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To be good (again): The Kite Runner as allegory of global ethicsDavid Jefferess a

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To cite this Article Jefferess, David(2009) 'To be good (again): The Kite Runner as allegory of global ethics', Journal ofPostcolonial Writing, 45: 4, 389 — 400To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17449850903273572URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449850903273572

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Journal of Postcolonial Writing

Vol. 45, No. 4, December 2009, 389–400

ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online

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DOI: 10.1080/17449850903273572

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To be good (again): The Kite Runner as allegory of global ethics

David Jefferess*

University of British Columbia, OkanaganTaylor and FrancisRJPW_A_427531.sgm10.1080/17449850903273572Journal of Postcolonial Writing1744-9855 (print)/1744-9863 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis454000000December [email protected]

In this article I critically examine Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, and specificallythe novel’s ethical demand, “there is a way to be good again”, in relation tocontemporary conceptions of humanitarianism. Using Mamdani’s analysis of thedistinction between the “good Muslim” and the “bad Muslim”, and reading the novel indialogue with Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism and Butler’s theory of humaninterdependence, I argue that The Kite Runner reflects a shift from the supremacy of raceand nation as primary markers of political community and identity to the idea of the“modern” as the framework for determining the “human”. As such, I read the novel asan allegory of global ethics.

Keywords: Afghanistan; cosmopolitanism; humanitarianism; political allegory; ethics

Originally published in 2003 with little fanfare, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner soon

found a reading public in North America as the first Afghan novel written in English.

Publicized initially through word of mouth, the novel was picked up by community reading

programs across North America in 2005, and eventually spent more than five years on the

New York Times bestseller list, currently with millions of copies in print in 42 different

languages. Reviews of the novel were by no means uniform, but the varying ways in which

the novel was praised provide insight into the attraction it exerted in relation to the historical

context of publication: the current war in Afghanistan, which began with the invasion by the

US and its allies in late 2001. For instance, Publishers Weekly praises the novel for repre-

senting the culture of an “obscure nation” that has become “pivotal in the global politics of

a new millennium” (Zaleski 43). A common theme in reviews of the novel is the text’s

ethnographic value; The Kite Runner teaches the non-Afghan reader about the history and

culture of Afghanistan (see O’Rourke). As Hosseini himself declares, the novel is really

about “finally putting a human face to the Afghans” (qtd in Sadat). Hence the novel

“humanizes” Afghan culture, providing depth and meaning to the sign “Afghanistan” for the

non-Afghan reader, otherwise a mere signifier of post-9/11 conflict.

While the text is praised for its ethnographic and historical value, it is also commended

by reviewers for the way in which it transcends the locality of its setting to provide a univer-

sal, and, ultimately, comfortingly familiar narrative. As one reviewer describes it: “Rather

than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them

both into this searing spectacle of hard-won personal salvation. All this, and a rich slice of

Afghan culture too: irresistible” (“Review” 630). From this perspective, Afghan culture, or

the locality of the action, provides merely a backdrop for a “universal” narrative of redemp-

tion. As Arun Mukherjee argues, non-western literatures have typically been evaluated in

terms of how effectively they attain universality – marked as familiar to the cultures of

*Email: [email protected]

Downloaded By: [Jefferess, David] At: 16:25 20 November 2009

390 D. Jefferess

Euro-America. Further, this ideal of universality is rooted in notions of the human: to

express universal themes is to enact humanity (213). In the case of The Kite Runner, the text

is remarkable for the way it humanizes Afghanistan for the non-Afghan reader, ironically

by transcending the particular circumstances of Afghanistan’s history to provide a morality

tale focused on the theme of personal redemption.

These diverse approaches to interpreting the novel – as ethnography, coming-of-age

narrative, and/or morality tale – seem to be contradictory; the culture and historical context

of the novel is the object of the narrative or merely backdrop for a universal story. However,

these various ways of situating the novel for the western reader are overlapping, in a way

that reflects what I interpret as the tensions and limits of current attempts to theorize a global

ethics. In this article, I do not provide a critical reading of the novel as a window into

Afghan culture or in relation to the long tradition of western representations of Afghanistan,

as described by Fowler, for instance. Instead, I am interested in how the text’s apparent

humanizing function reflects current theories of a cosmopolitan ethics. I critically examine

Amir’s need “to be good again” in order to analyse the way in which (the desire for) a global

humanitarian ethics underwrites the historical context of The Kite Runner’s production and

popularity. While Amir’s quest for personal redemption may be read as an allegory of

Afghanistan’s national project of healing, I read the novel as a political allegory that reflects

the way in which the “third world”, marked by its difference from the “West”, becomes a

site to be transformed through the project of nation-building. This project is presented in the

West as an ethical demand that is paradoxically conceived of as both a humanitarian project

and a disciplinary one; to be recognized as human, Afghanistan must conform to particular

western expectations of democracy, liberalism, and multiculturalism. While the novel’s

reception reflects an openness to, and a desire for, understanding the Other, it also reflects

the limits of acceptable difference. Specifically, I use Mahmood Mamdani’s analysis of the

distinction between the “good Muslim” and the “bad Muslim”. I argue that, as political alle-

gory, the novel reflects a shift from the supremacy of race, nation and religion as the mark-

ers of political community and identity to the idea of the “modern” as the framework for

determining the “human”, and, hence, moral obligation to the Other. I read the novel, then,

as an allegory of global ethics.

