Each of our lives is governed by key moments, turning points, forks in the road down which our futures travel. The decisions, choices, and interactions we make scatter our experiences rendering us as individual and unique as the genetic codes in our cells. Perhaps it is because of this scattering that when experiences unify a community, a nation, the globe they become so much more potent. The 'where were you?' moments: the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin wall, September 11th 2001. I wasn't alive for the first one, and as the wall fell I was more interested in Sesame Street and getting as much liquidised food into my chubby cheeks as I could (I was not a particularly politically aware toddler). But I was 14 years old in 2001 and the memory of that day exists more clearly in my mind than many in the years since. So quickly Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Afghanistan became buzzwords- shorthand for fear and terror.
There's no way for me write this in a way that isn't spectacularly trite but what astonishes me now is how little I still know about Afghanistan, what was going on before that fateful day, its history and the seemingly unending traumas the nation underwent (and continues to undergo). A Thousand Splendid Suns, written by the very talented Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini of The Kite Runner fame, has allowed me to explore in a very small way the turbulent past of the country. Of course, it is a novel and the characters themselves fictionalised. But the fall of Communist oppression, the hopeful transition to an Islamic nation state that gradually fell to the control to the Taliban highlights the unending tragedy that befell the nation in the latter portion of the 20th Century, represented through its central characters.
Hosseini centres his novel around the lives of two women, Mariam and Laila. Mariam, a harami (literally, 'forbidden'), is an illegitimate daughter of a moderately wealthy man with three wives. Although he only pays the minimal courtesy to her and her mother, Mariam adores him and her life enters a tumbling downward spiral when she is left disappointed on her birthday (a fact that comes back with a shuddering punch to the heart in the closing pages of the book) and runs away to find him. This of course makes it sound like her actions drive her fate when in fact, it is the societal powerlessness of both Mariam and Laila which drives so much of the narrative. Throughout the novel what Hosseini does so well and so brutally, is to illustrate repeatedly the inherent strength of these women despite the constraints in which they live. As Mariam is sent from the countryside to Kabul to marry,Rasheed, a much older man, who later also becomes Laila's husband we see a young woman with no option but to mould her existence around that of her husband's. The self-assurance with which Rasheed commands her is horrifying in its very matter-of-factness and Hosseini seems at pains to impress the commonplace attitude of control and subjugation on his readers.
This is not to say the male-female dynamics in the book are totally negative- far from it. Laila, who is a child when Mariam first moves to Kabul, has a warm relationship with her father and Hosseini's gentle handling of her friendship with her best friend Tariq creates a heart to a novel without which large portions of it would have been very bleak indeed. However, both Laila's father and Tariq are constructed as outsiders- her father, a quiet intellectual, is brow-beaten by his dominating (although terribly fragile) wife and Tariq has already been the victim of war- losing a leg to a landmine in his early childhood. They represent the good and the broken. What this means is when both of these men are gone and Laila falls into the power of Rasheed the 'status quo' seems that much more brutal.
And it is brutal. The horrifying ridiculousness of the Taliban declaration across Kabul which happens in the second half of the book is still fresh in my mind:
"...Singing is forbidden...Dancing is forbidden...If you keep parakeets, you will be beaten. Your birds will be killed" and then, in it's own special paragraph: "Attention women: You will stay inside your homes at all times. It is not proper for women to wander aimlessly about the streets...You will not, under any circumstances show your face... You will not speak unless spoken to... You will not laugh in public... Girls are forbidden from going to school. All schools for girls will be closed immediately."
Shall I go on? I'm re-reading and typing and I want to throw the book out of the fucking window again. Because, as I mentioned at the beginning, this stuff was (is) real. Throughout the novel Hosseini does not shy away either in the description of the assault on Afghanistan by the Taliban or the physical assaults that Laila and Mariam and eventually Rasheed are subjected to. In the same way that the current assault on the cultural heritage of Syria (which by the way is an assault on the cultural heritage of everyone on this planet), Laila finds herself being particularly horrified by the destruction of the enormous sculptures of Buddha she visited with her father and Tariq. There is no getting around the subject matter- that of systematic and dismal destruction of culture and lives- but Hosseini does so with real humanity and truth, particularly through his handling of the relationship between Laila and Mariam. They do not instantly bond because they are women sharing a difficult situation. The process is a slow one, and driven as much by their own individual desires to survive as their collected one. But once forged the relationship is as deep as it is complex and the denouement of the novel will leave you utterly heartbroken.
It's probably clear from what I've written that the book is highly emotive. It is, as far as I can remember, the novel which has bought me to tears the most times. But I don't believe that is its main aim. It never feels hyperbolic or cynical- indeed it is the realism of the novel which is often the hardest to bear. Despite this there are moments of magic too and a couple of particularly fairytale like occurrences although Hosseini is clever in the construction of his characters to make it not merely a tale of good and evil. And incredibly, it is also a novel infused with hope. At the end there are good tears as well as sad ones. In the postscript to the novel Hosseini described A Thousand Splendid Suns as his 'modest tribute to the great courage, endurance and resilience of Afghanistan' and this is the sentiment that closes the novel. Rebuild and hope. There can always be hope. And in those moments, particularly those dark, unifying moments, this is the most important thing to hold on to.
