Afghanistan in the Cinema

8. A Way to Feel Good Again: The Kite Runner

8 A Way to Feel Good Again The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel The Kite Runner was a sleeper of a book. Published only two years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, it attracted a smattering of attention in the critical press when issued in hardcover. But in between its debut and its trade paperback publication, a plethora of Afghanistan tales fertilized the market, from the release of Osama to the onslaught of Afghanistan documentaries, historical novels, and burqa-clad women’s memoirs. With the way paved, The Kite Runner achieved critical mass at an astonishing speed, spread by word of mouth through the reading circles of America. Hosseini’s story soon appeared on the New York Times best-seller list in 2005 and stayed there for years to come. Afghanistan in the Cinema: Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada) and Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) before the war i-x_1-198_Grah.indd 146 1/25/10 2:27:38 PM The Kite Runner 147 Almost overnight the book was adopted by universities, reprinted in several different editions (even an illustrated one), became the subject of numerous high school study guides, and inevitably inspired a Hollywood feature film. The book’s success was so great that it allowed Hosseini, an Afghan American physician living in San Jose, California, to give up his medical practice for an even more lucrative career as a full-time author. His next work, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was published in 2007 to warm critical response and even warmer sales. It’s not an exaggeration to say that The Kite Runner has become not only the single most important source of information on Afghanistan for American readers but also the most widely read American story ever written about the modern Islamic world. The Kite Runner’s appeal has a great deal to do with its thoroughly gripping plot, a tale of sin and fall, guilt and redemption. The two main characters are Amir and Hassan, two boys living in Afghanistan’s capital in 1978. Amir belongs to the educated elite, his father (Baba) a Westernized and affluent Pashtun Afghan with enough clout to have Ahmad Zahir play at his son’s birthday. Hassan, on the other hand, is their servant’s son, a Hazara and thus the victim of both racial and religious prejudice (the majority of Hazaras are Shias as opposed to the mostly Sunni Pashtuns). Amir and Hassan nevertheless ignore these differences and join together in a variety of boyhood pastimes, from reading Ferdowsi’s book of Persian legends, the Shahnameh, to flying kites in spectacular competitions. After the two friends win the citywide kite-fighting contest, a vicious Pashtun boy named Assef corners Hassan and rapes him. Amir, who witnesses the terrible crime from a distance , does nothing to stop it. Tormented by the memory of his cowardice and guilt, he eventually drives Hassan and his father from his home, only to lose that home himself when the Russians invade. Baba and the child flee Afghanistan, settling in Fremont, California (the largest community of Afghans in the United States). There Amir becomes an American, marries Soraya, the beautiful daughter of an Afghan general in exile, and comes into his own as a storyteller, eventually achieving success as a writer of fiction. His father, on the other hand, cannot adapt to Western ways and soon succumbs to cancer. As the immigrant narrative reaches its conclusion, Baba’s friend summons Amir back to Afghanistan to save Sohrab, the son of his old and much-maligned friend Hassan. Stealing into Taliban country in disguise, Amir finds the child in the clutches of Assef, still engaging in psychopathic violence but this time as an Islamic fundamentalist . Rescuing the boy and returning to the United States, Amir, Soraya, and Sohrab become a new family in a land of peace and opportunity. Like its literary source, the Hollywood version of The Kite Runner was also a cultural milestone. As director Marc Forster put it, the purpose of the i-x_1-198_Grah.indd 147 1/25/10 2:27:38 PM 148 border crossings film was to “humanize that part of the world . . . [to] give a face and voice to a country that’s been in the news for three decades, and create an emotional connection beyond culture or race.”1 For Americans, the film provided the first-ever cinematic view of urban Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion. John...