Kaleidoscope 5.2, Ahmad Thamrini Fadzlin B. Syed Mohamed, “Once Upon a Kite”
Once Upon a Kite: Glimpses into Afghanistan’s Race Relations
AHMAD THAMRINI FADZLIN B. SYED MOHAMED
Time can be a greedy thing - sometimes it steals the details for itself. - Khaled Hosseini, The
Kite Runner. p226
Afghanistan is a nation plagued by a series of wars and conflicts. Even before the infamous
9/11 tragedy, Afghanistan suffered for decades as a result of foreign intervention (Zaidi, 2006),
internal conflict induced by its trans-ethnic populations (Adeney, 2008) and competition among its
neighbouring countries (Akhtar, 2008).
During these long periods of conflict, a wide range of
experts and scholars from different disciplines discussed how to ‘cure’ this turbulent land.
However, almost all of them have focused on political, economic, religious and ideological aspects,
neglecting ethnic relations as an important foundation for peace. At present, there is a dearth of
discussion on the impact of the prolonged conflict and struggles on the county’s diverse ethnics
and race relations, even though a better understanding of these social relations may facilitate
future peace.
This article attempts to redress this gap by analysing the plot and the characterizations of
race relations in Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner
(2003).
I argue the novel can be
perceived as a ‘time capsule’ that freezes the nation’s “warring tribal principalities, petty mountain
states, and ethnic enclaves spilling over the present national borders” (Lieberman. 1980:272).
There are two reasons for this; firstly, when a writer writes, they must be able to capture the true
“sense of time” to make the story believable and secondly, in doing so they may capture the
experiences and relationships between different social groups at the time the story took place.
My analysis of this novel sheds light on race relations in Afghanistan which may contribute
towards longer lasting peace in the country.
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The Kite Runner (henceforth TKR) is Hosseini’s debut novel and the first novel written in
English by an Afghan (Noor 2004:148). TKR tells the story of a thirty-eight-year-old writer named
Amir and his life journey from Kabul to San Francisco from 1975 to 2001. Amir was born into a
wealthy Pashtun family and was raised alone by his father Baba after the untimely death of his
mother during his birth (Pashtun is the majority ethnic group in Afghanistan).
During his
childhood, Amir is befriended by Hassan, a loyal Hazara’s servant son (Hazara is a minority ethnic
group, largely Shiite, that has been subjected to invasion and unfair treatment from the Pashtuns).
However, their friendship turns sour after it is aggravated by an event involving bullies. When the
Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, Amir and his father Baba flee to Pakistan and end up in
America. Picking up what is left of their life, they establish a new life in America managing a gas
station and selling goods at a flea market. Amir marries Soraya, the daughter of a former Afghan
general, but they remained childless even after fifteen years of marriage. Amir was then contacted
by Rahim Khan, a friend and former business partner of his now-deceased father. Through him,
he learns that Hassan was in reality his half-brother, the product of Baba’s affair with Ali's wife.
This incident recalls Amir’s troubled past when he betrayed the trust of his best friend.
After
learning that Hassan and his wife have been killed by the Taliban, Amir hesitantly makes a journey
back to Afghanistan to rescue his nephew, only to discover that boy has been enslaved by his
former childhood bully who has become a Taliban leader. In the face of challenging obstacles,
Amir manages to bring the child back to America and adopts him.
Race, Ethnicity, and Racism
There are different definitions of race.
Scientifically, race can be defined as “an arbitrary
selection of identification of specific physical or biologically transmitted characteristics” (Yetman,
1999:3). Writing on issues of race and ethnic relations, Feagin and Feagin (1999:5) point out that
the development of such a definition in the scientific field “was not developed from close scientific
observation”, but rather from “popular beliefs about human differences that evolved from the
sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries”. Due to this, the notion of what race is scientifically
has often been contested and it is still debated among many scholars and critics in various fields.
Appiah (1986) argues that race genetically means that all human beings – no matter where
and who they are – descend from the same source. In other words, a coloured, brown eyed, short
and slightly disfigured man living in Pakistan would have in him a considerable amount of genetic
composition of a white, blue eyed, tall and well-proportioned English gentleman living in England.
