As I have read A Thousand Splendid Suns, one of the connections from the book to the world is domestic violence. After Mariam lost her baby and the many others after that, Rasheed became very remote towards her. At the end of part, Rasheed made Mariam eat rocks to show her how badly her rice was. I connected this to domestic violence because many women go through the physical and verbal abuse from their husbands in the world today as Mariam is going through from Rasheed in the book. In the text it states, “his powerful hands clasped her jaw. He shoved two fingers into her mouth and pried it open, then forced the cold, hard pebbles into it… then he was gone, leaving Mariam to spit out pebbles, blood, and the fragments of two broken molars,” (hosseini 104). My group will benefit from this connection because recognizing the domestic abuse could allow for a better connection to the book and what Mariam is going through.
Another connection I made is to women’s rights. The women in Afghanistan are treated like slaves. They are expected to clean up after their husbands and endure the physical and verbal abuse of them. They are also not supposed to walk by themselves without their husbands. This issue is still a problem today. Even in the US women are still “marching for their lives.” In the text it says, “As a reminder how women like us suffer, she’d said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us,” (Hosseini 91). This important to recognize because it shows how little choices Mariam has in her marriage with Rasheed and her life in general.
The last connection I made was when Mariam is first being talked to about marriage she immediately does not want to marry. She believes that she is too young. Jalil and his wife’s see it differently, they think that it is the perfect time for her marriage and they go through with it telling her that they have already chosen her husband and that he would be in town in a couple of days. They didn’t give her any choice in her say if she wanted to or not. I can connect this to myself, not in the extent of marrying, but how sometimes others don’t care about your feelings, and will still do things that upset you. Sometimes others care more about fixing a problem than how it will actually affect you in the long run. In the text it states, “And do you, Mariam jan, accept this man as your husband?’ Mariam stayed quiet. Throats where cleared. ‘She does,’ a female voice said from down the table,” (Hosseini 52). This connection is important because many people have done things they don’t wanna do before like Mariam had to do, and they can connect to the feeling of feeling powerless when doing something not in their favor.
