#The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

[smokefalls]

And why must we always ruin what is beautiful with what is true?

Jamil Jan Kochai, “Saba’s Story” from The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

[m-c-easton]

Book Picks: The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

I'm still reading through the best books of 2021/2022, and my fav so far is The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. Masterful and riveting, these stories of war and diaspora will break your heart and bind it up again. Jamil Jan Kochai is an author to watch. #reading

I’m continuing to work my way through titles that made waves in 2021 and 2022, and this is my favorite so far. If you are in the market for masterful short stories, Jamil Jan Kochai’s collection will not disappoint. A National Book Award finalist, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak feels like it enfolds the entire world in its embrace, spanning the United States and Afghanistan, teen gamers and aging…

[nateconnolly]

Me: Now that I’m about to move to a much smaller living situation, I should probably give away some of my books, so that my collection is smaller. That way, my books won’t take up too much space in my new studio apartment :)

Also me: When I get there, as a reward for doing the hard work of moving, I'll get myself a copy of Blood Meridian. And American Mother. And Desiderata and Nausea and Howard Zinn on War and Kindred and the novel version of The Shape of Water and Antigonick and Gravity And Grace and The Persian Bayan and The Collected Poems of Borges and The Empathy Exams and The Cancer Journals and Regarding the Pain of Others and Rap and Redemption on Death Row and Unraveling Oliver and Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals and Tetrabiblos and Unsong and Werewolves in Their Youth and The Shahnameh and The Lotus Sutra and The Complete Plays of Euripides and Thirteen Ways of Looking and Pig by sam sax and The Underground Railroad and Under the Banner of Heaven and On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals and A Question of Freedom and The Ferguson Report: An Erasure and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass and Allegory in Dante's Commedia and North and Howl and The Epic of Gilgamesh and Poison for Breakfast and The Inexplicable Logic of My Heart and Strange Adventures (2021) and Nightingale and When Einstein Walked with Godel and Everything and More and the Annals of Tacitus and Wuthering Heights and Last Night in Montreal and Jokes Told in Heaven About Babies and Exhalation and All My Sons and Limbo and Other Places I Have Lived and Plainwater and The Idiot and Anna Karenina and The Avesta and Braiding Sweetgrass and The Phenomenology of Spirit and The Blind in French Society and Short Stories of the Troubles and Cities of the Plain and Desert Solitaire and Mysterium Cosmographicum and Giovanni's Room and The Things They Carried and The Hidden Lives of Trees and Cosmos and The Kitáb-i-Aqdas and The Birth of Tragedy and Emily Wilson's translation of The Iliad and Go Tell It to the Mountain and Archeology of Knowledge and Ledger and The Beauty of the Husband and Everything in this Country Must and Paper Covers Rock and Horseradish: Bitter Truths That Are Hard to Swallow and Crush and A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing and Emma and Richard II and Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong and Philosophical Fragments and Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Mrs. Dalloway and The Seal of the Unity of the Three and Anatomy of Melancholy and 2001: A Space Odyssey and Pensées and The Argonauts and Huckleberry Finn and Lose Your Mother and La Vita Nuova and Renaissance Rivals and American Originality and The Art of War and The Fire Next Time and The Lola Quartet and Ireland, Colonialism, and the Unfinished Revolution and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and The Bloody Chamber and Howl's Moving Castle and The Poetic Edda. I'm sure I'll have space :)

[fatehbaz]

Midway through Jamil Jan Kochai’s collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, which maps generations of Afghan and Afghan American lives against over a century of entwined wars, sits what appears to be a résumé. Entitled “Occupational Hazards,” it meticulously records the everyday labors of an Afghan man: [...] his “[d]uties included: leading sheep to the pastures”; from 1977–79, “gathering old English rifles” left over from the last war while being recruited into a new war; in 1980–81, “burying the tattered remnants of neighbors and friends and women and children and babies and cousins and nieces and nephews and a beloved half-sister”; [...] becoming a refugee day-laborer in Peshawar, Pakistan; in 1984, becoming a refugee in Alabama, where he worked on an assembly line with other Asian migrants whom the white factory owner used to push out the local Black workforce; and so on. Dozens of events, from the traumatic to the mundane, are cataloged one by one in prose that is at once emotionless and overwhelming. [...] Kochai interviewed his father for the résumé’s occupational trajectory [...]. An Afghan shepherd [...] is displaced by imperial wars and then, in the heart of empire, is conscripted into racialized domestic economies [...]. [M]ethodically translating lived violence via a résumé, a bureaucratic form that quantifies labor in its most banal functionality, paradoxically realizes the spectacular breadth of war and how it organizes life’s possibilities. [...]