If this is the case, then the issue of race should not matter, which suggests that race does not
really exist.
But, such a theory of genetic make-up, even when scientifically proven, does not
alleviate racial prejudices. The concept of race still exists in many societies in many part of the
world and can have very real and violent consequences. Race may be instrumentalised in various
ways. During the periods of European colonialism, for example, the ideology of white supremacy
established colonial rights to rule others. The idea “decides that another group is incapable of
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representing themselves, and undertake to speak, write, and act on their behalf – about them, for
them, without consulting them” (Childs & Williams, 1997:104).
Linked to the concept of race is ethnicity.
Derived from the Greek word ‘ethnos’ which
means ‘people’, ethnicity identifies the membership of a person through his or her common
“origin, history, values, attitudes and behaviour” (Yetman, 1999:2).
Different ethnic groups may
differ from one another in terms of language, clothing, religion, and their way of life. In some
cases this has led to violence. Riphenburg (2005) explains that “ethnic groups are no longer
viewed as primordial, but are considered to be the products of history, the design of concrete
procedures of administrative classification, political organization, and socialization (31).
Race in Afghanistan
This section looks at the construction of race and ethnicity in Afghanistan, and how, over
time, it produced Qawm – a rigid and segmented social system. The relevant Afghani social
concepts are Qawm (people, tribe, community), Wulus (nation, tribe, relatives), and Tyfah (clan,
tribe, group) (Roy, 1989; Goodson, 1998; Shahrani, 2002).
According to Shahrani (2002), the
Qawm, Wulus and Tyfah:
…provide the most fundamental bases for individuals and collective identities and loyalties, and
they are the most persistent and pervasive potential bases for the organization of social
formations, for the mobilization of social action, and for the regulation of social interaction
among individuals and between social groups. As generalized social organizational principles,
Islam, ethnicity, and kinship have been equally available to individuals and collectivises in
Afghan society at large, as well as to those who have controlled the central government
powers. They have been applied and manipulated not only to further common or similar
collective national goals, but also to pursue separate, often divergent, and sometimes
conflicting and contradictory aims by individuals, groups, and state institutions. (707)
Lieberman (1980) further explains that even though the Qawm is distinct among the
Pashtuns, the same social phenomenon exists in other ethnicities throughout the country. This
traditional tribal identity is so effective that if the central government imposes new laws which are
not acceptable by the tribe, there is a strong likelihood of violence in response (Lieberman,
1980:272). Some have suggested that strong affiliation with the Qawm has led the Afghans into
uncountable tribal feuds and wars which will affect the country’s ethnic relations for years to
come. As a result, when the Pashtuns came to power, they created ‘hierarchical relations’ where
the Pashtuns dominate the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities in northern and central
Afghanistan (Newell, 1979:437). This article endeavours to discuss the Qawm and its representation
in TKR through Edward Said’s notion of Latent and Manifest Orientalism and John Arthur’s
conception of race.
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Latent Racism
John Arthur asserts that racism is the way in which a person displays his/her covert and
overt attitude towards other members of the society. A covert attitude may be perceived as a
latent form of racism, the condition of having “unconscious positivity” (Said 1995:206) towards
another group of people which contains some basic ‘truths’ of the others. Informing perception
on racial differences, these ‘truths’ are inherited from one generation to another, and then become
the “will-to-power” (Said 1995:222).
Thus, race has become a notion of power that fetishes
difference, and segregates the people into groups. The differences that have occurred would then
be accepted as the ‘truth’.
Qawm is so central among the Afghans that it has created “a country comprised of various
groups with differing cultural traits, including language, religious practices, physical appearance
and attire, and customs [where] inter-marriage between ethnic groups and religious groups is
relatively uncommon, and even the notion of being an Afghan has always been severely limited”
(Goodson, 1998:275). As time passes, each ethnic tribe will build their own perception to elevate
their own superior place and connection with the land, resulting in tribal wars and extended
hatred. Centuries later, these perceptions have been transferred from generation to generation
embedding latent racism, negative prejudice and stereotypical traits which are ‘willed’ as a social
truth of a particular tribe.
