A Thousand Splendid Suns (32 page)
F
or almost three decades now, the Afghan refugee crisis has been one of the most severe around the globe. War, hunger,
anarchy, and oppression forced millions of people—like Tariq and his family in this tale—to abandon their homes and flee Afghanistan
to settle in neighboring Pakistan and Iran. At the height of the exodus, as many as eight million Afghans were living abroad
as refugees. Today, more than two million Afghan refugees remain in Pakistan.
Over the past year, I have had the privilege of working as a U.S. envoy for UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, one of the world’s
foremost humanitarian agencies. UNHCR’s mandate is to protect the basic human rights of refugees, provide emergency relief,
and to help refugees restart their lives in a safe environment. UNHCR provides assistance to more than twenty million displaced
people around the world, not only in Afghanistan but also in places such as Colombia, Burundi, the Congo, Chad, and the Darfur
region of Sudan. Working with UNHCR to help refugees has been one of the most rewarding and meaningful experiences of my life.
To help, or simply to learn more about UNHCR, its work, or the plight of refugees in general, please visit:
www.UNrefugees.org
.
Thank you.
Khaled Hosseini
January 31, 2007
A
few clarifications before I give thanks. The village of Gul Daman is a fictional place—as far as I know. Those who are
familiar with the city of Herat will notice that I have taken minor liberties describing the geography around it. Last, the
title of this novel comes from a poem composed by Saeb-e-Tabrizi, a seventeenth-century Persian poet. Those who know the original
Farsi poem will doubtless note that the English translation of the line containing the title of this novel is not a literal
one. But it is the generally accepted translation, by Dr. Josephine Davis, and I found it lovely. I am grateful to her.
I would like to thank Qayoum Sarwar, Hekmat Sadat, Elyse Hathaway, Rosemary Stasek, Lawrence Quill, and Haleema Jazmin Quill
for their assistance and support.
Very special thanks to my father, Baba, for reading this manuscript, for his feedback, and, as ever, for his love and support.
And to my mother, whose selfless, gentle spirit permeates this tale. You are my reason, Mother jo. My thanks go to my in-laws
for their generosity and many kindnesses. To the rest of my wonderful family, I remain indebted and grateful to each and every
one of you.
I wish to thank my agent, Elaine Koster, for always, always believing, Jody Hotchkiss (Onward!), David Grossman, Helen Heller,
and the tireless Chandler Crawford. I am grateful and indebted to every single person at Riverhead Books. In particular, I
want to thank Susan Petersen Kennedy and Geoffrey Kloske for their faith in this story. My heartfelt thanks also go to Marilyn
Ducksworth, Mih-Ho Cha, Catharine Lynch, Craig D. Burke, Leslie Schwartz, Honi Werner, and Wendy Pearl. Special thanks to
my sharp-eyed copy editor, Tony Davis, who misses nothing, and, lastly, to my talented editor, Sarah McGrath, for her patience,
foresight, and guidance.
Finally, thank you, Roya. For reading this story, again and again, for weathering my minor crises of confidence (and a couple
of major ones), for never doubting. This book would not be without you. I love you.
This extract is taken from a speech given at Book Expo America on 2 June, 2007.
I
began writing like the boy in
The Kite Runner
, Amir. I grew up in Kabul in the 1970s, and I wrote poems and little plays that I would coax my siblings and cousins into
staging for our parents at parties. I also wrote short stories, which I recall were dark, intense, even unabashedly, proudly
melodramatic and, in their own childish way, dealt with issues of loyalty, friendship and class struggle. They made up for
what they lacked in subtlety and style with a big, winning, expansive heart, which are words that some people have used, maybe
with some justification, to describe
The Kite Runner
.
The language in which I’ve written has changed. I began writing in Farsi, then I wrote in French and now I mostly write in
English, but one thing remains constant: I’ve always written for an audience of one. For me, writing has always been the selfish,
self-serving act of telling myself a story. You know, something grabs my interest and compels me to sit down and see it through.
This is how
The Kite
Runner
was written. I had two boys in mind, one who was conflicted and on very unsure moral ground, the other pure and loyal and
rooted in integrity. I knew that their friendship was doomed, that there would be a falling out and that this would impact
the lives of those around them in a profound way. The how and why that would happen was the compulsion that led me to sit
down and write that novel in March 2001.
