Thoughts on Partitions by Amit Majmudar

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A few years ago I taught a little bit about the partitioning of India and Pakistan. Not many students had actually heard of this event. This would be an excellent novel to introduce students to that event that continues to shape that part of the world. It is a great novel to read when thinking about the violence that is happening around the world. The book also goes into depth about violence against women in war zones and even the thoughts and motives of the perpetrators of such violence.  There were several parts where the author used such beautiful language to express something thoughtful and thought-provoking about humanity.  I will include two of them below:

The first example is when the traveling group of children and one adult hear the ominous sound of a vehicle motor behind them (they are on guard for violent people and human traffickers who travel with trucks):

"It isn't a truck, though.  It's a passenger bus. Masud [a main character who is a doctor and a Muslim] waves his arms, sensing as he did before, a detached kindness guiding the courses and intersections of people, which violent men try to disrupt but succeed in disrupting only for a time." (p.196)

When the doctor takes on a Sikh last name in order to work peacefully at a Sikh refugee camp, the author adds an interesting commentary.

"The false identity doesn't trouble him the way it would have just a day before, when he walked in the kafila and answered thoes who asked him with his given, Muslim name. He knows his caregiving is neither Muslim, nor Sikh, nor Hindu. Or rather it is all three of these. The name, on the man or on the God, is something around it, not of it--thinner than the gloves on his scrubbed hands and peeled off just as easily." (p. 200)

Majmudar, A. (2011). Partitions. NY: Picador

A bit about The Age of Shiva

Suri, M. (2007) The Age of Shiva. NY:  W.W. Norton & Company.

As a novel to assign in the classroom, the topical links to make with this book deal with family studies and women’s studies and the intersection of both. The reader follows the life of Meera, from her teenage years to motherhood and widowhood. Meera has origins in a modern Indian family, but has to live her adult life within a family quite different from her own.  The author takes pages to delve into emotional dramas of the main character and the challenges of family dynamics.   

Autobiography of Navajo Surgeon

Alvord, L. A., & Van Pelt, E. C. (2000). The scalpel and the silver bear: The first Navajo woman surgeon        combines Western medicine and traditional healing. NY: Bantam Books.

This book juxtaposes well with the idea of social determinants of health.  The Alvord & Van Pelt (2000) write, “The causes and cures for illness are woven into everything else” (p.113).   Alvord, a path breaking surgeon recounts her educational experiences, family life, and work at hospitals. She applies to her operating room, physical examinations, and waiting room interactions the beliefs of some members of the Navajo nation in witchcraft (p. 65) and avoidance of those who are sick and dying (p.65), as well as the cosmological concepts of harmony or hózhó. 

My interest in this scientific way of looking at the world was magnified with each class I took. Biochemistry, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, even calculus had the same internal logic as much as Native American cosmology. The way the white blood cells attack an intruding virus, the way too much or too little of anything disturbs the body functions, the way tissue defends or repairs itself—it was all hózhó, the beautiful balance of the universe, rephrased in scientific terms.  (p. 37)

Alvord identifies the bedside manner that works best for her patients, reducing the number of questions she asks patients (pp. 46, 102, 111, 114,); being careful with touching patients (pp. 76, 108); using the Navajo language even intermittently in a conversation with some patients (pp. 76); giving proper introductions to establish her family connections to the community, and being prepared for anything to happen (p.61) .  The book explains how one person connects their mulitple worlds as a surgeon and a Navajo woman. 

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.

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

This book is interesting to juxtapose and think about alongside the ideas of flexible, cultural, and social citizenship. These forms of citizenship expand the definition of citizenship or belonging to include belonging to more than one country (flexible), having a sense of being accepted for one’s everyday practices and ways of life (cultural), and social (being accepted due to how one is a member of a community-who is giving back as well as benefiting from living in a particular place).  Certainly, Julia Alvarez describes an interesting relationship of children (four sisters-Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía) growing up in a family that has lived in and then left the Dominican Republic.  The story even provides a different picture of the children holding back from adjusting due to the different stressors the children face and the parents (who had been directly harassed by the government in their original country) adapting to the new place. The family holds a small family party of the one year anniversary of the family’s quick departure from the Dominican Republic and the celebration of their arrival in the United States “one American year old” as the book states (p.150).  The family even added candles to blow out and make a wish on a birthday cake. “What do you wish for on the first celebration of the day you lost everything? Carla wondered.” (p.150). This idea of flexible citizenship applies to this idea. Carla and her family remain rooted to their island home and at the same time live in the United States. Yolanda would return to the island at the beginning of the book.  The book does not go in chronological order. This is interesting as it also presents a message about the circuitous routes of belonging that immigrants face.  The family and each sister individually struggles for cultural and social citizenship and assert their flexible citizenship.

Reference

Alvarez, J. (1991). How the Garcia girls lost their accents. NY: Plume.