97 pages • 3 hours read
Farah Ahmedi, Tamim AnsaryThe Other Side of the Sky
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Prologue-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
In the Prologue, Ahmedi reflects on why she wrote her memoir while still a teenager. She did not think she had yet accomplished anything in life that would justify a memoir, but she found encouragement in Alyce Litz, an American volunteer with World Relief, the organization that facilitated her immigration from Afghanistan. Litz told Ahmedi that “with a life like mine, surviving itself is an achievement—just surviving” (1). Ahmedi admits to being skeptical about the validity of this point. She notes that from where she stands now, as a high school-aged young woman living in the United States, her childhood back in Afghanistan, and all of the tribulations that she survived in between, seem so distant; a world and a lifetime away. Ahmedi decided to tell her story after all because it is the story of her people, and it is both a story of tragedy’s trials and of life’s eternal promise.
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Gondola”
Ahmedi opens “The Gondola” with a vignette about visiting an amusement park in suburban Chicago with her friends Alyce and John Litz. She recounts the marvel of her first experience with the whole spectacle that is an American amusement park. She describes her fascination with a ride called the Gondola. Ahmedi tells the Litzes that she wants to try the ride, and despite their initial reservations, Alyce takes her on the ride. Ahmedi loved it at first: she describes her exhilaration at the feelings of weightlessness, speed, and sudden change of direction. At the peak of the ride, the machinery sent off sparks, instantly yanking Ahmedi back into the moment in Afghanistan when she stepped on a land mine. In the middle of the ride, she started screaming for help, just as she did on that fateful day 10 years earlier. Litz threw her arms around Ahmedi, eventually calming her down.
The Gondola incident was not the first, nor the last, flashback, nightmare, or post-traumatic stress event for Ahmedi. One of her legs was amputated due to the injuries she suffered in the land mine accident. Afterwards, she dreamed about riding a bicycle, running around her yard in Kabul, or just walking. She does not have those dreams anymore, although her mind still seems to have forgotten that her leg is gone. She never has pain or any sensation for her missing limb, as some amputees report experiencing, but she does sometimes start to rise from bed and falter before remembering that she needs to put on her prosthesis.
Ahmedi despairs about all that she has lost, about all her loved ones who have either perished or continue to endure great hardship in Afghanistan. She moves between sleepless nights and nightmares about something bad happening to her mother, who is the one family member who came with her to the US, or about her one American friend abandoning her. She sees visions of her deceased father and grandfather, urging her to come be with them. She then feels guilty for her sorrows, telling herself that “it’s all in my head” and that she is safe now. She ends this first chapter recounting her positive dreams, in which she grows wings and soars to great heights.
Prologue-Chapter 1 Analysis
The Prologue introduces us to Ahmedi’s narrative persona. In two brief pages, she shows the reader that she will soberly recount the horrors of being a war refugee. She also submits her memoir humbly, as a record of her people’s survival, not her own individual accomplishments. “The Gondola” announces the prominent role that physical and mental trauma will play in Ahmedi’s narrative. Surviving both the acute trauma of losing her leg and the larger emotional and social trauma of war that would tear her family apart is both the occasion for this book and the ongoing motif in which Ahmedi tells her story. This first chapter also frames her outsider perspective: to the uninitiated, American amusement parks and entertainment are both scary and exciting, much like US society as a whole. Her screams of horror during her flashback on the ride were indistinguishable from the screams of exhilaration from everyone else. No one can come to your aid when they are immersed in their own pleasures.
Related Titles
By these authors
