Nadia Hashimi
The Pearl that Broke its Shell by Nadia Hashimi unfolds in parallel narratives of two women in Afghanistan who lived a hundred years apart. The women are Rahima and her great, great grandmother, known as Bibi Shekiba.
The novel opens with Rahima as a young girl living with her parents and sisters. Their aunt begins telling them the story of Bibi Shekiba to inspire them. One side of Bibi Shekiba’s face is severely disfigured as a result of a cooking accident. She assumes the role of a man by fending for herself after her immediate family dies of cholera. She is then taken in by her relatives who cheat her of her birthright and treat her as a servant before trading her away to serve another family. Her story inspires Rahima to become a bacha posh, the cultural practice which allowed any family without sons to dress a daughter as a boy. This was a temporary solution to help the family since a son had freedom of movement to go to school, to shop, and to work—something denied to females.
Bibi Shekiba is eventually traded to work in the king’s palace. Dressed as a male, her job is to guard the women in his harem since men could not be trusted to do so. When one of the king’s wives is discovered to be in an illicit sexual relationship with a man, she is stoned to death. As the guard on duty, Bibi Shekiba is punished for failing in her duties. She is sent off to become the second wife to a close advisor of the king’s son. She gives birth to a son, securing her position in the household.
Along parallel lines, Rahima is married off to pay for her father’s debt. She becomes the fourth wife of a brutal war lord where she is abused by him, his mother, and some of his wives. Because she knows how to read and write, she accompanies his first wife to the Afghani parliament in Kabul to help her navigate the paperwork as a member of the newly formed parliament. When Rahima’s young son dies unexpectedly of illness, she disguises herself as a bacha posh and escapes to a shelter for abused women.
Rahima’s aunt intermittently weaves Shekiba’s narrative to inspire and encourage Rahima to follow in her ancestor’s footsteps. Although they lived a hundred years apart, the similarities between the lives of the two women are readily apparent. The restrictions on women remained unchanged. Sequestered, secluded, and powerless, women were the property of men to be dealt with and disposed of as they saw fit. They were denied voice and deprived of their rights. Bickering and jealousy proliferated as women competed for male attention and privilege. And with few exceptions, women were frequently used as tools to reinforce the patriarchal oppression of their sisters.
The narrative structure worked well with the intermittent weaving of the dual story lines. But more could have been done with the setting by immersing the reader in the sensory experience of life in Afghanistan. The characters felt distant, perhaps because of the nature of the writing which was primarily expository. While we read about and sympathize with Shekiba and Rahima for the abuse and discrimination they experience as a result of the patriarchal tenets of their culture, we are not drawn to them as characters. Their stories end inconclusively: Shekiba hopes her son’s generation will see better days; and Rahima escapes the abuse to end up who knows where.