Danger Music by Eddie Ayres

Author:Eddie Ayres [Eddie Ayres]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

In Afghanistan, violence was not confined to the Taliban. I began to understand how it was encoded into everyone’s life here. Even the land itself was violent: there were minor earth tremors every few days, shaking the Mexican House enough for sweet Cami to wake us up and make sure we were not scared.

There were so many things I could have been, often was, scared of—the tremors, the Taliban, kidnapping gangs, the traffic, Dr Sarmast, the resentful Afghan teachers, the hopeless junior staff, the angry kids. Being scared became a background noise for me, one I blended into my life until I only noticed it when I was going to school, or when a bomb blast surged from a distance.

Despite the ocean of smiles, the laughter, the glee at school, there was always a feeling that violence was not far away—the angry look, the swipe at a friend, the snatch of an instrument, swift bullets for words. I had a young man called Shoaib for music theory. He was always very polite, charming even, again with a disarming smile and a graciousness that few men in the West could ever muster. Shoaib had an argument with a teacher, the sergeant major teacher, who told him he shouldn’t wear un-Islamic clothing (necklace and rings). Shoaib totally lost it. He smashed a wall and had to be pacified by two friends. This was after he had smashed a guitar. Dr Sarmast wanted to talk with Shoaib’s parents, but his dad was in the army fighting the Afghan fight, an insurgency in the Panjshir Valley, and there was no possibility his mum would come on her own.

Anger. So much anger, always there. Kids, adults. Men, women. Stress, pessimism, frustration, impotence. I could never reconcile the contrast between Afghanistan’s gracious music, manners and kindness and the brutality of its reactive behaviour. How could you be calm here? How could you not get angry in that world?

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