Universality, ethics, and the notion of humanity

The end of the Cold War has seemingly ushered in a new era that allows for (re)new(ed)

articulations of a global human community. More specifically, the wars in the former

Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the Congo have precipitated anxious attempts in the West to theorize

and establish international norms and procedures for determining and enacting responsibility

for the Other. For instance, the emergent concept of the “Responsibility to Protect” and the

rhetoric of nation building have become prominent frameworks for imagining the role of the

“international community”. Similarly, the emergence of theories of globalization as a new

form of empire and cultural homogenization, or, conversely, as a postcolonial global village,

as well as the 9/11 attacks and the consequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have provided

the context for renewed critical engagements with humanitarian ethics. I situate my reading

of The Kite Runner in the context of two such ethical theories: Kwame Anthony Appiah’s

formulation of the cosmopolitan and Judith Butler’s theory of human interdependence.

In Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), Appiah theorizes cosmo-

politanism as consisting of two interlocking strands. First, cosmopolitanism signifies the ethi-

cal obligations we have to others, “beyond those to whom we are related by ties of kith and

kind, or even the more formal ties of shared citizenship” (xv). Appiah delineates this moral


Journal of Postcolonial Writing 391

obligation as refraining from causing harm to others, and, if possible, as intervening to alle-

viate suffering caused by natural disaster, poverty, war, or genocide (153). Cosmopolitanism

also connotes an ethical position that values human lives, “which means taking an interest

in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance” (xv). This vision of cosmopolitanism

as global human community also acknowledges the heterogeneity of this community; it seeks

to value, and understand, difference.

Similarly, in the aftermath of the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Judith Butler

has sought to investigate the conditions for empathy for strangers that Appiah situates as

central to a cosmopolitan ethic. Butler prefaces Precarious Life (2004) with the recognition

of human interdependence: “This fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a

condition that I can will away” (xii). Responding to theories of dehumanization that situate

that problem as one of representation (the Other is represented as inferior, uncivilized, or

evil – hence not-quite-human), Butler contends: “it is not simply [ … ] that there is a

‘discourse’ of dehumanization that produces these effects, but rather that there is a limit to

discourse that establishes the limits of human intelligibility” (35). As a result, within the

dominant political discourse of the United States, as articulated by the mass media, human

interdependence across borders is willed away; the death of an Afghan, Iraqi, or Palestinian

is not simply rationalized as just, but is, Butler contends, for the most part “unmarkable”.

Meditating on the politics of mourning, Butler contrasts the very public mourning of those

who were killed in the World Trade Center as a mode of reproducing the US national imag-

inary, against the unmarked death of the Other, overseas. She asks: “at what cost do I estab-

lish the familiar as the criterion by which a human life is grievable”? (38) The Taliban

massacre of 2500–3000 Hazaras in 1998 at Mazar-i-Sharif and Sheberghan, for instance,

was largely unreported in the West until after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when

the political argument for occupying the state required further justification than the search

for Osama bin Laden (see Gutman). Butler, like Appiah, seeks to confront the “problem” of

difference – who is familiar, whose deaths can be marked and mourned – that is intertwined

with the post-Enlightenment conception of a common humanity.

The identification of “universality” in a third world work of fiction has long been a

mode of praise and acceptance, and a means of selecting which third world texts are worth

reading in the West; this practice clearly “take[s] the white reader to be the norm”

(Mukherjee 85). In her analysis of the popularity of The Kite Runner, Meghan O’Rourke

notes that the text has been particularly intriguing to the US reader because, while it allows

for the consumption of difference, it does not challenge the reader to meaningfully contend

with that difference:

Study the 631 Amazon reviews and scores of newspaper features about The Kite Runner, andyou’ll find that most fail to mention that the narrator converts from a secular Muslim to adevoutly practicing one. Hosseini’s story indulges this readerly impulse to downplay what ishard to grasp and play up what seems familiar [ … ]. As the Denver Post reviewer was all toohappy to reassure readers, “This isn’t a ‘foreign’ book. Unlike Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago,Hosseini’s narrative resonates with familiar rhythms and accessible ideas.” (O’Rourke np,emphasis added)

To some degree, the novel’s portrayal of Amir’s turn to Islam as personal spirituality prob-

lematizes the totalizing representations of Islam in western media accounts of the so-called

“War on Terror”, and, more generally, in a variety of Orientalist discourses. Yet at the

same time, by conforming to the narrative expectations of the western reader, and affirming

the dominant cultural values of that reader (i.e. religion as personal), the novel translates

difference into sameness.


