Expatriate Literature and the Problem of Contested
Representation: The Case of Khaled Hosseini’s
The Kite Runner 1
Janette Edwards
Abstract: This paper examines the varied public responses, favourable and
unfavourable, to Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel, The Kite Runner, and its
2007 film adaptation. It looks especially at the outcry in Afghanistan over
‘culturally inflammatory’ elements of both novel and film typically framed
by the Anglophone press as the gap between Western liberalism and ethnoreligious extremism, and considers those hostilities against antagonisms
toward Hosseini’s work expressed within the Afghan expatriate communities.
In seeking a nuanced understanding of what lies at the core of this so-called
‘clash of sensibilities’, the author draws upon media reports and critique,
conversations with Afghan transnationals, and Hosseini’s text to explore the
broader but related questions of 1) the limits of acceptability in art,
particularly when it transgresses the norms of the society from which it has
emerged and 2) the future of expatriate literary production when carried out
under communally-imposed constraints. All views expressed in this paper are
the author’s and not those of the United States Department of Defense or the
Defense Language Institute where she serves as associate professor in the
Faculty Development Division.
Key Words: Afghanistan;
hermeneutics; narrative theory
1.
Khaled
Hosseini,
expatriate
literature;
Introduction
By conventional measures of artistic and commercial achievement,
Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel, The Kite Runner, has been a triumph.
Hosseini’s story of the friendship of two Afghan boys, the brutal interruption
of that relationship, and the eventual redemption of the protagonist has sold
more than four million copies in the United States and several more million
worldwide. 2 Having won a host of book awards, The Kite Runner now
appears regularly on reading lists for freshmen entering American colleges
and universities. At least one prestigious journal for mental health care
professionals has cited The Kite Runner’s ‘clinically pertinent themes,’ and
not-for-profit organisations serving refugees have recommended the book for
anyone wishing to better understand the plight of displaced persons. 3 The
2007 movie version of the book has broadened the novel’s audience and
2
Expatriate Literature and the Problem of Contested Representation:
The Case of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner
elevated its author, the son of an Afghan diplomat who sought asylum for his
family in America during the 1970’s, to the increasingly prominent role of
de facto spokesperson for Afghan transnationals. Hosseini’s new wealth, in
the meantime, has allowed him to suspend his medical practice and use his
notoriety to advocate for his struggling countrymen and women, a pursuit he
has declared as meaningful as the ‘literary interest’. 4
Hosseini’s good intentions notwithstanding, only days before the
anticipated release of the film version of The Kite Runner in Kabul, the
Afghan Ministry of Culture ‘quietly’ banned it amidst fears of violence and
death threats against the child actors who had played the film’s protagonists.
At the core of the disturbance, it was widely reported, was Afghans’ sketchy
knowledge of and outrage over a homosexual rape scene in which a Hazara
boy was assaulted by a group of Pashtun thugs. After reporting on the
removal of the boys and their families to the shelter of the United Arab
Emirates, the Anglo-American media settled into formulaic explanations for
the violent public reaction. Between October 2007 and January 2008, more
than 200 reports covering Afghans’ restive anticipation of the release of The
Kite Runner appeared in American, Canadian, British, Australian, and Irish
newspapers, most of which framed it as an overreaction grounded in
ignorance and religious zeal. Remarks by the president of Afghanistan’s
state-run media company to Washington Post reporters suggesting that
Afghan audiences would believe the on-screen rape was actual and respond
accordingly supported a broadening consensus that the ban was the
government’s concession to the ‘mentality’ of an illiterate and religiously
conservative rabble incapable of distinguishing between cinematic mimesis
and real life. 5 That the rape scene involved boys from rival tribes, and that it
carried the potential to arouse ethnic tensions—a not insignificant factor that
would have complicated the emerging deficit model—was, with few
exceptions, given scant attention. In favouring such facile cause-and-effect
formulations over closer analysis, the media managed to announce and
dismiss the phenomenon in a single stroke.
