Anna Mäkinen
MEMORY AND EXILE Spatiotemporal Narrations of Displacement in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed
Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences Master’s Thesis October 2020
TIIVISTELMÄ
Anna Mäkinen: “Memory and Exile: Spatiotemporal Narrations of Displacement in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed” Pro gradu -tutkielma Tampereen yliopisto Englannin kielen, kirjallisuuden ja kääntämisen tutkinto-ohjelma Lokakuu 2020
Tutkielma käsittelee muistin merkitystä maanpaossa menneisyyden narratiivisen (re)konstruoinnin kannalta Khaled Hosseinin romaaneissa Leijapoika ja Ja vuoret kaikuivat. Hosseinin teoksia on tutkittu suhteellisen vähän, vaikka niissä kuvattu maanpakolaisuus on ajankohtainen aihe postmodernissa yhteiskunnassa ja lisääntyvän liikkuvuuden, globalisaation sekä niitä seuranneen ajan ja tilan pirstaloitumisen aikakaudella. Tutkielmassa tarkastellaan postmodernissa viitekehyksessä, miten maanpakoa kuvataan ja rakennetaan romaaneissa, ja miten maanpaon sekä maanpakolaisen muistin kautta voidaan ymmärtää aikaa, tilaa ja identiteettiä nykymaailmassa. Hosseinin romaanit edustavat postmodernia kirjallisuutta ja maahanmuuttajagenreä, ja kummankin keskeinen teema on maastapako Afganistanin historiallisessa kontekstissa. Leijapoika rakentuu Yhdysvaltoihin asettuneen afganistanilaisen pakolaisen muistoista, kun taas Ja vuoret kaikuivat koostuu useista toisiinsa kytkeytyvistä maanpakotarinoista, jotka kehittävät ja laajentavat maanpaon käsitettä. Maanpako näyttäytyy romaaneissa ajallis-tilallisena kokemuksena, jossa korostuvat jälkeisyys, liminaalisuus ja muuttuvuus. Aikaan ja tilaan liittyvänä ilmiönä maanpako nivoutuu muistiin, jonka kautta maanpaon kokemuksia kohdataan, tulkitaan, rakennetaan, kerrotaan ja tehdään nykyhetkessä läsnä oleviksi. Maanpakolaisen muisti on narratiivinen ja rekonstruoiva prosessi, jossa menneet ja nykyiset ajat ja tilat limittyvät toisiinsa. Ajallis-tilallisuus, liminaalisuus ja muuttuvuus leimaavat myös romaaneissa rakentuvia maanpakolaisidentiteettejä. Maanpakolaisen muistin ajallis-tilallisuus ja narratiivisuus ilmenevät Leijapojassa muistin kartoittamisen kautta. Romaania lähestytään tutkielmassa kartografisena muistelmateoksena, jossa korostuu moniaistinen muistaminen. Kartoittaessaan muistojaan maanpaosta kertoja laatii samalla kartan maanpakolaisidentiteetistään. Ja vuoret kaikuivat -romaanissa puolestaan on useita eri kertojia, mikä heijastelee postmodernia monikeskuksisuutta. Menneisyys, muisti ja identiteetti rakentuvat intertekstuaalisesti ja intermediaalisesti romaanin monissa narratiiveissa, mikä tuo esiin kaikkien (itse)representaatioiden rekonstruoidun luonteen. Moninaisten näkökulmiensa kautta romaani rakentaa globaalin, liminaalisen ja muuttuvan maanpaon tilan. Romaaneissa kerrotut maanpakomuistot ovat luonteeltaan intiimejä ja moniaistisia, mikä johtaa menneisyyden tilalliseen läsnäoloon nykyisyydessä. Elvyttämällä menneisyyden jokapäiväisen kokemusmaailman muisti muodostaa maanpaossa ajallisuuden, joka kyseenalaistaa sekä näkökulman historiaan aikakausien ja käännekohtien sarjana että postmodernin pirstaloituneen aikakäsityksen. Menneisyyden ja nykyisyyden jatkuva limittyminen horjuttaa lineaarista aikakäsitystä ja puoltaa kehämäistä aikaa, johon sisältyy myös tulevaisuus. Samalla maanpako haastaa muuttumattomia ja rajattuja tiloja ja identiteettejä painottaen niiden sijaan muuttuvuutta, moninaisuutta ja liminaalisuutta. Lopulta romaanit kirjoittavat maanpaon muutoksen ja tulemisen tilaksi, jossa ’siellä ja silloin’ ja ’täällä ja nyt’ ovat olemassa yhtä aikaa.
Avainsanat: maanpako, muisti, ajallis-tilallisuus, moniaistinen kokemus, narratiivinen kartografia, postmoderni monikeskuksisuus, kehämäinen aika, liminaalisuus, jälkeisyys, muuttuvuus, narratiivinen rekonstruktio
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ABSTRACT
Anna Mäkinen: “Memory and Exile: Spatiotemporal Narrations of Displacement in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed” Master’s Thesis Tampere University Degree Programme in English Language, Literature and Translation October 2020
This thesis explores the significance of memory in exile from the perspective of the narrative (re- )construction of the past in Khaled Hosseini’s novels The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed. While Hosseini’s novels have hitherto received relatively little academic attention, the exilic displacements depicted in them prove of interest in the postmodern era of accelerating mobilities, globalisation, and the consequent fragmentation of time and space. In this context, it is inspected how exile is portrayed and constructed in the novels and what implications exile and exilic memory have on understanding time, space, and identity in the contemporary world. In the realm of postmodern literature and the immigrant genre, Hosseini’s novels each thematise exile in the historical context of Afghanistan. The Kite Runner recounts the memories of an Afghan refugee to the US, while And the Mountains Echoed relates a range of interconnected exile narratives that develop and diversify the notion of exile. In the novels, exile manifests itself as a spatiotemporal experience characterised by the sense of afterness, liminality, and unfixity. Due to its affiliations with time and space, exile is intertwined with memory, through which the experiences of exile are confronted, interpreted, reconstructed, narrated, and presenced in the novels. Exilic memory is a narrative and reconstructive process defined by the constant overlapping of the past and the present times and spaces and is, thus, spatiotemporal like exile. Spatiotemporality, liminality, and unfixity characterise also the exilic identities negotiated and narrated in the novels. The spatiotemporality and narrativity of exilic memory materialise in The Kite Runner through the notion of memory mapping. The novel is read as a cartographic memoir characterised by multisensory remembrance. Through mapping his memories of exile, the narrator simultaneously maps his exilic identity. And the Mountains Echoed, in turn, reflects postmodern polycentrism through its multiple narrators. The plural perspectives of the novel exhibit intertextual and intermedial constructions of the past, memory, and identity, which evokes the reconstructed nature of all (self-)representation. Through their dispersed viewpoints, the narratives of the novel construct a global, liminal, and unfixed exile space. The exilic memories narrated in the novels are intimate and multisensory in quality, which has the effect of spatial presencing of the past in the present. In restoring the lived experience of the everyday of the past, exilic remembrance composes a temporality that interrogates both the epochal understanding of history and the fragmentation of postmodernity. The constant overlapping of the past and the present undermines linear conceptions of time, favouring, instead, a circular temporality that also contains the future. At the same time, exile queries fixed and bordered spaces and identities, opting for fluidity, plurality, and liminality. Ultimately, the novels write exile as a space of becoming where ‘there and then’ and ‘here and now’ coexist.
Keywords: exile, memory, spatiotemporality, multisensory experience, narrative cartography, postmodern polycentrism, circular time, liminality, afterness, unfixity, narrative reconstruction
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Memory in Exile ...... 1 Exile: A Spatiotemporal and Liminal Experience ...... 4 Exilic Memory and Identity: Individual and Collective Narratives of Liminality ...... 8 Spatiotemporal Exilic Memory: Presencing the Past and the Spatial Time of the Everyday ...... 14 2. The Kite Runner: A Cartographic Memoir of Exile ...... 23 Narrative Cartography: Mapping the Sensuous Everyday ...... 26 Langscapes of the Mind ...... 33 Conclusion ...... 46 3. And the Mountains Echoed: Narrating Postmodern Exile Space(s) ...... 48 Fictions of Memory: Narrative Reconstructions of the Past ...... 52 Spaces in Flux: A Geocritical Reading of Exile ...... 67 Conclusion ...... 84 4. Conclusion: Exilic Alternative(s) for Reading Contemporaneity ...... 87 Works Cited ...... 90
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1. Introduction: Memory in Exile
The world today is one of movement and flows, characterised by the unfixedness of postmodernity. The rapid advancement of information technology and scientific progress have reshaped the organisation of capitalism (Francese 1-2) and induced a world economy marked by dislocations of capital, humans, nationalities, and cultures (Bernard-Donals 2). The globalising world is saturated by people on the move: mass migrations, the refugee crisis, and tourism have but accelerated in the postmodern era. Indeed, movement is a central source for social description, as the labels pioneer, tourist, refugee, immigrant, explorer, and tourist among others demonstrate (Peters 18). The processes of deterritorialization have produced a postmodern subject who is spatially disoriented, deprived of a traditional sense of place and community (Francese 2-3) – a subject whose state can be viewed as resonating with the politics and poetics of exile. In this context, narratives thematising exilic mobilities – such as Khaled
Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed – offer fertile ground for exploring displacement in the postmodern era.
In the postmodern atmosphere of disorientation, time becomes fragmented.
Postmodernism perceives time as bound to the continuous, intense, unfixed present, cut off from the ancestral past and the uncertain future (Francese 3). The linear development of time is queried and altered by the simultaneity of global networks (Foucault 22). Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz term this disconnection from the historical continuity “social amnesia” (1), highlighting the role of memory – or rather, its absence – in the postmodern scene. In this perspective, the collapse of the past and the future drive memory in crisis: it seems to be, as the title of the introduction suggests, in exile. On the other hand, Radstone and Schwarz affirm that alongside the postmodern verdicts on memory’s demise, memory has become the site of many intersecting issues: “the temporal imaginings of past, present, and future; subjectivity and identification; the passage from the inner life to the outer world; even the politics of being in 2 the world and of recognition” (2). It is these perspectives that lend themselves to exploring memory in exile and undermine the predominant presentness of postmodernity.
In exile, it is the past that gains significance. Exile invokes a radical dislocation from the past place and the past time, whereby the sense of what it means to exist is disrupted
(Schuback 176). Exile requires re-evaluating and reinterpreting the past, the future, the perceptions of time and space while revealing a sense of the present as “clusters of echoes and delayings” (ibid. 175-176). Exile emphasises an understanding of memory not only as serving the interests of the present but also very much affected by the past that, in turn, enables the existence of the future. Thus, despite its affiliations with postmodern mobilities and fragmentedness, there is memory in exile. Exilic memory interrogates the postmodern perceptions of time by showing how the past, the present, and the future can be in equal interaction with each other – without, however, imposing linearity to their unfolding.
Khaled Hosseini’s novels The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed each thematise exile, entangled with the turbulent history of Afghanistan.1 While the novels – The
Kite Runner most prominently – do introduce characters in exile in the conventional sense of banishment from homeland (Peters 19), they also complicate the concept by offering it a broader context in the postmodern world of mobility and flows. And the Mountains Echoed relates a range of interconnected exile stories in a narrative moving between different places, spaces, and times, while demonstrating, also, the possibility of exile at home. The exilic characters of the novels encounter their past dislocations through remembrance, searching for coherent identities by tying together their fragmented narratives. By turning to the past, the novels simultaneously pave way for the future and introduce new possibilities for orientating
1 Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns as well as his latest piece of work, Sea Prayer, the illustrated novella in verse, are left outside the scope of this thesis. While A Thousand Splendid Suns does depict exilic experiences, it does not substantially add to the perspectives on exile depicted in the other two novels and is, thus, discarded here for the sake of brevity. Sea Prayer, in turn, differs from the novels both in style and in focus. While the novella does engage itself with the thematic of exile, it is at no stage set in Afghanistan which, as a site of remembrance, is of importance in this study. 3 oneself amidst the postmodern movements. The outlooks that the novels offer are not characterised by the determination to overcome exile, but, rather, suggest exile as a mode of interrogating unequivocal understandings of national belonging and cultural identity. This thesis departs from the premises constructed in my BA thesis, The Postcolonial Home in Khaled
Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, relocating, however, the scope from the concept of home in exile to exilic memory and its implications in the postmodern era.
The remainder of this introduction explores memory in exile relying on the theoretical framework provided by exile and memory studies, with an emphasis on spatiality. Combining spatial and temporal theorisations of exile (e.g. Naficy, Schuback), it is defined as a spatiotemporal experience characterised by the sense of in-betweenness and unfixity. Due to its profound affiliations with space and time, exile is irrevocably intertwined with memory.
Drawing on autobiographical and psychoanalytic perspectives (e.g. Parsons, Kennedy,
Bernstein), memory is inspected as a narrative and reconstructive process defined by the constant interaction between the past and the present. Narrativity characterises also exilic and diasporic identities (e.g. Hall), and, through the latter concept, extends to inform also collective memory (e.g. Halbwachs, Hirsch). The narrative that is memory is, in exile, fundamentally entangled with past and present places and is, thus, spatiotemporal on par with exile itself.
Indeed, spatial studies (e.g. Tally, Moslund, De Certeau) are deployed to highlight the spatiality of exilic memory, which culminates in presencing the sense of the past places (or memoryscapes) in the present. The intimate and multisensory quality of exilic memories offer an alternative perspective to epochal understanding of the past; drawing on Homi Bhabha, it is demonstrated that it is the lived experience of the everyday that manifests itself in the plural exilic memories depicted in the novels. Accordingly, exile queries not only identity but also categorical conceptions of space and time. 4
Exile: A Spatiotemporal and Liminal Experience
Traditionally, exile is perceived as an escape from a homeland either as a result of a penal expulsion by governmental powers (Naficy 1993, 6) or induced by an imminent threat that makes the home no longer safely habitable (Peters 19). In this perspective, exile entails a voluntary or involuntary deterritorialisation, a physical separation from home, that is characterised by a twofold relationship to location: physically in one place, exiles dream of returning to another (Naficy 1993, 8-17). Saturated by the sense of loss and disruption, exile is primarily the quest for the home from which one is estranged, a quest for the restoration of the original state of being (Peters 19-36). Thus conceptualised, exile is inseparable from home or homeland; it is movement that presupposes the existence of a home.
This place-centred understanding of exile encounters challenges in the postmodern era.
As Hamid Naficy (1999, 6) notes, the contemporary dislocations have driven the empirical and metaphorical home (and homeland) in crisis. Home as the central referent of exile is now in perpetual manipulation, which has destabilised the concept and forced its radical redefining:
“From a homogeneous, unitary, and monolithic conception of exile has emerged one that consists of multiple and variegated exiles, big and small, external and internal, forced and voluntary” (9). Indeed, viewing exile as a dynamic organism on par with exilic subjects themselves (10), Naficy outlines a broader understanding of exile:
Today, it is possible to be exiled in place, . . . to be at home and to long for other places
and other times so vividly portrayed in the media. It is possible to be in internal exile
and be unable to, or wish not to, return home. It is possible to return and to find that
one’s house is not the home . . . that memory built. It is possible to go into exile
voluntarily and then return, yet still not fully arrive. It is possible to be able to return
and choose not to do so, but instead continue to dream and imagine a glorious return. It 5
is also possible to transit back and forth, be in and out, go here and there – to be a nomad
and yet be in exile everywhere. (3-4)
In a similar vein, John Durham Peters notices the afterlife the concept of exile has as a metaphor today (18).2 It has become “an idiom available for the uprooted” (36), a form of cultural invention that creates something new through the act of looking backward (20). Exile as an evolving, nuanced, and dynamic notion with both material and metaphorical bearings points to a sense of displacement within the concept itself: in the wavering postmodernity, exile itself seems to be in exile.
Even though the aforementioned notions of exile emphasise the versatility and the metaphoric possibilities of the concept, they do so in a mainly spatial framework. The evocation of leaving and returning, of ‘here’ and ‘there’, of being uprooted or deterritorialised points to a concept that evolves through movement and in relation to multiple locations. While these space- focused theorisations are undeniably valid, they merely hint at another referent of exile that is, to say the least, equally important: namely, time. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback stresses the temporal dimension of exile in defining it as “not only existence after a cut and separation but
. . . an existing as afterness” (175). Drawing on Gerhard Richter’s notion of Nachheit,3
Schuback describes afterness as a “condition that remains constantly separated, but also always near to that which it has been separated from without return. Afterness is the condition of a disquieted and stressed nearness to a far away” (177). Exile as afterness, then, means “existence after having existed. It is an after-existence” (176). Aptly, Schuback draws parallels between
2 Resonating with the mobility of exile, the term metaphor itself signals movement: its etymology lies in Greek ‘metapherein’, ‘to carry across’ (Peters 19). In modern Greek, ‘metaphorai’ denotes vehicles of mass transportation, a signification that Michel de Certeau connects to stories: in organising and traversing places, linking them together, and creating sentences and itineraries out of them, narrations from news reports to literary productions can serve as means of mass transportation, as metaphorai (115-116). In this sense, the novels analysed in this thesis themselves symbolise and evoke the sense of movement. 3 Schuback (177) explains that in addition to its literal meaning, afterness, the German term Nachheit implicitly evokes the meaning of Nahheit, nearness, which sounds almost the same. Nearness, thus, becomes a decisive experience in afterness. 6 exile and the echo in reflecting on the repetitive nature of afterness (178). Indeed, the metaphor of the echo offers perhaps the most accessible way of understanding her argumentation: like the echo that repeats its source, being same but different, irretrievably distant and tangibly near, existing after having existed, so the one in exile is a “self that has become an after-itself” (180).
The echo is echoed also in Schuback’s linking afterness to a sense of the present as the
“simultaneity of an after coming after coming after” (179), a movement in itself instead of a mere turning point from the past to the future (177-78). According to Schuback, exile disrupts the perception of time as continuous: in exile, the cut itself becomes the measure according to which all that was before it and all that has been since then are constantly and simultaneously drawn to the present to be reinterpreted (179). Schuback’s views, then, reveal a sense of exile not so much as a spatial distance to the point of origin but a temporal one to the past existence, a temporal distance aporetically characterised by unsettling nearness.
The above discussion elicits an understanding of exile that necessarily entails both spatial and temporal dimensions; it is, thus, a spatiotemporal phenomenon. In exile, time and space do not exist as separate entities but are inseparable from each other.4 Exile culminates in the quivering tension between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ the time and space (or time space) of existence before the separation and that since then. Crucially, it is this tension of in-betweenness that the aforementioned perspectives on exile share: Schuback, drawing on Nabokov, describes exilic afterness as “the movement of the between” (180), “the movement of existing between worlds, languages, images, [and] sensibilities; indeed, the movement of between-existence” (186), whereby “existence itself is an on-the-way-toward without return and without arrival” (187). In a similar vein, Naficy (1993) describes exile as a process of perpetual becoming characterised
4 This statement echoes Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope (literally, ‘time space’), the intersection and fusion of temporal and spatial indicators in literature, whereby “time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (84). Although Bakhtin restricts the application of the chronotope to the analysis of literary expression, his approach is useful in understanding the merging of time and space beyond literary works. 7 by in-betweenness and those on exile as “liminars” freed from any imposed cultural attachments
(8-9). Liminars transcend fixed locations and identities, continually living on a cultural threshold between other cultures (2-9).5 Exile, then, is essentially informed by liminality, which
Bjørn Thomassen defines as the quality of “any ‘betwixt and between’ situation or object, any in-between place or moment, a state of suspense, a moment of freedom between two structured world-views or institutional arrangements” (7). According to him, liminality enables the moulding of meanings and reality and carrying them to different directions (ibid.). Although the aforementioned theorists have different views on the durability and persistence of (exilic) liminality,6 their perspectives aid in exposing the potential of the in-between as a space of rethinking identity in relation to what was before the cut and what has been since then.
Despite the outlines of exile sketched above, exile should not, as Naficy notes, be viewed as a generalised condition, as not all displaced people experience exile uniformly:
“Exile discourses strive on detail, specificity, and locality. There is a there there in exile” (4).
