When the Moon is Low

Published in 2015, When the Moon is Low is a novel by the American author Nadia Hashimi. Drawing on her Afghan ancestry, Hashimi paints an arresting picture of what it is like to be an undocumented immigrant fleeing Taliban-controlled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. Focusing on the experiences of one family rather than a faceless multitude, Hashimi forces the reader to confront the hardships and traumas suffered by anyone suddenly ripped from a middle-class lifestyle and forced into a meager, hunted, and unstable existence.

When we first meet our narrator Fereiba Waziri, she is a young girl growing up in Kabul. The country is deeply traditional and ruled by superstition – something we experience through Fereiba’s relationship with her stepmother, who seems to be straight out of central casting. Unwilling to allow Fereiba to go to school, the stepmother only relents when Fereiba turns thirteen, so our protagonist gets to be a teenage first-grader.

Fereiba’s first escape is a lucky one. She enters an arranged marriage with Mahmood, a loving and kind man who works as a civil engineer. He has a more modern understanding of women’s rights, and Fereiba is free to get a teaching degree and wear whatever clothes she wants.

Of course, this idyll is quickly interrupted. When the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan in 1979, the U.S. retaliates by arming a fanatical religious group called the Taliban. As they rise to power, they impose their extremist views: women must wear the chador and cannot hold jobs. Fereiba and Mahmood’s relatives start to flee the country, but they decide to wait the war out in Kabul instead. The couple has two children: Saleem and Samira, and Fereiba is pregnant with a third.

Mahmood soon becomes a target for the Taliban because of his freethinking ways and is brutally murdered. Finally, Fereiba realizes that she must take her children and somehow make her way through Europe to reach her sister in London. This second escape is much harder. Saleem, who is now fifteen, finds himself struggling to become a man before he is ready. Samira, meanwhile, has been so traumatized by her father’s murder that she stops speaking entirely. On top of that, Fereiba is laden down with Aziz, the new baby.

The family first gets out of Afghanistan and into safe houses in Iran. From there, they are able to reach Turkey. It is at this point that Saleem starts coming into his own – something the book marks by narrating chapters from his point of view, although in the third person. In Turkey, he connects with a kindly professor and his wife, Hakan and Hayal, who offer the family a place to stay, and he earns a little money by working on a tomato farm.

Despite the peace this respite brings to her children, Fereiba knows that getting to London must be her first priority. She packs up the children and crosses into Greece – cautiously optimistic that now they that they are in Europe, it will be easier to move northward. In Athens, they live the lives of undocumented migrants everywhere. Fereiba takes a job cleaning hotel rooms where she can be paid under the table since refugees aren’t allowed to apply for asylum or to get legal jobs – Greece doesn’t want to make it too easy for them to stay. Meanwhile, Saleem joins the crowd of other young male Afghan refugees in the city. The men have an established pattern: sleeping in parks under tents at night and then scrounging for food in restaurant trash or from aid workers during the day.

Eventually, the family saves enough money to travel on to Italy, which is good news for the very ill baby Aziz who cannot get adequate medical care in Greece. But two days before their departure, Saleem is separated from his mother and siblings. Greek police find him and send him back to Turkey. Unable to do anything to help him, Fereiba decides to leave for Italy without him in order to save Aziz.

Saleem is able to escape by himself and eventually reaches Italy. However, in order to do this, he has had to shed any sense of himself as a child or even adolescent and, instead, is forced to join the hardened criminals who haunt the streets of Rome after dark. The decisions he is faced with now are adult ones that could affect his life forever.

The novel ends with unresolved ambiguity. Fereiba is eventually able to reach London, where she finds her sister. But we leave Saleem in Italy, clinging to the hope of reuniting with his family, but without any concrete possibilities of how to get there.

The novel received mixed reviews, primarily because while Fereiba’s first-person narration is colorful, moving, and very engaging, the novel seems to lose a lot of steam when Hashimi switches to the third person to tell Saleem’s story. As the disappointed reviewer Christina Ianzito puts it in the Washington Post, “Choosing a single strong narrator might have elevated “When the Moon Is Low” from a pretty good book to a gripping yarn.”