---

In this collection, war is past, present, and plural. In Afghanistan, Kochai recounts the lives of Logaris and Kabulis, against the backdrop of the US occupation, still dealing with the detritus of previous wars - British, Soviet, a­nd civil - including their shrines, mines, and memories. In the United States, Afghan Californians experience the diasporic conditions of war -- state neglect of refugees combined with targeted surveillance -- amid the coming-of-age of a second generation that must confront inherited traumas while struggling to build political solidarities with other displaced youth.

These 12 stories explore the reverberations between historical and psychic realities, invoking a ghostly practice of reading. Characters, living and dead, recur across the stories [...]. Wars echo one another [...]. Scenes and states mirror each other, with one story depicting Afghan bureaucracies that disavow military and police violence while another depicts US bureaucracies that deny social services to unemployed refugees. History itself is layered and unresolved [...]. Kochai, who was born in a refugee camp in Peshawar, writes from the position of the Afghan diaspora [...]. In August 2021, the US relegated Afghanistan to the past, declaring the “longest American war” over. Over for whom? one should ask. [...] War, in other words, is not an event but a structure. [...]

---

In Kochai’s collection, war is not the story; rather, war arranges the scenes and life possibilities [...]. Kochai carefully puts war itself, and the warmakers, in the narrative background [...].

This is a historically incisive narrative design for representing Afghanistan. Kochai challenges centuries of Western colonial discourses, from Rudyard Kipling to Rambo, that conflate Afghanistan with violence while erasing the international production of that violence as well as the social and conceptual worlds of Afghans themselves. Instead, this collection moves the reader across Afghans’ transcontinental, intergenerational, and multispirited social worlds -- including through stories of migrations and returns, homes populated by the living and the martyred, language that enmeshes Dari, Pashto, and Northern California slang, as well as the occasional fantastical creature [...].

---

Like Kochai’s debut novel 99 Nights in Logar (2019), this collection merges realism and the fantastic, oral and academic histories, Afghan folklore and Islamic texts, giving his fiction a dynamic relation to history. Each story is an experiment, and many of them are replete with surreal or magical elements [...].

As in Ahmed Saadawi’s 2013 novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, a nightmarish sensorium collides with a postcolonial body politics [...].

In a recent interview, Kochai said that writing about his family’s experiences of war has compelled him to explore “realms of the surreal or magical realism […] because the incidents themselves seem so unreal […]. [I]t takes years and decades to even come to terms with what had actually happened to them before their eyes.” He points not to a documentary dilemma but to an epistemological one. While some scholars have argued that fantastic genres like magical realism are often conflated with exoticized imaginaries of the Global South, others have defended the form’s critical possibilities for rendering complex realities and multiple modes of interpretation. Literary metaphors, whether magical or otherwise, are always imprecise; as Afghan poet Aria Aber puts it, “you flee into metaphor but you return / with another moth / flapping inside your throat.” [...]

Kochai does not “escape” into the surreal or magical as fictions but as other ways of reckoning with war’s pasts ongoing in the present.

---

All text above by: Najwa Mayer. “War Is a Structure: On Jamil Jan Kochai’s “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.”“ LA Review of Books (Online). 20 December 2022. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[iirulancorrino]

Best books I’ve read this year: end of year edition

I read a lot of great books this year so it’s really hard to narrow down my favorites, but here are some I read during the past six months that I most enjoyed. (You can read part one here).

Best new releases: fiction

Not a ton of novels I loved but I thought Afghan American author Jamil Jan Kochai’s short story collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak was absolutely stellar.

Honorable mentions: Flight by Lynn Steger Strong and Small Game by Blair Braverman.

Best new releases: nonfiction

Partisans by Nicole Hemmer - argues convincingly that Trump was the natural evolution of decades of reactionary GOP politics, not an abberration.

