Reading beyond the burqa: Dismantling Afghan stereotypes through the texts of Khaled Hosseini and Yasmina Khadra.

The national popularity of Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns and Yasmina Khadra's The Swallows of Kabul suggests an overwhelming Western interest in Afghanistan. Because novels written outside of Afghanistan have become the popular method for Westerners to gain information about the country and its people, authors must create representations that break from the symbolism perpetuated through the media that draws direct connections among the burqa, oppression, and subservience. Both Hosseini and Khadra break from a variety of stereotypical representations of the burqa by grounding their texts in an accurate historical, geographical, and cultural context, suggesting methods with which Afghan women can utilize the burqa as a means to free themselves from the constraints of their society. Although successful in breaking many stereotypes, Hosseini's text problematically correlates Afghan women's modernity to Western modernity. Both Hosseini and Khadra's texts suggest that female characters may gain freedom only through their own mortality.