Western readers have been assured that, despite the furor, many
Afghans ‘of the educated classes’ admire the novel; one of the Kite Runner
producers was quoted as saying the Afghan elite characterized the movie as
‘a love letter to their culture’. 6 Hosseini himself stepped in to insist that the
message of both book and film was ‘tolerance, love, friendship and
forgiveness. . . .It denounces bigotry, it denounces violence, and hatred and
discrimination. I don't think anyone who walks out of that film does not
understand that’. 7 One can sympathize with Hosseini’s desire to disassociate
his art from the controversy, but it is difficult to overlook his exclusion of
Janette Edwards
3
large numbers of his countrymen and women when making claims for
‘anyone’. The ‘elite’ defense, in any case, carries the problematic suggestion
that the protests of the tribal Afghans, whose Otherness is long- and wellestablished, are too antithetical to Western mainstream ideas of artistic
freedom to merit serious consideration.
This paper follows The Kite Runner controversy beyond the borders
of Afghanistan to where it plays out still among its diasporic communities,
probing the boundaries of acceptability in art for expatriate writers whose
work violates the norms of the societies to which they belong. Toward this
end, it seeks the kind of nuanced understanding of the tensions surrounding
free expression that sidesteps the distracters of ‘liberal versus non-liberal
culture’ binaries and the ‘shut-down, sealed off entities’ that, as Edward Said
argues, we mischaracterise as ‘civilisations’ and ‘identities’. 8 It further
pursues the question of what lies ahead for expatriate literary production
when writers are constrained quite literally by considerations of what the
neighbors will say, examining the social and cognitive processes occurring
within what Habermas has called the ‘boundary-maintaining organisms’—the
‘we-group,’ in other words—that determine a community’s tolerance for art
that challenges its self-understanding and self-esteem. 9
To borrow again from Said, making sense of a disorderly reality,
grasping the ‘inter-connectedness of innumerable lives, “ours” as well as
“theirs,”’ 10 is a painstaking enterprise that could reasonably extend over a
lifetime. The aims of this study are more modest. It is in all respects a
preliminary investigation that has enlisted as research partners two Pashtun men
now living in California. Their sharing of their thoughts and lived experience
has helped create a dialogic space in which multiple perspectives complement
rather than collide. Storytelling—that ‘crucially intersubjective model of
discourse’ described by Kearney as a ‘quintessentially communicative act’ 11 —
is at the core of this work. Interpreting these stories within the framework of
Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity begins the task of inhabiting on an
imaginative plane the lifeworld of an Other, and advancing toward the ‘fusion
of horizons’ that Gadamer cites as the prerequisite to real-world praxis. 12
Without presuming to speak for entire expatriate communities,
research partners Abraham Safi and Nasim Salimi have voiced their opposition
to the content and influence of The Kite Runner, finding in both the potential to
undermine post-Soviet, post-Taliban advances and perpetuate humiliating
stereotypes about their people. Consistent with the participatory hermeneutic
research protocol developed by Herda, the perspectives of these men have been
captured in text, analysed, and reconsidered with their active participation. 13 As
partners in this process, they have enabled access to an unfamiliar worldview,
allowing Others to, after Gadamer, ‘transpose’ themselves and ‘become aware
of the otherness, the indissoluble individuality of the other person—by putting
4
Expatriate Literature and the Problem of Contested Representation:
The Case of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner
[themselves] in his position’. 14
2.
Distance, Membership, and Narrative Authenticity
Talk of a Western/Central Asian clash of sensibilities makes Nasim
Salimi bristle a bit. If there is a shabby side of this cultural divide, he makes
clear he is not on it. He is, by Afghan and any other standards, a well-educated
man, having completed university in Kabul and later graduate school in
Washington D.C. Mr. Salimi rejects the summative characterisation of
Afghanistan as a ‘non-liberal, traditional culture’, and rejects especially the idea
that hostile response to an American film would be the natural reflex of a
society averse to provocative images. Foreign movies were in fact a fixture of
his youth, and he points to the passages in The Kite Runner that describe Amir
and Hassan’s devotion to Hollywood Westerns as among the few authentic
elements of the novel. ‘It was not’, Mr. Salimi explained, ‘that [The Kite
Runner] was told from the Western point of view’:
[D]ifference in culture doesn’t mean that you should hate
something, or that you will hate. . . but there is a particularity
or speciality in this film that people didn’t like. . . .There are
so many stories told by the Western people who have been
brought up here, and nobody, there was no protest, nothing
against it. [T]he only thing I remember was Salman Rushdie’s
novel. . . that caused protests in the Islamic world. . .and
rightfully so. . . 15
The ‘particularity’ of the film, Mr. Salimi insists, is not the celluloid rape of a
male child. It is the vision, celluloid or otherwise, of sexual violence against a
member of one ethnic group—in this case, the Hazara, who are mostly Shi'a
Muslims—by his historical oppressor, namely, a Sunni Pashtun. 16 Mr. Salimi
further explained that the most aggressive protest came from the Hazara, who
believed the film gave them ‘a bad name’:
And that is their right to say, “Hey, this is not what happens”.