However, this latent form of racism raises one obvious question; does a person who has an
‘opinion’ of someone based on his concept of race, being embedded into his psyche
unconsciously, be categorised as racist?
The answer to this question is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’,
because the recognition of a racist depends on the attitude that a person has towards another
and how he/she reacts to it. As latent racism happens subconsciously, it is very difficult to gauge
someone’s level of racism.
Despite this, the effects of latent racism can be seen through
institutionalised racism in laws, education, social class and history, of which the people themselves
remain unaware. This is possible because a race must retain its own “meaning and significance
[which is] no different in principle from the significance of a flag, a political office, or a rule of
etiquette” because society “gives it meaning” (Arthur, 2007:71).
In the case of TKR, this ‘unconscious positivity’ has been presented through the relationship
of two ethnicities: firstly, the Pashtuns as the dominant, natural rulers of the country and the
original sons of the soil of Afghanistan, and secondly, the Hazaras, as the most oppressed ethnic
minority in Afghanistan (Felbab-Brown, 2013). According to Barfield (2004) and Lieberman (1980),
since the Pashtuns had dominated the Afghan state since the founding of the Durrani Empire in
1747, the Hazaras had been subjected to invasion, heavy taxation, and became debtors and
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bonded sharecroppers to nomadic Pashtun traders.
Furthermore, the two are also divided by
faith, as the Pashtuns were Sunni and the Hazaras were Shi’ah Muslims (Mushtaqur & Guljan,
1997). Roy (1989) cautions that any post-war development in Afghanistan may be affected by the
Pashtuns’ anti-Shi’ah standpoint and resentment towards the new self-assertive Hazaras.
Deliberating more on this point, Goodson (1998) observes that “Islam is a popular religion in
Afghanistan” and the only “major competitor to the "pure" Islam…are the tribal codes” (272). For
this reason, Islam serves the country more as “a unifying force” against foreign non-Muslim
invaders, but it has never been enough to unite all Afghans (Hyman, 2002:311).
Both ancestral and religious differences between these two tribes are presented in TKR. In
one instance, Hassan and his father Ali are described as “mice-eating, flat-nosed, load carrying
donkeys”, the distinctive characteristics of a “Hazara Mongoloid”(TKR:8).
Furthermore, Amir
admitted that for years, that was all he knew about the Hazaras; “that they were mongol
descendants, and that they looked a little like Chinese people” (TKR: 8). Such stereotypical
descriptions of Hassan and Ali clearly suggest an institutional form of racism that had been passed
on from generation to another. One effective way of achieving this is through education, as Amir
describes in the novel:
... School textbooks barely mentioned them and referred to their ancestry only in passing. Then
one day, I was in Baba’s study, looking through his stuff, when I found one of my mother’s old
history books... and was stunned to find an entire chapter on Hazara history. An entire chapter
dedicated to Hassan’s people! In it, I read that my people, the Pashtuns, had persecuted and
oppressed the Hazaras.
It said the Hazaras had tried to rise against the Pashtuns in the
nineteenth century, but the Pashtuns had “quelled them with unspeakable violence.” The book
said that my people had killed the Hazaras, driven them from their lands, burned their homes
and sold their women. The book said part of the reason Pashtuns had oppressed the Hazaras
was that Pashtuns were Sunni Muslims, while Hazaras were Shi’ah.
things I didn’t know, things my teachers hadn’t mentioned.
The book said a lot of
Things Baba hadn’t mentioned
either. It also said some things I did know, like that that people called Hazaras mice-eating,
flat-nosed, load carrying donkeys. I had heard some of the kids in the neighbourhood yell
those names to Hassan.
The following week, after class, I showed the book to my teacher and pointed to the chapter on
the Hazaras.
He skimmed through a couple of pages, snickered, handed the book back.
“That’s the one thing Shi’ah people do well”, he said, picking up his papers, “passing themselves
as martyrs”.
