Atiq Rahimi would have good reason to be pessimistic about the future of politics. Born in Afghanistan to a royalist father, he then fought the Soviet regime, only to see it fall into the hands of the Taliban. During the American occupation, he returned to the country to work with young people, until the country returned to the grip of the Taliban. And the expression of distress and bewilderment that he reads on the faces of Ukrainians invaded by Russia, he saw it on the faces of Afghans when he was a teenager.
“It’s exactly like the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Red Army in 1979. I recognize in these faces the distress and disarray that I saw on the faces of Afghans at that time,” he said in an interview. .
However, the epistolary exchanges that Atiq Rahimi had with his daughter Alice during the pandemic, which are recorded in the book If only at nightpublished by POL, are not pessimistic.
“All changes in humanity always begin with a crisis,” he said in a telephone interview from Paris. He compares the time we are living in to that, shattered by the Black Death and the wars, which preceded the Renaissance. However, according to him, humanity has been built, since the Renaissance, on an egosystem, and it must now be part of an ecosystem. A kind of new Renaissance, nothing less.
“We have built for ourselves, since the Renaissance, an egosystem which is in the process of collapsing. Man must return to an ecosystem to reinvent himself. Humanity needs to reinvent itself. »
“Our tragedy is that we are living this change and participating in this change,” he says.
restore hope
He admits it in an interview, the epistolary exchange he undertook with his daughter was then intended to give him hope, her whose last year of conservatory had been interrupted by the pandemic, and whose he wanted to maintain the momentum.
Each crisis, he continues, pushes humanity to question itself, “and this questioning gives us a new perspective, a new path, a new point of view”.
“And how are we going to be born,” writes his daughter Alice, in one of her letters. This is the question that many are asking. Not necessarily in the same way…”
When he writes to his daughter, born in France, about Afghan culture, Atiq Rahimi says that it is a culture that combines the past. It is a culture, he writes, “in which tradition prevails over modernity, the past over the present, memories over dreams. Yes, over there, we cherish the past; because the future, if we don’t know it, is thought out and written in advance. »
Afghanistan, Atiq Rahimi fled when it was under the yoke of the Soviet Union, of which his own brother was also a bitter defender. He also recounts this episode in one of the letters written to his daughter. To flee to Pakistan, he and his family had to rely on the mujahideen. Alice’s mother had to pretend that she was illiterate, although she had done a year of medicine at the faculty of Kabul.
Today, with the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, he views the current Afghan situation with bitterness.
“And what a charade to see, twenty years later, the same North Americans trying to bring the Taliban back into the Afghan government. With this possible return of the army of darkness, I can say that history is repeating itself because it has not yet reached its reality. Because unfinished,” he wrote.
A global malaise
However, he believes that the situation in Afghanistan is only one manifestation of a global malaise, the country being regularly at the heart of major global issues. “That things are going badly in Afghanistan is an indication that in the world nothing is going well. […] Unfortunately, international politics is in a state of incredible uncertainty. Marx said that history does not repeat itself, it stutters. Well, she no longer stutters, she repeats herself, and moreover in a very chaotic way. »
I can say that history is repeating itself because it has not yet reached its reality
Meanwhile, reality is also splitting into two, virtual reality having taken precedence over reality tout court, at least during the pandemic. This virtual reality, Atiq Rahimi describes it as confinement “in a world of which we are not the author”.
“No doubt you will be surprised to hear me talk obsessively about my desire to return to the reality of the world, thanks to this writing,” he wrote to his daughter. But beware, this is hardly for the sake of realism. No. I have no desire to come to terms with reality. »
It is not close either to be reconciled with politics, he who asserts himself as an anarchist. “My father was a monarchist, my sister was a feminist, my brother was a communist, and I am an anarchist, that is to say someone who always opposes politics,” he says.