“This bittersweet story of hardscrabble migration and exile in the west simultaneously tracks |
“Grima, one of America’s few Pukhtun scholars and an extremely keen observer of Pukhtun culture, both in its homeland and in the diaspora, follows an ordinary Pukhtun family as it survives in its native area, beleaguered by Taliban and the Pakistani military, and as some of its members seek fortunes but not assimilation in places as far as America. Their story ends with their cultural identity intact but their aspirations defeated in many ways by the modern post 9/11 world.” |
“Novelist Benedicte Grima has taken an under-represented world she knows well from her own work over several decades as folklorist and ethnographer and offered up the reader a rare and stunning glimpse of those islands of immigrants who survive abroad while not assimilating to their foreign surroundings. Seen through the eyes of the well-meaning, bumbling, unprepared and deeply culturally entrenched family patriarch…this is an important story for our times and should be read by anyone who wants to understand more deeply what it means to belong in our vastly interconnected world.” |