Fascism is defined as “A political ideology that asserts the superiority and inferiority of different groups of people and stresses a low degree of both freedom and equality in order to achieve a powerful state (O’Neil A-17). ” The novel A Thousand Splendid Suns takes place in Afghanistan at a time in its history where fascism had an iron grip on the Afghan people and every aspect of their lives. The author, Khaled Hosseini, showcases the adverse effects of Afghanistan’s fascist governments.
In the book, two women named Mariam and Laila fall prey to the fascist regimes in Afghanistan. Hosseini showcases his negative feelings towards fascism all throughout the book. He portrays the fascist theocracies of the Taliban and the Muhajideen as incompetent systems of government. He also shows these governments as destructive toward society and art, by writing stark contrasts between the past and the present of the book. The narrators of the book are both women, and their unique perspective, gives an inside look at how fascism affects women.
Along with showing the specific struggles of the women, writing from their perspective gave Hosseini the ability to show how fascism tears families apart. In the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, the author, Khaled Hosseini, displays his feelings that fascism is an inefficient political-economic system, is destructive to society, disenfranchises women, and tears families apart. Khaled Hosseni feels that fascism is an inefficient way of governing a country because fascism’s power comes from laws that display faulty logic. nd is ineffective at enforcing these laws in a reasonable and rational way. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Laila and Mariam experience the incompetence of the fascist state when Laila gives birth to her son Zalmai, and she has to be treated in a women only hospital that is ill-equipped, underfunded, and disgusting. At this hospital there are hundreds of women all waiting to see a small number of female doctors, who have to stay in their burqas the whole time they are working, even while they perform surgeries.
After Mariam finally elbows her way to the front of the throng of distraught women, she finds out the Laila needs a caesarean section, and the hospital is not provided with any painkilling drugs for Laila to take while she is being sliced open. Laila’s surgeon takes off her own burqa to perform the surgery, which is a criminal act, removes Laila’s baby, puts Laila’s organs back where they go, and stitches Laila together again. And although Laila and her new baby, Zalmai, both end up healthy fter this, it is easy to assume that this is the exception, not the rule. Hosseini’s way of writing this scene and describing the situation in which Laila must give birth shows the faulty reasoning behind the choices the taliban made in regards to women’s hospital funding. The Taliban refused aid money from non-governmental organization that were offering it for women’s healthcare services. They rationalized this with their beliefs that women are inferior to men and are only for making sons.
Although, if the Taliban wanted strong and healthy baby-making machines to make strong and healthy sons, they might have provided the women’s hospital with at least clean running water, soem antiseptic, and maybe a few receptionists or anesthesiologists. The complete disregard for the health of women is irrational and not thought through. Hosseini also shows the Taliban law enforcement as comically harebrained, along with the lawmakers themselves. He shows this when Tariq visits Laila at the end of the book and tells her a story he heard while he was in prison.
The story is about an artist who painted many scenes of flamingos and their long, pink, sinful legs. The authorities found out about these immoral waterfowl portraits and beat the artist and then made him paint pants on all the flamingos so no one would be tempted by their vicious sensuality ever again. But, the original paintings were with oil paints, and the pants were only watercolors, so when the Taliban was kicked out, the man could just wash off the pants and let the flamingo paintings once again reign in men and corrupt innocent women with their shameless debauchery.
This story is both sad and hilarious at the same time. The notion of flamingos being sexual is laughably absurd, but beating a man for painting them is horrifyingly so. Hosseini created this story to show his readers that fascism is both ridiculous and faulty. He shows Laila and Tariq as not reacting the physical punishment, as if it is to be expected, and reacting to the government’s notions about flamingos with the enthusiastic laughter that is usually reserved for a liberal talk show host’s reaction to Donald Trump’s latest antics.
All throughout A Thousand Splendid Suns, the author shows his negative feelings towards fascism by portraying Afghanistan’s fascist former governments as both hilariously and jarringly incompetent and inefficient. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, the author paints the picture that the fascist government is destructive towards the arts, society, and creative thinking. When the Taliban comes to power a radio announcement plays on repeat for more than a week listing the restrictive laws under the new regime.
These laws included forbidding singing, dancing, writing books, watching films, painting pictures, playing cards or chess, and practicing any religion other than the Taliban’s form of Islam in public (Hosseini 144). These laws were the cause of a blindingly fast turnaround in the culture and society of Kabul. Hosseini describes the Talibs destroying the art in a similar way to how Charles Dickens described the revolutionaries at the grindstone in A Tale of Two Cities. That is to say, Hosseini showed the book-burners and statue-smashers as wildly violent and murderously obsessed with destruction.
Laila’s reacts to this government required destruction of art and culture with disgust that turned her stomach and despair fueled by the injustice. Laila and Mariam’s husband, Rasheed, reacted with “a forgiving, affectionate kind of bemusement, as one might regard an erratic cousin prone to unpredictable acts of hilarity and scandal (146). ” Hosseini shows his own emotions through Laila’s reaction to Rasheed’s feelings, . The Taliban’s epic censorship of all things creative had consequences on every person in Afghanistan.
