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.
Themes
Culture Clash and the Immigrant Experience
The comparisons between home before and home today is perhaps inevitable in a refugee’s story. Although Ahmedi missed her family during the almost two years she spent rehabilitating in Germany, she feared returning to Afghanistan because she noted how modern and peaceful life was in Germany. She wondered why Afghans seemed destined to fight each other, while Germans lived peacefully. She longed for the educational and career opportunities that German women enjoyed. Comparing Afghanistan to Germany, Ahmedi writes about Germany: “This is better. I want to have a life like this—getting educated, working, supporting myself, making my own choices” (68). The contrast between Afghanistan, Germany, and the US is sharp primarily because of war. The instability of war and foreign interference has been a steady feature of Afghanistan since at least the nineteenth century. Such instability has a cumulative negative effect on social and economic development that contributes to the contrast portrayed in The Other Side of the Sky between Afghan life and that of Germany and the US
Ahmedi’s comparisons come from a child’s vantage point of wartime conditions, without the benefit of historical, political, or global perspective. Germans, of course, are notorious for having fought each other to the point of genocide recently; and American society continues to be riven with racist violence. Since Ahmedi arrived in the US in 2002, her adopted home has been at war with her native homeland. Ahmedi’s simplistic comparison between Afghan society and Western society thus emerges in the US media in the midst of President George W Bush’s second term in office and the height of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her narrative plays into the US government’s own representation of Afghanistan under the Taliban as a retrograde and renegade civilization. It also enjoins a longstanding discourse in American politics regarding immigration, multiculturalism, and national identity that portrays Western society as more advanced and enlightened than non-Western societies. This discourse argues that immigrants to the US must assimilate into American culture in order to not become a drag on American progress.
A Woman’s Place in the World
The Other Side of the Sky raises a number of issues common to women around the world, not just in Afghanistan or the US Women are the protagonists in Ahmedi’s narrative: besides her and her mother, it is a German mother who provided solace to Ahmedi while she is rehabilitating from her leg surgeries; her mother’s female cousin offered them refuge in Pakistan; a woman organized transportation to the refugee application center in Pakistan; women staff of World Relief, themselves former refugees, assisted Ahmedi and her mother upon their arrival in the US; and of course, Alyce Litz, a leader in Christian charity in Illinois, was a major source of support for Ahmedi and her mother.
There are a number of kind and honorable men along the way who also provide timely assistance to Ahmedi and her mother: besides her father, there is the kind Afghan doctor, the Afghan refugee father who leads them across the Pakistan border with his family, and the taxi driver in Islamabad. And yet it is clear that the forces which threaten Ahmedi and her mother in Afghanistan and Pakistan are connected to the patriarchy of Muslim fundamentalism. Ahmedi notes wistfully during her hospital stay in Germany, that German women can do anything, become anybody, go anywhere—“Look at the women, how free they are,” she writes (68). The Other Side of the Sky is published in the US within the context of the anti-Muslim stereotypes prevalent in the West; the Bush Administration claimed that one of the justifications for war against the Taliban was to liberate the Afghan women. Ahmedi’s book provides little historical or political context for interpreting gender inequity.
There is one sliver of insight when Ahmedi recounts how her second-grade teacher wore Western style dresses when she was a youth and went out in public without a headscarf (39). Although this slender insight supports the general consensus regarding the degraded status of women under the Muslim fundamentalist regimes that have emerged in Afghanistan and Pakistan since the 1970s, it also points to the larger degradation of these societies generally. Ahmedi’s account of the US is understandably short on an appreciation of sexism, gender discrimination, and sexual violence in American society, given that she had only been in the country for a few years when her memoir came out, but this silence only adds to the negative impression of gender in Muslim culture.
The Vulnerability and Resourcefulness of Refugees
Ahmedi’s journey with her mother from their home in Kabul, to Pakistan, and eventually to the US is harrowing, not so much because of what they endure, but because of the constant impression of their vulnerability. The sense is that their fortunes hang in the balance of strangers—they wonder whether the cab driver or the bus passengers or the border guard or the hotel clerk will take advantage of their vulnerability or will treat them fairly.