Indeed, the experiences of exile depicted in The Kite Runner and And the Mountains Echoed are all unique and have a context. That said, they also share certain fundamental characteristics that form the basis for the understanding of exile developed in this thesis: exile is a spatiotemporal phenomenon caused by a cut or a separation from an axiomatic sense of existence in a certain time space. However, it is not to be understood merely as a fall from a pure, originary state – a tendency of narrating any history that Mark Currie (88-89), following
5 In this context, it is interesting to note Bakhtin’s description of the chronotope of threshold, which is connected to “the breaking point of a life, the moment of crisis, the decision that changes a life” (248). As such, it resonates with the poetics of liminality and exile. 6 Thomassen perceives liminal spaces merely as periods of transition in between of passages and criticises the postmodern and postcolonial tendencies to treat liminality as a as an ideal, permanent state and a positive expression of cultural hybridity (1-2). His critique evidently points to Homi Bhabha’s (2004) theory of hybridity and the third space, according to which the liminal space between cultural identities, the third space, enables the negotiation of cultural differences and opens the possibility for new meanings to emerge in between the polarities. The third space, to Bhabha, is a place of hybridity that is “neither the one nor the other” (37, emphasis in original). While Schuback, similarly, views exile as a “non-way out” (180), Naficy seems to opt for an understanding of exilic liminality that excludes none of the above definitions in noting that it can be either a temporary or a permanent state (1993, 9). 8
Jacques Derrida, criticises – but rather as being in a relation of mutual contamination with the originary state; that is, producing its origin while being produced by it (89). Exile culminates in the liminal tension between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ ‘now’ and ‘then’; a sense of between-existence that, as afterness, echoes what was ‘there’ and ‘then’ while simultaneously reaching for ‘here’,
‘now,’ and beyond – that is, the future. As between-existence, exile destabilises stable feelings of belonging in an unsettling, agitating way.
Evoking exile’s intimate relationship with the questions of belonging essentially elicits its deep connection to home – not (only) as a location (a perspective interrogated earlier in this chapter) but as a taken-for-granted and familiar way of being which Michael Parsons terms a
“psychic home base” (6). In exile, this familiarity is rendered, to borrow the psychoanalytical term, fundamentally uncanny.7 Following Sigmund Freud, Parsons describes what is uncanny as “an ambush, making what should be familiar feel suddenly spooky and dislocated” (48); something that destabilises our usual ways of understanding the world and, in so doing, produces an ambience of anxiety and unsafety (7). Exile’s entanglement with the uncanny is multidimensional: it is not only inflicted by the intervention of the uncanny, but is, as Naficy notes, an uncanny condition itself as a liminal state of otherness (1993, 9), where neither ‘here’ and ‘now’ nor ‘there’ and ‘then’ seem fully familiar. This uncanny tension between ‘here and now’ and ‘there and then’ is, in exile, negotiated through remembrance.
Exilic Memory and Identity: Individual and Collective Narratives of Liminality
Fundamentally attached to time and space, exile is inseparable from, and manifests itself in, the workings of memory. Indeed, in exile, it is memory that speaks (Nabokov, qtd. in Schuback
185). According to Schuback, “memory shows how the past can be present”, not only in forming a bond with what has been but also as a way of making-present (180). It is “an image
7 The German word unheimlich influentially theorised by Sigmund Freud highlights the concept’s ties to home: usually translated as ‘uncanny’ or ‘eerie,’ the term etymologically corresponds to ‘unhomely’ (Freud 124, translator’s note). 9 of the lost” characterised by a double movement, preserving the absent so that it can, then, be called to memory and, thus, rendered present (ibid. 180-181). This process of making-present is that of remembering, or re-membering, an “imaginatively active process, in which the past is not simply reflected in the present mind of the rememberer as mirror, but where, instead, the rememberer actively creates the present-time experience called memory, in relation to the experience in the past” (ibid.). The act of remembering is essentially an enterprise of the present: it is a “process of recalling, interpreting, and reconstructing the past” (Stock 24) in the remembering subject’s current context. Memories, then, are fluid reconstructions that form the framework for interpreting the past and present experiences as well as for orienting oneself towards the future (ibid.). In the afterlife of catastrophes – such as exile – the medium of memory enables the reconstitution of selfhood (Radstone and Schwarz 3). It is this imaginatively active, interpretative turning towards the past in search for selfhood that defines the experiences of exile depicted in Hosseini’s novels.
Memories manifest life experiences, which compels Parsons to define all memory as autobiographical (39). Autobiographical memory encloses the whole range of memory use involved in reflecting on our lives (ibid.). The historical material that remembrance encounters in its reflection process is by no means unitary or unambiguous: it consists of
multi-layered fragments of memory, off bits of debris from the past, dream elements, gaping
absences, . . . stories, a history of discontinuities and unresolved questions, of traumas,
things unsaid, and memories actively destroyed. (Kennedy 181)
In this perspective, forgetting itself forms a crucial part of memory: it becomes, as Richard
Terdiman, analysing Freud, notes, a version of remembrance that rather than being an inarticulate blank, involves a story behind it (96). The intertwining of remembrance and forgetting in memory is crucial in the exilic experiences depicted in both The Kite Runner and
And the Mountains Echoed. 10
Despite its fragmentedness, the personal history constructed by memory is not merely an approximation to some real, unreachable truth – even in its indeterminateness it is all that we have (Parsons 45). The workings of autobiographical memory can be viewed as an inquiry, whereby the past is freed from its pastness through processes of rethinking, redescribing, and rearranging memories from the present perspective (Kennedy 181-186). These remembrances, reflections, form an intricate narrative account – that is, the narrative of personal history (ibid.).
Indeed, as Mark Freeman notes, in its sense-making objective, “the process of remembering the personal past is always already permeated by narrative” (274), as remembering always occurs in and through language, culture, and history. Rethinking the memory-narrative connection,
Freeman expands the historical material encountered by memory cited above to include not only first-hand but also second-hand material: others’ memories, stories read, images seen
(264). Through narrativisation – the fundamental method of memory – the second-hand material merges with the first-hand material, rejecting conceptions of any pure memory outside these influences (ibid.). On par with Parsons, Freeman renounces perceptions of memory as an approximation to the elusive truth; being mediated is “the very condition of possibility for the emergence of insight into one’s past” (274). In Hosseini’s novels, the processes of remembrance are, essentially, autobiographical and narrative in nature: undertaking inquiries into and organising their personal history, the characters pursue narratives of the self in their exilic circumstances. The past takes form not only in first-hand experiences but is also suffused with stories, others’ memories, letters, and different media that give shape to the narrated self.
The narratives of the self, the products of inquiries into personal history, are essentially connected to identity and identity construction. Indeed, emphasising the role of narrative not only in the workings of memory but also in the representation of individual and collective identities, Currie views narrative as an inescapable human mode of thinking and being (6).
Narrative self-reflection entails eliciting connections between life events, often rehearsing them 11 as turning points in personal history (Bernstein 57-58). This self-reflection can be considered as a form of autobiography, in which, as J. M. Bernstein maintains, the narrated self is a construction rather than a representation: narrating a life involves “a transcendence of the narrative emplotment of events beyond their original meaning”, an undertaking that “acts back upon the narrating self” (67). Thus, the inquiries into the past are inseparable from their objective, finding a sense of identity – as Bernstein notes, one’s true self is not something external to the process of self-reflection (70). Similarly, Stuart Hall attributes the foundations of identity to the fictional and fantastic narrativisation of the self (1996, 4). To Hall, “identities are . . . the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (1994, 225). However, identity is not grounded merely to the recovery of the past but belongs equally to the future: it is a matter of constant transformation and becoming, of perpetual positioning (225-226). This evocation of the future through remembering the past, as well as the nature of identity as continuous becoming and positioning, speaks to the essence of exile and exilic liminality. As liminars, exiles live in a perpetual tension between “where we came from . . . [and] what we might become” (Hall 1996, 4), constantly positioning their identities in relation to ‘there and then’ and to ‘here and now’. This in-betweenness and positioning elicits an understanding of exilic identity, on par with exile itself, as a spatiotemporal experience.
Liminality and becoming inform not only exile and exilic identities but also the workings of exilic memory itself. Drawing on Nabokov, Schuback describes memories in exile as “shimmering between images, the coming and going between languages, experiences, a longing back and forth” (175). In exile, everything that was, is, and can be is permeated by
“separation and leaving behind”, appearing as movement “on-the-way toward uncertainty” and creating a sense of the present constituted by loss and disappearance (ibid. 184-186). Memory in exile, then, rather than being a mere double of the time spaces past or present, is a 12 multidirectional movement that remembers the movement of between-existence, the leaving behind, the afterness itself (ibid. 186-187). Drawing on Derrida, Schuback notes that what is remembered is not so much what has been present but what can never become present (184).
In this sense, memory is “the experience of a certain ‘sorrow’ . . . of the others’ absence”; it is always a trace of another, of an afterlife (ibid.). As such, it echoes the ethos of exile itself: both memory and exile are determined by a certain sense of loss, afterness, and distance. Indeed, in a way, memory is always outside itself, outside which forms it, lacking any fixed position altogether (de Certeau 86-87). Along these lines, the title of this introduction gains yet further depth: memory not only resonates with exile; being in exile can be viewed as its inherent quality.
While the primary focus of this thesis is on the experiences of exile and exilic memory in Hosseini’s novels, the Afghan culture and history as collective experiences highlight the significance of the concept of diaspora in the novels. Closely interrelated, exile and diaspora differ in focus: where diaspora is, essentially, collective, the experience of exile can be individual (Peters 20). Historically referring to the scattering of Jews, diaspora has since come to signify the dispersal of peoples from a centre outwards (ibid.), to new geographical territories. Whilst it is the separation from a (psychic) home base that is central in exile, diaspora emphasises “networks among compatriots”: in diaspora, a real or imagined sense of community is maintained among the scattered through different forms of contact, such as travel and media, as well as through a shared culture, language, and rituals (ibid.). Yet the two concepts intertwine: both are built on the act of departure, both incorporate a sense of movement, and – although not always – exile can be a defining aspect of a diasporic community and identity.
Like exile, the diaspora experience is characterised by a sense of liminality and the potential to query stabile conceptions of national identity. Diaspora identities are simultaneously local and 13 global (Brah 196), subverting nation states altogether (Hua 192). The exilic experiences depicted in Hosseini’s novels are often entangled with living in diaspora.
Diaspora evokes collective perspectives on studying exilic memory: diasporas are
“contested cultural and political terrains where individual and collective memories collide, reassemble and reconfigure” (Brah 193). The concept of collective memory (or cultural memory) proceeds from the individual, cognitive processes of remembering being
“metaphorically transferred to the level of culture” (Erll 4). It refers to the capacity of a group in itself to remember (Halbwachs 54); “the symbolic order, the media, institutions, and practices by which social groups construct a shared past” (Erll 4)8. Shared by a certain group, cultural memory conveys it a collective, cultural identity (Assmann 110)9. Mutual forms of longing, memory, and identification define diaspora, albeit in a creative way: diasporic peoples “revive, recreate, and invent their artistic, linguistic, economic, religious, cultural, and political practices and productions” (Hua 193). Akin to collective memory, postmemory denotes “second- generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events”, characterising “the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth” (Hirsch 22). Due to its eminently indirect and mediated connection to the past, postmemory is – even more notably than memory – marked by an imaginative investment and creation (ibid.), which is vividly portrayed in And the Mountains Echoed. The phenomena of forgetting, also queried in the novel, are, too, of importance in diaspora studies: indeed, as Anh Hua notes, analysing diasporic
8 It should be acknowledged that Astrid Erll distinguishes between two perspectives on cultural memory: according to one, all memory is always inherently shaped by cultural contexts (5). This argument echoes Maurice Halbwachs’s theorising of collective memory, in which he maintains that purely individual memory does not exist, as people acquire, recall, recognize, and localise their memories in society and social frameworks (38). This study focuses on Erll’s second perspective on cultural memory as the reconstruction of a shared past. 9 Jan Assmann (110) differentiates between cultural memory and collective memory by treating the former as a form of the latter. The distinction stems from his determination to preserve intact Hablwachs’s original concept of collective memory, from which the cultural sphere is excluded. However, in this study the two concepts are used interchangeably, as the collective memory manifesting itself in Hosseini’s novels is essentially interwoven with Afghan (diaspora) culture. 14 memory can aid in rewriting oblivion into “an act, a creative invention, a performance, a selective loss” (198).
Evoking the matter of memory in exile and diaspora – both spatiotemporal experiences
– highlights how memory itself is not only entangled with time but also with space. Indeed, as
Eleni Bastéa maintains: “Our histories are bound in space, just as they are bound in time”, as our tendency to try to interpret the past by reading its traces in landscapes demonstrates (7).
Memory creates an intricate relationship with space, preserving its essence (1). Memory is, thus, a spatiotemporal phenomenon, the manifestation of which in exile will be analysed in depth in the following subchapter.
Spatiotemporal Exilic Memory: Presencing the Past and the Spatial Time of the Everyday
In exile, the processes of liminality, departing, returning, and remembering one time space while inhabiting another underline spatiality as a fundamental feature of memory. In Hosseini’s novels, Afghanistan is a central site of remembrance (and forgetting): the exiles’ memories intimately intertwine with the land and its cities, streets, parks, houses, homes, and rooms.10
This narrative focus on places evokes Bernard Westphal’s geocritical approach, which “places place at the center of debate” (112, emphasis in original). Interested in “the interface of world and text”, Westphal explores the relationship between a fictional representation and its ‘real’ referent, asking whether reality exists outside its many representations (112-116). Indeed,
Westphal views the referent and its representations as interdependent, interactive, and dynamic; subject to continuous evolution (113).Thus, the places and spaces are not only manifested in the characters’ memories but also constructed and reconstructed through the workings of their remembrance, which transforms them from mere locations to sites of interplay between geography, architecture, social structures, and (metaphorical) expressions of identity.
10 Even though the novels – And the Mountains Echoed especially – do exhibit also other places as points of reference for the characters’ inquiries into their pasts, all the narratives of the self, eventually, interweave with Afghanistan, connecting to each other through the land. 15
Correlating with these perspectives, Sabir Khan stresses the relevance of the negotiation of self and place through memory in émigré autobiographies (117).11 These autobiographies conjoin memory and place in their dual sense of haunting: the old haunts the authors return to entail both memories and series of sites from the past and in the present (119-120) – if these, in fact, may be separated from each other at all. These accounts incorporate architectural and cultural references alongside everyday detail, revealing “a twofold transformation of lived life: first, the figuration into memory of experiences and sensations, and then the transmutation of that memory into a coherent narrative” (117-118). These experiences and sensations, or the
“sense of place” (135), evoke the significance of the senses in everyday experience and, consequently, in the intersecting of memory and space. Indeed, as Paul Rodaway affirms in his theorisation of sensuous geography, the senses form the base on which spatial understanding is constructed: the senses – such as touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, and the sense of balance – both provide us information about our surroundings and, through their quality and the way we use them, themselves structure spaces and define places around us (3-5). The senses are media for experiencing and understanding both space and time: they “contribute to orientation in space, an awareness of spatial relationships and an appreciation of the specific qualities of different places, both currently experienced and removed in time” (37). The centrality of the senses in remembering spaces and places is evident in Hosseini’s novels: the exiles’ memories are often multisensory in nature, which, on the one hand, has the effect of presencing of place as a lived-in entanglement of culture and bodily sensations (Moslund 30-31); on the other, multisensory experiences serve as powerful metaphors for exile and identity construction in the narratives.
11 Even though Hosseini’s literature is not autobiographical per se, Khan’s views support the argumentation for the autobiographical and narrative nature of memory in the novels. Furthermore, autobiographical perspectives are of special relevance in the analysis of The Kite Runner as a cartographic memoir in this study. 16
The presencing of place – culminating in multisensory remembrance in Hosseini’s novels – marks a move from the detached inspection of a place as scenery to a direct sensation of place (Moslund 31). According to Sten Pultz Moslund, this presencing inevitably takes form through language, which compels him to speak of “langscaping of literature or a reading that maps the world as landguage” (30). These concepts point to the way in which a place has form- giving influence on language, endowing it with the sensory energies of its setting (31).
Moslund’s views connect to Robert Tally Jr.’s explorations of the interrelations between space and language in his notion of literary cartography, whereby the map becomes a figure for the linguistic and imaginative activity of writing: like a mapmaker, the writer surveys territory and weaves together different elements to produce a narrative, a “patchwork representation of a world”, a map in words (2013, 45-49). De Certeau, in turn, inspects a contrasting angle to the intersecting of space and literature: examining walking as spatial acting out of the place, he maintains that walkers on the streets weaving spaces together are, in fact, producing an urban text (93-98). In the act of walking, the walker constitutes “both a near and a far, a here and a there” (99) in relation to their position. These space-oriented analyses aid in exposing the spatial character of exilic memory in Hosseini’s novels. The spaces and places of the past give form to memory, loading it with sensations, which, in turn, are transmitted through narrative – that is, language – that functions not only as “a mode of world-representing but also . . . of world- making” (Hartog, qtd. in Tally 2013, 49). The memories, then, represent, create, and presence space, whereby remembrance itself can be said to become an act of mapping. This mapping parallels the act of walking de Certeau describes in constituting and connecting places – or memoryscapes, to modify Moslund’s term.
The idea of memoryscapes exposes how exilic memory – like exile – is fundamentally spatiotemporal. Memory, space, and time intersect through their layeredness, which de Certeau recognises in describing places as “palimpsests”, as “presences of diverse absences”, whereby 17 what is seen indicates what is no longer there (108). These fragmentary pasts and accumulated times, stories of displacements, in fact, compose the place, giving it its essence (ibid.).
Similarly, Bernard Westphal notes the stratigraphical presence of diverse temporalities in different spaces and locates space at “the intersection of moment and duration” (137). Thus, the surface of a given space “rests on the strata of compacted time” (ibid.). Without these obscuring layers of time, there could be no memory (Richter 151); indeed, as Terdiman notes, “Memory is how the mind knows time and registers change” (108). The spatiotemporal layeredness of places parallels that of the mind and memory: Roger Kennedy describes psychoanalytic history as a history of layers, “full of shifting strata, fragments of living reality, absences more than presences, a mutilated yet still living past, involving the elusive presence of the unconscious”
(181). The layers of memory, space, and time intertwine in the exilic memoryscapes of
Hosseini’s novels, revealing the integral inseparability of the three notions.
It is through the entanglement of memory, space, and time that exile interrogates the concepts of space, temporality, and identity. Returning to Schuback’s views quoted earlier in this chapter, exile destabilises the notions of linear time by positioning the cut as the reference point according to which what preceded and what followed are remembered in the present. In
Hosseini’s novels, these memories – both individual and collective – are intimately sensuous, permeated by and evolving through narrative, presencing places and the sense of liminality. In their spatiality, the memories embody “subjective time, the time of the everyday and of the self”, which interrupts the axiomatic geometrical abstractions of linear time, the time of history
(Schwarz 43). Although Hosseini’s novels are deeply concerned with the history of
Afghanistan, the workings of exilic memory complicate its seemingly causal logic and progression by introducing the time of the everyday to the narratives.
Indeed, the intimate, interpretative remembrance that the exilic characters of the novels employ in their quest for coherent identities marks a move away from what Bhabha deems 18 homogeneous and horizontal time (202). Criticising the tendency of historicist discourse to view societies as holistic cultural entities and products of epochal historical events on linear timelines, Bhabha opts for an understanding of the nation as a reproductive, temporal process
– “an event of the everyday” (203) – where the people and the incidents of their daily life function as metaphors for national culture. In this scheme, the nation is narrated through “the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference” (212). This “dissemiNation . . . of meaning, time, peoples, cultural boundaries, and historical traditions” (239) exposes the plurality of identities within a nation and paves way for understanding identity even beyond national borders and, consequently, in exile. Hosseini’s novels – And the Mountains Echoed in particular – exhibit the disseminating of meaning through diverse insights into the past, advocating for a perspective on temporality as the spatial time of the everyday that reveals the plurality of exile discourse and exilic identities.
In my BA thesis, I situated The Kite Runner within the framework of the “Immigrant
Genre” (George, quoted in Mäkinen 7), a sub-category of postcolonial literature.12 And the
Mountains Echoed is, also, informed by the politics of colonialism and postcolonialism – albeit not necessarily in the most traditional sense. Rosemary Marangoly George (197) argues for an expanded notion of postcolonial literature, whereby all literary texts interrogating “feeling at home”, be it in “homes, genders, a specific race or class, in communities [or] nations”, could be read as contributions to the immigrant genre. In this sense, the immigrant experience as envisioned by George correlates with the contesting of static feelings of belonging and identity
12 While George emphasises immigrants originating from former colonies – such as Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie – as the primary writers of the immigrant genre, she does suggest the incorporation of authors writing from any location affected by the dynamics of colonialism (George, qtd. in Mäkinen 7). Not a colonial site in the conventional sense, Afghanistan has experienced colonial dynamics due to foreign invasions over the centuries: the country acted as a site of the power clash between British India and Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 1970s it was invaded by the Soviet Union, and by the USA at the beginning of the 21st century (Barfield, qtd. in Mäkinen 7). Colonial tensions also persist in the minority structures the exiles encounter after fleeing their homeland in Hosseini’s novels (Mäkinen 7). Hosseini, himself an asylum seeker to the US in the 80s (Blumenthal, qtd. in Mäkinen 7), can be considered as contributing to the immigrant genre. 19 that exile elicits in this thesis. It, also, involves the idea of migratory movement, which highlights its relevance in relation to the spatial exile depicted in Hosseini’s novels.
