Remembering Nancy Hatch Dupree 1: Nancy in her own words Author : AAN Team Published: 20 October 2017 Downloaded: 5 September 2018 Download URL: https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/remembering-nancy-hatch-dupree-1-nancy-in-her-own-words/?format=pdf It is 40 days since the historian, archivist and activist on behalf of Afghans, Nancy Hatch Dupree, died, aged 89. As a tribute to this remarkable woman, we are publishing two pieces. The first is an interview which Nancy gave in 2007 to Markus Hakansson for a book authored by Nancy and published by the Afghanistan Swedish Committee, which features 58 chronicles about Afghanistan. In this interview, Nancy tells how she came to Afghanistan and fell in love with the country and with her husband Louis. She describes the fifteen wonderful years they had, excavating archaeological sites and with her writing guide books. She tells of the 1978 coup, Louis’ imprisonment and there eventual exile to Pakistan where they set up a project to collect and collate information. The extract ends with her eventual return to Kabul. AAN will publish a second dispatch which will be a collection of tributes from people who knew Nancy. Nancy Hatch Dupree moved back to the Afghan capital a few years after this interview took place. In 2013, she inaugurated the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University in 2013 (six years 1 / 20 after she secured initial funding for it of two million dollars). A description of the centre, which houses the now 100,000 document archive and provides research facilities to all, can be found here). AAN’s obituary for Nancy can be read here. The following is an extract from Markus Hakansson’s “A Chat with Afghanistan’s Grandmother”, taken from Afghanistan Over a Cup of Tea; 1995 – 2010, 58 chronicles by Nancy Hatch Dupree, translated by Norman Burns, Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, 2010 (2nd edition). “It’s important to remember that it is often simply chance that lies behind decisive things that happen in your life. That's been the case in my life anyway. That I ended up in Afghanistan was nothing more than pure coincidence,” says Nancy Hatch Dupree, an American living in Peshawar in Pakistan, close to the border to Afghanistan. When she is not working, and that's not very often, this cultural worker who lived in Kabul between 1962 and 1978 likes to relax and lean back with a good detective story, preferably one by Ian Rankin. Holland House is the name of the building where the Country Director of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan lives and it is here on the veranda that Nancy Dupree and I are sitting on the first day of our interview. It's a nice, warm day. Not too hot. The cars honk as they drive by the closed gate, lacking up a little cloud of dust. But in our enclosed garden we can hear the pleasant chirping of birds. A thought comes to me that I mustn't forget to ask about a special bird that means something special to Nancy. But I'll wait for a while with that. Right now, I'll/be content with underlining one of the points I have written down for this conversation: the hoopoe. We are sitting right in the heart of Kabul, a city dominated by contrasts. It's a beautiful city in all of its raggedness, genuine in spite of foreign military columns, hospitable but still strange. I have been here once before, in 2004. But since then, they have erected more buildings, and taller ones. Buildings with green or blue facades, just like in Dubai. But the neighbours of these glass giants are still small simple mud houses where people buy and sell, talk and make noise, live their lives. This is a city full of life but also a city where security has become much worse in the last few years, as it has in the country as a whole. Suicide bombers in the summer of 2007 are still a relatively new phenomenon. For me as a westerner, restrictions are many and I can only imagine how the true Afghanistan really is and try to take in the impressions I experience in my immediate surroundings. Instead, it will have to be through Nancy's stories that I will manage to see and feel the real Afghanistan. It is through her shrewd eyes that the brown dust is dissipated and the Afghanistan that once was makes its appearance. “Why Afghanistan?” I ask when I finally get my technical gear in order – an mp3 player with dictaphone function. '“Why did you end up here and why is it that you have chosen to spend your entire adult life here?” At first sight, Nancy looks like any sweet old grandmother. She is small and slender and speaks with a frail but self-confident voice. She could easily be taken for a person whose daily routine is 2 / 20 filled with baking cookies and drinking coffee. But instead, here we have an eighty-year-old woman who is cherished and surrounded with such respect, such esteem that she has almost become a legend. And wearing a patterned tunic with matching wide trousers and scarf, she seems to hover over the streets of Kabul. Here, everyone knows who she is and when I tell people why I am here in Kabul this time, I am met with jealous glances and comments. One day, and this was a long time ago, Nancy was standing with her [first] husband, an American diplomat in the Pakistan city of Lahore, at the Khyber Pass on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. “We ought to make a trip to Afghanistan next time we get some time off,” she said. He was not thinking of safety in those days. He liked the fashionable hot spots with zazzy nightlife. However, back in Washington, it didn't take more than a year or so before he came home from work one day and said: “Well, your wish has been fulfilled. I have been stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan,” Nancy jumped for joy. He looked disgusted. That was in 1962. As a young student at Barnard College, the women's branch of Columbia University, Nancy had her sights aimed at a career in music. She played the harp and from what I understand, there were times when it really sounded quite good. Her parents had spent a lot of money on an expensive harp and soon she was a part of the professional world of music. Her music teacher obviously felt that Nancy had talent as she often took her along on her musical tours. They played duets and were especially sought after around Christmas and Easter when churches for some reason are particularly interested in harp music. Nancy and her teacher toured all over the United States, in and out of cars, trains and buses and always dragging those cumbersome instruments behind them. “That was a very special period in my life but... it didn't take me long to realize that this wasn't what I wanted to do. This was not the way I wanted to live my life.” Nancy wanted to travel overseas and told her parents of her plans of putting her harp playing aside for a while. Her musical career was exchanged for studies in Chinese language, history, art history and economy. It was during her student years at Columbia University that she met her [first] husband-to-be and they were soon to be stationed in Lahore. Her days were taken up simply enough by being a housewife. But she had actually had a job during an earlier stationing in Iraq as an editor for a small news bulletin with a limited circle of readers consisting of embassy staff. Then came that day in 1962 when the big move was made to Afghanistan. After only a short period of time, Nancy's husband was called upon to make his first field trip. A whole staff of people were to go along with him and they were all up in the air about the trip which was planned for Bamiyan. Nancy was designated to be the guide for the trip. Upon their return to Kabul, a great dinner party was thrown to celebrate the ambassador's safe return. 3 / 20 That evening, Nancy found herself in conversation with two gentlemen. Mr Abdul Wahab Tarzi was the head of the newly established Department of Tourism. The other gentleman was a French archaeologist. Tarzi asked what she thought of Bamiyan. As the good wife of a diplomat, she was expected to respond with a fitting answer, something along the lines of how fantastic it was, the landscape, the culture and the people, everything was just extraordinary. That would have been a suitable response. But Nancy is a person who doesn’t make a secret of what she thinks, whether it is fitting for the situation or not. “Mr Tarzi, it's a scandal,” she said. “Bamiyan is one of the most beautiful places in the world. And you don't even have a guide. I know I must have missed half of what there is to see there!” Mr Tarzi responded in his kind Afghani manner: “You're absolutely right. You ought to do something about that!” The Frenchman, who had up to now only stood in the background, steps into the discussion. He asks Nancy if she likes to have tea and gossip with the other diplomat wives. “Not at all,” she said. “A waste of time.” “Do you like to play bridge?” he continued.