I work closely with the playwright, director, costume designer, set designer, props team, production marketing team, voice coach and the actors to achieve authenticity in every aspect of the production. I guide the directors away from using a burka when they’re itching to make a political statement. I encourage costume design teams to avoid Pakistani readymade outfits that can be purchased in Berkeley and instead provide them with photos of Afghan women inside their home, something that is rarely available through an online search.
Most playwrights and artistic directors do exhaustive research on Afghanistan and its people. Reading books and looking at photos without context, however, just scratches the surface of a culture. True to life characters and scenes from Afghanistan are important to understanding how geography, culture, upbringing and history drive Afghans’ thoughts and actions.
Simple things like references to fish, ocean and seas don’t work well because Afghanistan is a landlocked country. More nuanced issues, like women’s headwear in the Middle East and Central Asia, invite confusion and at times creates unintentional biases. You might say, “a headscarf is a headscarf,” but I’m here to tell you it isn’t. Here is a brief explanation.
An Afghan woman wears a chadar, a cotton headscarf which usually covers part of the head and shoulders, while Iranian women wear the chador, which is a large piece of black, floor-length, heavy fabric that wraps around the whole body, just exposing the face. When in public, Arab women wear the hijab, a thick headscarf that fully covers the head just exposing the face, whereas some Afghan women wear the burka, a full-length headdress that covers the face with a small mesh window for viewing the world.
So what? If the differences are so obscure, who will know the difference? After all, most of us write for a general audience. As a writer, playwright or film maker—in addition to good writing, good grammar, good dialogue, interesting plot—we owe our audience an authentic experience, which gives them a better understanding of a culture they’re engaging with through our art. As a fellow writer, I encourage you to look deeper. If you’re writing about a country you have not lived in for at least 10 years, find someone who has, and I can assure you, your writing will be a lot more moving.
I love the fact that Afghanistan is written about so passionately and so often, but I do wish that authors, playwrights, and filmmakers took the time to consult an Afghan on the authenticity of their work. As I work on my own novel, Unraveling Veil, which is set in San Francisco and Afghanistan, I spend a great deal of time thinking about how my Afghan characters speak, walk, think and interact. I often translate the English prose to Dari just to see if it sounds authentic.
In the spirit of cultural understanding and breaking stereotypes I invite you to two opportunities to see creative works by native artists.
In February of 2017, American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco will stage the World Premier of Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, which has sold over 16 millions copies around the world. The book is adapted for the stage by Ursuala Rani Sarma, a UK-based playwright, and directed by Carey Perloff. I’m the Cultural Consultant on this production. If you want to learn about what Khaled thinks about his book’s adaptation to the stage, see my interview of him.
