do you want anything from afghanistan?

i made this animation / animated drawing in 19 hours! this is my third animation, following tempelhof in fog & a forest grows in berlin. as you can see from the romance with colors — I’m feeling infinitely better than last autumn.

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do you want anything from afghanistan, he asks me — my friends are coming back from there soon. and i thought — do i want anything from afghanistan (?) for him, it’s simply that mother/home/land, the home he escaped, left behind. for me it’s a place i only know from radio and television noise of my childhood — the war in afghanistan, mr. president, when will you bring our soldiers back from afghanistan, those bombs and bodies in afghanistan — and i ask myself, am i allowed to want things — from afghanistan? am i allowed to want. and i almost SAY you (?) maybe. maybe it’s you that I want, but i’m not sure yet. so instead I look at him and I said — I don’t know, does afghanistan want anything from me? and he laughs, and when he returns he brings me pistachios and pine nuts handpicked from that land, spices made by his mother’s hands, and a pair of winter pants — she bought them in afghanistan, but the tag is in mandarin — made in zhejiang, my home province, my mother land. and maybe, do you want anything from afghanistan really means do you want anything from china / it means do you want anything from that other world we left behind, do you want anything from the place we visit sometimes / in between dream and memory / between home and a stranger land?