Dystopia and Heterotopia: Poetics and Politics of Space in Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns

Introduction

Over the past few decades, spatiality has become an important concept in literary and cultural studies. It is widely perceived that the rise of spatiality as a critical theory in recent decades has been “aided by a new aesthetic sensibility that came to be understood as postmodernism” (Tally Jr, 2013, p. 3). Within the field of literary studies, space is commonly understood through the binary of utopia and dystopia, with the former being defined as an ideal place better than one’s current setting and the latter being described as the worst place possible (Asl, 2020). The values associated with each term are thus in contradistinction with one another. Since World War II, popular culture has played a crucial role in the development of dystopian writing, which has served to prophesize the future of our contemporary world should negative sociopolitical practices persist. In contrast, those who oppose the dystopian trend have generally opted to explore the opposite notion of “critical utopia” that originates from a postmodern perspective (Baccolini & Moylan, 2003). Both dystopia and utopia focus on spatiality and are argued to be “two sides of the same coin” (Mustafa, 2021, p. 2). The utopian discourse pictures an ideal society that is controlled, harmonious, and favorable. In other words, a utopia is a perfect place where everything and everyone exists in an everlasting harmonious state. In short, utopianism is “a social phenomenon that is expressed in various ways, where there is a dream and desire for better life” (Mustafa, 2021, p. 2). On the other hand, the term dystopia refers to the actualization of social control for the formation of a horrifying social reality. In literary works, dystopias represent the “social fears and anxieties of humanity in an extrapolated way” which in turn speculates the “negative possibilities for the future of humanity” (Mustafa, 2021, p. 2). Hence, a dystopia is widely understood as a negative version of a utopia.

Since 9/11 events in the United States and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan by a US-led army, the concept of dystopia has often been used as the foundational and inseparable attribute of Afghan literature in English. It is commonly argued that contemporary Afghan writers depict the landscapes or spaces of Afghanistan as purely dystopian (Fitzpatrick, 2009; Ivanchikova, 2017; Lam, 2009; Sinno, 2020). However, the classification of space as either utopian or dystopian overlooks the possibility of a different space that could exist within the same spatial reality. As the postcolonial critic, Bill Ashcroft asserts, a dystopian discourse commonly leads to the formation of utopian narrative that underscores the possibility of a “radically changeable world” caused by the hope for a better future while being in a state of dystopia (Ashcroft, 2016, p. 37). In this relation, the Afghan American writer Khaled Hosseini’s novels have been similarly perceived to be of a dystopian nature as the stories often revolve around the atrocities of the wars, the cruelties of the fundamentalists, the horrors of extremism, and the oppression of individuals (Khan, 2017; Qamar & Shakeel, 2015; Shameem, 2014; Stuhr, 2011; Yeasmin, 2020). The present chapter aims to examine Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) to demonstrate how it depicts the functioning of alternative safe spaces within the same dystopian realities. To achieve this goal, we draw upon Michel Foucault’s (1986) concept of heterotopia to examine how the portrayal of such safe spaces throughout the novel provides an alternate way of life for its female characters within the confines of a dystopian reality. A close reading of the text underlines the attributes of such other places in accordance with Foucault’s six principles of heterotopia, which refers to the space where there is resistance against surrounding forces of oppression. In other words, within the existing dystopias and their oppressive conditions, there is a possibility that smaller utopias can be formed that can help to change the status quo, albeit temporarily. Heterotopias, as Karkov (2020) observes, “identify multiple places that were set apart from, while still existing in, the larger world – worlds within worlds and placeless places or places out of place” (as cited in Mustafa, 2021, p. 3). In other words, the smaller utopias can act as a space which is resistant to the oppressive forces of a particular society. In what follows, the chapter will first review the related literature within the field. Then, it will elaborate on the concepts of utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia. Next, the analysis of the novel based on Foucault’s principles of heterotopia will be carried out.