He wrinkled his nose when he said the word Shi’ah, like it was some kind of
disease. (TKR: 8-9)
Describing the textbooks used in schools and comparing them with another book he found
at home suggests a latent form of racism, as one race and their culture and history is celebrated,
while the other is denied. The education system has institutionalised the superiority of one over
the other.
Through repetition of the idea of being the better race, the Pashtuns placed
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themselves as a superior race to the Hazaras, and the Hazaras accepted and succumbed to this
inferior rank.
This is best exemplified through the master and slave relationship in the novel. In
the kite competition episode, as Amir is looking for Hassan he asks an old man by the roadside
about the direction taken by Hassan. Rather stunned and puzzled by Amir’s desire to ‘look’ for
Hassan, the old man asked him what the relationship of Hassan to him is. Explaining that Hassan
is a servant, the old man has “raised his pepper grey eyebrow” and tells Amir that Hassan is a
“lucky Hazara” and his father should “get on his knees, sweep the dust at his feet with his
eyelashes” (TKR:65-66). Being a Pashtun, Amir is considered as the master and his concern over
Hassan is unusual. The old man’s reaction over Amir’s concern clearly suggest a latent form of
racism, as he has stereotyped slavery as synonymous with the Hazaras.
The latent form of racism also affects daily life for Afghan people. In the novel, Amir is
approached by Rahim Khan during his birthday party and he tells Amir his love story. Rahim Khan
reveals that he had fallen in love with a beautiful Hazara girl named Homaira, the daughter of his
neighbour’s servant.
When he informs his family of his intention of marrying Homaira, Rahim
Khan’s mother is so devastated that she faints, while his brother Jalal “actually went to fetch his
hunting rifle”.
Rahim Khan later describes the situation as a fight between him and Homaira
against “the world” and reasons that “the world always wins” as Homaira and her family were put
on a lorry and sent off to Hazarajat.
He further surmises that it is “probably for the best” as
Homaira “would have suffered” because his family “would have never accepted her as an equal”
(TKR: 92).
Putting this episode in the context of Qawm, the latent form of racism that is
entrenched in Afghanistan has placed Rahim Khan in a position of discontent. Thus, his disclosure
that the “the world” is against him and Homaira clearly suggests that society is driven by a latent
form of racism that makes harmony between the two Afghan groups an impossibility.
In conclusion, TKR is a good fictional example how latent racism thrives through the
institution of racism into law, education, social structure and history. It is important to highlight
here that this is done through a long period of honing ethnic unconscious positivity over time
until it becomes the norm. This reality ultimately influences the development of the characters
and the story itself in TKR, where Hosseini reaffirms the superiority of the Pashtuns over the
Hazaras.
Manifest Racism
A consequence of latent racism is the manifest version of racism or the “stated view” (Said
1995:206) of race that “consists of openly articulated views” (Childs and Williams 1997:101). But
one might ask, what sets latent and manifest racism apart?
First of all, latent racism happens
subconsciously in a person’s mind, while manifest racism is the expression of “racial contempt in
the form of an attitude of either hostility or indifference toward people’s legitimate interest in
virtue of their race” (Arthur, 2007:15). The expression of manifest racism may come in the form of
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violent and aggressive behaviour, or through verbal abuse.
Secondly, manifested racism is the
‘displayed expression’ of a prolonged latent racism translated into action by those at the pinnacle
of a social hierarchy onto those below. I will now put forward two forms of manifested racism
described which are the reluctant racist and the militant racist.
John Arthur defines the reluctant racist as someone whose “upbringing or experiences have
made him a racist, but who deeply regrets that upbringing and the attitudes he has inherited”. He
then further describes the reluctant racist as one who is “instinctively cowardly but overcomes his
fear”, and who should be “admired for his ability to deal with problems ordinary people are lucky
enough never to face” (2007:19).
As mentioned earlier, the people of Afghanistan have
succumbed to the latent racism that has profoundly been embedded in their way of life.
However, in reality, there is no doubt that there are people whose position would be better
described as ambivalent. This reality creates characters like Amir and his father – the Pashtuns –
who suffer indirectly due to their relationship with Hassan and Ali – the Hazaras. In other words,
Amir and his father are jaded by the reality of race relations that they have to face and the true
feelings they have towards Ali and Hassan.
