If you've ever met a girl between the ages of 12-18 who owned a TV in 2000, odds are you've at least heard of the movie The Color of Friendship. Yes, it was a Disney Channel made-for-TV movie. Yes, my nerd is showing by blogging about this. and Yes, it is a wonderful movie.
Just to fill in those who HAVE been living under a rock for about a decade, The Color of Friendship was a movie that ran on Disney Channel starting in 2000. In the beginning of the movie, you meet Mahree, a white South African living in apartheid South Africa. She lives in a mansion, with her parents and her housekeeper, a black woman named Flora. Even though she considers Flora to be her best friend, she still holds deep-seeded racism that she has been raised with. Later, she goes to America with the hopes of living with a white family there. The family she does get placed with though, is the Dellums family. Piper, a girl Mahree's age, and her father, Ron, a congressman, were also hoping to get a black South African girl to live with them. Both parties are surprised, and it takes a while for them to warm up, but they go through the traditional Disney storyline of becoming friends and reconciling their differences.
Needless to say, this is a wonderful movie, but how does it connect to The Kite Runner? Well, the relationship of Hassan and Amir is very similar to the relationship of Flora and Mahree. Though she considers Flora her best friend, Mahree still is on the benefitting end of apartheid and is a wholehearted supporter of it. When she moves to America to live iwth the Dellums, she treats them like her servants until she starts to learn that the color of their skin does not automatically make them subservant to her. Hassan and Amir have almost the same relationship. Amir and Hassan might be best friends in someone else's eyes, but to Amir, Hassan is just his servant. It takes finding out that they were half brothers to make Amir see Hassan as an equal, and even then it is begrudgingly. Amir does not go through the Disney Channel happy machine and learn his lesson, but he does move on with his life. In Hassan's letter, it is obvious that Hassan forgave Amir, however undeserving Amir was. This makes it harder for Amir, because he wants to strive to be the person Hassan was in his father's eyes.
Thinking about the similarities between these two relationships makes the relationship in The Kite Runner easier to understand. Seeing how similar the white master, black servant relationship is to the Pashtun master, Hazara servant makes it easier for an American reader to understand. We are so informed about the civil rights fights in America and many people are very informed about Africa, especially apartheid South Africa. Many Americans, however, are far more uninformed about Afghanistan's social issues, and I can confess that I didn't know as much as I should have before reading this book. The relationships between Hassan and Amir and Flora and Mahree make for an interesting comparison between the different racism-powered regimes the world has seen.
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Just for starters...I loved that movie! I basically loved everything disney until they took off Lizzie McGuire and put on Hannah Montana.
ReplyDeleteFor "enders"...What is a friend? Is a friend someone you absolutely tell everything to, but won't admit you do so OR are they someone you talk to in class, but the public accepts them? I think Amir is going through that situation in the book. Obviously he knows that they can't socially be accepted as friends, but if he actually thinks they are or not is another story. He really needs to go through the Happy Machine to figure out his own thoughts.
Your blog also made me think about my own life. In the movie, Mahree comes from a white community. I come from a mostly caucasion community, sadly. She finds herself a little racist. I'm not racist, but it's harder for me to see my life anything other than what it is because of what I've grown up in. I've grown up in an architectual, law, business community and I can't exactly get that out of my head. Everyday I try to think of what is coming up and I can only think of my town and the people in it. Like Mahree in a way, I can't see anything different. I as well need to go through the Happy Machine to open my mind about my life. Unfortunately, it will take a while to build mine, (the directions are in sweedish...).
I have to agree! I love that movie! Mahree reminds me of that ignorance I had about a perfect world, before I went outside to explore the real knowledge of the world. Throughout the book, I also realized how similar Hassan and Amir's relationship was to the African Americans and the Caucasian’s during apartheid, or even before the United States Civil War. One was always dominated by the other, in this case, Amir and the Whites. The rest were helpless while they were degraded and hurt by such actions. I remember when I was reading the conversation between Rahim Khan and Amir talking about Hassan's death, he had said that Hassan was brutally murdered in front of everyone because he resisted a false accusation. They had dismissed this case as self-defense! Now, if you were not biased here and/or extremely stupid, you would know that this was a grave mistake. This reminded me somewhat of the Emitt Till case and how he was also severely beaten and killed. They found his body decaying, unrecognizable, besides the ring his mother had given him. This case had also been dismissed in favor of the whites, where the majority (if not all) of the juries were Caucasian. Both situations had been dealt with impartially.
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