scholarly journals Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner: Unveiling the Trauma of Adolescent Boys Trapped in Afghanistan’s Culturally Legitimised Paedophilia-‘Bacha Bazi’

Author(s):  
Pallavi Thakur ◽  

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner is a powerful narrative on ‘Bacha Bazi’, “same-sex pedophilia restricted to adult men and adolescent boys” (Powell, 2018, p.1), prevalent in Afghanistan. When marginalisation of Afghan women became the nucleus of major studies , especially during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Hosseini unveiled in The Kite Runner, the gruesome Afghan culture of ‘Bacha Bazi’ that disintegrates a boy’s social and sexual identity. ‘Bacha Bazi’ is not consensual rather coercion hence is equivalent to rape and reflects the grotesque violation of Afghan male children’s human rights. While the world viewed Afghanistan as a land of incessant wars, tribal conflicts, violence and female exploitation, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner provided a startling insight into ‘Bacha Bazi’ and its implications on Afghan boys. The novel reveals the socio-culture domain of Afghanistan and ethnic rivalry playing an instrumental role in the existence of Bacha Bazi. In the light of the above discussions, the present paper examines the deleterious effects of Bacha Bazi on Afghan male children. It elucidates the psychological trauma of adolescent Afghan boys that evolves out of the sexual abuse and new androgynous identity imposed on them.

Author(s):  
Hartini Selian ◽  
Jumino Suhadi ◽  
M. Manugeren

Abstract This study is about heroism in the novel The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. There are three points of discussion under this title: giving protection, defending rights and gratitude. Defending rights is associated with heroic deeds. A hero is a random citizen that rises to an occasion and performs an action of superhero proportions. Gratitude implies thankfulness or an appreciation of benefits conferred together with a desire, when practicable, to return those benefits. Defending rights is tied to human rights which are universally applicable to one and all. These are the significant components of heroism. One of the relevant and outstanding modern theories of heroism applied here is proposed by Gibbon (2009) stating that hero is just an average man who fights to solve a common problem in today’s society. The study is conducted with Descriptive Qualitative Method proposed by Haughman (2009) in which he states that Qualitative research is a form of social inquiry that focuses on the way people interpret and make sense of their experiences and the world in which they live. Kipling leads children down the jungle path into adventures beyond their day to day imagining and along the way he shows the value of ‘doing for yourself', of 'learning who to trust'. The result shows that heroism is highlighted through the major characters and the conclusive points are some of the significant characters such as Mowgli, Father Wolf, Mother Wolf, Hathi, and Bagheera have done heroic deeds. Their heroism is presented in the forms of giving protection, defending rights and gratitude. Keywords: heroism, human rights, gratitude


2018 ◽  
Vol III (I) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Muhammad Rizwan ◽  
Manzoor Ahmad ◽  
Syed Asif Anwar Bukhari

Soon after its creation, Pakistan confronted many issues including refugee problem, scarcity of able political leadership, absence of mutual consensus between both wings of the country and confusing nature of the relationship between Islam and state etc. took almost nine years to frame the permanent constitution for Pakistan. Constitution, the basic document of a state, determines the shape of its laws, structure of governance and system of rights and duties. The effectiveness of a constitution is judged by its practicability in the given area where it is enforced by the state machinery. Although, all civilized states of the world do possess a constitution, yet a good constitution is one which must protect the basic human rights by ensuring the independence of judiciary. Due to countless hurdles at the beginning of its journey, Pakistan’s constitutional development in the right direction could not take place. The main objective of the present study is to provide deep insight into the events and factors causing a delay in the constitution-making for the newly created state of Pakistan. The various events which took place from 1947 to 1956 have been analyzed in a subtle way.


AJIL Unbound ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 113 ◽  
pp. 360-364
Author(s):  
Rene Urueña

Christian Evangelicals are a growing political force in Latin America. Most recently, they have engaged the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to challenge basic LGBTI achievements, such as same-sex marriage and other demands for equal rights. Several commentators thus speak of an imminent showdown between human rights protections and Christian Evangelism in the region, which would mirror similar conflicts elsewhere in the world. This essay challenges this narrative and warns against a top-down “secular fundamentalism,” which may alienate a significant part of the region's population and create deep resentment against the Court. As it turns forty, the Court faces a “spiritual” crisis: conservative religious movements have become one of its key interlocutors, with demands and expectations that compete with (but could also complement) those of other regional social movements. Difficult as it may be, the Court needs to be bold in creating argumentative spaces that allow for the Evangelical experience to exist in the public sphere in Latin America, in a context of respect for human rights in general, and for LGBTI rights in particular.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 49-51
Author(s):  
Gabriel Karthick K

The article examines the psychic trauma of youngsters during the crucial stage of their life. It gives a deep insight into the practical issues faced by youngsters, as explained by R.K. Narayan in his novel. It describes the complex transition of an adolescent mind into adulthood. The themes of the novel The World of Nagaraj are closely attached to real-life experiences of youngsters and also engross the psychology of young minds. The main objective is to analyze the common psychic issues of youngsters in the Indian context.


