Abuse In A Thousand Splendid Suns

Have you ever thought about sharing a husband or wife with another person? A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, this book focuses on two different women who end up getting brought together and marrying the same man. The book is placed in Afghanistan from the 1960s to the early 2000s. This book spans from the soviet invasion till when the Taliban reigned and then when they fell. The two women get abused by their husbands and try many different ways to get a better life. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, the author shows that spousal abuse is very prominent within Afghanistan.

Within A Thousand Splendid Suns, Mariam and Laila have been abused by Rasheed countless amount of times within the book. “His powerful hands grasped her jaw. He shoved two fingers into her mouth and pried it open, then forced the cold, hard pebbles into it. Mariam struggled against it, but he kept pushing, the pebbles in, his upper lip curled

“I’ll go down and teach her a lesson who does she think she is, that harami, treating you-” (pg 206). This quote it is showing that Rasheed is sending verbal threats or saying if he should go and “teach Mariam a lesson.” This is a sign of mental abuse that has occurred in the book many times. Rasheed was telling his new wife Laila at the time this because Mariam didn’t like Laila at all. Within Afghanistan this occurrence is very common, the husbands sometimes threaten the wives to get what they want and when they want it. If the wife is not doing something right they will end up taking out their anger or annoyance on their wife by verbally threatening them or they are hurting them with physical abuse. We view this as wrong or inhumane but the husbands in this culture and society view this as normal. This will stick with me knowing that people are mentally and physically abusing their wives that they chose to marry and they