Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar (23 page)

Over our food, which we dug into with our hands, Atta boasted proudly of Pashean's many talents, telling me that in addition to his prowess as an entertainer, he was also a professional blackmailer, a master thief, and a prolific murderer, with an estimated fifty victims killed by his own hand. As Atta related this last statistic in delighted exclamation, the other men and boys in the room laughed and stared reverentially at Pashean, who grinned and nodded his head in acknowledgment.

After the trays with our food were taken away and we were sipping at sugary black tea and munching dried mulberries, Pashean began to perform, regaling us with vaudevillian skits and dances, bawdy jokes, and gossipy, extemporaneous riffs on everything from sex to politics. To the ecstatic amusement of Atta and his boys, Pashean acted out a skit that he called “The Unwilling Bride on Her Wedding Night.” After encouraging one of the boys to play the “eager bridegroom,” Pashean placed a turban cloth over
his head to resemble a burka. As the “groom” got into the spirit of things by attempting to paw Pashean, giggling hysterically as he did so, Pashean was transformed into a skittish virgin bride, a wriggling bundle of firmly locked knees, defensive slaps, and falsetto mewings of mock-terror.

Pashean called his next piece “The Willing Bride on Her Wedding Night.” Using the same youth as his stand-in for the bridegroom, Pashean imitated the amorous cooings and heated gasps of a supposedly impassioned woman, and proceeded to climb into his lap and rub the boy's thighs lasciviously. The skit ended decorously enough, with Pashean lying supine, his head nestled in the groom's lap, staring longingly into his eyes.

To my Western eyes, this was exceedingly tame fare, more
Perils of Pauline
than
Sex in the City
, but to the Afghans in the room, Pashean's bodice-ripping farce was heady stuff, and had them gagging and weeping with laughter and embarrassed incredulity.

After a few minutes, Pashean enacted his own death scene. He called it simply “The Death of Samad Pashean.” The performance involved Pashean lying prone on the floor in front of us and periodically gasping for an extended period of time before finally falling silent. The death rattle was very authentic.

But then clearly, Pashean was no stranger to death, and afterward, as if to underscore the point, he began bragging about one of the murders he had committed. It seemed that a man had insulted him, and in order to avenge his honor, Pashean had later gone to his home, killed him, and then stolen his shoes. To have made off with his victim's shoes was the height of effrontery—and a very funny thing to do, as well, for everyone laughed uproariously about this.

Next, turning to me, Pashean offered to kill anyone I might want dead in Kabul for the equivalent of two thousand American dollars. When I told him that his price was absurdly high, he guffawed good-naturedly. As I had suspected, Pashean's price was just an initial negotiating position. “We can talk price,” he said with a wink.

Like all good jesters, Pashean had some irreverent things to say about the powerful personalities of his country. He singled out Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, for particular disdain. Karzai, he intoned, was like one of the stupid mountain dogs that Afghans keep in their villages, which go off hunting by themselves in the winter only to lose their way home again in the snow. It was a parable that left me flummoxed until my friend interpreted. “Karzai has been with the Americans for so long, he has forgotten what Afghanistan is like.”

As Pashean went on, issuing a string of new quips about Karzai—none of them complimentary—I began to discern where he was coming from. Like almost everyone else in the room, Pashean was an ethnic Tajik. Hamid Karzai was an ethnic Pashtun, as were the hated Taliban whom he had replaced. Thanks to the Americans, who had handpicked him, Karzai had become Afghanistan's interim president, but he had been forced to share his government with leaders of the Tajik- and Uzbek-dominated Northern Alliance, whose fighters had swept down from Charikar to seize Kabul after receiving cash, arms, and advice from the CIA. But ever since winning a majority of the votes in the country's first postwar presidential elections—held six months previously—Karzai had purged many of them from their positions and replaced them with his own loyalists.

Pashean accused Karzai of being ungrateful to the men who had fought in the jihad. “The mujahideen are having a hard time now. Karzai is kicking them out from the government. But if people have worked hard for you, you have to give them something in return.” He added, grumblingly, that most of the government's U.S.-funded reconstruction projects were taking place in Pashtun areas, rather than Tajik ones, and he asked, “Why are the people who supported the Taliban being rewarded, and not those who fought them?”

