child when she bleeded profusely at the bathhouse, “it’s normal, isn’t it? Isn’t it? Isn’t it
normal? (P-89)” Rashid mourns over this incident and starts to avoid her and becomes
extremely shrewd. It was then she recalls her mother’s words, “each snowflake was a sigh
heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky,
gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silenly on the people below.... how
quietly we endure all that falls upon us. (P-90)” four years passes during which she suffers
six more miscarriages. She turns 19 on april 17, 1978. All these years, she takes in her
husband’s dominance, insults and disrespect towards her. It wasn’t easy for her to tolerate his
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He was of the
view that it was a good time to be a woman in Afghanistan. In this part of the story, civil war
is so active in Kabul that buildings have started to blow away, in the course of time Laila and
tariq are separated, since his family decides to move away from Afghanistan, and laila’s
house too gets blown away in one of the explosions, she is left orphaned, the next time she
opens her eyes, she finds herself in a hospital covered in gashes attended by Mariam and
Rasheed. Here is where, the two heroes of the story come together, maraiam and Laila. Two
women in the same house, both are the victims of bad fortune. Rashid now is the husband to
both. Laila discovers that she is six weeks pregnant by tariq’s baby, the part of their love
growing inside, part of her love, tariq still alive inside her, but before Rasheed would get
suspicious about the baby she’ll have to sacrifice herself if she has to give life to her baby.
“She knew what she was doing was dishonourable. Dishonourable, disingenuous,
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And spectacularly unfair to Mariam..... Laila already saw the sacrifices a mother
had to make. Virtue was only the first. She put a hand on her belly. Closed her eyes. (P-213)”
Laila as a women was now completing the role of a mother, another sacrifice, “lying beneath
his cold sheets that night, she watched him pull the curtains shut” On the other hand Mariam
was dying from inside seeing her husband being shared by another woman. Rashid had been
unfair to her wife. To him, if he as a man keeps relations with other women is not a sin, but,
his wife even showing up to people without being clad in a burqua is the biggest crime. She is
looked down upon by Rasheed in front of Laila, now being addressed like a village girl, and
worse than that, “ have you told her, Mariam, have you told her that you are a harami? (P-
216)” Mariam was thirty three old, but that word still had a sting. She sees her husband
taking care of Laila just the same way he did for her years back when she had his child. Laila
gives birth to tariq’s child, whom Rashid thinks belongs to him. Its a girl, whom Rashid
denies to even see but on the other side Laila rejoices the birth of tariq’s and her
In Part three, a shift in this isolation occurs when Laila becomes a part of her life. An epiphany occurs where Mariam starts to realize the injustices that surround her; The amount of her life wasted with Rasheed, the physical and emotional abused endured from him, and the injustices she knows Laila is about to endure.Then as she starts to bond with Laila, Mariam feels a sense of purpose; the kids look up to her as a secondary mother figure and she has Laila as a companion. So when Rasheed had the intent to kill Laila, Mariam had to act. She has taken justice into her own hands by responding to Rasheed’s physical injustice and the injustices of equality rights towards women at the hands of the Taliban. She later tells Laila that she was simply “acting like a
Mariam and Laila face a lot of social injustice yet they do not attempt to challenge the issues because they are told to endure all forms of pain and social injustice. From a very young age, Mariam was told by her mother that all she needed to do was to withstand any pain and suffering, it’s the one skill she needed.” Endure . . . Women like us. We endure. It’s all we have”(17). In addition, Laila also suffered the injustice of society since she was a single mother it was not safe for her to live on her own so she had no choice but to marry Rasheed. The society gave women no choice but to endure and that’s the main reason why Laila and Mariam were unable to take a stand. However, close to the end of the novel Mariam decides to take initiative and fights back. She finally takes action because she is driven by the love she has for Laila and her child since they are the only family she’s had that loved her. So when Rasheed her husband attempts to choke Laila to death, Mariam reflects on how much injustice she has faced and how unjust both her husband and the society have been towards her and other women. At this point, Mariam realizes that she must end her and Laila’s suffering once and for all. So she takes Rasheed’s life. Although Mariam is executed as a form of punishment, she is very successful at taking a stand to end the oppression and injustice. Mariam knew her actions were fatal yet she still did what she knew was right. Furthermore, she sacrificed herself and didn’t regret her action instead she was pleased that “she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother” ( 329). Her actions freed Laila and her child from Rasheed’s abuse and helped them build a better life. Thus Mariam was successful and did not want to endure the injustice or see Laila suffer, she did it by
The narrator searches for recovery after the death of his daughter and his failure to protect his brother as he promised his mother he would. In his “condition” he is not unlike the narrator in “Zaabalawi” who claims to have “a disease before which men are powerless” (Malfouz 809).... ... middle of paper ... ...
