The Wind Blows Away Our Words: Doris Lessing
“There are no human rights under the Russians…” Amir Mohamedi (1986)
Doris Lessing was, in 1986, one of the most celebrated and thought-provoking writers of the 20th century, and although she had, by that year, lived in London since 1949, her birth in a famine ridden Iran in 1919, and her childhood adventures in Rhodesia (where her parents had bought a rundown farm in 1924, a farm they struggled to make pay) there can be very little doubt that those early years would, subconsciously perhaps, have aligned her with any form of human struggle, not least the bloody Afghan struggle against the Soviet Union who had invaded (the Soviets called it an ‘intervention’) that country in 1979. Doris wasn’t going to leave that event go unexplored.
My first, and only, physical ‘contact’ with the Russian/Afghanistan War happened (around the time of Lessing’s book, The Wind Blows Away Our Words), when, as an oriental carpet buyer, I came across a huge stack of Afghan Rugs at a carpet trade show. Nothing unusual in that perhaps: but these hand-woven rugs depicted the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan in quite graphic detail. I bought the lot.
