Sorrow and Loss

Throughout the novel, the author uses each of the characters’ experiences with loss in order to consider the ways in which such sorrow might impact the human psyche. Many of the primary characters’ losses are associated with their families. For example, in Part One, Chapter 1, Khalifa returns to his home village for the first time after receiving “word that his mother Mariamu had suddenly died” (11). Only days after returning to see his father, Khalifa's father passes too, “thin and shrunken in death when he had been so vigorous and such a champion in life” (12). Several years later, when Khalifa meets Ilyas, he urges him to return home to his family, “remembering his own neglect of his parents and how badly it made him feel afterward” (25). As soon as Ilyas returns to his village, he discovers that his mother and father are also dead. Years...