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To be good (again): The Kite Runner as allegory of global ethics
David Jefferess
a
a
University of British Columbia, Okanagan
Online publication date: 20 November 2009
To cite this Article Jefferess, David(2009) 'To be good (again): The Kite Runner as allegory of global ethics', Journal of
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Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Vol. 45, No. 4, December 2009, 389400
ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online
2009 Taylor & Francis
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, Okanagan
Taylor and Francis RJPW_A_427531.sgm 10.1080/17449850903273572 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 1744-9855 (print)/1744-9863 (online) Original Article 2009 Taylor & Francis 45 4000000December 2009 DavidJefferess david.jefferess@ubc.ca
In this article I critically examine Khaled Hosseinis The Kite Runner, and specifically
the novels ethical demand, there is a way to be good again, in relation to
contemporary conceptions of humanitarianism. Using Mamdanis analysis of the
distinction between the good Muslim and the bad Muslim, and reading the novel in
dialogue with Appiahs notion of cosmopolitanism and Butlers theory of human
interdependence, I argue that The Kite Runner reflects a shift from the supremacy of race
and 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 as
an allegory of global ethics.
Keywords: Afghanistan; cosmopolitanism; humanitarianism; political allegory; ethics
Originally published in 2003 with little fanfare, Khaled Hosseinis 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 texts
ethnographic value; The Kite Runner teaches the non-Afghan reader about the history and
culture of Afghanistan (see ORourke). 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: david.jefferess@ubc.ca
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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 Afghanistans 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 texts apparent
humanizing function reflects current theories of a cosmopolitan ethics. I critically examine
Amirs 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 Runners production and
popularity. While Amirs quest for personal redemption may be read as an allegory of
Afghanistans 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 novels
reception reflects an openness to, and a desire for, understanding the Other, it also reflects
the limits of acceptable difference. Specifically, I use Mahmood Mamdanis 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 Appiahs
formulation of the cosmopolitan and Judith Butlers 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
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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 25003000 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 ORourke
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, and
youll find that most fail to mention that the narrator converts from a secular Muslim to a
devoutly practicing one. Hosseinis story indulges this readerly impulse to downplay what is
hard to grasp and play up what seems familiar [ ]. As the Denver Post reviewer was all too
happy to reassure readers, This isnt a foreign book. Unlike Boris Pasternaks Dr. Zhivago,
Hosseinis narrative resonates with familiar rhythms and accessible ideas. (ORourke np,
emphasis added)
To some degree, the novels portrayal of Amirs 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.
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392 D. Jefferess
Appiahs desire to articulate a cosmopolitan ethic and Butlers 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, Hosseinis
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 fathers friend Rahim Khan has called
him from Afghanistan, the narrator, Amir, contemplates Rahims 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, Shia, 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 Hassans exile from the household. The object of Amirs 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 Khans
phone call Amir returns to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to redeem himself: he must rescue
Sohrab, Hassans son, from the evil Assef, a Taliban monster, and, significantly, Hassans
erstwhile rapist. Amirs 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 Runners narrative of personal redemption and
healing, I want to read the novels 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 Amirs 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
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Journal of Postcolonial Writing 393
with his sitting on a mountain of pearls, helplessly weeping with his wifes 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 Hassans dream (91, 111). Finally, Hassans 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 fathers love. Amir, longing for his
fathers approval, uses and misinterprets the story as an allegory for his own life,
whereas, in fact, it is Hassans relationship as also the son of Amirs 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: Id 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 young
one, 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 people
pollute our homeland, our watan. They dirty our blood. He made a sweeping, grandiose
gesture with his hands. Afghanistan for Pashtuns, I say. Thats my vision. (43)
Assefs 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 Assefs 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
(Assefs 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, Hassans 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. Amirs 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, Amirs father disparages his desire
to write real boys/men dont read poetry, they play soccer (21) and laments his inability
to fight back, for a boy who wont stand up for himself becomes a man who cant stand
up to anything (24). Amirs 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
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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 Amirs shame is embedded in his fail-
ure to perform his masculinity, he is simultaneously an enlightened male in that he
critiques Afghan cultures 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 readers 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 Amirs maturation within the tradition of the coming-of-age narrative,
however, fails to recognize how Amirs story provides an allegory of the Afghan nation. For
Mir Hekmutallah Sadat the novel reflects the history of Afghanistan and the nations 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 Shia servant Hassan, who is discriminated against and
abused throughout the novel, and the Pashtun and Sunni upper class Amir, is symbolic of
Afghanistans religious and ethnic tensions. However, Hassans real status as Amirs half-
brother, as well as Amirs 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 Jamesons 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 Sadats 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 ORourke contends, Hosseini presents information with the diligence of
a Frommers 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
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Journal of Postcolonial Writing 395
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 Jamesons 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 Khans reminder to Amir that there is a way to be good again, and the way this
edict becomes Amirs 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 Mamdanis 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.
