Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States’ War on Terror on television, and then visit your family in the very places that the U.S. army invaded and occupied. These experiences shape the work of novelist Jamil Jan Kochai, author of 99 Nights in Logar and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, which was a finalist for The National Book Award. Jamil joins Northwestern prof. Kalyan Nadiminti and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about narrative form and the cycles of war. We begin by discussing the second person, a technique Jamil uses throughout Hajji Hotak. He describes it as the most “dangerous perspective” for a fiction writer to take because it brings readers to the edge of the immersive world fiction is supposed to create. The second person in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, from which Jamil reads, forces readers to grapple with our own complicity in the surveillance of Afghan families in the United States and to consider the paradoxical affection that develops between people on opposing sides of war. From there, Jamil, Kalyan, and Aarthi discuss the relationship between video games as mass media and the novel as literary form. Jamil is a huge fan of Final Fantasy VII (who isn’t?) and talks about how games like Call of Duty (a game he played more ambivalently) perform a recruitment function for the U.S. army. He rewrites that vision of war in more complex terms in his own story “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.” Kalyan reflects on how the category of the post-9/11 writer intersects with the War on Terror, and the three of us consider the symbolic function of 9/11 in contemporary fiction written from inside and outside the United States.
Mentioned in this episode:
John Barth
Khaled Hosseini
Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”
Judith Butler, Frames of War
Call of Duty
Final Fantasy VII
Inaam Kachachi, The American Granddaughter
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Listen and Read:
Audio: All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV)
Transcript: 8.4 All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV)
We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí – Novel Dialogue
- We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí
- 9.5 Who Owns These Tools? Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde (SW)
- 9.4 “That In Between Time,” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)
- 9.3 Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP)
- 9.2 Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper
Cavanaugh, Meighan. Cover design. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, Jamil Jan Kochai, Viking Press, 2022. Front cover.
Novel Dialogue 