The Kite Runner – Lending grace to Afghan people

Book Review

 

When a work of art transcends the ordinary, it becomes a landmark; a credible gauge of the society that gave it life. More often than not, the careers of many gifted writers run their full courses without ever producing works whose sublimity define their time. There are only few writers who have achieved this. By my reckoning, this little tribe has names like – Chinua Achebe, Leo Tolstoy of Russia, Jean-Paul Satre of France, England’s William Shakespeare, William Faulkner, Francis Scot Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway of America, Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda of Chile among others . We can add Khaled Hosseini of Afghanistan to this list. 

In his joyously received debut novel, The Kite Runner, Hosseini seized a high chair among the elders of the word and made himself very comfortable in it. In a world defined by America’s viewpoint; America’s enemies are the world’s enemies. For well over a decade now, the South-Central Asian country of Afghanistan has been the epicenter of America’s war on terror. As a result, what the world seems to know of Afghanistan is largely what America and her powerful media networks have to say. Afghanistan and her hapless citizens who have had the short end of history’s stick; from Alexander the Great’s invasion in 330 BC through a string of invasions by Arab Muslims, the Mongols and Ghengis Khan, through the British and Soviet invasions to the Taliban menace of the 90s have known nothing more than vilification, depersonalization and devaluation. The cumulative effect of America’s war on terror on Afghan history is that it effectively blotted out whatever beauties it possessed and primed the ears of the world for dark, sinister tales. And so, the Tajiks and the fiercely proud Pashtuns who live and die for Nang and Namoos (honour and pride) suddenly began to look so despicable that you wondered if they deserved a place on God’s green earth. It is this stereotype, this deep-rooted profiling of Afghanistan that Khaled Hosseini set out to repudiate when he wrote the opening paragraph of The Kite Runner in March 2001. He had just completed his Residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and was practicing as an intern when the urge took him. And what an historical urge it has turned out to be?   

On the surface, The Kite Runner seems a highly unlikely title for a book as ambitious as Hosseini had set out to write. But whatever reservations the reader might have about the title soon fizzles out with the enchantment of the opening line; I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. With the pregnant innocence of this opening, Hosseini lurches out in a grand attempt to restore dignity to a vilified people. The Kite Runner is a bold effort to lend the world an alternative story on Afghanistan; but it is also a nuanced tale of betrayal and redemption. It is a simple, moving story of Amir and Hassan and Baba and Ali which grows into the story of the resilient Afghan people, trapped in a prose lucid beyond our imagining. However, you wouldn’t be wrong, if you see The Kite Runner as an intricate web inside which Khaled Hosseini hides to laugh at all the hypocrisies of life.  

One thing is clear from the outset, though: Khaled Hosseini seems quite incapable of penning a boring paragraph. Every sentence shimmers with life in The Kite Runner. Every phrase sings with the clarity of a nightingale. But the key to understanding this 324-page book lies in one refreshingly elegant statement – there is a way to be good again, uttered by a dying Rahim Khan in a long distance phone call to Amir, the narrator. Rahim Khan is Hosseini’s silent moral force in the story, who knew so much but neither gave secrets away nor allowed what he knew to influence his judgment of people close to him.  

As the story begins, we glean that Amir has had uneasy peace in America since he fled Kabul with his father following the Soviet invasion of the 1970s. True, America had offered the promise of a new life, but dark shadows from the past deny Amir any chance at experiencing real peace. That was until Rahim Khan’s call came and swivels him round to look back at a tainted past; a past that would not go away. From this furtive glance springs green memories of a near perfect childhood of innocence that shattered like a broken glass in Amir’s hallway of life from where a fragment would always pop up to cut his feet as he journeys on.  