The reconsiderations of identity, time, and space also locate Hosseini’s novels within the realm of postmodern literature: Currie describes the tendency to represent issues of identity and cultural difference in the context of global, cultural standardisation as well as the loss of linearity in temporal experience as the characteristics of postmodern novels (4). Furthermore, echoing Bhabha’s notion of dissemination, Joseph Francese (5-10) connects polycentrism, the perseverance and intertwining of multiple heterogeneous narratives, along with the inclination to view history as a network of interconnected microhistories rather than “a process of unilinear evolution” (107) as features of postmodern narratives. Within postmodern texts, Francese identifies what he terms “oppositional postmodern narratives” (109) that, like Hosseini’s novels, contest the continuous present of postmodernity by recuperating the past. Indeed, mulching the past into meaning (Ansary x), as well as reconstructing identity and negotiating
‘here’ and ‘there’ (Saed and Muradi xii-xxii) are traits characterising Afghan American literature, in the domain of which Hosseini’s novels pertain.13
A rather traditional depiction of exile involving a refugee experience and border- crossings, Hosseini’s first novel, The Kite Runner, recounts the story of Amir, the son of a wealthy businessman, who flees his Soviet-occupied homeland, Afghanistan, for the US.
Amir’s past and present are defined not only by the banishment from the homeland but also by his guilt caused by failing to interfere in the rape of his servant, Hassan. In a narrative built on autobiographical remembrance and the mixing of child and adult experiences, Amir relates the events that finally take him back to Afghanistan before, eventually, finding coherence in his
13 Afghan American literature, thematising the Afghan immigrant experience in the US (Ansary ix), emerged triggered by the Soviet invasion in the 1970s, the civil war in the 1990s, the Taliban movement, the US war against it, and the subsequent exile of thousands of Afghans to the United States and experienced a new wave due to the post-9/11 media attention to Afghanistan (Saed and Muradi xi-xiv). The Kite Runner was one of the first works to originate out of these experiences. 20 personal narrative. Combining Tally’s notion of literary cartography, de Certeau’s act of walking as a metaphor for remembering, and Moslund’s presencing of place with autobiographical and psychoanalytical perspectives on memory, I read The Kite Runner as a cartographic memoir in the second chapter of this thesis. Exhibiting and presencing the multisensory memoryscapes of his exilic past through narration, Amir maps his memories in the memoir that incorporates the past, the present, and the future. Through the processes of memory mapping Amir also maps his exilic identity, situating it in the movement of the in- between.
And the Mountains Echoed, analysed in the third chapter, is a more complicated take on the thematic of exile. Reflecting postmodern polycentrism, the narrative moves between places, spaces, and times, refusing to settle on the story of one protagonist. Afghanistan and the individual pasts interwoven with that of the country are related from very different viewpoints: a young Afghan boy from a rural village, his stepmother, a well-off servant from Kabul, an
Afghan poet and her adopted daughter, an Afghan American doctor, a Greek plastic surgeon, and the daughter of an Afghan immigrant in the US. While sharing the sense of exile and displacement caused by different – and yet similar – circumstances, the multiple narratives, also, reveal the plurality within exile, remembering, and forgetting. The plural perspectives depicted are characterised by intertextual and intermedial constructions of the past, memory, and identity, which evokes the reconstructed nature of all (self-)representation. The dispersal of viewpoints also has implications on space: following Westphal’s logic of geocriticism, the narratives of the novel write Afghanistan as a complex, global place, and, eventually, participate in approaching the identity of a liminal and unfixed exile space.
While Hosseini’s work has hitherto received relatively little academic interest, The Kite
Runner has been read, for example, as a neo-Orientalist narrative (e.g. Huggan), as an allegory of global ethics (Jefferess), and as a translation of the national trauma of Afghanistan for the 21
Western audience (O’Brien). And the Mountains Echoed, in turn, has been studied in terms of its representation of the concept of family (Nguyen), its representation of the Afghan institution of marriage (Qamar and Shakeel), as well as its portrayal of the conflict between patriarchal and feminist ideologies (Ahmad and Khan). The perspectives of interest in this thesis, however, have mostly been overlooked in previous research.14
In exploring memory and exile in two of Khaled Hosseini’s novels, this study aims at exposing the multiplicity and unfixedness inherent in the notion of exile that Naficy recognises.
It is affirmed that exile, in its multiplicity, is a spatiotemporal phenomenon, as is exilic memory, through which the experiences of exile are confronted, interpreted, reconstructed, narrated, and presenced in the novels. The relationship between exile and remembrance in the novels, however, is dual: the processes of remembering and memories not only presence exile but are also themselves permeated by a sense of exile in metaphorical and unconscious ways that unfold through the narratives. These processes of exilic remembrance, in their ambience of liminality, complicate absolute notions of (national) identity and introduce difference into categorical conceptions of time and space, interrupting the linearity of historicism by replacing it with the subjective time of the everyday. The time of the everyday, however, is disconnected neither from the past nor the future, as some postmodern perspectives suggest; in exile, the sensuous and spatiotemporal memories constantly presence the past in the present, while simultaneously contain traces of what is to come. In this sense, the past, the present, and the future cannot exist as a mere linear sequence; indeed, as Currie notes, the parts of any sequence necessarily constitute each other, entailing each other’s traces (84-87). This logic of mutual contamination characterises exile in Hosseini’s novels, where the past, the present, and the future time spaces are concurrently present in every memory and in every moment. In this view, exile is not
14 Questions of exile and memory do arise in Blumenthal’s article as well as in my BA thesis. 22 confined to the nostalgic remembrance of the past; it already contains within it the future and the possibility of carrying meaning and identity into new directions.
23
2. The Kite Runner: A Cartographic Memoir of Exile
Of Hosseini’s three novels, The Kite Runner is the most explicit manifestation of the autobiographical and narrative nature of memory: it is Amir, the protagonist, himself that engages in the recounting of his life narrative in an exilic autobiographical project that takes place after all the events of the novel have already occurred.15 Presencing the sensuous memoryscapes and moving between different time spaces, both as acts of remembrance and physical journeys, the narrative emphasises the spatial character of Amir’s memory (and exile) and elicits spatial perspectives in the analysis. Drawing on Tally’s notion of literary cartography, de Certeau’s act of walking as a metaphor for remembering, and Moslund’s presencing of place, I inspect Amir’s autobiographical project as a memory map. Memory maps organise the narratives of those who remember both temporally and spatially, reveal intricate interactions between the past and the present, and expose memory’s entanglement with historical, social, geographical, and cultural contexts (Tamanoi 19). In mapping his exile, Amir also navigates towards a coherent sense of self.
In his mapping project, Amir assumes the role of an autobiographer: an autobiographer sets out to reassemble the scattered elements of his life to create a sense of unity and coherence across time (Gusdorf 35). The work is characterised by “postulating of meaning” (ibid. 42), whereby the retrospective position allows the autobiographer to confer meaning on events which at the time of their occurrence had several meanings or none at all. This ethos of the past as a defining force is evident in The Kite Runner – as Amir’s Baba (father) remarks: “what happens in . . . a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime” (126). In a similar vein,
Amir commences his autobiographical project in a memoir-like start in December 2001: “I
15 In this context it is interesting that Hosseini has admitted the protagonist of The Kite Runner to be deeply autobiographical (Hoby), a fact strengthened by Gusdorf’s assertion that all literary creation is autographical in character (46). However, this thesis refrains from drawing conclusions on Hosseini’s life based on the novel and opts for a reading of The Kite Runner as a fictional memoir. 24 became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975”
(1). What follows is a memoir of the decisive events that, beginning in the Kabul of his childhood in the 1960s, lead Amir through the historical conflicts of Afghanistan of the 1970s16 and the personal crisis caused by his failure to intervene in the rape of his brother-like servant,
Hassan; to the late 20th century US as part of the Afghan diaspora; back to Afghanistan on a redemptory mission to save Hassan’s son, Sohrab; and, finally, back to the US with a new- found sense of identity.
Engaging with his past retrospectively allows Amir to observe his life with a vision of a mapmaker. As Georges Gusdorf illustrates his concept of the removing effect of memory,
As an aerial view sometimes reveals . . . the direction of a road or a fortification or the map
of a city invisible to someone on the ground, so the reconstruction in spirit of my destiny
bares the major lines that I have failed to notice, the demands of the deepest values I hold
that, without my being clearly aware of it, have determined my most decisive choices. (38)
In this sense, Amir’s autobiographical undertaking can be viewed as cartographic in nature, a cartographic memoir.17 Recalling the ‘bigger picture’ of what preserves meaning and value in the present (ibid. 44), Amir creates a memory map that, like (and as) an autobiography, captures the relationship of significance between the outlined spaces and places as well as experiences and events intertwined with them (Olney 247). This memory project, necessarily, realises itself as a work in the present and for the present (Gusdorf 44), seeking to situate “what I am in the perspective of what I have been” (ibid. 38) and, thus, begets a “creation of self by the self”
16 In 1973, the Afghan monarchy ruled by King Zahir Shah was abolished in a coup and the country was declared a republic led by Daud Khan, who, however, was killed in a subsequent coup in 1978. The power was seized by his former socialist allies, members of the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The new socialist regime, however, encountered internal resistance due to its radical policies, which brought it on the verge of collapse. Attempting to stabilise the situation, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, which led into a ten-year occupation and war between the Soviets and the PDPA on one side and the Islamist-led mujahideen on the other (Barfield 134). 17 The concept is inspired by the title of Christopher Norment’s memoir that, however, looks at maps with a different, non-literary focus. 25
(ibid. 44). Along the same line, James Olney remarks that an autobiographical reaching for the past from the present evokes an understanding of life that, rather than horizontally stretching back through time, vertically reaches towards the roots of an individual, from the consciousness into the unconscious (239). In this perspective, Amir’s memory mapping is a way to outline and locate his identity in exile, both in relation to his past, present, and future as well as in relation to the places entangled in them.
Amir’s cartographic memoir is not only an undertaking of remembrance – it is also a narrative production. A storyteller from early on, Amir becomes a professional writer in the
US, and his literary career as well as the memoir-like structure of the narrative insinuate that the novel is, indeed, a published autobiography in the world it constructs. As both the narrator and the writer, Amir draws his memory map textually, as a work of literary cartography. In literary cartography, the merging of place and storytelling, the writer blends diverse elements
– such as “scraps of other narratives, descriptions of people or places, images derived from first-hand observation as well as from secondary reports, legends, myths, and inventions of the imagination” (Tally 2013, 49) – to produce a narrative, drawing a map-like image of the world
(ibid.). The map produced is not a mere projection of reality, but a construction rendered meaningful through processes of selection (ibid. 53-54) – much in the same way as the life narrative of an autobiographer.
In what follows, I outline the elements that Amir draws on in weaving his exilic memory map. Taking its form through narration and narrative structures, Amir’s memory map vividly exhibits the sensuous time spaces and the societal and psychological memoryscapes of his past, interwoven with the conscious and unconscious workings of his mind. The analysis echoes the layeredness of memory, time, space, and the mind in its structure: starting with the merging of memory and narration, it burrows into the “langscapes” (Moslund 30) of Amir’s mind. As an overarching theme, exile heavily informs Amir’s memoir, both in concrete and metaphorical 26 ways. Amir’s mapping project serves to route and locate his exilic identity and introduces new
– exilic – ways of understanding time and space.
Narrative Cartography: Mapping the Sensuous Everyday
As literary production, Amir’s memory map is, essentially, formed through narration. Narration both functions as a cartographical tool, an instrument of organising and structuring memory, and is the very medium of memory that enables its emergence. On par with exilic memory,
Amir’s memory map is spatiotemporal in nature: it routes his past and his present in relation to each other, incorporating different places and locations. Like a cartographer examining territory and landscapes, Amir determines the shape of his literary map, whereby “some shadings need to be darker than others, some lines bolder” (Tally 2013, 45). The different narrative techniques and shifts resemble the erratic structure of a map, depicting the intensity of Amir’s memories – some of them vague, some striving in detail – in a cartographic manner.
Initiating his mapping project in the US in December 2001, Amir identifies the invitation of his father’s friend, Rahim Khan, to Pakistan the previous summer as the incentive for his reconnection with the past before exile: on the phone, “I knew it wasn’t just Rahim Khan on the line. It was my past of unatoned sins” (1). Sitting on a bench in Golden Gate Park after the call, Amir’s mind wanders to the crucial events of 1975 that fundamentally altered his way of life and defined his exile from Afghanistan. Interestingly, the narration distances itself from the moment of recollection and creates an effect of layered memory: in December 2001, Amir remembers his act of remembering that took place the previous summer. In autobiographical terms, the first chapter outlines the “double persona” of the writer-narrator: telling the story as narrator and enacting it as protagonist, the autobiographer, in fact, simultaneously exists in different time spaces that merge as the narrative unfolds (Howarth 87). Indeed, activating memory to recall what was experienced through the senses in an earlier time space is an act of focalisation in the narrative (Margolin 48). Focalisation, a perception of the story world from a 27 particular perspective in a particular place at a certain time (ibid. 42-49), serves as a way to both separate and blend Amir the narrator’s and Amir the protagonist’s spheres of existence.
The depiction of Amir’s memories of the Afghanistan of his childhood in the 1960s emphasise his role as the double persona of the memoir: the narration becomes a mixture of the world of experience of the child protagonist and a “second reading” (Gusdorf 38) of that world that adds a level of consciousness of the autobiographer-narrator. Remembering the abolition of monarchy in July 1973, Amir remarks: “The king, Zahir Shah, was away in Italy. In his absence, his cousin Daoud Khan had ended the king’s forty-year reign with a bloodless coup”
(32). Amir the child’s experience of the political change contrasts with the narrator’s historical account. When Hassan, the son of the family servant Ali, asks him what a republic is, Amir can but shrug: “‘I don’t know.’ On Baba’s radio, they were saying that word, ‘republic,’ over and over again” (32). The mixing of these temporally (and spatially) distant perspectives creates a sense of detachment from the societal, political, and lineal history that is imposed onto Amir’s memory map in a fragmented way, necessarily as an enterprise of the present. This blending, at times to an ironic effect, queries the relationship between historicist accounts and the lived experience: Amir’s disengagement with the former is accentuated in his being bored by the news (32), preferring fiction to the boring history books (17), and hearing the coverage of Radio
Kabul News through walls (51). Although epochal events provide some framework for Amir’s memory map, its main routes are traced through the event of the everyday, to return to Bhabha’s concept – it is, rather, Amir’s mundane life with its relationships, routines, and experiences that gains significance in the past time space the narrative constructs and presences. Despite the coup d'état, “life went on as before. People went to work Saturday through Thursday and gathered for picnics on Fridays in parks, on the banks of Ghargha Lake, in the gardens of
Paghman” (38). Even after the Soviet invasion in 1979, the real tragedy for Amir is not the political unrest of the society he inhabits but, rather, Hassan’s rape that he could not stop: “Long 28 before the Roussi army marched into Afghanistan, long before villages were burned and schools destroyed . . . Kabul had become a city of ghosts for me” (121). Amir’s remembrance, in weaving together the societal and personal by co-focalising his narrator and protagonist perspectives, maps a time space where both the past and the present are simultaneously present.
The event of the everyday is highlighted in Amir’s memory map also through the highly sensuous quality of his memories. He remembers Baba’s study in Kabul smelling like tobacco and cinnamon (4), as well as “‘what Baba looked like . . . what he smelled like too’” (281). The descriptions of past time spaces are often very vivid and exact, permeated by sounds and smells, as Amir’s memory of his departure from Kabul in the back of a fuel truck in 1981: “MiGs roaring past overhead; staccatos of gunfire; a donkey braying nearby; the jingling of bells and mewling of sheep; gravel crushed under the truck’s tires; a baby wailing in the dark; the stench of gasoline, vomit, and shit” (108). Sense memories are an integral feature of experiencing the past and may include smells, tastes, textures, sounds, qualities of voice, postures and ways of moving, colours, and even degrees of brightness, as well as the intrusion of sounds and images from television (Morse 63-67). This sensuous reconstruction of the past is tangible in Amir’s exilic remembrance of the past time spaces. The multisensory memories presence the lived-in space of the everyday, giving it an ambience of reality and reliability in comparison with the canonical history.
Amir’s multisensory memoryscapes frequently take form through detailed spatial pinpointing and physical movement, which emphasises the cartographic quality of his memoir.
To return to de Certeau’s concept of walking as the spatial acting out of a place, the Kabul of
Amir’s childhood is reconstructed as a lived-in space through motion, through his roaming the streets and the bazaars of the city: “One day, we were walking from my father’s house to
Cinema Zainab for a new Iranian movie, taking the shortcut through the military barracks near
Istiqlal Middle School” (6). In America, Amir maps his surroundings by driving around, “from 29 the East Bay to the South Bay, up the Peninsula and back . . . through the grids of cottonwood- lined streets in our Fremont neighbourhood . . . up the hills of Los Altos” (120). This driving scene in the US is superimposed with another everyday cartography of driving in Afghanistan
– it is by car that Amir, as an adult, returns to Kabul, to a scenery mixed with memories:
We were driving westbound toward the Karteh-She district on what I remembered as a
major thoroughfare in the seventies: Jadeh Maywand. Just north of us was the bone-dry
Kabul River. On the hills to the south stood the broken old city wall. . . . The Shirdarwaza
range stretched all the way west. It was from those mountains that I remember the firing of
the Topeh chasht, the “noon cannon” (217).
Through this concrete geographical mapping of places along with multiple mentions of different architectural and cultural artefacts, foods, and concepts, the space seeps in the narrative. Laden with sensory, spatial, and cultural elements of its setting, the narrative maps the past time spaces as langscapes, to return to Moslund’s idea. This langscaping, again, contributes to presencing the past time spaces in the present, evoking the everyday practices as an alternative to the detached historicist understanding of the past.
The presence of the present in the past, then, gains relevance in the way Amir’s memories take form and are organised. His memoir is, until Rahim Khan’s phone call in the summer of 2001, characterised by forth-and-back-flowing narration occasionally interrupted by exact temporal locations and memories. The narration alternates between remembrance of eras; snippets of memory that lack exact temporal pinpointing and, rather, serve to characterise broader periods; recollections of precise points in time; as well as accounts of the history of
Afghanistan that contextualise Amir’s memories. Born in Kabul in 1963, Amir remembers his childhood as an era resembling “one long lazy summer day with Hassan, chasing each other between tangles of trees in my father’s yard, playing hide-and-seek, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, insect torture” (22). His memory is also organised by seasonal changes: he 30 associates winter with playing cards by the stove, watching Russian movies, eating turnip qurma, kite flying, and celebrating yelda, the first night of winter, a tradition he recalls also in the US (44; 127). Summer in Kabul is dry, dusty, and spent at school reciting ayats from the
Koran (95). Precise temporal pinpointing, in turn, roots Amir’s memories to the map: “One day, in July 1973, I played another little trick on Hassan” (26). It is in the recognition of eras that the present seeps in the narrative and the past, elevating Amir the narrator to the position of
“the voyeur” (de Certeau 92) spectating the whole of his past from afar18; whereas the precise spatiotemporal locations shift the focalisation on Amir the protagonist, who, then, exhibits the role of the walker on the street, presencing the past in the narrative and in the present.
The shifts in narration also accentuate the intensity of Amir’s memories. While most of the memoir is narrated in the past tense, which emphasises the distance of the autobiographer- narrator to the events being depicted, some memories are transmitted in the present tense, whereby these flashes from the past seem to omit the presence of the narrator altogether. This shift of deictic centre indicates an endeavour to re-experience the initial act of focalisation
(Margolin 53) and presences the past drastically. These memories acquire an intense, often nearly distressing quality, and frequently pertain to critical situations that entail a halt, a possibility of a drastic change. In Amir’s memory map, these moments often function as focal points which characterise the past before the event as necessarily leading up to it, and what follows as afterness in every way affected by the event. Having been beaten on his trip to Kabul as an adult, Amir is disoriented at a hospital in Peshawar: “Faces poke through the haze, linger, fade away. . . . They all ask questions. Do I know who I am?” (259) The focal points reroute
Amir’s course of life and, at the same time, the development of his identity; they function as turning points and crossroads leading to new directions. In this sense, these moments have the
18 De Certeau describes the voyeur as a contrast to the figure of the walker: in spectating the world from an elevated position, the voyeur sees the whole of it but simultaneously alienates himself from daily practices and behaviours (92-93). 31 quality of liminal passages: they involve a rupture of the taken-for-granted, a chaotic and unsettling period of fundamental doubt, that ultimately leads to an altered reality (Thomassen
1-7).19 From this perspective, these liminal moments evoke a sense of exile, metonymously resonating with the exilic in-betweenness that informs Amir’s mapping project as a whole.
