Under The Persimmon Tree Analysis

Imagine the experience of living under the rule of a violent group of terrorists, with no freedom whatsoever. This is what it is like to Najmah in the book Under the Persimmon Tree, by Suzanne Fisher Staples. In this realistic setting, Najmah, the main character, loses most of her family due to the brutality and imposition of the Taliban. The novel depicted the Taliban as dangerous and strict, which is interchangeable for what the Taliban is like in reality. Staples used the Taliban conflict to deepen the reader's understanding of the impact of conflict on people's lives. In the novel Under the Persimmon Tree, the Taliban is accurately shown as destructive, forceful, and extremely strict. Najmah, along with many other Afghanistan and Pakistan inhabitants, are terrified of the Taliban because of, “how they lock the people of entire villages inside their houses and burn them to the ground,” (Staples 12). She also knows “how they slaughter men like goats, slitting them open and leaving their blood to soak into the ground,” (12). To inform her reader of how dangerous the Taliban is, Staples rightly depicts the Taliban as highly murderous. But not only that. Additionally, Najmah
They took Najmah’s brother, Nur, and her father, Baba-jan, away from her to, “come and fight with the Taliban,” (Staples 17). Not only that, but when Najmah finds her mother, Mada-jan, after a bomb was set off by the Taliban in Golestan, “she stares with glassy, dead eyes,” (67). Habib, “lies motionless a few feet behind her, facedown in the dirt,” (67). The bomb killed both her mother and brother, not to mention destroyed her home. These events led to the conflict of Najmah being all alone with nowhere to turn. If, in the novel, the Taliban was not depicted as being so violent, then there would be little to no conflict remaining in Najmah’s