“The beginning of a great journey has become a gentle, untroubled memory, like a dream you need not fear and do not lose.”
All the Roads Are Open: An Afghan Journey (1939–40) by Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942) is an account of a trip that Schwarzenbach undertook with a fellow traveller and journalist Ella Maillart in 1939. In June they started their journey by car setting out from Geneva through Zagreb, Belgrade, Sofia, Istanbul and then traversing Turkey, Iran and finally reaching Afghanistan in August, in the looming shadow of the WW2. In October they parted their ways when Maillart went to India and Schwarzenbach to Turkistan and then followed Maillart to India in January 1940 before returning to Europe. Maillart also wrote an account of that trip and of her troubled friendship with Schwarzenbach which was published in 1947 under the title The Cruel Way. Reading and comparing these two accounts of the same journey might be a fascinating reading exercise. I first came across the reference to Annemarie Schwarzenbach when reading Compass by Mathias Enard and I became immensely interested in this author
Annemarie Schwarzenbach was a Swiss writer, archaeologist and photographer. Her life was marked by the difficult relationship with her conservative family, especially by her dominant mother Renee who was a well-known music patron and had close ties to Richard Strauss and the Wagner family. For some time Schwarzenbach was close Klaus and Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s children, who introduced her to morphine which became Annemarie’s addiction for the rest of her life. She lived in Berlin between 1931 and 1933 followed by unaccompanied travels to Turkey on the Orient Express, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and in 1934 she visited Soviet Union. In 1935 she married the French diplomat Claude Clarac in Teheran which was largely a marriage of convenience. Following her trip to Afghanistan with Ella Maillart, Schwarzenbach met the American writer, Carson McCullen who fell in love with her, but these feelings were not reciprocated by Schwarzenbach. McCullers dedicated her novel Reflection in a Golden Eye to Schwarzenbach, and both women remained in the contact until Schwarzenbach’s death. Between 1941 and 1942 Schwarzenbach travelled to Portugal and to the Belgian Congo where she came into conflict with the local authorities. Annemarie Schwarzenbach died in 1942 as a result of injuries she suffered in a bicycle accident. After her death, Schwarzenbach’s mother Renee destroyed most of her daughter’s work as it depicted her family not in a positive light. Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s work was rediscovered in the 1980s when she reached posthumously a cult status.
Annamarie Schwarzenbach travelled to Afghanistan in the late 1930s. It is important to remember that this was more than a decade after the reformer king Amanullah Khan made an attempt to modernise and westernise Afghanistan when it comes to equal rights, individual freedoms including very progressive women’s rights which led to uprisings and revolts among the more radical members of the society. Amanullah looked up to Turkey’s Ataturk and his reforms at that time. In 1926 Amanullah Khan founded the Kingdom of Afghanistan which lasted until 1973. He drafted the first constitution, modernised schooling system for boys and girls, overturned a strict dress code for women, made primary education obligatory, introduced literacy courses, invited Indian and French teachers to Afghanistan, established over 300 schools in the provinces and promoted Pashto as an important element of the Afghan identity which ultimately led to recognising Pashto as an official language in 1934. He was forced to abdicate, and Mohammad Nadir Shah took power in 1929. He abolished most reforms implemented by Amanullah Khan. After the assassination of Nadir, his son Mohammad Zahir Shah took power in 1933 and remained the king of Afghanistan until 1973.
The late 1930s saw the recognition of Afghanistan on the international stage followed by many trade agreements with the countries in Europe. In 1934 Afghanistan joined the League of Nations and was recognised by the United States. Afghanistan developed strong ties to the Axis countries: Germany, Italy and Japan but during WW2 it decided not to take sides and remained ‘neutral’. During his reign Zahir Shah tried to come back to some of the reforms implemented by Amanullah Khan, but not to the expected extent.
Published as a collection of lyrical and deeply reflective essays. All the Roads are Open is more than a travel memoir. It also constitutes a compassionate meditation on solitude, dislocation, displacement, existential isolation, the meaning of physical and inward journey, finding solace in the beauty of places, rootlessness, the invisibility of the women Afghanistan, harsh landscapes being a mirror of internal struggles and bearing a witness to injustice, dehumanisation and alienation of others. In her prose, Schwarzenbach combines the elements of local mythology, history, tradition, emphatic observations and memories.
“(…) I went about Stamboul like a sleepwalker, unwilling to give in to the visible and tangible familiarity all around, always gazing across the rising sea of roofs to the Asian shore. There another world began, the bare hills of Anatolia, a procession like frozen waves, there greater winds blew, the human voice died away, glossy herds grazed on immeasurable pastures, there the smoke of the burnt offerings passed eastwards from steppe to steppe – (…) there was a threshold I had to cross…”
“I lack a sound and reassuring instinct for the solid facts of our earthly existence; I cant always tell memories from dreams, and I often mistake dreams, coming to life again in colours, smells, sudden associations, with the eerie secret certainty of a past life from which time and space divide me no differently and no better than a light sleep in the early hours.”