The intense presencing of the past in these flashes of remembrance is accentuated by their tangibly sensuous character. Amir’s memory of waiting for news on Hassan’s son
Sohrab’s state after his suicide attempt at the hospital in Islamabad is charged with his sense of the surrounding space:
I close my eyes and my nostrils fill with the smells of the corridor, sweat and ammonia,
rubbing alcohol and curry. On the ceiling, moths fling themselves at the dull gray light tubes
running the length of the corridor and I hear the papery flapping of their wings. I hear
chatter, muted sobbing, sniffling, someone moaning, someone else singing, elevator doors
opening with a bing, the operator paging someone in Urdu. (306)
The past being presenced is, in its sensuous quality, almost palpable, as if Amir was physically present in the past. Yet the flash is a mere memory of a time space beyond his reach and, thus, charged with afterness, of intense nearness to a far away, to re-evoke Schuback’s views. The multisensory memories, then, evoke and presence not only the past but also the sense of exile in Amir’s memory map.
As a contrast to the flashbacks that weaken the presence of the narrator, the narrative is also saturated with strategies that accentuate the meaning making processes of the memoirist, creating a flash of the future in the past. Amir’s childhood memories proleptically connect to his present knowledge: “Then he smiled his Hassan smile and disappeared around the corner.
The next time I saw him smile unabashedly like that was twenty-six years later, in a faded
19Although emphasising their fundamental uncertainty, Thomassen treats liminal passages essentially as pleasant moments of freedom (4-7). However, I argue that distressing situations may also provoke the possibility of profound change and, thus, function as liminal moments, as is evident in The Kite Runner. 32
Polaroid photograph” (60). The prolepses add to the sense of the exilic afterness of Amir’s present existence: “I . . . almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had” (65). These flashes also occur vice versa, through analeptical remarks in Amir’s more recent memories. His memory of returning to Afghanistan intertwines with that of departing: “The last time I’d travelled that road was in a tarpaulin-covered truck going the other way” (215). The sudden interjections of the present in the past and the past in the present produce cuts to the narrative flow interrupting its chronological progression and, thus, connect metaphorically to the atmosphere of exile. They also complicate the sequential understanding of time, emphasising the inseparability of the past and the present in Amir’s memory map.
Amir’s memoir is also characterised by the inseparability of first- and second-hand material: different intertextual and intermedial elements permeate his memory, forming a part of the narrative. In Amir’s memory map, special emphasis is given to storytelling, which often functions as a source of information, filling the essential gaps in Amir’s narrated life. It is partly through the stories and memories recounted to him that Amir constructs his idea of his father, a bear wrestler (11) whose father was killed by a thief: “I was always learning things about
Baba from other people” (16). His memory of his deceased mother, then, is based on the testimony of an old acquaintance of hers Amir encounters when he returns to Kabul in the early
2000s (221), which metaphorically coincides with his reconnection with his motherland. It is, also, through a story that Amir reconnects with Hassan, the key figure of his past: Amir’s memory of meeting Rahim Khan in Peshawar in 2001 triggers a radical act of focalisation through a narrator switch. Rahim Khan, as the narrator, recounts his memory of reuniting with
Hassan and his family (181-190), and, eventually, delivers Hassan’s letter to Amir, which also merges with Amir’s memory. The letter gives Hassan a personal voice for the first time in the narrative, depicting his outlook on life in Kabul in the early 2000s (192-194). In addition to stories and letters, Amir’s memories of Afghanistan are saturated with bits and pieces of 33 information transmitted in the media. He has lived the war in his homeland through the TV screen (215) and, returning to Kabul as an adult, realises the city exists “not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle” (214).
Although the second-hand data are an integral entity of his memory, their mediated quality adds to the sense of displacement and detachment Amir experiences in relation to his past and, accordingly, to the presence of exile in his memoir.
The ethos of exile is present in Amir’s memoir also through the underlying movement of the narrative. Starting his mapping project in December 2001, Amir finishes it in March 2002 by describing kite flying with Sohrab at the Afghan gathering in Fremont four days before (322-
329). The identification of these two temporal locations points to the unfixity of Amir’s remembrance and the narration process itself, creating a sense of constant motion in his memoir: the autobiography unfolds on par with the unfolding of his existence in and between the pinpointed places. The implicit movement between these time spaces also creates an effect of layered time: while Amir remembers the passing of time in his past, time also passes in his current existence. In fact, in the end, even the process of mapping memory becomes a part of the memory map, the cartographic memoir. The present and the past, thus, intertwine through the narrative, and the perpetual movement incorporates also the future to the cluster of time spaces in the memoir, impeding any sense of linearity. The constant interaction and overlapping of the different time spaces along with the impossibility of definite spatiotemporal settling reverberates with exile and Amir’s exilic identity, the expressions of which in his memoir are explored next.
Langscapes of the Mind
Mapping his memories in a project of narrative cartography, Amir simultaneously maps his exilic identity, the expressions of which are both conscious and unconscious in his memoir. In addition to the explicitly narrated escape from one place to another, exile manifests itself in the 34 memoir implicitly, through recurring metaphors of liminality, movement, and non-linear time.
Amir’s identity mapping is characterised by distressing shimmering in between, to reconsider
Schuback’s conception of exilic remembrance: torn between other people’s expectations and his own personality, between two lands, between the impulses of remembering and forgetting, his routing work is progress on-the-way-toward uncertainty. This flux liminality exposes the merging of time, space, memory, and identity in exile and demands alternative ways of defining these concepts.
Amir’s troubled sense of self is traceable to his childhood, the memories of which are defined by complicated relationships and power structures that often manifest themselves spatially. The house Amir lives in is the most significant setting of his past (Mäkinen 9) and, at times metaphorically, embodies the state of his relationships. On the one hand, the house in the affluent Wazir Akbar Khan district is a sanctuary protected by wrought-iron gates, the estate which Amir and Hassan roam, climbing the poplar trees in the driveway and playing in the garden; on the other, it is a site of alienation where Amir feels like a ghost (50) due to the lack of approval and attention expressed by his father. Feeling responsible for the death of his mother at childbirth, Amir considers himself the culprit for the lack of intimacy between him and his father: “I always felt like Baba hated me a little” (17). Amir and Baba are portrayed in Amir’s memories as polar opposites (Mäkinen 10). A wealthy businessman, Baba is a “force of nature”
(11) “mold[ing] the world around him to his liking” (14) and is unable to understand Amir, who prefers reading and writing to sports and struggles to defend himself against bullies: “‘If I hadn’t seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I’d never believe he’s my son’”
(20). The alienation between the father and the son is accentuated by their scarcely intersecting spaces: “Baba and I lived in the same house, but in different spheres of existence” (44). At home, Baba mostly isolates himself by retreating to his study, a space Amir rarely has access 35 to. Amir remembers Baba’s presence at the house mainly as sounds and chatter heard through walls and closed doors.
The societal power structures of the era, too, manifest themselves in Amir’s memories of Baba’s house. A prosperous Pashtun family, Baba and Amir have two Hazara servants, Ali and his son Hassan.20 Even though the relationship between the four men is remarkably close,
Ali and Hassan inhabit a hut in the garden rarely entered by Amir or his father. The hierarchy between the two social groups is striking: “When . . . we were done playing for the day . . . I went past the rosebushes to Baba’s mansion, Hassan to the mud shack where he had been born”
(5). As noted in my BA thesis (Mäkinen 10), Amir’s relationship to Hassan is complex. On the one hand, growing together, the two boys share a brother-like connection that offers Amir an escape from Baba’s aloofness (17); on the other, the sincere and brave Hassan represents the qualities of a proper son in Baba’s eyes, which begets jealousy and anger in Amir. Amir never views Hassan as his friend (22) and sometimes uses his power position to test him, asking him to chew dirt (48) or taking advantage of his illiteracy (25). The conflict escalates when, in the winter of 1975 after winning an annual kite flying tournament, Amir witnesses Hassan’s rape by Assef, a local harasser, and chooses not to interfere: “Maybe Hassan was the price I had to pay . . . to win Baba” (69). The agonizing guilt caused by this decision profoundly changes the boys’ relationship, again in spatial terms. Amir banishes Hassan to the periphery of his life (78), isolates himself to his room and to his “little airless bubble of atmosphere” (78), and, eventually, drives the servants out of the house accusing Hassan of theft (92).
Amir’s not intervening in Hassan’s abuse defines the constant interplay of remembering and forgetting in his memoir. Amir’s remembrance is permeated by impulses to forget: to him, America is “a river, roaring along, unmindful of the past. I would wade into this
20 Pashtuns are the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan and constitute the country’s ruling elite, whereas Hazaras historically ranked at the bottom of the country’s ethnic hierarchy due to racial and religious prejudice (Barfield, qtd. in Mäkinen 7). Pashtuns are Sunni Muslims, Hazaras Shia Muslims. 36 river, let my sins drown to the bottom, let the waters carry me someplace far. Someplace with no ghosts, no memories, and no sins” (121). Yet the past persists: mentions of Hassan provoke the resurfacing of the guilt and Amir’s mind’s returning to the alley where the rape happened
(80). Indeed, the blind alley recurs as the intersection between remembering and forgetting, as the culmination of Amir’s repressed past; it is a metaphor of blocked memory. Drawing on
Freud, Terdiman analyses forgetting as “blockages of recollection determined by the psyche’s need to not remember something troubling” (95). These blockages, then, substitute unwanted memories (ibid.). The cul-de-sac embodies Amir’s attempted disconnection with his past, but also the impossibility of escaping from it. At the very beginning of his mapping project, Amir remarks: “Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years” (1). The figure of the alley, exhibiting Amir’s guilt, evokes a spatial approach to his trauma and emphasises the spatial quality of not only remembering but also forgetting in exile.
The tension between remembering and forgetting intensifies as a result of Amir’s return to Afghanistan. Discovering Hassan to be his biological half-brother drives Amir to question his identity, notably in a fundamentally spatial way: “I felt like a man who awakens in his own house and finds all the furniture rearranged, so that every familiar nook and cranny looks foreign now. Disoriented, he has to reevaluate his surroundings, reorient himself” (199). Rahim
Khan’s revelations and the discrepancy between his memories and the war-torn land inflict a conflict in Amir’s remembrance. On the one hand, he yearns for oblivion (201) and feels alienated in the Taliban-ruled Kabul, a site of “rubble and beggars” (216), and like a stranger at the gates of Baba’s house, a raddled version of the structure built by his memory (232). On the other, he refuses to let himself forget and experiences a deep reconnection with his past homeland: 37
The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land . . . it surprised me. I’d been gone long enough
to forget and be forgotten. . . . I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I hadn’t. . . . I
sensed Afghanistan humming under my feet. Maybe Afghanistan hadn’t forgotten me
either. (213)
However, the dynamics of remembering and forgetting are not presented merely as clear-cut repression mechanisms; the unintentional and unpredictable nature of forgetting is also reflected on in the narrative. Curiously, Amir’s notebook, a gift from Rahim Khan received as a child that proves significant for Amir’s writing aspirations and his memoir, is not remembered by the old man himself (176). The beggar Amir encounters in Kabul only has shattered memories of his mother (221), and when Sohrab, Hassan’s son Amir rescues in Kabul, is distressed about forgetting his parents’ faces, Amir consoles him: “‘Time does that’” (281).
These workings of memory illuminate how memory in exile is in a perpetual state of flux, susceptible to the mechanisms of the mind as well as the dynamics of time. They also seem to make a metafictional remark on the nature of the memoir itself: despite its detailedness, it is a product of memory that already entails its inconstancies.
The dynamics of time manifest themselves in Amir’s remembrance also in implicit ways. The narrative exhibits seemingly unconscious anticipations that proleptically link to occurrences recounted later in the memoir. To get his father’s attention during their trip to
Ghargha Lake, Amir remembers declaring he might have cancer (13). Later in America, Baba is diagnosed with lung cancer, of which he eventually dies. Upset with the impassiveness of the
American ambassador regarding Amir’s intentions to adopt Sohrab in Islamabad, Amir accuses him of not understanding what it is like to want a child – only to discover his daughter has committed suicide (293). Not much later, Sohrab tries to kill himself. On the one hand, these
“presentiments” (Freud 1919, 146) seem to inexplicably anticipate future events; on the other, they are remembered when the events they anticipate have already occurred, which suggests 38 the link is created in Amir’s memory. These mental processes point to Freud’s principle of “the omnipotence of thoughts” (ibid. 147), which refers to the attribution of the misfortunes as the direct consequences of earlier thoughts or events. The anticipations in the narrative could, then, be read as further manifestations of Amir’s guilt, which extends from Hassan’s rape to all the adversity in his surroundings: every member of his past family is “either dead or dying” (195), except for him. Furthermore, the anticipations disrupt the linearity of time, presencing the present in the past memoryscapes.
The linearity of time is also interrogated through dreams. Dreams form a noteworthy part of Amir’s memoir, remembered both as recounted stories and intense interruptions in the narrative flow. Amir’s remembering Hassan’s abuse is cut by an abrupt memory of a dream of him being lost in a snowstorm (66-67). Returning to Afghanistan, Amir dreams of the execution of the assaulted Hassan, realising the face of the killer is his own (212-213). These seemingly out-of-context disruptions can be read as narrative symbols, apparently unnecessary additions in a disrupted narrative that, in fact, express through language what is still unknown at the conscious level (Vuletić 53-54). These disruptions merge the past and the present as well as the conscious and the unconscious, contributing to the narrative as a whole (ibid. 52-53). As “a plumb line into the unconscious” (Parsons 23), Amir’s dreams twine around the thematic of guilt and rape, articulating his troubled and disoriented sense of self in relation to his past.
Parsons explores dreams as lived experiences where time and timelessness intersect; inhabited places outside the temporality of everyday life (23-25). The timelessness of dreams is induced by their unpredictable nature: due to the absence of the usual logic of cause and consequence, there can be no unequivocal before or after in dreams (23). In this sense, Amir’s dreams are spatial experiences that distort lineal conceptions of time, both interrupting the narrative flow and introducing the timelessness of the unconscious to his memoir. The dreams’ relation to time gains yet further dimensions through remembrance: as parts of the memoir, they are memories 39 themselves and, also, exhibit the blending of dreams and memories. Amir’s recollections of
Hassan’s rape are cut by alternating dreams and memories: the dream of a snowstorm connects to the memories of the boys’ shared childhood and a sheep sacrificing ritual (65-68). During a car ride to Islamabad after rescuing Sohrab, Amir’s dreams display flashes of the past: “most of it I only remember as a hodgepodge of images, snippets of visual memory flashing in my head like cards in a Rolodex” (273). Waiting at the hospital after Sohrab’s suicide intent, Amir dreams of things he cannot remember later (308). The dreams, then, exist at the intersections of remembering and forgetting and presence the (repressed) past in the present. As cuts to the flow of the narrative and remembrance they also metaphorically evoke the atmosphere of exile in the memoir.
The recurrence of the rape and guilt in Amir’s memory map invokes the phenomenon of repetition. From a psychoanalytical perspective, repetition refers to a transference of the forgotten past to the current situation (Freud 1914, 151), as well as the constant, unintended, uncanny recurrence of the same thing successively (Freud 1919, 142-145). The sense of repetition is a crucial feature in Schuback’s idea of exile as afterness, the echo-like after- existence: “‘After’ is the figure of a repetition that repeats itself” (177, emphasis in original).
In Amir’s memoir, it is not only his guilt that returns through dreams and memories; the sense of exile also repeats itself in his remembrance. Indeed, the rape is one of the most significant metaphors of exile: in Amir’s memoir, it represents the cut and the measure according to which he interprets his life in the present. Hassan’s assault elicits a disruption both in the narrative and
Amir’s sense of existence, depriving it of familiarity. The infiltration of the unfamiliar is twofold: Assef’s offense also portends the foreign interference Afghanistan confronts during the Soviet invasion (Mäkinen 11). In fact, in a broader perspective, Assef serves as the narrative representation of all the factions provoking the historical turmoil of Afghanistan: European powers, various powerful elites, and Taliban (O’Brien 4). His German origins and admiration 40 of Hitler highlight his symbolism of external interference (Mäkinen 11) and destructive world orders. The rape as the symbol of the occupation continues reappearing in the narrative: a soviet soldier threatens to rape one of the women Amir and Baba flee Kabul with (101); Amir finds out a childhood friend of his has been raped during the invasion (106); Sohrab is abused by
Assef, who holds him captive in the Taliban-ruled Kabul. The rape is the fissure where the uncanny seeps in, both as a lived everyday event and as a symbol for foreign occupation, marking the foundations of Amir’s exile.
Hassan’s rape is, in addition to its entanglement with the figure of the alley, deeply connected to winter. The winter of 1975 represents the assault in Amir’s memories as “the winter that Hassan stopped smiling” (41), the winter Amir sees him run a kite for the last time
(49). The return of Amir’s mind to the alley, both in memories and dreams, is accompanied with a recollection of “droplets of blood staining the snow dark red” (80). Before the rape, winter had been Amir’s favourite season; after it, he cannot wait for spring (77). Amir’s dream of being lost in the snowstorm further accentuates the figure of the winter as a metaphor of being caught in his trauma and guilt. Representing a period of profound change, winter also symbolises exile. Indeed, citing Wallace Stevens, Edward Said describes exile as “‘a mind of winter’ in which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable” (186). In this sense, winter resonates with in-betweenness and signifies a transition. In this perspective, it is notable that Amir’s mapping project also takes place in the winter and ends towards spring, which points to the overcoming of the trauma. A similar tension of liminality manifests itself in the repeating images of greyness: watching Ali and Hassan leave his father’s house, Amir sees “rain through windowpanes that looked like melting silver” (96).
Leaving Kabul himself after the Soviet invasion, Amir considers his life a “gray, barren canvas”
(108), and sees the “gray morning sky” (108) when climbing out of the truck. Evoked in 41 moments of fundamental change, the greyness elicits an ambience of uncertainty and incompleteness, a grey area that, like winter, reverberates with the state of exile.
The most telling and powerful metaphor for exile manifests itself in the recurring of the element of water in Amir’s memories. The water oozes in moments of transition and change, creating a sense of something set in motion. In the very beginning of his memoir, Amir’s recollections of Rahim Khan’s phone call intertwine with those of Spreckels Lake and sun sparkling on its surface (1). Fleeing Kabul, Amir hears “the faint sound of water tumbling through the valley” (98), and, when he is waiting for the ride to Peshawar with dozens of other refugees in a basement, there is “the sound of water drops trickling somewhere” (105). Hassan and Ali leave Baba’s house in the rain (96); after Baba’s cancer diagnosis, “passing cars sprayed grimy water onto the sidewalks” (138); and Sohrab attempts suicide in the bathtub, “the water drops dripping from the faucet and landing with a plink into the bloody bathwater” (308).
Despite the often sinister quality of the moving water in Amir’s memories, it also carries the promise of progress. Crucially, after a sunny period, it rains in Fremont on the day of the Afghan gathering, when Amir finally finds a connection with the traumatised Sohrab through kite- flying (327). Indeed, as Gaston Bachelard notes: water signifies “a type of destiny . . . that endlessly changes the substance of the being” (6). Water is a transitory element: “A being dedicated to water is a being in flux” (ibid.). Water embodies the movement and flow inherent in the concept of exile, as well as the fluidity of Amir’s exilic identity.
Water is also deeply entangled with time, memory, and repression in Amir’s memoir:
Hassan’s dream of an imaginary monster in the Ghargha Lake comes to represent the hidden guilt residing in Amir’s unconscious. “There is no monster, he’d said, just water. Except he’d been wrong about that. There was a monster in the lake. . . . I was the monster” (76). America, then, is the “great, big river” (205) of forgetting to Amir, which evokes Heraclitus’s river metaphor: comparing the present to the incessant flowing of the river, he denies the existence 42 of any unchanging reality (qtd. in Olney 238). According to Heraclitus, one will never “enter that stream, that same unique density of experience, time, and consciousness, twice” (ibid.).
The figure of water, then, entwines a myriad of meanings in Amir’s memory map, symbolising the instability of exile, movement, transition, passing of time, forgetting, and the fluid essence of memory and identity. Indeed, evoked in the context of memory mapping, the flux water contradicts the fixing tendencies of cartography. Watery areas pose challenges to mapmaking, refusing to settle within artificial borders. The figure of water, thus, incorporates movement to
Amir’s memory map, endowing it with an unfixed quality that challenges the traditionally stabilising character of mapping.
