Najaf Mazari - The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif
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This book traces an Afghan refugees extraordinary journey-from his early life as a shepherd boy in the mountains of Northern Afghanistan to his forced exile after being captured and tortured by the Taliban, to incarceration in an Australian detention centre...and finally to freedom. A poignant and powerful, often humorous, story of suffering, injustice and survival that explores the resilience of the human spirit. An extraordinary account of an epic journey to freedom, told with great intelligence, humour, poetry and integrity. Even in his darkest hours of despair, Najaf clings to hope and his deep love of life and people. Arnold Zable
Writer and refugee advocate Najaf donates all royalties from the sale of this book to the Masawat Development Fund which he founded to raise funds to support health and education programs in Mazar-e-Sharif and surrounding villages. You can check it out at www.masawatdevelopmentfund.org.au
Beautifully captured and penned by award-winning biographer Robert Hillman, this is a compelling story of an exceptional yet ordinary man whose generous spirit, natural leadership and desire for peace transcends enormous danger and heartbreak. The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif follows the extraordinary journey of Najaf Mazari from the despair of Afghanistan under the Taliban regime to the flowering of a new life in Australia. Unaware of the fragility of innocence in a country torn by civil war, Najaf describes his childhood working as a shepherd, an apprentice welder and, finally, finding his calling as an apprentice rugmaker. After a few months I was weaving simple quality rugs without assistance...but then came the more difficult taskslearning to repair rugs, to stretch rugs, to match colours, make colours, create a design that does justice to fine yarns...It was during my initiation into the deeper mysteries of my craft that I began to understand how a world can exist within a single room. For when my concentration was at its greatest, it felt that the world lived in the yarns, in the colours and in the skills of rugmaking. Family joy soon turns to tragedy as the war between the Russian forces and the Mujahedin violently thrusts its way into Najafs lifefirst his elder brother is killed by a sniper, then his family home is destroyed by a stray rocket, killing both his younger brother and brother-in-law. Najaf, too, is badly wounded and is reduced to selling crotcheted socks on a street corner while his injuries slowly heal. Eventually returning to rugmaking, Najaf trains himself not to think too far into the future. In 2001, the adult Najaf is captured and tortured by the Taliban. He is forced to flee Afghanistan, leaving his wife and child behind to place his life in the hands of people-smugglers, bound for an unknown destination. Half way across the world in south-east Asia, Najaf and almost a hundred other refugees learn for the first time that they are bound for a country at the bottom of the world called Australia...
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of MAZAR-E-SHARIF
Najaf Mazari & Robert Hillman
But the real and lasting victories
are those of peace, and not of war.
Emerson
Published by Wild Dingo Press
GPO Box 1556
Melbourne
Victoria 3001
Australia.
Tel: +61 3 9523 0922
Fax: +61 3 9523 0822
Email:
www.wilddingopress.com.au
ABN 74 141 410 675
First published by Insight Publications in 2008
Text copyright Wild Dingo Press 2010
Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, any fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review) no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owner, Wild Dingo Press. All inquiries should be made to the publisher at the above address.
Cover design: Susannah Low & Emma Statham
DTP: Emma Statham
Maps: Dimitrios Propokis
Editing: Catharine Retter and Iris Breuer
Printed in Australia by Ligare Book Printers
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Mazari, Najaf, 1971
The rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif / a memoir of Najaf Mazari
written by Robert Hillman.
ISBN 9780980757026 (hbk.)
eBook ISBN 9780980757033
Mazari, Najaf; Woomera Immigration Reception and
Processing Centre; Refugees Australia Biography;
AfghansAustralia; BiographyMazari, Najaf.
Other authors/contributors:
Hillman, Robert, 1948
325.2109581
Only wood grown from sustainable regrowth forests is used in the manufacture of paper used in this book.
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to all those people
of Afghanistan who have lost so much
in wars their houses, their limbs and
their lives and to all people working for
peace throughout the world.
NAJAF MAZARI was born in 1971 in a small village near Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. At the age of 12, he left school and, unbeknown to his parents, apprenticed himself to a master rugmaker. Thus began his love affair with rugs.
