Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror"

Disrupting Memory

Sarah O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367443030
• eBook ISBN: 9781000386424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores the ways in which transnational fiction in the post-9/11 era can intervene in discourse surrounding the "war on terror" to advocate for marginalised perspectives. Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror" conceptualises global political discourse about the "war on terror" as incongruous, with transnational memory frames instituted in Western nations centralising 9/11 as uniquely traumatic, excluding the historical and present-day experiences of Afghans under Western—specifically American—hegemonic violence. Recent developments in trauma studies explain how dominant Western trauma theory participates in this exclusion, failing to account for the ongoing suffering common to non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. O'Brien explores how Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), Nadeem Aslam (The Wasted Vigil, The Blind Man's Garden), and Kamila Shamsie (Burnt Shadows) represent marginalised perspectives in the context of the "war on terror".

1 Translating Trauma in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

Introduction

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner was published in 2003 to what David Jefferess describes as “little fanfare” (2009, 389). As the first Afghan novel published in English, The Kite Runner eventually garnered attention in a post-9/11 political climate fascinated by the potential for insight offered by the novel’s setting and subject matter. Jeff Zaleski of Publishers Weekly praised the novel for its representation of an “obscure nation” that had become “pivotal in the global politics of a new millennium” (cited in Jefferess 2009, 389). Hosseini’s novel found a wide readership, particularly in North America, and “spent more than five years on the New York Times bestseller list” (Jefferess 2009, 389). It was also made into a film in 2007, thus cementing its cultural significance and bringing Hosseini’s story to an ever-wider audience.

The enduring popularity of Hosseini’s novel speaks to its role as part of the narrative running contrary to the rhetoric of hatred and demonisation of Muslim populations fostered in the post-9/11 era. The importance of a novel such as this should not be underestimated, especially when one considers its release during what was for a new generation Afghanistan’s entrance onto the global political scene. 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 role that Western politics has had in its development and much of its turmoil. Hosseini’s novel therefore takes on the task of advocating for Afghanistan in a Western context whose dominant discourse had effectively reduced it to “the caves of Tora Bora and poppy fields and Bin Laden” (Hosseini 2013, III). In a foreword to the tenth anniversary edition of The Kite Runner, Hosseini describes feeling satisfaction at the notion that his novel “helped make Afghanistan a real place” for readers (2013, III). Hosseini acknowledges a worldwide audience in “India, South Africa, and Tel Aviv” and specifies Western readers in “Sydney, London, and Arkansas”, noting his personal experiences in California as influential in his writing (2013, III); he expresses delight that The Kite Runner has helped to make Afghanistan more than “just another unhappy, chronically troubled, afflicted land” for his readers and that they come away able to “put a personal face” on his homeland (2013, III).

The Kite Runner tells the story of two young Afghan boys, Amir and Hassan, the latter the servant of the former, whose lives are shaped by the perpetual conflict that grips Afghanistan in the latter half of the 20th century: Russian occupation; the upheaval caused by Mujahideen warlords; the rise of the Taliban. We mainly follow the emotional toll these events take on Amir, who is established within the novel as Hosseini’s primary representative or narrative double. In the foreword to his novel, Hosseini admits that his “childhood and Amir’s mirrored each other in many ways” (2013, I). Amir’s childhood in Afghanistan is one of relative privilege; as the son of a wealthy businessman and a member of the Pashtun upper class—Afghanistan’s dominant ethnic majority—Amir is shielded from the worst of the violence in his country unlike, as we will discover, his Hazara counterpart, Hassan. By the novel’s end, Amir is a citizen of the United States and effectively an outsider in his country of origin; due to ongoing conflict he is denied the opportunity to remain in Afghanistan and instead is forced to emigrate with his father and pursue his career as a writer in the West. In San Francisco, Amir settles and marries Soraya, a fellow Afghan emigrant, and continues to grapple with his identity as an Afghan American. In the novel’s later stages, Amir, now an established novelist in the West, returns to Afghanistan to witness what has become of the world he left behind. On this trip, Amir finally comes to terms with the trauma which forced his emigration and the collapse of his family unit, as well as the ongoing turmoil stifling Afghanistan’s development. In this section of the novel, Amir recovers his potential as a storyteller, and Hosseini brings us full circle to the creation of The Kite Runner’s metafictional structure: Amir commits his coming-of-age story—recognised as allegorical by Jefferess (2009, 394) and other critics—to narrative form, representing Afghanistan’s return to agency.

