How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
They called him "flat-nosed" because of Ali and Hassan's characteristic Hazara Mongoloid features. For years, that was all I knew about the Hazaras, that they were Mogul descendants, and that they looked a little like Chinese people. School text books barely mentioned them and referred to their ancestry only in passing. Then one day, I was in Baba's study, looking through his stuff, when I found one of my mother's old history books. It was written by an Iranian named Khorami. I blew the dust off it, sneaked it into bed with me that night, and was stunned to find an entire chapter on Hazara history. An entire chapter dedicated to Hassan's people! In it, I read that my people, the Pashtuns, had persecuted and oppressed the Hazaras. It said the Hazaras had tried to rise against the Pashtuns in the nineteenth century, but the Pashtuns had "quelled them with unspeakable violence." The book said that my people had killed the Hazaras, driven them from their lands, burned their homes, and sold their women. The book said part of the reason Pashtuns had oppressed the Hazaras was that Pashtuns were Sunni Muslims, while Hazaras were Shi'a. The book said a lot of things I didn't know, things my teachers hadn't mentioned. Things Baba hadn't mentioned either. It also said some things I did know, like that people called Hazaras mice-eating, flat-nosed, load-carrying donkeys. I had heard some of the kids in the neighborhood yell those names to Hassan. (2.23)
Ethnicity is complicated in The Kite Runner. Amir and Hassan have different ethnic groups: Amir is Pashtun and Hassan is Hazara. To make matters confusing, though, Pashtuns are Sunni Muslims and Hazaras are Shi'a Muslims. (So ethnicity and religion intertwine.) Here, Amir talks about how the Hazara people have been pretty much erased from official Afghani schoolbooks. Since the Pashtuns are in control, the Hazaras don't get much space in the official history of the country. There's also an attempt, it seems, to cover up the genocide committed by the Pashtuns against the Hazaras in the nineteenth century. Do you think Amir's betrayal of Hassan is just another instance of Pashtuns mistreating Hazaras – or does Amir, by telling Hassan's story, attempt to change things?
Quote #2
But despite sharing ethnic heritage and family blood, Sanaubar joined the neighborhood kids in taunting Ali. I have heard that she made no secret of her disdain for his appearance.
"This is a husband?" she would sneer. "I have seen old donkeys better suited to be a husband." (2.25)
Amir praises Sanaubar's beauty. Ali, on the other hand, isn't known for his looks. Even though Sanaubar strikes us as cruel here, we can make sense of her disdain for her husband's appearance. Powerful people sometimes mock powerless people. Athletic people sometimes dislike clumsy people. It's mean, but it's also human. (For example, "If I have this trait, why don't other people have it?") However, we at Shmoop think something else is going on: self-loathing. Two paragraphs before this one, Amir recalls some of the terrible ethnic slurs for Hazaras. One of them is "load-carrying donkey." Sanaubar, like Ali, is a Hazara. And so there's some self-hatred when she says, "I have seen old donkeys better suited to be a husband." In a way, she's adopting the slur that the Pashtuns use against her own people. It could be that she has internalized hatred.
Quote #3
The curious thing was, I never thought of Hassan and me as friends either. Not in the usual sense, anyhow. Never mind that we taught each other to ride a bicycle with no hands, or to build a fully functional homemade camera out of a cardboard box. Never mind that we spent entire winters flying kites, running kites. Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile.
Never mind any of those things. Because history isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing. (4.4-5)
This passage occurs in the midst of two relevant insights: 1) Amir never hears Baba refer to Ali as his friend in the stories he tells; and 2) no amount of history, ethnicity, society, or religion can change the fact that Amir and Hassan spent all their formative childhood moments together. So what should we make of Amir's contradictory statements here – doesn't he say history both does and does not trump his love for Hassan? Said another way: can history and ethnicity break the bonds of family? We're not sure. This might be the paradox at the heart of the novel.
