A Thousand Splendid Suns Summary and Theme
Born in 1959 near Herat, Afghanistan, Mariam is the
illegitimate child of a wealthy man, Jalil, and his one-time housekeeper, Nana.
For the first fifteen years of her life, Mariam lives a secluded life with Nana
in a kolba (shack), situated in a clearing away from the main town. As penance
for his adultery, Jalil comes to visit Mariam weekly, bringing her small gifts
and news of the world. From her parents Mariam inherits conflicting views:
Nana’s, that a harami like her must endure a lifetime of pain; and Jalil’s,
that there is a whole world to discover beyond the kolba. Near her 15th
birthday, Mariam goes for the first time to the Herat house Jalil shares with
his legitimate wives and children. She is barred entry and forcibly taken home,
where she sees that Nana has hanged herself.
After this tragedy, Mariam is for a while installed in
Jalil’s guestroom. However, his wives are keen to get rid of her and so arrange
for her to be married to Rasheed, a man from Kabul, who is thirty years her
senior. Still in deep grief, Mariam goes along with the motions and moves to
Kabul with Rasheed.
Although Kabul is a modernizing city, where women have
greater liberties of expression, Rasheed proclaims himself of a traditional
mindset and asks that Mariam wears a burqa. She slowly grows accustomed to
Rasheed and begins to enjoy her status as a legitimate wife rather than an
illegitimate child.
However, when seven of Mariam’s pregnancies end in
miscarriage, relations become fraught between the couple. Rasheed, who
desperately wants a son to compensate for the one who drowned in a previous marriage,
is violent and contemptuous towards Mariam.
Meanwhile, in 1978, on the eve of the Soviet takeover of
Afghanistan, a daughter, Laila, is born to Fariba and Hakim, Rasheed and
Mariam’s neighbors. A rare beauty, Laila grows up intellectually encouraged by
her ex-schoolteacher father but ignored by her unpredictable mother, who thinks
only of her sons fighting in the Mujahideen’s army, against the Communists.
Never truly knowing her older brothers, Laila grows close to Tariq, a
carpenter’s son whose leg was blown off by a land mine.
When the Soviets leave in 1989, much guerrilla fighting
follows and the streets are so dangerous that Laila has to be taken out of
school. As she enters her teens, Laila’s relationship with Tariq deepens and
becomes more flirtatious. Tariq tells her that he must leave Kabul with his
ailing parents, and he and Laila become physically intimate just before his
departure. A few weeks later, Laila’s own family is packing to move away from
Kabul. However before they can get away, a bomb explodes, killing Laila’s
parents.
Laila is saved by Rasheed and Mariam nurses her back to
health. One day a messenger visits to tell Laila the devastating news that
Tariq is dead. Motivated by both lust and a sense of propriety, Rasheed asks
Laila to become his second wife. Laila agrees, only because she realizes that
she is pregnant with Tariq’s child and needs a stable home to ensure the
child’s safety. Marrying Rasheed in haste, Laila attempts to pass off the child
as his own.
In the beginning, Mariam is extremely hostile to Laila,
whomMariam sees as a husband stealer. Rasheed does his best to pit the two
women against each other. However, when the baby, Aziza, is a girl and not the
hoped-for son, Rasheed becomes cooler towards Laila and hints that he has
suspicions that he is not the child’s father. United by their love for Aziza
and their distaste Rasheed, Laila and Mariam form a powerful bond. When they
attempt to run away, they are discovered and returned home, where Rasheed
punishes them brutally.
A Thousand Splendid Suns Summary and Theme
Soon after the Taliban—with its rigid, misogynist laws—comes
to power, Laila finds that she is pregnant again, this time with Rasheed’s
child. In an unsanitary and underfunded women’s hospital, she gives birth to a
son, Zalmai. When Rasheed’s shoe shop burns down and he cannot hold another
job, the family’s grave financial difficulties mean that Aziza has to be sent
to an orphanage, while Zalmai continues to be spoiled.
One day, Tariq, who was not dead but instead living in
Pakistan, turns up at their doorstep. When Zalmai tells his father of their
visitor, Rasheed has Laila in a death-grip. Mariam murders him with a shovel in
order to save Laila’s life. Knowing that the two wives of a murdered husband
would not have a chance of victory in a Taliban court, Mariam gives herself up
and is sentenced to death, while she encourages Laila to elope with Tariq and
the children. Laila and Tariq live in Pakistan for a while, but after a year
return to a more peaceful Kabul, to help rebuild the city.