In the opening chapters, we see Amir and Hassan growing up under the imperial influence of Baba, Amir’s father who Hosseini portrays as the quintessence of Afghan manliness with sizeable Nang and Namoos. Through Amir’s precocious eyes, we are led into the hidden pathways of Afghan culture and life unbeknown to the world. We learn that Afghanistan was not always a dark parch of earth with a semblance of humanity but a land peopled by peaceful human beings whose cravings are not different from those of any other community. Amir’s keen eyes lead us through the throbbing streets of Kabul and Jalalabad to the fiendish kite-fighting in the very dead of winter when Afghan kids perform what would pass for a symbolic rite of passage. But there is also the symbolism of the kite in the tale which we would confront later in the story – no matter how high a kite flies, it must return to earth; a subtle suggestion that every true search for redemption brings us back to the point of transgression. Hosseini’s highest achievement in this unimaginable debut novel is not just the majesty of his language but his ability to detach himself from all emotions of kinship and present Afghan life in its most evocative depiction, showing just as many triumphs as tragedies. In a surprising sort of way, The Kite Runner is so reminiscent of Achebe’s detached, unsentimental presentation of the Igbo culture in Things Fall Apart; a state of aesthetic grace that pronounces no harried judgment on the subject of the story but lends the reader a functional compass with which to navigate to a balanced perspective.  

We hear Hosseini’s mocking laughter at the duplicities of Afghan life which place much premium on pride and honor but deny the humanity of the Hazara. To the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, the Hazara, descendants of the Mongols and Shi’a Muslims, are a mere tribe of donkeys; good only as domestic servants. In a mocking interrogation of this curious mindset in The Kite Runner, Baba who is seen as the glory of the Pashtun masculinity turns to Sanaubar, the whoring wife of his Hazara servant, Ali, to sire a son; Hassan. Here, Hosseini silently hints on the interconnectedness of humanity; a theme that certain peoples of the world would do anything to repudiate. The secret of Baba’s socially “incorrect” behaviour and its unwanted fruit are conveniently buried between Baba and Rahim Khan, his close friend, for as Amir would later learn from Khan, long after Baba had died; in Kabul of that time, some things mattered more than the truth. We also see this hypocrisy in Asef, Hosseini’s darkest character in the story who in spite of being a pervert could not understand why Amir would have anything to do with Hassan whose only flaw is that he is Hazara. Nonetheless, Hosseini brilliantly shows us that other things are just as important; such as friendship and loyalty, betrayal and redemption. We see a most unusual loyalty in Hassan’s attachment to Amir. But there is an irony here as both have no clue that they are bound by blood. We also see Amir’s fascination with Baba whose love and approval he endlessly pines for but never wins. As Baba’s only child, Amir feels a sense of entitlement to his love. He hates the fact that he almost always shares Baba’s affection with Hassan. He craves Baba’s rambunctious physicality, his daredevilry and gumption in much the same way as Hassan longs for his fragile superior airs, his bookish aloofness. Hassan’s father, mercilessly portrayed as a hideously ugly Hazara with a tremulous walk, is faithful to Baba beyond logic. Similarly, Rahim Khan, Baba’s friend is presented as a dignified, sensitive man whose belief in Baba’s strong ways is total even though he does not live Baba’s lifestyle. With deft craftsmanship, Khaled Hosseini piles ironies upon ironies in this tale. Hassan’s telling declaration of his unwavering devotion to Amir echoes like a haunting gong through the pages of the book: for you, a thousand times over.  

Khaled Hosseini knows that in life, great loyalty usually precedes great betrayal. And so, from the complex, iron-cast loyalties in the plot spews great betrayals in the personal relationship of the characters against the backdrop of a greater betrayal of the Afghan people by the ruling class which could not chisel out a stable leadership. First, Baba betrays his ‘despised’ Hazara servant and sires Hassan from his wayward wife, Sanaubar. Then, Sanaubar betrays the strong bond between mother and child and abandons Hassan shortly after he is born to elope with some gypsies. Then Amir betrays Hassan by failing to stand up for him when the vicious thug, Asef rapes him in an alley. It happens on a near perfect day; a day when Amir finally wins Baba’s approval by proving his manliness in the yearly kite-fighting tournament after cutting down the last kite in the sky. Hassan proves his loyalty by running to catch the fallen kite to present to Amir as is the custom. But that is not to be. A cruel incident that would alter the magic of their idyllic childhood occurs as Hassan is running home with the fallen kite. He is seized upon and brutally raped by the pervert, Asef, in an alley while cowardly Amir watches awestruck. That incident ruptures their relationship, leading to virulent resentment by Amir and a cold betrayal that forces Hassan and his father to flee the only home they have ever known. From this moment on, Hosseini deftly sets the stage for cause and effect as Amir sets out on a journey for restitution and atonement.  

