War in North Carolina Literature
schoolhouse made of concrete blocks. There was also a small shop that sold cans of Coca-Cola, Fanta, and condensed milk alongside packages of Iranian dates. A few flies buzzed around freshly slaughtered mutton carcasses that dangled from hooks outside. Next door was a bakery with various-sized rounds of naan cooling from nails on the wall. The village was mostly populated by Tajiks, with a few Uzbek families living near the far hill. In past decades, a few Pashtun families had also lived in the village, but they had fled elsewhere during the civil war of the 1990s. Now Aminullah and his family were the only Pashtuns left, although they lived about three kilometers outside of the village center and rarely interacted with the others. Below, Aminullah saw the foreigner’s car parked in front of the school building where he had been studying half an hour earlier. He could not see the woman, but a small crowd had gathered nearby. Aminullah hoisted his school bag higher on
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his shoulder and trudged down the hill. When he reached the schoolhouse, a dozen other boys were already crowded around the door. Across the street, an older woman watched quietly through her burqa, while two young Tajik girls in white hijabs gossiped in hushed but excited voices. The foreigner and one of the men from her car had already gone inside. Only her driver, a middleaged, Hazara man with a wide, Mongolian-looking face, remained outside. He wore a black leather jacket over a traditional Afghan shalwar kameez and was leaning against the car, smoking a cigarette. Although slightly short, he had the broad, muscular shoulders and detached demeanor of a former soldier or policeman. Aminullah turned his gaze back to the schoolhouse door, where a crowd of taller Tajik boys were still gathered. For a moment, he considered joining them, but instead walked across the street and sank to a squat by the mosque. Aminullah looked at the school for a few minutes before opening his school bag. He pulled out his most valuable possession: a third-hand, paperback
Aminullah imagined himself as the broom-riding protagonist, soaring effortlessly through the sky like a fierce bird of prey as everyone cheered him on.
Bookmark (mixed media acrylic, graphite, masking tape collage on hardboard, 24x32) by George Scott
copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Persian. The faded, half-torn cover depicted a boy not much older than himself riding a mythical, winged creature. Aminullah had been given the book by a teacher after the teacher’s own son had outgrown it. It was the only non-school book that Aminullah owned, and he had already read it eight times. Aminullah carefully opened the cover and flipped to his favorite scene: the second Quidditch match, where Harry Potter rides his new broom, catches the Golden Snitch, and heroically leads House Gryffindor to victory. Every time he read that chapter, Aminullah imagined himself as the broom-riding protagonist, soaring effortlessly through the sky like a fierce bird of prey as everyone cheered him on.