Destiny Danielle Waters Multicultural Perspectives Essays (1014 words)

Destiny Danielle Waters Multicultural Perspectives Professor Oropall April 2018 Book Report I chose to read A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan American writer born in Afghanistan in 1965. Khaled grew up during the time of bloody communist war while the Soviet Army invaded his country which is why I believe he ' s based his first and second book in the 1960 ' s to the 2000 ' s as a parallel to his own life. While reading this immensely detailed book, I learned that the Afghani community is very heavily sexist as evident by the way Rasheed treats Mariam, Laila and her daughter Aziza. Rasheed has the mindset that a woman ' s only role is to do household chores, pamper and take care of the man of the house and produce baby boys. Granted the time era of the book is the early sixties into the new millennium, but I was very aware of the fact that Rasheed ' s mentality and understanding of a woman ' s place in the home was the mentality of many men- even in todays day and age. When I first read A Thousand Splendid Suns, it was most definitely a culture shock to me because I really only knew the inner workings of the hispanic culture I come from. It was hard to read and realize that the mistreatment of women and young girls is so very prevalent in Afghanistan and countries like that one as well as the fact it is so widely accepted in their culture. My knowledge of the Taliban and organizations of the like is very limited but I was able to relate back to what I learned in high school with relevance to how the justice system works in strikingly different ways for women and men. For example, men have the right to divorce, beat and/or kill their wives for literally anything they see fit and the death of the woman would be blamed on her own actions even if she was to say, be defending herself from her own abusive husband on the verge of killing a young girl. I was surprised at the amount of words I did not understand because Khaled included many words in farsi alongside the rest of the english words. Mainly it was a surprise because there was not much of an explanation of what the words meant but I feel as though that helped to really get any reader, including myself, deeply immersed into the bookend the culture he was trying to have us understand. I would not necessarily say that my belief system was challenged but that is only because I believe in energies and karma. So in all honesty reading this from that perceptive and not from a heavily religious eye allowed me to be open and nonjudgemental of the things that were presented in all aspects of the literature. However I was in awe at how much detail he provided in relation to the more disturbing parts of the book because many times authors just skip over those parts because they may make the reader uncomfortable and that may not always be received well by critics and readers alike. In a way, I did gain a bit of a better und erstanding of skills one and two because there are many examples of how the skill can be related to. I was able to see how the Afghani culture was indeed a very intricate multi level one and the relationships demonstrated clearly how it was very different from my own future. I appreciated being able to learn so much from this book alone and it was great way to interpret skill one since I could see how even the communication varied so much from American mainstream culture. When it comes to skill two, I could see exactly how some of the barriers played a large part in the Afghani culture. For example, stress and discrimination were very prominent in the part of the book about Mariam and her life as well with Laila and Aziza since Rasheed was explicitly discriminatory toward his wives for not being able to have kids (Mariam) and for having a