The Other Side of the Sky

“Lately, I dream that I’ve grown wings sometimes. I have feathers. I can fly. I love those dreams! I’m soaring overhead, and people are all pointing to me and exclaiming, Look! It’s Farah! She can fly! Farah can fly!” 

In the first chapter, Ahmedi introduces the reader to her voice that will narrate The Other Side of the Sky. She is a teenager, newly re-settled in the US after several years as a refugee from war in Afghanistan. The transition was difficult, and in this first chapter, she describes some of her many recurring nightmares. She ends the chapter, however, with this hopeful dream that represents overcoming. In this vision, she takes flight with wings that represent change, love, and growth. 

“For most Afghans, however, the nearest border lay far away, across a dangerous landscape, a journey of many days, and those who fled the country forfeited everything they owned. Leaving the country was therefore a big decision that not everyone was willing to embrace. Millions fled, but millions more stayed. Many of the latter still had to leave their bombed-out villages. They made their way to the nearest place where bombs were not falling. And the single safest place from Soviet bombardment was Kabul, because that is where the Soviets themselves lived. In just a few years, therefore, that pleasant city filled up with refugees from the villages and swelled into a bloated metropolis full of sprawling slums.” 

Ahmedi’s family moved from the Afghan countryside to Kabul before the war because of her father’s business interests. They were uniquely positioned, therefore, to witness the transformations in the city as a result of war. This excerpt is important for two reasons: First, it foreshadows Ahmedi’s own impending refugee status. For much of her childhood, the war went on around her, mostly outside of the city. But eventually it turned city life upside down as well, decimating her family and leading her and her mother to become refugees in Pakistan and then in the US. Second, this passage is one of the very few moments in The Other Side of the Sky where we glimpse the larger historical and political context for her experience as a refugee. In the US, the overarching representation of places like Afghanistan is one of unrelenting poverty and human congestion. This passage reminds us that these conditions are the result of war-making and other specific policies involving the international community, not a reflection of Afghan culture. 

“As a child, then, I never learned very much about Kabul. Even now, I know merely the names of a few neighborhoods. I have no sense of where they are or how the city is laid out. I went out a few times with my parents and saw bits of the city through a taxicab window.” 

The war shaped Ahmedi’s entire childhood in Afghanistan. One of the major impacts on her day to day life was that she rarely left the walled family compound for safety reasons. As a young child who knew nothing different, she does not remember this as a hardship. Reflecting back, one of the things she realizes is that she never learned much about her own city, culture, and history. This is another key early moment in Ahmedi’s narrative where we can glimpse the impact of war. This sheltered childhood undoubtedly contributed to her yearning for the “the other side of the sky.”

“After hearing that story, I felt sick with worry and made myself a private promise never to lie or cheat or steal again. Meanwhile, in the larger world, in the war-torn country all around me, people were being slaughtered for no crime at all, many of them children just like me. Maybe at that very moment someone was planting the land mine that would soon plunge my small life into horror.” 

Ahmedi’s mother told her children a parable about a young boy who would steal but was never held accountable for his behavior, until eventually he committed a truly heinous deed and was caught. At the time her mother told her and her siblings this story, Ahmedi was feeling guilty for having stolen small things here and there. Her mother’s parable served its parental purpose, and Ahmedi was chagrined into honesty from then on. This passage, concluding her chapter on her childhood, serves to establish Ahmedi’s character as deserving and worthy of the aid that would come her way later on in the form of the World Relief charity. Immigration and war are controversial and divisive issues, and sometimes the people victimized by them are blamed for circumstances beyond their control. Anti-immigrant or anti-refugee rhetoric is sometimes based on the notion that immigrants and refugees are taking resources that are not rightfully theirs to use. In other words, this rhetoric presupposes a theft of some kind on the part of the immigrant or the refugee. Ahmedi’s story vouches for her integrity and worthiness for inclusion in American society. 

“At that time I was just starting to wonder what lay beyond the limits of my own experience. I was pondering the big questions—the world, the skies, the universe. I remember one day our teacher astounded us with the news that the world was not flat, but shaped like a ball. That was so interesting to me! She told us too that there were other countries in the world, quite different from ours. The idea of other countries, other people different from us, wearing different kinds of clothes, living in different kinds of houses, speaking different languages—this dazzled me and filled my mind with possibilities. I received her words like a desert receiving rain, just drank them in, drank up her stories.” 

