{"id":66,"date":"2014-12-11T01:53:58","date_gmt":"2014-12-11T01:53:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/?p=66"},"modified":"2014-12-11T01:53:58","modified_gmt":"2014-12-11T01:53:58","slug":"love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/2014\/12\/11\/love\/","title":{"rendered":"Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

Love is patient, love is kind, love had too much to drink and now he is confused<\/a><\/p>\n

In Khadra\u2019s The Swallows of Kabul<\/em>, love is a major theme: Specifically, the novel discusses the ways in which love manifests itself in the lives of two different couples, both of which encounter problems surrounding their love for one another. The existence of love in such a dark place as Taliban-ruled Kabul as an escape from the oppressive streets is both a relief and a burden: Upon loss of love and the happiness that it yields, the loneliness and bareness of life in as repressive a culture as this one is emphasized. Love ends tragically in this book, and it does so in multiple ways: The stunning and loving Zunaira accidentally causes her husband to trip and he hits his head in a way that results in his death, while Atiq, a prison guard for the Taliban, struggles to love his dying wife. Even his wife\u2019s final act of love is dark \u2013 she poses as Zunaira, who was condemned to death, in order to allow Atiq to escape with Zunaira, who did nothing wrong. She is brutally executed.<\/p>\n

The coexistence of love and death is a popular theme in literature, perhaps because one attempts to make the other more manageable. Love is an accomplishment, and finding and experiencing it perhaps makes death feel less like the rushed end to an unaccomplished life, but rather a closing to time well-lived. The darkness of the death that occurs in The Swallows of Kabul<\/em> questions this, however, by writing love a bloody and violent setting. To illustrate this, I designed a visual poem centered around the ideas of love and death. It examines death as an act of love (as Atiq\u2019s wife, Musarrat saw it) and the call to meet at as dark of a place as an executioner\u2019s tree.<\/p>\n

The poem occurs on a background of \u201clove is —-\u201c poetry that I wrote. This simply lists the various forms that love takes in Khadra\u2019s setting, in order to give us a way to discuss the death that occurs simultaneously. \u201cThe dreams in which I\u2019m dying are the best I\u2019ve ever had\u201d is a line from Gary Jules\u2019s \u201cMad World,\u201d and represents Musarrat\u2019s literal wish to die for her husband\u2019s happiness. Because of her decaying state and her husband\u2019s fitful love, death is an enviable alternative to life and offers at the same time a version of happiness for her husband. This wish is the one upon which the requests to meet at the \u201changing tree\u201d are made. These lyrics are excerpts from Mockingjay<\/em>, a film inspired by Suzanne Collins\u2019s Hunger Games<\/em> series, and speak of two lovers who are meeting at the site of the one\u2019s death in order to escape, as it is revealed later in the song, just as Zunaire and Atiq meet at the \u201csite\u201d of Musarrat\u2019s death, to escape the oppression they face once again into the blissful state of love.<\/p>\n

This representation describes the way that love is both the background upon which death takes place, and also is enabled to exist by death\u2019s presence, a major theme in The Swallows of Kabul<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Love is patient, love is kind, love had too much to drink and now he is confused In Khadra\u2019s The Swallows of Kabul, love is a major theme: Specifically, the novel discusses the ways in which love manifests itself in the lives of two different couples, both of which encounter problems surrounding their love for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7085,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7085"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions\/68"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/equalandopposite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}