Hey there all of you, once again welcome to my blog!

I hope everyone had a lovely reading break and is finding the transition back to classes much easier than I am. Since we haven’t covered much new material since the last blog post, I wasn’t too sure what I’d write about this week. So I’ve decided to give you all some background to my ASTU essay proposal that we’ve been working on. I’m actually pretty excited about this essay because I got to choose my own novel, outside of the syllabus. I chose one of my favourite books by one of my favourite authors: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. There were a few reasons I thought of this novel in particular, one of them being that we were recently looking into Poems from Guantanamo Bay. It was briefly talked about how poetry for Middle Eastern cultures is more of an everyday thing. When we talked about this, it brought to mind a quote from A Thousand Splendid Suns where one of the main character’s father jokes that there was a time when you couldn’t stretch a leg in their city without poking a poet in the ass.

There were other similarities within the novel itself that reminded me of novels we’ve read over the past year. Like Marji’s parents from Satrapi’s Persepolis, who didn’t want to leave their country even though their lives were in danger and their beliefs had to be censored, because they loved their homeland that much. This sentiment was also in Hosseini’s novel, where Laila’s (one of the main characters) mother refused to leave their country of Afghanistan even though rockets were striking houses and killing people around them everyday. It put her whole family’s lives in danger but she would not change her mind. When I first read Hosseini’s novel (yes, I’ve read this book several times) I was struck by the fact that someone could love their home so much, almost more than their family. But years later, after reading Persepolis, I think I could understand better where that love for your home comes from.

Anyways, the purpose of this blog was to give everyone who hasn’t read this book a little info on how great it is. If you haven’t already guessed, it is set in Afghanistan. Hosseini narrates the lives of two women, which I think is amazing, given the time period for women in Afghanistan. The first, Mariam born in a rural village outside of Herat in 1959 and the second, Laila in the city of Kabul in 1978. They both have very different personalties, live very different lives, but somehow their trauma leads them into the same household. It’s over a very intense time period in Afghanistan’s history, when the country goes from Democratic rule to fighting the Soviets, to the Taliban taking control, to America declaring war on the country. It is an especially difficult time period for women in Afghanistan, Laila is born during a peaceful time where women are encouraged to learn and work but in her young adult years is when the Taliban take over with a very different mindset.

Besides all the politics of it, what makes the book one of my favourites is how poetically it is written. I found the first chapter online for anyone who is interested. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s definitely worth the read and I hope all of you get the chance to look into it or any of the other novels that Khaled Hosseini has written, like The Kite Runner or And the Mountains Echoed.

Citations:

Falkoff, Marc. Poems from Guantánamo the Detainees Speak. Iowa City: U of Iowa, 2007. Print.

Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead, 2007. Print.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York, NY: Pantheon, 2003. Print.

hey there fellow bloggers of ASTU 100,

the past two weeks we’ve really been focusing on trauma and poetry, two themes that seem to go hand in hand. Specifically though, trauma caused by acts of terror. Something about studying poetry on the subject, however, has made me question who is responsible for terror? From the works of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay, it would seem the US military are the bad guys, but from the point of view of many Americans, it is only in retaliation to greater evils. The collection of poems from the detainees of Guantanamo Bay is quite controversial in this way. Many even think that the poems should never have been released. But if poetry in itself is an act of self expression, then are some people not allowed to that right?

I found the poems from Guantanamo Bay tied in nicely with Juliana Spahr’s collection of poetry “This Connection of Everyone with Lungs.” To me, her poems were trying to relay the themes of connection and disconnection. The first poem of her book titled, Poem Written After September 11/2001, especially emphasized this. I found that basically, her poems were a more artistic way of putting Judith Butler’s theory from her novel “Frames of War.” 

In many of her poems and especially in the last one of the book, she repeats a theme of everyday life but compares it to warfare. For example, Spahr writes:

“In bed, when I stroke the down on yours cheeks, I stroke also the carrier battle group ships, the guided missile cruisers, and the guided missile destroyers.”

I think what she’s trying to say with this repeated theme is that with everything that is revealed in your life, there is a life connected to yours that is concealed, or ignored. But we are inevitably connected to these lives and aspects of life. As Spahr repeats in her poems, “How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs.”

Citations

Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs Poems. Berkeley: U of California, 2005. Print.