Outside Reading, Week 4, Post A

Vocab
tawny (196) - of a dark yellowish or dull yellowish-brown color.

brusquely (171) - abrupt in manner; blunt; rough

Figurative Language
"Laila can't hear anything but the ringing. But she can see the words, like thick black syrup, spilling out of the woman's mouth."(174)

This passage is part of a sequence of small stanzas that comes after Laila's house is hit with a rocket. The whole section embodies Laila's disoriented state and over delirium that she experiences in the hours following the blast. Laila temporarily loses hearing on one of her ears and relies primarily on sight for the following days. This explains why she uses a simile to compare words to the "thick black syrup", as she can only see the woman talk but cannot actually hear the words.

"From the walls of the room, Ahmad and Noor smiled down." (170)

In this excerpt, the author uses a personification to describe Laila's mother's attachment to her sons, Ahmad and Noor. Although Ahamd and Noor died a while ago, Laila's mother still adorns the house with their photos. The author gives the pictures of Ahmad and Noor the human ability to look to show that a) the mother still is obsessed with them and b) their pictures are everywhere in the house.

"So she let him kiss her, and when he pulled back she leaned in and kissed him, heart pounding in her throat, her face tingling, a fire burning in the pit of her belly." (159)

The author captures the heat of the moment that Laila and Tariq were experiencing with such hyperboles as "heart pounding in her throat" and "fire burning in the pit of her belly". The author doesn't really mean that there was a heart pounding in Laila's throat or that there actually was a fire burning in Laila's stomach, but he uses this extreme imagery to demonstrate to the reader the emotions at the time.

Quote
"Laila took grim inventory of the people ni her life. Ahmad and Noor, dead. Hasina, gone. giti, dead. Mammy, dead. Babi, dead. Now Tariq..." (196)

I felt that this quote best demonstrates the current theme in the book, that you cannot truly love or hold onto anything, and perhaps foreshadows Laila's actions later in the book.

Theme

As I said before, I think that the current theme is that you cannot love or hold onto anything, because it can all be ripped apart from you. Laila's friend, Hasina, and lover, Tariq, both move from Kabul and leave her. She tries to follow them, but the day she is supposed to leave, her mother and father are killed by a rocket, so she is left with nothing and no one. Then, to make matters worse, Tariq is killed.