Amir’s memory mapping, also, essentially involves the mapping of his exilic identity, the construction of the narrative of the self. Indeed, as Gusdorf notes, an autobiography is “the mirror in which the individual reflects his own image” (33). In his theorisation of the mirror stage, Jacques Lacan explores encountering one’s own reflection as the simultaneous recognition of the permanence and the otherness of the self, the establishment of the relationship between the self and its surroundings (95-97), which emphasises the mirror as a figure of identity construction. In Amir’s memoir, metaphorical and real mirrors recur, symbolising the reflective process of identity building and encountering the past. As an autobiographer, Amir makes himself an object, encountering his double, which is simultaneously fascinating and frightening (Gusdorf 32). The double Amir confronts through this self-reflection embodies his guilt: it is, citing Freud, a part of the self rejected as something alien (1919, 143). The deed causing Amir’s guilt is the culmination of his perpetual self-criticism induced by being mirrored in others throughout his childhood. Through Baba’s eyes Amir sees himself as a failure, and, having sacrificed Hassan, he wonders: “what would I see if I did look in his eyes?” (70)
Mirroring occurs also in Amir’s relationship to Assef, Hassan and Sohrab’s abuser, which is manifested in Amir’s recognising himself as Hassan’s executioner in his dream. The idea of 43 mirroring and the double intertwine with the sense of the uncanny which, in this case, originates in Amir’s seeing “a manifestation of forces that he did not suspect in a fellow human being, but whose stirrings he can dimly perceive in remote corners of his own personality” (Freud 1919,
150). Amir’s quest of identity building forces him to face and reflect on not only his traumatic past but also the complexity of his personality.
Flashes of physical mirrors also continue appearing in Amir’s remembrance. Amir and
Hassan reflect sunlight to their neighbours’ houses with a shard of mirror (3) and Amir recalls sunlight twinkling in the side-view mirror of a passing truck during a day at Ghargha Lake with his father (13). It is, precisely, side-view and rear-view mirrors that Amir repeatedly observes.
Through one, he sees Baba going to ask for his future wife’s hand (144) and is inspected through another by a taxi driver in Islamabad: “I saw his eyes in his rearview mirror, skipping from
Sohrab to me. . . . I saw my own face too” (283). Before embarking on the last spell of his journey to Kabul, Amir takes the last glance at his host through a sideview mirror (214). The backward-looking quality of both types of mirrors reflects Amir’s turning towards the past in his autobiographical project. Indeed, the mirror as a figure of memory is evoked in Foucault’s observation: “In the mirror, I see myself where I am not” (24). In remembering his past, Amir sees himself in it, being simultaneously absent from it. Both side-view and rear-view mirrors, also, possess a distinct spatiality: they are small, partial mirrors not directly in front of the observer, the purpose of which is not the observation of one’s own reflection. As figures of remembering, they, thus, reinforce the physical absence of the observer from the scenery observed, that is, the past. They, also, symbolise separation and leaving behind, signalling an act of looking backward while simultaneously moving forward, which further accentuates their entanglement with remembrance.
The mediatedness of mirroring, seeing the mere reflection instead of the object itself, evokes the sense of exilic afterness; paralleling the echo, the reflection reproduces its source, 44 being the same and different simultaneously – like the one in exile. In this way, the mirror is yet another representation of the cut that defines Amir’s exilic existence. It is, at the same time, a metaphor for the mediated quality of memory and any access to the past, which, again, interrogates the seeming unambiguity of epochal history and questions the linearity of time.
Correlating with the effect of being mirrored, Bhabha’s idea of “‘double and split’ time of national representation” (206) rejects any homogeneous views on history. The figure of the mirror, in this perspective, symbolises this “double-time” (208), the split between horizontal history and the living contemporaneity (ibid.). It is the latter, the event of the everyday, that overrules the epochal in Amir’s memoir.
The construction of identity, memory, and the past is also reflected on through the recurring stories in Amir’s remembrance. A story itself, Amir’s memoir is imbued with the thematic of storytelling. As noted in the previous subchapter, stories form a part of everyday interaction in Amir’s life and have a communicative dimension as sources of information. Their relevance is manifested also in the important status that fiction acquires in Amir’s memories.
An avid reader, Amir remembers finding solace from Baba’s distance in his mother’s old books:
“I read everything, Rumi, Hafez, Saadi, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming”
(17). He reads stories, poems, and riddles to the illiterate Hassan, especially the Shahnameh, the ancient Persian epic (24-25). The boys’ favourite story, “Rostam and Sohrab”, recounts the tale of the warrior Rostam, who kills his nemesis, Sohrab, only to discover him to be his long- lost son (25). Allusions to the story recur in the memoir, emphasising the tale as the framing device against which Amir and Hassan’s relationship is mirrored (Blumenthal 258): feeling responsible about Hassan’s adversities and his eventual death, Amir discovers his old servant to be his half-brother. However, the analogy is drawn in his remembrance also to his relationship with Baba. Having won the kite tournament, Amir pictures the reaction of his father: “Rostam and Sohrab sizing each other up. A dramatic moment of silence. Then the old 45 warrior would walk to the young one, embrace him, acknowledge his worthiness. Vindication.
Salvation. Redemption” (60). In addition to the symbolism of guilt evoked by the Shahnameh, the interweaving of Persian canon with Western literature in Amir’s reading habits points to
Amir’s inability (and refusal) to locate himself consistently neither in an American nor an
Afghan homeland (Blumenthal 262) and invokes the ambience of exilic liminality. In this perspective, these stories within Amir’s life story serve as spatial indicators of in-betweenness in his memory and identity mapping project. They also open new textual spaces within the narrative, enabling analogies and invoking the layeredness of Amir’s cartographic memoir.
Furthermore, this intertextuality – the tendency to “cite, allude to, refer to, borrow from or internalise other texts and representations” (Currie 3) – attaches The Kite Runner to the domain of postmodern literature, which, according to Currie (ibid.), often identifies a particular intertext in order to rewrite it. Indeed, Amir’s rescuing and adopting Hassan’s son – who, hardly by chance, is named Sohrab – can be read as an act of rewriting the ancient tragedy and, simultaneously, Amir’s identity shaped by guilt.
Along with reading, writing acquires relevance in Amir’s memoir. Writing stories from early on, Amir decides to major in creative writing in the US. He becomes a published novelist, whose writing project the memoir itself represents. The figures of writing and reading connect to Schuback’s views on memory as resembling both writing and reading simultaneously: remembrance is “not only a preserving and registering activity but also a creation of images that render present what is absent” (181). These figures also evoke the narrative nature of memory as well as its narrativisation in Amir’s autobiography. The prevailing of fiction – as opposed to non-fiction – in the narrative, both as read works and written productions, points to memory’s reconstructive approach to the past and offers an opportunity to reflect on the very
‘essence’ of memory and history. Like fiction, memory is “imaginative, that is, capable of creating images” (ibid.), which raises questions on the relationship between memory and 46 reality. It is precisely this relationship that the narrative seems to contemplate on. The figure of reading extends to Amir’s attempt to read his past, his memories, the people around him, even himself in his quest for identity, which evokes the idea of reading as interpretation. The figure of writing, then, symbolises the narrative quality of identity construction; through his memoir,
Amir narrates himself. Writing is also, essentially, reconstruction, a perspective elicited in
Amir’s habit to change the stories he reads to Hassan, inventing alternative endings. This imaginative rewriting applies also to reconstructing the past. As Kennedy notes, “writing can create a sense of continuity out of the historical material, but this continuity is only partial and provisional, as it is always being reorganized after the event; meaning is always being deferred”
(190). In this sense, the recurring figures of reading and writing and their evocation as metaphors of interpreting, constructing (and reconstructing), as well as rewriting reveal a view on the reconstructed quality of any accounts of the past. This rethinking of reality and history, necessarily, positions the past and the present in constant interaction, abandoning any linear conceptions of time. The one in exile continuously constructs and reconstructs the past in remembrance, in a project which deprives claims for objective veracity of any relevance.
Conclusion
Amir’s cartographic memoir is a textual map of memory, exile, and identity that, in the spirit of postmodernity, interrogates fixed understandings of space and time. Indeed, as Eric Prieto notes, “in our postmodern era, the multipolar, nonlinear, spatial metaphor of the map replaces the single technological arrow of history as the dominant interpretive paradigm” (19). Amir’s memory map exhibits a circular perspective on understanding time by positioning the past, the present, and the future in constant interaction with each other. It also reveals time’s entanglement with space by introducing memory, exile, and identity as spatiotemporal phenomena. This exilic spatiotemporality is characterised by perpetual movement and in- betweenness, the sense of being on-the-way-toward uncertainty. 47
It is in this uncertainty that Amir, finally, finds certainty in exile. His mapping project marks by no means a settled sense of identity: as Gusdorf states,
Autobiography is . . . never the finished image or the fixing forever of an individual life:
the human being is always a making, a doing; memoirs look to an essence beyond existence,
and in manifesting it they serve to create it. (47)
This open-endedness demonstrates itself in Amir’s memories of the Afghan gathering in
Fremont at the very end of his memoir. Flying a kite with Sohrab, Amir experiences the overlapping of his past and present time spaces, notably in a deeply sensory way: “I smelled turnip qurma now. Dried mulberries. Sour oranges. Sawdust and walnuts. The muffled quiet, snow-quiet was deafening. Then far away . . . a voice calling us home” (327-328). The fusion of the past and present points to Amir’s finding peace in exile; yet it does not imply any sense of permanence. The ethos of transition prevails in the return of the snow, a figure of exilic in- betweenness. However, the snow’s affiliations with the repressed events that induced Amir’s exile are weakened as it transforms into a symbol of home-finding that, in exile, is characterised by perpetual positioning. Indeed, after Amir decides to fetch the kite for Sohrab, the narrative, crucially, ends in the atmosphere of incessant motion with the words “I ran” (329), which evokes the exilic identity as a matter of constant becoming. The figure of the kite, too, expresses the idea of surpassing set boundaries, borders of nations and identities, and, accordingly, resonates with Amir’s exilic identity.
The sense of indefiniteness is where the exilic memoir locates itself. As Amir remarks,
“Zendagi migzara, Afghans like to say: Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end, kamyab, nah-kam, crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis” (317). The disregard for beginnings and endings, again, evokes the lived experience of the everyday as the embodiment of flux, exilic existence. The ethos of constant becoming evokes the possibility of the future and the mapping of memory and identity as ongoing processes. 48
3. And the Mountains Echoed: Narrating Postmodern Exile Space(s)
Contrasting with the rather unilateral depiction of exile of The Kite Runner, And the Mountains
Echoed exhibits multiple perspectives on exile, memory, time, and space. Recounting a range of interrelated exile stories and focalising different characters, the narrative connects and juxtaposes different spaces, times, and perspectives, at the same time positioning itself among the innumerable narrative representations existing in and constructing the world. Accordingly, the novel reflects what Francese describes as “the multiplication of the narrative centre” (110) characteristic of postmodernity and postmodern literature. This polycentrism rejects privileging any one of the myriad heterogeneous and conflicting narratives but, rather, emphasises the multiplicity of interdependent representations and perspectives (10-11). By subverting any dominant narratives, postmodernism restores marginalised microhistories and counternarratives, considering the spectrum of narratives as dialogic points of reference (107-
110). This perspective complicates the understanding of history as a “concatenation of causes and effects culminating in the present” (107), emphasising that the present can only be understood in the light of the “latent, disparate elements of the past” (108). This dissemination of meaning and perspectives, to connect Francese’s views with those of Bhabha, is evident in
And the Mountains Echoed, the multifocal narratives of which explore and reveal the plurality inherent in the phenomena of exile, remembering, and forgetting.
The postmodern polycentrism and its prejudicial implications on clear-cut temporal linearity invoke Michel Foucault’s logic of simultaneity21:
We are in the epoch of simultaneity: . . . the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near
and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. . . . [O]ur experience of the world is less that
21 Even though Foucault’s article stems from the 1980s, the epoch of simultaneity can be seen to extend to the 21st century and to manifest itself in Hosseini’s novels. 49
of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and
intersects with its own skein. (22)
The simultaneity manifests itself in And the Mountains Echoed in the network of the exilic narratives that are, essentially, intertextual. This intertextuality is twofold: while intratextually conflicting, complementing, referring to, overlapping, and intersecting with each other both spatially and temporally, the narratives also relate to other texts and stories in the extratextual world. This dispersal of representation is also intermedial: the narratives evoke and refer to other media, such as photography. While the intertextuality and intermediality reflect and produce temporal simultaneity, they also participate in the construction of the past by merging with memory. Through evoking other texts and media, the novel examines the reconstructive nature of memory, underlining its narrative and fictional dimensions, both on an individual level as well as through collective perspectives on postmemory and diaspora memory. At the same time, the narratives ponder the reconstructed character of all (self-)representation through metaphors and metafictional strategies.
In addition to interrupting temporal linearity, the polycentrism and the simultaneity have implications on understanding space. The plural perspectives of And the Mountains
Echoed go beyond the unilateral sensuous everyday exhibited in Amir’s exilic memoryscapes in The Kite Runner. Although it is the event of the everyday that the characters of And the
Mountains Echoed encounter in their past and present, the multifocality of the narratives that are entangled with the same spaces relocates the focus from individual perceptions of a place to the place itself. This perspective re-evokes Westphal’s geocriticism that emphasises the interdependence of a place and its narrative representations. Geocriticism adopts “a plural point of view . . . located at the crossroads of distinct representations”, and it is this multifocalisation that allows approaching the identity of the referenced space (114). This spatial multipolarity re- evokes the idea of the map, underlining its geographical affiliations. In this perspective, the 50 multiple narratives and memories of the novel, through narrative cartography, construct and reconstruct the same recurring places at overlapping and different times, approximating the identity of Afghanistan that evolves through certain recurring locations within the land and through its position in the global context. The narratives, also, conjoin places to reflect the
“simultaneity of a global village” (Currie 4). The places and spaces connect and merge both through the mobility of the exilic characters and through the intertextuality and intermediality of the narratives. Incorporating other texts and media opens new spaces within the narratives, including the cyberspace. Indeed, evoking the contemporary culture of new technologies is, according to Currie, common in the postmodern novel and offers opportunities to reflect on globalisation, the emergence of a global space (3). In this global context, the narratives of And the Mountains Echoed, ultimately, engage in constructing and mapping a polycentric and diasporic exile space.
Indeed, along with their intertextual relationship, the multifocal narratives of And the
Mountains Echoed connect through their shared atmosphere of exile. The past of each narrator is defined by a sense of separation and leaving behind, which is encountered through remembrance. As for Amir in The Kite Runner, this interpretative turning to the past from the present time space is marked by the quest for directing oneself towards the future with a coherent identity. The narratives exhibit different time spaces that mix through changes in tense and spatiotemporal jumps from one memory to another. This circularity of time manifests itself also in the structure of the whole novel: the narratives are not ordered according to any linear logic, but, rather, according to their relation to one another.
All the narratives of the novel are set against the bedtime story told by Saboor, Abdullah and Pari’s father, in the rural Afghan village of Shadbagh in the autumn of 1952. In the story, a farmer named Baba Ayub is forced to give his young son to a div,22 whom he later, unable to
22 In the Persian literary tradition, the div is a supernatural character that serves as the embodiment of the evil (Marzolph 163). 51 accept his loss, traces to discover that his son has been gifted a prosperous life in the div’s castle away from the hardships of his home village. Torn between his wish to regain his son and the hesitation to deprive him of his new life of opportunity, Baba Ayub eventually decides to return home alone. Impressed by Baba Ayub’s choice, the div gives him a potion that makes him forget the intended rescue mission and his son altogether. The narrative that follows is focalised through Abdullah, Saboor’s son, in the autumn of 1952, recounting the journey of the father and the children from Shadbagh to Kabul through the desert. In the city, the real purpose of the trip unfolds: Abdullah’s little sister is sold to the family which the half-uncle of the children,
Nabi, works for. Losing Pari produces the cut that comes to define Abdullah’s existence in the way of an exilic cut discussed in the previous chapters.
The narratives that follow each connect to the siblings’ story. The first of them jumps to the spring of 1949, relating Abdullah and Pari’s stepmother Parwana’s harsh life in Shadbagh in the shadow of her twin sister, Masooma, before marrying Saboor. Painfully remembering her part in the accident that caused the paralysis of her sister, Parwana is only liberated from the carer’s burden after Masooma asks to be left in the desert to die. The novel continues in epistolary form with Nabi’s letter to Markos Varvaris, a plastic surgeon staying with him in
Kabul in the early 2000s, in which he recounts the events defining his life narrative from his arrival to Kabul in the 1940s to his approaching death in the early 2000s. The narrative that follows is reflective of exiles’ plural relations with their homeland, exhibiting diasporic outlooks on memory and forgetting through focalising Idris, Nabi’s employers’ old neighbour, who escaped to the US in the 80s and visits Kabul in 2003. The novel continues with an intertextually constructed narrative alternating between Pari’s memories of her past recollected in 1974 and extracts from an interview with Nila in Parallaxe, a French magazine. Defined by a sense of disconnectedness from her distant past and the complicated relationship with her mother, Pari grows to discover her roots in Afghanistan through Nabi’s letter in 2010. What 52 follows is a snippet of the life of Adel, the young son of a wealthy jihadist, in the Shadbagh of
2009, where the family has settled after their attempted murder in Kabul. The mansion of Adel’s father stands on the spot of Abdullah and Pari’s old home, which Adel discovers after meeting
Gholam, the son of the siblings’ half-brother. In the following narrative set in the autumn of
2010, Markos Varvaris reflects on his past of global mobility in an intermedial account fusing memory and photography. His remembrance is defined by his flight from his native Greek island and the complex relationship with his mother. Finally, the novel ends with the narration of Abdullah’s daughter, Pari, in 2010 in the US, where her parents fled the war-torn
Afghanistan. While the separation of Abdullah and his sister permeates all the narratives of the novel, focalising through Pari introduces a diasporic experience most profoundly affected by the events of the past.
Reverberating with the div story, all the narratives reflect on separation and leaving behind as well as the multifaceted nature of memory and forgetting. At times metaphorically, they construct an experience of exilic memory that reverberates with a sense of distance and proximity simultaneously. This interplay of distance and proximity, of polar opposites, informs also the exile space that the novel maps, and, ultimately, the emerging exilic identities depicted in the narratives.
Fictions of Memory: Narrative Reconstructions of the Past
As in The Kite Runner, the presence of the past in the present is tangible in And the Mountains
Echoed: the past persists as a force defining and informing the present existence of the exilic characters. As Pari tells her niece, “‘You are lucky . . . to know where you came from’” (410).
While the narratives of the novel are not built exclusively on remembrance in a memoir manner, they do explore and exhibit memory and forgetting in exile, offering plural perspectives on the complexity of the phenomena. Indeed, especially forgetting is reflected on beyond the concepts of repression and decaying memory; in the narratives, forgetting manifests itself in ways that 53 interrogate its position as a mere flaw in the memory system. In the characters’ interpretative turning to the past, remembering and forgetting intertwine and become interdependent. As
Douwe Draaisma notes, forgetting, often perceived and described as nothingness, erasure, deletion, or disappearance, in fact, exists within remembrance, being integral to its mechanisms
(2-4). In this sense, forgetting becomes a part of memory; indeed, “without forgetting, remembering would be impossible” (Della Sala xiii). Forgetting is one of the ways in which the exilic characters of And the Mountains Echoed encounter their past.
The narrative quality of both forgetting and remembering is explored through intertextual and intermedial constructions of the past that manifest themselves both intra- and extratextually. In addition to referring to existing texts and media outside the story world, And the Mountains Echoed is explicitly built on internal intertextuality through its multiple separate but interconnected narratives. All the narratives, in a way, relate to and develop the div story.
They, also, complement each other, weaving an underlying narrative – that of Abdullah and
Pari’s eventual reunion. The intertextual and intermedial construction of the past is, however, exhibited also within individual narratives, through both evoking and incorporating different forms of representation. Nabi traces and recounts his past in a letter of confession incorporating various decades, and Pari’s past unfolds partly through the interview with her mother.
Abdullah’s past, in turn, becomes a bedtime story he tells his daughter – which emphasises the analogies between the div story and his own – and, thus, it is through a story that Pari acquires access to her familial past and cultural roots. Markos, in turn, traces his past through photos in a narrative that textually reproduces photographical conventions, and Idris’s remembrance of
Afghanistan manifests itself through metaphors that self-reflexively point to different media and textual genres and endow his memories with a fictional quality. The textual and narrative metaphors recur throughout the novel and reflect on the fictional character of all representation, including memory, identity, and the novel itself. 54
Like those of Amir’s, Nabi’s memories manifest themselves in an essentially narrative form. The letter, to him, is a story, “a tale” (84), mainly of his unrequited love for Nila, which defines his past. Content with Nila’s mere presence, Nabi is “happy enough to be the vessel into which she poured her stories” (100). Nila’s inability to have children prompts his idea of his half-niece Pari’s purchase to the Wahdati family, a decision that in the way of an exilic cut comes to inform his existence: “all these years later, I still feel my heart clench when the memory of it forces its way to the fore” (116). Suleiman’s stroke and Nila and Pari’s consequent departure in the 50s become another cut that transforms Nabi’s sense of existence, the past before the events acquiring a fictional quality:
Sometimes when I summoned [Nila] in my mind, . . . it was as though I had made her up.