These intense interpersonal conflicts play out simultaneously along bitter rivalries in the country’s leadership, the Soviet invasion and the harrowing escape of Baba and Amir to America, Baba’s eventual death and Amir’s personal struggles for respite from the vicis-situdes of life until Rahim Khan’s call points him homewards for true redemption and final denouement. However, before Amir’s return, we see Sanaubar, Hassan’s whoring mother make a redemptive return to his son. After throwing her legs wide to diverse winds, Sanaubar returns, a broken hag to the forgiving arms of his son. Hosseini captures Sanaubar’s return in a gripping prose thusly – we saw a toothless woman with stringy hair and sores on her arms. She looked like she had not eaten for days. But the worst of it by far was her face. Somebody had taken a knife to it and the slashes cut this way and that way. But Sanaubar’s true redemption comes in the quantum emotion she invests in nursing Sohrab, Hassan’s son when he is born. Thus in Sohrab, Sanaubar gets life’s second chance to make right what she made wrong by abandoning Hassan. Hosseini invokes the full symbolism of the wandering kite coming back to earth here. Baba’s own act of restitution is slightly different, though. He builds an orphanage and performs little acts of charity; subtle little acts of goodness that make up for his betrayal of his faithful servant.  

And so, prodded on by that ominous call from Rahim Khan, Amir the kite flier returns kite-like to his beloved Kabul to find a society in the cold grips of a most bizarre tyranny. The Taliban had taken over from where the Russians had left off with his childhood enemy, Asef as their supreme leader. In a cruel replay of macabre history, Asef seizes Sohrab, Hassan’s son and turns him into a sex slave. To atone for his horrid sin, Amir must rescue Sohrab from the devilish Asef and prove for once in his miserable life that he is capable of dying for something. 

In plot, characterization, historicity and language, The Kite Runner is almost flawless. From Kabul to Peshawar to California, Hosseini makes our journey pleasurable with the incandescent flame of his language, his acute humour and his power of observation as the narrative voice transits from the innocent perplexity of a child to the wise timbre of a guilt-ridden adult. A major accomplishment of The Kite Runner is that the reader would no longer need a physical visit to Afghanistan to understand its ways after reading this book. However, one of the many unwritten rules of assessing a good work of fiction says that it should show rather than tell. Hosseini fails on this score as there are many instances in the book where after providing all the subtle hints that would enable the reader to arrive at the answer, Hosseini goes on to draw the conclusions for the reader still. But even so, the sublimity of language in The Kite Runner makes it difficult for the average reader to notice this flaw. And so does the foreboding irony that runs through the life of almost every character in the novel.  

Perhaps, few writers in our time understand characterization as Khaled Hosseini. In The Kite Runner, Hosseini succeeds in giving us characters that are heroic but adorably flawed; whose known and implied qualities entitle us to a sense of kinship with them. Baba is one massive lump of a character, clutching tenaciously, though dubiously, to his Nang and Namoos, Asef is a devil but a brilliant one with an amazing sense of history and pride, Amir the narrator is cerebral and bookish but calculative and cowardly, Sanaubar may be a reckless whore but she carries a good sense of justice. But Baba’s life offers us the supreme irony; a fiercely proud Pashtun man that places his Nang and Namoos above every things else, Baba dies with the shame of not openly admitting his paternal debt to Hassan for fear that he would lose face if it were known that he had impregnated the Hazara wife of his Hazara servant. He struggles all through his life to balance his parental obligation to Amir and Hassan without giving away this defining secret. Almost in all instance, Hosseini succeeds in giving us fully realized characters.  

On page 28 of the book, Hosseini writes as though he knew what he would achieve with his debut effort. In the note Rahim Khan left for Amir after reading his first short story, he tells him that his story had irony; it is something that some writers reach for their entire careers and never attain. You have achieved it with your first story. This self prophecy is richly fulfilled in The Kite Runner with over 8 million copies sold worldwide, a soar away motion picture version of the book and a publication in 48 countries of the world at the last count. If Khaled Hosseini decides not to write again after this debut offering, like Ralph Ellison, author of the monumental Invincible Man, his legacy in The Kite Runner is enough reminder of his indubitable genius.      

