ISTANBULI PALAU—AFGHAN RICE PILAF

Ingredients:

1 1/4 cups brown rice, rinsed in cold water

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 yellow onion or one cup green onions chopped

3 garlic cloves, minced

1 pound ground turkey or beef

2 ½ teaspoons kosher salt, more to taste

2 teaspoons coriander

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/8 teaspoon ground clove

1 cup peas, frozen or fresh

2 cups spinach chopped, frozen or fresh

2 carrots, peeled and diced

1 large jalapeño pepper, seeded, chopped (optional)

Directions:

Add the rice and several cups of water in a deep pot. The water should be two inches above the rice.

On high heat bring to boil, turn down the heat to medium and simmer for around fifteen minutes or until the rice is cooked through.

Place a large sauté pan on medium high heat. Add olive oil, onions and garlic. Sauté for two minutes or until the onions are translucent.

Add ground turkey to the sauté pan. Quickly break apart the meat with a spatula as it cooks all the way through, around five minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients, stir until ingredients, especially the spices are mixed well. Cover pan with a lid and cook on medium heat for around 10 minutes.

Drain the rice in a colander and let it sit until all the water drips out of the colander. Add the rice to the sauté pan.

Mix until the rice turns a light green color from the spinach and meat sauce.

Cover the sauté pan with aluminum foil folding the edges to make it airtight. Place the lid on the foiled pot, reduce the heat to low and cook for another fifteen minutes.

Serve with a side of salad or steamed vegetable.

  

Serves 4-6

By Humaira

Do you want to know the dirty secret of Afghan diaspora?

Our elders are addicted to Afghan television.

Yup! Twenty-four hours of non-stop, addictive, live television programming streamed from Afghanistan into living rooms of millions of Afghans that fled Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the 80’s. Our old and immobile waste their days away by watching what the young generation considers junk. Despite living outside Afghanistan for over thirty years, the elders have not found cultural roots in their adopted homes such as Los Angeles, Virginia, Sydney, and Frankfurt. Their community speaks their language and lives in a rectangular box.

Every time I call my mom or aunt, I compete with shrieks of soap opera actresses speaking in high-pitched Dari in the background. Talking to Jeja, my mom, during her favorite show is like talking to my fifteen year old—lots of gaps filled with silence and a “what” or “aha”.

Recently I spent a week with Jeja at her home in Los Angeles.  We bonded by breathing the same air while sitting side by side in-front of her big screen TV watching Afghan talk shows, comedy shows, and even Turkish and Korean soap operas (yes, they're dubbed in Dari). During meals, Jeja discussed the latest news and the clever plotting of the Turkish soap operas.

As Jeja felt pride in her media savvy-ness I on the other hand struggled a little with the formal Dari and at times asked her for clarification. After all these years, when I translated for Jeja at stores, at doctor’s appointments or at banks, the table is finally turned.

Thankfully there was one show I fully got, Pokht-o-Paz, a cooking show.  Aside from improving my formal Dari, I was thrilled to get a recipe out of this experience, even if it was from a show and not from Jeja.

Chef Habib Khashae of Pokht-o-Paz made Istanbuli Palau, a dish I hadn’t eaten before. It turns out that many countries in the Middle World have a version of Istanbuli Palau/Polo. I’m sharing the Afghan version.

This rice pilaf has ground meat, carrots, peas, spinach and flavorful spices. I modified the recipe by using brown rice instead of white and I used ground turkey instead of ground beef. Istanbuli Palau a quick and easy dish you can serve with a side of salad or maybe steamed broccoli on weeknights. The kids loved it and left overs were great the next day.

WHAT THE HECK IS AN AFGHANISTAN CULTURAL CONSULTANT?

By Humaira

The Women's National Book Association's San Francisco Chapter asked me to write an article about my work as an Afghanistan Cultural Consultant and why it's important to look deeper than a Google search. If you want to see how I work, check out my blog POST with a video, HOW HOLLYWOOD AND VLOGGERS MISREPRESENT AFGHAN CULTURE AND AFGHANSITAN.

WRTING WITH CULTURAL AUTHENTICITY

Khaled Hosseini created my first cultural consulting gig. A theater company was staging the first production of his novel, The Kite Runner, and he wanted the play to feel authentic. Naturally, when a friend and international bestselling author asks me to help, I say, “Yes!” I jumped in and have since consulted on nine stage productions, several scripts and a Hollywood film.

As a Cultural Consultant, my main goal is to bring cultural literacy for authentic portrayal of Afghan people, their customs and the Dari language. I hack away at stereotypes and generalizations and spend a great deal of time explaining Afghanistan’s history. I educate my clients on why Afghans pray differently from Saudis, how Afghans communicate with their body and how Afghans have been impacted by 35 years of war.

Cast and creative team for the Kite Runner play at Actor's Theatre, Louisville

Cast and creative team for the Kite Runner play at Actor's Theatre, Louisville

 

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.

 

This fall, Golden Thread Productions presents Our Enemies: Lively Scenes of Love and Combat by award-winning Egyptian playwright Yussef El Guindi. The play shows how representations of Arab Americans and Muslims in the media are fraught with references to terrorism and backwardness.

If you have a project—book, movie, manuscript, teleplay or opera—relating to Afghanistan, go ahead and drop me a note at humairaaghilzai@gmail.com and let’s talk.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how the portrayal of your people, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity affects you. If you like this post, go ahead and share it with your Hollywood producer, theatre director or best-selling author friend. You never know when they’ll be in need of an Afghanistan Cultural Advisor.

Here are two other articles that you might be interested in reading:

AFGHANS SPEAK DARI: OPEN LETTER TO DIRECTORS OF THE JUNGLE - A PLAY

WORKING WITH A CULTURAL CONSULTANT WHEN WRITING AN INTERNATIONAL PLAY: INTERVIEW WITH U.S. PLAYWRIGHT GABRIEL JASON DEAN AND HUMAIRA GHILZAI, AN AFGHAN EXPERT