For example, despite being brought up together,
Amir’s father had never mentioned Ali as his friend in many of his stories. The same characteristic
is also seen in Amir:
... The curious thing was, I never thought of Hassan and me as friends either. Not in the usual
sense, anyhow. Never mind that we taught each other to ride a bicycle with no hands, or to
build a fully functional homemade camera out of cardboard box. Never mind that we spent an
entire winters flying kites. Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with
a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and a low-set of ears, a boy with Chinese doll face
perpetually lit by a hare lipped smile.
Never mind any of those things. Because history isn’t easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In
the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi’a, and nothing was
ever going to change that. Nothing.
“But we were kids who had learned to crawl together, and no history, ethnicity, society, or
religion was going to change that either”... (TKR: 24)
The expression “never thought of Hassan and me as friends either” summarises
Afghanistan’s race relations, and is used by Hosseini to discuss Afghanistan’s societal taboo. By
purposely highlighting the relationship between the ‘master’ and the ‘slave’, Hosseini brought to
our attention the Afghan’s negative attitude in not being able to tolerate the existence of such a
relationship.
This created an ambivalent group of people – like Amir and his Baba – who are
trapped between their desire to see their relationship beyond the master/slave construct.
The
reader experiences Amir’s and his father’s psychological and emotional torture as a consequence
of having such a relationship.
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The militant racist is, according to John Arthur, a person who possesses “attitudes [that]
include unjustified hostility toward a racial group” (2007:23) “accompanied by character and moral
defects” (2007:25) that ultimately result in an act of violence towards a racial group. A significant
attribute of a militant racist is prejudice, which can best be described as an act of having a “closed
mind, violently rejecting any alternative view, refusing to criticize or allow others to criticize his
assumptions, read and listened not to learn, but to acquire information and find additional
support for prejudices and opinions already in his mind” (John Arthur quoting Allan Bullock,
2007:20). Assef, a half German, half Afghan with blond hair and blue-eyes, the antagonist in the
novel, exemplifies this trait. Regarding himself as the true son of the soil of Afghanistan, Assef
cultivates what he thinks is the ‘true’ people of Afghanistan.
After the coup, Assef reveals his
prejudice towards the Hazaras. The realisation of Assef coincides with Afghanistan’s history during
World War II.
According to Tanner, many German scholars were dispatched by Hitler to
Afghanistan – especially to Nuristan where blond, blue-eyed Afghans lived – in order to spread
the Nazi idea of racial purity (2002:223). In one account, he told Amir and Hassan that he knew
that the newly self-proclaimed President Daoud Khan (actually Mohammad Daoud, who in 1973
had taken over the government from King Zahir while he was away in Italy and made Afghanistan
a Republic) would like to talk about Hitler. He later indicates that he has read a book that “they
don’t give out in school” and reasons that Afghanistan is the land of Pashtuns; they are the pure
Afghans, and not the “flat-nose” Hazaras who have polluted the country (TKR 38-39). He then
turns to people like Amir and his father by indicating them as the source of the ‘problem’ by
socialising with the Hazaras and accepting them as ‘friends’. Assef’s belief indicates his worldview
that people like Amir and his father should also “rot” in Hazarat as they are “a disgrace to
Afghanistan” (TKR: 38-39).
After the invasion of Soviet Union, Assef joins the Taliban, which began in 1994 among the
Pashtuns of Kandahar and aims to create a pure Islamic state in Afghanistan.
(Ahady, 1995;
Magnus, 1996; Goodson, 1998; Hyman, 2002, Tanner 2002; Barfield, 2004). According to Tomsen
(2000), the Taliban were initially welcomed by the Afghan population, due to their growing
weariness of war and dissatisfaction over the corrupt Mujahideen government (179). The Taliban
were at one time on the right path towards building a better Afghanistan, as they “effectively
implemented an unprecedented and almost complete ban on opium cultivation, started
reconstruction of the road from Kabul to Kandahar and was in the process of putting together its
first five-year plan”(Pain, 2001;4181). However, the movement was once again manipulated by the
Pashtuns to reassert their traditional claim to power over the nation (Goodson, 1998:276).
