Commodifying Scars: A Critical Take on Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns

Abstract

In the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini Hosseini aims to unveil the Afghan woman and display her lifelong struggle—within the inner circle of home and the larger society—to the global readership. For Hosseini, who prides in being the ‘writer and the Afghan’ and is also the ‘elected’ representative of Afghanistan for the Occidental world, the subject of the ‘inner lives’ of two struggling Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, seemed appealing. He considers it his primary responsibility to represent these women by drawing a meticulous picture of the women restricted within the oppressive reigns of Mujaheedins and Talibans. However, Hosseini’s representation of the hopes, sorrows and disappointments of the Afghan woman is problematically essentialist and hardly innocent. Through the narrative, the role of the Afghan woman gets defined within a limited genre of femininity using which the author upholds and prizes the face of women who are constantly suffering and enduring. His writing exemplifies how suffering is often manufactured, marketed and sold as a commodity to evoke ethical, affective responses. In an attempt to represent the pain of the victim to the dominant audience, Hosseini promotes a scar culture that ends up creating a less authentic victim who is perfectly in sync with the expectations of victimhood of the audience. Sympathy is aroused for a victim whom the audience wants to see in the slot of a victim - in this case, a non-Western doubly-Otherised Afghan woman – whose plight would fan the audience’s need for self-validation as the superior Self in comparison to the victimized inferior Other.