As she disappears behind her turquoise gate, Behnaz looks over to Omar’s bedroom window once more and then up to the crooked balcony still sitting above her front door. All these paths, she thinks … all these paths that lead from heart to heart are tangled up here in Shaahir Square.
In her young woman’s heart, which she knows is the same as her old woman’s heart, these are the things that matter. These are the things that hold life together.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ARE AN important part of a book for an author. Writing them usually marks the end of the writing process and is the time you finally get to say thank you to all the important people in the writing process who would otherwise remain nameless. Like any good speech, you usually build to a crescendo. With The Night Letters, I want to change that process.
Jane Curry, the owner and managing director of Ventura Press, wrote: ‘It is very rare for an editor to receive credit for their work on a book or get a mention in the sales points. Any appreciation shown is usually from the author, tucked away in the acknowledgements. And yet at the very core of our industry is the quality of the writing.’ While my thanks to my editors are still ‘tucked away’ in the acknowledgements, I want to make them first in that process, for they are an essential part of that ‘core’. What makes a book rise above the ordinary is the work of the editors. I am aware that too many superlatives eventually mean nothing, so I’m going to try to keep this simple.
Thank you, Zoe Hale, for your tough questions, persistence, honesty and kindness. You’re not too tough. Simone Ford, I want to thank you for just about everything, or more precisely, a copyedit and an editor–writer relationship that, for me, was perfection (except for the ‘Track Changes’ thing that we won’t mention again … sorry). I hope these few words sufficiently convey my deep gratitude and admiration to you both. Will you work with me on the next one?
Jane Curry, you are a gem. Thank you for seeing the value in my manuscript and for your joy and enthusiasm. It is infectious. Thank you for the title also, and ditto to all of the above.
I also want to thank Emily O’Neill for the evocative cover design and Holly Jeffery for her marketing expertise. Special appreciation to Jeannette Encinias for allowing me to use ‘Beneath the Sweater and the Skin’, the poem she wrote for her mother.
A few years ago I had the privilege of mentoring women writers living in Afghanistan through the Afghan Women’s Writing Project until that project folded due to lack of funding. I remain humbled by the strength and beauty of the Afghan women writers I worked with. They want war to end, a better life, and equality and freedom for all Afghan women. Their fight for these basic human rights has been long and hard but they remain undeterred. Like so many others, I fear for them with the resurgence of the Taliban. My heart is with them always.
Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries on Earth. It is estimated that forty-two per cent of people live below the poverty line (in the rural areas it is higher), while twenty per cent live just above that line and could fall below it at any time. By all accounts over ninety per cent of Afghan women have been sexually abused. And yet, for the vast majority of women their main concern is not their rights but surviving the daily struggle to keep themselves and their children fed, sheltered, safe and alive.
Richard Flanagan once said that as fiction writers we write what we don’t know, otherwise we are simply writing autobiography. While this is true, have you ever wondered why anyone would want to write about what they don’t know? Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge) believes it is because writers need to know what it feels like to be another person: ‘to help ourselves bear the burden of the mystery of who we are (and) the mystery of who others are.’ We also write to bring you on this journey with us so that you too might imagine what it is like to be another and to share the ‘burden’ of this ‘mystery’. As both writers and readers, we are, together, intrinsically and intuitively entangled in this mystery of fiction and life.
The Night Letters is a work of fiction, apart from Commander Kaftar. Afghanistan’s only female warlord is such an extraordinary character that I could not resist introducing her to you through a cameo role. Because I wanted my representation of Kaftar to be authentic, I relied heavily on Jennifer Percy’s riveting account of meeting the commander, ‘My Terrifying Night with Afghanistan’s Only Female Warlord’. If you read it you will recognise much of Sofia’s interaction with the warlord. For the same reason I have also taken, verbatim, the radio communication between Taliban leader Mullah Baqi and Commander Kaftar, as reported by Tom A. Peter in ‘A Woman’s War: The rise and fall of Afghanistan’s female warlord’. It was just too good to pass up.
A number of years ago I learned of a female entrepreneur running a taxi service out of Kandahar. She became my original inspiration for Fatima, although the taxi service is the only thing the real woman (who otherwise remains a mystery to me) and my invented character of Fatima have in common.
In light of Sofia’s work with midwives, it would be remiss not to mention the work of the Afghan Midwives Association (AMA), the primary purpose of which is to strengthen and support midwives in Afghanistan through education and training. Among their many innovations is a field-based program that aims to increase ‘the visibility, status and respect of midwives within their [remote] communities’. You