I never intended to get the novel published. Even when I was as far as two-thirds of the way through writing, it never crossed
my mind that anybody would actually read it although I thought my wife probably would because she loves me. So you can imagine
my astonishment at the reception that
The Kite Runner
has received worldwide since its publication. I received letters from India, London, Sydney, Paris, Arkansas, all over the
world from readers who expressed a passion to me. Many of them wanted to know how to send money to Afghanistan. Some told
me they wanted to adopt an Afghan orphan. In those letters I saw the unique ability that fiction has to connect people who
dress differently or practice different religions, and I saw how universal some human experiences are, like friendship, guilt,
forgiveness, loss and atonement.
In those letters, I also saw how I had unwittingly placed myself in a daunting position—that of following up
The
Kite Runner
, and writing a book that, through no fault of its own, would bear the burden of comparison to
The Kite
Runner
, while the ink was still wet on its pages. The reading of every fan letter I received was punctuated by a loud and anxious
gulp and a feeling of pity for this as-yet-unwritten novel. I feared for the sanity of my family who would have to bear with
me as I set about writing this new book.
I had further complicated matters by deciding on a narrative that demanded not one but two central characters, both of them
women. This was a decision that I’d made when I was putting the final edits on
The Kite
Runner
—a father and son story set exclusively in the world of men. I wanted to write another love story set in Afghanistan but this
time a mother/daughter tale and about the inner lives of two struggling Afghan women. I suppose there were some easier roads
I could have gone down, but I chose this one because, both as a writer and as an Afghan, I couldn’t think of a more riveting
or important or compelling story than the struggle of women in my country. Dramatically speaking, every other topic paled
in comparison.
Unfortunately the image of the burqa-wearing woman walking past the stern, glaring face of the Taliban official has become
familiar around the world, perhaps even iconic. When I was in Kabul in 2003, I met a man who worked as a bodyguard for a government
official. He told me, kind of casually, a story about a woman he had seen beaten by a Taliban official on the street. In telling
that story, he used a rather grisly if colorful expression. He said he beat her until her mother’s milk leaked out of her
bones. In listening to that story it seemed unreal to me that this happened in Kabul. Not long ago, women in Afghanistan were
professors at universities, they were doctors and lawyers, worked in hospitals, taught at schools and played an important
role in society. They were women like my mother, who was university educated and a teacher of Farsi and history, eventually
becoming the vice principal of a very large high school for girls. But that was in Kabul, and Afghanistan is not a nation
of urbanized middle-class people. There has always been an ideological gap between liberal reformist Kabul and rural Afghanistan.
The sad truth is that the Taliban-style oppression of women in certain regions of Afghanistan existed long before the Taliban
was even a twinkle in the loving eye of the Pakistani secret intelligence. Whereas Kabul has been, relatively speaking, a
hub for female autonomy, rural Afghanistan, especially south and east along the border with Pakistan, has been traditionally
a patriarchal tribal region where men have decided the fates of women.
There, women have always lived in confinement. They have always worn the burqa on the street and rarely gone to school beyond
the age of twelve so there was rampant illiteracy in those areas. For centuries, women there have been told when they will
marry, who they will marry, and, incidentally, for how much. For the most part, rural Afghan women have led quiet, subterranean
lives of obedience and service.
This may surprise you but throughout the last century there were multiple attempts to liberate, as it were, the women of Afghanistan,
originating in Kabul. There was a king named Amanullah in the 1920s who actually banned the wearing of the burqa in public.
He built the first hospital for women and the first school for girls. He brought teachers over from Europe and sent women
to Europe to get an education. Amanullah tried to ban forced marriage, raise the minimum marrying age for girls to sixteen
and ban the practice of bride price. Unfortunately, largely as a result of these attempts, there was a rebellion and he was
run out of town. He ended up dying an old man in exile.
There were other attempts in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, some of which had fruition. In 1964, Afghan women gained the right to
vote. But Kabul’s reforms have always been met by the patriarchal tribal leaders with mockery, contempt or in some cases mutiny,
as in the case of poor King Amanullah.
So, as you can see, life was a struggle for some women in Afghanistan well before the Taliban. But it became all but unbearable
with the outbreak of factional war, anarchy and extremism. In many ways, that’s when disaster really struck.
