Kaboul mon Hiroshima

Abstract

In an interview after the publication of his The Patience Stone (Syngué sabour, 2008), Atiq Rahimi succinctly summed up his reaction to the French film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). ‘Je ne comprenais rien, et pourtant, j’étais bouleversé’, he said, ‘Je me suis dit: Kaboul sera mon Hiroshima’ (Chemin 2008: para. 1). This apparently innocuous comment discloses the identity of ‘M.D.’, a writer to whom he dedicated his novel, as Marguerite Duras, the scriptwriter of the film. It sounds disconcerting from the mouth of a Dari-speaking Afghan author who received asylum in France, given the allegations of Eurocentrism made against the film’s screenplay and Cathy Caruth’s reading of it. While offering virtually no glimpse into the man’s past, the film consecrates most of its dialogue as well as flashbacks to reconstruct the woman’s fragmented memories. Hiroshima thus serves as the site of a femme tondue’s struggle to work through her personal trauma, not the collective suffering of Japanese hibakusha. As such, Duras’s text does not provide a suitable aesthetic or narrative format to explore non-European experiences of war and atrocities, let alone long-term systemic oppression. In this respect, Rahimi made a strange choice: he turned to such a Eurocentric text as Hiroshima mon amour, despite the possibility of inadvertently marginalizing his own people’s trauma. This chapter, then, seeks to map out the ways Rahimi’s text appropriates Duras’s screenplay to articulate the personal and collective traumas experienced ‘somewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere’.