Atiq Rahimi: 'We became trapped in this self-image, until all we knew was war'

Atiq Rahimi fled Afghanistan amid the winter snows to make a new life as a writer and film-maker in Paris. Gerry Feehily meets an exile who returned

It's 350 miles from Kabul to the Pakistan border, almost as far as London is from Edinburgh. Only there are mountains in between, some of which rise to 12,000ft . Should you set off in mid-winter, the landscape is white with snow. And if the year is 1984, reconnaissance aircraft and bombers fly above you, while beneath your feet lie landmines. By day, you rest in village mosques, but are kept awake by zealous theology students, who sometimes beat you. You walk at night.

It sounds like a bad dream, but sitting in the Café Select in Montparnasse, sipping a morning coffee, is novelist and film-maker Atiq Rahimi. He has been there, and come through. Now 40, with a neatly trimmed beard, and startlingly grey eyes, he says, "I was 22 at the time. But if I had known how hard it would be on the feet, maybe I would have stayed at home". Raising his eyes to the heavens, he laughs.

Listening to him, one is struck by an essential point about storytelling. Experience can be an awful thing, but somehow authors always enchant, even as they inform and terrify. So while Atiq Rahimi's novels deal with the devastation of his native Afghanistan, they also contain a soulfulness, a sweetness, which make them beautiful too. His first book Earth and Ashes, a bestseller in both France and Germany, has just appeared in Britain (translated by Erdag M Göknar; Chatto & Windus, £8.99). "For me, every story comes with its own narrative and linguistic problem," he says. "With Earth and Ashes, despite the subject-matter, I wished to play with Persian, my native tongue, its oral and written registers. It's a violent book, but beneath it buzzes the poetry of the 13th century."

This tension between past and present makes Earth and Ashes sing, even in English, and in singing it hints at something beyond the desolation we associate with Afghanistan. There is, and has always been, another reality. "I was born into a Kabul in which notions like Tadjik or Pashtoun were meaningless," he says. "My mother was a teacher, while my father, a provincial governor under the monarchy of Zahir Shah, introduced me to the works of Victor Hugo, in a house where there were always translations of Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf lying, and where everyone could recite a poem or sing."

Following the coup d'état of 1973, however, in which the king was overthrown and Afghanistan declared a republic, Rahimi's family began to fall apart. After studies at the Franco-Afghan lycée, he briefly joined his father in exile in Bombay. Returning shortly after the Soviet invasion of 1979, he read literature at the university of Kabul, and worked as a cinema critic. Called up for military service, he was offered an exemption, if willing to submit to the Soviet regime, which his elder brother was part of. "I was offered a scholarship in Moscow," he says. "But having a monarchist father and a communist brother made me something of an anarchist. I had to find another destiny."

Which brings us to a mosque in the mountains in 1984, about a three-day walk from Pakistan. "Including my future wife, there were 22 of us," he says. "Robbed by f bandits, ill, the snow was so deep, the land so mined, we thought we were stuck till spring." A mujahedin commander volunteered to take them. "A very brave man," he remembers. "He led on horseback, shooting with his Kalashnikov into the snow. 'If a mine blows up, and I'm blown up,' he said, 'take another road'."

"We had to step into the prints his horse left behind. Eventually we got to the border. The mujahedin said, 'Before you, Pakistan, behind you, your country. Look on it for the last time.' I looked back, our footprints in the snow as far as the eye could see. Before us, a perfectly white landscape. To me it was like a blank page. Like freedom."

For a month, he stayed in Pakistan, wondering whether to join the resistance. He eventually applied for political asylum in France. "If there was a communist terror at home, then in Pakistan I realised we had walked straight into our future, the religious terror of the Taliban." Considering himself more a cultural refugee than a political one, he completed a doctorate in audio-visual communications at the Sorbonne, and began writing Earth and Ashes in 1996, partly in response to the new Taliban regime, partly to the news of his brother's death. "My family, fearing I would try to avenge him, kept his murder a secret for two years," he says. "It struck me that this culture of vengeance was the reason why, time and again, Afghanistan descends into new forms of violence. This refusal to mourn, always to seek vengeance without concession, meant that even as the Soviets withdrew, with one million dead behind them, we were fighting yet again."

An attempt to come to terms with this madness, Earth and Ashes is the tale of Dastaguir, an old peasant, as he leads his five-year-old grandson, Yassin, to the Russian-run coalmine where the latter's father works. The boy, the only survivor of a Soviet bombing raid which killed his mother and grandmother, has been deafened by blast, but, as yet, does not understand why "stones have stopped making sound". His father, groomed by the Soviets as a model worker, thinks the Mujahedin the culprits.

The book is a parable of familial dysfunction, in which an ageing peasantry, confounded by a newly industrialised world, faces a future in which the children cannot hear. Rahimi has compressed 10 years of Soviet occupation into less than 60 devastating pages. "It must be remembered that many Taliban were war orphans, raised in madrasas in Pakistan," he says. "Having never had a mother, having never had relationships with women, knowing only the Koran and the fear of hell, they were psychically crippled. Although I set Earth and Ashes during the Soviet occupation, I was really trying to find a way to explain to myself the roots of their ascendancy."

In choosing to narrate in the second person, he also compels the reader to face the inferno from Dastaguir's point of view. "The 'you' of the novel is at first violent," he says, "but I would also hope poetic. Earth and Ashes is like an open letter, addressed to Afghans, to westerners, but also friends. It's a protest, if you will, against a war the world seemed completely indifferent to."

After 18 years in exile, Atiq Rahimi returned this February to an Afghanistan the world, if only briefly, had remembered. Shooting a documentary for French TV, he visited the ruins of Kabul, constantly reminded of lines in Frederich Engels' 1857 essay. "With the Afghans, war is an excitement and relief from the monotonous occupation of industrial pursuits," he quotes.

"After defeating the British empire," he goes on, "we began to identify with the image westerners constructed for us. Having built a culture on Zoroastrian, Greek, Buddhist and Islamic elements, from the 19th century on we became trapped in this new self-image, hollowed ourselves out, until the only thing we knew, it seemed, was war."

For this reason he is helping to establish an Afghan writers' centre in Kabul, with the assistance of the French government. "We need schools and hospitals for minds and bodies," he says, "but to restore our soul" – his grey eyes laugh – "more poetry". E

Atiq Rahimi: Biography

Atiq Rahimi was born in Kabul in 1962, and educated at the Franco-Afghan lycée there. His father, a provincial governor sympathetic to the constitutional monarchy of Zahir Shah, was imprisoned for three years following the coup d'état of 1973, in which the king's cousin declared Afghanistan a republic. For a brief period, he joined his father in exile in India. Shortly after the Soviet invasion of 1979, he returned to Kabul, where he studied literature and became a film critic. Aged 22, he fled for Pakistan, seeking asylum at the French embassy. A resident in France since 1985, he completed his studies in Rouen and then at the Sorbonne, Paris. He is the author of two novels. Earth and Ashes, now published in English by Chatto & Windus, was a bestseller in France and Germany. He is working on a film of the book, and has recently returned to Kabul, where, in between shooting French TV documentaries, he is helping set up a centre for writers with philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.