Surviving Trauma in A Thousand Splendid Suns

In the novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (2007), Titanic fever captivates the war-weary community of Kabul, Afghanistan.  This novel’s signaling to popular culture as open to interpretation and use in ways unintended by the pop culture creators (appropriation is what makes pop so especially fascinating) mirrored actual lived events in Kabul, Afghanistan.  For U.S. readers it may seem unexpected to think a major Hollywood blockbuster should engender so much attention after and during long years of war during summer 2000 when U.S. mainstream news covered the details of a devastating drought. An online article in November 2000 in Afghanistan’s News Center explains that the movie began a Kabul market’s lucrative branding of many merchandise and services (including wedding cakes, clothes, and hairstyles) with the word “Titanic.”  Simultaneously, videos of the movie were smuggled and consumed under the radar of the Taliban (some of who are humanized in this same novel).  The book illustrates that people find inspiration for resilience in unexpected places.  

Another surprise was that the obsession was over a tragic love story that fed a narrative need in a city with its own connected tragedies both large and small.  Such tragedies faced by the Afghani people-- on a personal, family, neighborhood, city, and country level--interconnect due to the atrocities of war, the (I-have-to-put-down-this-book-and-breath-to-get-through-this-part) cruel misogyny and child abuse, and the violent power struggles shape the entire novel.   In the novel, the children in the family on which the story focused re-enact scenes in the movie, particularly the dramatic ending and deaths of some of the movie’s main characters.  In the observation of one character the appeal of the Titanic is explained, “Everybody wants Jack….That’s what it is. Everybody wants Jack to rescue them from disaster. But there is no Jack. Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead” (Hosseini, 2007, p. 270).  But the story of a death turned into something to playfully make one’s own as both book-created and living Afghanis touched by the film’s story continue to live through each of their own living private and family hell and know that stories of other tragedies can be used to get through.

References

Afghanistan News Center. (2000, November). Titanic Craze Grips Afghan Capital. Retrieved from                http://www.afghanistannewscenter.com/news/2000/november/nov17h2000.htm.

Hosseini, K. (2007). A Thousand Splendid Suns. NY: Riverhead Books.