74 pages • 2 hours read
Khaled HosseiniA Thousand Splendid Suns
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Illegitimacy and Its Opposite
From the outset of the novel, the reader learns that Mariam is a harami, a bastard child who is born at great inconvenience to her parents. Nana’s life is reduced to drudgery in a kolba, and she relies upon her seducer to provide for her. For Jalil, supporting Mariam and Nana is penance for his shameful transgression, something he does not want advertised when he casts Mariam out of his public life. Despite the fact that the transgression belongs to her parents and Mariam’s “only sin is being born,” being a harami defines the rest of her life (4).
A burden and embarrassment to Jalil’s family, the harami is disappeared into matrimony in faraway Kabul. Once she is married, where her crime is to not produce heirs and so at her husband’s convenience is replaced by a younger wife, Laila, Rasheed uses the term harami to taunt Mariam, and devalue her legitimacy as a wife, a respected member of the family (216). Hearing the term “still made her feel like she was a pest, a cockroach” (216).
Ironically, Mariam gains a sense of legitimacy through the affections of baby Aziza, who at the start of her life is the illegitimate daughter of Tariq and Laila. By continually moving towards Mariam, Aziza is granting her the “first true connection in her life of false, failed connections” (246). Bolstered by her mother and Mariam’s love, Aziza, in the first illegitimate years of her life, does not feel like a harami, despite Rasheed’s best efforts. Through their support for each other, Aziza, Mariam and Laila reinforce each other’s legitimacy when the Taliban and Rasheed would deny them basic aspects of their humanity.
Experiences of Political Regime Change
From the time of Laila’s birth in April 1978, the novel’s narrative is set against the background of the Communist takeover of Afghanistan; the rehabilitation of the Mujahideen in 1989; their fracturing into rival warlords; the ascension of the Taliban in 1996; and finally, their defeat in 2002.
Laila’s life is marked by conflict and changes dramatically with the regime changes. Conflict is evidenced in the loss of her childhood friend Tariq’s leg through a land mine and the conscription of her brothers into the Mujahideen’s army. Owing to their different genders, Tariq and Laila’s friendship is made possible in the more permissive Communist era, as is their depth of intimacy. Once the Communists leave and the Mujahideen establish a more traditional, religious order, which is deepened by the Taliban’s enforcement of women’s confinement, spontaneous intimacy between a man and a woman is impossible. Thus, when Tarik returns to find Laila, little Zalmai, who has grown up under the Taliban, instantly knows there is something transgressive about his mother having a male friend.
Mariam’s life is made less convenient by the Taliban’s restrictions in 1996 and she suffers from hunger like the rest of his family when Rasheed loses his job. However, the confinement she has been living in since her marriage means that the changes in regime are less felt by her. Even in the so-called Communist Golden Age for women in Afghanistan, as a grown married woman, who is the property of conservative Rasheed, Mariam is immune to any of the benefits of equality. Largely illiterate and confined, she only hears of the news when Rasheed chooses to tell her, and her experience of life and freedom remains consistent for the duration of her marriage.
Female Solidarity
Though the Taliban’s laws—which punish crimes such as painting one’s nails with the loss of a finger and administer beatings for women who leave the house without a male relative—hold women in contempt, the patriarchal structure of Afghan families means that women have always been treated as inferior citizens.
In his novel, Hosseini explores the ways in which women support or sabotage each other. From the outset, Nana is fiercely protective of Mariam, refusing to let her go to school because the other children will call her a harami and laugh at her (18).She does her best to shield her daughter from the “rejection and heartbreak” she will inevitably face if she goes into the world (19). Nevertheless, a teenage Mariam accuses Nana of sabotaging her chance to bond with Jalil and enjoy the “good life” her mother never had (28). It is only after Jalil’s rejection that Mariam cements her solidarity to her mother, realizing that “she had been right all along” (35). When Nana gives up on her by committing suicide, Mariam experiences enormous guilt and internally learns to lower her expectations of love.
Laila also experiences an inadequate sense of solidarity with Fariba. While Laila longs to be close with Fariba and feel her protection, the latter largely neglects her, apart from when she comments on Laila’s beauty and the need to be wary of her reputation when she is a teenager. Laila grows resentful of her mother’s sporadic interference after so much indifference and also blames her drama for them waiting seventeen days after Tariq’s family to leave Kabul. Nevertheless, Laila’s lack of warmth from her mother means that she is able to hinge her loyalties to Tariq and his family.
Of course, the greatest example of female solidarity is in Mariam and Laila’s friendship. As ambaghs, Rasheed’s wives in a polygamous marriage, they are automatically pitted as rivals. This is especially the case because Mariam has disappointed Rasheed and young, beautiful Laila could potentially fulfill all of his hopes for an heir. Still, when Laila—who is shocked by Rasheed’s brutality towards Mariam—defends her, and baby Aziza bonds closely with Mariam, offering her the sort of love she did not think was possible for her, their loyalties are set. They are able to laugh as well as help each other through trying circumstances. Their attempt to run away when the Taliban forbids solo women travelers is a marker of their solidarity and the punishments they deal with, when they are found, out draw them closer together. The tragedy of Hosseini’s novel is that one of the women, Mariam, has to sacrifice her freedom and life so that Laila can thrive and escape with Tariq. Even after Mariam’s execution, Laila is guided by her solidarity with her in making life decisions ,such as returning to rebuild Kabul and visiting Herat. With the possibility of a female child called Mariam at the end of the novel, there is the sense that Mariam lives on through Laila.
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