To be thinking about “the big questions” at such a young age testifies to Ahmedi’s precocious mind and personality. She was ready for big challenges at a young age, as she would discover not too long afterwards. Passages such as this one also establish Ahmedi as a citizen of the world. This perspective is important when discussing the situation refugees face. Most refugees are pushed out of their homes due to policies and decisions by governments. In a world that currently is shaped by national borders and belonging, being a refugee means belonging nowhere. Ahmedi is demonstrating that being a citizen of the world begins with a sensibility towards difference and an open mind, not with refugee status. The implication is that if more people take up this sensibility, the refugee plight will become less likely. 

“We don’t have the tools and skills to help you here, but in Germany, my child, they have experts. Experts! Yes, when they get finished with you, your friends will envy you. You’ll be the talk of the town, strolling about in your high-heeled shoes. Go with the Germans, my child!” 

After Ahmedi steps on the landmine, she languishes in the Afghan hospital for 40 days. When the doctor tells Ahmedi’s family that a German organization came to Kabul periodically to take a limited number of injured Afghan children to Germany for treatment, Ahmedi did not want to go. The kind Afghan doctor cheers her up and encourages her to go because the German doctors will be able to make her life better. This episode changes her life, not only because it preserved her physical health, but also by exposing her to a wider world. The high-heeled shoes become a metaphor for reimagining physical ability and beauty. As a young woman with one amputated leg and one fused leg, Ahmedi is ineligible for inclusion in the narrow mainstream constructs of femininity, but her prosthetic and her character, become her high-heeled shoes, allowing her to traverse great heights to redefine physical beauty and desirability as a woman. 

“No one heard my grief. I didn’t scream or make a single sound. I kept everything bottled up inside me. After all, I had no one to share it with, you know…I had been so sure that I was going to walk again, that my life would go back to normal. I had spent so many hours imagining my return to Afghanistan, my family’s surprise, the delight that would bloom on their faces as I ran to them across the airfield. I had spent so much time imagining myself whole again.” 

Ahmedi has just discovered that her leg has been amputated below the knee. She is shocked and devastated. This quote is powerful because it reveals the isolation that she endured during the year and a half she spent in Germany. Hardly anyone communicated with her about her condition, what was being done to her, and what she could expect from her ordeal. She has nothing but gratitude to the German hospital staff for taking care of her wounds, but it is reasonable to wonder why there seemed to have been so little effort to communicate with her, especially since the organization that brought her to Germany for treatment had a longstanding relationship with Afghanistan and presumably could have arranged for Farsi-speaking translators in the hospital. In many ways, this quotation encapsulates Ahmedi’s childhood: connected but estranged from a loving family, an internal emotional life suppressed because of external exigencies, and the struggle to realize wholeness.

“In the midst of her own grief that poor woman had the compassion to wonder about my sorrow. At such a moment as that, she enlarged her heart to include me in all her feelings about her son. And this, too, is the world. Whatever my story means, this is part of it too. Again and again—even though this world is filled with such indifference and so much random cruelty—at a crucial moment some good person has crossed my path and taken the trouble to care about me.” 

Ahmedi writes about a mother of another patient at the hospital in Germany who befriended her. Even after her own son was out of the hospital, the mother would come and visit Ahmedi. This quotation helps underscore the importance of Ahmedi’s emotional trauma and healing. The landmine accident itself was a unique incident of terror—meaning, its intrinsic arbitrariness made it senseless and the fount of endless unanswerable questions. For instance, throughout The Other Side of the Sky, Ahmedi asks why these things happened to her. In interviews conducted years after the book’s publication, she says she continues to be haunted by these questions. On top of this is the fact that her family was powerless to aid her recovery, exacerbating her fear, entrenching her isolation, and girding her emotional armor. These are just some of the ways that post-traumatic stress manifests. Through it all, Ahmedi is clear-eyed about the good in the world. It is as if the purpose of cruelty in the world is to expose the goodness in humanity.

“As far as I could tell, Afghanistan had nothing built by people. As far as I could tell, my homeland was an empty, barren country. The sight of all that emptiness began to alarm me. I stopped looking. I huddled in my seat, clutching my hands together, feeling the anxiety swelling inside me like a harsh bubble.” 

