Translating Trauma in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

In The Kite Runner (2003), Afghan American author Khaled Hosseini attempts to make Afghanistan more than “just another unhappy, chronically troubled afflicted land” (foreword 2013, III). At 12 years of age, Amir is a bystander to the rape of his childhood friend Hassan; his own inaction during the assault traumatises Amir and leads him to a lifetime spent seeking redemption. The chapter traces the ways in which Hosseini presents this trauma as an allegory for the national rupture that occurs in Afghanistan during the mid-1970s following the invasion of Soviet forces. I explore Hosseini’s position in post-9/11 discourse as a transnational author, translating Afghanistan’s historical and cultural trauma for a Western reader presumed to be unfamiliar with this context. However, Hosseini’s text elides much of the complexity of Afghanistan’s recent history as the novel neglects the trauma experienced by Hassan, a member of an ethnic minority, and ultimately reproduces his oppression. Further, in depicting Amir’s recovery from trauma—and, via allegory, that of Afghanistan—Hosseini closes the narrative with an un-earned and simplistic catharsis for the reader, allowing us to avoid dealing with Afghanistan’s ongoing trauma under the post-9/11 US invasion.