“The logic is that there are no innocent people in a guilty nation… The wounded and injured are being brought out to Peshawar” (6).
(Disclaimer: Starting with a book review with parentheses might be very unusual. But prior to starting this review, I feel I need to explain that this review will mainly consist of my personal interpretations, impressions, and thoughts on tragic events in 2020, thematically related to the book, The Blind Man’s Garden. Hence, those personal interpretations, impressions, and thoughts can be written in religiously or culturally biased ways. For whom can feel being culturally or religiously being offended through my writing, I would like to apologize in advance.)
In 2020, the time when I believe many people might call the fiery or hellish year, I have been noticing sporadic tragic events, intertwined visible or invisible, physical or non-physical extreme violence. And still, when approaching the curtain-fall of this year, through various forms of violence, uncountable innocent victims’ lives have suffered, destroyed, ruined, and been still perishing. The book, The Blind Man’s Garden is a story of an innocent family, destroyed by the external violent factors when they are set in historical turbulence. As my view that literature is a reflective mirror of reality, before diving into the fiction, there is a need to investigate my violent reality similar to the fiction’s setting. Some of these violent events, vividly, have been conducted by political or religious forces that show physical brutality or unsympathetic, indifferent actions towards the weak, pursuing extreme religious creed and extorted cult-like faith.
I suggest that two clear illustrations of the violence, killing the innocent. One is, yes, again, regarding the Present of the United States. On October 18th, when over 200,000 innocent COVID-19 patients had passed away, Trump attended a Church in Las Vegas, packed with hundreds without wearing masks. When the President showing off his un-sympathy and his governmental power that aimed only for achieving his reelection without helping the social weak without any practical plans or policies for the contagious disease, the paster remarkably prophesied his God’s word, saying, “The Lord said to me I’m going to give our President a second win.” In this event, I could see that this violence was based on one’s great irresponsibleness towards reality and was indirectly murderous done by so-called Christians through their idolatry actions. Not long after this event, on 27th October, in Nice, in France, three guiltless people were piteously murdered. More tragically, one elderly female was beheaded by extremist Muslims, in the same way as a French teacher was stabbed and beheaded three months ago, as a series of cruel tragedies through the direct brutal actions. Therefore, regardless of that their actions are direct or indirect, both events are considerable examples of how the violence from the extorted, extreme faith and creed can kill, ruin, and destroy the lives of innocent.
The Blind Man’s Garden echoes with those kinds of violent tragedies, depicting the dangerousness and cruelty of extreme belief and how the violence destroys innocents’ life thoroughly. One of the main characters who obviously manifests the victimization from the violence is Jeo, who is a son of Rohan and Sofia. In the early part of this fiction, after 9/11 occurred and the War on Terror between the Western military forces (mainly by the United States’ army) and Afghanistan (in particular, al-Qaeda) broke out, Jeo, having the strong righteous motivation to help wounded innocent people, non-military civilians, decides to go to Peshawar. His brother, Mikal, follows him to aid him. But as the same as they cannot save all of the innocent civilians, even themselves become innocent victims. Jeo loses his life, and Mikal is captured by the Islamic militant force and sold unwillingly to American armed force. These all-miserable events conduct by political or religious forces consisting of zealous, ardent groups for what purpose they came for.
The protagonist and “the blind man,” Rohan’s case is more complicated and ironic. He was a zealot who believes in Islamic religious teaching fervently. Although he built an education institution with his wife, Sofia, he forcefully set his own religious belief on this school against his wife’s goodwill (such as promoting students’ prosperous life through education) on “the basis of law and order” (27). On the school premise, “the basis of law and order,” he added Islamic as the prime dogma before education, “against his wife’s wishes.” As the following consequence, “Over the years” the principal premise of her wife’s passion “has been amended further, going from Islamic education is the basis of law and order to Islam is the basis of law and then to Islam is the basis of law and then to Islam is the purpose of life, while these days it says Islam is the purpose of life and death” (27). Rohan was a wrongdoer and inflictor steals and ruined autonomous and motivation of life efforts from his innocent wife and partly contributed his early wife’s death, who was defamed as “an unbeliever, an apostate” (37).
But ironically and more severely, the school, Ardent Spirit’s motto became more deteriorated through the “links with Pakistan’s intelligence agency” to train jihadist students, and also he forced “It was the reason for Rohan’s clashes with Ahmed, the reason why Rohan was eventually forced out five years ago.” At this point, he unintentionally falls as an innocent victim, judged by the more extremist Muslim.
Thus, I suspect and interpret, finally, his eyes go blind due to his feeling of guiltiness on his wife’s death and being betrayed by his religious beliefs. The blindness stands for his unconscious instinct to cover or being hidden from the tragic reality, which made or makes him and his family innocent victims in the inevitable historical turbulence. However, all those tragic events on the family are created by the cruel external forces, conducting violence such as murder innocent women for their religious honor, invading and killing innocent civilians, and destroying goodwill and wishes on the innocents. In this respect, as I noticed from the book and my reality, I argue that extremists only politically utilize the religious theme for actualizing their desire and profits. I understand that this review seems a bit far from the traditional literary review, but I am writing this to share my interpretations of the current reality. There are already too many innocent victims are there.
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