8.4 All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV)

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)

10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT) – Novel Dialogue

How to write about place is a question that cuts across the career of the South African Ivan Vladislavić. The questions of place and space are pressing ones in the context of South Africa, where the transition to democracy in 1994 included a redrawing of the national map, and the last three decades have seen the large-scale transformation of urban centers such as Johannesburg. What defines Johannesburg a literary city? asks the critic Jeanne-Marie Jackson. From this unfurls a series of reflections about the writer’s relationship to place and the various ways in which narrative form can be bent to capture the experience of place—and in particular the experience of a place as it changes across time. The resulting work may feel fragmentary, Ivan allows, but that is a function of the nature of place rather than an imposition on the part of the writer. Finally, the conversation turns toward Ivan’s choice to study Afrikaans literature in the 1970s. As a tradition often at odds with Afrikaner politics and urgently concerned with the world Ivan himself inhabited, reading the work of Afrikaans writers such as Ingrid Winterbach, Entienne Leroux, André Brink, and Breyten Breytenbach offered a vital counterpoint to Ivan’s training in the English canon. Ivan closes by fondly remembering the teacher who introduced him to the writer’s notebook, a habit that continues to be crucial to his practice today. Mentioned in this episode: The Folly Double Negative The Near North Zoë Wicomb, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town Georges Pérec Gauteng John Miles, Ampie Coetzee, Ernst Lindenberg, and Taurus Publishers Marlene van Niekerk Nadine Gordimer The Goon Show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1. 10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT) 42:40
2. 10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH) 40:40
3. 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW) 43:57
4. 10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP) 46:37
5. We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí 47:03

Cavanaugh, Meighan. Cover design. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, Jamil Jan Kochai, Viking Press, 2022. Front cover.