ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 11, 2020

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns: A Biopolitical Reading with reference to Power and the State of Exception

Bhargavi Gogoi

Research Scholar, Department of English, Tezpur University. Assam, India.

ABSTRACT

The Machiavellian concept of power formulated by the nameless policy-makers who actually run governments has no other concern than the power of the state. It viewed the population of the state as a resource -it wanted to learn about humans as a species and know about their biological secrets as well as it also wanted to develop the capacity of humans as machines by disciplining their bodies. Foucault terms this new kind of political rationality as ‗biopower‘ because it concerned itself with every aspect of life. The theory of ‗bare life‘ originates from these concepts. Agamben refers to ‗bare life‘ as a conception of life in which the sheer biological fact of life is given priority over the way a life is lived. The concept of Biopolitics is a kind of politics of bare life which happens due to the collapsing of the distinction between bios (the form in which life is lived) and zoē(the biological fact of life). These concepts could be distinctively found in ‘s A Thousand Splendid Suns. The novel is about the plight of two Afghan women- Mariam and Laila who are bound to each other through their husband Rasheed. Their life becomes a desparate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear during the regime. It is during this regime that their conditions could be said to have been reduced to ‗bare life‘ because a ‗state of exception‘ was formed. This paper attempts to study how the biopolitics of Foucault could be traced in this ‗state of exception‘ under which constitutional rights were flagrantly violated in Afghanistan. The paper also aims to discuss the plight of the Afghan people being reduced to a ‗bare life‘.

KEYWORDS: Khaled Hosseini, state of exception, power, bare life, biopolitics, Afghan

INTRODUCTION

The contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (trans. 1998) points that the exception is the original relation of the entire Western paradigm of politics. The Greeks, Agamben argues, made a critical distinction between the simple fact of living – zoe – and the qualified political life – bios. While the simple fact of

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ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 11, 2020 living in itself had a ―natural sweetness‖ for Aristotle, the end of politics was not merely this ―bare life‖ but the politically-qualified ―life according to the good‖. Agamben asserts that this account of politics become canonical for us moderns, centring on competing articulations of the ‗good life‘. Agamben then invokes the French philosopher Michel Foucault‘s distinction between this classical paradigm and the identification of a distinctively modern ‗biopolitics‘, in which biological life (of both the individual and the species) becomes what is at stake in politics. For FoucaultAs Foucault writes that for a long time, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question. For Foucault, biopolitical modernity is marked by political processes, principles and practices which question the very existence of man as a species. The instance of this could be found in the beginning of the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), Khaled Hosseini describes Mariam‘s first visit to . Mariam sees a bustling city, with cypress-lined streets and flowerbeds; people walk the streets and the street markets are abundant. Not only is the city beautiful, but it also is safe and friendly even for such a young girl as Mariam. Although she walks alone and is clearly of meager means, no one points or shouts at her, and no one questions the fact that she is walking alone or suggests that she has anything of which she should be ashamed. In fact, a taxi driver picks her up and takes her to her destination. This is in stark contrast to Mariam‘s experience in the market and her sense of safe anonymity within her burqa, and to Laila‘s terrifying trips to visit her daughter Aziza in the orphanage. The story of Afghanistan includes the story of the role and place of women in Afghan society. Hosseini touches on this in , but he has clearly dedicated himself to examining the condition of women in this novel. Laila is the beloved daughter of her father, but her mother focuses primarily on Laila‘s brothers. Laila is all but forgotten in her mother‘s grief for the loss of her two sons. Mariam, in contrast to Laila, lives in poverty but has the rough love of her mother and the apparent doting of her father. Both girls‘ lives change abruptly and clearly for the worst when they become connected to Rasheed through marriage. They each enjoy a brief honeymoon period with their husband, but they are ruled by his wishes and desires and defy him at great risk to their wellbeing, in Laila‘s case, the well-being of her children. It may pass through the mind of the reader to wonder whether Hosseini has overstated his case. Rasheed‘s treatment of Mariam predates the Soviet invasion and the civil war, and his relationship with

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ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 11, 2020 both Laila and Mariam predates the Taliban. ―The Taliban is a Pashto and Persian word of Arabic origins referring to lower level students of Islam, usually from poor, rural background and always males‖ (Wahab, Youngerman, 205). Those students originated from JamiatUlema- Islam and constituted the core of the Taliban movement that ruled Afghanistan in the second half of the twentieth century. The majority of the Taliban members were students from the Pashtun areas of , including thousand of Afghan refugees from the Soviet conflict for whom the religious school provided religious education while free schools supplied food and lodging. Additionally, a great number of Pashtun Pakistani young students also joined the movement, as well as Arabs and other non- Afghan Muslim volunteers (Ibid: 205).