Physical geography of harsh, uninhabited and vast landscapes of the Balkans and Central Asia depicted by Schwarzenbach evokes the internal emptiness, existential isolation and lack of human presence. Portrayal of Mount Ararat, Kurdish villages, the ruins of the Armenian churches, Mazandaran, and the Persian Desert where she witnessed dehumanisation of the chained prisoners labouring under the scorching sun, as well as descriptions of the Afghan cities of Herat, Kabul, Ghazni reflects Schwarzenbach’s emotional struggle in the collapsing and suffocating world of the late 1930s.
When she depicts nomadic tribes, farmers condemned to forced labour, Polish refugees, Russian refugees fleeing the terror of Stalinist regime in the Soviet Russia, people from the societal peripheries, Schwarzenbach sees their existence as being conditioned by the numerous struggles and constant suffering, often caused by the political turmoil and social and religious norms.
When it comes to the women in Afghanistan, Schwarzenbach strongly felt their absence in public spaces; sha saw their invisibility which she expressed in her essay titled The Women of Kabul. The only places where women were not restricted were the walled concealed gardens. In all her essays Schwarzenbach showed empathy towards the women of Afghanistan, who were deprived of their own voice and denied any social agency.
“In the weeks we had spent in this devoutly Mohammedan country we had made friends with farmers and city officials, soldiers, bazaar merchants and provincial governors, we were received hospitably everywhere and began to take to this masculine, jovial, unspoilt people. (…) But we seemed to be in the land without women. We knew chador (…) which has little in common with romantic notions of Oriental princesses’ wispy veils. (…) We saw these muffled, formless figures darting shyly down the lanes of the bazaar (…). But there was little humanity in these ghostly apparitions. (…) How did they love, what occupied them, who received their sympathy, their love or their hate? In Turkey and Iran we had seen schoolgirls, Girl Scouts, students, working women and ones active in social causes, already helping to shape the face of their nation, already an integral part of its life. We knew that the young King Amanullah (…) had instituted hasty reforms in Afghanistan, attempting to follow Turkey’s example in particular. (…)”.
With the king Amanullah’s abdication, as Schwarzenbach’s noted, women were forced into closed domestic life and could not show themselves on the street without a veil. She asked herself:
“Were the first stirrings of freedom forgotten, had those few weeks in 1929 vanished from women’s memory? (…) Could women be excluded from such a programme of progress? Must they not share in this new life abd be liberated from the stupefying constructions of their existence?”
In the essay called Herat, Schwarzenbach portrays the former splendour of the city’s courtyards, old mosques and old buildings. Herat was the place where she found tranquillity, particularly in the city’s gardens. Herat symbolises the fading past in the similar way to contemporary Europe which was heading towards the collapse at that time. Herat offered Schwarzenbach shelter from the events in Europe and allowed her to exist in solitude.
In her writing Schwarzenbach aims to be a compassionate observer of human suffering but also of resilience of those pushed to the margins of the society. She also reflects on the rapid modernisation which affected the traditional ways of life in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan reshaped Schwarzenbach’s internal world and redirected her inward journey. Always a guest, always an outsider, every next place Schwarzenbach visited offered merely a temporary refuge from all the hardships. She would always remain “without roots”, without a sense of belonging to one place which had an impact on her emotional well-being.
“But the journey ever so slightly lifts the veil over the mysterious space – and a city with a magical unreal name, Samarkand the Golden, Astrakhan or Isfahan, City of Rose Attar, becomes real the instant we set foot there and touch it with our living breath. The pavement of Damascus echoes under our feet, the hills of Erzurum glow in the evening light, the minarets of Herat loom at the end of the plain. (…) In Kabul we form friendships, make ourselves at home, we know the Russian who bakes European bread and Gulam Haidar who sells fountain pens, airmail envelopes and Veramon. Already we have our daily habits, find our way home in the dark, and ultimately it is only an accident that we wont spend the rest of our lives here: here or elsewhere, on the shore of the Caspian Sea (…).”
“On a journey the face of reality changes with the mountain and rivers, with the architecture of the buildings, the layout of the gardens, with the language, the skin colour. And yesterday’s reality burns on in the pain of parting: the day before yesterday’sis a finished episode, never to return.”
All the Roads are Open is such an interesting and compelling book offering a unique perspective on traveller’s solitude, existential isolation, approaches to mental health, a clash between rapid modernisation and tradition, belonging and individual freedoms told by the woman with an adventurous soul and courageous heart.
“It is not for me to dictate greeting and parting and draw the boundary between reality and vision. I’m left with the magic, the name, the heart miraculously touched.”