Quote #4
His [Assef's] blue eyes flicked to Hassan. "Afghanistan is the land of Pashtuns. It always has been, always will be. We are the true Afghans, the pure Afghans, not this Flat-Nose here. His people pollute our homeland, our watan. They dirty our blood." He made a sweeping, grandiose gesture with his hands. "Afghanistan for Pashtuns, I say. That's my vision." (5.44)
This guy Assef is a jerk. And just plain evil. His misguided sentiment, though, informs the Taliban massacre Assef participates in at Mazar-i-Sharif. It also informed the Holocaust. (Hosseini consciously references the German concentration camps: Assef's mother is German and Assef actually admires Hitler.) Purity works for some things, like water and grain alcohol, but not the ethnic makeup of a country.
Quote #5
I was eighteen. Her name was Homaira. She was a Hazara, the daughter of our neighbor's servants. [...]
He took a long gulp of his scotch. Coughed. "You should have seen the look on my father's face when I told him. My mother actually fainted. My sisters splashed her face with water. They fanned her and looked at me as if I had slit her throat. My brother Jalal actually went to fetch his hunting rifle before my father stopped him." Rahim Khan barked a bitter laughter. "It was Homaira and me against the world. And I'll tell you this, Amir jan: In the end, the world always wins. That's just the way of things." (8.133-136)
Rahim Khan is telling Amir about an early romance of his with a Hazara woman named Homaira. (Don't forget that Rahim Khan's romance with Homaira parallels Baba's romance with Sanaubar.) The reactions from Rahim Khan's family might strike you as outlandish. Perhaps, though, they tell us a little about the distance between Hazaras and Pashtuns in the Afghanistan of Rahim Khan's early adulthood. Marriage binds two families together and you can see – pretty clearly – the fear expressed by Rahim Khan's mother (she faints) and his brother (he goes to get his gun). But we might want to disagree with Rahim Khan's last statement. Does "the world" always win? In the novel, do social prejudices win out over Amir's love for Hassan? Is Amir's rescue of Sohrab successful?
Quote #6
I remembered something Baba had said about Pashtuns once. We may be hardheaded and I know we're far too proud, but, in the hour of need, believe me that there's no one you'd rather have at your side than a Pashtun. (12.151)
This, friends, is a complicated statement. Sometimes generalizations about a culture don't harm anyone: "We Irish like to have fun." Sometimes they harm everyone and are patently false: "The Irish are a bunch of drunks." So, is Baba's statement here harmless or harmful? Well, does he mean you wouldn't want a Hazara at your side when the going got tough? Maybe some context would help: Amir is recalling Baba's statement during General Taheri's visit to Baba in the hospital. General Taheri, a Pashtun, is a devoted, loyal friend. So, perhaps it's harmless to some degree. If you dig deeper, though, there's more at stake. Remember that Amir, a Pashtun, abandoned Hassan, a Hazara, in the alley. Does Baba's statement mean you want a Pashtun at your side only if you're a Pashtun? And a Hazara at your side only if you're a Hazara? Does Baba's comment further isolate these ethnicities?
Quote #7
He [Assef] leaned toward me, like a man about to share a great secret. "You don't know the meaning of the word 'liberating' until you've done that, stood in a roomful of targets, let the bullets fly, free of guilt and remorse, knowing you are virtuous, good, and decent. Knowing you're doing God's work. It's breathtaking." He kissed the prayer beads, tilted his head. [...].
I had read about the Hazara massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif in the papers. It had happened just after the Taliban took over Mazar, one of the last cities to fall. I remembered Soraya handing me the article over breakfast, her face bloodless.
[Assef:] "[...]. We left the bodies in the streets, and if their families tried to sneak out to drag them back into their homes, we'd shoot them too. We left them in the streets for days. We left them for the dogs. Dog meat for dogs." (22.24-26)
Since ethnicity and religion intertwine inextricably in the Afghanistan of The Kite Runner, Assef justifies ethnic cleansing through religion. This is problematic. Assef has ultimate justification – God's will – for what amounts to murder. (We can imagine the daily and more common persecutions this justification must bring about as well.) Although Hosseini paints Assef as an extreme character, in the end Hosseini sheds some light on the bizarre and false justifications of ethnic prejudices in Afghanistan.
