Gender-Based Violence and the State of Afghan Women in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns
“Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman.”
Between the 1979 Soviet invasion and the gruesome rise to power of the Taliban that followed in Afghanistan, Afghan women have been likely to be hit by bullets and bombs as they were to be beaten by their husbands, fathers, brothers, and even soldiers.
For the #16DaysOfActivism global campaign to end gender-based violence, we dive into the socio-cultural, religious, and sexual gender-based violence represented in Khaled Hosseini’s critically acclaimed book A Thousand Splendid Suns.
The prevalence of gender-based violence is mainly a result of the existence and practice of patriarchal social systems still held in many societies to varying degrees in our world today. The Afghan society in Hosseini’s story and even today, is riddled by culture and religion influenced by such systems, dictating and limiting the lives of women. It is worth noting that both conforming and resistance earn women the same fate as we will see even in the book.
The goal is to not only show how literature bares witness to these ills but to also give our two cents on how male-dominated cultural, political, social, and religious structures and institutions of power lay the bedrock for gender-based violence to continue to thrive, and in this case even in the face of a war.
Following the fall of the Taliban, Hosseini returned to Afghanistan in 2003 to not just the ghost of a once modern and thriving society, but also story after story of women paying collateral damage in the backdrop of war and a socio-cultural and religious shift that encouraged the oppression of women in Afghan society, subjugating them to unending gender-based violence, discrimination, suppression and ban from active life and enjoying their fundamental social, political and human rights. It is these stories that birth the fate of the three focal characters of his book, Nana, Mariam, and Laila.
Nana, whose fate we encounter first is Mariam’s mother, the product of an extra-marital affair with Jalil, a wealthy businessman whom she worked for. Nana is an embittered woman who decides to punish herself and Mariam by moving to a secluded hut on the outskirts of Herat to live and avoid the shame and wrath of Jalil’s three wives and their legitimate children. Although she allows Jalil to visit Mariam every Thursday and even allows Mariam a teacher, her resentment causes her to lash out at Mariam often, never failing to remind her of her unfortunate station in life as an unwanted thing.
It is Nana whose famous quote “Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman.” has become an iconic reference in pop-culture and socio-cultural discourse about the role patriarchal systems play in the lives of women.
Nana, whom Jalil had accused of forcing herself on him when news of her pregnancy with Mariam reached his wives. She was then fired and disowned by her father who was so ashamed he moved out of the city.
Nana, who was almost married once but had the wedding cancelled by the family of her husband-to-be after she suffered an epileptic episode. Yet Nana’s story merely sets the stage for what is to befall Mariam, it is Nana’s death that changes the course of Mariam’s life forever.
Mariam was moved to her father's house temporarily after her mother’s death. His wives, still unaccepting of her compelled him to marry her off to a cobbler, Rasheed, who was thirty years older than she was, she was only fifteen years old at the time. Rasheed lived in Kabul and soon Mariam was torn away from her only living family.
Rasheed was a peculiar man with strong beliefs in the subjugation of women. Before the tyranny of the Taliban made it compulsory for all women of Afghan, Rasheed had instructed his newlywed bride to present herself in a Burqa when in public at all times, in his words, he did not want to be perceived as a weak educated man who allowed their equally educated wives to speak to other men directly and without shame.
He often coerced Mariam into intercourse she objected to, excusing it as the honourable thing to do as a married couple. In the beginning of their marriage, even though his beliefs often puzzled Mariam he was not unkind to her until after seven miscarriages. Her failure to give him a son earned her beatings and insults for the rest of their marriage.
The reader is able to sense how Mariam’s self-confidence and the way she saw herself deteriorated over the cause of her marriage, although Afghanistan was still very much cosmopolitan at the time, Rasheed’s behaviour was very much backed by socio-cultural and Islamic constructs in Kabul, bringing us back to the fact that gender-based violence can only continue to thrive as long as society continues to operate systems that allow it.
In The Gender Knot: Unraveling Patriarchy, author Allan Johnson explains this best, in his words “A society is patriarchal to the degree that it promotes male privilege by being male-dominated, male-identified and male-centered. It is also organized around an obsession with control and involves as one of its key aspects of the oppression of women.”
The story then shifts to Laila, a girl who lived just down the street from Mariam and Rasheed, born to one of the educated couples Rasheed had despised in the neighbourhood for their modern ways of living. Laila grows up, groomed for success by her parents. Laila’s life goes against everything men like Rasheed expect from the life of a woman.
Laila’s childhood friend Tariq, a disabled Pashtun boy is a notable character in Laila’s story.
When Laila turns fourteen, Afghanistan enters into a civil war that changes the course of everything in the story. Kabul becomes a ghost of itself as it suffers continuous rocket and bomb attacks. Tariq’s family like many other Afghan families decided to leave the country for Pakistan, earlier one of Laila’s friends had been married off and left the city and her other friend got hit by a rocket and shattered into pieces.