In the story “In Camera, Saadawi illustrated how women were treated by the legal system in Arabic country when they did something against the system. The protagonist, Leila Al-Fargani, who was a young woman on trial for calling the “mighty one”, which is a respective title for the President of their country, a stupid man. Moreover, during the time she was waiting for the court date, she was brutally beaten and raped by ten men who seem to be the guards. At the time she was in the court, she was still suffering from the pain both in physical and mental way, but she did not collapse. When the time the judge and those with him declared that ten men raped Leila and also her father’s honor got trampled. (This is the way we torture you women- by depriving you of the most valuable thing you possess”). For the response she said: “You fool! The most valuable thing I possess is not between my legs. You are all stupid. And the most stupid among you is the one who leads you.” In one hand, this quote completely showed that the man thought this sexual violence was totally right when the woman had committed a crime. In anther hand, it also showed that in the very deep of Leila, the...
Ahmed’s mother is the first to fall into playing her stereotypical social construct after her husband; Hajji Ahmed beats her for not supplying him with an heir, a son. “One day he struck he struck her, because she had had refused to subject herself to a last, desperate ordeal…” This act shows Ahmed’s mothers weakness, a gender normative of women, compared to her husband. However instead of lashing back she accepts the fate she has put herself into. She punishes herself similar to the acts her husband acts onto her. “She, too, began to lose interest in her daughters…and struck her belly to punish herself.” At this point in the novel, it is evident that Ahmed’s mother is adjusting her own belief to match that of Hajji. His reoccurring distaste for his seven daughters has rubbed onto his wife. This compliance to accept her husband’s belief fits into that mold that says that women are not assertive and follow with what their husbands want. The next section femininity is seen in it’s natural essence is seen at the end of chapter three when Ahmed has been attacked and his father confronts him about his girlish ways.
Rasheed was the man in the relationship and Mariam was the typical wife that did her wifely duties and stayed home while he goes and works and provides money. He treats her as if she’s worthless and means nothing to the world. When he eats he doesn’t look at her or speak to her, he is demanding, and tells her how worthless and uneducated she is. This then leads to him becoming abusive punching her, slapping her, kicking her, speaking rudely to her, he did this to damage her. A lot of this occurs because Mariam can get have his son and she is also considered a harami. Everything she does infuriates him and blames all the issues on her. She constantly tried to avoid making mistakes and did everything to his liking, but he always found a way to abuse her and blame it on her. Rasheed did not care about anything but himself he abided by the patriarchal stereotype ,which is being the dominant one throughout society and making women inferior. Mariam felt powerless and fearful. She was a victim of abuse and oppression. She married a man that said everything he did was normal in a relationship. Even though Mariam was in a violent marriage she became a strong women and soon she overcomed these
Originally, Mairma would acquiesce to Rasheed’s demands: if he said “shut up,” she would (98). If she was beaten, she would take it. She felt no hope of freedom from his brutish acts so she endured through them. Wallowing in despair would only make her marital-situation worse. Later, out of routine, Rasheed’s abuse is prevented because of Laila. She pleads “please Rasheed, no beating!” over and over until he forfeits his attack against Mariam; feeling loved, it is a kindness that Mariam cannot forget (241). In Mariam’s final resistance to the churlish man, she shows her love for others. Aiming to kill, Rasheed acts violently upon Laila, and Mariam fights back. As he once beat her, she beat him back. The scene juxtaposes how she once accepted the abuse, and now she fights back because she does not want to lose the one who makes her feels that she “had been loved back”: Laila (224). After being controlled by Rasheed for the majority of Mariam’s marriage, she takes control of her own life for once by making he decision to kill him in order to protect Laila. Mariam’s fight back shows her willingness to sacrifice to prevent Rasheed’s cruelties further. Risking worse abuse, Mariam chooses to save Laila’s life in exchange for her own. Laila brought Mariam an unmistakable happiness: “[Mariam] was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. ... It was not so bad ... that she should die this way ... This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings” (224). Mariam gives Laila the opportunity to live a life sans of Rasheed’s barbarities to plague them after learning herself how inhumane he was. Moreover, the cruelties Mariam faced against Rasheed revealed her endurance as a woman. Mariam remained strong throughout her marriage and fought back against her husband, an act
The novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is separated into four sections with the first part told from Mariam’s perspective and the second part from Laila’s perspective. Thus, Part III alternates between Mariam’s and Laila’s point of view with each chapter. In Part III, we begin with Mariam’s perspective. Rasheed digs Laila out of the rubble of their home, and Mariam slowly nurses her back to health. Laila is essentially a stranger to Mariam, which helps to explain why Mariam calls her simply “the girl”.
