The World Is a Carpet

An unforgettable portrait of a place and a people shaped by centuries of art trade and war.. In the middle of the salt-frosted Afghan desert in a village so remote that Google cant 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 overheada sign of Americas omnipotence or its vulnerability the villagers are unsure. They know though that the earth is flatlike a carpet.. Anna 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 doesfrom 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.