Brenda and the F Word

In 1953, a young Swiss writer, Nicholas Bouvier, traveled by car from Serbia (then part of Tito’s Yugoslavia) all the way through Greece, Turkey, and Iran to Kabul, Afghanistan and over the famous Khyber Pass. The journey became a marvelous book called The Way of the World. Here is some of Bouvier’s reporting on a night spent in a cell with a very friendly jailer in Kurdistan.

“The folk tradition of lex talionis, the vendetta and family feuds, was beginning to go out of fashion. But there was still talk of what had gone on three years previously in the Bukan valley. The men of two rival families assembled in a house in the village, with their respective mullahs, to sort out a case that had set them at odds for several generations. For a whole afternoon, the parties feasted, smoked, and discussed the matter without once raising their voices, but without coming to a solution. So they banished their priests and everyone under 15, bolted the doors and windows, lit an oil lamp in order to see each other’s faces, and settled the quarrel with daggers. There were six survivors out of thirty-five guests…”