On breaking a piece from her mother Nana’s heirloom Chinese
tea set, 5-year-old Mariam is called a harami, a word meaning bastard, that
describes her illegitimacy (3): “She understood then what Nana meant, that a
harami is “an unwanted thing […] an illegitimate person who would never have
legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family,
home, acceptance” (4).
Her father, Jalil, on the other hand, who visits her on
Thursdays, calls her “his little flower,” makes her feel wanted and tells her
stories about the Queen Gauhar Shad and the poet Jami. Mariam listens with
“enchantment,” admiring Jalil for his worldly knowledge (5). Nana is scornful,
saying that Mariam is not to believe a word Jalil says because he cast them
both out of his “‘big fancy house like [they] were nothing to him’” (5).
Mariam, however, likes being around Jalil, who makes her feel deserving, even
if she has to share him with his three wives and ten legitimate children.
Mariam lives near Herat, her father’s town, but has never
been to visit the place where he owns a cinema, three carpet stores and a
clothing shop. Nana had been one of his housekeepers, but following her affair
with Jalil, was thrown out. Her own father, a lowly stone carver, disowned her,
fleeing to Iran. Jalil struck up a quiet deal whereby he sent pregnant Nana off
to the kolba, claiming that she forced herself on him. Embittered, Nana warns
Mariam that “‘[l]ike a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing
finger always finds a woman” (7).
A Thousand Splendid Suns -Character Analysis
MARIAM
Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of wealthy business owner
Jalil and his former housekeeper, Nana. The first fifteen years of her life are
lived with Nana in a kolba, a shack her father built as penance for his
adultery. Mariam grows up respectful to Nana, quietly heeding her diatribes and
adoring of Jalil, whose stories help her imagine a world beyond the kolba. Her
sense of entitlement leads her to visit the house Jalil lives in with his
legitimate family. When he rejects her, she learns that being a harami, a
bastard, is a sentence towards a lifetime of exclusion.
Mariam’s subsequent loss in confidence and sense of low
status is reflective of the treatment she accepts from her misogynist husband
Rasheed. She feels that the burqa he makes her wear is a buffer “from the
scrutinizing eyes of strangers” (72).
Mariam is on the plainer side, with “archless, unshapely
eyebrows […] eyes mirthless green and set so closely together that one might
mistake her for being cross-eyed” and a long chin (53). As a result of
Rasheed’s beatings, she also loses teeth and ages prematurely; nevertheless, by
the time she has come to know the unconditional love she experiences with Laila
and Aziza, she possesses the radiance of the “thousand splendid suns” that give
the book its title (381). For Mariam, being born into the world an unwanted
child and having her low worth reflected in the contempt she is treated with by
her husband, the feeling of leaving the world “as a woman who had loved and
been loved back” is enough to give her a sense of abundant peace (361).
In Mariam’s character, Hosseini portrays a woman whose
happiness is less predicated on personal achievements or a happy ending than in
the connections she made with others. Mariam’s life-fulfilment being
exclusively through her connection with others may be unusual to an American audience,
who grow up with the narrative that life is about the fulfilment of individual
dreams.
LAILA
Laila, the novel’s second heroine, is born on the eve of the
Soviet Revolution in Afghanistan and the rest of her life is shaped by
political turbulence. Growing up under the Communists, as her ex-schoolteacher
father says, “is a good time to be a woman in Afghanistan” because it is likely
that she will have the opportunity to study at Kabul’s university and embark on
a career as a doctor or engineer (133). Laila, who with her blonde curls and
turquoise eyes is a “pari, a stunner” is from a young age in love with her
neighbor, Tariq (108). Her sense of duty towards her parents comes in sharp
conflict with her ardent feelings for Tariq, when she has sex with him before
he leaves Kabul with his family.
Once she learns that she is pregnant with Tariq’s child
(Tariq is imagined dead at this point by Laila), 14-year-old Laila makes the
“sacrifices” of a mother and marries Rasheed in order to have protection for
her baby (213). While married to Rasheed, Laila only pays lip-service to his
strict rules and her sense of love and wisdom is enough to penetrate through
Mariam’s initial hostility. Strong in her convictions, Laila stands up for
Mariam when Rasheed beats her and is indefatigable in finding ways to visit
Aziza in the orphanage, even when Rasheed will not accompany her and the
Taliban enact terrible punishments on women who walk alone in the streets.
Once Laila is reunited with Tariq, she serves in the Afghani
reconstruction efforts and fulfils the destiny expected of her by her father,
who said that women of her intelligence will be essential to the rebuilding of
Afghanistan. By teaching in the orphanage Aziza was once sent to, Laila holds
both her father’s ambition and the memory of Mariam’s goodness in her heart.