As though she had never truly existed – not only she but I too, and Pari, and a young, healthy
Suleiman, and even the time and the house we had all occupied together. (143)
The sense of distance and disbelief Nabi experiences in relation to his past intensify as he learns about Nila’s suicide almost thirty years after it occurred. Without Nabi being aware of it, Nila has ceased to exist outside remembrance; she has, indeed, become fictionalised, existing in the narrative of Nabi’s memory. Similarly, Nabi remembers the history of Afghanistan as a narrative, the narrating of which he declines: “the suffering of this country has already been sufficiently chronicled, and by pens far more learned and eloquent than mine” (138). He, thus, rejects recounting epochal versions of the past, opting for the everyday experience in his account. This rejection also highlights remembrance as narrative presencing of the lived experience of the past: “I lived those days already, and I intend to relive them on these pages as briefly as possible” (138). Refusing to narrate, Nabi refuses to remember.
The narrative nature of memory manifests itself also in the workings of postmemory.
In this version of remembrance, it is, essentially, a narrative of the past that is remembered rather than the past itself. Postmemory, an aspect of the diaspora experience, is informed by the 55 inclination both to mourn and “to re-member, to re-build, to re-incarnate, to replace, and to repair” the past of the former generations (Hirsch 243). These tendencies characterise
Abdullah’s daughter Pari’s existence fundamentally affected by her father’s past, especially his separation from his sister. Deeply touched by her aunt’s experience recounted to her as a bedtime story, Pari feels marked by her fate: “If what had been done to her was like a wave that had crashed far from shore, then it was the backwash of that wave now pooling around my ankles, then receding from my feet” (422). Abdullah’s sister is a constant attendant in Pari’s existence. Pari simultaneously feels her fundamental absence and peripheric, spatial presence:
“I could always spot the black of her hair and the white of her profile out of the corner of my eye” (399). Pari looms, but is never to be observed directly, which endows her presence with a simultaneous sense of distance and nearness.
Caught in the diasporic liminality between her parents’ past and her own present, Pari clings to her aunt’s story as a source of identification:
We were interlocked, . . . linked beyond our names, beyond familial ties, as if, together, we
completed a puzzle. I felt certain that if I listened closely enough to her story, I would
discover something revealed about myself. (401)
Indeed, Pari’s sense of connection to his father’s sister is so profound that it elicits a reading of a “duplicated, divided, and interchanged” self, which Freud describes as a manifestation of the idea of the double (1919, 142). Pari sees her twin in the mirror, shares the same interests with her, and draws her as her own portrait. The identical quality of two persons as well as their co- ownership of each other’s knowledge, emotions, and experiences positions them as doubles, the motif of which evokes questions of identity and the sense of self due to its harking back to times “when the ego had not yet clearly set itself off against the world outside and from others”
(ibid. 142-143). In this sense, for Pari, Abdullah’s sister is a means of negotiating her own exilic identity by creating an object of identification out of the narratives of her familial past. 56
Additionally, Pari’s persisting presence points to the circularity of time in exile; it is the embodiment of her niece’s past and familial origins elsewhere, a figure of presencing the past in the present.
The reconstructed nature of the past – and memory – reveals itself when Pari, finally, meets her aunt: “It’s like seeing the photo of a radio personality, how they never turn out the way you had pictured them in your mind” (406). A similar disparity between postmemory and earlier generations’ pre-exilic pasts is exhibited in Gholam’s circumstances. Growing up as a refugee in Pakistan, Gholam’s existence is informed by his father’s memories of Afghanistan:
“‘My father said to me and my brothers, he said, ‘Wait… wait until you breathe the air of
Shadbagh, boys, and taste the water.’ . . . You’d think he was describing Paradise” (296). To
Gholam, Afghanistan is “a foreign country” (295); indeed, as Hirsch notes, for the exiles encountering the workings of postmemory, “‘home’ is always elsewhere even for those who return” (243). The mediatedness of postmemory accentuates the spatiotemporal distance of the exiles to their past; yet the past persists in their present existence.
The mechanisms of postmemory are present also in Pari’s, Abdullah’s sister’s, exile.
Having escaped Kabul with her mother Nila as a child, Pari has limited access to her lived past.
Her earliest experiences and the separation from her biological family elude her in a form of forgetting that Draaisma explains as the loss of memories not stored in language (22). In the course of the development of linguistic capacities and the arrival of the conscious self, a child loses access to its early memories that lie beyond the reach of verbal associations (ibid.). These memories, lacking verbal form, are beyond Pari’s narrative memory. They manifest themselves in her life as a profound sense of absence, “a vague pain without a source” (450), that sometimes, triggered by unexpected experiences that connect to her past, dissipates to give way to flashes of memory. Encountering a dog in France, Pari is suddenly overcome by the sense of a shape of another dog, unsure whether it is “a memory or the ghost of one or neither” (252). 57
Thus, detached from her past, Pari relies on Nila for “the glue to bond together her loose, disjointed scraps of memory, to turn them into some sort of cohesive narrative” (249). However,
Nila withholds information on their shared past in Afghanistan, keeping Pari at a remove from it. Nila’s interview and its revelations on her unhappy past in the grip of her father and, later, her marriage disorient Pari, “make her feel as lost as if she were wandering through a desert at night, surrounded by darkness and the unknown, the truth elusive, like a single tiny glint of light in the distance flickering on and off, forever moving, receding” (251). The figure of the desert and the flickering of a remote light spatially symbolise the unreachability of her past yet underlying its continuing presence. It is through a narrative that Pari, finally, gains access to her past as Markos reads Nabi’s letter to her on the phone. The letter fuses with Pari’s first- hand experiences, becoming a part of her exilic memory.
The reconstructed nature of memory is also underlined in Idris’s exile story. Having escaped Kabul with his family in the 80s, Idris has settled in San Francisco, making a life in the diaspora community. Returning to Kabul in the early 2000s, he feels conflicted about his relationship to the past of his homeland and his compatriots as an exilic survivor: “The stories these people have to tell, we’re not entitled to them” (168). He is determined to support Roshi, an Afghan girl who has lost her family and a part of her face to her uncle’s axe, to prove he is not one of the diasporans who, according to Roshi’s nurse, make promises and forget. He returns to San Francisco exhilarated and energised, but Kabul’s vivid, arresting details soon acquire an artificial quality: “it’s like describing music. He cannot bring it to life. . . . His descriptions sound to him generic, insipid, like those of an ordinary AP story” (181). His experiences in Afghanistan turn into stories told at work and at the dinner table in conversations that resemble “discussing a recently watched, emotionally drenching film whose effects are beginning to wane” (190). Eventually, even Roshi becomes an abstract figure, “like a character in a play” (193), in Idris’s remembrance. The spatiotemporal distance to his lived experience 58 in Kabul gradually assigns his memories a fictional quality: they become “an illusion, a mirage”
(ibid.); his promise to Roshi “a terrible misreading of the measures of his own powers. . . .
Something best forgotten” (194). The fictional character of the past is re-evoked through
Roshi’s autobiography, the signing event of which Idris is drawn to years later in the US.
Narrativised in a concrete way, the lived everyday of Roshi’s exilic past becomes a reconstruction, a story, from the present perspective. It takes the form of fiction in the eyes of its audience: the visitors to the event consider the autobiography as book club material, a tale worthy of filming.23 The similes and metaphors evoking different media and textual genres invoke the reconstructed, narrative nature of memory and the narrativisation of the past as a form of forgetting: Idris’s fictional encountering of the past highlights its receding from his everyday. This narrativisation, nevertheless, is also a powerful means of presencing the past;
Idris is terrified to “revisit himself on the pages of the book” (195). However, his eventual discovery of his complete non-appearance in the autobiography is, ironically, “like an ax to the head” (197). Roshi’s choice reveals the profound blending of the past and the narrative memory: through narrating a past, a reality, in which Idris is absent, Roshi allots Idris’s experiences a fictive quality. In Roshi’s story, Idris does not exist.
Additionally, the fictionality of the past and memory manifests itself intermedially in the merging of memory and photographs. Indeed, as Draaisma notes, the act of taking a photograph does not result in a memory and a picture separate from it; the memory interferes with the photo and, eventually, the photo interferes with the memory (213). Photos’ connection to memory is complex: they remind us of what we have forgotten; yet they, simultaneously,
23 The tendency of the US audience to accredit Roshi’s exilic past with mere fictional value and objectify it as a good to be consumed evokes the logic of the gaze. According to Bernard Westphal, the gaze falls on the Other, on a space rendered exotic (123). It lingers on the spectacle of otherness, “carrying estonishment, dismay, or indifference, and feeding a discourse exclusively used by the Same” (ibid.). On the societal level, “a gazing culture focuses on a gazed-upon culture whose status as a ‘culture’ is most often found to be minor or inferior” (ibid.). The reception of Roshi’s autobiography, thus, seems to voice a word of criticism on the Western gaze to the past of Afghanistan and its exiles. At the same time, it can be read as metafictional reflection on the role of the novel itself – and, indeed, of all Hosseini’s novels – in the society. 59 need memories to mean anything (ibid. 214-215). Photographs, as Hirsch remarks, have the capacity to “signal absence and loss and, at the same time, to make present, rebuild, reconnect, bring back to life” (243). Currie, reflecting on Derrida’s notion of archive fever, treats photography as a form of remembering entangled with narrative consciousness of the self and its surroundings, whereby the present is experienced as a future narration of the past, “as if the recordability of the view for the future constitutes its importance in the present” (101-102).
Currie views this accelerating archiving as a potentially problematic part of the contemporary culture if (and when) “the impatience to record, narrate and monumentalise events actually takes over from the experience of them” (102).
The impulse to document and photography as memory are exhibited in the narrative focalised through Markos, who remembers his past as a series of pictures. He recalls discovering a camera in the window of a local shop on Tinos as a child and viewing his future through the lens:
[I] imagined myself in India, . . . taking photos of the paddies and tea estates I had seen in
National Geographic. I would shoot the Inca Trail. On camelback, in some dust-choked old
truck, or on foot, I would brave the heat until I stood gazing at the Sphinx and the Pyramids,
and I would shoot them too and see my photos published in magazines with glossy pages.
(348)
Inspired by this vision, Markos and his friend Thalia build a cardboard box camera which
Markos uses to capture Thalia’s portrait on the beach. The countdown to 120 before dropping the shutter textually transports Markos’s remembrance from one past time space to the next, from a flash of memory to another, most of them entangled with Thalia’s portrait; from losing and finding the photo on a hike in Chile to giving it to a dying boy in India, Markos traces his nomadic past through recollections that themselves acquire a picture-like quality. Narrated in the present tense, these memories presence the past in the narrative and the present, which 60 complicates the reduction of the lived experience Currie condemns. Despite their flashing, photographic quality, the memories are characterised by sensuous presentness:
Forty-one… forty-two… I wake up in a big room. The air is thick with heat and something
like rotting cantaloupe. . . . Walls marked by patches of mold. The window beside me lets
in hot, sticky air and sunlight that stabs the eyeballs. (359)
The sensuous character of Markos’s photographic memories queries the fixity associated with a photograph, its frozen depiction of reality, through incorporating the event of the everyday to the flashes of his past. These image-like memories acquire a fluid, spatial quality through their multisensoriality: they are not immobile objects of observation but lived, evolving experiences.
In addition to presencing the past, this somewhat paradoxical entanglement of fixity and flux in Markos’s remembrance evokes exile and its potential in interrogating any fixed (self-
)representations.
The photograph, also, exhibits the narrative nature of memory and identity. Reflecting on his past, Markos notes: “I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good
I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this story” (378). This narrativity, for
Markos, is essential in moulding meaning into his exilic existence as a contrast to human behavior “unconcerned with convenient symmetries” (ibid.). Indeed, it is the interpretative observing that characterises both memory and photography, evoking the narrative, reconstructed quality of both.
Photos, however, are not mere representations of the narrative and photographic qualities of memory; they are, also, sources of the past, memory, and identity. Photographs occupy the edge between remembering and forgetting and, similarly, that between memory and postmemory (Hirsch 22). Pari remembers her adoptive father, Suleiman, mostly through old photos, and Adel commits to memory the framed images in the living room documenting his 61 father’s jihadi days, picturing himself as a war hero next to his father. Pari, Abdullah’s daughter, acquires access to her roots through her aunt’s photo album, browsing through pictures of
Shadbagh and her relatives in France. Indeed, photos connect the remembrance of different generations, functioning as “the fragmentary sources and building blocks, shot through with holes, of the work of postmemory. They affirm the past’s existence and, in their flat two- dimensionality, they signal its unbridgeable distance” (23). Yet they do have implications on this distance: In the presence of her aunt, “the most shining relic” (451) of Pari’s childhood, she feels the spatiotemporal distance, the years dividing them, “rapidly folding over one another again and again, time accordioning itself down to nothing but the width of a photograph” (ibid.).
This intermedial metaphor for the moulding of time evokes the logic of non-linear temporality.
Indeed, in the novel, the photograph can be read as another manifestation of circular, exilic time that incorporates the present, the past, and the future at once. It is, at the same time, a future narration of the past as well as a means of presencing the past in the present, and it also entails an element of sensuous presentness, as is evident in Markos’s photographic memories.
In addition to remembering, the meaning of forgetting is evoked in the narratives through fiction. Reflecting on the div story after losing his sister, Abdullah yearns for the magic potion so that he, too, could forget (55). As an ironic analogy to the story, he is, eventually, relieved of the burden of remembering through a memory disease that transforms his everyday existence into “a mystifying story, a puzzle to struggle through” (410). Abdullah’s disconnected thoughts and his waning memory signal a sense of an uncanny loss of the self, as the source of his exilic identity – the past – recedes beyond his grasp. The figure of the desert, the setting of
Abdullah’s journey to Kabul, recurs as a metaphor for forgetting and the unreachability of the past: arrested in constant confusion, he is “ragged and lost, staggering across a desert, the path behind him littered with all the shiny little pieces that life has ripped from him” (460), his memories “leaking like a sand from a fist” (426). The transformation of Abdullah’s memory 62 re-evokes the reconstructed character not only of memory but also of forgetting. Facing the fading of the memory of his wife, he fills it with “bogus details and fabricated character traits, as though false memories are better than none at all” (426). Although this fictionalisation is depicted as a distortion of memory and identity in Abdullah’s case, the novel also complicates this reading. Recounting the div story, Abdullah’s father remarks: “Do you understand,
Abdullah, how this was an act of mercy? The potion that erased these memories?” (15)
Similarly, reflecting on the separation with her brother, Pari considers herself the fortunate one, having had the infantile “luxury of forgetting” (462). However, the mutual oblivion overshadows the eventual reunion of the siblings; neither can truly recognise the other. The past remains beyond reach, embodied in the remains of a bridge that Pari, Abdullah’s daughter, observes in France: “It ends midway across the river. Like it reached, tried to reunite with, the other side and fell short” (462). Pari’s childhood feather collection that Abdullah has accumulated and kept for decades remains a mystery to Pari as she, finally, receives it as an adult: “‘I don’t know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he . . . remembered me’” (ibid.). The continuous interplay of remembering and forgetting, of being remembered and forgotten, invokes the unfixity of memory in exile. Like the desert, memory is in constant motion, encountering the past through unpredictable and changing ways. The past evolves through the workings of remembrance and forgetting, being narrated and re-narrated in memory.
The reflections on the reconstructed and narrative quality of the past, memory, and identity in exile that the narratives evoke point to a certain narrative self-consciousness of the novel itself. This self-consciousness is, according to Currie, characteristic of postmodern literature aware of its condition in a world permeated by representations (3). The postmodern novel often highlights and contemplates the role of narrativity in framing history and construing the world (74). Considering the past not in the light of its reality but how it has been represented 63 by other texts endows the postmodern novel with a fundamentally intertextual mode (ibid.). As has been affirmed, this intertextuality manifests itself not only intra- but also extratextually in
And the Mountains Echoed. Rumi’s poetry recurs in the novel as graffiti art in the streets of
Kabul and in a love letter from Masooma’s admirer, and Nabi partakes in the Persian poetic tradition by describing Nila’s laughter as descended “from Heaven itself, the garden of the righteous . . . where the rivers flow beneath, and perpetual are the fruits and the shade therein”
(98-99).24 Pari, in turn, knows her old homeland mostly through Le Monde and tries to connect with her demented brother by drawing analogies with the film Slumdog Millionaire, and Idris picks E.T., Babe, Toy Story, and The Iron Giant to watch with Roshi.
As in The Kite Runner, references to texts and media with different cultural affiliations textually evoke exilic liminality and the unfixity of exilic identity. They, also, underline the participation of the novel in the narrative tradition and practice that informs the human existence. Allusions to both explicitly fictional productions and fact-based representations
(such as news media) position the novel in the same context with both, simultaneously reinforcing and undermining its historical reliability. This juxtaposition is also evident in relation to history, which is demonstrated in Nabi’s musings on history writing in his letter.
Evoking history as narration points to the fictional, reconstructed quality of the epochal history itself, positioning it as a story among others. Indeed, this dissemination and polycentrism of stories that Bhabha and Francese theorise relocate the focus from questions of reliability altogether, positioning it on the means of narrative representation and reconstruction in composing reality and the past. This realisation evokes the narrative self-consciousness of exilic memory itself, positioning it as one of the disseminated stories.
24 Nabi’s statement of heaven as garden in reference to Nila’s laughter evokes Persian Sufi poetry that Rumi and Hafez, 13th and 14th century Persian poets, represent. Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, emphasises the esoteric and spiritual aspect of Islam, which is reflected in Sufi poetry (Fotouhi 60-62). Sufi poetry is transcendental in nature: Often referred to as poetry of divine love, it is characterised by its celestial symbolism – e.g. the figure of the garden – that expresses aspirations for a connection with the divine (ibid. 62-63). 64
The narrative self-consciousness of the novel culminates in metafiction and reflections on narrativity. Describing a photo of himself and his mother, Markos notes: “You can sense a current of dissatisfaction between us. . . . Or maybe you can’t. But every time I see that picture
. . . I can’t help but see the wariness, the effort, the impatience” (323, emphasis added).
Addressing the reader invokes the act of reading and further highlights the fictional quality of the narratives as well as the workings of memory depicted in them. Similarly, during his stay at an Indian hospital, Markos’s mattress is “no thicker than a paperback book” (359). A manifestation of narrative self-awareness, this reference is also a powerful means of sensuous presencing of the past, that not only seeps in the present within the narrative but is also tangible in the present of the reader, who might be holding a paperback book.
The narrative self-awareness of the novel intensifies into narrative self-reflectivity in the interview with Nila, where she, discussing her poetry, declares:
I see the creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. . . . Creating means
vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants.
. . . You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly. (239-240)
Nila’s thoughts on the creative process invoke the nature of narrative representation in general, as well as questions on who is entitled to narrate and what. Reading the interview, Nila’s daughter Pari is deeply affected by its revelations that drive her to contemplate on the merging of reality and fiction in the narrative of her past:
. . . if the account Maman had given of her life in the interview was a lie, then where did the
images of her work come from? Where was the wellspring for words that were honest and
lovely and brutal and sad? Was she merely a . . . magician, with a pen for wand, able to
move an audience by conjuring emotions she had never known herself? Was that even
possible? (250-251) 65
While the narratives offer no solutions or clear-cut explanations on the relationship between reality and fiction, the questions Nila and Pari evoke linger as metafictional remarks. Fiction permeates the narratives as well as the exilic memory manifesting itself in them, endowing the past with a narrative quality – but it is this narrative element that, eventually, constructs the reality of the past in the present.
Ultimately, the narrativity that informs the past, memory, and identity along with all representation extends to understanding exile. The interpretative turning towards the past and the manifestations of narrative memory that the novel exhibits are reflected in the recurrence of creative characters in the novel. Nila is a poet, Markos a photographer, Pari a painter. Their engagement in artistic expressions and creative productions signals an act of imaginative construction, generating something new blending fiction and reality. This creative process evokes the workings of exilic memory and the moulding of exilic identity that the characters immerse in to negotiate their exilic in-betweenness. At the same time, it points to the reconstructed nature of these processes. Indeed, the comments of Nila’s interviewer reveal the significance of recreation in exilic self-representation: “And you break in these poems from the rhythm, rhyme, and meter that I understand to be integral to classic Farsi poetry. You make use of free-flowing imagery. You heighten random, mundane details” (239). Breaking the poetic tradition, forging its rigid structures into free-flowing and flux ones, and underlining the everyday point directly to the conception of exile explored in this thesis.