Let me tell you something about Hazaras, they’re very proud
people. . . .[T]alking to them about themselves in this way is
sort of trying to humiliate them and trying to put them down. 17
Abraham Safi, who in his ‘former life’ taught history in Kabul,
agrees that The Kite Runner’s sexual assault episode will be interpreted as a
humiliation, but it is the tearing at old wounds that he most regrets. After so
Janette Edwards
5
many years of murderous struggle, he wants to see his homeland ‘come back
together’, but fears that such fictional revisitings of interethnic insults could
upend a precarious civil order:
[I]t’s not like a mushroom that grows in the corner of the
bathroom, you know, it is a society. It takes time. Healing. And
then you throw things like [The Kite Runner] in between, you
know, a guy in America writes a book saying all the Hazara
people were raped by Pashtuns. . . .So what then [is] left? These
Hazara people are going say, “Well, these Pashtuns are the
worst people on the face of the earth”. The Pashtuns are not
going to tolerate Hazara coming and telling them that, so
they’re going to fight. 18
But the objections raised most pointedly by Nasim Salimi and
Abraham Safi concern the ‘guy in America’—the author himself—whose
voice, they claim, is inauthentic and whose motives are suspect. Hosseini was
a diplomat’s child who had, in all likelihood, spent most of his life outside of
Afghanistan before emigrating to the United States. His early separation from
his homeland and the fact of his reckless devising of characters and situations
that would certainly pit neighbour against neighbour back in Afghanistan,
indicate, as far as Mr. Safi is concerned, that Hosseini, ‘[didn’t] really know
the fabric of the society’ about which he wrote. The novel’s popular appeal,
as well as whatever authenticity it shows, owes, Mr. Safi believes, to outside
influence: ‘He obviously had a good consultant. [Hosseini] knew this society
[i.e. America], what sells. . .which worked’.
Mr. Salimi looks to the details—rather, the inaccuracies—of
Hosseini’s narrative as confirmation that he is an outsider. ‘The more you
know about Afghans and Afghan society’, Mr. Salimi says, ‘the more you
know the. . .holes. . . in this book’. One anachronism that particularly irks
him is a scene early in the novel where the two protagonists encounter a
group of Afghan soldiers near a military barracks. One of the soldiers singles
out Hassan, the Hazara boy, for insult, calling out, ‘I knew your mother, did
you know that? I knew her real good’, and gesturing obscenely. 19
Unthinkable, Mr. Salimi insists, because the Afghan soldiers of that era
served only two years. How, he wonders, could the soldier have known
Hassan’s mother, especially when the narrator has told us that she abandoned
Hassan years before? As for the next scene, where Amir consoles a tearful
Hassan in the darkness of the cinema, Mr. Salimi is equally adamant:
I’ve never seen in my life. . . you would never see [boys] cry,
even with a friend. No matter if that friend is Amir, or whoever
6
Expatriate Literature and the Problem of Contested Representation:
The Case of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner
that is. And [Hassan] is a young man. . .he could go there and
do something by himself, but not to cry with another person. 20
The temporal and sociocultural fallacies—the ‘gaffes’, as Mr. Salimi calls
them—have convinced him that Hosseini has neither the knowledge nor the
authority to write a novel that treats historical events in Afghanistan,
especially events that retain the power to incite riots. ‘He went out of
Afghanistan as a kid and now he’s writing a story not because he knows
about it, [but] because he has heard it’, Mr. Salimi says. 21
There is also the matter of language. Mr. Salimi describes a booksigning event for The Kite Runner he attended at a community services center
in Fremont, the San Francisco Bay area city whose ‘Little Kabul’ district is
the hub of Afghan expatriate life in California: ‘We went there, sat down.