The Kite Runner emerged in the post-9/11 period as a novel that challenged the rhetoric legitimising the invasion of Afghanistan. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were framed as an instance of collective trauma for a Western world—and specifically an American society—unused to such violence. Jenny Edkins describes “the intrusion of the real of death and devastation into New York on a sunny September morning” as “a brutal reminder that all security is a fantasy” (Edkins 2003, 227). Efforts to reinstate state authority and to lessen feelings of powerlessness were immediate in the aftermath of the attacks and were seen particularly in the language of remembrance and the rhetoric of the “war on terror” (Edkins 2003, 228). The resultant conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq represent the culmination of this rhetoric and were integral to efforts at reclaiming authority in the aftermath of 9/11.

In entering into this discourse and explicitly attempting to “put a human face” on his “homeland”, Hosseini rails against one-dimensional framings of Afghanistan that rendered it synonymous with the Taliban or al-Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks (2013, III). In combating this framing, Hosseini might be seen to take on the mantle of the national writer, a spokesperson of sorts for Afghanistan in the West. In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova writes about the preponderance of national writers among those representing the “periphery” in world literature; she argues that peripheral writers, deprived of an “autonomous” literary legacy, are reduced to the role they play in furthering a national political cause, whether they embrace such a task or reject its burdens (2004, 41). Meanwhile, sociologist Sarah M. Corse notes that “national literatures had traditionally been understood as reflections of the unique character and experiences of the nation” (1997, 1). Within this conceptualisation of national literatures, national writers are tasked with ascertaining the dominant traits, values, and cultural norms of their respective nations for canonical representation where such a canon is considered essential to the representation of national identity. However, Corse challenges this understanding of the role of national literatures as simplistic, noting that such canons are more often involved in the formation and maintenance of collective identities (1997, 3). Corse succinctly argues that “the pairing of literature and the nation is in fact a social construction that performs powerful and important cultural work” (2012, 3).

In this sense, Hosseini’s project in The Kite Runner, as articulated by the author himself, does appear to fall within the remit of the national novelist. However, to categorise Hosseini as a national author in the style described by Casanova or Corse is perhaps simplistic or reductive given Hosseini’s determination not simply to reflect or participate in the cultivation of a national character but to locate Afghanistan in a transnational context as a nation long shaped by its interaction with other spaces. The Kite Runner opens in December 2001 with an adult Amir casting his memory back to a day the previous summer when a family friend, Rahim Khan, called from Pakistan. Hosseini refers to landmarks like Golden Gate Park and Spreckels Lake to clearly situate the narrative in San Francisco (2003, 1). Conspicuously, the time of writing is noted as December 2001, but no reference is made to the context of the post-9/11 period, unavoidably evoked by the date and location. The significance of this temporal setting is instead allowed to linger over the opening of the narrative, charging it with expectation as Amir remembers his childhood in Kabul—a city under invasion by US troops in December 2001—and something that occurred in a “deserted alley” in 1975 that has shaped his life, an incident that we later discover was Hassan’s rape (Hosseini 2003, 1). In this way, Hosseini maps a connection between Kabul in 1975 and America in the post-9/11 period, implicitly linking these spaces for the reader. The narrative that we are about to experience, this opening suggests, will explicate the relationship between these times and these places, offering an understanding of the ways in which they are linked. Similarly, Amir is presented as someone shaped by his experience in Kabul but who now considers San Francisco “home”, a product of transnational movement (Hosseini 2003, 2).