Aburi Botanic Garden – A beauty that never dies

Travelogue


The entrance to the Garden

 

Aburi is one word that occupies an important place in Nigerian history. Aburi is more than a word actually. It is the name of a small Ghanaian town that was chanted with the reverence of a litany in the events that led to the Nigerian Civil War. Aburi was the last theater of peace and reason before the illogic of the gun-nuzzle took over. It was the town where Yakubu Gowon and Emeka Ojukwu met to make the final attempt for a peaceful settlement of the crisis that led to the war. History tells us that Aburi did not fail us; Gowon did. What history does not tell us, however, is that Aburi is more than a treaty town; it is also a picturesque little escarpment on the outskirts of Accra and home to West Africa’s oldest and greenest garden. And perhaps, because of history’s silence, many Nigerians that visit Ghana never get to see this 120-year old splendor in the sun. I almost missed it on my recent visit to Ghana but for the timely suggestion of Godwin Nnanna, a Nigerian journalist that lives in Accra.

Children playing in the Garden

I had been in Accra for 5 days. I had savoured the quieted of Labone, the scenic beauty of Cantonment and the sight and smell of downtown Accra. I had been to Cape Coast and seen the bewitching forest of the Kakum National Park and its mazy walkway that stands 30m high and 330m long. I had also visited the majestic Elmina Castle with its array of haunting relics of our misbegotten past. Elmina had left me bleeding all over with mind-wrenching imageries of the transatlantic slave trade. I was still traumatized by Elmina when I arrived Aburi Botanic Garden. I had traveled up a breath-taking, steep mountain road that snaked like a river past the hilltop castle where the Aburi Accord was struck and stopped over briefly to photograph the beautiful home of Rita Marley, wife of the late Reggae King, Bob Marley.

 

Rita Marley's Villa in Peduase, near Aburi

 

 I had taken in the silky smoothness of the road, the unspeakable peace of the countryside, the quirks of local folks who seemed accustomed to the unfamiliar gaze of strangers and arrived at the regal gate of the Aburi Botanic Garden. A long paved road hemmed in on both sides with tall palm trees wound deep into a lush green garden with thick canopy foliage. A light wind wafted from behind us stirring the fronds of the tall palm trees into a frenzied dance. It seemed a quaint welcome dance. But I took it all in with glee. 

The thick foliage of the Garden

Walking into the garden flung open the doors of memory and invoked images of my childhood in living colour. The chirping of birds on the low lying twigs of trees, the gentle cascade of debris from broken bird-nests overhead, the delicate flitting shadows of overhead canopies dancing on the ground in front of us as the wind shook tree branches above and the magnificent splash of brilliant rays through the leaves that broke into a thousand shards all around us. As we walked further in, it began to feel more like a walk into a friendly rainforest and less like a walk in the garden. Then, gradually, the tall palm trees gave way to even taller trees of all kinds and from all climes. Each tree is diligently identified by its native name, its origin and its botanical name. Further steps took us deeper into the floral bowls of the garden. Birds sang on tree tops above. In the distance, a faint throbbing of hip-hop rhythm serenaded us. We wended our way through the track, weaving through trees, partly egged on by the faint rhythm and the mazy splash of brilliant rays through the thick foliage above. Our search ended soon as we arrived a small clearing where a crowd of youths were dancing to the exploding beat. I remembered that it was Christmas. The season and the spirit.

Aburi International Conference Centre - venue of the famous Aburi Accord

 

Turning away from the party scene, we arrived another clearing. Suddenly the canopied roof of the scenario seemed to have been lifted up to allow a generous splurge of the sun on the verdant green lawn in the open where half-naked children romped about in play and a handful of picnicking Lebanese families sat in a circle over a meal. Standing on the edge of the clearing, I felt transported by the magic of the scenery through a flight of the imagination to a world where there so much peace, the birds herald the sun with a song each morning. On the far edge of the clearing stood a row of houses where holiday makers who wished to spend a night or two could live their dream. But the more I looked at the houses in this forest of flowers, the more they seemed to me like the perfect hideaway for writers who wished to court creative quietude on a blank sheet of paper. I made a mental note.

Outside of the regal gate of the garden, sunset beckoned in colours of bronze. We stepped into it.

