The War in Us: A Reflection on “Selling Kabul”
I remember watching Walter Cronkite announce Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. I was a nine-year-old kid in Michigan, doing the evening dishes. It was my first memory of “war,” and it was indelible. I didn’t know it was possible to take another country, like we did on board games. I naively thought the remaking of borders was, simply put, history.
The following year, the Iran–Iraq war started, and my Iraqi cousins were called to serve. Thus began a daily negotiation between my American privilege and my Iraqi precarity. What followed that war, almost without pause, were nearly three decades of conflict between my two nations. Yet, in the U.S., people just went on with life. Very little stopped. The bars were open, the mall was open, and the theater was open.
After a pandemic year of closed gatherings and collective loss, I wonder — will Americans arrive to Sylvia Khoury’s breathtaking play, Selling Kabul, differently? Will they recognize in themselves the harrowing bargains we make for survival? Have we become more intimate with our own history? Because, in this searing play, we meet people we might know: the mothers, the lovers, those working jobs they don’t believe in, those working jobs they do believe in. Each character suffers a loss: of person, of potential, of pride. We know these people, we could be these people. Together they’ve lost their belonging — and, as the play’s title suggests, their nation was sold out for individual survival. Afghans have been living with the cost of war for decades. I’d like to remind Americans: so have we.
The brilliant playwright, doctor, and human, Sylvia Khoury, asks us to intimately reflect on how our value-systems cost this one Afghan family so much, and in doing so, how our value-systems have come to define who we are. As I write, my news feed tells me of a school shooting in Michigan, a supreme court on the verge of overturning Roe vs. Wade, and another coronavirus variant billed as “cause for concern” or “midterm hype” depending on which news you watch. There’s a war here too, and perhaps, like Jawid, we’ve sold off parts of our country for the comfort of our TV.
It is possible that Sylvia’s play comes at a time we are poised to grapple with our place in a shared story. Multiple homeless and hungry people passed me on my way to the theater. When I sat in my seat, I looked at the masked audience, knowing someone here, too, lost their husband, their child, their potential, their job. I watched four profound actors on stage. I know these precious actors well, I know the stakes in their lives - how they carried this play for 19 months during the pandemic, how they faced industry-wide unemployment. I know that when they fight for family on stage, they’ve had to leave family behind in other states, or fly grandparents in to look after their young children — all just to tell this story for you. While none of that compares to the reality of their Afghan counterparts, I am reminded of the life investment it takes to even tell a story, to make a difference.
I left Sylvia’s play with an overwhelming feeling that I’ve been fundamentally changed over the last decades of war, in ways I can never fully unpack. I saw in her characters ordinary people, in impossible situations, becoming unrecognizable to themselves. When I look deep enough, the nine-year-old me doing dishes in front of the evening news would admit — there are unrecognizable parts of me now too.
What has the last 20 years cost you?
If, like Afiya and Jawid, you could collect what you’ve saved over the last two decades and invest it in someone else’s life…would you?
Sylvia’s play is a battle cry for us to do just that, to, at all costs, simply invest in each other.
Heather Raffo
December 2021
