In
the beginning of Shooting Kabul the
main character, Fadi Nurzai, is getting ready
to leave his home in Afghanistan with his family. As they are getting on
the truck that will take them over the Afghani-Pakistani border the Taliban
show up, and in the rush to get aboard he lets go of his little sister Mariam's
hand and she is left behind. The family arrives in America and begins to
assimilate, with Fadi's sister and father getting jobs, while Fadi attends school. At school he tries to forget about what happened with Mariam but he
can't let go of the guilt and he feels that he has to do something to find her
and bring her back. He feels that he begins to fit in at his school when he finds the
art room where he makes some friends. During art class Fadi finds out about
a photography contest with a grand prize of two roundtrip plane tickets to
either China, India, or Kenya. Fadi decides that if he was able to get to India
then he could easily just hop the border into Pakistan and then try to find
Mariam there. He already has a long experience with photography from taking
pictures with his father in the hills outside of Kabul, so he decides to enter
the contest. When the winner of the contest is announced, Fadi doesn't win, but his partner in the contest, Anh, does win second place. At Anh's award ceremony, Fadi looks at pictures taken in a refugee camp and he
recognizes his sister, in one of them. After they find out where Mariam is, his family contacts a refugee agency and has her sent to them.
Fadi
begins his new life in America rather shy and quiet, because he doesn't know anyone there. After 9/11, he becomes even more shy because he doesn't want to draw attention to himself. Two boys, Ike and Felix, begin to
bully him because of his ethnicity, calling him a "towel head" and a
"terrorist", but as Fadi adjusts and makes friends at his new school
he gets them to stop bullying him and others by throwing the two in a lake,
even though at first he wanted more severe physical revenge. Fadi carries the
guilt from leaving his sister behind right until the end of the story and that
really shapes many of his actions throughout the book. If his sister had not
been left behind he would not have signed up for the photography contest and he
wouldn’t have become friends with Anh in the first place. The book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E.
Frankweiler is very important to him and he draws comparisons to it a
lot. Fadi empathizes with the character Claudia as she is hiding out in a
museum because they both have left their old homes and have to go through a
difficult adjustment to get used to their new one. "Fadi blinked, his eyes watery. For all the problems in
Afghanistan, this was still home." He
is described as having "unruly dark hair" and a nose that had been
broken once. Anh and Fadi's father both think that he is a person with noble
intentions of getting his sister back.
The
theme of Shooting Kabul is that
family can be a very strong force. Many of Fadi's actions are driven by the love for his little sister. Fadi's immediate and extended family help him find her
because they all want Mariam back as badly as he does. A loss of a family
member affects everyone within the family, and when Mariam is left in
Afghanistan everyone becomes depressed. They all blame
themselves for her loss, and experience unwarranted feelings
of guilt. Every person in his family tells himself or herself that they are guilty, and each one of them tells someone
else how they were directly responsible for leaving Mariam behind. Fadi's older sister, Noor, admits to
everyone how she thinks she is responsible: "No, I'm the oldest. I should
have taken care of them… It's my fault Mariam is lost!" and Fadi himself
repeats throughout the book how it was his own fault, "It was his fault
that Mariam had been left behind, not his father's, not Noor's, not his
mother's."
The
epidemic of racism that followed 9/11, and the situations it created, is given
a spotlight in Shooting Kabul. When
Fadi arrives in his school, he sees a pair of bullies but they don't pick on him
at all. After 9/11, they begin to intentionally target children whom they think
have middle eastern skin color. One day Fadi gets jumped by Ike and Felix, who
break his camera and try to hurt him. He knows that he can't let them keep
attacking him, so he joins up with a group of boys who Ike and Felix have been harassing
and bullying in an effort to get them to stop. They corner the bullies, but
when a few in the group decide that they would like to beat up Ike and Felix in
return, Fadi stops them saying "We can't beat them up. That would
make us as bad as they are." When Fadi says that he joins the tradition
of leaders who have decided to respond to racism with nonviolence, such as
Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. He knew and realized that violence begets
violence, and if they injured Ike and Felix, they were in a sense hurting
themselves with the consequences of their actions. By choosing a path of
nonviolence, Fadi responded to racism and violence with forgiveness and mercy.
Shooting Kabul was a great book, and one
in which I saw America and the events of 9/11 through an entirely new point
of view. I would recommend it to anyone. Family plays an important role in
it, and even though much of its plot spins on a powerful tenet (that family can be a very strong force) and just one event, the
story does not suffer for it. A tragedy gives rise to a guilt-ridden but likeable main character, and, even though Fadi believes that it was his fault
that Mariam was left behind, I never believed that he really was to blame. Shooting Kabul is an interesting book
that presents the old coming of age story in a new way, and I really enjoyed
reading it.
I got the other picture from here
