Laughter amid sorrow

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The sign on the door reads, "No Entry Without Laughing."

It's a new sign, a new door and a new openness beyond the portal that leads to the office of Zanbel-e-gham, or, The Hod Carrier of Sorrow, Afghanistan's only satirical magazine. One of at least 100 magazines and newspapers that have proliferated on the streets of this wounded capital recently, it is alone in tracing its roots to the dour years of austere Taliban rule.

For five years, hidden in his home, Osman Akram Sargaden used his pen to fence with the rigidly Islamic Taliban mullahs who ruled this country, hand-writing pages of witty, acerbic, biting criticism of the hard-line regime.

At his side was cartoonist Mohammed Zia Kushan, who skewered the pretensions of the Taliban, the arrogance of Osama bin Laden and his Arab warriors and the sanctity of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the spiritual leader.

Monthly, Sargaden filled 10, 12, 14 pages with columns of criticisms and rumors, proverbs and poetry interspersed with Kushan's simply drawn cartoons. With the help of friends, he photocopied and stapled pages together.

Kushan's the country's only cartoonist, for the Taliban had ruled that no pictures should be made of the human form.

Kushan drew attention to his drawing in one issue of a turbaned Talib devouring skewers of meat. Looking on was a caricature of the average Afghan man, who was eating his own hand. Another cartoon showed Omar being lugged around by stooped Afghans in the two-poled zanbel, or hod carrier. Another depicted a woman in a burqa, the grate where her face should be drawn as jail bars.

'Very dangerous'

"We had to find a way to express people's grief," Sargaden said, "so we named the magazine Hod Carrier of Sorrow.

"Of course, it was very dangerous at the time," he continued. "People were hanged for very small crimes in those days. Of course, I was scared, but I never stopped."

At the same time, he said, the Taliban's humorlessness, their inability to understand life beyond mind-numbing recitations of prayers, insulated them from comprehension.

"The Talibs didn't take us seriously," Sargaden explained, "because they didn't know what a joke was. They didn't know how to laugh. We were trying to make jokes out of the difficulties in people's lives, out of different situations, but they just couldn't understand."

Still, Sargaden was careful trying to control distribution, knowing if he were discovered, it would be fatal.

With the creation of a government supported by the United States and Europe, many people, Sargaden said, believe the country is headed for the first period of peace and prosperity in nearly a quarter of a century. Even so, he insisted, Zanbel will continue to be published.

Still sharp

Neither Sargaden's prose nor Kushan's cartoons have lost their edge.

In the new issue, one of Kushan's drawings shows American soldiers hunting for al-Qaida fighters in the mountains. In the second panel, a Pakistani soldier is shown fanning bin Laden as he reclines . The point, of course, is that Pakistan, detested for its uncritical and lavish support of the Taliban, is still harboring al-Qaida terrorists.

His essays all speak to the burdens of Afghans.

"We're optimistic," he says, "but there is still a lot of sorrow in Afghanistan. That is why we will never go away."