Last week, while reading an old college friend’s manuscript of poems, I came across this couplet by the nineteenth-century Persian poet Ghalib which she had included as an epigraph:
Only a few, survivors, bloom again in the rose, the tulip.
Think of all those faces, gone down under the dust.
Having recently read A Thousand Splendid Suns, I immediately connected the imagery of the couplet to the imagery in Hosseini’s novel. Throughout A Thousand Splendid Suns, Hosseini alludes to some of the greatest poets in Persian literature, including Rumi, Hafez, Jami, Ghalib, and Said-e-Tabrizi, from whose poem Hosseini takes the title of his book. Laila’s father, Babi, we are told, “knew most of Rumi’s and Hafez’s ghazals by heart” and tries to instill in his daughter a love of literature. The ghazal, a form which has become increasingly popular among English language poets, is a classical Persian form adapted from the Arabic qasida, or couplet, in the tenth century. (A good explanation and some contemporary examples of the form can be found at the Academy of American Poets website: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5781.)
Hosseini’s other literary allusion to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea strikes me as both oddly out of place and apt at the same time. While The Old Man and the Sea is a novel I would imagine at least a few incoming Hood students have read, it is not one I would imagine many Afghans have read. In Hosseini’s story, Hemingway’s stark image of the great fish cleaned to the bone by sharks becomes a symbol for Afghanistan itself, and its people become Santiago, heroically enduring in the face of suffering.
However, it is the leap from Hafez to Hemingway that really intrigues me. What does this range say about Hosseini as an author, his interests and influences? How does he navigate the literary waters between East and West? Where else in the novel do you see a convergence of cultures?
Dr. Elizabeth Knapp, Professor of English
Another place in the novel where there is a convergence of cultures is at the points were the movie Titanic was a popular ‘secret’ focus. It is an interesting comparison because the Titanic is a love story, yet is a story about a strong women rebelling against what here culture is dictating her to do, the main character is being forced into a planed marriage based money/society status. A thousand splendid suns also has a love story, several women who are strong and yet batting things there culture dictates them to do. The women in this story are also placed into a marriage by a parent because of money.