Novel and drama notes

Hosseini (b. 1965, Kabul), Afghan American novelist. The book is a first-person memory: Amir, a Pashtun boy in Wazir Akbar Khan, son of the formidable Baba; Hassan, a Hazara boy, son of the servant Ali, Amir’s playmate and the finest kite runner in the neighbourhood. Hassan has a harelip; Baba later pays for the surgery. Hassan cannot read; Amir reads to him — often the story of Rostam and Sohrab — and sometimes tricks him with the words. They carve “Amir and Hassan, the sultans of Kabul” into a pomegranate tree. They fly kites in the winter tournament. The novel’s first sentence already knows the ending: a phone call, years later, will name “a way to be good again.”

Hold the household facts. Baba is generous in public, restless with Amir’s bookishness, secretly more bound to Hassan than the boys understand. Rahim Khan is the kinder father-voice. Assef, a violent Pashtun boy with a brass knuckles taste for “Afghanistan for Pashtuns,” is the street’s fascism. Ethnicity is not background colour: Hazara and Pashtun, servant and master, sit inside one courtyard. Identity is already split before anyone leaves the country.

The tournament: Amir’s kite wins; Hassan runs the last kite for him and will not give it up. In the alley Assef rapes Hassan while Amir watches from hiding and does not step in. That is the crime the rest of the book pays for. Shame makes Amir cruel: he frames Hassan with stolen money and a watch; Ali and Hassan leave. Baba and Amir then leave a collapsing Kabul for Pakistan and Fremont, California. Baba works at a gas station, sells goods at a flea market, is no longer a great man of the city. Amir writes, marries Soraya, daughter of General Taheri. Acculturation is this American labour; assimilation is the temptation to become only a Californian novelist; the past will not melt.

Diaspora here is not a postcard. It is war, class drop, a father dying of cancer in a strange hospital, a son who still dreams the alley. Do not call the America chapters a happy ending. They are the long middle in which guilt learns English.

Rahim Khan calls from Pakistan: Hassan is dead; the Taliban have wrecked the old house; Hassan’s son Sohrab is in Kabul. The secret comes out: Hassan was Baba’s son, Amir’s half-brother — which is why Baba’s love never sat evenly. Amir returns, finds Sohrab in Assef’s power, fights, is beaten, gets the boy out. An American adoption stalls; Sohrab attempts suicide; the ending is not a healed family photograph. In a California park Amir runs a kite for Sohrab and says the old phrase Hassan once said to him: “For you, a thousand times over.” Being good again is a practice, not a certificate.

Exam themes: guilt and atonement; Pashtun/Hazara violence; fathers and sons; storytelling as unpaid debt; diaspora that still has a door back into danger. Identity crisis is Amir’s whole plot. Hybridity is the American writer who must still speak Kabul. A twenty-mark essay should walk alley → California → Sohrab, not only “friendship is important.”

Soyinka (b. 1934), Nigerian Nobel dramatist. The Lion and the Jewel (first performed 1959; Oxford text 1963) is a comedy in three movements — Morning, Noon, Night — set in Ilujinle, a Yoruba village already crossed by a school, a road, and a magazine camera. Sidi, the village belle, has had her photograph printed; she is the “jewel.” Lakunle, the schoolteacher, woos her with book-English and “progress,” and refuses bride-price as barbaric. Baroka, the Bale (village head), the “lion,” is ageing, cunning, many-wived, and not finished.

Do not flatten the play into “tradition good, West bad” or the reverse. Lakunle’s modernity is half-learned mimicry: he wants Sidi without paying bride-price, talks of the Lagos train, misuses long words. Baroka’s custom is not a museum. He once bribed to keep the railway from cutting through Ilujinle, so his power would stay local. At noon he wrestles a younger man and throws him — the lion’s body is still a fact. At night he shows Sidi a stamp machine, as if the village could print its own modernity, then uses talk of stillness and change while he seduces her. Hybridity (Unit 1) is the whole stage: Yoruba dance and English sentences in one afternoon.

Morning: Lakunle carries Sidi’s pail, preaches against bride-price, is mocked. A photographer’s magazine has made Sidi famous; she tastes a new vanity. Noon: Sadiku, Baroka’s senior wife, is sent to court Sidi for the Bale. Sidi laughs: the lion is too old. Baroka wrestles and wins in public; then Sadiku dances, believing he has confessed impotence — a piece of theatre. Night: Sidi goes to his house to mock the fallen lion; the stamp machine and the talk of rest are bait; he seduces her. The comedy is rough: her “jewel” fame is also a trap. She returns no longer a maiden. Lakunle, who had said he would still take her, now offers a marriage that would skip bride-price because she is “spoiled”; that is another insult. She marries Baroka. The village drums. Progress, as Lakunle named it, has not won the jewel.

Themes: tradition versus a borrowed modernity; the female body as prize and as agent; print culture entering an oral village; language as costume. Lakunle is not Soyinka’s hero. Baroka is not simply the past. Do not write that Sidi made a free feminist “choice.” After the night, the village honour-path is marriage to the Bale; she turns a trap into status as his latest wife. A twenty-mark essay should stage Morning–Noon–Night, then name hybridity: Ilujinle will keep the school and the Bale. Do not write that Soyinka “rejects the West.” He laughs at a schoolmaster who cannot see the lion in front of him.