A Thousand Splendid Suns, Indeed

In the blazing heat wave that hit the Northeast last week, I sat on my Aunt's plush couch and finished the lasted pages of A Thousand Splendid Suns. My cousin rocked her baby as pans of southern food (fried chicken, collard greens, fried fish, potato salad, candied yams, cornbread, and MORE) simmered in the background. My mother buzzed around the kitchen with hands lightly dusted in cornmeal and my Aunt swung her hips, dodging the kitchen table and the counters, making her way to deck to attend to the fryer. What an enriched environment of women. Generations of marriages, children, education, love lost and found, happiness, fears, pain, and triumph. I smiled, closing the book knowing that the theme of A Thousand Splendid Suns is one that weaves women together all over the world.

The plight of Mariam and Laila, the protagonists of the novel, starts in two very different places, socially, although locality they're down the street from each other. But the chain of political events lands them in the same place, in the same house, with the same enemy. I brewed over this transition and thought of the war in Afghanistan, the recent war in Iraq, the drought in Africa, and the political unrest in Libya. These are the exact factors that shaped the novel.

But, how many women around the world are being held under these conditions without words, without hope but with a story? I don't want to depress anyone and I don't want to spoil the plot before my little book club-ers are finished so I'll leave you all with this:

Reading A Thousand Splendid Suns has reminded me that I need to always be appreciative of the stories we bare as women, whether we're writers or NOT, because through us the world is given new life.