Discussing oppression by looking at two texts, a short story “The Test” by Anglica Gibbs and a novel – “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khalid Husseini. These texts are very different, and they speak about oppression in different ways. They are set in different eras, different countries and totally different circumstances.
First let’s define and explain what oppression is;
According to Wikipedia, oppression is the systematic exploitation of one social group by another for its own benefit. It involves institutional control, ideological domination, and the imposition of the dominant group’s culture on the oppressed group. Another way of looking this is by considering the cultural, institutional, and individual set of beliefs and practices that privilege men, subordinate women, and denigrate values and practices. Oppression can also be caused by negative attitudes toward a person or group, formed without just grounds or sufficient knowledge. This attitude is unlikely to change in spite of any new evidence or contrary argument, and racism is one example of this.
“The Test” deals very explicitly with racism, and tells of how a black woman called Marian failed her driving test. The author uses a challenging narrative to force the reader to think about what they would do if put in the same situation as the characters in the story. The examiner pays no attention to Marian’s driving throughout the test. He causes her to fail after she shouts angrily at him after he puts her down in every word he says, calls her several wrong names and assumes that she is stupid. In this short story, white people are in control completely, and black people find themselves derided and belittled. Marian cannot get a suitable job, even though she has a degree, because of the colour of her skin, and she cannot pass her driving test because she is black.
The second text is the novel, “A Thousand Splendid Suns” written by Khaled Hosseini and set in Afghanistan, which is still a country in turmoil. Khaled Hosseini was born in Afghanistan and migrated to USA in 1980. “A Thousand Splendid Suns” was published in 2007 and the title comes from a poem about the glories of Kabul:
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls (172, 347).
The book is about various types of oppression of great concern to us today. Oppression causes violence, fear and despair, most especially among the women in Afghanistan. In the opening pages, one female character says portentously ..
“our lot in life, the lot of poor, uneducated women like us who have to tolerate the hardships of life, the slights of men, and the disregard of society”.
“The Test” illustrates the power of abuse, where actions originate from personal prejudice and ignorance. The characters represent three different social levels, and they are caught in a situation where there is a victim, a perpetrator, and a denying, yet guilty onlooker. Marian is oppressed and stereotyped as being an ignorant and uneducated black woman, expected to be illiterate, married and to come from the South.
Khaled Hosseini considers war to be a significant cause of oppression. A national invasion by the Taliban, an extreme fanatical religious/political group, impacts on hundreds of thousands of innocent people especially women and children. During the war, murder, torture, hunger, anarchy, bullying and oppression caused millions of Afghan people to abandon their homes and flee to neighbouring countries.
In this book, we see oppression through the eyes of two women, Mariam and Laiala, who become Rasheed’s suffering wives. Mariam, is a 14 year old girl who is forced to marry Rasheed, a man thirty years older than herself. She is an illegitimate child who is deprived of all educational opportunities, except religious tutorship in the Koran. Mariam always wanted to go to school, but her mother said,
“What is the sense of schooling a girl like you? It is like shining a spittoon. And you’ll learn nothing of value in those schools. There is only one, only one skill a woman like you and I needs in life, and they don’t teach it in school. Look at me.” And continues, “Only one skill. And it’s this: tahamul. Endure”.
On the other hand, in “The Test”, Marian proves the examiner’s racist assumptions to be wrong. She shows that she is an individual who is educated, understands and is fully aware of the prejudice that ignorant white Americans have about her, and the unfair way they treat her, due to her sex, race, and the colour of her skin.
The novel’s heroine, Mariam, is completely alone after her mother commits suicide. She has no choice when she is forced into marriage. If she had refused, she would have ended up living on the streets and begging, which to her, would have been a fate worse than death. In our society, we consider that to be married under these circumstances is truly terrible, and for Mariam, it turns out that it was. But to her perception, living in the society she did, and with no education, no family, and no money, she had no options.
Mariam endures several violent, oppressive years of marriage to Rasheed. Her failure to produce a child results in her husband manipulating Laila into becoming his second wife. Leila’s tragic loss of her family in the bombing of Kabul forces her to marry Rasheed when she is also just fourteen, and pregnant to her childhood sweetheart.
Under Taliban rule when the time comes for Laila to have her child, she is not admitted to the main hospitals that are for men only. She is forced to go to a hospital for women, where she is told they “had no clean water…no oxygen, no medications, no electricity (Page 255).”
Similarly, in “The Test”, Marian’s knowledge of her position in American society was revealed when she rebuked her employer’s suggestion that she should bribe the examiner …. “slip them a little something” by saying, “No, that would only make it worse, Mrs. Ericson. I know (page 44).” Aware that she is a victim of prejudice, Marion builds a protective barrier around herself, ignoring the cruel jibes, comments and actions of others.
Towards the end of the “Splendid Suns”, Mariam kills Rasheed, and her trial in a religious court lasts less than fifteen minutes. “There was no legal council, no public hearing, no cross-examining of evidence, and no appeals (Page 323).” One of her Taliban judges comments, “God has made us differently, you women and us men. Our brains are different. You are not able to think like we can. This is why we require only one male witness but two female ones.” (Page 324)
The novel also highlights the enormous obstacles placed against the education of women in Afghan society. Under communist rule, women were freer and had more rights than they’d ever had before. “The main reason Afghans were fighting against the Soviets was precisely to take away freedom from women. In tribal areas, women were rarely seen on the streets and only then in burqa and accompanied by men. The men lived by ancient tribal laws and were horrified by the communist ending of forced marriage, the challenge to rise the marriageable age to sixteen for girls, to require girls to attend school and have the freedom to work alongside men”.
The lives of the female characters in these texts are extremely limited. Even if they manage to have an education, people who are born into different circumstances where social status, skin colour or wealth determine their fate often have no choice in how they live their lives, and this is a terrible form of oppression.
As a young Muslim woman it seems to me that certain types of oppression could be a matter of perception. For example, if a woman feels comfortable wearing a hejab in a country like Australia, then she is perhaps not oppressed, because she is exercising her own free will, deciding that this is how she wants to dress and how she feels comfortable. We can relate this issue to Mariam as well. At the beginning of the novel, Mariam did not feel comfortable wearing a burqa but after she left her home city and was married, she felt that she could hide behind her veil and no one would know of her past, and her inadequacies. Marian, in “The Test”, had no such veil to hide behind, and the colour of her skin made her and her race the target of racial oppression and hatred.
