Background of the Study

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

America is a destination place for immigrants from many countries. Many immigrants stay in U.S for different reasons such as studying, working, or running away from economic or politic crisis, religious conflict and warfare in their homeland. In America, the immigrants come along with their original culture. However, they face many kind of problems in the host country; they realize that they are different with the local people, by having a different name, physical appearance, culture, ethnicity, and religion among other things. Nevertheless, they have to adopt and develop in the host country. This is proved from their success in literature. Many of them produced many literatures such as novels, essays, and short stories about their life as immigrant in their adopted country, such as Jumpa Lahiri, Shauna Singh Baldwin 1 and Amir Tan. They showed 1 Shauna Singh Baldwin published her first novel, What the Body Remembers 1999, that has been translated into 11 languages and won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Canada Caribbean region and was longlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize in Fiction. She is also the author of English Lessons and Other Stories and coauthor of A Foreign Visitors Survival Guide to North America. Her short stories have been published widely and have won numerous prestigious literary prizes in the United States, Canada, and India. Emily Johansen, Shauna Singh Baldwin, accessed on September 6, 2008. http:www.thecanadianencyclopedia.comindex.cfm?PgNm=TCEParams=A1ARTA0009820 that their work is good as well as the other writers from the origin of America. The other writers who succeed become an established writer is Khaled Hosseini. Khaled Hosseini is one of the Afghan immigrants who studied in Los Angeles and decided to become an established writer after releasing The Kite Runner. 2 Khaled Hosseini gets positive respond for his novel The Kite Runner from American public. His novel becomes best-seller in 2005 according to Nielsen BookScan 3 . Another responds come from a famous writer who participates in front of The Kite Runner’s cover, Isabel Allende Liona 4 : “ A wonderful work… this is one of those unforgettable stories that stay with you for years. All the great themes of literature and of life are the fabric of this extradionary novel: love, guilt, redemption…..it is so powerful that for a long time after, everything I read seemed bland”. Liona shows her admiration toward Hosseini that according to her can present enchantment story in the past for the readers through its themes such as love, guilt and redemption in a story. 2 Khaled Hosseini,Wikipedia. January 12, 2008. http:en.wikipedia.orgwikiKhaled_Hosseini, p. 2 3 Ibid., p. 3. 4 Isabel Allende Liona, born 2 August 1942, is a Chilean novelist. Allende, who writes in the magic realism tradition, is considered one of the first successful women novelists in Latin America. Her works are The House of the Spirits 1982, La gorda de porcelana 1984, Of Love and Shadows 1985, Eva Luna 1987, The Stories of Eva Luna 1989, The Infinite Plan 1991, Paula 1995, Aphrodite 1998, Daughter of Fortune 1999, Portrait in Sepia 2000, City of the Beasts 2002, My Invented Country 2003, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon 2004 Forest of the Pygmies 2005, Zorro 2005,Ines of My Soul 2006. Wikipedia. January,12 2008. http:en.wikipedia.orgwikiIsabel_Allende , p. 1-2. Hosseini’s The Kite Runner which was published in 2003 presents new idea and color, namely complexity of conflict toward friendship characters and other conflicts that happen in Afghanistan during colonization and post colonization era. It is very different with other writers that most of them tell about alienation, cultural shock, and depression. Hosseini can open the eyes of the readers to know Afghanistan life truly which for a long time is closed from outside. Hosseini wrote about Afghanistan before the Soviet war because that is largely a forgotten period in modern Afghan history. For many people in the west, Afghanistan is synonymous with the Soviet war and the Taliban. Hosseini wanted to remind people that Afghans had managed to live in peaceful anonymity 5 . Afġânistân, officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is a landlocked country that is located in south Asia. Afghanistan is a culturally mixed nation, a crossroads between the East and the West, and has been an ancient focal point of trade and migration. It has an important geostrategical location, connecting South Asia, Central Asia and Southwest Asia. In the 19th century, Afghanistan became a buffer state in The Great Game played between the British Indian Empire and Russian Empire. On August 19, 1919, following the third Anglo-Afghan war, the country regained full independence from the United Kingdom over its foreign affairs. 6 5 Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, Razeshta Sethnah’s interview, http:www.newsline.com.pknewsnov2003newsbeat4nov.htm. January 14, 2008. 6 Afghanistan, Wikipedia. January 6, 2008. http:en.wikipedia.orgwikiAfghanistan , p. 3 Since the late 1970s, Afghanistan has suffered continuous and brutal civil war, which included foreign interventions in the form of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, in which the ruling Taliban 7 government was toppled. Besides, many conflicts reveal namely internal conflict as pressure of repression, ethnic conflict and inter-religion conflict that become dominant conflict in Afghanistan society. The economy has suffered greatly from the recent political and military unrest since the 1979 Soviet invasion and subsequent conflicts, while severe drought added to the nations difficulties in 1998–2001. 8 This history influences Hosseini to lead the writing of his first novel “The Kite Runner”. Because his memories of peaceful pre-Soviet era, Afghanistan is as well as his personal experiences with Afghanistan’s Hazara people. 9 The Kite Runner reflects condition of Afghanistan society that becomes major issues such as discrimination, racialism and identity 10 that undergoned by the main 7 The Taliban Students of Islamic Knowledge Movement ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001. They came to power during Afghanistans long civil war. Although they managed to hold 90 of the countrys territory, their policies—including their treatment of women and support of terrorists—ostracized them from the world community. http:www.infoplease.comspottaliban.html. Accessed on January 6, 2008. 8 Economy of Afghanistan.Wikipedia. January 6, 2008. http:en.wikipedia.orgwikiAfghanistan , p. 17. 9 Khaled Hosseini 2008, op.cit. p. 3 10 Identity are the interface between a private sense of self that includes conscious and unconscious feelings, rational and irrational motivations, personal beliefs and values and those factors that constitute the social context in which we experience those feelings and motivations for example age, ethnicity and sex. Judy Gales and Tim Middleton, Studying Culture, a practical introduction Massachusset: Blackwell publisher, 1999. P. 32 characters, Amir and Hassan in this story. The other conflicts that appears internal conflict in Amir are ethnic conflict and inter-religion conflict in both of them. As we know, the civil war in Afghanistan caused by ethnic conflict. Afghanistan is ethnically a very diverse country, namely Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Aimaq, Turkmen, Baluch, and other small group. 11 In this story, the main characters who undergone those conflicts come from a Pashtun and a Hazara ethnic. The Pashtun is described as an ethnic group that has positive attribute and exclusive, namely high social status, honourable, high class, good appearance and success men. Besides, the Hazara has negative attribute, namely low social status, poor, low class, physical defect and low job such as waiter, servant and beggar. In this case, the different backgrounds in both of them appears the issues of cultural identity 12 which Amir also keep his cultural identity until he lives in America. Based on the statement that Amir has internal conflict based on the cultural identity, the writer is interested to analyze the issue of cultural identity in The Kite Runner. This novel presents the different identities based on two separate ethnical positions, Hazara and Pashtun. These identities are given meaning through the language and symbolic through which they are represented. The writer will focus on 11 Background Note: Afghanistan, http:www.state.govrpaeibgn5380.htm, p. 3. Accessed on May 24, 2008. 12 The issue of cultural identity is central to cultural studies, in so far as cultural studies examines the contexts within which and through which both individuals and group construct, negotiate and defend their identity or self-understanding. Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, Cultural Theory The Key Concepts New York: Routledge, 2002, p.183 the main characters, Amir and Hassan. In this research, the writer wants to analyze the issue of cultural identity using the concept of Stuart Hall’s Cultural Identity.

B. Scope of the Research