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Key Themes - Coggle Diagram
Key Themes
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Shame and Reputation
any of the Taliban’s laws, particularly regarding the status of women, consider women as shameful creatures that must be barred from the public sphere.
Mariam’s mother’s suicide, after Mariam runs away to Jalil, is one example of such shame.
By beating both Mariam and Laila, Rasheed combines psychological and physical harm, making them feel pain but also shaming them and asserting his own power over them.
As a harami (bastard), Mariam is made to feel deeply ashamed by her father Jalil’s family, by others in the village, and by her husband Rasheed.
Laila feels her own sense of shame for having survived the bombing that killed her parents, purely by luck.
Gender
Gender relations can also depend on specific traditional or regional norms—Mariam, for instance, is required by her husband to wear a burqa long before this becomes law.
The relatively progressive gender norms under communism change drastically with the arrival of the Mujahideen and, eventually, the Taliban.
Men, like Laila’s brothers, are the ones who go off to fight, while the women stay home and often must deal with the repercussions of war.
Laila sneaks across town to the orphanage, and with Mariam she plans an escape
Under communist rule, for instance, girls are permitted to attend school and work outside the home. Babi celebrates this status and encourages Laila to take advantage of it.
Female Friendship
But in more subtle ways, the time they spend together drinking tea, joking, and laughing allows them to draw strength from each other and endure their oppression.
One constant theme is friendship between women. The relationship between Mariam and Laila rests at the heart of the novel
Mariam and Laila, for instance, band together against Rasheed, the husband of both and the source of much of their suffering.
By the time the Mujahideen impose their own restrictions on the place of women in Afghanistan, female friendship becomes one way to subvert these restrictions from within.
Laila also treasures her friendship with her classmates Giti and Hasina, with whom she shares laughs, games, and secrets about boys—forgetting for a time about the violence and dangers of their adolescence.