There were some people among us who wanted to ask questions. There were
no non-Afghans among us, but even then they said, if you have to ask
questions, questions should be asked in English’. There were additional
conditions for audience participation, Mr. Salimi says, including a warning to
those who had not read the book to not ask questions. ‘Right there’, he
recalls, ‘this book brought a rift between some people. . .and in fifteen
minutes or so. . .the cops showed up’. There had been no altercation, so why,
Mr. Salimi wondered, would the police appear at a book-signing unless
someone had been expecting trouble? He does not know, finally, who called
the police or why; when I suggest that it must have been Hosseini’s people,
Mr. Salimi agrees, ‘It’s possible’. What intrigued him more, and still does,
was what many took as the exposure of Hosseini’s limited knowledge of
Pashto or Farsi, the major languages of Afghanistan, which would in turn
compromise his standing as a cultural insider. 22 With that embarrassment—if
it is indeed true—will come more challenges to his credentials as the
preeminent voice of the diaspora, and more accusations of his exploiting his
heritage for commercial reward.
Abraham Safi, at least, does not begrudge Hosseini his new wealth,
offering that, ‘if I find a way tomorrow and I know I can get rich, I will do it.
. .of course’. 23 He is critical of Hosseini for having apparently pursued his
ambitions outside a communal framework that would have ethically informed
his actions; for his own part, Mr. Safi says, ‘if I want to write some things
about Afghanistan, honestly. . .I’ll consider a lot of aspects, I’ll talk to a lot of
people, because I don’t want to hurt [anybody]’. Mr. Safi’s preferred
consultative approach to literary production, suggestive also of permissionseeking, evokes another, more traditionally Afghan framework: the Jirga, or
assembly of elders, who assume responsibility for decision-making that
Janette Edwards
7
involves groups or individuals. Mr. Safi himself has described the Jirga as the
lynchpin of Pashtoonwali, an unwritten code of ethics passed down over
generations of tribal Pashtuns, in a monograph he recently composed for
students of the Pashto language. 24 He does not explicitly propose this process
for Pashtun writers such as Hosseini, nor does he confirm—or deny—my
observation that some of the expatriate hostility might owe to Hosseini’s
having written things that affected his community’s public image without
clearing it with people first. It is evident, in any case, that The Kite Runner
represents a violation of what many of Hosseini’s fellow Pashtuns would
consider a communal trust.
3.
Individual Licence and Communal Responsibilities
What emerges most clearly from my conversations with Mr. Safi
and Nasim Salimi is their conviction that in order to write with legitimacy
about Afghanistan, one must have a deep knowledge of its social fabric and
an insider’s understanding of its past. It is, to borrow from Gadamer, a matter
of belonging to history, to a prefigured world in which one’s forebears,
remote and recent, have acted and suffered. The narratives passed down over
successive generations—Ricoeur’s ‘relay station for memory’ 25 —provide the
context for, if not the boundaries of, their self-understanding. Mr. Safi and
Mr. Salimi’s allegiance to narrative memory, in turn, is constitutive of their
common orientation toward both the world in which they live, and the future
to which they are striving. The ancestral narratives and cultural
understandings that comprise their communal identity seem here to be
regarded as precise and inviolate, and as such should be received, interpreted,
and reproduced in a manner consistent with the norms of the ‘we-group’. Mr.
Safi and Mr. Salimi’s rejection of Hosseini as a legitimate voice of the
diaspora is thus grounded, I believe, in their sense that if he were, truly, a son
of Afghanistan, he simply would not have been able to write such things.
