{"id":7048,"date":"2010-10-14T00:00:10","date_gmt":"2010-10-14T07:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/muslimahmediawatch.org\/?p=7048"},"modified":"2010-10-14T00:00:10","modified_gmt":"2010-10-14T07:00:10","slug":"however-tall-the-mountain-stories-from-an-afghan-girls-soccer-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/mmw\/2010\/10\/however-tall-the-mountain-stories-from-an-afghan-girls-soccer-team\/","title":{"rendered":"However Tall the Mountain: Stories from an Afghan Girls’ Soccer Team"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Named from an Afghan saying that \u201cHowever tall the mountain, there\u2019s always a road,\u201d However Tall the Mountain: A Dream, Eight Girls, & A Journey Home<\/a><\/em> is the true story of a project conceived by the book\u2019s author, Awista Ayub, to bring teenaged girls from Afghanistan to the United States for soccer training.\u00a0 The story follows the eight girls\u2019 experiences in the United States as well as in Afghanistan before and after the trip.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Image via Harper Collins. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The story itself is interesting and engaging, and quick to read.\u00a0 Although the writing is at times overly sentimental, the story is moving and it\u2019s easy to cheer for the team\u2019s success.\u00a0 The book is strongest and most genuine when reflecting, in the first person, Ayub\u2019s own experiences and identity as an Afghan-American woman (a label in which, she writes, \u201cthat hyphen includes and divides.\u201d) At the end of the book, her trip to Afghanistan for the first time since she left it as a baby, evokes questions about home and identity that are also very powerfully expressed.\u00a0 It would also have been interesting to see some of the girls telling some of their own stories directly (rather than only Ayub\u2019s retelling of them.)<\/p>\n

That said, However Tall the Mountain<\/em> generally does a good job of reflecting the diversity of personalities, backgrounds, families, and experiences of the young participants involved in the soccer team, who\u00a0all come across as very active characters in the story.\u00a0 They all have different relationships to their country, their culture, and the violence they\u2019ve experienced, which gives a three-dimensional picture of each girl herself and also of the team as a whole, and, by extension, of young Afghan women.\u00a0 Even the physical descriptions of the girls show a widely varied group, and\u2014with the major, cringe-worthy exception of the description of one girl to the famous National Geographic<\/em> cover from many years ago\u2014steer clear of stereotypes of what \u201cAfghan women\u201d look like (or \u201cshould\u201d look like.)<\/p>\n

Afghan culture is generally reflected as complex and able to change; for example, one girl\u2019s father always encouraged all of his children to be involved in sports and other physical activities, while another\u2019s brother forbids her from playing soccer; overall, girls\u2019 soccer is described as unfamiliar to Afghan culture, but this doesn\u2019t mean that its introduction is uniformly resisted or seen in a negative light.<\/p>\n

Religion is also portrayed as a positive and natural part of the girls\u2019 lives (and of Ayub\u2019s own life), rather than only as an oppressive force.\u00a0 I also appreciated that the story follows the girls\u2019 lives after they return to Afghanistan, with their trip to the United States positioned as an important moment, but not as the end of their story.\u00a0 As far as portrayals of young Afghan women by Western writers go, this is definitely one of the more nuanced.<\/p>\n

The focus of the book is on personal stories, without overtly trying to make any political point.\u00a0 Of course, this isn\u2019t really a context where it\u2019s possible to write about Afghan women without being political, whether intentionally or not.\u00a0 Ayub doesn\u2019t pretend that a small soccer team is going to completely transform Afghanistan, and she doesn\u2019t position herself as a hero or savior of the soccer team members. This is definitely something that could be easily projected on to her; the story could be read as a narrative of a courageous American saving her less-fortunate sisters, and there\u2019s not a lot in the book that actively rejects this.\u00a0 I would have liked to see more attention to the political situation in which the book would be read.<\/p>\n

The most disturbing example of this was Ayub\u2019s positioning of the Taliban as often the only source of violence and oppression in Afghanistan comes across as simplistic. \u00a0Even in the prologue, it was the new Marxist revolutionary government in 1978 that caused her family to flee, but it\u2019s when \u201cthe United States entered Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban\u201d that possibilities of return are opened (she later says about this period that \u201cThe door to Afghanistan was open.\u201d) It would be easy for someone not familiar with Afghanistan not to realize from this opening section that the government that forced Ayub\u2019s family out of Afghanistan is wholly separate from the Taliban government, and it isn\u2019t until partway through the book that this history is described in more detail.<\/p>\n

The United States government\u2019s role in putting the Taliban in<\/em> power in the first place is also glossed over; she does eventually mention that \u201cAt first, arms and funds from Western countries bolstered the Taliban,\u201d but the dichotomy of Taliban = bad guys and United States = good guys generally goes unchallenged.\u00a0 There is also little said about the destruction caused by the international forces currently occupying Afghanistan, which conveniently allows this kind of story to be told without requiring any reflections on Western complicity in any of the violence.\u00a0 I\u2019m not trying to reclaim any kind of respect for the Taliban here, but I do think it\u2019s problematic to position them as the only source of widespread problems in Afghanistan, as this book often does.<\/p>\n

In other words, it\u2019s hard to imagine massive political transformations coming out of this book, and it could probably be easily read as a justification for various forms of imperialism, which is a serious problem.\u00a0 That said, if read with a critical eye, it does present an overall portrait of Afghan women and of Afghan-American communities that is much more complex than a lot of other literature out there, and a challenge to the uni-dimensional and passive ways in which Afghan women are often portrayed.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Named from an Afghan saying that \u201cHowever tall the mountain, there\u2019s always a road,\u201d However Tall the Mountain: A Dream, Eight Girls, & A Journey Home is the true story of a project conceived by the book\u2019s author, Awista Ayub, to bring teenaged girls from Afghanistan to the United States for soccer training.\u00a0 The story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[55,56,160,590,1335],"class_list":["post-7048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booksmagazines","tag-afghan-women","tag-afghanistan","tag-awista-ayub","tag-however-tall-the-mountain","tag-taliban"],"yoast_head":"\nHowever Tall the Mountain: Stories from an Afghan Girls' Soccer Team<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Named from an Afghan saying that \u201cHowever tall the mountain, 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