Under The Persimmon Tree, By Suzanne Fisher Staples

Do you ever wonder what it is like to wake up not knowing if you will live another day? How about being so afraid to be beaten you don't even want to walk outside? This is what many people live through in the novel Under the Persimmon Tree, by Suzanne Fisher Staples. The Taliban has harshly ruled villages in Afghanistan and the surrounding areas, ripping families apart and going on shooting sprees. Making people flee their homes, the Taliban are making people's lives a nightmare. In Under the Persimmon Tree and in real life, the Taliban kill, steal, and ruin people’s lives without a second thought. The Taliban has a heavy impact on Nusrat and Najmahs characters in the novel.

In Under The Persimmon Tree, Staples portrays the Taliban as heartless

In real life, “Ahktar Mansour is the leader of the Taliban. The Taliban rule over 30 districts in Afghanistan and Syria” ( Cam T, Jason K). Additionally, the Taliban have very specific rules. Some of them are that “women are required to wear a burqa that covers the majority of their body, and men are required to have a full beard and wear a turban” (Nick O, Nick R). Adding to that, the Taliban steal from people and kill women for no reason.The Taliban has “very strict rules. If you don't follow them you could be severely beaten or even killed” (Justin Z, Hammam, Jordan). It has become clear, that the Taliban ruin people's lives by placing and enforcing extremely harsh rules in real life as

For Najmah, the Taliban has indirectly made her shave her head in order to become a “boy” so she wasn't targeted. Nusrat was thinking about all that Najmah has had to go through and says “it's hard to imagine the terrible things she has seen. It is too difficult to visualize a girl of this age making her way to Pakistan alone on foot, dressed as a boy” (208). The Taliban has put horrible and unimaginable images into Nur’s head that he won't ever forget. Nur describes what happened to Baba-jan and says “we heard gunshots- very close together” (254). When the Taliban took them over Nur saw “every grown man you and I have ever known.. With blood coming from bullet holes in their heads and bodies” (254). Nur will always have the image of the men in the villages dead bodies “overlapping each other”(254). Nusrat also suffers because Faiz is in Mazar-I-sharif working as a doctor. Since Nusrat is in Peshawar, she misses him very much and doesn't know if he is alive or dead. The only reason Faiz went back to Mazar-I-sharif was because he wanted to help his people who are being taken over by the Taliban. Nusrat “has faced too many difficult truths, and she spends much of the night trying not to think of herself alone, of Faiz gone forever” (217,218). Not knowing if her husband is alive is slowly making her more and more