Commencing the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini establishes a detrimental tone through the character of Nana. The mother of the main character of Mariam, Nana brands Mariam as a “harami” conducing “unwanted thing.” The reader learns that Mariam is denoted as a “harami” because Nana became pregnant with Mariam and was not wanted by Jalil.
Although Nana is Mariam’s mother, Nana does not convey a nurturing nor solicitous personality towards Mariam. The “Jinn” that takes over Nana’s body at difficult times depicts the remorse that Nana has towards Mariam. From religious believers who entrust in Allah, a Jinn was created from fire whereas human beings are believed to be created from clay. Jinns are invisible to the human eyes, however, the Jinn can see us. The Jinn that enters Nana’s body is a dark spirit, one which symbolizes punishment for the result of Mariam. The Jinn conveys not only a burden on Nana, but also Mariam, as it reminds her of the “lingering pain” she puts upon Nana.
While Nana signifies a pessimistic outlook, Jalil appears a foil character to Nana. Nana’s anecdotes to Mariam educe a feeling of burden. Even simple stories such as the birth of Nana forced “recrimination” and “burden” upon Mariam, as she apologized for her own birth. Little did Mariam know at the time the “unfairness of apologizing for her own birth.” Jalil, however, retorts the stories in a manner antithesis to Nana’s. In the first meeting of Jalil, he portrays a wholesome father- one that makes Mariam feel she is a “good daughter.”
Nana and Mariam’s house is “two hundred yards upstream, towards the mountains” and in the “center shade of the willows” is the “clearing” of Nana and Mariam’s home. The seclusion that the two live in conveys the feelings that Jalil has towards the two- that they should be isolated away from Jalil’s other “nine wives” as Nana and Mariam are sort of the “embarrassments” of the family. While Nana realizes the selfishness that Jalil portrays, Mariam fails to see that side of Jalil. To Mariam, Jalil represents the “world at large.” The existence of “presidents, trains, soccer, and museums” outside of the remote “kolba.”
Mariam quickly discovers the misinterpretation she had of Jalil and her mother. Nana’s reasoning for bashing Jalil was because she was afraid of Mariam leaving her. Hosseini foreshadows Nana’s suicide in the very beginning of the book with the “shattering” of Nana’s mother’s “Chinese tea set.” The “porcelain piece” that “slipped from Mariam’s fingers” foreshadows the death of Nana was from “slipping” through Mariam’s fingers when Mariam chose Jalil over Nana.
The next instance of foreshadowing occurs in the jinn that overtook Nana whenever Jalil was involved in her life. Whether or not Nana was falsifying the religious spirit and was really just a “disease” that could “be cured with pills”, or if the jinn actually occurred in Nana, the reader can induce that Nana nuanced Jalil with a “dark spirit.”
Once Mariam made her own decision to see Jalil, Nana was found “dangling” from “rope drooping high at a branch.” The death of Nana symbolizes the “death” of Mariam’s childhood, as she is now forced into making her own decisions and living for herself. Mariam chose to disobey Nana, and the death of Nana exemplifies the new, adult life that Mariam must now undergo.
Before Mariam left Nana for Jalil, one of Mariam’s games was to take pebbles, each representing one of Jalil’s children from each wife, and would arrange them in “four separate columns.” Rather than arranging all the pebbles altogether, the separation of the columns implies that Mariam does not belong with the others. This point is clearly shown when Mariam is rejected from Jalil to see him, and while leaving, the pebbles “spill from her pocket.” The spilling of pebbles imply that Mariam is not wanted nor meant to be a part of Jalil and his other wives family which foreshadows the forced marriage that occurs later in the novel.
Throughout the book thus far, Mariam has witnessed the feeling of not being wanted from her mother, her father, and now the women that Jalil live with. After Nana’s death, Mariam lives with Jalil for a short period of time, but soon discovers she is not wanted there. Jalil’s wife force a marriage upon Mariam to a man named Rasheed. Now that Mariam no longer has a mother or father, she is completely on her own
The man that Mariam marries, Rasheed, is a complete antithesis to Mariam. Starting with appearance, Rasheed has a “big square, ruddy face and a hooked nose…watery, blood shot eyes, and bush eyebrows” compared to Mariam who has a “narrow chin” and a “long, triangular face.” The personalities of the two also differ, as Rasheed expects Mariam to do all the cooking and cleaning. The marriage between the two depicts the basic routine in Afghanistan of forced marriage. Rarely in Afghanistan is a woman not married by the time she is 16 years old, which Hosseini shows through the young age of Mariam and the old age of Rasheed. Along with age, Hosseini conveys the problem with forced marriage when Rasheed expresses his feelings that Mariam’s job is to do the cooking, cleaning, and the “job of a wife” in which Rasheed believes is sex. The unpleasantness and uncomfortable feelings that Mariam constantly feels in her marriage to Rasheed depicts the negativity of forced marriages. In bed, Mariam “looks at the frozen stars in the sky and a cloud that draped the face of the moon like a wedding veil” a metaphor that denotes Mariam’s feelings on her marriage in which she is “frozen” in her marriage-- frozen with fear, regret, remorse, and disappointment.
Along with Rasheed’s inhumane outlook on marriage, he also forces Mariam to wear a “burqa” that completely covers her face and body from other guys looking at her. Rasheed hates the “married women” that walk around without enough clothing on. Hypocritical to what Rasheed says, Mariam discovers “magazines” in Rasheed’s room that show “beautiful women who wore no shirts, no trousers, no socks or underpants.” The hypocritical views of Rasheed shows the controlling side that Rasheed has over his wife, making the reader wonder if Rasheed had something to do with the death of his previous wife and son and makes the reader wonder if Rasheed will “control” Mariam too much and again make Mariam feel unwanted ultimately resulting in Mariam being left by Rasheed along with her parents.
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