Rasheed tries to convince Mariam that the only way to keep Laila safe is by marrying her. He ends up hiring a man named Abdul Harif to tell Laila that he had met the love of her life, Tariq, in the hospital and that he had died. Laila is told this right when she finds out that she is pregnant with Tariq’s child. Rasheed had hired Abdul Harif to tell Laila this because he wanted to get Laila to marry her. When Rasheed brings up marriage to Laila, she jumps on board right away, and falls into Rasheed’s trap. After Rasheed and Laila get married, he treats her like a queen. He becomes very protective of Laila. Almost all his attention is spent on her, and in a sense, forgets that he is even married to Mariam. But him acting affectionate and caring does not last very long. When Laila gives birth to a baby girl, named Aziza, Rasheed starts to treat Laila how he treated Mariam when she could not successfully carry a child full term. Again, Rasheed ends up not getting what he wants, and therefore he turns onto Laila. The abuse, both verbal and physical, starts to get worse in the household. A particular situation that displays just how violent the abuse in their household can get is when he locks Laila and Aziza in their room, and Mariam in the shed because they tried running away from Rasheed and the abuse. He leaves them without water or food, and it ends up almost killing Aziza. This is where Rasheed falls into the paradox of power again. “ ...the 16th century Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli insisted that compassion got in the way of eminence. If a leader has to choose between being feared or being loved, Machiavelli insisted that the leader should always go with fear. Love is overrated” (Lehrer The Power Trip). Rasheed would rather have his own family be completely afraid of him and almost
“I wouldn’t have fed you and washed you and nursed you if I’d known you were going to turn around and steal my husband.” (Chapter 31, page 226) Despite how toxic the relationship between Mariam and Rasheed was, Mariam did not want Laila to take
For five year old Mariam the abuse just started in her life as the word “Harami” meaning bastard sets the scene in A Thousand Splendid Suns. Mariam is not allowed to attend school and most certainly isn’t allowed to leave her controlling mother and her home. As the book progresses, the reader will see her neglectful father in and out of her life and her husband at fifteen, Rasheed. Rasheed takes Mariam away and requires her to fulfill wifely duties around the house and for him. Rasheed and Mariam try to have children and as tragedy occurs, Mariam fails to give a son to Rasheed.
As a young teenage girl, Mariam was arranged to marry Rasheed, Jalil's older friend. Rasheed, is a widowed shoemaker from Kabul. This is not the ideal marriage for Mariam, but she has no choice; her father defends the marriage: “True that would be preferable that you marry a local, Tajik, but Rasheed is healthy, and interested in you. He has a home and a job. That’s all that really matters, isn’t it?”
First talk about Mariam, a bastard of Jalil who makes her mother Nana & she live outskirts of Herat, away from his real family. Here the Nana is shown as an extremely possessive mother who committed suicide when her daughter leaves her to meet her father. Her mother tried to explain her how cruel the world his & there is no one in this world except her mother to give her love. She never realised it until the time when she loses her child & gets to take care of Laila (Mariam’s husband’s second wife) child. Laila, as mentioned here, is introduces in the second part very different from how Mariam was bought up.
The author does a great job establishing what the characters are going through and how they feel and react in that situation. In the beginning of the book Mariam is a young girl who has bigger dreams than what her mother thinks she can achieve which makes her view herself in a negative light. As she grows into a woman Rasheed still makes her feel this way, however when Laila comes into her life she becomes a whole new woman with a totally different attitude towards things. After reading the novel I think the author’s main purpose is to inform readers of the woman and their hardships in Afghanistan. The women had very specific rules they had to follow such as, no jewelry, no makeup, they can’t speak unless spoken to and must always be accompanied by a male relative when going outside their homes.