‘When you find yourself keep moving’: adapting to change in A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear

Abstract

In the years following the Afghan communist party’s bloody coup of 1978, Afghanistan has been devastated by conflicts that have killed and displaced millions: its people having accounted for the largest refugee group in the world during the 1990s. With his second novel, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, the Afghan writer and filmmaker Atiq Rahimi vividly conveys the experience of someone forced to begin life again in exile. In this essay, it is argued that, for this endeavour, Rahimi pays particular attention to the anguish and confusion caused by the loss of one’s sense of personal-identity. However, it is also argued that the author is similarly interested in the empowering aspects of such a loss; in particular, the opportunity for re-examining inherited understandings about who we are. As such, the essay explores Rahimi’s method of setting the debilitating and enabling effects of exile against one another. It concludes by maintaining that Rahimi’s intention, in doing this, is to reveal the dangers inherent in upholding too rigid a conception of personal identity; especially for those who have been divided from the land and culture of their birth.