Women suffered not only through the bombings and indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas like everyone else, not only were
beaten and tortured and humiliated and imprisoned, not only had their fundamental human rights violated over and over again,
but in large numbers also suffered from gender-based abuse. They were abducted and sold as slaves, forced into marriage to
militia commanders, forced into prostitution, and raped, a crime particularly heinous and unforgivable that was used to intimidate
families who were opposed to one faction or another.
Today in post-Taliban, post-9/11 Afghanistan there is talk again of liberating women, as there should be. The gender apartheid
that has been forced on Afghan women has been one of the great unresolved injustices of the modern world. In addition, Afghanistan
needs its women.
The whole project of rebuilding Afghanistan is doomed if the fundamental human rights of its women are not respected and its
women are not allowed to participate.
Queen Soraya, wife of King Amanullah, said: “Do not think, however, that our nation needs only men to serve it. Women should
also take their part, as women did in the early years of Islam. The valuable services rendered by women are recounted throughout
history. And from their examples, we learn that we must all contribute toward a development of our nation.” The Queen said
those words back in 1926 and it seems to me that her words are as relevant eighty years later, and perhaps even more so than
they were back then.
I returned to Kabul in 2003 and met people from all walks of life, and I remember standing at street corners and seeing fully
covered women walking along, trailed by four, five, six, seven children. I remember thinking, who is that person inside? What
has she seen? What has she endured? What makes her happy? What gives her sorrow? What are her hopes, her longings, her disappointments?
A
Thousand Splendid Suns
is in some ways my attempt at imagining answers to those questions. It’s my attempt to explore the inner lives of these two
fictional women and look for the very ordinary humanity beneath their veils.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
is very, very dear to me. It has been a labor of love, and I hope that it doesn’t sound too pretentious if I say that I think
of it as my modest tribute to the great courage, endurance and resilience of Afghanistan.
I hope that I will engage you, that I will transport you and that the novel will move you and leave you with some sense of
compassion and empathy for Afghan women whose suffering has been matched by very few groups in recent world history.
Khaled Hosseini
In brief
Mariam is a
harami
, an illegitimate child, who only sees her adored father once a week. On those precious days they go fishing, he reads to
her and gives her beautiful presents, but she can never live with him. She decides to visit his home, a visit he does not
acknowledge, and returns to find that her mother has hanged herself. Determined that she will not secure a place in their
household, her father’s wives marry her off to Rasheed, an elderly widower from Kabul, far enough away for Mariam to be safely
forgotten. It is a marriage that soon deteriorates into brutality and misery made worse for Mariam by Rasheed’s decision to
also marry the orphaned Laila. When Laila disappoints Rasheed by bearing a daughter, she too finds herself the target of his
cruelty. But out of this unhappy household grows a friendship which will bind the two women in a union as close as any marriage,
and which will endure beyond death. Written in often lyrical prose, Khaled Hosseini’s second novel weaves thirty years of
turbulent Afghan history through an intensely powerful story of family, friendship and, ultimately, hope.
Background
Khaled Hosseini’s reputation as an accomplished storyteller has already been well and truly established with
The
Kite Runner,
his celebrated debut novel written in the early hours before setting off for his “day job” as a doctor. Brought up in a tradition
of storytelling, Hosseini has described this tradition as first and foremost what writing novels is about. It is a quality
central to
A Thousand Splendid
Suns
which seamlessly blends the compelling narratives of Mariam and Laila with the deeply troubled history of Afghanistan over
the past thirty years. Hosseini has described writing the novel as “an even more satisfying experience for me than the writing
of
The Kite Runner
, because it was a more complex and ultimately unexpected journey.”
With his first novel Hosseini had wanted to give a Western public assailed with media images of war-torn Afghanistan, firstly
during the Soviet occupation and then under the Taliban, a glimpse of the country he remembered from childhood and to dispel
some of the misconceptions that some of his adopted countrymen had about it. Many of those misconceptions were about women
who had not suffered repression before the Taliban seized power, contrary to popular Western belief. During what many have
called the “Golden Years” of the 1960s and 70s, women actively contributed to Afghan society—Hosseini’s mother, for example,
taught at a girls’ school—and their rights had been confirmed in a new constitution in the mid-1970s. It is the role of women
that Hosseini has chosen to explore in his second novel and he does so vividly through the stories of Mariam and Laila, two
women separated by a generation but united by an unbreakable bond of friendship. These two endure not only the brutality of
their husband Rasheed, but also the appalling atrocities of the Taliban, yet remain resilient and true to themselves.
