Abstract:

            ‘Home’ is an issue of foremost concern in the literary works of the diasporic writers. The issue is more complicated for the members of Afghan ethnic communities, who were forced to leave their country due to some socio-political or historical upheavals. Haunted by the memory of the homeland, and the consequent feelings of alienation in the host land, these authors nurture a desire for the construction of an alternative ‘home’ that is prevalently imaginative. Salman Rushdie’s statement in his essay “Imaginary Homelands” is significant in this respect: “It may be that writers in my position, exiles or immigrants and expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, …our physical alienation from almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” (10).

            Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Khaled Hosseini (1965- ) and his family had to leave their country and migrate to the United States in the 1980s due to the Soviet War. This paper aims to critically analyze the issue of the construction of  “imaginary homelands” in Hosseini’s fictional works, The kite Runner(2003), A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), and And The Mountains Echoed (2013), in terms of the representation of Afghanistan both as space and place, contemporary conditions and people’s lives and experiences.

Work Cited

Rushdie, Salman. “Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. Granta Books, 1991.