The Kite Runner generated controversy, Mr. Salimi observed,
because it ‘was a made up story and didn’t have any connection with
reality.’ 26 The truth of this observation, at least for large numbers of Afghan
expatriates, has been well-demonstrated. Still, it poses what looks like an
insoluble problem for writers of fiction, expatriates or not: their stories may
or may not have ‘any connection with reality’, but they are in any case ‘made
up’. Novel-writing is, or at least I think it is, by definition a liar’s craft.
Indeed, it has been argued widely and persuasively that the received
knowledge that we call ‘historical fact’ is itself imitative and interpretive,
since it necessarily reinscribes phenomenological time—a uniquely human
construction—onto cosmological time, all in service of a grand idea or
mastery of meaning. 27 Where, then, does that leave the enterprise of cultural
production? Who presumes to pick up a pen, a brush, a camera, or a creative
8
Expatriate Literature and the Problem of Contested Representation:
The Case of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner
instrument of any kind when the space between the laureate and the hack is
so contested and, in this case, so volatile? And, coming back to the question
that initiated this discussion, what, in particular, is the future for expatriate
writers who operate under a set of standards considerably tighter than those
of their extra-communal counterparts?
In pursuing these questions, we need to be mindful that the world of
the imagination is the site of enormous energy, powerful if not outright
dangerous. Acknowledging that he had received hate mail after The Kite
Runner was published, Hosseini told a Time magazine reporter,
I guess I misunderstood what the role of fiction was.
Because I never thought it was about writing things that. . .
make everybody feel warm and fuzzy inside. I guess it’s
my Western sensibility, now that I’ve lived here for so
long, that I feel like these are things we should talk about. 28
Hosseini’s complaint mingles with those of other transgressive expatriate
artists, perhaps most notably Salman Rushdie, whose reflections on his
Satanic Verses experience include the bitter observation that, ‘It has been
bewildering to learn that people do not care about art’. 29 Rushdie’s—and
now, to a much lesser degree, Hosseini’s—ordeal may indeed be emblematic
of a clash of sensibilities in general and beliefs about the uses of fiction in
particular, but the truth value of their conclusions is uncertain. Their
adversaries will insist—and I believe they should be taken at their word—
that they do care about art, but that they care also, and just as passionately,
about upholding the honour and dignity of their societies and protecting the
public peace.
Toward the end of our conversation, Abraham Safi and I discussed
the responsibility of the artist to his community, as well as Mr. Safi’s
perspective on the nature of Hosseini’s offense:
by doing this, insulting somebody’s religion or beliefs. . .you’re
actually eliminating their right to them. . . .They have a right to
be living as dignified human beings. But when you insult their
beliefs, that means you’ve eliminated the freedom for all of
that. . .you know, you can’t just be so selfish. 30
Mr. Safi’s words are, for me, a framing of the limits of individual licence that
I rarely, if ever, consider; they are certainly a point for serious reflection.
They also comprise a wonderful irony, one perhaps fraught with possibility:
Janette Edwards
9
Mr. Safi’s thoughts on ‘eliminating’ the right of others to their dignity and
beliefs resonate strikingly with a passage from The Kite Runner where the
protagonist’s father instructs his son on the ‘only sin’,
“[a]nd that is theft. . . .When you kill a man, you steal a life,”
Baba said. “You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his
children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s
right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to
fairness. Do you see?” 31
For the moment, the clash has yielded to an intersection of sensibilities. If
nothing else, it is a platform from which to move forward.
Notes
1
This paper is dedicated to Ellen Herda, with my enduring admiration and
gratitude. Let me also here acknowledge, with thanks, the insights and
generosity of my research partners, Nasim Salimi and Abraham Safi.
2
L Grossman, ‘The Kite Runner Author Returns Home,’ Time, 17 May 2007,
viewed on 26 June, 2008, p. 3,
<http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1622583,00.html>.
3
G Pearson, ‘Book Review, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini’, Journal
of Child & Adolescent Psychiatric Nursing, vol. 20, no. 1, February 2007, p.
66. Regarding the novel’s themes of the post-traumatic effects of witnessing
sexual assault and political violence, the reviewer urges nurses working with
similarly traumatized immigrant children to ‘understand these unique
influences on functioning and acculturation to the United States’.
