“Maidan Sabz was a desolate place”: spatial politics and the cartographies of loss in Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed (2013)
摘要
This article examines Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed (2013) through the lens of Edward Soja’s trialectics of spatiality. It argues that the novel presents a cartography of loss in which space functions both as a symptom and as an agent of historical trauma. Unlike Hosseini’s earlier Kabul-centered works, this polyphonic narrative disperses its family saga across Afghanistan, Greece, France, and the United States. In doing so, it portrays the complex interconnections between local geographies and global displacements. Rather than treating landscape and architecture as static backgrounds, the novel presents huts, gardens, hospitals, cityscapes, and diaspora interiors as ideologically charged terrains where kinship, memory, and trauma become inscribed. Soja’s conceptual framework—Firstspace as material, Secondspace as symbolic, and Thirdspace as lived, hybrid, and resistant— helps to clarify how Hosseini’s spatial imagination shapes the formation of subjectivity and the transmission of loss across generations. A close reading of the novel’s fragmented structure shows that the constant shifts in location and voice reflect the ruptures of belonging, yet they also create spaces of counter-memory and emotional restoration. By placing Hosseini’s fiction within the context of spatial theory, this study suggests that geography in contemporary Afghan writing serves not as a neutral setting or a mere metaphor but as a fundamental component of identity and justice. It concludes that Hosseini’s fiction suggests an ethics of spatial awareness that invites readers to consider the ways in which power, dispossession, and resilience are mapped onto both intimate and transnational terrains.