Kabul and after

Zia’s Story
by Shahnaz Qayumi (illustrated by Nahid Kazemi)

Vancouver Tradewind Books, 2024
$14.95 / 9781990598142 

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

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The forces of world history descend on a Kabul neighbourhood and one household within it over the opening pages of Vancouver-based Shahnaz Qayumi’s quietly affecting picture book Zia’s Story.

During a day that young Zia has otherwise enjoyed kite-running, playing chess, and basking in the comforts of family, five men burst into his home. The armed men leave with Zia’s father, who informs his son, “You are now the man of our family, Zia. Until I return home.”

“We never heard from Pader again,” Zia explains as the next chapter begins. 

Unbeknownst to narrator Zia, the religious beliefs, political ideologies, and military operations shaping his homeland for centuries have assumed a new form as his story launches—one that shatters his family, strips him of innocence, and thrusts worldliness on him.

Zia may not yet know words like “refugee” and “displacement,” but his lived experience will teach him much in a very short time. 

Soon, Zia’s mother stops teaching at the university. Matter-of-factly, she tells him, “Women are not allowed to go outside alone anymore.” For adults reading Zia’s Story alongside the book’s intended intended audience of 9-12-year olds, Qayumi’s “Historical Note” explains what they likely already know: that the boy’s “experiences reflect a historical reality that prevailed in Afghanistan in the early 1990s.”

For young readers, Zia’s Story illustrates abrupt change, the severe impact of societal transformation, and even life’s endless, challenging unpredictability. It’s not a sugar-coated kind of tale. Zia’s father is disappeared, effectively. His mother loses her status, privilege, dignity, and wealth. Eventually, she resolves to court very real risk and flee the country with her son. 

In the cacophony and strangeness of urban Pakistan, where they both seek any employment they can and share crowded rented rooms, Zia’s mother grows despondent after she’d robbed. Zia, taking his dad’s words to heart, does what he can to help. But he’s a child. 

In spite of my summarizing here, Qayumi’s story isn’t bleak. The book’s harmonizing voice tells a different kind of story. For one, instead of becoming prematurely wizened, cynical, and street-smart, Zia is resilient and learns that there’s much to see and do in his new environments (which ends up being BC’s west coast). Within him, new experiences, sights, and knowledge catalyze into an embryonic worldliness, a nascent cosmopolitanism that broadens his view as his migratory arc takes him further and further from the lane near his home in Kabul he was so familiar with as the book begins.

Zia’s learns of resilience, of his own capabilities, of adventures of a new environment, of agency.

For kids—who do not speak of agency or worldliness or displacement—Zia’s Story works well at relaying a series of reassuring themes (even as its migratory travelogue, expressively illustrated in black-and-white by Nahid Kazemi, is not exactly a trip to Disneyland). There’s parental love (and vulnerability) and rapid change and one’s human capability to cope with it in positive, productive ways.

Even Zia’s loneliness doesn’t endure. He meets friends old and new and encounters adults who support and encourage him.

For a time, Zia’s world might be shifting sands and episodes of anxiousness. But, with his mother, he prevails, he adapts, and appears to thrive. And the Afghanistan he wants to remember—with its resplendent kites and full blue sky—remains intact, in his memory.

My Two-Faced Luck, the fifth novel by Salt Spring Islander Brett Josef Grubisic, published in 2021 with Now or Never Publishing, is reviewed here by Geoffrey Morrison. A previous novel, Oldness; or, the Last-Ditch Efforts of Marcus O (2018), was reviewed by Dustin Cole. [Editor‘s note: A BCR editor, Brett has reviewed books by Adam Welch, Andrea Bennett, Patrick Grace, Cole Nowicki, Tania De Rozario, John Metcalf (ed.), Brandon Reid, Beatrice Mosionier, Hazel Jane Plante, Sam Wiebe, Joseph Kakwinokanasum, Chelene Knight, Lyndsie Bourgon, Gurjinder Basran, and Don LePan for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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