Women and Resilience in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns

Afghan-born American novelist and physician Khaled Hosseini’s second bestselling novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, written in 2007, is set in “war-ravaged landscape of Afghanistan”, and it focuses on the tumultuous lives and relationship of Mariam and Laila. In contrast to Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, which is a story of “father-son relationship”, this novels is regarded as “mother-daughter story” by the author himself. The novel relates the story of Mariam and Laila in four parts. The first part focuses on Mariam, while the second and fourth part on Laila, and the relationship between the two women in the third part. At the background the novel also recounts Afghanistan’s troubled history of last several decades, through the eyes of a segment of the Afghan population that probably suffered and lost the most during that period, that are its women. Through this pitiable story of two women married to a man Rasheed, who oppress them physically as well as psychologically, the author tries to represent the situation of Afghan women, who are not only affected by the war but are also being oppressed by their domestic rulers, that are their husbands. The present paper attempts to examine the afghan women, oppressed under the rule of patriarchy, whether at the domestic level by their husbands or at social order under Taliban rule, and their resilience and tenacity to survive, which is clearly identified throughout this novel with a glimpse of hope at the end, as the rains return, the cinemas open, the children play and the orphanages are rebuilt.

Khaled Hosseini brings in this novel the subject of women suppression in Afghanistan along with the various other restrictions of education and familial subjugation. He has created the man-d...

... middle of paper ...

...ize that when oppression goes too far, whether through an individual or the state; once oppressed, subjugated or downtrodden can rise up against the tyranny. Hosseini, through the love and affection of Mariam and Laila for each other, portrayed “amazing resilience of human spirit where hope unfolds like a tiny, frail plant in the most unlikely places” (Null and Alfred 123).

Works Cited

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. Constance Borden ad Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. Inroduction by Sheila Rowbotham. London:Vintage Books, 2011 (1st Ed. 1949)

Hosseini, Khalid. A Thousand Splendid Suns. Rivekhead Books, 2007. Web.

Null, Linda and Suellen Alfred. “A Thousand Splintered Hopes”.The English Journal. 97.6. National Council of Teachers of English (July, 2008), pp. 123-125.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40503428. Accessed: 24/02/2014 06:40