Author(s):  
George Eliot ◽  
David Russell

‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.’ The greatest ‘state of the nation’ novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through her portrait of a Midlands town, George Eliot addresses gender relations and class, self-knowledge and self-delusion, community and individualism. Eliot follows the fortunes of the town's central characters as they find, lose, and rediscover ideals and vocations in the world. Through its psychologically rich portraits, the novel contains some of the great characters of literature, including the idealistic but naïve Dorothea Brooke, beautiful and egotistical Rosamund Vincy, the dry scholar Edward Casaubon, the wise and grounded Mary Garth, and the brilliant but proud Dr Lydgate. In its whole view of a society, the novel offers enduring insight into the pains and pleasures of life with others, and explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life:. art, religion, science, politics, self, society, and, above all, human relationships. This edition uses the definitive Clarendon text.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1037969X2098665
Author(s):  
Paula Gerber ◽  
Senthorun Raj ◽  
Cai Wilkinson ◽  
Anthony Langlois

Discussions about the human rights of LGBTIQ people tend to centre around two vastly different issues, namely, marriage equality and the criminalisation of same-sex sexual conduct. However, looking only at these two high-profile issues ignores the many pressing concerns facing LGBTIQ people around the world. This article identifies and analyses eight other human rights issues that urgently need addressing, in order to respect the rights of LGBTIQ people across the globe.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-51
Author(s):  
Alina Pelea

Abstract There are few professions and professionals to be constantly perceived as ambivalent. But for interpreting and interpreters, this seems to be the norm, rather than the exception. On the one hand, there has always been a sense of fascination for these extraordinary people who speak so many languages and have such a wide knowledge of the world. On the other, they have inspired reluctance, distrust or even fear. While literary works sometimes reflect one or the other perception, James Justinian Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba, of Ispahan, in England (1828) reflects both and provides us with an insight into the nature and circumstances of the situation. By following the attitude towards the mehmandar throughout the novel, the present paper considers a set of memes that seem to be still valid today. The reasons this is so relate to features inherent in the profession, the privilege of understanding both sides ‘of the coin’, the power tamper with information, the risk of misunderstanding, etc.


The Batuk ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-62
Author(s):  
Binod Sapkota

 This article analyses the representation of women in Khaled Hoesseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns (2003). This novel foregrounds the Afghan history in the aftermath of the fall of monarchy and the subsequent Russianinvasion, rise of Taliban and the arrival of the US after 9/11. All these events resulted in ethnic cleansing, hunger, mass exploitation, displacement and physical and psychological trauma to the common people especially the poor, women, and children. They brought eternal political instability to the ancient nation. The article uses the feminist lens of interpretation and concludes that the novel presents a graphical picture of Afghan women, their sufferings, their fight against the social and political patriarchy and biasness, their pain, human values and struggle for dignity.


The article is devoted to the psychological decoding of the totem dependence of one of the main characters of the novel by S. Protsyuk – Victor’s father. The totem in the work is modeled as a metaphor for human destruction, which is manifestation of fornication, fear, hatred, immorality, irresponsibility, moral and psychological indifference, instinctual desires for intimacy, pathological perception of the world, distorted forms of relationships between people. It is based on lust and despair, destroying characters at different levels of becoming – personal, psychological, cultural, national. It is established that Victor’s father in S. Protsyuk’s novel is modeled from several positions – father, husband and lover. Functional load of the father’s mission in the work is reduced to hatred of his son Victor, his psychological trauma; the function of Victor’s father as a husband is to form a discourse of moral and physical masochism based on lust, indifference to Mary’s feelings, as well as creating tension and social distance between the former spouses; the heroic totemic dependence of the hero is most clearly represented in his function as a lover, dependent on the female body and comfort, aimed at obtaining physical pleasure and developing his own philosophy of free relations. The totem in the novel is justified as a destructive mechanism that has the ability to transmit genetically, programming the next generations infected with the totem, on self-destruction, totem dependence, disharmony, moral and even physical degeneration. It is established that the hero was indifferent to family and social life due to his irresponsibility, immorality, frivolity, adventurism, ability to numerous adulterers. The influence of the totem has led the hero to a moral degeneration and a vulnerability to instinct. The destructive influence of the totem at the end of life led to the awareness of Victor’s father of the vanity, vanity and impermanence of life, unraveling the pathos of adultery and adventurism.


2019 ◽  
pp. 21-32

The present research focuses on the analysis of the novels “The Kite Runner”, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, “And the Mountains Echoed” by Afghan-born American writer Khaled Hosseini in line with the major characteristics of childhood, womanhood and family perspectives. Considering those perspectives found in this research, it is obvious that Hosseini globally demonstrates the real outlook of his nation and country, and moreover establishes that having peace and wealth is the life meaning for Afghan people the same as other, human beings. There are different literary perspectives in the studies of literature as archetypal, formalist, psychoanalytical, social-class, gender, feministic and historical. Hosseini’s works are interpreted, analyzed and criticized by using the historical perspective, which definitely show their contextual and discursive meaning in terms of diaspora literature. The childhood perspective is depicted in “The Kite Runner” via three personages of the novel Amir, Hassan and Sukhrob, moreover the writer describes the fate of Afghan people inside and outside of Afghanistan and can determine the problems of the people in diaspora. In “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, which deals with the problems of Afghan women, the author skillfully demonstrates the terrible conditions of females in pre-in-post Taliban periods on the example of two wives Mariam and Laila belonging to one man. The next work devoted to a family perspective “And the Mountains Echoed” gives the images of more than twenty various families from different parts of the world. Pariand Abdulla are the major characters of the novel and they are separated from each other in their childhood, yet reunited in their aged years when the value of memory and feelings lose their importance because of time and place correlation.


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