Verbalization of Afghan Multicultural Background in an American Novel by Kh. Hosseini (“The Kite Runner”)

Abstract

The article touches upon techniques and means of verbalization of the ethnocultural component in literary texts and illustrates it with a work by the American writer K. Hosseini who is Afghan by birth with Iranian cultural substrate. Bilingualism and biculturality of the author naturally nominates him for the role of a cultural translator, or “cultural mediator” between Afghanistan and the USA, noticeably affecting the content of the English literary text and primarily its key images. The analysis of the key images in the novel by K. Hosseini as well as the means of their verbalization and evaluation presented in the article supports the thesis about heterogenic character of these images. The image of the kite relates to the attributes of Afghan air battles as well as of American peaceful festivals. Thus, one of the manifestations of linguocultural heterogeneity in the analyzed novel is the combination of native (Afghan) elements of the author’s culture and the acquired (American) ones. The image of the kite runner in the novel embodies cultural diffusion since the knowledge that one of the participants must run for, catching a downed kite during a traditional winter tournament in Afghanistan, has an exotic cultural nature for the American reader. Ethnocultural peculiarity of artistic images is expressed in the novel both explicitly (in the descriptions of kite battles) and implicitly (in the author’s evaluative position). Moreover, processes of cultural diffusion and interference in the novel by K. Hosseini manifest themselves in the usage of lexical units naming realia of Afghan culture that are foreign for the English text. What is more, ethnocultural heterogeneity is realized in the images of major characters of the novel, who are Afghans but their actions and inner conflicts are estimated from the perspective of an American culture representative. To conclude, despite the dominating native Afghan culture, a certain synergy of artistic images in the novel lies in generating the author’s new meanings under the influence of both cultures.

Keywords: Bilingualism, ethnocultural synergy, heterogeneity, diffusion, interference