Across her 30-year career the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet has reported on conflicts around the globe, from West Africa to Central Asia. She spoke to Engelsberg Ideas’ Jack Dickens about her latest book, The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan, which tells the troubled tale of Afghanistan’s modern history through the eyes of Afghan men and women. It has been longlisted for the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction. An excerpt of the conversation follows, republished with kind permission.
Jack Dickens (JD) – I’ll start by taking you back to Kabul in December 1988, where you open your book. How did your interest in Afghanistan first emerge, and what led you there at that precise moment in time?
Lyse Doucet (LD) – A very long time ago, I began working for the BBC in West Africa. I spent five years out there, but, as a Canadian, I then had to get a work permit to go and work in Britain. Thankfully, I managed to get one through the kindness of strangers. But I soon wanted to go out into the field again, because my true love was being on the ground, in the heat and the dust, as a foreign correspondent. I had friends who said that I had to go to Pakistan, and, even though there wasn’t a BBC job for me there, I decided to take the leap. That’s where I first met Afghans. That was 1988; it was in the depths of the Cold War, when Western-backed fighters, known as the mujahideen, were battling against the Soviet-backed communist government in Kabul.
At that point in 1988, the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, who had come to power a few years earlier, was pulling troops out of Afghanistan after a disastrous, decade-long invasion. I was sort of nudged out of Pakistan by a competitive BBC colleague, who didn’t really want me on their patch finding all these stories about Pakistan and Afghanistan. So again, through the kindness of strangers, I was able to get a visa, a very rare visa, to go to Kabul. I was very lucky because, due to the politics and propaganda of the Cold War, the BBC wasn’t getting many visas to go to what was then Soviet-backed Afghanistan. So when I got my visa in the winter of 1988, I simply had to go.
‘The hotel on the hill’: Hotel Inter-Contnental Kabul. Photo: Wikipedia
I landed in Kabul on Christmas Day 1988, the day after my 30th birthday, during the coldest winter in a decade. Before arriving, I had been told there were only two places to stay: the Kabul Hotel in the city center or the Inter-Continental on the hill. And, in a split second decision as we left the airport in a fog of diesel fuel, I said, “Let’s go to the hill.” That’s how I arrived in the gloam of the so-called Inter-Continental. The hotel had retained its name even though the luxury chain running it had pulled out when Soviet troops invaded in 1979. I still remember being in that dark and gloomy lobby, with the receptionist standing behind a marble-topped front desk, asking me, as any hotel receptionist would say, “How long will you be staying, madam?” And I still remember thinking, “Oh, my goodness, how long am I going to stay? Is it going to be six days, six weeks, or six months?” Ultimately, I ended up staying nearly a year: it became my first Afghan home. That’s why, in the book, I tell the stories of the people who were part of my life in the hotel, and who then served in this hotel for decades, come what may, in times of war and peace, but mainly deepening war.
JD – That is one of the really unique and fascinating things about the book. You weave together the stories of Afghans who have worked at the Inter-Continental, from the 1960s to the present day, with the seismic geopolitical events that have unfolded around them. Could you explain why you chose to write the book in that way? Why did you feel that it was so important for you to capture Afghanistan’s history from this very personal perspective?
LD – When I began to travel after I finished graduate school in Canada, I found that I always turned to novels or to narrative history in order to try to better understand a new place or a new people. In that kind of writing, characters and history come alive on the page. For me, that kind of living history was one that helped to draw me into a society. And so, when I pondered how I wanted to write a story about Afghanistan, I sought to draw people into the history in a similar way. It wasn’t just that I was thinking of the conventions of fiction to tell a non-fiction story; it was also that, as journalists, we have all been confronted by this term called “news avoidance.” It was that people, including ourselves, were saying that the news is so grim, it’s so depressing; there are so many wars. And I found even myself turning the dial on the radio to listen to a classical music station rather than a news station. But of course, as journalists, as citizens, we have to know what is happening in the world. So I thought I would try a different kind of storytelling.
I still remember finishing graduate school in Canada and sitting in a café on Queen Street in Toronto, on a grey and drizzly day, and finishing Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. And I just sat there amazed and absorbed by the enormity of this book, thinking, “Wow, to write a novel that is also true.” And at that moment I was really overwhelmed by the idea that you could do this. Now, I’m certainly not putting myself into Capote’s category! But his book resonated with me. Around about the same time, I was also inspired by the New Journalism movement. You had people like Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, some of the greats of writing, finding different ways to tell real stories. And, as they say, the best stories are true ones.
Decades later, I decided to take a risk and write my own book. It was a gamble, and now the real judge will be the readers. I hope that it achieves at least some of what I set out to achieve. It’s about Afghanistan, but it’s also about very universal human experiences: it’s about people who live in times of huge flux, violence and change, and how their lives are disrupted as a result. It’s also about how people still get up in the morning and find an everyday courage to carry on.
READ the entire conversation as originally published in Engelsberg Ideas.