Indeed, it is this recreation and moulding of the tradition that the novel itself engages in. It evokes the Persian literary tradition through its storyteller characters that pass on “stories populated with jinns and fairies and divs” (398) to subsequent generations, as well as through incorporating one of these stories simultaneously as one of the narratives and as the backdrop of the others. The div story that the novel sets forth with, however, complicates the traditional arrangements of Persian stories. While the div in the Persian epics is the incarnation of evil, a 66 cunning monster that threatens the human existence (Marzolph 164), its initial role as the child- abductor in And the Mountains Echoed is overturned with the revelations on its altruistic intentions in providing the children taken with a life of opportunity, as well as its benevolence in allowing Baba Ayub the relief of forgetting. A similar act of recreation is present in the figure of the pari. In ancient Persian tradition, the pari is the div’s counterpart, who, in the course of the centuries, has evolved from an evil being into a beautiful and immortal female figure who possesses magic powers, including the capacity of flying, and is morally and physically superior to the div (Marzolph 165). Although the pari does not appear as a supernatural creature in the novel, the two human Paris embody the link to the Persian tradition. Contrasting with the pari’s supernatural perfection, the Paris of the novel are presented as essentially flawed, mortal human beings that lack magic abilities. They, however, do metaphorically evoke the sense of flying through their exilic identity that transcends borders, and their eventual union decades after the separation of the siblings invokes a complex sense of defeat in relation to the div’s actions.
Accordingly, the conventional state of the pari and the div as the “folkloric expression of the eternal dichotomy of the good and the evil” (Marzolph 165) is complicated in the novel through the ambiguity present in both figures. The merging of their traditional binarism evokes the logic of exile as a state in which spatiotemporal, cultural, and national polarities coexist and blend.
The element of creation essential in exile is, also, present in Said’s reflections:
Much of the exile’s life is taken up with compensating for disorienting loss by creating a
new world to rule. It is not surprising that so many exiles seem to be novelists, chess players,
political activists, and intellectuals. Each of these occupations requires a minimal
investment in objects and places a great premium on mobility and skill. The exile’s new
world, logically enough, is unnatural and its unreality resembles fiction. (181)
The emphasis on immateriality, creation, and the fictive quality of existence is echoed in the exile stories of And the Mountains Echoed. Indeed, in the world characterised by displacement, 67
Said observes, there exists a perception that the only home available is in writing (174-184) – that is, in creation and reconstruction. Through their interpretative and narrative memory, the exilic characters of the novel create their exile, carve and construct an exile space, which forms the scope of the following subchapter.
Spaces in Flux: A Geocritical Reading of Exile
Along with exploring the multifaceted, narrative nature of exilic memory and representation, the polycentric narratives of And the Mountains Echoed construct a plurality of spaces connected with and conditioning the exile experiences depicted in them. From a geocritical viewpoint, Afghanistan functions as a central geographical referent depicted from a spectrum of perspectives: it recurs as a site of exilic remembrance, as a point of departure and destination, and as a lived experience of the everyday. These outlooks undermine any exilic conceptions of the country as a mythical homeland destroyed and immobilised by war (the perspective evoked in Amir’s return to Kabul in The Kite Runner) and, rather, exhibit it as a site of contrasting realities in flux, that exists in a global space informed by simultaneity and mobility. The sense of flux marks also other spaces and locations portrayed in the narratives: the Wahdati house in
Kabul and the village of Shadbagh, as well as places that metaphorically connect to exile and memory, such as the desert. The flux, also, characterises the diasporic exile space constructed through the multifocal narratives; a space informed by the simultaneous sense of distance and nearness, absence and presence, containment and freedom. As Westphal notes, “When the territory is seen in a multifocal perspective, it begins to move” (137), rejecting fixed identity.
Indeed, this unfixity defines not only the identity of the spaces constructed in the narratives but also the evolving, liminal identities of their exilic characters.
The identity of Afghanistan evolves throughout the novel. On their way to Kabul,
Saboor, Abdullah, and Pari pass far-flung and dusty mud hut villages, women squatting by cooking fires (27). The plain countryside life conditioned by the changing seasons is contrasted 68 with Kabul, the hectic city of “traffic lights, and teahouses, and restaurants, and glass-fronted shops with bright multicolored signs” (38), an urban scenery in constant motion: “Cars rattling noisily down the crowded streets, hooting, darting narrowly among buses, pedestrians and bicycles” (ibid.). Contemplating the different realities, Nila views Kabul as progressive yet pompous and deems the provinces as “the real Afghanistan” (137), where the humble and resilient people lead more authentic lives. Interestingly, Nila seems to fall prey to the similar romanticised ideas of the privileged she later condemns while discussing Afghanistan in her interview: doomed to “a lifelong course of quiet servitude” (207), Afghan women are “admired by some in the West . . . turned into heroines for their hard lives, admired from a distance by those who couldn’t bear even one day of walking in their shoes” (ibid.). Inevitably, the narrative moves beyond simplistic statements and perspectives, exhibiting the complexity inherent in the different realities of the land: while Nila buys Pari a pair of new shoes at the bazaar, Abdullah observes a clubfooted beggar (50). After his trip to Kabul, Idris remembers the city as a mix of ruins and vivid details, such as “the bodybuilding gym amid the rubble, . . . a painting of
Schwarzenegger on the window” (181). To Nabi, the recent history of his homeland culminates in war – or, rather, wars: “Not one, not two, but many wars, both big and small, just and unjust”
(138). Markos, however, refuses to think of Afghanistan as a mere warzone: “‘We do have our incidents . . . but mostly it’s just people going about their lives’” (389). Indeed, to return to
Bhabha, it is the plurality of the event of the everyday that comes to define Afghanistan as a nation.
The complexity of the identity of Afghanistan is not confined within its national borders; the land is also mapped in and in interaction with the global, transnational space.
Growing up in Paris, Pari visits Afghanistan as an adult and, eventually, San Francisco in the
US to meet her brother, Abdullah, and her niece, Pari. Pari, Abdullah’s daughter, was born in the US, growing up in a diasporic setting that Idris is also a part of. Born in Afghanistan, Idris 69 revisits his old homeland as an adult and meets Markos, who, after leaving his native island in
Greece, roams through all the continents to eventually settle in Kabul. The mobility of the characters and the narratives connects different spaces to each other, reflecting “the spatial compression of the globe into a global village” (Currie 107). The travel networks of the postmodern society compress the globe geographically, reducing “the temporal gap between places . . . to a [global] co-presence” and promoting an understanding of the planet as a simultaneous unity (ibid.). Each entailing the sense of exilic mobility, the narratives also exhibit and reflect on other forms of movement in the postmodern era. Pari’s friend Collette owns a travel agency, through which Pari and her family visit Majorca, and Markos encounters “the cabs, the buses, the crowds” (381) that point to emerging tourism on Tinos. His travel memories teem with different locations: Belfast, Montevideo, Tangier, Marseille, Lima, Tehran (355).
The compression of the globe is also strengthened by “the simultaneity of . . . electronic forms of communication” (Currie 107). Indeed, “‘This Internet is a wondrous tool’” (149), Nabi states when asking Markos to find Pari, which he, eventually, does through Facebook, and Markos’s mother follows his son’s achievements online as his “cyberspace stalker” (388). The global space is, thus, intertwined with, structured by, and connected through cyberspace in the postmodern era.
A similar intermedial place-connectedness manifests itself through photography.
Exhibited in a place, photos connect and open up new and parallel time spaces within their physical location: on the walls of the house of the Wahdatis, Idris observes posters of the
Bamiyan Buddhas, of a Buzkashi game, of a Greek island, as well as Thalia’s picture (165). In this way, the pictures embody the logic of simultaneity and point to the polycentrism of postmodernity. As Currie notes, the new experiences of time and place deriving from globalisation and technological innovation also translate to the level of form in postmodern literature (4). In this sense, the very structure of And the Mountains Echoed, its polycentric 70 narrative form exhibiting the everyday in different time spaces, performs the simultaneous global space.
The postmodern transnational space is not only constructed through tourism and technological innovation in the novel; the narratives also evoke and reflect the mobilities entangled with global unrest. Nabi describes the 1980s in Afghanistan as “a time of exodus”
(138), during which people left the country hoping to resettle in the West. Having escaped the war, both Abdullah and Idris settle in the US. Gholam, in turn, has spent his childhood in
Pakistan on a refugee camp, a city within a city (295). Nila and Pari, fleeing their confined life in Kabul in the 1950s, also participate in the scattering of Afghan people and the creation of a complex, global diaspora space.
As a space constructed through dispersal, diaspora is a concrete metaphor for dissemination and multifocalisation. It is, also, a lived experience, in which multiple geographical locations connect to and interact with each other. The Afghan community in San
Francisco has Afghan TV stations, a mosque, and other commodities that reproduce and recreate the Afghan culture in the US through collective memory, such as Abe’s Kabob House, an Afghan restaurant owned by Abdullah. Representing the generational differences within the diaspora community, Pari’s views on her father’s restaurant are rather critical:
. . . the tacky item names on the laminated menus – Caravan Kabob, Khyber Pass Pilaf,
Silk Route Chicken – the badly framed poster of the Afghan girl from National Geographic,
the one with the eyes – like they had passed on ordinance that every single Afghan restaurant
had to have her eyes staring back from the wall. Next to it, Baba had hung an oil painting I
had done in seventh grade of the big minarets in Herat. (419)
The places and cultural artefacts transformed into meal names and paintings embody the persistence of the past time space and its influence on the current existence of the diasporans.
However, the narratives complicate any univocal conceptions of the diaspora space: Pari, 71
Abdullah’s sister, is “Afghan only in name” (259). Indeed, the diasporans’ relationship to the place they inhabit is not only that of cultural recreation; it is also a complex minority structure, whereby the refugees, depending on the hospitality of their receiver, are what Bhabha describes as “the other side of the citizenship” (Stierstorfer 20). After the closing of the refugee camp in
Pakistan, Gholam has faced returning to Afghanistan: “‘we were guests in Pakistan who’d outstayed their welcome’” (295) and, according to the Pakistanis, “‘Afghans belong in
Afghanistan’” (ibid.). These mobilities are not Afghanistan-specific but take place within a global context in the narratives: on TV, Pari watches South-Vietnamese refugees arriving in
Guam (247), and her son works with refugees from Darfur in Chad (266).
The narratives also display the global flows of humanitarian workers as a kind of countermovement to forced emigration. In Kabul, Idris meets Amra, a Bosnian nurse, who has served in disaster areas in Kosovo, Rwanda, Colombia, Burundi, as well as in Cambodia (168).
The international aid workers gathered at Nabi’s house create a transnational space within
Kabul: Idris can hear a mixture of German, French, and Greek while
A Nina Simone CD plays softly. Everyone is . . . talking about the new war in Iraq, what it
will mean for Afghanistan. The television in the corner is tuned to CNN International, the
volume muted. Nighttime Baghdad, in the throes of Shock and Awe, keeps lighting up in
flashes of green. (162)
The mixing of languages and cultures reverberates with the diasporic and exilic ethos of surpassing nation states, also on a global scale. Through constructing a transnational space, the narratives map Afghanistan as a participant of the mobile world, as well as position the Afghan exile stories in the context of global mobilities in the postmodern era.
In addition to the logic of global simultaneity, the multifocal perspectives the novel presents show how space is inseparable from time also in other ways: it unfolds as a temporal process in the intertextual chain that the narratives create across time. In fact, as Westphal notes, 72 space “exists in its temporal strata”: “the flux of space in time” manifested in the intertextual chain produces an effect of spatiotemporal layeredness (122). This stratigraphic vision reveals how the present time of space also entails its past (137) – as well as its future, as is evident in the novel informed by the circularity of time. The narratives not only circulate the same places at different and overlapping times but also exhibit their spatiotemporal layeredness through place-centered analepses and prolepses within the narrative memory of individual characters.
In addition to participating in the writing of the nation of Afghanistan, the narratives create more specific locations within the land. The house of the Wahdatis in Kabul recurs in most of the narratives and links them to each other. Entering the mansion with an abundant garden and luxurious décor, Abdullah feels like stepping into the div’s place (41). Analogically to the bedtime story, the house becomes his sister Pari’s new home that she revisits as an adult in the early 2000s having discovered her forgotten origins: “She had last seen the house back in 1955 and seemed quite surprised at the vividness of her own memory of the place, its general layout, the two steps between the living room and the dining room, . . . where she . . . would sit
. . . and read her books” (330). For Nabi, the house is the focal setting of his life: “it is home to me, and I am certain that I will soon take my last breath under its roof” (149). Proleptically pointing to the future of the house in his letter to Markos, Nabi describes his arrival to the mansion: “In those days, the house bore little resemblance to the lamentable state in which you found it when you arrived in Kabul in 2002. . . . It was a beautiful, glorious place” (85). After
Nila and Pari’s departure, Nabi inhabits the house with Suleiman, witnessing its destruction by the passing of time and war. The aging of the two men is personified in the decaying house:
“Like the house, Suleiman and I too were wearing down” (ibid.). After Suleiman’s death, Nabi becomes the owner of the house and welcomes Markos to stay in it in the early 2000s. The house becomes the base of humanitarian aid workers and the setting of a party which Idris attends in 2003. In Idris’s eyes, the house has “a whiff of past splendor beneath the ruin that 73 has been visited upon it. . . . [but also] evidence of slow, hesitant rebirth” (160-161). Thus, the house becomes the embodiment of the war-torn Kabul itself.
A similar sense of revival and progress unfolds in Shadbagh in the course of the narratives. A rural village revolving around the communal well, the windmill, the mosque, and the orchards in the eyes of Abdullah and Parwana in the 40s and 50s, the area later becomes
Shadbagh-e-Kohna (Old Shadbagh), where “the only surviving relic of the past was a decaying windmill” (280). Adel’s perspective in 2009 reveals the urbanisation of Shadbagh-e-Nau (New
Shadbagh) with schools, a clinic, a shopping district, and a hotel; a scenery which Pari,
Abdullah’s daughter, experiences through her aunt Pari’s photos when meeting her in the US in 2010. The transformation of the key locations parallels that of the land, emphasising
Afghanistan as an evolving nation. However, while the flux of space in time creates a temporality that encompasses the layers of the past and the future, it simultaneously conceals these layers. Visiting her old home in Shadbagh, Abdullah’s sister Pari finds it shielded by the walls of the mansion of Adel’s father. Concretely, the transformed space hides her past, which remains inaccessible.
The sense of flux extends to different landmarks and scenes that recur throughout the narratives, functioning as multifaceted metaphors for the entanglement of time, space, and memory in exile. Abdullah’s childhood is shaded by a giant oak tree, which “towered over everything in Shadbagh and was the oldest living thing in the village” (31). The tree was also a part of his father’s childhood, sustaining a swing that he and the sisters Parwana and Masooma would take turns in, and later the scene of the events that led to Masooma’s impairment: discovering Masooma’s love for Saboor, Parwana caused her sister’s fall. The tree also embodies the ancient past and ancestral continuity of the land: Saboor believes it had witnessed the emperor Babur marching his army to capture Kabul (32) and, counting the rings of its stump,
Adel and his father conclude that the tree had seen Ghengis Khan’s army march past (291). 74
After losing her daughter, Saboor fells the tree, unable to bear the sight of the scene where Pari used to swing. The cut tree becomes a metaphor both for the rupture of the family caused by
Pari’s departure and for Pari’s detachment from her past that she soon forgets living with her new parents in Kabul and, later, growing up in France. Yet, despite the transformation of the tree, the rings of the stump and the roots burrowing into the soil indicate the continuing presence of the past; indeed, encountering an oak tree in Provence, Pari is overcome by an inexplicable sense of absence (215). The significance of the tree extends to Pari’s exilic identity: even though she is cut off from her past existence, “what Pari has since planted . . . stands as true and sturdy and unshakable as a giant oak” (269). The tree metaphor lends itself also for understanding
Abdullah’s daughter Pari’s relationship with her father’s past, by which she is deeply affected: thinking of her aunt, she used to picture them as “two leaves, blowing miles apart in the wind yet bound by the deep tangled roots of the tree from which we had both fallen” (450). The figure of the tree embodies the interplay of distance and nearness inherent in exile: detached from the tree, its leaves are still connected to it.
A similar atmosphere of permanence manifests itself in the recurrence of mountains in the narratives, often entangled with the figure of the desert. It is only in the div story that mountains turn into a setting as Baba Ayub visits the div’s castle on top of one; the other narratives depict mountains from afar as a seemingly unchanging, distant scenery. The mountains loom in the background of the life in Shadbagh, their peaks “opaque silhouettes of crouching giants” (27). In his father’s pictures from jihadi days, Adel sees “nothing behind but mountains and sand” (276) and, having received Markos’s call, Pari suddenly recalls the “hazy strings of mountains that fall and fall away on the horizon” (272). The mountains embody the presence of the past in a concrete way, pointing to the underlying permanence of Afghanistan amid its flux realities. The seeming immutability of the mountains is contrasted with the surrounding desert, an entity comprising of the constant movement of the grains of sand, which 75 creates an unpredictable space between the spectator and the mountains. After losing his sister,
Abdullah dreams of being in the desert again, “alone, surrounded by the mountains, and in the distance a single tiny glint of light flickering on, off, on, off, like a message” (55). The sense of distance created by the remote mountains and the flickering light viewed from the dark, vast desert not only points to the unreachability of the past but also to the atmosphere of separation in exile. This exilic ambience resonating with the mountains is not confined within the borders of Afghanistan but occurs also in other spaces: Markos’s home island in Greece, Tinos, is lined by “the jagged mountains from which springs flowed every year” (343); fighting cancer, Pari’s mother observes “the foothills in the distance” (412) through the window in the US; and the
Provençal farmhouse of the children of Abdullah’s sister Pari has a view of the Vaucluse
Mountains (458). The distant mountains embody the past time spaces that the exilic characters of the novel are irrevocably separated from; yet their recurrence and permanence indicate the stratigraphic persistence of these past time spaces in the present existence of the exiles.
From a geocritical perspective, the multifocal exile narratives allow for an interpretation of the identity of exile itself; they all participate in the construction of an exile space.25 The plurality of perspectives and experiences undermine any fixed conceptions of exile and, rather, introduce multiplicity as its very essence. However, geocritically considered, the heterogeneous perspectives converge in a certain place (Westphal 122); they all share some fundamental features. The exile space is, for all the characters, a lived experience of the everyday that entails the past, the present, and the future at once. In their plurality, the exile narratives share the sense of separation, disorientation, liminality, and transition. All the characters have experienced a disruptive cut from the past existence; a cut that has generated a sense of escape. As Markos’s mother states, “‘what guides [people] is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want’” (390).
25 It should be noted that Westphal excludes the study of nongeographical places in his geocritical approach, emphasising the representations of geographical referents as the natural applications of geocriticism (119). However, I argue that due to exile’s profound entanglement with space it can be treated as a location and, thus, as an eligible object of geocritical analysis. 76
Nila, then, describes her state after hysterectomy as “disoriented, suspended in confusion, stripped of my compass” (244). This ambience of spatial bewilderment permeates the exilic experiences depicted in the novel, not culminating in the resolution of ambiguities but, rather, in movement on-the-way-toward newness.
The spatial bewilderment is profoundly present in Abdullah’s exile, which is informed by disorientation and loss. He aches for his mother, who died giving birth to his sister, Pari, whom Abdullah views as his only true family after his father remarries. The siblings share an extraordinary bond, Abdullah being “as much father to Pari as sibling” (106), believing it is his
God-given purpose to raise her. In their reconstituted family, Abdullah feels like “another woman’s leftovers” (25), and after losing Pari, Abdullah is deprived of his home (56). Pari’s absence, “like a smell pushing up from the earth beneath his feet” (55), comes to define
Abdullah’s existence in the way of an exilic cut and, eventually, causes his departure from
Shadbagh. The journey through the desert, following “the shadow of his father and sister lengthening on the gray desert floor, pulling away from him if he slowed down” (29), becomes a metaphor not only for Abdullah’s forgetting but also for his disoriented exilic existence.
Reflecting on the desert, Abdullah wonders “how easily a person could lose his way in it. No one to help, no one to show the way” (37). The past experience of abandonment, of being deserted, persists years later in the US, where Abdullah clings to his daughter, who, named after his little sister, becomes his solace in the cycle of loss. Indeed, as Pari’s mother notes, “Your father is like a child, Pari. Terrified of being abandoned. He would lose his way without you”
(433, emphasis in original). The ambience of loss extends to Abdullah’s mind in the form of memory disease that, eventually, deprives him of access to his past. Separation and loss – of loved ones, of home, of the past, and even identity – repeat and reproduce themselves in
Abdullah exile, creating a space suspended in uncertainty and distance. 77
Similarly, Abdullah’s sister Pari’s exile space is defined by a profound sense of absence and distance. The traumatic separation from her family as an infant, although beyond remembrance, still affects Pari’s existence. She grows up in Paris, detached from her roots in
Afghanistan. The past, however, persists as a lingering presence of absence in Pari’s life;
. . . the absence of something, or someone, fundamental to her own existence. Sometimes it
was vague, like a message sent across shadowy byways and vast distances, a weak signal
on a radio dial, remote, warbled. Other times it felt so clear, this absence, so intimately close
it made her heart lurch. (214-215)
Thus, the interplay of distance and proximity manifests itself in Pari’s experience of absence, re-evoking the figure of the flickering light in the desert and, accordingly, the exilic separation from her brother, her past, and her point of origin.