 

Rastafarian Gatekeeper guarding Rita Marley's Villa

Book Review - The Truth of Fiction and The Known World

By James Eze

The Known World by Edward P. Jones is one book that will engage the interest of the attentive world for a long time. It is not necessarily because the book won a Pulitzer; one of America’s most coveted prizes, or because of any striking signs of craftsmanship in the book. No. The Known World compels attention because it is wonderful example of how not to story a people. But most importantly, it compels attention because of its subject matter – slavery. And it is not just the story of slavery as we know it. It is the story of erstwhile slaves who suddenly turned slave owners. It is the story of black men and women whose sensibilities to injustice had become so dead that they turned round to hold fellow blacks in a subhuman grip, moments after tasting freedom. It is an unlikely story to be written by a black man but one which Jones, an African-American raised by a single mother in the Washington DC area, wrote with relish to the applause of the former enslavers of his ancestors.

In The Truth of Fiction, a 1978 lecture he delivered at the University of Ife, Chinua Achebe described art as “man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him, an aspiration to provide himself with a second handle on existence through his imagination”.

This definition offers a rich canvass upon which to examine The Known World and the ignoble mission of its author. Drawing from a large cast of characters, Edward P. Jones whose debut effort, Lost in the City, had shown a remarkable promise, set out to probe the conundrum of black Americans who owned human property in America. Slavery was always going to be a touchy issue between Africa and the West but The Known World is diabolically evocative. Jones’ fictive universe as shown in the book is a curious one, peopled by capricious characters, from the peripatetic William Robins and his eccentric horse – Sir Guilderman, through rebellious Henry Townsend and his dim-witted wife, Caldonia, to the unconscionably ambitious Moses, the morally upright Augustus Townsend, the half-crazed Alice and a tribe of minor characters who should have been left out of the tale at best. Essentially though, The Known World is the story of Henry Townsend, an inveterate slave owner who defied his father to become a prosperous owner of slaves in a society that held his kindred in perpetual slavery. There’s a seeming irony in the fact that Henry himself was a former slave whose freedom was bought by Augustus, his father and Jones’ symbol of morality in the book who hates the very idea of slavery with all his being. Henry Townsend learnt nothing about his slave years and had no qualms buying fellow blacks and holding them in slavery. Under the tutelage of his former master, Robins, Henry built an impressive estate for himself on the blood of his slaves. The Known World is a laborious read and but for a few occasions of brilliance and the antics of rough hewn characters like Sheriff John Skiffington and the startling unveiling of the half-deranged Alice as a gifted artist and entrepreneur in the concluding chapters, would have passed for a flat, uninspiring narrative that brims with needless minutiae of history. The book is painfully over researched and most of the historical facts do not exist in reality. Still, America’s literary judges hold The Known World in high esteem. But it is almost obvious, why Jones’ effort was so well rewarded. It is a hideous piece of expiating and apologetic literature. It helps the descendants of slave merchants and owners to look back at their heritage with less burden of guilt. Jones’ book reassures them of the rightness of their fathers’ deeds since even blacks, in Jones’ fictive reverie, enslaved fellow blacks in America of the time.

 

Edward P. Jones

Set in Manchester County, The Known World opens with a lurid depiction of the book’s unlikely hero, Moses, in the woods. Jones’ prose carries neither lightning nor thunder but just enough sparkle to drive the narrative. Nothing in the opening pages prepares the reader for the mindless details of irrelevant history that would assail him in the later chapters, though. But Jones manages to steer the reader to encounter each character from their final moments – a narrative technique that is needlessly experimental and could easily stifle the curiosity of the less patient reader. And there are times in the book when this technique pose a problem to the author’s supreme control of the plot. For instance, no sooner has Moses been introduced than Jones has, in exercise of his omniscience powers as his creator, pointed out that when he was an old man and rheumatism chained his body, he would look back and blame the chains on evenings such as these, when he laid in a little neck of wood, masturbating and eating dirt in the rain. But the careful reader would notice that Moses never made it to old age. Not in The Known World. Yet, Jones had to throw in that splinter to re-enforce the negative stereotype of his people. When this is added to his portrayal of Caledonia’s mother as a murderer who poisoned her husband for no clear motive, the picture of a dysfunctional people that Jones strives so hard to paint begins to emerge from the canvass. The overall message is clear – black people are no good. They rightly deserve history’s short end of the stick.

