Quarter 4: Week 2, Post A

I switched books this week to A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini because there weren't very many cultural differences to blog about in Atonement. I'm going to keep reading it, just not for our outside reading assignment.

Anyway...there is definitely an abundance of cultural differences to be found in this book! Within the first few pages I immediately noticed how many aspects of Mariam's life are strange to me. It's crazy to think how incredibly different her life is from mine, when she's just a teenage girl like me. For example, Mariam's father, Jalil, has three wives with ten children between them. Obviously, this would be seen as completely crazy and just wrong in our modern American culture, but it's seen as totally normal in Mariam's home of Afghanistan.

Another prominent example of culture difference is Mariam's arranged marriage to Rasheed. "Mariam's multiple step-mothers inform her that she has a "suitor" and even though she doesn't want to be married, her father has already agreed and she must honor that. She is only fifteen years old-something that would never happen in the U.S., but is seen as acceptable in Afghanistan. 'What are you, fifteen? That's a good, solid marrying age for a girl' (44). And arranged marriages are very uncommon in America as well, although they do still exist in some areas.

The last major cultural difference I found this week was Mariam's lack of familiarization with material goods. For instance, she sees a car for the very first time in her entire life when she is fifteen years old! "Mariam had never before touched a car. She ran her fingers along the hood of Jalil's car, which was black, shiny, with glittering wheels...the seats were made of white leather" (30). Cars are just one of many things that Mariam has never seen or used-things we take for granted in our daily lives.