In Nazi Germany, a notorious ceremony was held known as the Book Burnings—an event in which any text deemed contrary to Nazism, or displeasing to Nazi ideology, was burned. Works of major writers from various fields were destroyed: anything related to Marxism and communism, and books by authors such as Walter Benjamin, André Gide, Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. Like the Holocaust, this event can be understood as one of the moments in which the core of Nazism manifested itself fully. But here in Kabul, although the ruling regime is far too uneducated—and too illiterate even—to organize a so-called book burning, what they have done to books in practice is something that can be described most accurately as book-killing.
In Malī Market—Kabul’s largest book market—three floors once housed bookstores. Today, only one floor remains active, and even that has only a handful of shops. These remaining bookstores, unlike in the past, are no longer filled with a peaceful silence created by the dignity and presence of books. Instead, their silence now reflects suffocation—a sign of their slow, painful decline. Even before August 15, books in this city were not greatly valued; the profession of bookselling was often dismissed as “pointless” or “profitless”—and the second part, at least, has always been true.
Dust has tried—and failed, but not entirely—to swallow Kabul’s books. Its presence on the covers of the remaining volumes reveals their abandonment and isolation in those forgotten corners. Some bookstores in Kabul have not imported a single new book for years. Partly because the book market has collapsed to an unprecedented degree, and partly because the books they imported long ago still remain unsold. Mahdi [a pseudonym], who manages one of Kabul’s main bookstores, tells Public Tribune:
“Out of every ten customers who visit us, at least a few ask whether we buy their books instead of selling ours.”
He adds that booksellers live in constant worry about how the regime might treat books—and those who keep them. Mahdi believes that the little spark of curiosity and enthusiasm young people once had for “knowledge” and “awareness” has been extinguished. Young people can see for themselves that those who today hold power, wealth, and influence in Kabul are not products of education or reading. They reached what they have through entirely different means—and not through books.
Books in Kabul have met the fate Borges once described as “the best thing placed in the worst possible place.” Unlike other countries in the region and the world, bookselling and librarianship in Kabul have not taken shape even as an industry. Their commercial value—their bourgeois dimension—has not been enough to give books a market comparable to brand-name electronics, nor to ensure that demand consistently approaches supply.
It is unreasonable to expect a “breadless” population to buy, read, and love “books.” The way out of this swamp is not to encourage people—one by one—to read more. Rather, the material and concrete conditions of life must change so that speaking meaningfully about reading and about a thriving book culture becomes possible at all.
