Sparks Like Stars: A Novel

“I couldn’t take my eyes off the image of [my father and the president] with their backs to that woven buzkashi scene. The two men who loomed tall as mountains in my world were suddenly dwarfed by rearing stallions and their whip-clutching riders, a stampede ready to storm this very room.”

This image serves as foreshadowing of the coming revolution. Buzkashi, the national sport of Afghanistan, is a game in which mounted riders compete to transfer a goat carcass to a goal. The intensity of the riders anticipates the imminent violence, while the artifact points to aspects of Afghan culture that will be destroyed by war. The game can also be read as a metaphor for the way the world superpowers of the US and USSR competed to control Afghanistan as an ally and satellite.

“I looked for small signs that we were not facing the end of the world, holding on tight to my freshly spun theory that if the sun and moon kept their rituals, my world would remain intact.”

Hashimi conveys the emotional impact of traumatizing events by showing the magical thinking that young Sitara employs, both at this moment, when the attack on the palace is begun, and later, after her family is killed. The motif of heavenly bodies, particularly stars, offers a potent symbol suggesting there could be a pattern or logic to seemingly senseless or painful events, just as lines between stars can form the stories of constellations.

“The palace air, thick with destruction and sin, dissipated as I exited. Straining to see through the red smoke, I found a single star. It was all the light I needed to find my way.”

The star is a metaphor for guidance and, in the context of sin, heavenly mercy. The dissipating smell and smoke represent Sitara getting free of what is threatening the palace and the destruction that has consumed her family.

“The ring had become a talisman for me, a key to my survival. Against the scarred pink of my palm, the red of the garnet deepened. It was the color of the carpet upon which I’d read stories, the color of my father’s wool sweater, the color of pooled blood. The turquoise body was smooth as the inside of my mother’s wrist. It was the color of heaven-bound minarets with veins the color of shattered evil eyes.”

These vivid images associating the colors of the ring with memories of her parents illustrate how the ring from Ai-Khanoum becomes important to Sitara on multiple levels, a symbol of her losses but also a connection to both her country and her family.

“Allah does not deliver your fate fully formed, my father had said. It is up to you to shape it. But fate does not bend easily. Think of a blacksmith bending a rod. He cannot without daring to hold the rod to fire.”

Sitara’s memories of her father’s favorite sayings frequently provide powerful metaphors that reflect her current situation. As she contemplates leaving Kabul for America, Sitara reflects on this wisdom about how she must take a risk to influence her own fate. The moment represents a turning point from her being a victim to taking a more active part in determining her future.

“[My parents’] bedroom had been ransacked. Dresser drawers gaped open and clothes were strewn across the bed. My mother’s jewelry box, a lacquered piece my father had brought from India, had been looted. […] It looked like they’d been killed a second time.”

Seeing the way soldiers have torn apart and taken over her family’s home feels like another attack to Sitara. The image of the jewelry box, a pretty and precious piece, represents the love between the family that Sitara has lost, while the exposed clothes stand in for her parents’ bodies. More broadly, the mess signifies Sitara’s jumbled feelings and the sense that her life has been turned upside down. Hashimi’s writing is full of such precise, powerful metaphors.

“Though I didn’t rise [at the muezzin’s call], I cupped my hands together under the blanket and prayed for God to keep me safe, to grant my family entry to the gardens of heaven, and to forgive me for resenting Him as much as I did. If faith was a life raft, mine was riddled with holes.”

Sitara’s religious beliefs are complicated by her grief, as expressed by this metaphor of the raft. Her relationship with the religion of her childhood represents a way Aryana, as an adult, represses and avoids dealing with her traumatic history. When she returns to Kabul and is able to pray one morning, it symbolizes that she is taking steps toward reconciling with her past and her heritage.

“Before the coup, death had been a plaything. My friends and I had laughed and joked about it. […] But, now that I’d seen death, I knew it was a thing with teeth.”

This powerful metaphor of death as a toy that has developed fangs expresses Sitara’s emotional tumult and a new sense of caution after being traumatized by what she witnessed during the coup. Death has gone from being a concept to something tangible, and dealing with grief and loss are prevalent themes in the novel.

“This ring had become a talisman for me. As if this loop of ancient gold held together boulders instead of gems, the ring prevented me from feeling untethered, vulnerable to any rogue wind.”

The repetition of the ring as a talisman emphasizes its importance to Sitara. The idea that it connects her to Afghanistan and to her family—and, in representing Ai-Khanoum, to a lost and beautiful past—is strengthened by the image of a tether.

“When pain retreats, when skin repairs, when a broken bone becomes whole again, it is a miracle. […] But you would never feel this without the hurt. I would never wish the wound for you, sweet, mischievous Sitara. But I certainly wish you the light.”

This passage of her father’s reassurance after she was injured as a child represents the wisdom that Sitara remembers her father imparting to her and provides a metaphor she will remember in the allusion to a line from a poem by Rumi. Sitara recalls her father’s wisdom often after his death, using his words and reflecting on his life lessons to help her face difficult moments in her present. The memories provide metaphors that reflect on the action and conflict.

“I wondered if [Everett] would wear a short-sleeved shirt as he had on Sunday, or if he would wear something to conceal the scratches I hoped I’d left on his forearms. I wondered if the God in the church would know where the scratches had come from.”