Importantly, Hosseini’s declared interest in the national frame does not undermine the project of tracing Afghanistan’s transnational relations. As noted in the introduction to Disrupting Memory, the nation remains an important framework within transnational systems. Jie-Hyun Lim argues that the “most frequent misunderstanding of nationalism is that nationalism is national” (2010, 138). As such, Hosseini’s attention to the national does not preclude his consideration as a transnational author; his attempts to depict Afghanistan, even as he fixates on the national context, are automatically imbricated in transnational, global political discourse. This reality is borne out in Hosseini’s case when we consider the proven transnational appeal of his work, with The Kite Runner and Hosseini’s follow-up novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), selling over 38 million copies worldwide, 10 million in the US alone (Book Facts). Much like Amir, Hosseini was born in Afghanistan during a period of relative stability only to find himself—the son of a UN diplomat—seeking political asylum in the US by 1980 as his native country was thrown into turmoil during the Soviet-Afghan war. Like Amir, Hosseini has spent most of his life in America since arriving as a refugee. Hosseini trained and worked as a physician before he found success as a novelist, his first novel, The Kite Runner, taking on the task of depicting Afghanistan at a moment when it had found rather one-dimensional representation in Western discourse as a war-torn land dominated by terrorist organisations.

This chapter argues that Hosseini adopts a bildungsroman form as he traces Amir’s journey to realise his ambition as a novelist. In this sense, the structure of The Kite Runner mimics that of a performative metafiction, as we are privy to the events of the novel as they come to us via the narrative voice of a novelist detailing his journey toward being able to tell this very story. Through the relationship between Amir and his father, Hosseini covers issues such as religion and alcohol, presenting a pluralistic, cosmopolitan 1970s Kabul at ease with its transnationalism. I argue that—though, as we will discover, Hosseini’s conscious transnationalism is in some ways problematic—the bildungsroman form creates narrative space at the beginning of the novel for the imagination of Afghanistan as a complex nation with a history comprised of more than its tragedies: we are given a glimpse of a “before”.

On another textual level, however, this metafictional retelling of Amir’s bildungsroman, once complete, can be read as an allegorical representation of Afghanistan as a nation struggling to assert agency and achieve self-advocacy within the international community. While several critics have addressed the allegorical aspects of The Kite Runner (Jefferess 2009; Banita 2012), I examine Hosseini’s depiction of Afghanistan’s history of conflict as writing-back to limited post-9/11 memory frames, looking specifically at the ways in which his treatment of this suffering and prolonged national upheaval bears out current criticism of trauma theory in Western scholarship as limited in scope. Where Afghanistan’s national trauma is translated into Hassan’s rape, witnessed by Amir, Hosseini’s narrative ultimately fails to bear witness to the depth of colonial trauma, adopting a recovery-arc that elides the trauma of present-day violence in the region.

Bildungsroman

In the years since The Kite Runner’s 2003 publication, the novel has incurred significant criticism for its attempts to transcend “the locality of its setting to provide a universal and, ultimately, comfortingly familiar narrative” (Jefferess 2009, 389). The “comfortingly familiar narrative” takes the form of the bildungsroman which Hosseini employs to trace Amir’s development. As the bildungsroman proceeds we are introduced to a young Amir living in his boyhood home in the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul. The performance of metafiction here dictates that Hosseini does not present Amir’s youthful perspective via a straightforward first-person narrative voice; we are not privy to the events of the novel’s alternate temporal space as though they are occurring in the present. Instead, Hosseini maintains a layer of textuality which sees Amir’s childhood experiences filtered through the narrating perspective of his elder self as he engages in the project of communicating these events to a reading audience. As such, the interpretative distance afforded by the intervening decades is brought to bear on the narrative frame through which we witness the events of Amir’s childhood. This explicit sense of distance and removal forces the reader to continually reckon with the location of both Hosseini and Amir, as author and narrator respectively, firmly in the West, thus highlighting further the transnational quality of the text.

