Magsie Hamilton Little - Dancing with Darkness

review by Ro Bennett on show 28th July
This title is actually: Dancing with Darkness: Life, Death and Hope in Afghanistan. I must say that having read it I couldn’t see much hope. I’ll read from the Product Description by Alex Mason who is an Afghanistan expert.

London, July 7th 2005.The author, a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, witnesses the carnage caused by a suicide bomber on a London bus. At a loss to reconcile the blind hatred behind the attacks with the Islamic world she has been studying, and despite the risks, she feels compelled to travel to the heart of where many see as the conflict between East and West, in a search for understanding. She buys a ticket and gets on a plane to Kabul. A single non-Muslim woman in Afghanistan faces many dangers; but Magsie also encounters the warmth and humanity of the Afghan people, in their desperate struggle to survive. It is they who give her a knowledge of Islamic faith and culture she could never have learnt at college and enable her to see a side of Afghan life seldom reported in the Western press. Months later, back in London, life resumes as normal, before suddenly everything is turned upside down again. A desperate phone call from Kabul sends her rushing back to the country she has come to love - and plunges her into a terrifying nightmare.Alone and totally out of her depth, it is only now that the real journey can begin... Written with compassion and insight, this is a journey about loss, frustration and tragedy, but above all, about hope. 'She has a greater understanding and feel for Afghanistan than ninety-nine percent of the people reporting on or writing about Afghanistan.'


I didn’t totally agree with this description. She wasn’t alone, she was with Afghans and if she was ever out of her depths and I’m sure she was, it was because she deliberately made decisions and choices which put her in grave danger. She was very brave but also much of what she did could be considered extremely foolhardy. I would agree that the people Magsie got to know closely and become friends with were warm and they built up a wonderful relationship, but on the whole there was generally more hostility, animosity, mistrust, prejudice and negative reaction to her and rejection of her, her culture, her life style and beliefs and indeed most Western values.

What does come across is the warmth of the Afghan family and other people Magsie’s got to know well and her deep love and loyalty to the country and those people. I certainly feel I know more about Afghanistan than before. I have read several books like the Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns and the Book Seller of Kabul, but this book made life in Afghanistan and the situation there clearer and more real for me. It was a shocking book and a thought provoking book but also a page turner - very, very tense in places and very poignant in parts. However it didn’t leave me with much hope for a happy outcome or indeed any resolution to the situation in the immediate or foreseeable future.