4
L Hansen, ‘Interview: Khaled Hosseini discusses his childhood in
Afghanistan and his novel The Kite Runner’, ‘Weekend Edition’, National
Public Radio, broadcast 27 July 2003. Hosseini observed,
My primary concern as a writer is I hope this story resonates with
people, and that emotionally it is a story that people will think
about long after it’s done. But I also, from more than just a literary
interest, I also hope that it gets people to keep talking about
Afghanistan, and to remember that Afghanistan is still there, and
that there are problems of. . .Homeric proportions still there. And
that. . .Afghanistan still needs the long-term international
commitment and so on. So if it achieves anything for that end, in
even a small way, I think it will have been worthwhile’.
5
J W Anderson and W Booth, ‘”Kite Runner”: Danger On and Off the
Screen’, The Washington Post, 5 October 2007. The reporters’ mention of
10
Expatriate Literature and the Problem of Contested Representation:
The Case of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner
Afghanistan’s ‘28 percent literacy rate’ was evidently intended to provide
context for Afghan Film President Abdul Latif Ahmadi’s claim that, ‘People
don’t realize that [the movie is] not true. When they watch a film, they accept
it—it’s real, why did they do it?’
6
E McWhirter, ‘Powerful Love Letter’, The Daily Telegraph (Australia), 17
January 2008.
7
C Cadelago, '”Kite Runner” Author Supports Late Release to Protect Young
Actors’, San Francisco Chronicle, 16 October 2007.
8
E Said, ‘The Clash of Ignorance’, The Nation, vol. 273, no. 12, 22 October
2001, p. 12.
9
J Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. by T
McCarthy, Beacon Press, Boston, 1979, p. 109-110.
10
Said, p. 13.
11
R Kearney, On Stories, Routledge, New York, 2002, p. 5.
12
HG Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. by J Weinsheimer and D Marshall,
The Continuum Publishing Company, New York, 2002, p. 306-307.
13
E Herda, Research Conversations and Narrative: a Critical Hermeneutic
Orientation in Participatory Inquiry, Praeger Publishers, Westport,
Connecticut, 1999.
14
Gadamer, p. 305.
15
N Salimi, research conversation, June 17, 2008.
16
Oppression of and discrimination against Hazaras within Afghanistan is a
matter of historical record. See, for example, Human Rights Watch (HRW),
‘Massacres of Hazaras in Afghanistan’, viewed on 1 June 2008, <
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/afghanistan/>; R Magnus and E Naby,
Afghanistan: Mullah, Marx, and Mujahid, Westview Press, Boulder, CO,
1998; and J Canfield, ‘Ethnic, regional, and sectarian alignments in
Afghanistan’, in A Banuazizi and M Weiner (eds.), The State, Religion, and
Ethnic Politics: Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, Syracuse University Press,
Syracuse, NY, 1986, pp. 75-103.
17
Salimi.
18
A Safi, research conversation, 23 April 2008.
19
K Hosseini, The Kite Runner, Riverhead Books, New York, 2003, p. 7.
20
Salimi.
21
Ibid.
22
Hosseini’s cultural and linguistic ties are uncertain. Various biographies
have identified him as Tajik and a Shi’a Muslim, with family ties to Iran,
which, if accurate, would suggest he was a native speaker of Farsi, also
Janette Edwards
11
known as Dari. The language of the majority Pashtun group is Pashto; again,
whether Hosseini knows this language is unclear.
23
Ibid.
24
A Safi, ‘Pashtoonwali: Unwritten Code of Honor’, unpublished article,
2007.
25
P Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. III, trans. by K Blamey and D
Pellauer, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985, p. 114.
26
Salimi.
27
Ricoeur, p. 180, passim.
28
Grossman, p. 3.
29
S Rushdie, ‘In Good Faith’, Imaginary Homelands, Penguin Books, New
York, 1990, p. 396.
30
Safi.
31
Hosseini, pp. 17-18.
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12
Expatriate Literature and the Problem of Contested Representation:
The Case of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner
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Janette Edwards
13
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Janette Edwards is an Associate Professor and Program Manager in the
Faculty Development division of the Defense Language Institute in
Monterey, California. Her research and writing explore the interplay of
personal and communal identity and their relation to development practice.