Hood College Class of 2015 Reading

Concrete road barriers block a street in a newly-rich Kabul neighborhood. These type of barriers are most often erected privately by someone powerful enough to go unchallenged. They make local roads impassable and add to the daily frustrations of living in Kabul.

What happened to Kabul from the end of A Thousand Splendid Suns in 2003 to today?  In this short article from The Washington Post, journalist Pamela Constable returns to this city to reminisce about that magical moment described at the conclusion of Hosseini’s novel.  She remembers it as a time when “hope and the promise of change…burst forth in Afghanistan’s post-Taliban liberation nearly a decade ago.”  In contrast to those times, she details today’s landscape of “security barriers and fantasy palaces” and an atmosphere where “optimism and energy vanished long ago, gradually replaced with cynicism and fear.”  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dysfunction-and-dread-in-kabul/2011/07/13/gIQAQpBlGI_story.html

What are your feelings after reading Constable’s article about Kabul?  Has this new information affected the way you perceive the ending of the novel?  What do you think about her startling end statement?

Dr. Martha Bari, Director, First Year Experience

Reading A Thousand Splendid Suns was a revelatory experience for me. Despite America’s involvement in Afghanistan over the last ten years, I realized that my knowledge of the country’s history and culture was extremely patchy to say the least. Hadn’t Alexander the Great passed through with his troops, the source of the startling light-colored eyes Afghans sometimes possess and that I remembered from the famous 1985 National Geographic cover of an Afghan refugee girl? I knew the British and Russian imperial powers had played out their “Great Game” in Afghanistan in the 19th century. And I’d once eaten in an Afghan restaurant in New York, where I’d been impressed by the mix of Middle Eastern and Indian influences in the cuisine. But how did the mujahideen differ from the Taliban? What is the difference between a Pashtun and a Tajik? Call me clueless.

Given my ignorance, I appreciated the moving and engaging tour A Thousand Splendid Suns provided of contemporary Afghan history. Laila and Mariam won my heart with their bravery and powers of endurance. I wondered whether life for women in Afghanistan has improved at all since the beginning of the US presence there. Had the universities reopened and were women allowed to attend them again? A recent Washington Post article speaks to the difficulties Afghan universities are experiencing:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/12/AR2011021203931.html.
Likewise, an HBO documentary called The Love Crimes of Kabul that aired on Monday made the restrictions and injustices Afghan women are still subject to very apparent: http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/love-crimes-of-kabul/index.html.

More than any book I’ve read in recent years, A Thousand Splendid Suns left me with a burning desire to do something. For as many years as I’ve been alive, Afghanistan has been in a state of civil unrest, invasion, or war, creating generations marked by tragedy, displacement, and lost opportunities. Fortunately, Khaled Hosseini runs an eponymous foundation (http://www.khaledhosseinifoundation.org/) that makes it easy to take advantage of the urge towards activism his book inspires. Student Outreach for Shelters (SOS) is a program jointly run with the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) and designed for students and educators (http://www.sos4tkhf.com/). For every $1,500 students raise, the Khaled Hosseini Foundation will help the UNHCR provide one homeless family in Afghanistan the resources and training to build a shelter. You can either donate directly through the website or let me know if you would like to be involved in our fundraising efforts at Hood in advance of Khaled Hosseini’s visit on October 26th. I can be reached at prime@hood.edu. I look forward to hearing from you!

Dr. Rebecca Prime, Libman Professor of the Humanities

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