As she looks out of the airplane window upon her return from Germany, Ahmedi does not see any of the signs of society that she saw from the air when the plane departed Germany. No major highways linking the countryside, no cities with bright lights, no plowed fields with orderly crops. She was anxious about what kind of place she was returning to after experiencing the modern advancements and stability of German society. Ahmedi’s intuition was telling her that while she was returning to her family, but Afghanistan would never again be home to her. 

“Instead of making me feel safe—as they used to, as they still made my mother and no doubt my sisters feel—these high walls made me feel imprisoned. I felt as if I could not draw a proper breath in this compound. At once I began longing for space, for absence of enclosure, for freedom.”

Ahmedi attempts to readjust to life back in Afghanistan. Where she used to feel security, she now experiences violation. Ahmedi’s spirit expanded as her experience of the world has grown through her trip to Germany, and it was difficult, if not impossible, to unknow what she had now come to understand about her homeland. What was normal about life in Kabul (gunfire, rocket explosions, restrictions on movement) proved especially difficult for Ahmedi to accept upon her return from abroad. 

“Finally, the morning came, but the light seemed no different than the darkness. It was like waking up from a nightmare only to find oneself still in a nightmare, and it was the same nightmare. The horror of yesterday merely became the horror of today.” 

In this chapter, Ahmedi describes returning from the bazaar with her mother to discover that a rocket had hit their house and killed her father and sisters. She spent that first night in total shock, curled up on the ground, inert and stunned. The next day, she writes, brought only more darkness—the nightmare continued. And it would continue for several years, as this incident, the death of her father, was the immediate precipitating event that led to her and her mother to become refugees in Pakistan. In that sense, in this passage Ahmedi is naming the horror of becoming landless and homeless in the larger geopolitical and existential sense—a refugee.

“Three or four days after the rocket killed my family, the mujahideen slipped out of Kabul and retreated north, leaving the capital city to the Taliban, that terrible army of big-bearded boys.” 

In the passage where this sentence appears, Ahmedi acknowledges her ignorance at the time about the larger significance of the rocket explosion on her family home. In that context, this sentence perfectly captures the helplessness and outrage that a child feels but cannot name. “Terrible army of big-bearded boys” retroactively gives the Taliban a dressing-down commensurate with the needless destruction it wrought in Afghan society.

“My older brother was holding my little brother’s hand as they set off with the neighbor boys. We watched them go, a little band of boys, heading into the world on their own, with no one to protect them, no one to care for them except one another.”

Once the Taliban came to power, it was no longer safe for the family. Ahmedi’s mother decided that her sons needed to leave Afghanistan before the Taliban drafted them into their army or executed them for being hated Hazaras. The scene of the band of boys heading off into the hostile unknown is heart-wrenching. With hindsight, knowing that Ahmedi and her mother would be forced to leave Afghanistan themselves, one is left to wonder what would have happened if the family had tried to stay together. As it is, to this day Ahmedi has never heard from, or received any information about, her brothers. 

“That’s the thing about life. You never know when and where you will encounter a spot of human decency. I have felt alone in this world at times; I have known long periods of being no one. But then, without warning, a person like Ghulam Ali just turns up and says, ‘I see you. I am on your side.’ Strangers have been kind to me when it mattered most. That sustains a person’s hope and faith.”

Ahmedi and her mother travel towards Pakistan, but they cannot cross the border because they do not have enough money to bribe the border guards. Another refugee allows them to join their family, and he leads them through the mountains. Thanks to his assistance, they successfully cross the border. Ahmedi marvels at how the cruel world never seems to fail to deliver kindness and assistance when a person needs it most.

“Happiness filled our hearts. My mother’s asthma disappeared without a trace for one whole hour. Yes, for one whole hour there, my mother could breathe. You might as well say we had been in prison for thirty years and had suddenly been released—that was the kind of joy we felt.” 

Once they crossed to the other side of the mountain, they had officially reached Pakistan. As Ahmedi put it, “we had escaped Afghanistan” (113). Her analogy to being released from a decades-long prison term is not hyperbolic in light of their massive relief. The fact that Ahmedi’s mother could breathe untroubled for an entire hour is a stark reminder of the daily stress of wartime living and the connection between social stability and physical and mental well-being.

“My own spirits kept sinking too. I had no source of hope out of which to nourish my struggle. When you see some possibility of getting out of a pit, you can draw strength from the idea of where you will be once you get out: You see a goal worth fighting for. If the best you can hope for is to sink more slowly, struggle comes to feel pointless. You say to yourself, If I’m going to sink anyway, what does it matter whether I sink quickly or slowly? You lose your drive.” 

