Aman

For a few months when I was 21, I stood in the doorway of a Times Square movie theater every night and chatted with a man named Aman, who’d emigrated to the United States from Afghanistan the year before.

After the 10:00 PM show had started at the the Criterion, where I was an assistant manager, I would stand by the ticket box with Aman, an usher at the theater, and together we would survey the late night crowds of tourists, teenagers and theatergoers.

The eldest of three friends from Afghanistan, Aman was strikingly elegant, with a swept-back mane of dark hair and the posture of a sentry. 

Soft-spoken and kind, he would ask me in halting sentences about what I was reading, and smile with patience at my lunging replies. I was a young, lost, thick-tongued mess, so I let my regal colleague do most of the talking, which, as you can imagine, was of a distinctly guarded sort.

One night as we were about to close, a patron vomited in the entryway to the theater. I went to the storeroom, retrieved a mop and bucket, started walking it towards Aman, and . . . and kept walking, right past him, over to the puddle on the floor. I had never been a boss before, of any kind, and was incapable of making the needed request of anyone, let alone this man who was at least 20 years older than I and a lifetime more dignified.

I got to work on the stinking mess myself, but as I went to wring out the mop Aman placed his hand on my wrist and silently implored me not to. The look in his eyes wasn’t a collegial, “please, let me,” it was pained. Admonishing.

Of course. I had insulted him. I let go of the mop without a word and watched as he went to work. He mopped that floor, that dirty floor of a Times Square movie theater, quietly and quickly, with his back straight and his face at rest, without a trace of a grimace.

He cleaned it in the manner I’d seen him write letters home, talk to children and take off his jacket, with aplomb. When he was finished Aman put the mop and bucket away, washed his hands, and joined me at the ticket box. We watched the late-night parade of punks and barflies thin to a few tipsy stragglers, and it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know very much about this man, this man with whom I’d been sharing a midnight ritual for months, at all. I said, “Aman, what did you do at home, in Kabul, for work?”

Aman reached into his breast pocket and handed me a coin inscribed with Arabic calligraphy. I asked, “were you . . . a businessman, did you buy or sell things?” Aman reached again into his pocket and took out a small stack of Polaroid pictures. He handed them to me, one by one, taking a small pause between each photo. 

The first was of a haunting, twisted abstract shape in bronze, a sort of torqued apple with a hole through it. The next showed an urban plaza, a beautiful, terraced green and concrete space embraced by a large, sloping and curving monument of some kind, a sculpture, clearly created by the same hand responsible for the apple and the coin. 

Another photo was of a marble variation on a madonna and child, the mother’s neck extended as if she were warily watching the horizon as she cradles her nursing baby.

Amanullah Haiderzad was, and is, Afghanistan’s most celebrated artist. The plazas of Kabul are home to several of his large, public pieces, and its museums regularly present retrospectives of his work. He’s the founder of Afghanistan’s first undergraduate arts program at the University of Kabul, and the designer of its minted currency.

I don’t remember what I said to Aman about the pictures. I do remember that as I spoke I felt a little bit like what I imagine astronauts feel when they’re “pulling G’s,” like I was rushing with great velocity toward or away from something. 

I think of Aman often these days, every time I watch one of those horrific videos of people being tackled in Home Depot parking lots, lettuce fields or restaurants. Men and women carrying hedge clippers, ladders or lunch trays.

The videos are often accompanied by well meaning reminders of the important work immigrants do, of how they pick our food and paint our houses and tend our children. About how much they contribute to the economy. 

Stephen Jay Gould once said, "I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

The implied challenge to societies like ours in Gould’s observation is to create conditions in which no one is rendered invisible. Nobody should have to be an Einstein to be treated like one.

No artist should have to share his work to be thought capable of that work. No person should have to prove their potential for it to be respected. No human being should have to prove their humanity.  

The name “Aman” means peace, safety or security. Aman Haiderzad arrived in an America that allowed him to thrive as not merely a cog in an economic machine but an individual of particular talents and vision. Now a professor at NYU, he has worked as an artist and teacher in the United States for several decades, and his work continues to be exhibited all over the world. 

But times have changed. Two weeks ago, an immigrant from Afghanistan named Sayed Nader was taken into custody after being ambushed by ICE agents at a hearing in a New York courthouse. 

This past Friday he was put into ”expedited removal,” the Trump administration’s euphemism for immediate rendition to God knows where. 

Mr. Nader was one of the many translators who worked with U.S. troops during America’s twenty year war against the Taliban, a detail that he frantically shared with reporters present as he was being abducted, in desperate hopes that it would make a difference.