This fragment of illogic out of Jones’ fevered imagination reminds one of Chinua Achebe’s division of fiction into two broad categories in the lecture earlier cited. “There are fictions that help and those that hinder. For simplicity, let us call them beneficent and malignant fictions”, Achebe had observed. It is almost evident where The Known World belongs in these categories. It may be true to argue that fiction does not set out to please those about whom it is written but it is also true that The Known World was written to please a particular audience. The question then is could Jones have written a good story without further dispossession of his people? Well, may be. Now, could The Known World have been written in such a way that it confers dignity on African Americans without losing its core themes? The answer is “yes”. A major feature of The Known World is its absolute lack of a positive black character, its tendentious argument on the culpability of black people in the evil of slavery and its general undertone of a 21^st century black Conrad, out to justify the continuing evil of racism as the Heart of Darkness sought brazenly, in its time, to justify slavery, racism and colonialism with a bare knuckle portrayal of blacks as a little better than animals. This may well be the point from where Edward P. Jones makes a clear departure from the glorious path of his literary ancestors like James Baldwin whose resolute stand against racial wrongs upon his fellow African Americans is legendary. It is also a point from where a clear line could be drawn between Jones’ understanding of his writerly calling and Chinua Achebe’s sense of history’s demand on his art. Writing in yet another seminal essay, The Novelist as a Teacher, Achebe defines his mission thus: “Here is an adequate revolution for me to espouse…to help my society regain belief in itself and to put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement” It is certainly not clear whether Jones is utterly ignorant of the great redemptive possibilities of his art and willfully lends it to mischief. But it is clear that he has chosen the brittle touch of malignant fiction against his community to achieve instant acclaim. The good news is that he succeeded. That bad is that this success will always bring him pain from his own people.

It has always been known that every fiction carries a measure of truth. Some people might ask what truth, or whose truth? But there is always a fragment of truth to fiction. And there are many truths, besides. There are convenient and inconvenient truths depending the side of the coin one belongs. And this is why the truth of fiction inspires so much fear. The reason is simple. Again, Chinua Achebe gives us a handle here. “…only the story…can continue beyond the war and the warrior. It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters”, he remarked in Anthills of the Savannah. The silent power of the story that outlasts the boom of war drums and the blast of mortars inspires a special kind of awe in the audience. Dictators of all ilk and other manipulators of common will leave in mortal fear of this power and this has often led to the frosty relations between artists and maximum rulers. It is a sacred power which the artist holds in trust for his people and one he must not abuse. Yet there is sadly a growing feeling that Edward P. Jones may have abused this gift in The Known World. This perhaps explains why writing for Story South, Dan Schneider predicted that “As it is, time will not be kind to this flabby and overrated book”. It is hoped that Schneider’s prophecy does not come true so that Jones will be saved the harsh verdict of history.               

 

Today's Lagos - some changes are so fitting, you hardly notice them.

Dawn

(For Jos)

From dreams haunted by ghouls and gremlins,

Dawn froths with the foam of new birth;

Brimful with the sun-kiss of hope -

Oh the bitter-kola taste of yesterday

At this gate of new beginnings, we stand -

Pondering the brooding clouds

As old sins give way to the new…

I am the cockcrow witness, on one foot;

Peering at the vast smoldering rubble -

The charred remains of dreams and laughter in mid-growth

The withering palms and decapitated dogonyaros

In the distance, I can still hear the retreating footfalls

Of the Horsemen with faces shrouded in turbans of hate

Fading into the dispersing vapor of the yawning dawn.

As old sins give way to the new…

I watched the kind rays of the sun peck up the dew on the rubble

And dry the tears off the bleeding hearts of Jos

And from these hill which once kept a silent watch over our dreams

Shall sprout a new song of hope

As old sins give way to the new…

I watched hope gather the furrows of worry from the face of time

And I assumed the praying mantis poise of defense and prayer

As old sins give way to the new…

The love we have known has died with the retreating moon

Its receding steps shatter the peace we have known like a mirror

 

As old sins give way to the new…

    @James Eze