Pashean knew how to please a crowd. The men in the room wore aggrieved expressions, and they nodded their heads in agreement with his remarks.

Turning to me again, he brought up the U.S.-sponsored campaign to demobilize and disarm the former mujahideen fighters. Pashean said, “The Afghans are like scorpions, you know, and the Americans are trying to cut off our tails. The Americans are trying to turn the Afghans from scorpions into harmless frogs, but it won't work.” Pashean wore a gleeful but challenging expression. “We are turning in only the bad weapons, but keeping the good ones for ourselves, just in case we need them one day in the future.” He cackled with laughter, and all the other men in the room did too.

Pashean concluded, “We Afghans have learned how to eat for ourselves, like cows, who, with their cuds, know how to find the good stuff to eat, and how to spit out the bad.”

AMY WILENTZ

IN HAITI, PEOPLE ARE OFTEN ON THE BRINK OF STARVATION, SO THEY
think about food a lot. Haitians know what they like—it's very specific. They like pork from skinny little Creole pigs, but not from great fat pink American pigs. They like rice grown in Haiti and cooked so that there's some crunchy stuff at the bottom called
gratan
that's burned and sweet. That's the best part, the part “where all the grease, fat, and spices go,” a friend of mine says. They like scrawny Haitian chickens that scrounge around and eat what they find; big fat white grain-fed American chickens don't have the right catch-as-catch-can diet for the Haitian palate. Most important, Haitians like food cooked over a charcoal fire. This doesn't mean the food has to be cooked directly on the coals or just above them. Usually, in fact, the food is cooked in an iron pan or a big old pot over the charcoal. But for Haitians, the same thing cooked in the same pan over a gas or electric fire just wouldn't be as good.

Haitians like some strange things, too, but all their tastes are grounded in the idea of the usefulness—and scarcity—of food. Food is not a decoration in Haiti. Haitians, like many malnourished people, are obsessed with foods that are supposed to give you energy, get you through the day. I was once invited to a
tom tom
lunch by a radical priest who is now an adviser to
the Haitian government.
Tom tom
is one of many meals said by Haitians to
bay fos
—to give strength. It's an African dish made with very thick, yellowish breadfruit puree. It's my friend's favorite dish. You pick up sticky scoops of the mash with your fingers (already a bizarre thing for a Westerner) and eat it along with a delicious liquid meat stew. You don't even chew the breadfruit. The bits of
tom tom
sink like concrete into your stomach. Haitians like the way those unchewed bits of carbohydrate make even a small meal feel satisfying, but I wouldn't be surprised if an X-ray showed that the
tom tom
I ate at that meal more than a decade ago is still lodged somewhere within.

In August 2010 I went out to the provinces with my
tom tom
–eating friend. We went way up to the northwest reaches of the island, into the profound countryside. We stayed in a church compound—a modest place. I slept on a hard bed and across the room was a big tarantula whose position I checked every few hours in the light of my iPhone (it never moved). I had come to see a gathering of peasants from the surrounding area, and they came in by the hundreds, many of them astride donkeys. For dinner one night, we ate stew prepared by the church ladies. It was delicious, but I kept getting pieces of bone, fat, gristle, and skin. I gave my bowl back to the woman who was serving and asked for some meat, please. The word for meat in Creole is
viann
.

But clearly my understanding of the word was wrong. “You have
viann
there, already,” my friend said, looking at the pieces of fat and gristle in my bowl. What I wanted, he told me, was something Haitians call
chèr
or flesh. But the stew had no flesh in it. Flesh is too fancy, my friend told me. Too expensive. The peasants eat gristle, fat, and skin, and sell the flesh in markets down in the towns. Still, the stew was tasty, with three kinds of root vegetables and chicken fat and pasta floating in an intense shallot-flavored broth, and pieces of dense, velvety Haitian avocado on the side.

Two of Haiti's staples are big energy foods: sugar and coffee. Sugar and coffee were grown in colonial times in Haiti and are still grown there today.
The two crops are exemplary of opposite poles in Haitian history and economics. Sugar is a plantation food requiring large tracts of flatlands and intensive labor. Coffee is a mountain crop that can be grown in small individual plots. In colonial days, sugar was grown on the plantations by slaves and coffee in the mountains, by runaways.

