Steve Levin's Review

Steve Levin, the newest member of the Department, is having his review of Khaled Hosseini's latest novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, published in Khath, and he's kindly agreed to give us a preview. Hossieni, you may recall, published The Kite Runner a couple of years ago, and it's been made into a film, which is playing even now at the Amherst Cinema. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm eagerly awaiting the local premier this week of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Instead of continuing to wander off topic, though, I'll give you Steve's review, which introduces me to "New Orientalism," a concept I'll have to incorporate into my own theoretical lexicon, since it makes so much sense:


It is impossible to read Khaled Hosseini’s latest novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, without also considering the monumental popularity of his first novel, The Kite Runner. Published in 2003, The Kite Runner moved to the top of U.S. bestseller lists largely through word of mouth, became a favorite of book clubs and reading groups, and of course now has been adapted to a feature film that seems at once to avoid and to exemplify the hallmarks of a Hollywood treatment: the film employs, for example, a cast of unknown Afghan and Iranian actors but, in the style of a Hollywood epic, oversimplifies political and historical events as a way to accentuate elements of melodrama and sentimentality.

As with The Kite Runner, Splendid Suns weaves together dramas of personal struggle and regional politics. The novel focuses on two women, Mariam and Laila, and the staggering hardships they endure as both domestic and national subjects: in their own families they are marginalized as daughters and wives, and in the public sphere they act as signifiers of national identity for the Soviets, the Mujahideen, and the Taliban (the novel offers a more favorable portrait of gender equality under the Soviets, but also shows that Soviet forces, following a common strategy of colonial rhetoric, invoke gender politics as a way to defend the legitimacy of their expansion in the region).

Mariam is the daughter of a wealthy businessman in Herat who, seeking to placate his three wives by sparing the family the shaming presence of an illegitimate child, arranges Mariam’s marriage to a shoemaker in distant Kabul. The suitor, Rasheed, forces Mariam to wear a burqa—because “a woman’s face is her husband’s business only”--and lashes out viciously when she proves unable to fulfill his idealized expectations for a proper wife.

The story of Laila, a neighbor of Mariam’s, initially appears to offer a somewhat hopeful contrast to the depiction of Mariam’s conjugal incarceration. As a modern girl in Kabul, we follow her on adventures that resonate with Marjane Satrapi’s portrayal in Persepolis of a child coming of age in a city claimed by multiple political factions and constantly under siege (in Satrapi’s case, Tehran in the 1980s). Laila’s father encourages her independence and stresses the importance of education; that the schoolteacher compels students to espouse their ideological allegiance to the Soviets seems more a minor annoyance than a threat to their autonomy. And although Laila’s mother reinforces the unequal valuation of sons and daughters by neglecting Laila and reserving all of her affection for two sons fighting on the front for, as she sees it, Afghani national pride, with the Mujahideen against the Russians, Laila draws support from a close friend, Tariq, and his cosmopolitan family.

Yet the fighting that ensues after the collapse of the Soviet regime in the 1990s throws her life into turmoil. Through a surprising turn of events, Laila too eventually falls victim to Rasheed’s predations, and from 1992 to the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 she and Mariam do their best to survive in the face of horrific domestic violence and suffocating public restrictions. Through the portrayal of their subjection, we gain a window into the social landscape that materialized for women with the ascent of factional fighting in Kabul and the Taliban’s idiom of Islamization, which proscribed work, travel, and education.

Hosseini has been applauded for humanizing Afghanistan for western audiences and, with Splendid Suns, for bringing to the fore the graphic abuses women have suffered both in Afghanistan and generally as pawns in the muscular politics of nationalism. Yet Hosseini’s work also has been cited by some critics as a prototypical example of “New Orientalism.” This mode of representation, outlined most prominently by Fatemeh Keshavarz (an Iranian literature specialist at Washington University) and Hamid Dabashi (Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University), represents all Muslims as either good or bad. “Good” Muslims are inevitably modern while “bad” ones reflect stereotypes of blind devotion and social and sexual repression. Such representations prove comforting to western audiences because they sidestep history and serve to redeem a western ideal of modernity. Read through the interpretive frame of New Orientalism, we might observe that the only choice available to Mariam and Laila to escape the repressive sexual politics of Islam lies in embracing a familiar mode of cosmopolitan modernity: secular, consumerist, and universal.

These positions—one that celebrates Hosseini’s humanism and one that critiques the absence of historical complexity and calls for respectful representations of cultural difference (rather than affirmations of western modernity)--reflect, in my view, a complex double-bind for many contemporary global writers. Any representation critical of particular national contexts risks being absorbed into political agendas beyond the writer’s control. How does a writer balance the concerns of the local and global? How does one portray the social struggles of women in Afghanistan without also falling into the trap of what postcolonial critics have described as “colonial feminism”—the invocation of women’s rights to justify invasion by an outside power?
Our evaluation of these questions may come down to how we see this problem of “humanizing” Afghanistan. If the writer’s task is to present a picture of Afghanis as “ordinary” people who, contrary to ethnocentric stereotypes, have hopes and dreams and heartbreaks, then Hosseini succeeds in offering a vivid glimpse into an often misunderstood region. Yet if humanizing means expanding our sense of the political and historical determinants that have produced the contested and imagined nation of “Afghanistan,” and challenging readers not to remain in denial about particular aspects of these histories, Splendid Suns perhaps proves less successful. Although the novel excoriates the violence perpetrated by the Soviets, the Mujahideen, and the Taliban, it remains mostly silent on the ways in which these groups were largely enabled by a long history of British colonialism and U.S. interventionism. Only by suppressing this history can cosmopolitan modernity emerge as a triumphant corrective for the violence perpetrated against Mariam and Laila. The story Hosseini tells is moving and indeed full of human drama—sacrifice and courage and pain and loss, as some favorable reviews have said—but the question persists as to whether it does anything to restore suppressed historical memories that might unsettle western audiences, or whether it should.

--Jay