Homebody In Kabul

The first thing we learn in the Kabul part of the play, as soon as it leaves the Homebody’s home, is the account of the dismemberment of the Homebody’s body. The circumstances of her death are described in atrocious detail by Doctor Qari Shah in a page-long description (Kushner, Homebody 31-32) that brings, this time verbally, the body to the centre of attention.
Interestingly, one of the main events of Homebody/Kabul—whatever happened to the Homebody in Kabul—is not shown on stage but only recovered through narration. But it is not recovered univocally because we get two vastly differing narratives, the first one representing the account of Qari Shah, a representative of the Taliban establishment whose very name—Qari (‘reader’ in Arabic)—designates
Rather, it is refracted through multiple voices, including those of Priscilla’s protector and guide Khwaja (who, as the penultimate scene intimates, might be a spy for the Northern Alliance, using Priscilla to deliver strategic information to London) and Mahala, Doctor Shah’s first wife, who is eager to enlist Priscilla’s help in escaping the country. Both might simply be following a personal agenda in insinuating to Priscilla that her mother is still alive. To top things off, Zai Garshi, the hat seller who confirms the Homebody’s survival, conversion and marriage, turns out to be a former actor, who might just be putting on an act on behalf of Khwaja and Mahala. This narrative and representative constellation mirrors the representative/narrative doubling of the play’s first scene. In an ironic inversion, the imperial self, rendering a homogenizing narrative of the Other from the safety of her home, becomes herself the object of the Other’s heterogenizing narration/acting when entering the territory of the
Thus, the Homebody’s disappearance follows a clear logic: the character’s identity being dissolved through her immersion in the Other, there can be no more body to be identified as ‘her’. The play thereby inverts the topos of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ travel literature, according to which the self finds itself when moving, renouncing its home (Schulz 18). Kushner’s play turns this topos upside down: instead of finding herself through abandoning home, the Homebody—or rather the identity that has heretofore been associated with her—ceases to exist. At the same time it is suggested that, in the course of her connection with the Other, a new home may have forged a new identity on her body. The play’s open-endedness with respect to the Homebody’s true fate insinuates that in a territory where the symbolic violence of the imperialistic homogenizing discourse no longer holds, the identity of the hegemonic self becomes totally dependent on the heterogeneous narratives of the