392 D. Jefferess

Appiah’s desire to articulate a cosmopolitan ethic and Butler’s meditations on human

interdependence and the nature of the familiar reflect a fundamental shift from race, nation

and religion as the means of intelligibly marking communal identity and humanity to new,

yet by no means unitary, formulations of the human in a globalized order. Produced at the

same historical moment as these theories of post-national human community, Hosseini’s

The Kite Runner provides an example, as both a particular narrative and a specific cultural

object, of this shift in the discourse of human intelligibility and connection; yet, I argue that

the novel does so in a way that is antithetical to the sort of human community imagined by

Appiah and Butler.

The function of allegory

The Kite Runner opens by foregrounding the themes of sin, guilt, and redemption, which

shape the narrative. Speaking immediately after his father’s friend Rahim Khan has called

him from Afghanistan, the narrator, Amir, contemplates Rahim’s injunction that “there is a

way to be good again” (2). The story that follows is a meticulously crafted – perhaps too

contrived – morality tale. As a child, Amir “has sinned” by failing to intervene to save his

friend Hassan from sexual assault, a failure to act that is complicated by the fact that Amir

does not know that Hassan is his half-brother. Despite growing up together, Amir and

Hassan are different, and this difference is marked by social marginalization: while Amir is

Pashtun, Sunni, and the son of a wealthy Kabul businessman, Hassan is Hazara, Shi’a, and

a servant. The real impact of their status becomes clear when Amir enacts the guilt for his

failure to protect Hassan through further brutality against his friend, which ultimately leads

to Hassan’s exile from the household. The object of Amir’s shame thus expunged, and

following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Amir and his father escape to Pakistan and

then to the United States, where he attends college, gets married, and becomes a successful

novelist.

Yet this particularly American or western ideal of happiness – (heterosexual) marriage,

middle-class privilege, a consumer lifestyle, and a happy nuclear family – cannot be

fulfilled: Amir and his wife, Soraya, are unable to have a child. Following Rahim Khan’s

phone call Amir returns to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to redeem himself: he must rescue

Sohrab, Hassan’s son, from the evil Assef, a Taliban “monster”, and, significantly, Hassan’s

erstwhile rapist. Amir’s act of atonement is not, however, a form of Hollywood-style hero-

ism; rather, it is marked by the willingness to risk his own life for this young child, a

stranger who is, at the same time, intimately familiar (his nephew). The beating that Amir

receives from Assef in the climactic scene of the novel is described as cathartic: “My body

was broken [ … ] but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed” (303). It is the young child

Sohrab who saves Amir by blinding Assef with a brass ball slung from his slingshot. After

much tribulation in Peshawar, Amir ultimately returns to California with his new “son”, and

the novel concludes with the image of Amir and his now complete and happy family.

While many reviewers focus on The Kite Runner’s narrative of personal redemption and

healing, I want to read the novel’s representation of ethics – as individual and personal – in

a way that allows for an analysis of the novel as a political allegory of a global ethics. Before

working through how the text reflects current theories of humanitarianism and global iden-

tity, I want to first explore how the author utilizes the mode of allegory to develop these

ethical themes. Allegories that play on the themes of shame and moral goodness are a recur-

ring trope in the text. For instance, the young Amir’s first short story describes a man who

finds a magic cup that turns tears into pearls. The man becomes so obsessed with the acqui-

sition of wealth that he kills his wife so that he may weep for her loss, and the story ends



with his sitting on a mountain of pearls, helplessly weeping with his wife’s body in his arms

(33). Similarly, following his failure to save Hassan from Assef, Amir realizes that he is the

monster in the lake appearing in Hassan’s dream (91, 111). Finally, Hassan’s favourite story

from the Shahnamah – the tenth-century epic of Persian heroes, from which Amir reads to

Hassan during their childhood – describes a father, Rostam, who inadvertently murders his

long-lost son, Sohrab, who only sought to win his father’s love. Amir, longing for his

father’s approval, uses – and misinterprets – the story as an allegory for his own life,

whereas, in fact, it is Hassan’s relationship as also the son of Amir’s father that is misrec-

ognized within the household. After winning the kite competition, Amir fantasizes about

returning to his home, the story of “Rostam and Sohrab” becoming an allegory for his own

desire for the love of his father:

In my head, I had it all planned: I’d make a grand entrance, a hero, a prized trophy in my blood-ied hands [ … ]. A dramatic moment of silence. Then the old warrior would walk to the youngone, embrace him, acknowledge his worthiness. Vindication. Salvation. Redemption. (72)

In the Shahnamah there is no such moment of redemption: Rostam kills Sohrab, not recog-

nizing him as his son. The Kite Runner, however, particularly through the use of such alle-

gorical stories, as well as symbols such as the recurring image of the lamb and the defeat of

a monster with a slingshot, produces a complete and unambiguous tale of individual ethics.

