Plain talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Non-English writers of English have become part and parcel of English literature. Of course Indian writers seem to make up a majority in the group, the likes of Tagore, Mulk Raj Anand, RK Narayan and Raja Rao. There are also some African writers who have enriched Anglo-Saxon literature.

Now there is a new name to be added to this list. It is Khaled Husseini, the first, and until now, the only Afghan writer who uses English as a medium for his writing. Husseini has so far produced two novels. The first is The Kite Runner, which, to date, has sold 10 million copies throughout the world. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, has so far sold 700,000 copies in England alone.

Husseini lives in America, but was recently in London to attend the Galaxy British Book Awards, where he received the Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year award for his second book. The Kite Runner has been made into a film, which has just opened in Italy.

The Times has recently published a lengthy interview with him by Penny Wark, from which we learned a great deal about Husseini -- his upbringing, his life, his career as a medical doctor and his novels. Khaled is the eldest child of an Afghan diplomat and a mother who was a school vice- principal. Both parents were highly educated, respected and liberal in their instincts. While the father was serving as a diplomat in Paris, the Communists seized power in 1986 and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. He responded to the events by seeking political asylum in the United States and, as Penny Wark puts it, "swapped the life of privilege for welfare. Khaled finished his studies in California and graduated as a medical doctor.

Commenting on how he became a novelist, Khaled says, "I must have harboured some kind of secret dream to become a writer, but I never allowed the dream a chance to blossom into a real-life pursuit." I never felt I had what one would call genuine talent. The whole notion of creating a story and writing it down and making a living out of it seemed so outlandish and detached.

In the interview, Khaled explains how his family arrived penniless in the US. They lived in a small house, initially on benefits. His father, the ex- diplomat, worked on an assembly line and then as a driving instructor; while his mother worked in a 24-hour diner. With almost no knowledge of English, Khaled managed to finish his medical studies and become a licensed doctor.

He goes on to express some ideas about writers' themes. "I think most people want to be good and we're all so fallible; so flawed. I think we've all done something that we're terribly ashamed of. Who hasn't? We've mistreated somebody, been unkind, aloof, negligent and insensitive. Sometimes when we think about how we spoke to somebody, it's like biting on tinfoil. It just makes you cringe."

Talking about his novels, in which there is always a rich guy and a poor guy whose lives collide, he says, "I don't want to overstate my conscience, but I think there were some things I had begun to understand in a limited capacity as a child. I could sit here and be noble and say, yes, I have a sense of mission. With The Kite Runner, I was compelled to write because I had these two boys in mind; one was troubled, the other was very pure and good, and that was intriguing for me. As I wrote, I realised I couldn't tell the story without getting into what happened in Afghanistan, so that became part of it."

In his second book, The Thousand Splendid Suns, he went in with "a slightly tremulous sense of mission" because I wanted to write about Afghan women, which I felt was an important and relevant story and so rich a possibility for story-telling and dramas.

Khaled ends by talking about what he calls "survivors guilt," the guilt of those who live abroad in comfort, while others staye behind to suffer. "There's a kind of guilt that knaws at you and you feel bad and distract yourself, and there's the kind that you internalise and turn back around and use as a good tool to do something about what caused the guilt in the first place."

In his case, he has turned this sense of guilt into a positive thing, in the form of narrative.