The atmosphere of distance manifests itself also in Pari’s difficult relationship with
Nila. The sense of mutual alienation and disappointment seems to, ultimately, stem from the lack of biological relatedness between the women. As Nila states, “I don’t know who you are, what you’re capable of, in your blood’” (235). In the ambience of detachment, Pari roots herself in her everyday experience: she makes a career out of mathematics, characterised by “the lack of arbitrariness and the absence of ambiguity” (232), and finds a sense of permanence through her own family. Her daughter, Isabelle, has “solidified the ground beneath Pari’s feet – pocked as it still may be with blind gaps and spots, all the unanswered questions” (256). The old feeling of absence and identity crisis resurface when Pari reads Nila’s interview, the revelations of which “shift the ground beneath Pari’s feet”, “unsteady and upend her” (251). The spatial metaphors underline Pari’s exile as a spatial experience, as a sensuous experience. The sense of absence also manifests itself spatially, as a permanent, experienced, and sensed entity. It is only after connecting with Markos, visiting Afghanistan, and finding her brother and niece that the absence begins to take shape, transform into spatial memories of a windmill and mountains. 78
The restoration of the past sets Pari’s exile space into motion, transforming it into a place of interaction between the past, the present, and the future.
Like that of Pari, the exile of Markos is induced by a sense of separation in the private sphere, in his family home. Markos’s existence is defined by his complicated relationship to his mother, their being “together out of a sense of genetic duty, doomed already to bewilder and disappoint each other” (323). The disconnection between the two manifests itself spatially, again reflecting the figure of the desert and the merging of distance and proximity entangled with it: “the words I say to Mamá vanish unheard in space, as if there is static between us, a bad connection” (329), and, calling his mother from abroad, Markos is “speaking into a void across the continents” (ibid.). Markos’s exilic experience reverses the traditional logic of exile as a forced departure: he feels like an exile in his own home, marooned, as though his “real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self” (335).
Markos’s confined existence on Tinos prompts his escape, his nomadic mobility across the globe in search for reinvention and new identity, before settling in Kabul. Markos’s story interrogates Afghanistan as a place to be exited, a perspective presented by many of the other narratives, rewriting it as a destination, a station of settlement. He does, however, return to
Tinos in 2010 to visit his mother and his childhood friend Thalia, who has become a part of the family. His arrival is spatiotemporally disorienting: “it feels as though there is a gaping hole in the middle of everything. The decades of my mother’s life here with Thalia, they are dark, vast spaces to me. I have been absent” (384). The sense of absence and disconnection materialises in Markos’s reencounter with his mother, “the air between us thick with awkwardness and our awareness of all the time lost” (392). The physical presence of loss, of lost time in a space, reinforces the entanglement of time and space in exile. The act of returning to the location of origin highlights this entanglement: the remembered past is still stratigraphically present, uncannily fused with the sensed absence of the self in the space. For Markos, the reconnection 79 is also a source of reconciliation. Having discovered his mother’s pride for him, he feels something beginning to break wide open inside him (395). This inner movement evokes a sense of transition, of motion towards newness, which defines the exile space constructed in the narratives of the novel.
The narrative focalised through Idris, in turn, offers critical perspectives on the multiplicity of exilic leaving and returning. Idris’s exile space takes form through physical, back-and-forth movement between Afghanistan and the US, suspending him in a liminal state.
His return to Kabul in 2003 with his cousin Timur and the subsequent return to the US drive
Idris into an identity crisis induced by a sense of survivor’s guilt and his inability to reconcile his notions of self tied to different geographical and cultural locations. In Kabul, Idris is troubled by his position among “the wealthy, wide-eyed exiles [who have] come home to gawk at the carnage now that the boogeymen have left” (153). He despises Timur, who behaves like
“the quintessential ugly Afghan-American” (167) in Kabul, hypocritically
. . . tearing through the war-torn city like he belongs here, backslapping locals with great
bonhomie and calling them brother, sister, uncle, making a show of handing money to
beggars . . . like he wasn’t lifting at Gold’s in San Jose, working on his pecs and abs, when
these people were getting shelled, murdered, raped. (167)
Idris resents Timur’s rhetoric of the trip as reconnecting, educating oneself, bearing witness to the destruction, and giving back, when the real motive for the return is reclaiming their property in Kabul (155). Idris also feels offended, more than most locals, at the cheerful, condescending mocking of the foreign aid-workers in Kabul, and later in the US at his community’s disinterest in and ignorance of the reality in Afghanistan. Again in spatial metaphors, he feels a “rift between himself and his family” (186) and disconnected from the renovation projects at his house that “remind him only of the brutal disparity between his life and what he’d found in
Kabul” (185). Yet Idris gradually falls prey to the same bliss of ignorance he criticises as the 80 memories of the trip fade, the distance between him, Kabul, and Roshi becoming “infinite, insurmountable” (194). The realities of Kabul and Idris’s everyday experience in the US remain disconnected, two separate time spaces, the chasm of which defines Idris’s exile. This spatial organisation of his exilic identity is compromised when the past resurfaces in Roshi’s book- signing event, causing the overlapping of the separated time spaces and Idris’s suspension in identity crisis. The depiction of Idris’s exile demonstrates not only the inherent plurality in the notion of exile but also the ambiguities within a singular exilic experience.
Pari’s exile space, in turn, is informed by her parents’ exile, especially that of her father’s. Her existence is profoundly marked by the separation of the siblings and the persisting presence of her father’s lost sister. The past events also define Pari’s complicated relationship with her father that shapes her exilic existence. Pari aspires to meet her father’s expectations, desiring to cure his sadness and striving to exist within the limits of his rigorous love that
“squeezed you into something smaller than yourself” (423). Caught between her father’s hopes and her own aspirations, the persistence of the diasporic past and the everyday life in the US, the Afghan culture and the American one, Pari feels fundamentally lonely. For her, class trips to the aquarium, concerts, and school dances are “like watching an exciting movie with the sound turned off” (414), as a mere detached observer unable to fully experience her everyday surroundings. Discouraged by her father to engage in the local youth culture, Pari attends Farsi lessons and Sunday school at the mosque instead. Amid the whirls of her liminal life, she is
“like a fish made to swim upstream” (417). The fish metaphor extends to inform Pari’s experienced exile space:
All my life, I have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier
as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world
on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed 81
in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me. . . .
(447)
Despite Pari’s desire for freedom, her confinement is also a protected space. The thought of the glass tank breaking, of her father’s approaching death, terrifies her: “I will spill out in the wide open unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath” (ibid.). Pari’s detachment from her surroundings is an expression of otherness, both in relation to her Afghan origins and her home in the US. She yearns for the sense of connection and recognition, someone “in whose face I could always find myself” (399). Finding her aunt restores a sense of continuity and belonging in Pari’s identity in a very physical way: “I feel a tilting, something clicking into place. Something ripped apart so long ago being sealed again” (451). Through the resurfacing of the embodiment of the exilic separation defining Pari’s existence even before her birth, her father’s lost sister, the cut informing Pari’s exile is bridged. Although Pari’s aunt, after the loss of Pari’s parents, represents a reconnection with the past, her parents’ homeland remains beyond her reach. It is, rather, transnationality that comes to define Pari’s exile space as she discovers her relatives in France. Embracing her network in the global space, Pari surpasses the
(cultural) confinement that has shaped her identity. This reorganisation of identity is spatially embodied in Pari’s reorganisation of the family house after Abdullah moves into a nursing home: relocating furniture and emptying closets, she is claiming space that used to be inhabited by her parents, which creates a sense of movement onwards; an emerging, unconfined, exilic identity.
The atmosphere of confinement permeates also other exile spaces constructed in the narratives. For Parwana, it is interlocked with her twin sister in a dual sense: first, through her experience as the “pathetic shadow” (72) of the beautiful and well-liked Masooma, caught in the community’s fixed attitudes towards her as the difficult half; and, later, through her self- inflicted part as Masooma’s carer. Masooma’s paralysis interrupts Parwana’s sense of 82 existence, inducing her homebound exile experience defined by guilt and despair. Like Siamese twins, Parwana and Masooma are “two creatures inextricably bound, blood formed in the marrow of one running in the veins of the other, their union permanent” (60-61). Masooma’s paralysis also prompts Nabi’s exile, Kabul becoming his escape (68). The remorse Nabi experiences for the act of abandonment defines his existence as the servant of Suleiman
Wahdati, who, ironically, faces physical impairment after his stroke. Nabi’s life in the household culminates in his role as the chauffeur determined by “waiting outside stores, engine idling; waiting outside a wedding hall, listening to the muffled sound of the music” (90): he is a permanent outsider in the background, doomed to observe his surroundings at a distance, without fully participating. The sense of detachment manifests itself also in Nabi’s love for
Nila, Suleiman’s wife, whom he frequently sees through windows or the rear-view mirror in the car. Initiated by Nabi, Pari’s adoption disconnects him also from his family in Shadbagh, and his isolation increases after Nila and Pari’s departure, as Nabi and Suleiman escape their war-transformed surroundings in the confinement of the house: they unplug the television and the radio, stop buying newspapers, block the news from the outside world (139). In Nabi’s memories, the sense of isolation and confinement materialise themselves spatially, embodied in the house and the car.
A similar spatial tension of confinement is expressed, in Nila’s case, through bird metaphors, caged birds being a frequent motif in her early poems written in the grip of the familial and cultural roles assigned to her growing up in Afghanistan in the 1940s. In the narrative focalising Adel, in turn, the spatial confinement is the most tangible: after fleeing
Kabul, he lives in a compound shielded by guarded gates, walls, and barbed wire, a mansion cut off from news distribution and the Internet, which, to him, is “much like a prison” (290).
Adel’s isolation is defined by loneliness caused by the recurring absences of his father and the disconnection from his peers. Gholam becomes Adel’s only link to the outside world, even 83 though his presence, paradoxically, adds to Adel’s detachment from the everyday realities in
Afghanistan: Gholam’s life is “worlds removed from Adel’s own, though it unfolded practically within spitting distance of him” (302). The spatial sense of confinement becomes internalised as Adel’s awareness of his own reality as a son of a jihadist increases: he recognises his mother’s secrets, “all the things she kept locked up, closed off, carefully guarded, like the two of them in this big house” (314). The confined spaces, thus, metaphorically point to the spatial character of the mind and memory manifested in exile.
The sense of confinement depicted in the narratives is a defining characteristic of the exile space constructed in the novel. While it manifests itself as the event of the everyday and a spatially sensed experience, it also resonates with exilic identity in a broader context, addressing the conceptions of fixed (or imposed) national and cultural identities and exile’s
(probable) incompatibility with them. Interrogating the restricted existence of the exilic characters, the narratives overturn the metaphors of confinement and exhibit experiences of release and unboundedness. Alongside her aquarium experience, Pari dreams of unconfined fish:
I dreamt I was at a beach standing waist-deep in the ocean, water that was myriad shades of
green and blue, jade, sapphire, emerald, turquoise, gently rocking at my hips. At my feet
glided legions of fish, as if the ocean were my own private aquarium. (415)
As in The Kite Runner, water acquires a metaphorical dimension as an unstable element with fluid shades, as such reverberating with an evolving exilic identity. In the ocean, the fish know no borders. A similar sense of freedom manifests itself in the figure of the bird: birds are, also, the opposite of caged beings, as is evident in Suleiman’s observing “the birds perched on the trees, the sky, the clouds” (131) through the window after his paralysis. Abdullah, in turn, collects feathers for his sister, and pictures “the feather coming loose from the bird, up in the 84 clouds, half a mile above the world” (56) before landing. Like the fish, the bird defies confinement, moving without restraint, transcending cartographic borders.
The unconfined existence of birds and fish and their essence as mobile beings resonates with the identities in motion in the narratives. After Parwana, complying with her sister’s request, leaves Masooma to die in the desert, she “keeps marching toward her new life. She keeps walking, the darkness around her like a mother’s womb, and when it lifts . . . it feels like being born” (81). Similarly, after discovering the truth about his father’s illegitimate position of privilege as a criminal, Adel is disgusted; yet he simultaneously feels the emergence of a new identity, “an opposing current of consciousness . . . that did not displace the first but claimed space beside it” (315). These images of rebirth and transition point to the quality of exilic identity as constant positioning and becoming, interrogating the atmosphere of confinement present in many of the narratives. With the surfacing of his new identity, Adel is suddenly aware of “the wildly conflicting truths that resided within a person” (314). The coexistence of conflicting truths is, also, evident in the exile space mapped in the novel; exile culminates in the liminal tension between polar entities, incorporating both.
Conclusion
The postmodern polycentrism present in And the Mountains Echoed induces disseminated conceptions of memory and exile. In the context of counterhegemonic minority discourses that the novel itself participates in as Afghan American literature, this dissemination has bearing on redefining subjectivity: it breaches any sharp distinctions between the self and the other. As
Francese notes, the multiplicity of representations undoes the centre of narrative gravity and approaches new, interdependent unities (10-11). In a similar vein, in emphasising the reciprocal creation in the representation of space, Westphal questions the “bipolar relationship between otherness and identity” that comes to be “no longer governed by a single action, but by interaction” (113). This dissemination of meaning, stories, and perspectives materialises not 85 only in the multiplicity of the narratives in the novel; it is also manifested in their acknowledging the existence of other narratives, both through intertextuality and momentary cuts to the narrative flow that shift the focus to the margins of the story. During a conversation on Abdullah with her aunt in France, Pari suddenly observes a couple passing on a tandem bicycle, as well as a girl and a terrier sitting on the grass nearby (461). These sudden hints at other, seemingly trivial perspectives appear to metafictionally undo the narrative centre even within the individual narrratives of the novel, functioning as reminders of the myriad of heterogeneous stories beyond them.
The multipolarity that the novel embodies, also, connects with the ethos of exile. As
Said observes, exiles are aware of at least two cultures, settings, and homes, and this plural vision endows them with an essentially “contrapuntal” awareness of simultaneous dimensions
(186). For an exile, the existence in one environment necessarily occurs against the memory of it in another; thus, “both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally” (ibid.). This contrapuntality re-evokes Schuback’s metaphor of the echo in exploring exilic afterness: the existence in one environment echoes that before the exilic cut in another.
Indeed, the metaphor of the echo encompasses a plurality of meanings in And the
Mountains Echoed. Entangled with the recurring mountains, the echo evokes the interplay of distance and nearness in exile: representing the sense of distance in relation to the past, the looming mountains simultaneously signal its persistence and enable the return of the echo.
Struggling in exilic liminality, Pari whispers her double’s name, “waiting for an echo, certain that it would come someday” (451). The echo returns when Pari meets her aunt, the embodiment of her past. The echo, then, is a figure of return that positions its point of origin and its destination in constant interaction. This sense of interaction not only points to the contrapuntal exilic existence but also to the intertextuality of the multiple narratives of the novel: referencing 86 the same places, characters, and stories, the narratives echo in each other. This resonance extends to inform the relations of the novel with other texts and media. While the echo, thus, invokes the idea of polycentrism, it is also a figure of repetition that marks the points of convergence in the disseminated stories. In all the narratives, the sense of exile echoes, along with reflections on universal phenomena, such as remembering, forgetting, the passing of time, and death. In this way, the echo is simultaneously a figure of sameness and difference, of nearness and distance, of leaving and returning, of the present and the past. In signalling this coexistence of polarities, it is a figure of exile itself.
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4. Conclusion: Exilic Alternative(s) for Reading Contemporaneity
Amidst the postmodern flows and dislocations, exile has become a fashionable concept. Indeed, as Naficy suggests, due to the globalisation of travel, media, and capital, exile appears to have become a postmodern condition (1999, 4). The contemporary interest in exile often derives from the views of non-exiles on the benefits of exile as a redemptive motif (Said 183), a notion that runs the risk of overlooking the diversity of the often catastrophic global realities and othering societal structures that those in exile are compelled to encounter and exist in. As Said observes: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience” (173). Exile should not, thus, be reduced to a generalised condition of alienation and difference, to “one of the items on the diversity-chic menu” (Naficy 1999, 4). Exile is a context-specific experience that rejects unifying definitions. While exploring exile and its implications in the postmodern context, this thesis has not aimed at presenting clear-cut conclusions on the essence of exile – especially by one that has not experienced it – but, rather, emphasises its fluidity and indefinability.
While it is important to acknowledge exile’s foundational affiliations with global unrest, it should not be defined merely by its dystopic and dysphoric bearings but also by its utopian and euphoric possibilities (Naficy 1993, 6). Naficy views exilic liminality as a period of vast potential, a space of liberation and becoming, where “opposites don’t refuse, they re-fuse” (ibid.
6-10). This spatial depiction of exilic liminality correlates with Parsons’s temporally oriented theory of being open to the unknowness of the future as a source of being fully and creatively alive (2-61). The re-fusing of opposites manifests itself in Parsons’s understanding the present as a temporality that extends between the primal scene and death: while the past remains present and alive through memory, the freedom of imaginative movement extends also to the future
(10-31). The continual reconfiguring of one’s availability to the future and, inevitably, the uncanny death, enriches the present, which, in turn, enlarges the potential of one’s future life 88
(ibid.). According to Parsons, the imaginative movement required to live fully and creatively extends “back into the past, and from the past up to the present, forwards into the future, and back again to the present” (57), a perspective that resonates with exile as a space of becoming and circular time. As a manifestation of circular temporality, exile can, thus, be a euphoric space of being fully and creatively alive.
Bearing in mind the simultaneously dysphoric and euphoric character of exile, it is considered here, in line with Said’s conclusions, “not as privilege, but as an alternative to the mass institutions that dominate modern life” (184, emphasis in original). Exile can, then, introduce an alternative mode of perception on the one hand to univocal conceptions of time
(circular instead of linear), space (plural instead of singular), and identity (transnational instead of national); and on the other to the fragmentation and disorientation of postmodernity. Indeed, as oppositional postmodern narratives (Francese 109), the exile stories of The Kite Runner and
And the Mountains Echoed are equipped to question the compressed space-time coordinates of postmodernity through their recovery of the past by virtue of memory. As remembrance signifies the recuperation of a temporal depth lost to postmodernity, it is a valid means of restoring “fragmented electronic time and space to manageable parameters” (ibid. 6).
Interrogating the postmodern fragmentation, oppositional postmodern narratives (like exile) enable the critical rethinking of possibilities for self-determination and self-realisation outside the parameters of a single world economic system (ibid. 5). The temporal and spatial points of orientation debilitated by postmodernity are further strengthened by the narratives’ valorisation of counterdiscourses (ibid. 109-110), which re-evokes polycentrism, dissemination, and geocriticism as means of introducing difference to absolute notions of time and space. Exile, as depicted in Hosseini’s narratives, then, can subvert both the modernist desires to “homologate, integrate, and dominate diversity” (Francese 5) and the spatiotemporal compression of postmodernity, offering an (exilic) alternative for orienting oneself in the contemporary world. 89
Indeed, for Schuback, exile is the mode of understanding the present. She links her idea of exile as after-existence with contemporaneity at large: “Rather than a post-modern condition, we experience today a post-existential condition” (176). Following Richter, she describes today as a time that can only perceive itself as an after that is modified by this after (177). This realisation establishes after as a specific moment and dynamic, as afterness as such (ibid.). This afterness, then, is defined by “coming and living after, and not least what sort of nearness to what has been and what can be an after carries in itself” (ibid.). Exile and the present as afterness, then, both signal existence on-the-way toward without return or arrival (187).
According to Schuback, this juxtaposition can lead to the insight that those in exile are “the ones who come bringing with them the openness of coming and not only those that come from one place searching to remain in another” (ibid.). This openness of coming entailed in exilic after-existence can shed light on how post-existence itself is “nothing but a coming, a coming without a whence and a whereto” (187). Exile can, then, as a space and time of coming (and becoming), be a figure and a mode of understanding the post-existential contemporaneity.
The openness of coming and becoming re-evoke, yet again, the sense of motion that defines the idea of exile developed in this thesis. Fluctuation and movement permeate the exilic mobilities, the exilic memories, and the exilic identities taking form in Hosseini’s novels. They pervade the plural exile spaces mapped and the circular, exilic time manifested in the narratives.
Both in the sense of physical mobility and metaphorical flow, they define the narrative that is memory in exile. The fluidity inherent in exile endows it with multidimensional implications and possibilities in the contemporary world of forced and voluntary mobilities and deterritorialisations. Exile is (perhaps) a catastrophe that (possibly) already contains the potential of becoming and growth. 90
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