The Taliban, led by Mullah Mohammad Omar, were trained, armed and supported heavily by the (PSI) Pakistani Intelligence Service which has close links with various factions of Afghanistan Mujahedeen that rose up in resistance to the Soviet occupation. One can bear in mind that there is nucleus dissimilarity between the Taliban and the Mujahedeen groups, that is, while the latter were well- educated intellectual Muslims, Taliban Mullahs were mostly ignorant of Islamic history, law and scholarship. The curriculum of the Madrassas (school) was based on the repetition of the Quran and repeated the simple puritan values of the primitive Islam. The Mullahs who ran the schools often confuse Pashtun custom with Islamic laws, especially in matters of gender role (Ibid: 205). It could be found here that the Taliban‘s Puritanic rule reduced the lives of the people of Afghanistan into a bare life with the formation of a ‗state of exception‘. Here, Agamben‘s idea from Carl Schmitt‘s concept of the Sovereign could be stated with the Taliban being the sovereign that has the power to decide the state of exception, where law is indefinitely suspended without being abrogated.

It is also found in the novel that Laila or Mariam does not have any legal rights. But Hosseini carefully portrays both Laila, whose parents raised her with a greater sense of entitlement and privilege, and Mariam, whose mother taught her to endure by taking control of the conditions under which they lived to the extent that they possibly could. When Mariam finally softens to the 4603

ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 11, 2020 infant Aziza and reconciles herself to the presence of Laila in her household, they become allies. Rasheed‘s marriage to Mariam and Laila is one representation of marriage in Afghanistan. This is an instance of the power of the patriarch in the household. Here, Rasheed being the patriarch holds the reins of the family and does whatever he wishes- the second marriage with the orphaned Laila, sending of Laila‘s daughter to the orphanage and so on.

DISCUSSION

The novel A Thousand Splendid Suns is set in Afghanistan, with a time span stretching from the second half of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty first century. During this time of thirty years, Afghanistan was tormented by the civil war in which the main participants changed several times, causing terrible political and economic instability, poverty, injuries, and violent death of hundreds of citizens. Land mines, genocide, and fierce politics of gender inequality affected thousands of people. It is true then that all characters in A Thousand Splendid Suns are affected by war. The most detailed account of how war affects a child is found in the story of Laila, who was born in 1978 at the time of the communist coup. This coup signals the start of a civil war which lasts until the present day. Thus, all of Laila's childhood was marked by the consequences of war. During her childhood and teenage years, Laila spends years in the shadow of her mother's depression and she experiences her family being destroyed by war. Some of Laila's best friends relocate in search of a safer place, while others are injured or killed. Laila's boyfriend, Tariq, is maimed for life by a landmine. Later, Laila's suffering from war is aggravated by her inability to maintain a safe and happy environment for her two children.

In the narrative, the main players in the Afghan war are the Soviet Union and the United States of America whose president ―shipped the Stinger Missiles to down the Soviet helicopters‖ with the aid of ―Muslims from all over the world: Egyptians, Pakistanis, even

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ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 11, 2020 wealthy Saudis, who left their millions behind and came to Afghanistan to fight the jihad‖ (Hosseini 112). After the withdrawal of the Soviet army from the country, the Afghan armed forces are unable to maintain internal peace: ―the Mujahideen, armed to the teeth but now lacking a common enemy, had found the enemy in each other‖ (Hosseini 169). Even after the allied western forces invade Afghanistan and help establish interim administration, this new government is unable to call the criminals of war to answer, but instead ―warlords...live in posh homes with walled gardens‖ and are ―appointed minister of this and deputy minister of that‖ (Hosseini 398). From the way, Hosseini describes the historical events, it seems that the history of Afghanistan is characterized predominantly by the country's political impotency.

Moreover, Hosseini shows that such a state not only fails to provide a safe and nurturing environment for its youth, but it also facilitates turning children into soldiers. The single regional alternative to the Mujahideen, the Taliban, is associated by Hosseini not only with their strict ruling, but also with such natural phenomena as drought. This allows Hosseini to further promote the reader's dislike of the Taliban by using stories of children suffering from hunger. The author gradually builds up the tension by making several references to danger looming over the lives of the readers' favorite characters. First, Rasheed's suggestion to make a street beggar out of Aziza is met with a point-blank refusal from Laila. Sometime after this incident, Rasheed's family is faced with a shortage of food and the readers are presented with a disturbing story of a mother ―who had ground some dried bread, laced it with rat poison and fed it to all seven of her children. She had saved the biggest portion for herself" in order to avoid a death from starvation‖ ( Hosseini 298-99). The climax of the hunger theme comes when Laila leaves Aziza in an orphanage filled with many children whose parents are unable to provide them with even minimal nutrition. Each of these distressing scenes contributes to the general atmosphere of despair and fear linked to the Taliban rule.