Given that vulnerability is comprised mainly of poverty and homelessness, coupled with a lack of familiarity with the foreign lands through which they travel, the plight of refugees seems to swing between the extremes of being exploited or being extended generosity from strangers. The two interactions with Pakistani police officers, before and after Ahmedi and her mother’s interview at the embassy in Islamabad, capture these two polar extremes. On the way to the embassy interview, police stop their taxicab and extort money from Ahmedi and her mother. On their return trip to Quetta, they miss their train and are stranded at the train station with no ticket, no money, and no shelter. A police officer approaches them and offers to help. At first, Ahmedi is gripped with fear, given their experience the previous day with the other officers, but this officer helps them get their ticket changed and finds them safe shelter for the night. In anecdotes such as these, The Other Side of the Sky shows how the refugee experience strips down all of the trappings of human existence to the basic dichotomies of good and evil.
Placing Faith in God’s Hands
Ahmedi traces her changing fortunes to finally placing her full faith in God’s hands. They were in Quetta, Pakistan, living in a small room of a Pakistani family’s home, exchanging housework for room and board, and Ahmedi despaired at ever getting out. One night, as she looked up at the stars, she surrendered her will to God: “Oh, please, God, help me. I can’t hold up this weight anymore” (131). From that moment, writes Ahmedi, she felt a change begin: “For the first time, truly, and totally, I was surrendering to Allah” (132). Slowly she felt herself relax, become more patient and tolerant, negativity stopped sprouting in her heart, and a serenity took over.
This calm strength is evident in her persistence through each obstacle that they encountered in their immigration to the US and transition to American life. Indeed, the precarity of refugee life, of surviving war, and the opportune intercession of World Relief does give Ahmedi’s story the qualities of a miracle. Ahmedi’s faith is also an understated current in her memoir. The Other Side of the Sky, in fact, becomes an interfaith narrative without religious dogmatism, in which the unity of humanity rises above the horrible things that human beings do to each other.
Education Opens Up the Whole World
The title of Ahmedi’s memoir, The Other Side of the Sky, is in part a reference to the importance of education. When she was a child, Ahmedi imagined getting a long ladder and climbing up to the sky. She wondered what was on the other side of the sky. When she learned some basic facts about the world from her teacher—such as, the earth is not flat and that you can never reach the sky—she was astounded. Also, the existence of other countries in the world, quite different from her own, opened her mind to the possibilities of a fuller life. Ahmedi writes, “I received her words like a desert receiving rain, just drank them in, drank up her stories” (40).
Every day Ahmedi hungered for school, to learn—so much so that it was her haste to reach school the morning of her accident that led her to take the fateful shortcut through the field where she stepped on the landmine. Fortunately, the landmine accident did not end her life or short circuit her pursuit of knowledge. Quite the opposite, it turbocharged her hunger for education: her treatment in Germany exposed her to a much wider world than she might ever have known had she not stepped on the landmine.
Once the light of education is lit, it casts a shadow even during the darkest of times. During her years as a refugee in Pakistan, Ahmedi always saw the hardships that she and others around her endured as abnormal, or at least as not her destiny. One time, when her mother was in a Pakistani hospital, Ahmedi observed a dying girl in a nearby bed. The girl’s family had become weary of her illness and had gone back to their normal routines in the presence of their dying child. “Everything becomes normal,” writes Ahmedi, “if it just keeps going long enough” (122). Ahmedi wondered if she too would someday become inured to suffering and hardship. She recognized that, without a sense of possibility, “you lose your drive” (123). “If the best you can hope for is to sink more slowly,” Ahmedi writes, “struggle comes to feel pointless” (123). For Ahmedi, hope is the essence of education; a lifeline out of the pit of struggle. She arrived in the US at the end of the school year and waiting for the beginning of the new school year was excruciating for Ahmedi. At the end of her memoir, Ahmedi’s final word is for the parents in Afghanistan: “I want to tell them to send their children to school” (248).
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