Come Back to Afghanistan Blog #5

I was surprised to hear that many of my classmates did not enjoy the novel. In my opinion, it was one of the most educational and modern books that we could have read for this time period. Hyder put his ideas into a highly graspable context, using well thought out metaphors as if they were simple sentences. The plotline was definitely one of the ones that I was fond of from the selection of books that we read this year; I would even venture to say that maybe it was the novel that I most enjoyed this year. The way he retold his story of going and feeling like a foreigner was something that I have always wondered about myself, being of Arab descent and never having been to the Middle East. I feel like if I went to anywhere there, I would be completely lost without the help of translators or natives, even though it is where I am from. However, there are both sides of me; on my mom’s side, my family has been traced back to William Brewster on the Mayflower. So, I am umpteenth generation on my mom’s side and the first on my dad’s. I think that the story was also very relevant to what is happening right now in the world. It gave me a much better perspective of Afghanistan and how the country is governed, as well as the American influence. I am embarrassed to say that I really had no idea about anything to do with Afghanistan before. I basically grouped it together with all the other Arab countries in that part of the globe, but now I realize it is a completely separate world. They do not even speak Arabic, and when the Arabs controlled the military base in Kabul the Afghans talked about them badly and made fun of their customs. The book really helped me understand what Afghanistan is really about in terms of government, culture, and more.