{"product_id":"the-world-is-a-carpet-isbn-9781594632679","title":"The World Is a Carpet","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn unforgettable portrait of a place and a people shaped by centuries of art, trade, and war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eIn the middle of the salt-frosted Afghan desert, in a village so remote that Google can’t find it, a woman squats on top of a loom, making flowers bloom in the thousand threads she knots by hand. Here, where heroin is cheaper than rice, every day is a fast day. B-52s pass overhead—a sign of America’s omnipotence or its vulnerability, the villagers are unsure. They know, though, that the earth is flat—like a carpet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnna Badkhen first traveled to this country in 2001, as a war correspondent. She has returned many times since, drawn by a land that geography has made a perpetual battleground, and by a people who sustain an exquisite tradition there. Through the four seasons in which a new carpet is woven by the women and children of Oqa, she immortalizes their way of life much as the carpet does—from the petal half-finished where a hungry infant needs care to the interruptions when the women trade sex jokes or go fill in for wedding musicians scared away by the Taliban. As Badkhen follows the carpet out into the world beyond, she leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of fates woven by centuries of art, war, and an ancient trade that ultimately binds the invaded to the invader.Anna Badkhen has won awards for her reporting from the Middle East, Central Asia, East Africa, and her native Russia and the Caucasus. Her writing has appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eForeign Policy\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e, and other publications. The author of \u003ci\u003ePeace Meals \u003c\/i\u003eand other nonfiction books, she lives in Philadelphia.The Carpet\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt four in the morning a phalanx of black silhouettes set\u003cbr\u003eout across the desert: three people and a donkey headed\u003cbr\u003ewest on a sinuous dustbowl trail. The yogurt bow of the\u003cbr\u003emoon had slipped behind the Earth an hour earlier, and the trail\u003cbr\u003ewound invisibly through thick predawn dark that arced toward the\u003cbr\u003ehorizon. All was still. To the south, the Big Dipper scooped out the\u003cbr\u003emountains I could just skylight against the spongy, star-bejeweled\u003cbr\u003eMarch night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmanullah led the way. He skirted the spines of cousinia and\u003cbr\u003ethe diaphanous spheres of calligonum only he could pick out,\u003cbr\u003ehopped the cape hare burrows he alone knew about, sidestepped the\u003cbr\u003eboulders he alone remembered. He never changed pace. He never\u003cbr\u003ebent down to check for sheep spoor. He never looked up: he didn’t\u003cbr\u003enavigate by stars, didn’t know their names, didn’t recognize the constellations.\u003cbr\u003eWhat for? Stars were unreliable beacons, nomads that\u003cbr\u003emoved about the heavens at will, like the Turkoman forefathers.\u003cbr\u003eHave you never seen one suddenly tear off from its roost and streak\u003cbr\u003eacross the black, looking for a new home? Amanullah walked the\u003cbr\u003etrail by heart, steering from a memory that wasn’t even his own but\u003cbr\u003ehad double-helixed down the bloodstream of generations of men\u003cbr\u003ewho had traveled this footpath perhaps for millennia. A memory\u003cbr\u003ethat was the very essence of peregrination, a flawless distillation of\u003cbr\u003eour ancestral restlessness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe walked single file. Amanullah first, then the donkey, then\u003cbr\u003eFahim, who taught English at an evening school in Mazar-e-Sharif\u003cbr\u003eand was helping me with translation, then I. At a brisk clip, in dry\u003cbr\u003eweather, the eighteen-mile walk across the hummocked loess usually\u003cbr\u003etook about five hours. Amanullah had made this journey every\u003cbr\u003etwo weeks since he was six or seven. Now he was thirty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“If other people in the world walked as much as we do, and\u003cbr\u003eworked as hard as we do, they’d go crazy,” he announced. He paused\u003cbr\u003efor effect. Amanullah bragged about the unimaginable hardships of\u003cbr\u003elife in the desert fondly and often. In the dark, I pictured him smile\u003cbr\u003ein sly satisfaction at the gravity of his own pronouncement. But\u003cbr\u003ewhen he spoke again, he sounded surprised.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“But we don’t.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was Thursday, bazaar day in Northern Afghanistan. We were\u003cbr\u003ewalking to Dawlatabad, the market town nearest Oqa, Amanullah’s\u003cbr\u003evillage. We were going to Dawlatabad to buy carpet yarn for\u003cbr\u003eAmanullah’s wife, Thawra.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor the next seven months, Thawra would squat on top of a\u003cbr\u003ehorizontal loom built with two rusty lengths of iron pipe, cinder\u003cbr\u003eblocks, and sticks in one of Oqa’s forty cob huts. Day after day, she\u003cbr\u003ewould knot coarse weft threads over warps of thin, undyed wool,\u003cbr\u003eweaving the most beautiful carpet I have ever seen.