Through Laila, Hosseini presents a counter to the Western stereotype
of Afghan women as burqa-clad, disempowered and devoid of sexual agency.
Laila’s independence and determined, passionate nature repeatedly play into
conflict with the brutal misogynist regimes of the Taliban and Rasheed. This
heightens the drama of her experience and enables the reader to identify with
her.
RASHEED
The husband of Mariam and Laila has a virile physicality; he
reeks of tobacco and cologne, is tall, “thick-bellied and broad-shouldered,”
with a “big, square, ruddy face […] hooked nose […] crowded teeth” and abundant
hair (53). His sense of manhood is reflected in his coarse style of lovemaking,
taste for pornography and manner of eating with his hands. Still, he is
obsessed with the namoos,orhonor, of his wives, making them wear burqas so that
their faces are reserved for him. When the Taliban come to power, he is not
“bothered much” because it is little trouble to grow the requisite beard and
his treatment of his wives is already in line with the regime’s misogynist
views (274). He handles his suspicion that Laila has been sexually active prior
to their marriage and that Aziza is not his child calculatingly, dropping
threats here and there and finally sending Aziza off to an orphanage when he
claims there is not enough money to feed her, while at the same time spoiling
his son, Zalmai.
Overall, Rasheed, the domestic antagonist of both of
Hosseini’s heroines, is an unsympathetic character. However, the reader is made
to understand that his treatment of his wives, though on the extreme side, is
culturally sanctioned and therefore not merely the result of his personal
inclinations. Hosseini also provides insight into Rasheed’s psychology: the trauma
and perhaps repressed guilt over the drowning of a son from a previous marriage
and his desperate need for an heir in his subsequent couplings. Once Zalmai is
born, his wish is fulfilled, and he channels his personal and material
resources into helping the little boy thrive. However, he goes overboard when
Zalmai becomes a disagreeable, entitled child.
TARIQ
Laila’s childhood best friend, Tariq is the son of a
carpenter and had his right leg blown off by a landmineduring the Afghan war
with the Soviets. Still, he is mischievous, loyal and impulsive. Hosseini
portrays Tariq through Laila’s eyes, so that the reader sees him as virile and
heroic. Tall and handsome and muscular, he comes to Laila’s defense when she is
teased by a gang of boys. Later, in his teens, he grabs hold of a gun and tells
Laila that he would “kill” for her (173). He fulfils his promise when he comes
back to Kabul to find Laila, rescue Aziza, and adopt Zalmai as his own son,
however nostalgic the little boy is for his real father. However, Hosseini, in
his tribute to Afghan women, saves the bravest act of heroism for Mariam, who
sacrifices her life, and Laila, who takes the initiative to rebuild
Afghanistan.
NANA
Nana, Mariam’s mother, is a living example of a wronged,
embittered woman. Nana, the daughter of a stone-carver, who was betrothed at
the age of 15 to a parakeet seller, had her expected future stolen when a
“jinn” entered her body and caused her to begin having epileptic fits (4). She
then went on to become a housekeeper in Jalil’s household and when she was
seduced by him, fell pregnant with Mariam. Secluded in the remote kolba, both
to save Jalil’s reputation and by her own inclination to avoid her neighbors’
scorn, Nana lives a joyless life. She warns her daughter that the only lesson
she needs is to learn to “endure” the hardships of life and forever mistrust
men, who have wretched hearts and will let her down (18). Despite her apparent
hard-heartedness, Nana loves her daughter and gains a sense of purpose from
Mariam’s needing her. Nana repeatedly insists that Mariam will have “‘nothing’”
in the world once she is gone (27). When Mariam escapes to visit her father and
stays overnight without any promise of return, Nana is able to endure no longer
and hangs herself.
JALIL
Mariam’s wealthy father, Jalil is the apple of her eye.
Whereas Nana tells her stories of bitterness and terms her a harami, Jalil, who
visits Mariam weekly, praises her, takes her fishing, and shares stories
fromthe cinema and of the world with her. Nana points to Jalil’s hypocrisy when
he tells Mariam that children got free ice cream on Tuesdays at his cinema:
“‘The children of strangers get ice cream. What do you get Mariam? Stories of
ice cream’” (6).
