09 February 2009

Influences on My Work

Author Tamim Ansary during an interview in his San Francisco home.

By Tamim Ansary

Tamim Ansary, author of West of Kabul, East of New York, directs the San Francisco Writers Workshop, the oldest continuous, free writers workshop in America. He writes and lectures about Afghanistan, Islamic history, democracy, the creative writing process and other issues.

When I think back to “influences” on my writing, I find that my primal sources were oral. I was born into a family tradition of poetry, storytelling, mysticism, and philosophy going back a thousand years to Khwadja Abdullah Ansary of Herat; and although as a child I never read my forebears’ work, I heard their words and the spirit of their work resonating in the conversations of my father and his brothers and cousins and friends, who gathered every day to quote couplets, coin phrases, and discuss deep issues over endless cups of tea; and I, tucked on the floor next to my father, listened in unnoticed.

And then there were the virtuoso family storytellers I grew up with, headed by my grandmother K’koh, who never spent a minute in school and could not write her own name yet spun whole universes for us, inhabited by giants and sorcerers, tricksters, and heroes roaming surrealistic landscapes, where trees might bloom with eyeballs and horses take flight and then burst into fireballs: She came to us as a voice in the dark, and we children, piled up like puppies, listened breathlessly.

I could not get enough of those stories — literally: Adults were too few and too busy to sate my craving, so I had to start making up stories of my own.

By then I had learned to read, with which tool I could break into another treasure, one locked into a 20-volume set of books titled The Book of Knowledge: It was an illustrated children’s encyclopedia. Every day, after my elders went to school or work, I pored through those volumes, finding out what stars were made of, who built the pyramids, and how to tell Indian elephants from African ones, and when the others came home I couldn’t wait to tell them.

Everything I write today goes back to those earliest sources, I think: I’m still poring through books of knowledge, still bursting to tell people what I’ve learned, still trying to reconstitute that voice coming out of the darkness with accounts of epic journeys and images of blazing horses; and I’m absorbed, still, in that conversation that my father and his peers were part of once, only I’ve graduated to the table now, and the table has expanded across the globe, and the voices are  coming through many media, all of us just trying to puzzle out what this world is about and tell each other what we’ve unearthed about the mysteries.