In the world of Khaled Hosseini, the Afghani novelist who first shot to fame with “The Kite Runner,” oppression is dominant, but it is women and children who lead the ranks of the oppressed and downtrodden in his books.
In his first novel, Hosseini recounted the plight of two boys growing up in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation ending with the Taleban, and in his second book, “A Thousand Splendid Suns” again it is children and women who dominate the scene.
Khaled tells the story of two women, who grew up facing war, male oppression and war... quite a combination, I say. Of course although his heroines are fictional they do resemble millions of women in the Islamic world. If we take away the surrounding culture, we’ll see a woman whose fault in life is her sex. She is treated as a slave by her father or her husband, and is subject to all sorts of oppression, and the mere fact that she is a woman is the main charge leveled against her.
Reading “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, I found myself comparing and contrasting stories in my head and no matter where I looked I still found a common thread running through Mariam and Laila (Hosseini’s heroines) and millions of women in our midst. Those similarities are not superficial; they reflect a line of thought that males in Eastern societies have adopted and lived with. There are some exceptions but as in those novels or rather in the real world we see around us, those exceptions do not change the depressing picture. And that depressing picture is that we are all oppressed by a male somewhere, if not at home then on the street or for some of us maybe at work.
In Hosseini’s novel, Mariam who as a child gets snubbed by her father lives with her mother but after her mother dies, her father marries her off against her will to the first suitor. The man starts to abuse her after she fails to bear him the son he wanted. To her husband that was all her worth in life, and without it she is nothing more than a slave and a burden, a being that had to be covered from head to toe when she goes out and will have to follow his orders, however outrageous.
The other woman in the book, Laila, seems to have a better luck, with a father who educated her and was proud of her. But when the war deprives her of her family she finds herself married to a man she does not love, and has to bear life with him because there is nothing else she can do, for Taleban were in power and as a woman she was not exactly their favorite kind of person.
So here we go from the world of fiction to another miles away from wars and Taleban, but the maladies, it seems, are the same, and the women have to bear the brunt of it. In our part of the world we are still dealing with those who think women should always follow men in everything. If they happen to have an independent mind or thought then that makes them an enemy who has to be crushed, and men have unlimited freedom and sometimes backing from society in doing so. After all there is nothing worse than the combination of two evils: A woman and a mind!
A friend told me that she had to quit her job because she could not tolerate the way her boss was treating her. She once made the mistake of answering back a verbal attack from him. She did it politely but from that day onward she became the enemy who had to be defeated and destroyed. She realized that she couldn’t do anything about it as no one would take her side against his and she had to quit her job and start her own business.
But not all women are that lucky or determined. Some in our society have no alternatives; others were taught that obedience is the supreme virtue and between these two groups are those who simply think that this is as good as it gets.
This is how those men use the status given to them by tradition, culture. They acquire rights that go to their heads and suddenly they become obsessed with the idea of their own superiority. Only this power is used against those least equipped to resist it because of their gender and the inferior position society accords them because of their gender.