The truth about Jalil is more complex than Mariam’s adoring,
filial view or Nana’s defamatory portrait. On the one hand, he is typical of a
man in his high-status position and uses his prerogative to have multiple wives
and a mistress. When Mariam asks to be seen in public with Jalil or comes to
his home, he denies her out of deference to his reputation. Again, while Mariam
is still traumatized from her mother’s suicide, he agrees to have her married
off to Rasheed, to protect his reputation. Nevertheless, there is a part of
Jalil that feels he has to atone for bringing Mariam into the world as a harami
and he builds the kolba and visits her out of a sense of penance. At the end of
his life, he is humbled by the misfortunes he has endured through conflict and
in a letter addressed to Mariam, he apologizes sincerely to her, calling
himself a “weak man” and asking for her forgiveness (394).
MULLAH FAIZMULLAH
Mullah Faizmullah, an elderly, educated religious man, visits
Mariam and Nana in the kolba and in a manner that is ahead of his time, sees
the value in educating an illegitimate village girl. He tells her stories of
religious miracles and says that the words of the Koran will “‘comfort’” her in
times of need (17). Though a less glamorous visitor than Jalil, Mullah
Faizmullah proves a more reliable source of comfort to Mariam after Jalil
rejects her and Nana kills herself. He tries to reassure Mariam that Nana’s
suicide was not her fault and though she does not wholly recognize this, his
words and presence stay with her at other times of her life. She realizes that
the presence of Laila and Aziza in her life was the hand of God and recites a
verse from the Koran for comfort, just before her execution. Although Mariam
claims that she never experienced disinterested goodness before Laila and
Aziza, Mullah Faizmullah was an earlier example of this and his family hold
Mariam’s memory dear, even after his death.
HAKIM
Laila’s father, Hakim, stands out as a different sort of man
to the chauvinistic, alternately-charming-and-brutal model of the other
patriarchs in the novel. Physically, he is “a small man, with narrow shoulders
and slim, delicate hands, almost like a woman’s” and the spectacles that mark
him as an intellectual (109). A former schoolteacher before the communists
replaced him, he has a vast knowledge and a learned perspective on Afghan
history and culture. Nevertheless, for the period of history he is living
through (the war against the Soviets, which takes his sons to the front line),
his gifts go underappreciated, especially by his wife, who wishes he was of
greater practical help around the house. Rasheed, Laila’s future husband, sees
Hakim as effeminate and overly lenient with his daughter.
Hakim has great regard for Laila’s intelligence and sees her
gender as no barrier to her getting an education, even altruistically
speculating that the communists who fired him will provide for his daughter.
Even after his demise, Hakim’s standards are there to guide Laila; she is
dismayedby the Taliban’s attacks on female liberties and confinement of women
in the home. When the period of Afghan reconstruction begins, she once again
remembers her father’s words that she, an intelligent Afghan woman, will have a
crucial role to play.
FARIBA
Laila’s mother, Fariba, was once an exuberant, independent
woman, who in her youthclimbed the wall between her house and Hakim’s and was
instrumental in eliciting a proposal from him. Robust in build, with a laugh
that “bulldozed” Hakim, Fariba is a force of nature (147). She is curious when
young Mariam moves to the neighborhood as Rasheed’s long-awaited second wife
and is a gossip, hosting women’s teas, where all matters are discussed.
By the time Laila is 9 and her older brothers have gone away
to fight with the Mujahideen, Fariba is often depressive, reclusive, and
neglectful of her daughter. While Laila is certain of her father’s affection,
she wishes she could be closer to her mother, though her extreme moods disallow
it. Laila’s inability to share in Fariba’s grief, when her two brothers die,
forges a further rift between them.
For Hosseini, however, Fariba’s neglect serves as an
essential plot device. It enables Tariq and Laila to sneak off, have sex and
conceive Aziza and it also provides a counterpoint to the protective, maternal
relationships Laila enjoys with other women, both her daughter and
Mariam.
AZIZA
Laila and Tariq’s daughter, Aziza, is the fruit of her
parents’ hurried illicit relation prior to Tariq’s departure. Her name means
“cherished one” and is symbolic of the sacrifices Laila makes for her, in
marrying the abusive Rasheed and initially enduring Mariam’s hostility.
Ironically, her alleged father Rasheed never calls “his daughter by the name
the girl had given her” and goes on to give her away, while he spoils her
brother (231). Nevertheless, Aziza adapts to Rasheed’s negligence and violence,
adopting “a calm, pensive” demeanor beyond her years (290). This precocity is
even more evident when she is sent to the orphanage and gives “vague but
cheerful replies” to Laila’s entreaties on her well-being, though a stammer
indicates some trauma (317). In a book about female courage and endurance,
Aziza, who has been parented by both Laila and Mariam, has the good qualities
of both, and it is implied that she will become another fine young woman who
will help to rebuild Afghanistan.
A Thousand Splendid Suns -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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