And, if there is a way to be good, there is also clearly defined evil. Assef is the archetype

of the sinister and the cruel. As a child he is the neighbourhood bully, one who idolizes

Adolf Hitler and is driven by an ideology of ethnic absolutism:

His blue eyes flicked to Hassan. “Afghanistan is the land of Pashtuns. It always has been,always will be. We are the true Afghans, the pure Afghans, not this Flat-Nose here. His peoplepollute our homeland, our watan. They dirty our blood.” He made a sweeping, grandiosegesture with his hands. “Afghanistan for Pashtuns, I say. That’s my vision.” (43)

Assef’s childhood hatred for Hazaras portends the Taliban ideology of Pashtun supremacy

that justified massacres such as that at Mazar-I-Sharif, as well as the execution of Hassan

by the Taliban and Assef’s enslavement of the young child Sohrab. Amir explains that he

would later learn that the English word for a “creature” such as Assef is “sociopath” (41).

As such, Assef is not simply the doer of evil, he is evil. Evil is embodied in his actions

(Assef’s rape of Hassan) or ideas (of ethnic supremacy), but is not reducible to these; it is,

significantly, an irredeemable condition. By contrast, Hassan – as well as his son Sohrab –

is pure and innocent. As he is being abused, Hassan’s face has a look of resignation, and he

is imagined by Amir as the lamb that he would have to slay to win the love of his father (81,

82). Hassan, Amir contends, is “incapable of hurting anyone” (11); he means everything he

says and assumes everyone else does too (58). He is loyal, benevolent, good.

Against these archetypal figures of good and evil, Amir is fashioned as conflicted and

dynamic, exhibiting modern, western sensibilities. Amir’s “liberal maverick” (190) father

rants against the Mullahs, challenging the teachings that young Amir brings home. His

childhood is remarkably similar to the idealized American male childhood of drinking

Coca-Cola and playing “Cops and Robbers”. As a child, Amir’s father disparages his desire

to write – real boys/men don’t read poetry, they play soccer (21) – and laments his inability

to fight back, for “a boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand

up to anything” (24). Amir’s shame at not saving Hassan is felt not simply as personal fail-

ure but as a failure to fulfil his role as a male. While his father regards him as insufficiently

masculine, Assef regards him as a traitor to his ethnicity and religion, due to his relationship


394 D. Jefferess

with Hassan and the secular liberal ideology of his household. Yet this liberal sensibility

prepares Amir for the immigrant experience in America, as it is patterned upon the “idea”

of America, which his father loves (132). And while Amir’s shame is embedded in his fail-

ure to perform his masculinity, he is simultaneously an “enlightened” male in that he

critiques Afghan culture’s gender double-standards; Soraya characterizes him as “different

from every other Afghan guy” (189). The story, then, is not simply a tale of individual

ethics. As protagonist, hence the natural object for the reader’s affinity, the liberal, privi-

leged, Americanized, and secular Muslim Amir grows, matures, and assumes his responsi-

bility as a man in the world in the tradition of the Bildungsroman.

Reading Amir’s maturation within the tradition of the coming-of-age narrative,

however, fails to recognize how Amir’s story provides an allegory of the Afghan nation. For

Mir Hekmutallah Sadat the novel reflects the history of Afghanistan and the nation’s need

for healing. Utilizing the framework of national allegory, Sadat, unlike the non-Afghan

reviewers of the novel cited above, argues that the historical setting for the novel provides

not simply the backdrop for the action but also a symbolic history of Afghanistan which illu-

minates the inequalities and injustices that result from notions of ethnic difference. The rela-

tionship between the Hazara and Shi’a servant Hassan, who is discriminated against and

abused throughout the novel, and the Pashtun and Sunni upper class Amir, is symbolic of

Afghanistan’s religious and ethnic tensions. However, Hassan’s real status as Amir’s half-

brother, as well as Amir’s adoption of Sohrab, reflect, in the tradition of national allegory,

a form of healing or union. Yet, ironically, this new relationship or union is fulfilled not in

Afghanistan but in the United States.