Mariam makes the ultimate sacrifice for the woman and children who have become her family and for the relationship she sees that Tariq and Laila might have. Although her final act is tragic, 4605

ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 11, 2020 it is also heroic and a choice that she makes. Mariam lives out the final days of her life in the Walayat Women‘s Prison. To the women in the prison, many of whom are imprisoned for attempting to run away from their husbands, Mariam, who has killed her husband, is a hero. She is honored and cared for by her cellmates and loved by their children until her final day. It is well to recognize that Hosseini‘s characters are neither passive nor helpless, but they are abused and their lives are made tragic by social and religious mores and the political restrictions placed on them and the lack of any kind of support afforded them. Hosseini strengthens his case in pointing out the hypocrisy behind laws put into place by the Taliban who forbade women from working outside the home even when no males in the family could support them, who prevented females from attending school, and who endangered the lives of women and children by limiting the availability of health care for women to one severely understaffed and unfunded hospital in Kabul.

The way in which Hosseini makes us remember various Afghan political parties in unfavorable light is the description of the methods by which the Mujahideen and the Taliban increase their numbers. The two accounts that follow are narrated by Rasheed, the cruel and lustful villain of the novel. These new warlords do not waste their time with brainwashing and prefer using violence: ―They're forcing young boys to join, [Rasheed] said... They drag boys right off the streets. And when soldiers from a rival militia capture these boys, they torture them…They make the boys lead them to their homes. Then they break in, kill their fathers, rape their sisters and mothers‖ (Hosseini 248). Three important observations can be made about these two episodes. First, by making an abominable character voice these accounts, the author steers his readers toward establishing a link between this sadistic man who terrorizes his wives and Afghan political forces unwilling to stop the feud between them while involving reluctant citizens in their war. Second, to intensify the negative emotional response to the Taliban and the Mujahideen actions, Hosseini lets Rasheed narrate brutal details of the new fighters' recruitment and point out how the Taliban use to their advantage the adversity of some of the most vulnerable: refugee children. Finally, and most importantly, the two different Afghan parties are

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ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 11, 2020 lumped together by such descriptions; there is no difference between their barbaric ways, the history of their appearance, and their attitude towards the citizens of Afghanistan.

In addition to representing Afghan teenagers as either brainwashed or physically forced into supporting any side of the conflict, Hosseini portrays the youth as largely indifferent to what cause is supported by warring parties. When Tariq asks Laila what she thinks about the Mujahideen nearing Kabul, she is only able to repeat her father's ideas ―something...about the troublesome marriage of guns and ego‖ (Hosseini 168). Without a chance for supporters of any of the political parties to voice their reasons and without a critical reflection on teenager's thoughts on the situation, the important political background of the novel‘s plot becomes oversimplified and deprived of any historical context.

CONCLUSION

For Foucault, biopolitics is political power exercised on whole populations in every aspect of human life. Agamben borrowed and adapted this concept of biopolitics and the reduction of life to ‗biopolitics‘ became an important thread in his works. Agamben‘s critical conception of a homo sacer , reduced to a bare life and thus deprived of any rights, can be found in the portrayal of the condition of women or the weaker section of the Afghan society during the span of thirty years in A Thousand Splendid Suns. The Puritanic rule of the Taliban regime led to the formation of a ‗state of exception‘ in Afghanistan. In that state of exception, the victim like Mariam becomes a criminal for trying to save Laila from the cruelties of their husband Rasheed. She was not even allowed to present her voice as her justification. Besides, the novelist also presents with instances when the state of exception was formed, the life of the Afghan people and the youngsters was reduced to a bare life. The distinction between their life and the life of the ‗sacred man( homo sacer)‘ was made by those with the judicial power.

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WORKS CITED

Abdullah Mohammad Dagamseh and Olga Golubeva, ―Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns as a Child-Rescue and Neo-Orientalist Narrative‖ CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 19.4, 2017:

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———. The History of Sexuality, volume 1. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Random House, 1978.

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______. ―A Thousand Splendid Suns: Sanctuary and Resistance.‖ Critical Insights: Cultural Encounters. ed. Nicholas Birns. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013.

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