Ducks by Kate Beaton - amazing graphic memoir by the Hark, A Vagrant writer about working in the Alberta oil sands to pay off her student debt. An incredible portrait both of what it’s like growing up working class in a small town and the sacrifices that entails and the trauma of being one of the few women in a very harsh working environment.

Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv - fascinating series of vignettes by one of my favorite New Yorker writers exploring different people’s perceptions of mental illness and how we can become trapped in our own narratives.

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners by Margaret A. Burnham - this was hard to stomach because of the depth of cruelty it described but is well worth reading to understand just how all-encompassing a reign of terror Jim Crow was for black Southerners.

Getting Me Cheap: How Low Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty by Amanda Freeman and Lisa Dodson - Damning Indictment of how this country treats poor people and how women and girls, particularly single mothers, bear the worst burden.

We Need to Build: Field Notes for a Diverse Democracy by Eboo Patel - I would get every left-of-center person to read this if I could.

Honorable mentions: His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa and Bad Jews by Emily Tamkin.

Best fiction (non new)

I ended up reading a lot of fiction by 20th century European authors, and particularly loved The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig, Everything Flows by Vassily Grossman and The Years by Annie Ernaux. Reading these felt like getting a little tour of the century, particularly of how radically modern Europe was shaped by WWI and WWII.

Boy Parts by Eliza Clark and In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes were my two other favorites, and are of a pair in that they’re refreshing (despite being over 60 years old in one case) takes by woman writers on a specific style of novel and make incredible use of an unreliable narrator.

Best nonfiction (non new)

I continued to read a lot of nonfiction about abortion and most appreciated The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler, which details the human cost of the “baby scoop” era and Beggars and Choosers by Rickie Solinger, which criticizes the shift from rights to choice-based language in discussions of reproductive politics.

I also really enjoyed Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind about reactionary politics, which honestly felt like a better version of The Decadent Society and Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong, which was written before the pandemic and felt extremely prescient about a lot of the discourse of the past few years.

Best poetry

I didn’t read a ton of poetry that really grabbed me but I enjoyed Sherry Shenoda’s The Mummy Eaters, which explores the author’s Coptic Egyptian heritage. From previous years, I enjoyed Philip Metres’ Shrapnel Maps and Richie Hofmann’s Second Empire.

[septembriseur]

Do you have any book recommendations?

Actually, yes!

Dan Hicks’s The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution is fascinating, vital, and powerfully written.

I also recommend Jamil Jan Kochai’s collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories.

In terms of, like, novels… honestly, I haven’t read a novel I enjoyed in ages. I do really like the Benjamin January mysteries by Barbara Hambly.

I’m continually looking for novels that I might like… but a lot of what gets published now is just so badly written, with little-to-no editing, and it’s hard to read.

[obsessioncollector]

He watched clip after clip of systematic rape and mutilation and murder, and all the while, he kept justifying that to take witness, to record and analyze atrocities, was his duty as a scholar, as a historian, as a . . . But the clips, the photographs, even the textual descriptions, warped something in his understanding of his own body. Often, he stared at his hands, touched his skin, and attempted to make sense of all the atrocities that could be committed against flesh, and this contemplation left him sleepless and depressed and afraid. He wondered why God had made humans so malleable, so soft, only to be torn apart on highways or systematically mutilated in dark chambers and black sites, at the hands of beloved men, until the mind could no longer comprehend the suffering of the body and destroyed itself. 

Jamil Jan Kochai, “The Tale of Dully’s Reversion,” in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

[pussyhoundspock]

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai and Swing Time by Zadie Smith 📚

Oh I love Zadie Smith! I have read swing time but I've read a handful of her books -- white teeth was my favorite. I've definitely seen and considered swing time in libraries/book stores but it hasn't made the final cut yet! & I love sjort stories so I'll definitely add the other one to my list!

[smokefalls]

History isn’t only ever measured by battles and massacres and prisons, but also by the incremental blood drip of the thinnest veins.

Jamil Jan Kochai, “Hungry Ricky Daddy” from The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

[paandaan]

⏳for the book rec!

the haunting of hajji hotak and other stories by jamil jan kochai

send me an emoji and i will give you a book rec

[tinynavajoreads]

Recently Finished: The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai, and No Such Thing As an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura

Both of these books are one that I wouldn't necessarily pick up at first glance, but hearing what their actual stories were about, I was intrigued and checked them out from my local libraries on the Libby app.

