Khaled Hosseini in A Thousand Splendid Suns takes readers on a journey of the city and country of his birth, Kabul, Afghanistan. In his deeply moving and thought-provoking novel, he particular focus is on the lack of freedom and control of women set against the backdrop of the decades of wars and power struggles.
It is written from the view point of two women. The first woman who is 15 in 1974 is considered of ‘a good, solid marrying age’ and is married off to a widower thirty years her senior. While her prospects as a harami (a bastard) are not the best, any hopes and dreams of a better life are crushed by her husband’s patriarchal viewpoint and violent disregard of her. His thinks that a woman’s face is her husband’s business, so insists that his wife must wear a burqa.
Contrary to current day Afghanistan, the mid-1970s represented a period of freedom where women could walk to the market unaccompanied and wear pants – normal realities in most other countries. The period of Soviet/Communists power between 1978 and1992 is considered the most empowering for women in Afghanistan as opposed to the current extremely oppressive regime – the Taliban.
Readers are introduced to a second young girl, age 9 as the Soviets leave Afghanistan in 1989. She experienced the freedom of that era, went to school, socialised with friends, and secretly has a crush on one of the boys in her neighbourhood. But as Kabul is seldom without conflict, destruction and turmoil return with everyone’s lives being upended by death or the need to flee to Pakistan.
The two women’s lives intercept with the husband representing a way of thinking that is so extremely oppressive and cruel, and foreign to liberated women. How can it be considered a life worth living if a woman is not allowed to laugh, sing, dance, wear make-up, go to school, make eye contact with men, and only speak when spoken to. Kabul’s jails are groaning from the women who have run away from their oppressive husbands. Sharia law, as practiced by the Taliban in Afghanistan, is “gender apartheid” as UN officials and others have called it and gross human rights violation.
A Thousand Splendid Suns is a touching story that is also about love and friendship against the violent backdrop. It is a deeply compelling read for any empowered woman to understand how women’s choice and freedom can be totally removed by controlling, insecure men and disguised as cultural norms.