Amirs story of his life is marked by a series of images of faces: for instance, a Mullahs
ugly face (17), Sorayas bloodless face after reading of Taliban atrocities (290), and the
puffy blue face of a mans body, hanging in the streets of Taliban-controlled Kabul (271).
However, no characters 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 almost
perfectly round face, a face like a Chinese doll chiselled from hardwood: his flat, broad nose
and 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 meaty
appendage that looked like it was added as a mere afterthought. And the cleft lip, just left of
midline, where the Chinese doll makers instrument may have slipped, or perhaps he had
simply grown tired and careless. (3)
This meticulous description of Hassans 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 Hassans face is imaged as something crafted, but
imperfect, individual, yet standard: a toy. Marginalized as a Shia, Hazara servant, yet the
narrators 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
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396 D. Jefferess
perpetually sad face. Then, after Amirs 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 Levinass 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 Hassans face figures the moral claim that
shapes the narrative of the novel; Hassans face is that of goodness, and Amirs 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; Hassans 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). Amirs moral
obligation is particularly delineated through this recognition of familiarity. When Amir
watches as Hassan is raped, he notes the resignation in Hassans 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 Quranic story of
Ibrahim/Ishmael or the Christian notion of the lamb of God. When Amir first sees Sohrab
as Assefs 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 (29293). 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 childs facial features rein-
forces, or serves symbolically to produce, an ethical obligation that Amir is compelled to
fulfil.
While Assefs face is never described in the same detail as Hassans, major characteris-
tics are identified throughout the narrative. Repeated references are made to Assefs 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 Assefs face with his slingshot, but Assefs 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, Assefs
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 15051).
In Appiahs 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
doesnt 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 Others precariousness:
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Journal of Postcolonial Writing 397
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 Amirs moral obligation is an intimately familiar one, made painstakingly familiar
to the reader.
Assefs 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 Assefs 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
novels 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 Assefs eyes not as markers of an
evil Other but as reflecting the western readers 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 to
stay composed. Father used to say its wrong to hurt even bad people. Because they dont
know 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 was
your age, but your father saved me. Your father was very brave and he was always rescuing me
from trouble, standing up for me. So one day the bad man hurt your father [ ] in a very bad
way, and I I couldnt save your father the way he saved me [ ] there are bad people in
this world, and sometimes [ ] you have to stand up to them. What you did to that man is what
I should have done to him all those years ago. You gave him what he deserved [ ]. (33435)
Amirs response reflects the simple binary logic of morality offered to a child; his aim, in
part, is to ease the childs 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, nave and
innocent Sohrab who must, in the end, perpetrate this necessary violence. Babas bravado
and Amirs 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 Wests and particularly George W. Bushs
rhetoric of the so-called War on Terror: there are bad people in the world who deserve
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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, Amirs rationalization of
Sohrabs 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, 23). 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
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Journal of Postcolonial Writing 399
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 novels problematic representation of
evil. Assefs 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 Mamdanis 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. Huntingtons 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 Huntingtons 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 Association
for Commonwealth Languages and Literature Studies (CACLALS). The author would like to
thank the anonymous referees of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing for important insights that
helped to shape the argument of this article.
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400 D. Jefferess
Notes on contributor
David Jefferess is an Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of British
Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, Canada. He published Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Libera-
tion, and Transformation in 2008.
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