In a brutal irony, the foster home Aryana is placed in is not safe for her. Her resistance to Everett’s attempt to assault her shows that she is finding her courage and is willing to fight to protect herself. That Everett and Janet pretend to piety while mistreating their foster children is another cruel irony. Aryana’s inability to find refuge in faith represents her trauma and confusion as she tries to come to terms with her grief and loss.

“I don’t think I ever thought of Nia as my mother. I certainly never called her Madar. But somewhere along the line she became Mom, a distinct and hard-earned title.”

Antonia becomes the link between Sitara’s lost Kabul and Aryana’s America, the hinge between the two halves of her life. Aryana maintains this separation by not confusing Antonia with her birth mother, whom she called Madar, but instead acknowledging her efforts and sacrifices by using the English word Mom.

“Grief is a tarry substance, and I was covered in it, head to toe. Everything stuck to me—a sideways glance, a phrase beyond my grasp, the sight of a girl running into her mother’s arms. And if I had tried to strip myself of it, I would have lost flesh in the process.”

Hashimi’s language eloquently captures Arayana’s grief and how she feels it is a part of her. Like tar, grief clings to her, and trying to remove it will only cause her more harm. These simple but powerful metaphors are typical of Hashimi’s figurative language.

“I’ve carved the life I have out of stone, and stones are not easily carved.”

This metaphor captures how Aryana feels hardened by grief and trauma, which causes her to keep her past a secret. The reference to stone calls up the ring from Ai-Khanoum to which Aryana feels attached.

“I’ve thought a lot about how tightly my mother clung to us because she’d already lost my sister. Her scars were visible. And I know what I saw in her face in that final second of grief and that grief would have killed her if a bullet hadn’t.”

A subtle but prevalent theme in the novel is that of motherhood, and one mark of Aryana’s grief and separation from her family is that she has no wish to have children of her own. Here, Aryana’s language suggests this choice is a defense against the pain of potentially losing a child, which indicates more largely how Aryana has avoided dealing with her grief and trauma.

“Grief is nothing but the far brink of love. Love is the sun, grief is the shadow it casts. Love is an opera, grief is the echo. You cannot have one without the other. But if you follow that grief, you’ll find your way back to love.”

Antonia says this to console Aryana, but she conveys important advice in her metaphors that grief is part of love. Her suggestion to follow grief back to love foreshadows the journey Aryana will take through the remainder of the novel, and the larger struggle of the Afghan people to rebuild and find healing after destruction, which is represented by the OMAR facility.

“It shouldn’t surprise me that I look like my mother. I buy clothes that remind me of her, dresses and skirts that I can hang in my closet to imagine I am a child peering into my mother’s wardrobe. I have outfits that resemble each of the ones she is wearing in the photographs I snuck out of Kabul.”

As an adult, Aryana realizes she is attempting, in some way, to reconnect with her mother by imitating her clothing style and look. It is a way to keep her mother alive, but it also expresses Aryana’s longing for her mother, and the wish to have her back.

“All I want is an accurate record of history. I want a truthful account of that night. I want something to mark the graves of my family so that the world can know for certain that they lived and died.”

After she meets Shair, Aryana has a new motivation: she wants answers about what happened to the bodies of her family. The quest to find out the facts of her own history has a parallel in the excavations of Ai-Khanoum, which attempted to uncover Afghan history.

“How desperately we struggle for meaningless things—revolution, martyrdom, bricks of gold […] When the only thing worth fighting for is a glimpse of heaven in this life.”

Shair, who like Aryana misses the Afghanistan he knew and loved, reflects with bitter irony on what has happened to their country in the quest for power and in putting effort into the wrong goals. They are both grieving lost loved ones, and this connects the protagonist and antagonist of the novel to poignant effect.

“I cringe to see women sheathed head to toe in burqas, obscured from the world. I know that, for many, this cover is the least of their concerns, but it is one marker of how much has changed. I wonder what my mother would say if she were to see me wearing a headscarf now.”

On her return to Afghanistan, the headscarves women are required to wear become a symbol to Aryana of how much has changed. She sees notes of modernity and some signs, like the women in burqas, that make her feel Afghanistan has gone back in time. The country is scarred and hobbled, but still full of many beauties, though some are covered and hard to see.

“The long tail of Draco still curls around Ursa Minor, as it did when I was a little girl. The sky is full of conquests and sorrow, heroes and villains, monsters and magic.”

Looking at the stars when she returns to Afghanistan connects Aryana to her childhood, where she was interested in the stars; she is reading about astronomy in the first chapter. The stars have functioned as navigational guides and symbols, but here the many stories of the stars parallel the many stories of Afghanistan’s varied history.

“Mom may be right about forgiving myself, but she does not know the abyss I see when I look inward. What if I forgive myself and nothing changes?”

These lines bring out the internal obstacle confronting Aryana, finally articulated in the last part of the book. Her grief has become an obstacle to living her life, and she has trapped herself by blame and guilt that she survived when her family died. It takes revisiting Afghanistan, the place where it all began, for Ayrana to feel she can start over.

“I think of how far I’ve come, how long I’ve waited. My headscarf slips away, irreverent, as I press my head to the ground and grieve the last ounce of hope I’d managed to hold.”

This is Aryana’s lowest point in the novel, when she is shown the graves where the bodies of the president and his family were recovered. Not finding her family’s bodies is like losing them again. At this point, Aryana finally grieves, and this act of release symbolically clears the way for her epiphany about where Shair said her family is buried.