According to Ahady (1995), this derailment is not surprising, as the Pashtuns, despite being
Muslim, are also governed by their pre-Islamic code of behaviour – the Pashtunwali (Ahady.
1995:632). TKR illustrates this by including the Taliban in an incident at Ghazi Stadium during the
interval of a football match where “a chubby, white-bearded cleric dressed in grey garments”
conducts a Shari’a law to punish a “sinner befitting his sin”. Reciting verses from the holy Quran,
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the man reasons that the man and woman have committed adultery, and they are then stoned to
death led by a tall, broad-shouldered man who is wearing a ‘John Lennon’ black sunglasses and a
sparkling white garment. Amir later discovers that the man is Assef, who confesses that he is not
religious but has joined the Taliban to fulfil his mission. When Amir asks about his mission, Assef
replies that “Afghanistan is like a beautiful mansion littered with garbage, and someone has to
take out the garbage” (261). This leads him to tell of the massacre that happened at Mazar-iSharif in August 1998 in which he participated and killed thousands of Hazaras and left their
bodies “for the dogs” (TKR: 254) – an event taken from real life.
Based on the accounts provided
by Tanner, the Taliban (mostly Pashtuns) launched an attack on the city and managed to gain
control of it in 1997. Enforcing the Shari’a laws, the Taliban tried to disarm the Hazaras, and this
ended in bloodshed that killed more than three thousand Taliban. This led to an attack in July
1998, where the Taliban had once again managed to regain control of the city and sought to
revenge “their earlier disaster by slaughtering every Hazara they could get their hands on, up to
six thousand” (Tanner 2002: 285). Seeking revenge over the death of their comrades rekindled the
hatred between the Pashtuns and the Hazaras, and was used to justify their murderous act.
Remembering the Kite: Time for Reconciliation
Dupree (2002) in her paper Cultural Heritage and National Identity in Afghanistan stated
that:
A glance at Afghan history affirms an oft-repeated pattern of alternating periods of fission and
fusion. Afghans may quarrel happily among themselves, but they stand together and assert
their pride in being Afghan when outsiders threaten. A sense of national identity does exist,
elements of divisiveness not-withstanding. (978)
As I have argued above, the dynamics of race relation among the Afghans is relatively
unique and intensely fragile due to their affiliation to their Qawm.
TKR presented a view this
relationship and how “personal rivalries appear to be reinforced by cultural and ethnic differences”
(Newell, 1979:435). My analysis of TKR has one important implication: securing peace in
Afghanistan requires more than just political restructuring, a huge economic boost or another
unwelcome foreign intervention.
What is most important for the Afghans is having time to
reconsider their ethnic relations and to create room for reconsolidating their differences (Ahmad,
2002).
Afghan people need to redefine their nationhood based on the shared affiliation to the
land, not their historical differences.
As presented by Hosseini in TKR, each and every tribe in
Afghanistan is inadvertently influenced by and subscribes to a racist mentality that has been
passed from one generation to another.
Negative Qawm tribal-ship will not help the Afghan
people to develop the country as a nation, but will prolong internal conflicts
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Like Amir, who had
Kaleidoscope 5.2, Ahmad Thamrini Fadzlin B. Syed Mohamed, “Once Upon a Kite”
to come to terms with his guilt and his father’s past mistakes, peace is possible for all Afghans if
they can understand that:
“There is a way to be good again...” (TKR:2)
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Ahmad Thamrini Fadzlin B Syed Mohamed,
School of Education,
Durham University
[email protected]
Ahmad Thamrini Fadzlin has been a language teacher at the National Defence
University of Malaysia since 2007.
His research interests include Postcolonial
Literature in English, Nationalism, Identity and critical theory.
He is currently
pursuing his PhD in Higher Education at Durham University’s School of Education.
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Kaleidoscope 5.2, Ahmad Thamrini Fadzlin B. Syed Mohamed, “Once Upon a Kite”
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