hold things together as the government collapses around him; a prisoner in the notorious Bagram Prison who suddenly finds himself free when prison guards abandon their post. Andrew Quilty was one of a handful of foreign journalists who stayed in Kabul as the city fell. This remarkable book is his first-hand account of those dramatic final days.
About the Author
Andrew Quilty is the recipient of nine Walkley Awards, including the Gold Walkley, for his work on Afghanistan, where he has been based since 2013. He has also received the George Polk Award, the World Press Photo Award and the Overseas Press Club of America award for his investigation into massacres committed by a CIA-backed Afghan militia. August in Kabul is his first book.
