We are perhaps over-fond of saying that globalization brings nations together, abolishes distance, leads to interdependence and so forth. These easy phrases grow smooth with repetition. But actually, an honest telling of the Kurdish story does involve a "learning experience" about American history also. This is no mere slab of coffee-table gorgeousness, designed to evoke the quaint and the folkloric. It is replete with blood and tragedy and struggle and all the other raw materials of humanity and ought to engage us even if it did not expose our complicity. Look again at the photographs of the Kurds, like a river flowing uphill, as they flee their homeland en masse in the spring of 1991. America had gone to war in the name of these people so recently subjected to massacre by poison gas. Forgetting, here, is not an option.
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KURDISTAN: In the Shadow of History. By Susan Meiselas . With chapter commentaries by Martin van Bruinessen . Random House: 390 pp., $100
Homeward Bound
December 07, 1997|CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS | Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Nation, has reported from Kurdistan and, with the photographer Ed Kashi, produced a book entitled "When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds."
Nothing is flawless. Arthur Henderson was not British prime minister in the 1930s but a member of Parliament, for instance. But this is like the knot of imperfection that pious weavers include in the warp and woof of a Persian rug. This book is everything that scholarship and journalism and humanism ought to aspire to be. I have spent a scribbling life in the service of the disputed proposition that one well-chosen word is worth 1,000 pictures, but I have to concede, in the face of Meiselas, that my words can do no more than point you at her photographs.
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