Responding to the widespread critical reaction against Fredric Jameson’s contention that

third world texts necessarily constitute national allegories, Julie McGonegal argues:

“national allegories are well suited to the challenging task of analyzing the textual fissures

and fractures that arise out of the social and subjective fragmentation of the national forma-

tion” (260). Thus, Amir cannot function as a symbolic figure representing the “nation” in a

simple one-to-one equivalence; rather, his allegorical position as displaced subject helps to

“disclose the ambivalent and contradictory positions occupied by individuals and collectiv-

ities involved in the complicated and difficult business of nation-making” (260). While I am

sensitive to Sadat’s reading of the novel as an allegory of national healing, I am tentative

about reading it as a “writing home” (to the people of Afghanistan and the Afghan

diaspora). In many ways, the text may be regarded more appropriately as writing to empire:

Farsi, Dari, and Pashtu words are almost all translated in the text, sometimes even within

the dialogue, as if the characters are actually speaking in English and translating these

words. Further, as O’Rourke contends, Hosseini “presents information with the diligence of

a Frommer’s travel guide” and makes use of a discourse of popular self-help therapy,

presenting this tale of the Other in the idiom of the western observer. Certainly the novel

does expose the ethnic-religious tensions in Afghanistan and the historical problem of mate-

rial inequalities. However, when analysing the novel in the context of its primary market, it

seems to present an allegory of the transcendence of national borders in order to affirm

contemporary constructions of transnational humanity and benevolence, particularly as

articulated in the West.

The narrative of The Kite Runner is allegorical in the sense that the story is concerned

primarily with moral questions regarding responsibility and intervention, and it reflects, or

is translatable into, contemporary ethical-political discourses of humanitarianism and

globalized identities. Hence I read the novel as a “political allegory”, which Imre Szeman

suggests is how Jameson actually uses the term “national allegory” (816). By allegory, then,

I do not mean simply a literary form – in the tradition of Bunyan – but also a critical



perspective. As Szeman argues, to understand allegory as a way of reading “foregrounds

metacritically the cultural/social situation of the reader of the text and indeed the very fact

that every interpretation of a reading is a kind of translation mechanism that it is best to

acknowledge” (812). This echoes Jameson’s contention that the study of “Third World

culture” by the reader in the West “necessarily entails a new view of ourselves from the

outside” (68). To read the novel as a political allegory therefore places the reader within

the symbolic framework of the narrative rather than as an outsider deriving pleasure from

the personal/psychological exploration of supposedly universal values, or as a tourist,

coming to “know” and “understand” an Other. As a reading position allegory draws the

specific story of Amir and his personal quest for redemption out into a second, wider story,

in which the reader is implicated in the ethical problem of human interconnection that Judith

Butler contemplates. She writes: “I cannot think the question of responsibility alone, in

isolation from the Other; if I do, I have taken myself out of the relational bind that frames

the problem of responsibility from the start” (46). This relational bind is disavowed in both

approaches to the novel discussed above – as a universal humanist story, on the one hand,

or, on the other, as “ethnography” seeking to translate the “strange” and “foreign” into intel-

ligible national narrative.

Moral obligation to be good

Rahim Khan’s reminder to Amir that there is a way “to be good again”, and the way this

edict becomes Amir’s mission in the novel, reflects not just an individual dilemma that

the “universal” reader can identify with, but the way in which “goodness” and “human-

ity” become imbricated in the politics of the familiar and the modern. Specifically, it

reflects Mahmood Mamdani’s recent engagement with how race, nation, and/or religion,

as essentialized difference, may be transcended through the demarcation of an individual

as “good”. Reading The Kite Runner as political allegory, then, I want to examine the

object of the “face” in the novel as a marker of human intelligibility and, hence, ethical

obligation.

Amir’s story of his life is marked by a series of images of faces: for instance, a Mullah’s

ugly face (17), Soraya’s bloodless face after reading of Taliban atrocities (290), and the

puffy blue face of a man’s body, hanging in the streets of Taliban-controlled Kabul (271).

However, no character’s face is described in the detail afforded to the faces of Hassan and

Sohrab. Amir begins the narrative of his childhood with the memory of climbing poplar

trees with his friend Hassan whom he introduces to the reader:

I can still see Hassan up on that tree, sunlight flickering through the leaves on his almostperfectly round face, a face like a Chinese doll chiselled from hardwood: his flat, broad noseand slanting, narrow eyes like bamboo leaves, eyes that looked, depending on the light, gold,green, even sapphire. I can still see his tiny low-set ears and that pointed stub of chin, a meatyappendage that looked like it was added as a mere afterthought. And the cleft lip, just left ofmidline, where the Chinese doll maker’s instrument may have slipped, or perhaps he hadsimply grown tired and careless. (3)

This meticulous description of Hassan’s face, followed by repeated references to it, serves

to humanize Hassan; yet the repeated comparison to a doll – both here and throughout the

novel – also reflects the way in which Hassan’s face is imaged as something crafted, but

imperfect, individual, yet standard: a toy. Marginalized as a Shi’a, Hazara servant, yet the

narrator’s closest friend, Hassan, through this initial description of his face, is marked as an

object of pity. His hare lip prevents him from smiling, we are told, and so he has a


396 D. Jefferess

perpetually sad face. Then, after Amir’s father gives him the gift of surgery to “fix” his lip,

he is raped by Assef and so loses any will to smile.

