Saturday, November 7, 2009
"What is a country?"
I have constantly heard professors say that if you have a question you should ask it because most likely there are others in the class with the same question, and it makes me wonder how many other people had the same question Sitara did. Sitara asked her sister, Sarwari, “What is a country,” in complete sincerity because she did not know what made a country a country. And Sarwari realized that she did not know the answer either, and she only knew some of the things that would come out of the new country, “the advantages which Muslims would get.” So if Sitara did not know, Sarwari did not know, and Abbas also did not answer Sitara’s question, how many other people were fighting for a country and did not know what a country is?
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I think that is what the central question of this book is. Why is this thing called a country being so fought over? Why is this piece of land that has no "value" to these people being so highly regarded in their minds. I find it very interesting that they were fighting over this piece of land they had no ties to while simultaneously having their identities be reinvented to remove all location characters. They were no longer so and so from this village, they were Muslims, etc. etc.
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