Critical Appraisal of Hazara in Hossenei’s novel, The Kite Runner

Abstract

There reside more than fifty ethnic groups in Afghanistan. The major ethnicities include: Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara. The Durrani-Pashtun dynasty founded and ruled Afghanistan throughout its history. The Pashtun are the largest plurality followed by Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek. The Pashtun and Hazara, sunni and shia, constitute around 42% and 09 % of the total population respectively. The Hazara are considered marginalized ethnic group due to heterogeneous ethnicity as well as sect. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hossenei’s debute novel, written in English, published in 2003, portrays the power relationships between the Hazara and Pashtun in Afghanistan. Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism has blurred the frontiers of orientalism. For him, the West is superior, civilized, and humane, while, the East, inferior, uncivilized, and aberrant. Orientalism is a political vision of reality that promoted difference of familiar ‘Us’ and
strange ‘Them’. Hossenei, ensuing USA’s political vision of War of terror, portrays through the lens of fiction the power relationships of ethnic dominance between the Hazara and Pashtun in Afghanistan. Deviating from Said’s Orientalism, this paper constructs the orientalist theoritical model: the Hazara as inferior but loyal; imaginative, humane, and protector in relation to the Pashtun depicted in the novel as superior but treacherous; unimaginative, brutal, and aberrant. The paper argues that the motivation in the novel is of power, of dominance, of a complex hegemony: to highlight the marginalize but civilized position of Hazaras in relation to the dominant but uncivilized Pashtun. Foucault’s notion of exclusion is highly applicable in The Kite Runner: to fence the discourse of Hazara off from others and keep those other statements out of circulation. The methodology is qualitative and interpretive. Thus, the paper attempts to examine critically the appraisal of Hazara in the novel, The Kite Runner.