In Precarious Life Butler draws upon Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the face to theorize

the problem of the intelligibility of the Other and the ethics of responsibility. She explains

that she seeks to consider the “face” in order to “explain how it is that others make moral

claims on us, address moral demands to us, ones that we do not ask for, ones that we are not

free to refuse” (131). The initial description of Hassan’s face figures the moral claim that

shapes the narrative of the novel; Hassan’s face is that of goodness, and Amir’s redemption

depends on his ability to fulfil this moral demand, one that is marked as ethical by the shame

and guilt he cannot escape. When Amir arrives in Pakistan to meet Rahim Khan, Rahim tells

him of finding Hassan when he was 23; Hassan’s face had changed as a result of the hard-

ship of his exile from the household – his skin was darker and tougher, and he had lost some

teeth – but Rahim assures Amir that he would have recognized him (216). Amir’s moral

obligation is particularly delineated through this recognition of familiarity. When Amir

watches as Hassan is raped, he notes the resignation in Hassan’s face, the look of the lamb

(81), an image which both serves to humanize Hassan but also reflects religiously shaped

reading positions that frame how such an image signifies: for instance the Qur’anic story of

Ibrahim/Ishmael or the Christian notion of the lamb of God. When Amir first sees Sohrab

as Assef’s prisoner, dressed in girls’ clothing, it is once again the face that marks his famil-

iarity – his humanity: “The resemblance was breathtaking. Disorienting [ … ] It was the

Chinese doll face of my childhood [ … ]. His head was shaved, his eyes darkened with

mascara, and his cheeks glowed with an unnatural red” (292–93). For the hateful Assef,

difference is marked by presumptions of ethnic facial characteristics, such as the flat nose

of the inferior Hazara; in contrast, despite the degradations the child has experienced, partic-

ularly his de-masculinization by Assef, the familiarity of the child’s facial features rein-

forces, or serves symbolically to produce, an ethical obligation that Amir is compelled to

fulfil.

While Assef’s face is never described in the same detail as Hassan’s, major characteris-

tics are identified throughout the narrative. Repeated references are made to Assef’s blond

hair and blue eyes, and other features are highlighted piecemeal, although his whole face is

never described. His eyes are sinister and he wears “a savage sort of grin on his lips” (42).

The power that Hassan exercises over Assef, in one childhood incident, is the ability to

deform Assef’s face with his slingshot, but Assef’s face is never whole or recognizable as

his alone; it is always described through its parts, which bear the mark of archetypal evil.

Thus, for instance, when Assef beats Amir in the duel to see who will “win” Sohrab, Assef’s

spit-shining teeth are revealed by his “snarl” and his bloodshot eyes roll in his head (302).

Similarly, his specific act of violence against Hassan – sodomy – marks him as deviant from

the norms of heterosexual masculinity. He is a “creature”, non-human.

Butler identifies the way in which the figure of the face, as in the case of Assef, can also

serve to dehumanize. Providing as examples the “face” of Hitler, Saddam Hussein, or

Osama bin Laden, Butler contends that the face of evil ceases to be a face at all; the faces

of these men, made spectacle and repeatedly represented, disavow their humanity and, with

it, any capacity for redemption (Butler 150–51).

In Appiah’s theory of the cosmopolitan, he recognizes the moral obligations that we have

to members of our own family or community, but focuses on the problem of moral obligation

to the stranger. He writes: “If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely

doesn’t matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifica-

tions are due” (153). Similarly, in her treatment of the figure of the face, Butler is interested

in the way in which discourse allows, or limits, recognition of the Other’s precariousness:



“To respond to the face, to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious

in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself” (134). By contrast, the face that

compels Amir’s moral obligation is an intimately familiar one, made painstakingly familiar

to the reader.