Sometimes I think about the first time I was given a piece of sugarcane to chew. This was decades ago, long before the earthquake that struck on January 12, 2010. I remember watching a cane and coconut salesman on the corner of Delmas in downtown Port-au-Prince chopping off a piece of a long, thick brown stick that looked something like bamboo. The traffic was going by, or not going by, and making a huge racket of blasting music and honking horns and talk, talk, talk; shouting, too. I was watching this man cut—and I had eyes only for him. He wore a black button-down shirt that draped over his thin shoulders as if they were a sharp, child-size hanger. He had on long cutoff shorts, and wore black plastic flip-flops on his way gigantic feet. He concentrated on his work and didn't give me a lot of pleasantries, as Haitians normally will do. He didn't want to cut himself with his long knife. He was working away, and it didn't take him long.

Meanwhile, I was watching. He also sold coconuts that he chopped open; I was thinking that maybe that would have been easier to enjoy than this cane. The big green coconuts were sitting in a row, a few piled precariously upon the tops of others. Haitians like to drink coconut water from underripe fruit. Unlike water itself, coconut juice is always clean, and it's sweet and refreshing. This nice man also supplied straws. And you just drank out of the shell. It's easy to drink out of the coconut, and you naturally make the analogy: coconut shell . . . cup. But there was no translating the stick he was cutting into any food or culinary vessel one was used to. You couldn't look at it and say
cup
, or
plate
. As the heat of the traffic jam behind me radiated toward our corner, I was thinking,
This is where the word
cane
comes from
—the hard, brown, upright stalk of the sugarcane plant. (It turns out that the word for sugarcane and for a walking stick and for a rod to punish
with all come from the same root: the word
canna
, which is Latin for reed.
Kanasik
is the word for sugarcane in Haitian Creole, from the French
canne à sucre
.)

The sugar man did his work in an instant. He wielded a mean machete, and he did not know—nor did he care—where the word for cane comes from. He handed me a little less than a foot of stick, with the top seven or so inches peeled back to show the dense white flesh. The friend I was with gave the cane man a small amount of change from her purse. He cut a piece of cane for her, too. I looked at mine. It was like something a gardener might know what to do with.
Oh, I'm going to eat this? Yeah, right
. But how, I wanted to know. The friend I was with began to show me.
Comme ça
, she said. And she bent her head toward it. It was a devotional movement.

Is there a way to describe the taste of raw cane? I mean not just
sweet
, but some way to capture the entire experience. Let me try. First of all, wherever you are, if you're eating raw cane, it's hot out, and you're hot and thirsty and this piece of cane doesn't look as if it's going to do much for you. Cane that's ready to be consumed like this is extremely unprepossessing, like a branch of an old tree that some squirrel has knocked down and tried unsuccessfully to eat, or to kill. It looks mangled, predigested.

So you hold the dry brown stalk in your hand and you dip your head over the exposed inner wood, that's what the white flesh is like, like fresh wood soaked in sugar juice. But until you begin to . . . to . . . to
gnaw
on it, you've got no idea how wet it is, how much juice it holds. You take a bite, and it turns out it's all sugar juice and wood. The thing explodes in your mouth, boom, and you rip the wood away from the stalk with your teeth and chew. You look like a ruminant animal, chewing and chewing, with that stick in your hand so everyone knows what it is you're working over in your mouth. The sugar goes right into your blood, at least it feels that way. The juice sops into your system, and you're rehydrated in an instant.

Meanwhile there's this unpleasantness with the wood. It's like old chewing gum—it loses its savor, yet unconscionably, it remains on the scene.
Now you have a mouth full of masticated white stalk, a sort of resistant, woody, tasteless mass that is, at all costs, not to be swallowed. I'd watch other people deal with this: they spat it out on the street, where it rested up against the curb alongside chewed-down mango pits and the split and empty skins of keneps—lychee-nutlike fruits. So I spat mine out—this is not a process that makes one feel delicate and feminine. It's more like being a stevedore or a gangster from the 1930s, spittin' a chaw.