Hosseini’s family sought asylum in the United States in 1980 shortly after the Soviet invasion. Hosseini returned to Afghanistan
after a twenty-seven year absence, following the fall of the Taliban, partly to satisfy a yearning to see his homeland again
but also to find out how it was faring. He came back to the United States with a sense of optimism although not as much as
he had hoped for, citing the security situation and the narcotics trade as two causes for grave concern.
About the author
Khaled Hosseini was born in 1965 in Kabul where his father was a diplomat and his mother taught Farsi and history. After the
1978 coup and the subsequent Russian invasion, the family fled Afghanistan for the United States, receiving political asylum
in 1980. They settled in San Jose, California where his father found work as a driving instructor. Hosseini is a doctor and
lives with his wife and two children in Northern California.
The Kite Runner
, his first novel, has been met with great critical and popular acclaim.
For discussion
• The novel opens with the sentence, “Mariam was five years old the first time she heard the word
harami
.” How important is that word in the novel? How does Mariam’s illegitimacy shape her life?
• “The next time Mariam signed her name to a document, twenty-seven years later, a mullah would again be present”. Khaled
Hosseini foreshadows events, both domestic and national, at many points throughout
A Thousand Splendid Suns
. What effect does this have?
• “But it was the women who drew Mariam’s eyes the most”. What is it that fascinates Mariam about the women of Kabul, and
why does it capture her attention? How are women treated by the various regimes that take control of Afghanistan? How are
the main female characters portrayed in the novel? To what extent do these portrayals differ from any preconceptions that
you may have had about women in Afghanistan?
• Mariam protests at the idea of marrying Rasheed, begging her father not to force her. What kind of husband does he prove
to be? How does she come to feel about him? How does their marriage change? Why do you think Rasheed behaves in the way that
he does?
• “And in this fleeting, wordless exchange with Mariam, Laila knew that they were not enemies any longer”. How is the deep
bond between Mariam and Laila forged? How does this bond sustain both of them?
• How does the observation of Islam in Kabul differ from Mariam’s hometown of Herat? What part does religion play in her life?
How important is it in the novel?
• “To me, it’s nonsense – and very dangerous nonsense at that – all this talk of I’m Tajik and you’re Pashtun and he’s Hazara
and she’s Uzbek. We’re all Afghans, and that’s all that should matter”, Laila’s father tells her. How important is this ethnic
diversity both in the novel and in what happens to Afghanistan throughout the thirty years the book spans?
• What is the significance of the novel’s title? Why do you think Hosseini chose it?
• What do you think of the novel’s ending?
• How would you describe Hosseini’s writing style? Were there particular passages that impressed you and if so what were they
and why?
• How are the West and the Soviet Union portrayed in the novel? What part do they play in Afghanistan’s troubles?
• Hosseini is an expatriate Afghan. To what extent do you think this has influenced the writing of
A Thousand
Splendid Suns
, and his portrayal of Afghanistan?
Resources
•
www.khaledhosseini.com
– Khaled Hosseini’s website
•
www.barnesandnoble.com/writers/writer
details.asp?z=y&cid=1145572#interview
– interview published on Barnes and Noble’s website
•
www.afghanmagazine.com/2004_06/profile
/
khosseini.shtml
– conversation with Farhad Ahzad published on afghanmagazine.com
•
www.bloomsbury.com/Authors/microsite
.
asp?id=480§ion=1&aid=863
– conversation between Hosseini and Riverhead Books, his American publisher
•
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_
asia/1162108.stm
– Afghanistan timeline published at the BBC’s website
Suggested further reading
Fiction
Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Married Woman
by Manju Kapur
The Woman Who Walked into Doors
by Roddy Doyle
Swallows of Kabul
by Yasmina Khadra
Non-fiction
The Sewing Circles of Herat
by Christina Lamb
The Bookseller of Kabul
by Asne Seierstad
Other books by Khaled Hosseini
The Kite Runner