Free Write-A Thousand Splendid Suns

For those of you who haven’t read A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, it is a story about two women trapped in an abusive marriage, both physically and verbally abusive, in Afghanistan. The younger of the two, Laila, was told that her boyfriend was killed and therefore since her parents were killed, she should marry Rasheed, the abuser. Mariam, Rasheed’s first wife, had several miscarriages, but no children, so Rasheed was not happy with her and treated her much worse than he treated Laila, who was young and beautiful.
This book really opened my eyes to how dramatically different a woman’s place is in Afghanistan compared to a man’s. Men are allowed to beat their wives, and at one point, after a failed attempt at running away, the women were caught and questioned by an officer. They feared for their lives. ‘“If you send us back,” she said instead, slowly, “there is no telling what he will do to us.” She could see the effort it took him to keep his eyes from shifting. “What a man does in his home is his business.”’ The way that women took this abuse and how easily men got away with it, without a care in the world, honestly made me angry. Also, before the Taliban took control, some men were looked down on because of how lenient they were when it came to controlling their wives. While some women were allowed to wear only a scarf, lipstick, nail polish, some were even allowed to smoke.
Once the Taliban came in control though, the ideas were stomped out. Women were not even allowed out of the house without a male relative. Laila, who was forced to put her daughter in an orphanage because they could not afford to feed her, risked being beaten to see her daughter. She even tried multiple times a day to see her daughter if she was seen alone the first time. She soon learned to wear extra layers of clothing to soften the beatings she received from the Taliban posted along Kabul’s streets.
When Laila was pregnant with her second child, men and women were no longer allowed to be treated in the same hospitals. The women’s hospital that she was forced to go to was basically a riot; Taliban guards had to guard the doors to treatment rooms. When Laila was in labor, she found she needed a caesarian section; the hospital had no drugs, clean gloves, and no x rays. All the money for hospitals either was turned away because it was charity, or given to men’s hospitals.