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf the eastern hemisphere’s carpet-weaving region that extends from\u003cbr\u003eChina to Morocco were itself a carpet, and one were to fold it in half,\u003cbr\u003eThawra’s loom room would fall slightly to the right of the center\u003cbr\u003efold. Prehistoric artisans upon these plains were spinning wool and\u003cbr\u003eplaiting it into mats as early as seven thousand years ago. Since\u003cbr\u003ethen, people here have been born on carpets, prayed on them, slept\u003cbr\u003eon them, draped their tombs with them. Alexander the Great, who\u003cbr\u003emarched through the Khorasan in 327 bc, is said to have sent his\u003cbr\u003emother, Olympias, a carpet as a souvenir from the defeated Balkh,\u003cbr\u003ethe ancient feudal capital about twenty-five miles southwest of Oqa.\u003cbr\u003eFor centuries, carpets were a preeminent regional export, a currency,\u003cbr\u003estatus symbols, attachés. When Tamerlane, who was crowned emperor\u003cbr\u003eat Balkh, was absent from his court, visitors were permitted\u003cbr\u003eto kiss and pay homage to his carpet, which they were instructed to\u003cbr\u003etreat as his deputy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf all the Afghan carpets, those woven by the Turkomans are\u003cbr\u003ethe most valued. Marco Polo, in the thirteenth century, lauded\u003cbr\u003eTurkoman weavers for producing “the best and handsomest carpets\u003cbr\u003ein the world.” Six hundred years later, Francis Henry Bennett\u003cbr\u003eSkrine, a retired commissioner of the Indian Civil Service, and the\u003cbr\u003eLondon linguist Sir Edward Denison Ross wrote that Turkoman\u003cbr\u003ecarpets were “unrivalled in Asia for beauty and durability.” For their\u003cbr\u003erich palette of reds—mahogany, terracotta, liver, and the atrorubent\u003cbr\u003eof the fratricidal blood that soaks their land—the Turkomans are\u003cbr\u003ecalled the Rembrandts of weaving.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFine clay dust will filter into Thawra’s mud-and-dung loom room as\u003cbr\u003eshe weaves. Through the scrub-brush lath ceiling there will seep\u003cbr\u003einto the room particles of manure, infi nitesimal flecks of gold from\u003cbr\u003enearby barchans, the terrible black cough of her neighbors’ famished\u003cbr\u003echildren, echoes of the war that jolts the plains and contorts the\u003cbr\u003eCretaceous massifs of her land. A roadside bomb will go off, and the\u003cbr\u003edesert outside her doorless entryway will groan in response with the\u003cbr\u003ephantom footfalls of past invaders: Achaemenid and Greek, Mughal\u003cbr\u003eand Arab, Ottoman and Russian, British and Soviet. A speck of an\u003cbr\u003eAmerican Navy F\/A-18 strike fighter will catch a sudden sunray on\u003cbr\u003eits wing and for the instant it pierces the incredibly high azure it\u003cbr\u003ewill become a ghost of a different glint: on Genghis Khan’s sword\u003cbr\u003ebefore it split the skull of a Bactrian housewife, on the barrel of a\u003cbr\u003eguerrilla’s jezail matchlock before it discharged at some subaltern\u003cbr\u003eof the Raj. Taliban scouts will appear on the path where Amanullah\u003cbr\u003eand I walked for yarn, then vanish again, the way all raiders\u003cbr\u003ecome and vanish upon this eternal battleground.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThawra’s will be a yusufi carpet, a diamond pattern her mother\u003cbr\u003eand her mother’s mother wove before her, on the backdrop of wars\u003cbr\u003epast. Under her thin fingers, almond-size flowers with ogival petals\u003cbr\u003ewill shine in a field of ocher and deep maroon. Each fl ower will\u003cbr\u003ebloom from two hundred and forty knots she will tie by hand the\u003cbr\u003eway her foremothers did; each knot will be a temporal Möbius strip\u003cbr\u003ethat ties past and present.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnce the carpet is finished it will take flight from this fantastically\u003cbr\u003ebrutalized land that clings to the violent tectonics at the\u003cbr\u003ethirty-fourth parallel. Amanullah will roll it up and cram it into\u003cbr\u003ehis donkey saddlebag, and his father will take the familiar footpath\u003cbr\u003eacross the desert to deliver it to Dawlatabad. A middleman\u003cbr\u003ethere will sell it to a dealer from Mazar-e-Sharif, the largest city in\u003cbr\u003eNorthern Afghanistan, the modern capital of Balkh. After that,\u003cbr\u003eperhaps, Thawra’s carpet will be jabbed into the back of a beat-up\u003cbr\u003etaxicab, then tossed into the bed of a truck painted with dreamy\u003cbr\u003epastorals, in which it will journey across Afghanistan’s war-racked\u003cbr\u003elandscape and over the border, through Pakistan’s implacable tribal\u003cbr\u003eareas, to the rug markets of Peshawar and Islamabad. Or maybe it\u003cbr\u003ewill travel west, past the mass graves of Dasht-e-Leili, across the\u003cbr\u003eKarakum Desert, to the bazaars of Istanbul. Or else it will trundle\u003cbr\u003ein the trunk of a bus bound for Kabul, from where it will fl y to\u003cbr\u003eDubai, and from there, across the Atlantic Ocean until it alights at\u003cbr\u003ea dealership in the United States, the single largest purchaser of\u003cbr\u003ecarpets on the world market at the time of this story. A wealthy\u003cbr\u003epatron will pay between five and twenty thousand dollars for it.\u003cbr\u003eWherever her carpet ends up, for her work Thawra will be paid less\u003cbr\u003ethan a dollar a day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut first, she will weave. After each knot, she will cut weft yarn\u003cbr\u003efrom its ball with a small, sweat-darkened sickle. Thk, thk, thk, the\u003cbr\u003esickle will go, measuring time between dawn and dusk, birth and\u003cbr\u003edeath, peace and war, measuring life immemorial.","brand":"Riverhead Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305049182437,"sku":"NP9781594632679","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781594632679.jpg?v=1767742312","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-world-is-a-carpet-isbn-9781594632679","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}