Sparks Like Stars : A Review
We take our names for granted, but they’re the bedrock of our identity. Yet we can shed names like a blanket to fit the situation, always in the surety that we’ll return to the sanctuary again. Sometimes, that may not be the case, as with the protagonist in “Sparks Like Stars” by Nadia Hashimi. Nadia Hashimi is also the author of “The House Without Windows”, about a woman imprisoned for murdering her husband. In all her books, she explores the astounding stories of everyday women and how they confront the trauma of their existence.
Sitara Zamani is 10 years old, growing up in the president’s palace in Afghanistan that she calls Arg. Filled with ordinary fascinations and nestled in the blanket of innocence, she lives with her parents and younger brother Faheem. One day, an extraordinary thing happens: an archaeological exhibit with gold and artifacts from ancient Bactria comes to the palace, intriguing Sitara. Since her father is in the cabinet, she asks him to show her the artifacts secretly, and he obeys her directive, including the code to enter the artifacts. Inadvertently saving her life in the process when her whole family is slaughtered during a coup, and she hides in the exhibit until a guard helps her sneak out. Then, she experiences countless trials and mistreatment, eventually being adopted by a diplomat and taken to the United States. But in the process, she is forced to shed her name and take her sister’s, leading to an internal conflict that remains unresolved.
Hashimi so perfectly describes how Sitara, now Aryana’s grief and survivor’s guilt, her feeling of being unmoored from this world. What happens when the people who keep us at shore, who can save us from any crisis crumble? Aryana becomes a doctor and hides her wounds deep within her until the guard who saved her comes as a patient, finally drawing blood from the scab and freeing her to take a journey to Kabul to find her family’s remains.
Hashimi captures the immigrant’s paradox of holding a place in a memory and being surprised at the changes time wroughts on places we used to love, as Aryana finds her house demolished. The desire to belong to somewhere, to something or someone haunts Aryana in every step, unable to relinquish her family’s ghosts. They’re trapped within her, yearning to break free and find release. Yet time can slowly soften, or at the very least, disguise wounds. Till only slight objects, a scent, a toy, summon her father’s voice.
What is especially striking is how her childhood trauma encapsulates Aryana, making her afraid of revealing herself to those she cares for. How you can’t be loved unless you think you’re worthy of love. But you never truly get to know the character beyond her trauma. Perhaps that’s an artistic choice, that she defines herself by her trauma, but you always get the feeling that Aryana has more to her than one event. The plot itself can be deceptive, giving the reader the impression that it builds up to a journey to Kabul. In reality, the scale is minuscule and intimate: the journey of Sitara’s soul as it patches up its wounds.
The author interrogates the idea of a family even more: Are we defined by our blood? And how do we react when we lose our anchors? Is it truly possible to let ourselves out again and find a new family? Trust is at times walking a tightrope, and when the whole world is shaking, it can be impossible to find the courage to fall, not knowing if a cushion will stem our fall. So even when we’re wobbling on the rope, it feels easier to stay than risk stepping off. For the longest time, Aryana stays on the rope of grief, uncertainty, and guilt, until she is propelled to find her voice by people that come to be unexpected cushions. She reflects that she “had the ancient world wrapped around [her] finger even as the modern world [she] lived in curled its cruel fingers tighter around [her] throat”. She lives in this state, smothered by what is and weighed down by what was, as many of us are.
Sitara’s odyssey out of the prison of her mind, from being rootless like Antaeus, to replanting herself in both words, is painted distinctly with heart and honesty. Shown through mundane actions and the shattering of instincts, we fall into the story of Aryana and Sitara, as well as those around her. Fiercely hoping that they reach their own sanctuary and climb out of the abyss of misery. “Sparks Like Stars” is a spellbinding portrait of Afghanistan and America, truly exploding into fireworks that illuminate the sky in every hue of the rainbow.