In this chapter, Ahmedi is describing life as a refugee in Pakistan. Although she and her mother were fortunate to escape bodily harm, and were able to find a way to get by, there is a powerful degradation of the spirit, nonetheless. Ahmedi shows how precarious the refugee life is and makes it clear that survival frequently hinges upon outside assistance.

“All these things buzzed inside me like hornets released from a hive. I looked up at the stars, those same stars I had gazed upon with so much wonder when I was in second grade. And then—somehow—that long-forgotten sense of wonder came upon me again. I felt myself drawn up into all that space.” 

Living as a refugee in Pakistan, Ahmedi was almost at her wit’s end. She was increasingly despondent about ever changing her circumstances. She was angry with God and “too beaten down by [her] hardships to worship him” (130). One night, she looked up in the sky and gazed on the same stars that had held so much wonder for her as a child. This time, she surrendered completely to God. She spoke to him from her heart, and from that moment, she began to sense a change. A few nights later, she saw a shooting star, and not long after that sign came the news about the resettlement program for Afghan refugees. 

“And now, when I look back, the first fourteen years of my life feel like a dream—everything that happened up to the moment when I boarded the plane for America. And I still feel how important it is to pay attention to God, to recognize God, to believe in God, to live with a pure heart and let only purity and truth come pouring from one’s soul: That’s the way to live. Such is my belief.” 

Since she had surrendered totally to Allah, Ahmedi had learned of the World Relief opportunity, had secured a spot in the program for her and her mother, had navigated their way to Islamabad and back to Quetta, and had seen their hopes put on ice by the events of September 11, 2001—only to have them resurrected once more six months later. Within a week, they were on a plane to America. Faith is a powerful force.

“You’re new to this world. You must accept that some of your judgments and ideas may be mistaken. It’s natural to be afraid, but before you make any decisions based on fear, take some time to get to know these people and their customs. Slowly, you will begin to understand how it is here. Then you’ll find some peace of mind.”

Aquila Tsamir from World Relief speaks these words. She was hosting Ahmedi and her mother at her house for dinner and was trying to calm their fears about being in the US. Ahmedi and her mother were convinced that the Americans were going to keep them as slaves and that they needed to escape. They were unable to communicate with the Americans, and even if they had been able to, they did not trust them. They needed another Afghan refugee like Tsamir to reassure them. Tsamir’s words stand as universal watchwords for anyone in a foreign land or dealing with a different culture. 

“You’re trapped inside your language like a rabbit in a cage.” 

With poetic economy, Ahmedi perfectly captures the difficulty of trying to navigate the US when you cannot speak English. 

“At last I have someone. I don’t know what would have happened to us if Alyce had not found us. Before I met Alyce and John, my mother and I were living in a prison constructed of our ignorance. Alyce opened the bars of that prison by showing us the world we now lived in.” 

In discussions about immigrations in the US, much is made of the fact that immigrants often seem to live in their own enclaves, a separate subculture or sub-community within the larger American community. There are many legitimate reasons for this, but Ahmedi is saying that the separateness she and her mother experienced was not by choice but because of ignorance. Litz’s intervention enabled them to find productive ways of integrating into American society. This is a theme that Ahmedi would reiterate in the closing chapters of the book: the necessity for Americans to step up and reach out to newcomers from abroad to make them feel welcome and support their integration into society. 

“One moment I would be listening to the teacher, and the next moment I would find myself deep in my past, wrestling with my demons, drowning in panic. And I would have to shake my head to wake out of it and tell myself, No, no, Farah! You’re in America now. Pay attention to the teacher, the teacher.” 

Ahmedi spent most of her initial time in school in ESL classes. She describes the challenge of having to concentrate, hour after hour, in order to make a tiny bit of progress. If her focus wavered even for a moment, as it inevitably would, she would be yanked back into her past. Although she does not elaborate on her “demons” and her moments of panic, it is clear that Ahmedi had to work very hard to succeed in her new country.

“I know it’s hard for American students to reach out to us refugees, and maybe you worry about being rejected or put on the spot. But here is one thing I want to say in this book: it’s harder for us to reach out to you—we, with our clumsy English. I want to say, don’t be afraid of us—you have to understand: We’re afraid of you. We want to make friends, but you have to take the first step.” 

This is Ahmedi’s message to American students. It transcends the refugee experience and stands as a clarion call for how to cross differences of all kinds.