Atiq Rahimi

Asked (on Radio France) that most European of questions -- whether he felt French or Afghan (what a silly question: why does one need to feel any such thing?) -- Atiq Rahimi replied with the old saw of all emigrants: I feel Afghan in France, French in Afhganistan.

I myself don't have any such feelings. Wherever I am, I am merely a passer-by. There is a great comfort in that, not having to belong, not being obliged by whatever the natives do. One can then pick and choose from what is on offer: float floats on Loi Krathong, but refuse to hate the Burmese, for example. The decision is purely one of pleasure; one is not compelled to it by any false desire to be in any particular way; to be anything other than what one is pleased to be.

Atiq would probably manage to feel this way, too, if he had lived in more than two places for any length of time. There is a sense in which emigration -- straddling two cultures -- is liberating -- one begins to see the limits of each of his two civilizations; but that is at best a half-way house to true freedom and that is something approached only asymptotically as one piles on his cultural exposure. The more cultures one learns, the more one learns to tell the difference between the local -- the accidental-- and the universal and never changing. And the more one can be neither Afghan nor French but -- himself.