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“I find it almost impossible now to write a place until I leave it behind,” says Jamil Jan Kochai, author of this week's "Letter to a Stranger."

In this essay, Jamil takes us to a landscape he left behind years ago—Logar, Afghanistan, a river valley south of Kabul. His story unfurls in a field behind his grandfather's compound, set against the splendor of a Logari sunset. It’s a stunning essay, teeming with the particulars of rural Afghanistan—the smell of woodsmoke, the mountains’ dark silhouettes—while rendering a universal human experience: bracing against a stranger, hoping they’ll “pass by without a word,” only to be surprised by what happens once the stranger says hello. Or in this case, Salaam.

We hope you enjoy this story that encompasses decades and continents with simplicity and poise. And don't miss Jamil's thought-provoking interview below, in which we discuss languages, homesickness, and writing about family.

The OA Editors

"In fact, my eldest uncle Ahmadzia Maamaa—may Allah have mercy on his soul—very explicitly warned me not to tell anyone my father’s name or that I had come from America. He escorted me about the countryside, wherever I went, to make sure I was safe. 'I promised your father no harm would come to you here,' he told me. 'What harm?' I said, laughing, though I had an idea."

Jamil Jan Kochai, "To the Logari Who Asked About the Sun"

OA: Besides the sunset, what is an image of Logar you keep returning to?

Watak’s marker. When I was young, Watak’s marker was just a long branch with a few flags tied to it, held up by a pile of stones. It marked the spot near where my father’s younger brother died during the Soviet Occupation. The marker stood at the edge of a canal, surrounded by mulberry and chinar trees. When I would kneel at the marker to pray, I would hear the babbling of water in the canal and the wind rushing through the leaves of the trees and the wheat in the fields. Especially near dusk, there was always such a haunting beauty to the marker and its surroundings.


OA: Homesickness is a very present theme in your “Letter to a Stranger.” How has your relationship with missing Logar evolved over the years? 

Well, this sense of homesickness was one of the main reasons why I began writing fiction in the first place. Writing Logar became an outlet for my longing for those lost summers in my home village. These images and conversations and adventures from Logar kept replaying in my head at the oddest times, and I felt the need to put them to paper. Over the years—and I don’t mean to sound overly morose (there is a bitter joy in loving a place so much you long for it, you write for it)—I’ve only added more places and images and people to my repertoire of loss. I couldn’t bring myself to write about Sacramento (my hometown) until I left the city behind and began to long for it in Iowa, and now that I’ve left Iowa, I find Iowan stories creeping up on me. In this way, I think writing, for me, becomes an act of (failed) resurrection. And I find it almost impossible now to write a place until I leave it behind. 
 

OA: When did you start writing, and what were the first things you wrote about?

I first started writing fiction my senior year of high school. Before then, I’d always had a knack for telling stories, but never writing them. As a teenager, I wrote about revolutionaries and executions and sacred elk. It was either very ironic or very sentimental and not much else.

 

OA: When you incorporate your family into your writing, how do you weigh what to tell and how much to reveal? Does your intended (or unintended) audience play into this at all?

I try to be as sensitive as possible with my family’s stories. Whenever I’m writing about my family, I’ll have a frank conversation with them about my intentions and the actual content of my work. It’s important to me that my parents or my siblings don’t feel like I’m exploiting their pain or their loss, and, alhamdullilah, my family has been incredibly supportive of my writing endeavors. Nonetheless, I do find myself questioning the nature of the relationship between my family (and their stories), myself (and my work), and my readership (and their gaze). I’ve written in the past that I sometimes feel like a middleman, like a peddler of stories, like I’m merely translating my parents' stories and selling them for a profit to an American audience. For this reason, I’m always careful about how my family or my village or my country is being represented in my work. It’s an anxiety-inducing process of listening and writing and reading and discussing and questioning myself over and over until I feel like my stories can hold up under scrutiny.

 

OA: In an essay for LitHub, you write of the rich Afghan oral storytelling tradition, and how transcription makes the story “murdered of its orality,” while translation left you wondering what was being “lost, or distorted.” A key chapter in your novel, 99 Nights in Logar, is written entirely in Pashto. How do you think being bilingual affects your writing, in either language? What do you think of a future literary scape where works can be increasingly multi-lingual?

Almost my entire life has revolved around navigating and negotiating Pashto and English (and to a lesser degree Farsi and Arabic). Struggling with and negotiating these languages has always played a key role in how I’ve come to understand the world and my own position within it. For this reason, it was only natural for me to write my stories with a bilingual narrative voice.

You know what—that’s wrong. It wasn’t natural. It was something I had to discover through much trial and error. When I first began writing, it was with this McCarthy/Hemingway type voice that was very old and white and unnatural. My stories felt so strained and dishonest, and it was only by studying writers like Sandra Cisneros and Junot Diaz that I felt inspired to write in a voice that better reflected my own experience of the world as an immigrant. And so, for me, it’s incredibly exciting to see a literary landscape that is increasingly multi-lingual. I think it’s important that readers begin to reorient how they understand accessibility and translation and “given information.” For a long time, I think there has been this presumption that if an immigrant writer chooses to incorporate a second language (even minimally) into their work, that all of it must be translated and explained away for the audience, which, in my mind, can sap the life out of a story. When I’m reading a story, I want to run and breathe with the characters, I don’t want to be led around by some corny tour guide. I want my stories to be whispered to me, with intimacy, even if a few of the phrases are lost in translation. 

 

OA: What are you currently working on? 

I’m working on a collection of short stories tentatively titled “The Haunting of Hadji Murat and Other Stories,” which I hope to complete by the end of the year.

 

OA: Who are some exciting new writers you’ve been reading recently? 

Aria Aber, Sarah Thankam Mathews, Pam Zhang, Brandon Taylor, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Deepak Unnikrishnan, Akil Kumarasamy, and Elaine Castillo are all brilliant writers whose books you need to buy immediately.

 
"Teachers in Texas Are Fighting for Their Lives," by OA contributor Lauren Hilgers, The New Yorker

"The Eye Exam," by OA contributor Faith Adiele, The Offing

"Dimanche à Bamako," by OA contributor Raksha Vasudevan, Believer Mag

"Instead of All-Night Techno, Berlin's Clubs Are Hosting Immersive Art Shows," by OA contributor Diana Hubbell, Condé Nast Traveler

"On Witness and Respair: a Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic," Jesmyn Ward, Vanity Fair

"Enter Planet Miranda July," E. Alex Jung, Vulture
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Header photo courtesy of Jalil Jan Kochai.
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