Open Magazine – August 06, 2019

52 5 august 2019

A

day after Barack
Obama won the presidential
nomination for the
democratic party, Nemat
Sadat cracked open his laptop and sat
down to write a novel. In a few weeks he
wrote 45,000 words. It was august 2008,
roughly a year before he came out to his
family, about six years after he came out
to himself. Watching a black man rise to
power was catalytic. “Somehow I got
inspired by him,” says afghanistan-
born, Washington-based Sadat, 40, while
on a visit to India. “He was the first bira-
cial person to win the nomination for a
major political party in the US. I thought
if he can do that, then I can certainly
write a novel.”
that novel, The Carpet Weaver
(Viking; 304 pages; rs599), was
launched in delhi recently, 11 years and
hundreds of rejections since it was be-
gun in 2008. Sadat’s debut novel starts
in1977, centres on a teenaged kanishka
Nurzada and his family in a lively, less
constricted kabul. It plots kanishka’s
adolescence, his attraction to his friend
Maihan and their beleaguered teen-
age romance against the backdrop of
intensifying socio-political tumult in
afghanistan. eventually, the family
is forced to leave the country, even as
kanishka nurtures hopes for a reunion
some distant day in some distant land
with his first boyhood love.
“the novel is not just about one
thing but about multiple things. It’s a
coming-of-age story or a bildungsroman,
and a kunstlerroman as it is the coming
of age of an artist, the carpet weaver,”
says Sadat. “It’s also about a clash of cul-
tures because the character has multiple
identities, and about those clashing
identities, which is similar to my life

with my clashing identities.”

the lubricating power of the novel is

kanishka’s quest for both familial accep-

tance and romantic love. Set in a conser-

vative society where homophobia isn’t

just socially sanctioned, but practically

state policy, since it invites the death

penalty, the frisson of the forbidden

animates the relationship. ‘the one

thing I know is that allah never forgives

sodomy,’ says Zaki jaan, kanishka’s god-

father in the novel’s opening line. ‘kuni’,

as gay men are disparagingly referred to,

‘deserve hell’ another character says in

an anonymous note to kanishka.

the seeds of the novel emerged

from Sadat’s own thwarted romances.

“I haven’t shared this before publicly

or privately, and that is, the history of

unrequited love in my own life. Being

rejected time and again by everybody I

wanted to pursue a relationship with,”

says Sadat.

there are easy parallels between

Sadat’s life and kanishka’s: the afghan

roots, taking refuge in the US, kan-

ishka’s sister Benafsha who was “100 per

cent inspired” by his own, identity crises.

and for both, there were few templates

of romantic love to aspire to. ‘all the

romances in the canon of afghan litera-

ture...involved heterosexual couples,’

kanishka thinks to himself.

for Sadat, as a gay person of colour

in the US, there was little by way of

reference points in american popular

culture. “I felt like a fish out of water in

the LGBt community which is predomi-

nantly dictated by gay White men from

affluent households,” he says. “that was

a different world. for me the literature

they were putting out didn’t resemble

me.” except oddly enough, one work:

Brokeback Mountain, a tragic romance

between two White cowboys. “them

living a double life; being married and

pursuing romance—it was the kind of

double life I was living,” he says. “I wasn’t

lucky to have this romance but I was pre-

tending to pursue women in order for

people to stop questioning my identity.”

Sadat, a journalist and activist, grew

up in california (he left afghanistan as

an infant) and did not know personally

the kabul he captures, whether the art

of carpet weaving or the sweaty ham-

mams. the portrait was drawn up from

conversations with relatives and family

who lived through that period.

the novel’s title refers to kanishka,

the son of a carpet salesman who despite

his father’s exhortations to the contrary

nurses an artistic passion for carpet

Facing up to the Forbidden

The novelist Nemat Sadat tells Bhavya Dore

about the travails of coming out as a gay man in Afghanistan

I felt like a fish out of

water in the LGBT

community which is

predominantly

dictated by gay White

men from affluent

households”

Nemat Sadat

bookS