Assef’s face, on the other hand, although not described explicitly, necessarily resembles

the archetypal faces of “evil”. Significantly, the face of Hitler, with whom Assef is specifi-

cally associated, has been produced in the West not as a sign of the European capability for

inhumanity but as marking exception, evil. Hence Assef’s blue eyes, which reflect his

mixed racial and cultural heritage as Pashtun and German, do not mark his affiliation with

the West, but, ironically, his infrahumanity, the threatening result of miscegenation. In each

case – the representations of Hassan/Sohrab and Assef, respectively – moral obligation is

defined through antithetical notions of familiarity: the familiar as intimate or familial

(Sohrab), and the familiar as commonly reproduced (the face of evil). As a result, the

novel’s production of moral obligation is limited to the familial and so avoids engagement

with “difference”; there is no need to explain or understand why Assef thinks and acts as he

does; he is simply the antagonist, hence “evil”. The moral lesson of the novel, in opposition

to its own perceived value as a cultural text – the way in which it represents difference –

appears to contradict the ethical philosophy expressed by Appiah and Butler: moral obliga-

tion to the Other cannot be limited to the notion that familiarity provides the condition for

the intelligibility of the human. To read the text as political allegory, then, problematizes the

simplistic dichotomy of good and evil and foregrounds Assef’s eyes not as markers of an

evil Other but as reflecting the western reader’s complicity with, and connection to, histo-

ries of violence, including the war in Afghanistan long before 9/11 2001.

In the climactic scene in which Assef is defeated it is Sohrab, not Amir, who incapaci-

tates Assef long enough for the two to escape. Where Amir is consumed by the shame of

having failed to act to intervene in the rape of Hassan, young Sohrab feels guilty for having

blinded Assef:

“Will God put me in hell for what I did to that man?” he asks. His face twisted and strained tostay composed. “Father used to say it’s wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they don’tknow any better, and because bad people sometimes become good”. (334)

Amir responds:

Not always, Sohrab [ … ]. The man who hurt you [ … ] he tried to hurt me once when I wasyour age, but your father saved me. Your father was very brave and he was always rescuing mefrom trouble, standing up for me. So one day the bad man hurt your father [ … ] in a very badway, and I … I couldn’t save your father the way he saved me [ … ] there are bad people inthis world, and sometimes [ … ] you have to stand up to them. What you did to that man is whatI should have done to him all those years ago. You gave him what he deserved [ … ]. (334–35)

Amir’s response reflects the simple binary logic of morality offered to a child; his aim, in

part, is to ease the child’s conscience, to assure him that he will not be punished for his act

of violence and that he need not feel guilt or remorse. Ironically, it is the pure, naïve and

innocent Sohrab who must, in the end, perpetrate this “necessary” violence. Baba’s bravado

and Amir’s desire to be the man his father wants him to be frame redemption in specifically

masculine terms, but this masculine rhetoric serves only to rationalize the violence that

Sohrab must perpetrate.

This rhetoric echoes, on the one hand, the West’s – and particularly George W. Bush’s

– rhetoric of the so-called War on Terror: there are bad people in the world who deserve


398 D. Jefferess

punishment. The claim of Canadian Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier that the job of

Canadian soldiers in the current war in Afghanistan is to “kill people” and that the enemy

are “detestable murderers and scumbags” (Thorne np) initially created controversy in

Canada, but has been quickly forgotten as the Canadian media report only on Canadian

casualties; Afghans, civilian or combatants, need not be constructed as “detestable” to

justify their killing, for within the media discourse of the NATO presence in Afghanistan

their deaths are not marked at all. More importantly, I think, Amir’s rationalization of

Sohrab’s act of violence also conforms to elements of the patriarchal rhetoric of humanitar-

ian responsibility. For instance, Lloyd Axworthy, who has been a key proponent of the

Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which was accepted by UN member states in 2005,

attributes the problem of global violence to the “evil” of individuals such as Foday Sankoh,

head of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, and the avarice of “predators” such

as international terrorists, drug dealers, small arms traders, illegal-diamond merchants, and

people smugglers (Axworthy 261, 2–3). The Responsibility to Protect doctrine justifies

international intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state when a government is deemed

by the “international community” to be “unwilling or unable” to protect its own citizens

from gross human rights abuses (“Responsibility” viii). The doctrine is formulated within a

utilitarian rhetoric inflected with an ethical language that largely elides the historical and

structural causes and conditions for the sorts of violence and abuse it seeks to remedy.

Writing of peacekeeping activities in particular, Sherene Razack suggests that the moral

cause of western humanitarianism has historically been justified by the need to protect a

dehumanized or infantilized Other. “With its emphasis on pity and compassion”, Razack

argues, “saving the Other can be a position that discourages respect and true belief in the

personhood of Others” (155). As a result, the discourse of moral necessity that underwrites

this humanitarian ethic produces specific limits on human intelligibility.

The Kite Runner, as much as it provides a window into Afghan culture, also projects

back to the western reader the simple moral absolutes that inform the War on Terror as

paradoxically both a “war”, based on the fulfilment of vengeance or justice, and a humani-

tarian project of “sharing” western values, such as democracy and liberalism; for instance,

saving oppressed Muslim children/women from misogynist, oppressive Muslim men.

