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‘Bookseller of Kabul’ author to pay damages

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A court in Norway has ordered Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad to pay damages of about $40,000 to a member of an Afghan family she wrote about in her 2003 book “The Bookseller of Kabul.” The World’s Carol Zall has more.

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MARCO WERMAN: Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad’s 2003 book The Bookseller of Kabul sold millions. But a court in Norway ruled recently that her writing defamed one of the characters, and ordered her to pay $40,000 in damages. Ms. Seierstad was found guilty of defamation and negligent journalistic practices. She maintains the judgment is wrong, and says she will appeal the case. The World’s Carol Zall has more on the story.

CAROL ZALL:  When Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad went to Kabul in 2002, she lived with the family of a well-known bookseller there, Shah Muhammad Rais. She spent about five months with the family, then left and wrote a book about the experience. Although she changed the names of characters and wrote it in a novelistic style, she presented her book as non-fiction, based on interviews, some via translators, with the Rais family. The Bookseller of Kabul was a worldwide bestseller. But Back in Kabul, Mohammad Rais and his family were not happy.

MOHAMMAD RAIS:  She is lying about many things.

ZALL: Rais claims Seierstad distorted the facts and defamed him and his family. One of the bones of contention is how women are portrayed in the book. It was Muhammad Rais’s second wife, Suraia, who brought the suit against Seierstad in the Oslo court. The ruling said the book breached her privacy and that Miss Seierstad didn’t act in good faith. And Muhammad Rais takes issue with the fact that Seierstad portrayed him as buying his wife Suraia. Seierstad says this particular issue comes down to semantics.

ASNE SEIERSTAD: Whether the Afghans would use the word buying and selling, that’s a different question, but I am in my right to use that word. It doesn’t sound nice that you can buy or sell a life, but I would still insist that is what is going on in Afghanistan. If you have a daughter you will give her away usually for a sum of money or for goods or other things.

ZALL: Rais, however, says all he did was pay for the wedding.

RAIS: I paid just for the expenses of her marriage. It’s exactly the same as you do in the United Kingdom and European countries and United States. Marriages have expenses.

ZALL: The question of the marriage is just one sore point. Mr. Rais is also angry about a scene which depicts his mother without clothes on, and many other details. After the Norwegian court’s ruling in favor of Suraia Rais, seven other family members are now reportedly planning to sue Miss Seierstad. At stake is not just the truth of these particular facts, but also the way a Western journalist chose to interact with and portray a group of people in war-torn Afghanistan. Seierstad, who wrote the book in the style of a novel, says the ruling is unfair.

SEIERSTAD: I feel I’m also being judged for the form that I’ve used, the literary form. So it makes it more difficult to work as a documentary journalist.

ZALL: And, she says, it limits what she and other reporters can do.

SEIERSTAD:  It’s definitely reducing journalist’s right to not write rosy pictures about the world but to really write the reality.

ZALL: Still, Muhammad Rais maintains that Seierstad’s book is not at all reality.

RAIS: It’s not true. And it doesn’t give a good image of Afghan culture and Afghan ordinary people life.

ZALL: With a vow to appeal the decision from Seierstad, and more lawsuits in the pipeline, the case promises to keep the courts busy with difficult questions about journalism and interpretation of cultural differences for some time to come. For The World, I’m Carol Zall.

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