41 pages • 1 hour read
Yasmina KhadraThe Attack
Fiction | Novel | 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.
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
The Picture of Sihem
When Amin loses his wife, all that remains of Sihem are Amin’s memories and photographs. As Amin begins to learn more about his wife’s true beliefs, these memories become tainted, forcing him to confront uncomfortable truths about how little he knew his wife.
Amin’s favorite photograph of Sihem sits on his bedside table; Sihem is the only person deemed worthy of occupying this important position by Amin’s bedside (and in his life). When Amin loses Sihem, before he learns the truth, he looks at the photo and feels nothing but despair for the comfortable, loving life that has been ripped away from him. When he does learn about Sihem’s involvement in the bombing, he can no longer bear to look at the picture. He turns the picture away from him, no longer certain of the true nature of the person staring back at him.
Many items around the house embody Sihem’s spirit. When Amin is still in denial, he feels as though the house is haunted with her spirit. Even after the police come and turn the house upside down, physically disrupting the once-quiet household, Amin can feel his wife’s presence. He does not want to admit that Sihem could have committed murder, so the photographs in the household (as well as all of the furniture and her possessions) become alien to him.
Amin’s changing perception of Sihem is reflected in the photograph he finds in the picture album. He examines the album in a distant manner, no longer feeling any emotional attachment to the woman he once knew. His nascent detective skills help him realize that Adel and Sihem were together. The truth, uncovered in the photograph, becomes a representation of Amin’s ability to accept new truths about Sihem. He examines the image (and the memory of his wife) from a new angle.
Cigarettes
Following the death of his wife, Amin’s life deteriorates. Amin has not smoked in many years, but as he struggles to put the pieces of his life back together, Amin asks Kim for a cigarette. When she hands it to him, the moment embodies much of their relationship and signals the self-destructive journey on which Amin is about to embark.
Though Kim puts up partial resistance to Amin’s worst impulses, she enables him to follow through on his most self-destructive ideas. The speed with which Kim crumbles in her resistance to offering Amin a cigarette reveals a great deal about her character. It shows how much she cares about Amin and the lengths she is willing to go to ensure that Amin is happy. Before she agrees to drive Amin to Jerusalem or indulge his growing alcohol dependency, she hands him a cigarette while commenting on his typical aversion to smoking. As doctors, Kim and Amin are both aware of the health impacts of smoking. Kim smokes even though Amin has mostly given it up, but she is so keen to help her friend and to make him feel better that she hardly pauses in her decision to help him smoke again. Once she hands Amin the first cigarette, barely a scene goes by in which Amin does not smoke. As Amin becomes more self-destructive, he smokes more. As he finds himself in greater danger, increasingly drunk, or lost and alone, he smokes. Just as Kim enables this first act of self-destruction, she enables everything that follows.
Healing and Medicines
Amin does not see himself as an Arab or a naturalized Israeli; he puts aside what he sees as petty political squabbles to emphasize his role as a doctor. While others harm and injure, he heals. To Amin’s family, his medical talents have allowed him to escape the poverty that affects many in Palestine. To Amin, being a doctor has allowed him to rise above the political dimensions of the world around him. Any mention of healing, medicines, and doctors are important motifs in the novel, situating characters in specific ideological positions and illustrating their differences.
Following Sihem’s bomb attack, the victims are rushed to Amin’s hospital. He stays in the operating room until late, working many hours to heal those people his wife has killed and maimed. Their different roles in relation to the bomb attack demonstrate their clashing ideological positions. While Sihem demands dramatic action to resolve long-standing conflicts, Amin does only what he can to repair the wounds that others have caused. That they are on different ends of this scale is a way that healing and harm are used as a motif to represent their irreparable differences. Likewise, Amin meets plenty of people who inflict violence upon him. This violence is not sectarian in origin: The Israeli police, his Israeli neighbors, and his Arab jailors all beat Amin, inflicting many wounds on his body.
There is an irony in that the universality Amin desires—the unity between Israeli and Arab—is only shown in an equal desire to hurt and harm Amin. Amin’s alienation from these people is clear: They inflict pain and wounds; he only hopes to heal. Reconciliation with such people will never be possible for Amin the doctor. This motif is made most explicit when Amin talks to those involved in the Palestinian struggle. He has long conversations with the man with the Lebanese accent and Adel, both of whom try to convince him of the necessity of violent struggle in the pursuit of a just cause, but Amin denounces them entirely. He cannot bring himself to justify inflicting pain on others. In this respect, Amin’s isolation is once again shown through repeated motifs of violence and healing.