Laila’s family finally decided to leave the city as well but got killed by a rocket that raised their home to dust just a few days before they were to leave, leaving Laila unconscious and severely injured. It is at this point in the story that Laila and Mariam’s fate cross and Laila is rescued by Rasheed and is cared for back to good health by Mariam. During Laila’s recovery in Rasheed and Mariam’s care, a man comes with news of Tariq’s death. Laila is devastated by the loss of all her loved ones. When she finds out that she is pregnant with Tariq’s child, she quickly agrees to marry Rasheed to avoid being tossed out. This decision makes Mariam resent her at first until Laila births a girl child, much to Rasheed’s disappointment, suddenly both women become sisters in suffering, at the hands of a husband they both have to endure.
Laila who is more fierce and strong-willed than Mariam, considering the life she was given, often resists Rasheed’s tyranny but was often met with beatings and rape as a result. Laila and Mariam continue to form a tight bond as they jointly raise Laila’s daughter. On their first attempt to escape, Rasheed catches them and punishes them through beatings and starvation that almost kills them both.
As the Taliban rose to power in Kabul, things got tougher for the women, Rasheed became even more stern in his abuse and even a fiery Laila became shrouded. The Taliban officially implemented the subjugation of women into law, they closed down schools and hospitals for women and required all women to only walk the streets or travel accompanied by a man. Women who had occupied positions in the Afghan government were beaten and thrown out, any form of resistance had them killed. During this time Laila is forced to give birth to her son in a war-torn women’s hospital via caesarian section without anaesthesia, as supplies to the women’s hospital had stopped due to the Taliban’s disregard for their personhood. Rasheed favours his son over Laila’s daughter and as things worsen, he forces Laila to give her up to an orphanage.
In our society, men like Rasheed are shielded because the abuse of women systematically receives cultural and structural support. Bart and Morgan suggest that this is accomplished and maintained by patterns of interpersonal interactions prescribed by cultural and social structures as we see in Hosseni’s depiction of the Afghan society.
The story takes its final turn when one day Tariq appears much to Laila’s surprise. As the two reunite, Mariam and Laila decide to try escaping again with his help. When Rasheed finds out that Laila had gotten a male visitor, he beats her severely and begins to strangle her when Mariam hits him with a shovel and ends his life.
Mariam, aware of the strain her actions have put on their escape plan decides to turn herself in while Laila and Traiq go ahead with the children. Mariam was sentenced to public execution, yet in the face of her death she found solace in the fact that even though she was born and lived her whole life as an unwanted person, an illegitimate person with little prospects of a respectable and happy life, she was dying as a woman who was greatly loved and whose sacrifice provided freedom for the only people who ever truly loved her. Mariam who had not been shown kindness or the love of a mother, had been that and more for Laila and her children, she faced her last days with no regrets.
Meanwhile, Laila, Tariq, and the children faced a happier fate.
A Thousand Splendid Suns painted a vivid picture of the place of the woman in Afghan society and how their fortune mirrored that of their country, battered and torn by violence. The Afghanistan civil war and the rise of the Taliban was a historic period in Afghan history, but history is rarely fond in its remembrance of women or their plights and Hosseni’s ability to make this mark through the lives of these women is highly commendable, and is what has earned the book its critical acclaim.
Reviews suggest that the sisterhood between Mariam and Laila was some sort of resistance against the violence that they faced, while I agree, I must note that women have developed communities in each other for centuries in order to escape systemic violence and other gender-based injustices, yet the world has not been rid of it. My resolve continues to remain that sisterhood and community can only go so far, a lot of the time all it creates is a space to endure the hands of gender-based injustices together, what the world needs is an overhaul of every socio-cultural, religious, and political structure that has given room for it to thrive.
This article will not be complete without looking at what the Afghan society is like for women today, and how different is theira plight from that of the women in Hosseni’s story.
According to UN Women’s Women Count report, In 2018, 34.7 per cent of women aged 15-49 years were reported to have been subject to physical and/or sexual violence by a current or former intimate partner in the previous 12 months within the report timeframe. The report also shows that women of reproductive age (15-49 years) often face barriers in respect to sexual and reproductive health and rights: in 2016, 42.2 per cent of women had their need for family planning satisfied with modern methods.
As of 2019, the average female literacy rate in the country was around 17 per cent against the total adult literacy rate of 33 per cent. UN Women further reports that as of december 2020, only 38.6 per cent of the SDG indicators from a gender perspective were available, with gaps in key areas which included unpaid care and domestic work, key labour market indicators, such as the gender pay gap and information and communications technology skills. Many areas such as gender and poverty, physical and sexual harassment, women’s access to assets (including land), and gender and the environment – lacked comparable methodologies needed for regular monitoring.
However, the same research reported that as of February 2021, 27 per cent of seats in Afghan parliament were held by women.