The Haunting has been mentioned earlier on this blog, with the haunting surrealist stories of love and family and connection, especially to Afghanistan. It pulled me in in ways that I didn't think it would and kept me there with all the connections and intertwining threads throughout each story.

No Such Thing sounded cute, and a light read that I checked it out on more of a whim. But with each job change and each rediscovery of herself (the main character), I got to know her a bit more and to empathize with her. Working in a capitalistic society is hard enough without all of the emotional labour that comes with it. But by resting and giving herself time to heal again, she discovers her love for her work again and slowly makes her way back.

Both of these books had a bit of a surrealist vibe, while staying just finely enough on this side of reality, that you could see these things happening. But the small bits of fancy and flight gave a connection, a cord to the stories that made me want to keep reading them. I enjoyed both and would recommend you try them out as well.

Fair warning for The Haunting though, it does deal with war, and the war in Afghanistan and all that comes with it. Read at your own behest.

[rockislandadultreads]

National Book Award Finalists: Fiction 

Have you read any of these National Book Award Finalists? These fiction selections were chosen out of 463 submissions! There are also finalists for nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people's literature - be sure to check out the full list here. 

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors an extraordinary fear. But C4 is of particular interest. Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster-care system: three boys and one girl, Blandine, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her. Now all Blandine wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads. Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents - especially Blandine - go to achieve it? Does one person’s gain always come at another’s expense? Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and community, entrapment and freedom. It announces a major new voice in American fiction, one bristling with intelligence and vulnerability.

The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones

Gayl Jones, the novelist Toni Morrison discovered decades ago and Tayari Jones recently called her favorite writer, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. Now, for the first time in over 20 years, Jones is publishing again. In the wake of her long-awaited fifth novel, Palmares, The Birdcatcher is another singular achievement, a return to the circles of her National Book Award finalist, The Healing. Set primarily on the island of Ibiza, the story is narrated by the writer Amanda Wordlaw, whose closest friend, a gifted sculptor named Catherine Shuger, is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill a husband who never leaves her. The three form a quirky triangle on the white-washed island. A study in Black women's creative expression, and the intensity of their relationships, this work from Jones shows off her range and insight into the vicissitudes of all human nature - rewarding longtime fans and bringing her talent to a new generation of readers.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai

Pen/Hemingway finalist Jamil Jan Kochai ​breathes life into his contemporary Afghan characters, exploring heritage and memory from the homeland to the diaspora in the United States, in the spiritual and physical lands ​these unforgettable characters inhabit. In “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” a young man’s video game experience turns into a surreal exploration on his own father’s memories of war and occupation. Set in Kabul, “Return to Sender” follows two married doctors driven by guilt to leave the US and care for their fellow Afghans, even when their own son disappears. A college student in the US in “Hungry Ricky Daddy” starves himself in protest of Israeli violence against Palestine. And in the title story, “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak,” we learn the story of a man codenamed Hajji, from the perspective of a government surveillance worker, who becomes entrenched in the immigrant family’s life. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is a moving, exploration and narrative of heritage, the ghosts of war, and home - ​and one that speaks to the immediate political landscape we reckon with today.

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews

Graduating into the long maw of an American recession, Sneha is one of the fortunate ones. She's moved to Milwaukee for an entry-level corporate job that, grueling as it may be, is the key that unlocks every door: she can pick up the tab at dinner with her new friend Tig, get her college buddy Thom hired alongside her, and send money to her parents back in India. She begins dating women - soon developing a burning crush on Marina, a beguiling and beautiful dancer who always seems just out of reach. But before long, trouble arrives. Painful secrets rear their heads; jobs go off the rails; evictions loom. Sneha struggles to be truly close and open with anybody, even as her friendships deepen, even as she throws herself headlong into a dizzying romance with Marina. It's then that Tig begins to draw up a radical solution to their problems, hoping to save them all.

The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela

In this contemporary debut novel - an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity - Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends. Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds. Captivating and poignant; a modern coming-of-age story about the essential nature of community, The Town of Babylon is a page-turning novel about young love and a close examination of our social systems and the toll they take when they fail us.