A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [146]
Today in post-Taliban, post-9/11 Afghanistan there is talk again of liberating women, as there should be. The gender apartheid that has been forced on Afghan women has been one of the great unresolved injustices of the modern world. In addition, Afghanistan needs its women.
The whole project of rebuilding Afghanistan is doomed if the fundamental human rights of its women are not respected and its women are not allowed to participate.
Queen Soraya, wife of King Amanullah, said: “Do not think, however, that our nation needs only men to serve it. Women should also take their part, as women did in the early years of Islam. The valuable services rendered by women are recounted throughout history. And from their examples, we learn that we must all contribute toward a development of our nation.” The Queen said those words back in 1926 and it seems to me that her words are as relevant eighty years later, and perhaps even more so than they were back then.
I returned to Kabul in 2003 and met people from all walks of life, and I remember standing at street corners and seeing fully covered women walking along, trailed by four, five, six, seven children. I remember thinking, who is that person inside? What has she seen? What has she endured? What makes her happy? What gives her sorrow? What are her hopes, her longings, her disappointments? A Thousand Splendid Suns is in some ways my attempt at imagining answers to those questions. It’s my attempt to explore the inner lives of these two fictional women and look for the very ordinary humanity beneath their veils.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is very, very dear to me. It has been a labor of love, and I hope that it doesn’t sound too pretentious if I say that I think of it as my modest tribute to the great courage, endurance and resilience of Afghanistan.
I hope that I will engage you, that I will transport you and that the novel will move you and leave you with some sense of compassion and empathy for Afghan women whose suffering has been matched by very few groups in recent world history.
Khaled Hosseini
READING GUIDE
In brief
Mariam is a harami, an illegitimate child, who only sees her adored father once a week. On those precious days they go fishing, he reads to her and gives her beautiful presents, but she can never live with him. She decides to visit his home, a visit he does not acknowledge, and returns to find that her mother has hanged herself. Determined that she will not secure a place in their household, her father’s wives marry her off to Rasheed, an elderly widower from Kabul, far enough away for Mariam to be safely forgotten. It is a marriage that soon deteriorates into brutality and misery made worse for Mariam by Rasheed’s decision to also marry the orphaned Laila. When Laila disappoints Rasheed by bearing a daughter, she too finds herself the target of his cruelty. But out of this unhappy household grows a friendship which will bind the two women in a union as close as any marriage, and which will endure beyond death. Written in often lyrical prose, Khaled Hosseini’s second novel weaves thirty years of turbulent Afghan history through an intensely powerful story of family, friendship and, ultimately, hope.
Background
Khaled Hosseini’s reputation as an accomplished storyteller has already been well and truly established with The Kite Runner, his celebrated debut novel written in the early hours before setting off for his “day job” as a doctor. Brought up in a tradition of storytelling, Hosseini has described this tradition as first and foremost what writing novels is about.