Pasts In Toni Morrison's A Thousand Splendid Suns

Many characters in A Thousand Splendid Suns have troubled pasts and they affect their interactions and decisions in their future. The characters’ which will be analyzed are Nana, Mariam, and Laila. The women that I will be writing about have been through turbulent pasts and are plagued by the experiences which affect their lives. When one analyzes these characters past they can see how carefully the author fabricates their pasts which explains their paths and actions later on in the novel.
I'll start with Nana’s troubled past and show how it affected her in the future. “Then, a week before the wedding date, a jinn had entered Nana’s body… When the news reached Shindand, the parakeet seller’s family called off the wedding.”(Page 10). For the
Which can explain some of her insecurities. “She understood what Nana meant, that a harami was an unwanted thing; that she, Mariam, was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance.”(Page 4). Because Mariam is brought up illegitimately Nana resents Mariam because she wasn’t conceived from love. On the other hand, Jalil is an influential person and chooses not to accept Mariam as his child because it would ruin his “clean” image. “Nor was she old enough to appreciate the injustice, to see that it is the creators of the harami who are culpable, not the harami, whose only sin is being born.”(Page 4). Mariam was not wanted from the beginning by both of her parents. Jalil had an illegitimate child, and Nana has a child out of wedlock. This poses a problem for Nana in her culture because those sort of “mistakes” weren't accepted in the culture. But the irony of that is, Jalil is off the hook because he is a man. That's why Nana tells Mariam that a man's accusing finger always points at a woman. Mariam’s mother always put her down and told her she can’t achieve anything because she is a female. She takes her mother's words and absorbs them rather than rejecting them and putting them aside. This baggage put onto Mariam stays with her until Laila arrives in her life giving her a reason to
Although a problem arises in Laila’s life that forces her to become independent. “Laila wishes Mammy would notice that she, Laila, hadn’t become shaheed, that she is alive, here, in bed with her, that she has hopes and a future. But Laila knows that her future is no match for her brothers’ past. They have overshadowed her in life. They will obliterate her in death.”(Page 109). Mammy, Laila’s mom, lays in bed mourning her two son’s deaths. Laila is forced to cook for herself, think for herself, do the household chores. This gives Laila independence that allows her to absorb the things around her take it in for herself. It helped her in the future because she wasn’t easily influenced by what other people said to her. “For Mammy, he (Babi) would brush aside this daydream of his, the way he flicked specks of flour from his coat when he got home from work. And so they would stay.”(Page 151). Babi is a light in Laila’s life because he encourages her to do well in life. Also, Babi shows her how much family matters to him by staying with Mammy in Afghanistan. He knew it would be much safer in Pakistan, but chooses to stay because Mammy said so. Let us remind ourselves that Mammy is not a particularly beautiful person, “Her beauty was the talk of the valley. It skipped two generations of women in our family, but it didn’t bypass you, Laila.”(Page 108), so Babi wasn’t chained to her good looks. Furthermore, most of