As Amir recalls the circumstances of his youth and the experiences that shaped his development, his relationship with his father stands out as of singular importance. Baba is presented within the narrative as representative of a particular part of Afghanistan’s history: the period during King Zahir Shah’s reign when Afghanistan enjoyed a prolonged period of prosperity and peace. Baba is aligned with this time in Afghan history and embodies the independence and progressivism by which this era is characterised in the narrative; he was born in “1933 … the year King Zahir Shah began his forty-year reign” (Hosseini 2003, 23). Amir’s interactions with this stalwart figure encapsulate the complex environment in which our protagonist is attempting to find his voice as a storyteller. Baba, meaning father, as he is known throughout the narrative, is described in quite formidable terms; he “was a force of nature, a towering Pashtun specimen with a thick beard, a wayward crop of curly brown hair unruly as the man himself” with “hands that looked capable of uprooting a willow tree” (Hosseini 2003, 12). Baba functions within the narrative not just as a father to Amir, but as a community leader; most significantly he gains local recognition for building an orphanage, cementing his status as a father-figure within the community.

Amir’s struggle to overcome his father’s disapproval and become a successful writer represents the novel’s primary engagement with the bildungsroman form. Amir’s efforts, and subsequent failures, to live up to his father’s expectations create space within the narrative for “speaking-back” wherein Hosseini can communicate significant aspects of Afghan culture to a primarily Western reading audience. For example, Baba attempts to share a love of soccer with Amir, who can muster only indifference, having not “inherited” a shred of Baba’s “athletic talents” (Hosseini 2003, 19). We are told that Baba travelled to “Tehran for a month to watch the World Cup” in 1970 when most of Afghanistan did not yet have access to television (Hosseini 2003, 19). Beyond highlighting Baba’s relative wealth and privilege—a point to which we will return—his interest in what is perhaps the quintessential international sport demonstrates the extent to which Afghan society contained transnational influences in the 1970s. At the same time, however, Baba can be seen to indulge in interests that are more specific to Afghanistan, bringing Amir to a local Buzkashi match; watching as men on horseback compete to deposit an animal carcass in a goal, Amir is horrified by the violence of “Afghanistan’s national pastime”, crying “all the way back home”, but the reader is provided with access to an Afghanistan that is diverse in its interests (Hosseini 2003, 20).

It is unusual, of course, for Afghans to be represented in depth in Western media, which tends to present one-dimensional caricatures of Muslim people and communities. Halim Rane argues that the exclusion of “more representative stories and images that provide a more complete picture” eventually creates “narrow, skewed perspectives” that hinder cross-cultural understanding (2014, 2). Hosseini attempts to counter such one-dimensional representation through nuanced treatments of Baba and Amir, both of whom are presented as sympathetic despite their frequently oppositional interests and perspectives. Hosseini’s use of the bildungsroman narrative structure, even as it presents Baba as a flawed father who is “disgusted” by his son’s sensitivity, provides insight into the breadth of his character; we are asked to view Baba as an individual neither Othered nor removed from the context of his Afghan heritage (Hosseini 2003, 20).

Critics such as Jefferess have dismissed Hosseini’s characterisation of Afghan society as subscribing to a universalist approach;¹ however, in determining the accuracy of this charge—and to complicate its premise—it is worth pausing over Hosseini’s intentions, acknowledging that his goal is not to erase Afghan culture for the benefit of a Western reader, but to reflect an Afghan society that he recalls as truly cosmopolitan. Hosseini has r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Translating Trauma in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner
• 2 Shared Graves: Empire and Trauma in Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil
• 3 Haunted Communities: Tracing the Ghosts of the “War on Terror” in Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden
• 4 Spectres of Empire in Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows
• Conclusion
• Index