Mamdani captures this paradox through the notion of Culture Talk, which he argues is

articulated in two distinct yet complementary ways: first, the West produces itself as

modern by identifying Others who are not yet modern; hence an ethical relationship based

on philanthropy. On the other hand, the West also produces itself in relation to those

deemed “anti-modern”, for whom a disciplinary apparatus, in the form of military action, is

required (Mamdani 18). As a result, the discourse of the War on Terror – though Mamdani

narrates a history that long pre-dates the 9/11 attacks – produces “good Muslims” (read:

modern, secular, and westernized) against “bad Muslims” (read: doctrinal, anti-modern,

and virulent). He argues that “unless proved to be good, every Muslim was presumed to be

bad. All Muslims were now under the obligation to prove their credentials by joining in a

war against bad Muslims” (15). The Kite Runner provides for Afghans a human face, other-

wise not recognizable in popular representations of the country as a site of seemingly

never-ending warfare. Yet the reception of the novel also suggests that Hosseini has not

simply made the “face” of Afghanistan intelligible for the non-Afghan reader; in fact, the

text simultaneously reproduces the narrative that Mamdani describes, a narrative of “good”

Muslims in need of protection and refuge, and who are on the path to modernity, and “bad”

Muslims who must get what they “deserve”. Such a narrative certainly problematizes

homogenizing gestures within the West that reduce Islam to Taliban terrorism or funda-

mentalism. The questions that remain unaddressed, or only partly addressed, are these: to



what extent is the desire to know or understand the Other also the desire to evade the prob-

lem of difference? To what extent does this sort of cultural understanding seek comfort in

the idea that there are good Muslims who think, act and talk as “we” do? To read The Kite

Runner as political allegory therefore requires an examination of what Jameson calls the

“discontinuous and heterogeneous spirit of the form” (73). Read in this way, the novel does

not “teach us about Afghanistan” so much as provide a venue for interrogating the ethical

discourse that produces the subject as human, or as capable of, and entitled to, human

rights.

The failure of the novel to address the problem of difference as that which is non-

familiar and non-archetypal is reinforced by the novel’s problematic representation of

“evil”. Assef’s constant racial marking as “Aryan” (blond hair, blue eyes) is undercut by

the clear suggestion in the novel that his behaviour is motivated not by religion (“Islamic

Fundamentalism”) or ethnic hatred but simply by irrational malevolence. Such a descrip-

tion vindicates Mamdani’s suggestion that “evil is understood outside of historical time.

By seeing the perpetrators of violence as either cultural renegades or moral perverts we

are unable to think through the link between modernity and violence” (4). Read as politi-

cal allegory, The Kite Runner does not reinforce the simple binary framework and ethical-

religious absolutism of an ideology like that articulated by Samuel P. Huntington’s The

Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1998). Nonetheless, the repre-

sentation of conflict in the novel is in many ways indebted to a similar civilizational rhet-

oric. While Mamdani contends that it is no longer the market (capitalism) or the state

(democracy) but rather culture (modernity) that marks the dividing line of current global

conflicts, I would suggest that the presumption of modernity (as encapsulating culture,

economics, and politics) is the emergent framework for defining the human. This frame-

work is obviously indebted to earlier European imperial ideologies, with the significant

difference that race, ethnicity and religion as primary markers of identity and humanity

are both unstable and insufficient. The climactic episode of the novel – in which Sohrab is

saved and Amir and the child escape the “savage” Assef – functions allegorically not to

reaffirm the distinction between “Us” and “Them” but between the “good” whom we can

either identify with (Amir) or protect/pity (Hassan/Sohrab), and the “bad”, who in this

case is marked not so much by race or religion, but by the refusal to be civilized or

modern. Yet this rejection of modernity, as Mamdani suggests, is ironically a product of

that very same modernity, and, I would suggest, this narrative framework is just as famil-

iar, or universal, as the Us/Them binary of Huntington’s civilization theory and earlier

Orientalist constructions of essentialized cultural difference, marked as racial or religious.

The discourse of “goodness”, as an ethic of humanitarianism, describes and constructs the

difference between those who can be constituted as human, or redeemable, and those who

cannot. At the same time, it occludes this difference by placing it within the terms of a

binary rhetoric similar to those that have served to articulate previous models of radical

“othering”. It is precisely this difference that Appiah and Butler seek to acknowledge in

order to theorize a renewed humanitarian ethics; in The Kite Runner this difference need

not be comprehended.

Note

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the Canadian Associationfor Commonwealth Languages and Literature Studies (CACLALS). The author would like tothank the anonymous referees of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing for important insights thathelped to shape the argument of this article.


400 D. Jefferess

Notes on contributor

David Jefferess is an Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of BritishColumbia Okanagan in Kelowna, Canada. He published Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Libera-tion, and Transformation in 2008.

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