Quote #8
Assef's brow twitched. "Like pride in your people, your customs, your language. Afghanistan is like a beautiful mansion littered with garbage, and someone has to take out the garbage."
[Amir:] "That's what you were doing in Mazar, going door-to-door? Taking out the garbage?"
[Assef:] "Precisely."
"In the west, they have an expression for that," I said. "They call it ethnic cleansing." (22.86-89)
This is what we in the literature business like to call a "BOOYA!" moment. Assef carelessly uses a metaphor – taking out the garbage – which suggests "cleaning" or "cleansing." Amir takes advantage of the implicit metaphor and tells it like it is: Assef committed the crime of genocide. Notice, too, how Amir participates in the clichés of action films. We can imagine Schwarzenegger letting fly a zinger like this one. Coincidence? Maybe not. The number of references to Hollywood films actually outnumbers the references to Afghani politicians.
Quote #9
Sohrab stopped chewing. Put the sandwich down. "Father never said he had a brother."
[Amir:] "That's because he didn't know."
[Sohrab:] "Why didn't he know?"
"No one told him," I said. "No one told me either. I just found out recently."
Sohrab blinked. Like he was looking at me, really looking at me, for the very first time. "But why did people hide it from Father and you?"
[Amir:] "You know, I asked myself that same question the other day. And there's an answer, but not a good one. Let's just say they didn't tell us because your father and I...we weren't supposed to be brothers."
[Sohrab:] "Because he was a Hazara?"
I willed my eyes to stay on him. "Yes." (24.106-113).
Amir has recently rescued Sohrab from Assef and the Taliban. And Amir, eating lunch with Sohrab, suddenly blurts out that he and Hassan were half-brothers. As Amir says, "[...] [H]e had a right to know; I didn't want to hide anything anymore" (24.105). Amir does the right thing here – most readers probably let out a sigh of relief when Amir tells Sohrab the truth about Hassan. But we also find it a little sad that this twelve-year-old boy already knows enough about his homeland to guess Amir and Hassan shouldn't have been brothers because of ethnicity. It's a sort of barometer of ethnic relations in Afghanistan: even a young boy knows it's somehow improper for a Hazara and Pashtun to have the same father.
Quote #10
But as we spoke, I caught his eyes drifting again and again to Sohrab sleeping on the couch. As if we were skirting around the edge of what he really wanted to know.
The skirting finally came to an end over dinner when the general put down his fork and said, "So, Amir jan, you're going to tell us why you have brought back this boy with you?"
"Iqbal jan! What sort of question is that?" Khala Jamila said.
"While you're busy knitting sweaters, my dear, I have to deal with the community's perception of our family. People will ask. They will want to know why there is a Hazara boy living with our daughter. What do I tell them?"
Soraya dropped her spoon. Turned on her father. "You can tell them – " [...]
"It's all right." I turned to the general. "You see, General Sahib, my father slept with his servant's wife. She bore him a son named Hassan. Hassan is dead now. That boy sleeping on the couch is Hassan's son. He's my nephew. That's what you tell people when they ask."
They were all staring at me.
"And one more thing, General Sahib," I said. "You will never again refer to him as 'Hazara boy' in my presence. He has a name and it's Sohrab." (25.89-98)
On the one hand, The Kite Runner shows us extreme ethnic hatred through the character of Assef. But what about more common prejudice – the kind that doesn't necessarily result in violence but that still poisons a society? Even though General Sahib is a likable character, we see a nastier side of him here. (In Chapter 13, we already saw how violently the General defended his family's honor when Soraya left home to live with another man.) With the General, Hosseini depicts ethnic intolerance in the very fabric of a society. An otherwise good person, General Sahib asks, "What will respectable people say about my daughter's adopted son?" By having an unexceptional character question Soraya's living arrangements, Hosseini casts doubt on Afghan society. Here's a more or less normal guy, Hosseini says, and he is prejudiced. It seems that in many ways the problem is not personal but societal.