Hardship, hope, blood in the soil
‘What draws me and inspires me is the resilience of the human spirit’
It’s the journey of an Afghan fixer and the Canadian he guided through his war-ravaged homeland, before paying a heavy price.
It is also the shared discovery of two men that, tangled in each of their lives, there are histories — different but not so different — of stolen land and the dispossessed.
In one of a series of stories and photo essays produced by the National Film Board of Canada and presented in collaboration with Postmedia, photographer Larry Towell and former pediatrician Hashim Shukoor, share their deeply personal insights.
Shukoor was forced to flee to Pakistan with his wife and daughter, then to leave them behind and come alone as a refugee to Canada.
Today, he maintaines contact by telephone as he works as a concièrge, longing to be reunited with his loved ones.
Hashim dreams of resettling his family in Canada and of one day returning, as Canadians, to visit a wounded homeland that for many has been stripped of dignity, sense of place, and of something to believe in.
Towell, meanwhile, savours his own return to Lambton County in southwestern Ontario.
But he recognizes that his bucolic farmland on the banks of the Syndenham River occupies the land where once lived the Chippewa — before it was settled by the Scots, the English and fugitive slaves who arrived from the United States via the famed Underground Railroad.
Through the pair’s shared experience, Towell comes to realize and is struck by the depth of a man’s connection to his homeland.
Larry
War changes everything it touches — history, the landscape, people. It has forever changed the life of Hashim Shukoor, the man who worked as my fixer in Afghanistan. He can never go home again. He’s a refugee now, separated from the people and country he loves.
Hashim guided me around Afghanistan in 2008 and 2009, through the vibrant, troubled streets of Kabul and the sparse village region north of the city. He took me to a clinic where children were fitted with prosthetics to replace limbs claimed by landmines. He introduced me to a neighbourhood where young men inject heroin at all hours. He showed me that daily life in Kabul marches in lockstep with the unimaginable.
Amid ruined villages, graveyards, and rusting steel a day’s drive north of the city, I saw a scarred yet beautiful world. Cattle drink from rivers littered with broken military vehicles. Shepherds lead their goats through the ruins, grateful for silence. We didn’t know then that Hashim would be forced to flee, robbed of the people and place he cherishes.
Hashim
I dream about home. War has separated me from my family and profession. I am a refugee, a trained pediatric physician, a husband and father. Before I came to Canada I worked with Western journalists like Larry. Now I am a building concierge in Toronto.
I often drift into daydream on my subway commute. For a few precious moments I am home, surrounded by my family in Kabul after the pleasure of a midday meal. I long for the company of loved ones. The sense of community — that is what I miss the most here. Pulled in opposing directions, I measure my memories against my hope for the future.
I grew up in a village of mud houses. My father taught school and sold medical supplies in the provincial market. It was a simple life. We grew vegetables and were connected to the land.
Here I share an apartment with a fellow Afghan, feeling hopeful, but not connected to this place. Decades of war have blighted my country, but not my spirit. My wife and daughter are coming to Canada. This promise sustains me. It is almost an additional full-time job to bring them over — reviewing legal documents, attending immigration appointments, sending e-mails. They will come and together we will make our future.
Larry
Here at home, there’s an old conflict beneath my own two feet. My farm sits on rural Ontario land stolen from the Chippewa. It was settled by the English and the Scots, and later provided sanctuary for fugitive slaves who came up through the Underground Railway between 1840 and 1860. You don’t have to travel halfway around the world to find a story about stolen land and the dispossessed. That story’s buried deep in the soil here, alongside the seed of hope that has drawn settlers, fugitives, immigrants and refugees for well over 150 years.
Neighbours whose ancestors were here before my time tell me that fugitive slaves planted the trees lining the road to my front door. County records show that two families of former slaves lived on this farm until the American Civil War ended. The bones of those who died in the township lie in unmarked graves nearby. Hardship and hope, side by side.
Hashim
I was already a refugee and stranded between past and future when my daughter was born. I have met her three times in her short life, in Peshawar in Pakistan.
Afghans who have worked with Western journalists are accused of collaboration. That was my fate. At first the threats against my life were vague and unfocused. They became specific soon enough. The men behind the threats knew the location of my office in Kabul. They would come for me, they said.
I cannot go back now. I wonder if my daughter will recognize me when we meet again. I speak with my family by phone and in the daydreams that sustain me.
Larry
As a young man I volunteered at the Home for the Dying in Calcutta. That opened my eyes. I helped feed people. I cleaned floors. I took pictures. I couldn’t foresee how deeply it would affect me or that I’d spend much of my professional life trying to figure out what it meant to me. I saw it again in Nicaragua, then in El Salvador and dozens of countries since.
It’s not the poverty or class conflict or the suffering that draws me, not for its own sake. And I’m not interested in war stories, or talk of heroics and glory. What draws me and inspires me is the resilience of the human spirit. I try to capture the beauty of that spirit in my pictures.
An image of a mother and daughter at a gravesite in El Salvador isn’t just about the loss of a loved one. It’s also about the politics behind the formation of the death squad that put that boy in the ground. Are my pictures political? Yes. Everything is.
Hashim
One day, God willing, I will walk with my daughter through the Kabul neighbourhood where I spent happy afternoons with friends long before she was born. I will show her something of the world I come from, but it will be difficult to share this and other aspects of my past with her as she gets older.
She will be Canadian, experiencing my old neighbourhood as a tourist might. Perhaps she’ll see it as Larry did, with an outsider’s sense of wonder and sorrow, admiration and pain. True and genuinely felt, but still as an outsider. I do not know. I am sure only of my own emotions.
I felt shame when I stood beside Larry and saw young men reduced to nothing, robbed by a killing addiction to heroin. Hungry and desperate, they swarmed us when we brought apples to share. This is what remains of a generation, people with no sense of who they are. The Soviets and the mujahedeen, the Taliban, and the Canadians could not provide the essentials: dignity, a sense of place, something to believe in.
For a moment I saw my country through Larry’s eyes, through the lens of his camera. Like how my daughter will see her father’s past — through the eyes of another. Through photographs.
Larry
I’ve always lived in rural Ontario, neighbour to sharecroppers and carpenters, farmers’ fields and big oaks. It’s peaceful, beautiful country. It feels good to return home after weeks on assignment — I edit pictures, tend to chores, plan new trips. From my studio I watch the Sydenham River wind its way south to Lake Erie.
After that first trip to India almost 40 years ago, I lived on the river for two and a half years, on a raft I made out of scrap wood. My children learned to swim in this river, as I did when I was a boy. It gave them the same experiences. It’s our shared inheritance. This land beneath my feet has taught me something about the connection between the spirit and where you live, and why I care about people who’ve been separated from where they belong, like Hashim.
Hashim
Canada cannot return to me what I have lost, but it can share its future with me. My wife and I will raise our daughter here and, God willing, she will never know the legacy of war as her parents have. This will be her country, passed down by those who have relinquished our past.
WHAT DRAWS ME AND INSPIRES ME IS THE RESILIENCE OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT.