AN EXERCISE IN WORLDMAKING 2009 - ISS

16 What’s Yours is Mine 191
this voyage; therefore shifting that Helper to the category of ‘obstacles’:
people pretending to know the Victim.
The second nameless Magic Helper appears, who ‘got wind of the
search,’ as though nature is carrying the goal through elemental forces.
This Helper is obliging and mentions childhood history with the Victim
as well as her present location. He brings her, defying obstacles not only
temporal (‘six-hour drive and three-hour hike’) but deadly (‘across a border
that swallows lives’). Despite that, she arrives after three days with
children and, like a lover’s reunion, Hero and Victim meet: ‘When
McCurry saw her walk into the room, he thought to himself: This is her.’
And with his certainty, she is ‘found.’
4. Evaluation: Examination of Her Life, Her Body
The ‘finding’ instigates evaluation in many forms: free clauses on the
story from outside (‘it was the strangest feeling’); attributed character
commentary; extra details; suspension of action via paraphrase/repetition;
gesture intensification; and comparisons of what did/did not happen,
or might have been (Johnstone 2001:638).
Villain ‘namelessness’ is first resolved, ‘Names have power, so let us
speak of hers: Sharbat Gula.’ No longer anonymous, yet her name,
probably unheard before by ‘typical’ Western readers, will not resonate,
establish connection or meaning. Gula will effectively remain ‘other.’ To
embed the unusual, she is identified as Pashtun, described as ‘the most
warlike of Afghan tribes,’ reinforcing ethnicity-driven barbarism and racist
perspectives Western militarized discourse often attributes to Third-
World conflict. This is further legitimized by presenting supposedly
widely-known (essentializing) facts, ‘it is said of the Pashtun that they are
only at peace when they are at war.’ Here the entire ethnicity is not only
attributed to being inherently violent, but enjoying it as well. This separates
them from the intended audience of ‘good, socially proper and stable
persons’. Gula is identified within this violent category: ‘her eyes -
then and now - burn with ferocity,’ as though both as adult Pashtun and
as child, she embodied natural aptitudes for violence.
Damaging attributions continue in discussions about the uncertainty
of her age. ‘Stories shift like sand in a place where no records exist. No
one, not even she, knows for sure.’ The metaphor evokes stereotypical
‘Arabian night’ imagery, and bestows importance to Western recordkeeping
and science. The timelessness of Afghanistan is reminiscent of