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Under the same shining sun, there is one country where almost all women are illiterate and eighty percent of them have to face forced marriages; where one in every three women experience physical, psychological or sexual violence and every half an hour, a woman dies during childbirth. (Source: IRIN) The country is called Afghanistan. Having left this "Land of Afghans" since his childhood, Khaled Hosseini, with his two international bestsellers, has traced his way back to his birthplace and recounted to the world what's happening there. In his latest novel, a Thousand Splendid Suns, the author focuses on one of the most miserable groups of people on earth: Afghan women. Through feminist lens, Hosseini captures, in the doleful yet shining life of two female protagonists, the picture of how women in Afghanistan are oppressed both physically and mentally, in domestic sphere as in community, and how they resist the sexism imposed by men.

The story begins with Mariam, a countryside girl who represents a "traditional woman". Throughout her short life, she has to face a double oppression by men in feminist view and by classism according to Marxist ideology. From a little girl to a full-aged woman, Mariam has been pained by two important men in her life: Jalil, her father, and her husband, Racheed. Fathers and husbands are authoritative figures whom women, particularly the Afghanis, must depend on, who are deemed to play the role of protectors and, conventionally, possessors. In Mariam's case, however, they assume additional role of destroyers. With his weakness, all Jalil can be is a feeble father, who always fails to stand up for his daughter. Racheed, on the contrary, overexert his power to stand upon her. Apart from her inferiority as a woman, Mariam's life is pulled even lower by her social status. In Afghanistan, as in many countries, class system still plays a substantial role in people's lives. One's value as a human being is equated with the social class one belongs to (Tyson, 55) Being born an illegitimate child of a rich, young patron of the mansion and a poor, lowly housekeeper, Mariam is casted outside community in a skimpy kolba and labeled since her birth as a "harami". For Jalil's wives, she is a "disgrace" to their family, a "trace of their husband's scandalous mistake" (p. 52). Even Racheed looks down upon her rural origin and compares her to a valueless, second-classed Volga (p.235).

This painful experience that Mariam is subjected to results in what psychologists call childhood trauma. It is a type of psyche damage caused by bad happenings which disrupt a child's sense of safety and security ("Emotional and Psychological Trauma: Recognizing the Symptoms and Getting Help", 2008). For Mariam, she has been through series of tearing events: Jalil's betrayal, Nana's suicide, bearing of harsh, socially prejudiced eyes, and babies that she time after time conceives but never has. All of these mould her into a person whose self-esteem is all dried up, who perceives herself as worthless as a "scurrying cockroach" (p.4) and as less- than- human as "a stray dog" (p. 39) in her father's eyes, and "a house cat" (p. 104) in her husband's mind. Over and over, she is haunted by Nana's dying words: I'll die if you go. I'll just die (p. 42) and keeps blaming herself a "treacherous daughter" (p. 99) who caused her mother's death. Locked up in these feelings of worthlessness and guilt, Mariam becomes self-effacing and withdraws herself from other people. She ran away when neighboring wives, wanting to know the newcomer, flock around her (p. 73) and finds it comforting hiding herself in a burqa, which separates her from the world, so that no one can penetrate "all the shameful secrets of her past" (p. 78). If Mariam appears as a weak, helpless and supine woman, it is because again and again, she has been let down with the dream that any ordinary girls dream: to be a sultan of someone's heart.