A Thousand Splendid Suns

It is a good time of year for lists of blessings and things we are thankful for. After having read A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, I’ve come up with a rather sober one:

1. I am thankful for having had the fortune and opportunity to partner myself with a person who does not hit me, rape me, isolate me, threaten me & my children, or shame me in any way, shape, or form. He has never put a loaded gun in my mouth, made me eat gravel, or kept me from my family.

2. I am thankful that I live in a country where the government values the equity of people regardless of their gender (in broad terms); that as a woman I am extended the right of an education, a profession, rights to my body, my children, my home, and the vote.

3. The simple fact that I am writing this, adding hyperlinks to other sites, and posting it on the Internet without fear of retaliation by my government is actually quite remarkable in the global climate that we live in. I’m allowed to do keyword searches of “Taliban” and “Al-Qaeda” in safety (although questionable anonymity).

Reading A Thousand Splendid Suns did not make me aware of these things for the first time. Rather, it magnified the political and social climate in Afghanistan in a way that reinforced a previously held, though perhaps underappreciated, gratitude. It is the story of relationships between women and the sacrifices many women in war zones are forced to make. It plots the trajectory from rival to friend to ally that many relationships can take. It is absolutely outrageous that women anywhere in the world are treated as Laila and Maryam, the protagonists in Hosseini’s illuminating tale. This seems like a story that one might introduce as not being true, but nonetheless has happened; truth through fiction.

In the book, we follow Laila and Maryam alternately as they come of age in Kabul and Herat (respectively). Their paths begin on different slopes of the same hypothetical mountain, and when their lives cross, it seems they’ve arrived at the same poisoned mountain stream. The story of their survival in the face of an awful marriage and the sacrifices they make for one another and for their children is heartbreaking, and at times, covertly uplifting.

Throughout the story, Hosseini details Afghan politics. As someone with almost no knowledge of modern Middle East politics, I had a hard time keeping track of the various individuals and political groups they represent. Among the dozens of names of politicians and warlords, none of which I recognized, there are communists, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, the Russians, and the US. I think this difficulty added to the story however, it created a chaotic background to set the story against: it didn’t matter who was killing whom, the point was the Afghan people were living with fear, violence, and frighteningly dwindling resources every day, for years.

This was the first book I’ve read from the flood of literature that uses the Middle East (Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, specifically) as a setting. I look forward to learning more and reading others. It is terrifying to process these books in the context of real wars (i.e. Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation New Dawn), real US and NATO soldiers, and knowing that we might really be on the wrong side. As I think critically however, I am forced to wonder if there ever is a right side. The US isn’t at war with a country; it engages militia groups, rogue fundamentalists, and people who don’t represent anyone but themselves. The trouble consistently is that to get to our enemies, we must first step over the lives of innocents; blameless people who are our sisters and brothers and who are victims not only of the US’s retaliatory actions, but of the same global violence that inspired it.

The line by seventeenth century poet Saib-e-Tabrizi from where the title originates explains the brilliance in any community, as well as giving a context for the heartbreak of war:

“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”