Honorable Mention Kite Runner Essay
by Mark Sidor, Auburn High
A book is a portal to a distant place, a doorway to a far-off land where reality is at the stake of the writer and the truth lies in the eyes of the reader. Stories allow a person to experience cultures different from their own. My twelfth grade contemporary literature class recently finished reading and analyzing Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. This novel had much to teach about the cultural life of Afghanistan.
Hosseini placed his book in a culture that few outside people truly understand or at least allow themselves to. But what a lot of people tend to avoid subjects they do not understand, sometimes to the extent to accept stereotype and shut out truth. It can be hard to put differences aside and read a book with a fresh mind, but only then can you actually benefit from the overall experience and travel to the world unknown.
The Afghan culture is one filled with rich foods, fine art, and a long history. Hosseini writes about many different aspects of this culture. To start, Afghanistan is a country divided into two rivaling groups. This issue is brought up various times throughout the book. One group seems to dominate the other, in a sense control. But then, at one point in history almost every culture has had issues of slavery or suppression.
However, not only are the people split but so are the sexes. It is built into Afghan culture and tradition that women go unnoticed. Hosseini mentions that if a woman is seen talking to a man in public she is unfit to be wed in the eyes of society. That is just touching upon the topic, but it is hard to fully understand this idea.
Afghan culture and tradition seems very extreme to American culture, yet that would be a biased statement. It is hard to compare to completely different cultures and judge one based on the other. Every culture is unique, in which case it is next to impossible to be able to judge. Instead, we should learn to accept other cultures, or at least learn to learn about them. This can be made possible by reading a book with an open mind; by leaving judgment out of the process you can better analyze what is happening and simultaneously learn about another culture.
On top of reading the book, my teacher took the assignment one step further with “Afghan Fridays.” What started out as simple research projects on food, music, culture, history, etc. turned out to be fun-filled learning experiences with ethnic food, interesting tid-bits of history, and music and dance. Reading Hosseini’s novel allowed me to experience a new culture through imagination, as well as hands on in a classroom setting. In the end, it can be said that reading can be a very enriching experience.