The Kite Runner

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I saw the movie of The Kite Runner before it came out, and at that point I was intrigued to read the book, but it took me this long to get around to it.

It's a problematic story, at best. The narrator, Amir, grew up as an upper-class Afghani. The story is about inter-Afghan racism in the narrator's childhood, with the narrator as the racist, holding privilege and power over his boyhood best friend, Hassan, who is a Hazara, and Amir's father's servant's son. The story is also homophobic. The relationship between the two boys is brought into sharp relief by a homosexual assault on Hassan, after which Amir's bad behavior destroys the friendship and eventually forces Hassan and his father out of the household.

With the Russian influx that started the destabilization of Afghanistan which continues to this day, Amir and his father immigrate to the United States. Amir eventually returns to Afghanistan to confront his old guilts and his old enemies, and attempt to rescue Hassan's son from (continued homophobic) Taliban excesses, at great cost to everyone involved.

The huge value of this best-selling novel, for me, is first in its willingness to explore the mind of a teenage boy actively engaged in cruel, selfish, and racist behavior, rather than the much easier task of staying with the boy who is harmed by that behavior. I also deeply appreciated its descriptions of Afghanistan and the comparisons with not only the U.S., but the San Francisco Bay Area, where the narrator, the author, and I all live. Finally, the book does not come to a clean, pretty resolution about rescuing the boy and bringing him to America to be one happy family.

Those very real qualities have to, in my mind, be balanced against the unremitting homophobia and a tendency to heighten the drama, sometimes at the expense of characterization and depth. In the end, however, I'm glad I read the book and glad I saw the movie, and I do feel like I understand a little more about Afghanistan, its people, and its travails, than I did before I picked up the novel.

Comments

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

a lot of the critiques i heard were about whether it glossed over america's hand in afghanistan's problems. i was also disturbed by how it (like a lot of popular movies/books) works to get the reader to sympathize with the person with more power.

i've had this uncomfortable feeling before with the book "corregidora" with its depiction of female-female sexual harassment.

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

this is kind of tangential, but is it inherently homophobic for a straight man to describe male-male rape? or is it bc it's a work of fiction (and not personal testimony)? this topic sort of brought up for me the fact that i have male friends of various orientations who have experienced sexual violence perpetrated by men in power :/

[(Anonymous)]

*nods* The American role is not completely ignored; an oversimplified description of the narrative is "the Soviets messed things up badly, the Americans made things worse, and then the Taliban was the worst of all." At the same time, I felt like the American role could have been more emphasized.

As for sympathizing with the person with more power, that's a "yes and" for me. As the reader, you do sympathize with the person with more power, and you also want to rip his throat out for how he uses his power, especially in the first half of the book.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

That was me, just not logged in.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

The reason I call this homophobic is that there's no indication anywhere in the book that there are any male-male (or for that matter female-female) relations that are not power-driven, rape or rape-like, or conducted by sociopaths.

Male-male rape is a fact of life, and I don't think describing it is homophobic. But letting it fill the entire space of same-sex relationships feels homophobic to me.

[dhobikikutti]

Data point: This has been a book critiqued by other Afghanis as a Neo-Orientalist narrative in the manner of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

[buria-q.livejournal.com]

yes, this.

[vegablack62.livejournal.com]

I have an entirely different take on the book. I thought it was a personal story about power and its abuse within a family. How some members have priveledge and others do not and how that priveledge twists the relationships even when they are loving. My husband came from a background in a foreign country where he grew up with child servants. His mother grew up in the same situations but with even more extreme power relationships. I have heard many bitter stories from her of how abusive these relationships often were. I can tell you that some members of her family joined communist guerilla groups years ago over their bitterness over how servants (who were really relatives) were treated. I myself have met child servants and former child servants when visiting my husbands family abroad. They reminded me very much of the boy in this story. I thought he did an excellent job of showing the pitfalls of this system. I knew exactly who Hassan was almost immediately because of my own knowledge of my husband's families history.

The story wasn't meant to be about the causes of the war in Afghanastan. That's the background for a story of power,and love and how they are twisted for everyone. It is a family story.

I did not find it homophobic. Homosexuals are against child abuse and molestation. Why would there need to be a balancing homosexual relationship within the context of the story if the author couldn't find a way to make it work in the story? That is puting a political burden on art that it doensn't need to carry. Why can't the author assume the reader can see the child abuse for what it is and not typical homosexual behavior?

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

I think this comment is a really good summary of what the book was about for me, and I similarly did not find the book homophobic. The narrator does and says nothing to suggest his repulsed reaction to the rape of his friend or probable later sexual abuse of a child/other children is generalized in his mind to men who have loving relationships with other men. The person who criminally commits these acts is clearly getting off on power and violence and there is no implied or stated correlation between what he does and homosexuality.

[vegablack62.livejournal.com]

And indeed the character who attacks the child is himself homophobic. The general culture's homophobia is not presented in a sympathetic manner. Indeed the two boys who express it help aid in a homosexual rape. The author does a good job of expressing how rape as a way to put someone in their place as an inferior. How it expresses complete disrespect for the victim and how someone can despise someone and still feel sexually attracted to them. I thought the whole issue of describing a race as ugly and inferior while finding them sexually attractive was well described. This phenomenon exists in the US just look at Strom Thurman. I liked the way the book handled that.