He fled Afghanistan in 2001 after being tortured, narrowly escaping certain death during the genocide of Hazara men and boys in Mazar-e-Sharif carried out by the Taliban. Reluctantly leaving behind a young wife and six-month-old baby, he made the dangerous journey overland, eventually crossing the ocean in a leaky boat to the shores of Australia, where he ended up in the Woomera Detention Centre. After his release, he settled in Melbourne where he now owns a rug shop, selling traditional Afghan rugs.
His wife and daughter were finally given permission by the Australian government to join him in 2006 after almost six years separation. In April 2007, he was granted Australian citizenship.
ROBERT HILLMAN is a Melbourne-based writer of fiction and biography. His most recent biography, My Life as a Traitor, written with Zarha Ghahramani, came out in 2007 and appeared in numerous overseas editions the following year. His 2004 autobiography, The Boy in the Green Suit, won the Australian National Biography Award for 2005.
His collaboration with Najaf Mazari on The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif grew out of an abiding interest in the hardships and triumphs of refugees.
NAJAF'S JOURNEY
DISCLAIMER
The story told here is factual. Every care has been taken to verify names, dates and details throughout this book, but as much is reliant on memory, some unintentional errors may have occurred. On occasions, real names have been replaced with substitute names to protect people who remain in danger of recrimination. The behaviour and speech of each person in the book is accurate, regardless of any prudent disguise.
The Publishers assume no legal liability or responsibility for inaccuracies; they do, however, welcome any information that will redress them.
I DID NOT KNOW that I could feel this much sorrow without a body to bury. How heartsick can I become before I break down and weep in front of everyone? I wander about the camp with the blanket from my bed around my shoulders, searching for a spot where I can't be seen and can't be heard. And where would that be? I have been in the camp for three months. If such a spot exists, wouldn't I have discovered it before this day?
The camp is Woomera, or really my small part of Woomera, a section called November. I share November with hundreds of people from lands I have never visited, lands that are as mysterious to me as my own homeland of Afghanistan is to the guards who keep watch on us day and night.
We who are watched and guarded, we who are questioned, probed, doubtedwe are all illegals. We have come to Australia without invitation. We have jumped the queue. I had not heard an expression like that before I came to Australiajumping the queue. It belongs to communities that place a very high value on orderliness, on due process. It's a good thing, of course, to value orderliness. The community of Afghanistan is only orderly now and again. But it was never my intention to jump this strange queue of which I had never heard. I don't think any of us here ever thought of stealing our way to the head of a long line of people patiently waiting to cross a border into Australia. Most of us would never have qualified for a place in the long line to start with. All I wanted to do was to stand up on the soil of a land where rockets did not land on my house in the middle of the night and hold my arms wide and say, Here I am. My name is Najaf Mazari. Do you have a use for me in this country?
As I wander between buildings, I catch sight of the desert beyond the wire fences. I come from a land of deserts, but this desert is not the same as those of Afghanistan. It is difficult to say in what way it is different, but it is. If I were to fall asleep in the desert of Afghanistan without a soul in sight and somehow wake in the desert of Woomera, I would know in an instant that I was in a strange place. It is not only my eyes that would tell me, but my skin. The touch of the air itself would whisper it to me. My skin has lived all but six months of its 30 years inside a few square kilometres of Afghanistan.
I find a solitary place at last. I am in an alley, concrete beneath my feet. Before me stand tall steel bars dividing the compound in which I am free to walkfrom a building housing an office of the Department of Immigration. I have been in that office, but only once. I sat in a chair at a metal desk. An official of the Immigration Department took a seat behind the desk. An interpreter sat to my right. The official spread papers and documents on the surface of the table. Some of the documents were mine, but they did not include a birth certificate. I have never had a birth certificate. Back in Mazar-e-Sharif, I have a taskera, which is more like a family history going back for ages. But no birth certificate. Very few Afghanis can produce such a document. What a country I come from! Strangers to the idea of queue-jumping, and on top of that, babies are born without anything in writing to prove that they exist!
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