Snapshots: This Afghan American Life

Snapshots is a collection of personal narratives and poems by 15 Afghan American writers from the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of California. The first collection of its kind, this book gives a subtle glimpse of a new immigrant community through the eyes of its first American generation. The Afghan American community was born some 30 years ago, after catastrophe shattered Afghanistan: a revolution, the Soviet invasion, a civil war, and finally the rise of the Taliban, a string of events that claimed over a million lives and drove as many as ten million Afghans into homeless exile. Some hundred thousand of those refugees made their way to America and a good many settled in California; where the largest Afghan community outside Asia coalesced in the East Bay suburbs of San Francisco. Now, the first generation of Afghan Americans has come of age; most were born here; others left Afghanistan as very young children. For this generation, growing up in the shadow of their parents tragedy, Afghanistan is the dream that permeates every waking moment. In their poems and narratives, you can see this dream of Afghanistan twining with the reality of America to form a new thread in the American fabric.