Translating Trauma in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

Abstract

Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel The Kite Runner, as the first Afghan novel published in English, garnered attention in a post-9/11 political climate fascinated by the potential for insight offered by its setting and subject matter. The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 brought unprecedented attention to a region that had been summarily ignored by conceptions of history formulated by the West, despite the impact that Western politics had had on its development. Hosseini’s novel advocates for Afghanistan in a Western context whose dominant discourse has effectively reduced it to ‘the caves of Tora Bora and poppy fields and Bin Laden’, as Hosseini put it in a foreword to the tenth anniversary edition of The Kite Runner.1 Hosseini acknowledges an intended Western audience as he emphasises the fact that The Kite Runner has helped to make Afghanistan more than ‘just another unhappy, chronically troubled, afflicted land’ for his readers (III). Hosseini achieves this in a narrative that traces his protagonist Amir’s journey through political and personal turmoil, and, crucially, as a witness to trauma. At twelve years old, Amir is a bystander to the rape of his childhood friend Hassan; the incident traumatises Amir and leads him to a lifetime spent seeking redemption. This essay traces the ways in which Hosseini presents this assault as an allegory for the national rupture that occurs in Afghanistan during the mid-1970s as the country experiences the collapse of the monarchy and the invasion of Soviet forces. Through the use of this allegory, Hosseini translates the trauma of ongoing conflict for a Western audience. Khaled Hosseini, World Literature and the Post-9/11 Novel The Kite Runner emerged in the post-9/11 period as an example of world literature that challenged the rhetoric legitimising the invasion of Afghanistan. World literature is defined by the Warwick Research Collective as literature that emerges from the ‘dialectics of core and periphery that underpin all cultural production in the modern era’.2 Hosseini’s particular status – as a member of the Afghan diaspora and a full-time citizen of the West – can be seen as bolstering his decision to write fiction that might ease the difficulties of cross-cultural understanding in the post-9/11 era while providing a way for the destabilisation of the notion of the centre-periphery relationship. In her influential work on world literary relationships, Pascale Casanova argues that the periphery is defined by its relationship to the centre, whether it seeks consecration and approval or sets out to chart an antagonistic course.3 Peripheral writers are 1 Khaled Hosseini, Foreword to The Kite Runner (London: Bloomsbury, 2003) III. Note: Further references to this text will be included in parentheses in text. 2 Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Toward a New Theory of World Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015) 51. 3 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (London: Harvard UP, 2004) 23.