All artists, musicians, and writers lost their jobs, and most likely their lives. The Taliban was so opposed to the arts that they shot bullets into the grave of a singer because dying once was not enough (145). In A Thousand Splendid Suns, one theme that appeared throughout the entire book was that fascism disenfranchises women and relegates ambitious and career-seeking women to unpaid domestic positions. Writing the book from the perspective of two women was a deliberate choice that Hosseini made to depict all the specific injustices that women faced in Afghanistan under the fascist regimes.
When the Mujahideen still in power, Laila and Mariam, along with Laila’s daughter Aziza, tried to escape to Pakistan from their oppressive husband and government in Afghanistan. Laila stole small bills and coins from Rasheed for months, and when she finally had enough money collected, she, Mariam, and Aziza walked to the bus station to purchase their tickets. Actually obtaining the tickets was the hardest part for them because women were not allowed to travel without a mahram, a male relative, to supervise them.
Laila gave a nearby stranger their money and begged him to buy their tickets and pretend to be their cousin, and he politely agreed. Their whole plan relied on trusting a complete stranger to do something illegal to help them, and he tattled on them to the police. Laila and Mariam were taken to the police station, interrogated, and told to wait for Rasheed. Laila implored the officer to let them leave on the bus, and telling him what Rasheed would do to them when he gets them home, but he said: “What a man does in his home is his business (139).
When Rasheed got them home, he beat, belted them, and threw them in separate rooms for two days devoid of light, water, and food. Under the Taliban regime, besides not being able to travel by themselves, women would be beaten if caught outside their house alone. Laila experienced this brutality many times. After Rasheed’s shop burned down, and he lost a few jobs after that, he made Laila give Aziza over to an orphanage because they could no longer afford to feed her. Every day after they left her there, Laila would ask Rasheed walk with her to the orphanage so Laila could see her daughter and be with her and talk to her.
Rasheed agreed in the beginning, but after a few visits, he got bored, and sometimes would walk halfway there with her, and turn around because he was tired, but after a few weeks Laila stopped asking, because she knew the answer would be no. Whenever Laila went by herself, it was a treacherous journey. The Talibs caught her many times, and when they did, they beat her; with a radio antenna, a stick, a club, or with their fists. To protect herself from these beatings, Laila started wearing heavy sweaters under her burqa to protect herself (Hosseini 166).
She did this all while bombs flew overhead and only Mariam was on her side. Laila could not feed her daughter, and was forced to endure beating after beating to see her in an orphanage, and the government was not on her side at all. Fascism is based on nationalistic and hyper-masculine ideals that leave no room for empathy, or compassion towards anyone, especially women (Authier). There are still lasting effects of the harsh rule of the Taliban for women today in Afghanistan. For example, in the United Nations’ “Gender Inequality index,” Afghanistan was in 141st place, with only four other countries below it(Tignor 841).
In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini shows that fascism takes power and rights away from women by writing about the injustices fascism inflicts against women through the eyes of his female narrators. Families are split apart many times throughout A Thousand Splendid Suns. Before the Taliban is in power, there are bombs over Kabul everyday. These bombs destroy entire neighborhoods, and kill girls walking home from school. Tariq’s father’s health is failing, and staying in Kabul is not helping.
Tariq and his family are leaving Afghanistan, and he has to leave Laila and the place he lived for his whole life. Tariq asks Laila to marry him and come with his family, but she has to say no. Laila is the only child left in her family, and if she left Kabul, it would destroy her parents. Tariq is also an only child, and if Tariq stayed in Afghanistan, his parents would have stayed as well, and they would have died in Kabul. Leaving her mother and father would devestate them, and if Tariq did not go with his parents, they would not leave, and then they would die in Kabul.
The brutality of the Taliban and their bombs ripped people from their loved ones before they were even in power. One of the hallmarks of fascism is glorifying the state over the individual (Authier). The Taliban leaders demonstrated this by putting their cause of taking over the government before the lives of Afghan civilians. The Taliban also tears Mariam from her family: Laila, Aziza, and Zalmai. When Mariam kills Rasheed, she does it in self defense, and in defense of Laila. Mariam’s trial lasted 15 minutes, and it ended in a death sentence.
There was no jury, no lawyer in her defense, no appeal, and no witness. In a court in the United States, Mariam might have gotten off with a few years in jail with a good lawyer’s help, but in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, Mariam was her husband’s property, and he could beat her if he wanted to, and the law did not protect her. Even though she murdered her husband, Hosseini made it so every reader wanted to kill Rasheed alongside Mariam. Laila and her children took Mariam as their mother, aunt, and friend, and Mariam saw Laila and Aziza as the only people who loved he.
When Laila and Mariam part ways, neither of them are the same. Laila thinks about Mariam every day, and attributes everything she is to Mariam. Mariam is alone and afraid without Lailafor the ten days she is in jail before her execution. The fascist system was set up so that there was no way for Laila and Mariam to be happy together. Rasheed’s death was The only way out of their oppresed and miserable live, and that was what tore them apart. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini show fascism tearing families apart in the aftermath of its wave of destructiion.
