[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW7aGiuKZaU&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
Lacking the power of the book…
It may be freezing cold here in England and every road and train closed down due to snow, but I am having a great time running on the indoor treadmill. Some days I can clock 2 hours.
When I run I listen to books on tape. This is a trick my friend Mark Bittman taught me, and it works.
This week I am listening to The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini.
Most of these books-on-tape are read by professional readers, and they’re quite good. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and in fact the whole Swedish series was read by Simon Vance, who does a stellar job of creating characters and voices.
But what makes The Kite Runner so remarkably compelling, once you get into it, is that it is read by the author. Hosseini is no professional reader. At times he even stumbles a bit. But his passion for his own work comes through in the reading.. and of course, in the writing,
Watching any movie after you have read the book is always a disappointment, and this is no exception. (Neither was the Steig Larsson experience).
But listening to Hosseini write about, and talk about, his own life in Afghanistan, I started to think about any videos I have seen made by Afghanis about their own lives and their own world – and I could not think of one.
I could think of a lot of news clips and videos I have seen about Afghanistan. I could think of a few Hollywood movies I have seen about Afghanistan. I could even think of a few documentaries I had seen about Afghanistan – including a few by some people who work or worked for me. But I could not recall one single piece by an Afghan about his or her own country.
Strange.
It’s not like we have not been in Afghanistan for the past 10 years.
It’s not like we don’t have daily contact with that country.
It’s not like people in Afghanistan don’t have access to video cameras.
And it’s not like there isn’t a platform for film and video in this world, because God only knows there is.
What we have not done is to put together the idea of people telling their own stories and publishing their own stories.
We’ve done it in print.
This is why Hosseini writes so passionately about Afghanistan. It is something he now only knows, it is something he lives.
By the same token, it is why Philip Roth can write so passionately about Newark, New Jersey.
That was his life, as Kabul was Hosseini’s.
What we have not done is said to Hosseini (or a thousand potential Hosseinis – or Roths, for that matter), here’s a video camera. Use it as you once used a pencil.
Tell me your story.
