Personal Afghan relationships in fiction embody the nation’s ethnic inequalities.

Evidence

Despite their childhood bond, Amir is always aware that Hassan is “just a Hazara,” even using the observation to justify fleeing the scene when Hassan is assaulted (68). He acknowledges his own class and ethnic privileges, but the layer of historically ingrained prejudice remains. Despite his protestations about the boys’ youthful closeness, their relationship is always marked by power. Moreover, when it emerges that Hassan is in fact Amir’s half-brother—sired by Amir’s father on his Hazara servant’s wife in an act of appropriation clearly redolent of the wider ethnic imbalance—the book’s central relationships likewise take on a symbolic quality. The sensitive and bookish Amir is forever trying to gain paternal approval from Baba, his father, a self-made businessman and philanthropist whose physical prowess and civic-minded generosity have made him a local legend. The irony is that their reconciliation—after Amir wins the annual kite fight—takes place at the cost of Hassan’s humiliation and banishment. Sunni Pashtuns always win, and Shia Hazaras are always beaten. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 249

Categorization

• XREF: Fiction-makes-ethnic-hierarchy-personal is the same move Morey traces elsewhere — connects to how Naqvi/Hamid use diasporic intimacy to make Islamophobia’s effects visceral rather than abstract.