No Space for Further Burials by Feryal Ali Gohar: Book Review

Abstract

No Space for Further Burials is a chilling indictment of the madness of war and our collective complicity in the perpetuation of violence set in Afghanistan in late 2002. The novel’s narrator, a US army medical technician in Afghanistan helping “liberate” the country from the Taliban, has been captured by rebels and thrown into an asylum. The other inmates are a besieged gathering of society’s forgotten and unwanted refugees and derelicts, disabled and different, resilient and maddened, struggling to survive the lunacy raging outside the asylum compound. The novel becomes a powerful evocation of the country’s desolate history of plunder and war, waged by insiders and outsiders, all fueled by ideology, desperation, and greed. This astonishingly powerful story unfolds the tragedy of Afghanistan, as told by the captive narrator, in hauntingly beautiful prose. While the characters try to cope with their individual destinies, the terrible madness of war is counterpointed with the poignancy of their lives and the narrator’s own peculiar predicament the “victor” now a victim, his ambivalence a metaphor for everything Afghanistan symbolizes.