Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Losing ground
In a way the stories of Mariam and Laila were driven more by what they lost (or never had) rather than what they gained. Considering the many scenes of death and grief (Nana's suicide, Ahmend and Noor's martyrdom, Tariq's "death", Lilia's parents, etc.) where did you feel the loss most powerfully on behalf of the characters? What made this so?
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9 comments:
Good question.
I felt the loss of Nana greatly. Here was someone who had no place in the world, no love, who tried to be a good mom in her own way (by, among other things, sharing some bitter truths with her daughter) but just had nothing — nothing but hopes pinned to a naturally misguided child — to sustain her emotionally. And I felt deeply for Mariam when she was old and wise enough to truly understand the loss of Nana, the injustice of her life. I also felt deeply the loss of Laila's dad (I knew somehow that he was all that separated her from a terrible fate).
Mariam's martyrdom bothered me. I just didn't really grasp why she turned herself in. I could just understand her being damn tired of life, I guess, and having no energy to run, but I didn't really see how her admitting to the crime shielded Laila. It seems like in a country where women are prosecuted (and stoned) for being raped that Laila would also be implicated in the act that led to her husband being killed. So that seemed a little weird to me, but also the guilt she professed at depriving the little boy of his father. Yes, he was blood, and yes, the boy idolized him, but the man was a monster (the boy's love stemmed from the dad treating him like a prince at the expense of all the women in the household, who were treated like chattel). It was a sick way of life. He would have grown up to be an incredibly sick man if that influence in his life was allowed to continue. I could see her feeling saddened by depriving the kid of his dad (because the kid wouldn't be able to know that his dad was a sick monster), but for her to be so beside herself with grief on that front seemed bizarre. She saved his mother's life! What would his life have been like if she HADN'T killed the bastard? I'm really curious. Did you guys have any thoughts like that? Maybe that's sort of a Western notion — this kind of cost/benefit—lesser of two evils analysis. I don't know.
And, dammit, the loss of those ancient Buddhas sickened me all over again, even though I saw it coming.
I felt the loss of Nana before she ever died! She reminds me of when Naomi in the book of Ruth tells people to call her Mara, which means bitter, because that is what life has done to her.
I was completely fooled by Tariq's "death." It was one of the hardest moments for me because it pushed Laila toward Rasheed, which is of course what he wanted. At that point I think the author had removed from me the ability to hope that goodness would come in the hell of the country. The story of his death was too plausible, I didn't even question the messenger's weird behavior.
The night Mariam spent outside the wall's of Jamil's house was also awful. There she lost all illusions of who her father was and, I suppose what "love" meant or felt like.
Oh, I suppose those were both the key turning points in those women's lives! It was after each incident that Mariam and Laila began to accomodate to the pressures around them and gave up parts of themselves (the bright, shiny, smart parts) in order to survive.
As much as I hated to see the Buddha's go, I felt the earlier picnic and sightseeing by Hakim, Laila and Tariq was a thin little device to prepare us for their destruction. Not good storytelling in my mind.
I agree that Mariam's guilt toward Zamil (yet another man who saw her as an annoying object) was misplaced. Hosseini would have done just as well for her to choose death in order to free Laila and herself, really. It would have made it a better martyrdom.
But all her life she had been punished for things she didn't deserve. Perhaps her guilt was an internalization of that same pattern.
The loss of Nana was profound. Just when Mariam understood her mother for the first time, she was gone.
And the loss of Jalil. Or rather, the dream of Jalil. Suddenly all Mariam's dreams of her father came crashing down, her mother was dead, and she had no one.
I agree that Rasheed's death was going to be a benefit to Zalmai in the long-term, but it was probably also hard for Mariam to watch him mourn. He was an innocent child, and he didn't know he was better off without his father. I think the bottom line for Mariam was that she had caused Zalmai pain and she couldn't help but feel some guilt about that.
That being said, I agree that Hosseini could have left that out to better effect.
I was fooled by Tariq's death, too! Didn't have a clue.
Yes! Well said: that they "gave up parts of themselves (the bright, shiny, smart parts) in order to survive."
And I think you both have good insights into Mariam's personality, that she had "internalized a pattern" of being punished for things she didn't deserve and that her innate goodness led her to empathize so thoroughly with Zalmai's loss.
I agree, AEL, that the Buddha incident was not great storytelling. It was rather heavy-handed since we all knew what the outcome was. There were a few places in this book and in "The Kite Runner" where I thought Hosseini's treatment of a scene bordered on the patronizing, where things felt a little too neatly and sentimentally packaged.
I just remember when the Buddhas were destroyed being incredibly angry that anyone could destroy such an ancient work of art (remember how the museums were also plundered and the animals in the zoo killed or allowed to starve). It's sort of bizarre how much outrage that evoked in the West (was he playing to the West by including this scene?). I guess we are jaded when it comes to people treating other people atrociously. We're more used to it than people wantonly destroying millennia-old, irreplaceable art.
Plus, the destruction of the Buddhas really showed what the Taliban were all about, the narrow-minded zeal that was hardly religious and the fact that most of the Taliban did not have a deep cultural connection to Afghanistan (they were mostly Pakistani or trained in Pakistan, weren't they?). They were like a foreign invader ransacking the country and destroying its cultural heritage in the name of something most Afghanis did not identify with.
I appreciated the way the author introduced the Taliban, explaining how they were all refugee kids from camps on the outskirts of the country, and had no ethnic ties, no direct Afghani identity. Or no "roots" like you said. That was all new information for me and I think does explain some the grip their religious ideals had on them. They had nothing else to hold on to.
An interesting question to me is what about Afghani society made them vulnerable to the Taliban take over? Was it the decades of war they had already endured? Or the mixed nature of their own society (Pashto and Persian and Tajik)?
Yeah, that is a good question. I think what you've suggested about the long state of being at war and the ethnic tensions are definitely factors. Plus, the literacy rate in Afghanistan is appallingly low and the culture is still essentialy tribal (Rory Stewart talks about this a lot in "the Places in Between"), which would also make the populace susceptible to the "promises" of fundamentalism.
Moreover, Laila's dad was on to something when he told Laila: A society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated.
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