Stories from an Afghan State of Mind

Members of an extended family appear across narratives, but what links the collection is the inevitable legacy of an invasion: the tottering foundations of home and heritage. (Representational image: Wanman Uthmaniyyah via Unsplash)

In Jamil Jan Kochai’s remarkable debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar, a 12-year-old boy and his companions set out on the trail of a dog in the wilds of an eastern province in Afghanistan. Through this frame, Kochai explored how the brutality of the country’s invasion worked its way into the daily lives and thoughts of its citizens. The novel also artfully encompassed much recent history, from the coming and going of the Russians to tribal strife and the arrival of the Americans.

Kochai’s prose combined elements of poignancy and magic realism to create a distinctive portrayal of the land’s woes and willfulness. The same approach informs the twelve tales in his striking new collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories. As with 99 Nights in Logar, this volume concerns itself with fractured and melancholic identities. It investigates presences and absences, hauntings and dislocations.

These stories are set in the world of Afghan immigrants in the United States as well as in their homeland. Members of an extended family appear across narratives, but what links the collection is the inevitable legacy of an invasion: the tottering foundations of home and heritage.

Many stories read as though they have emerged from a swirling phantasmagoria of conflict. A boy is drawn into a video game in which he is compelled to avenge atrocities against his father and uncle. A couple in Kabul piece together the body of their son from packaged parts periodically left outside their door. A man returns to his ancestral property to look for buried treasure and discovers a land mine instead.

It's a collection in which harshness and tenderness can come together in unexpected ways. In one story, a virginal student in America embarks on a fast to support a Palestinian activist he is attracted to. In another tale of two sentences – one long, one short – a woman recreates the calamitous night her brothers were shot, a fallout of “a benevolent American invasion”.

Metamorphoses of various kinds also feature, with two stories incorporating literal transfigurations. In the first, an American airman parachutes “softly toward an inconspicuous little village he had yet to bomb”. He is placed into a pit by the locals, whereupon he is transformed into a bleating goat with a blond mane.

In the other, an Afghan-American PhD candidate studying the history of revolutions turns into a small monkey and goes on to lead a violent insurrection against the occupiers. Kafka’s domesticated ape in his ‘Report to the Academy’ may have been “moved neither to lament, nor to complacency”, but Kochai’s simian activist answers questions “with a calm swagger unseen in an Afghan insurgent since the bygone days of Ahmad Shah Massoud.”

One of the structurally inventive stories here is in the form of a resume. It outlines the life of a man who was a shepherd in Logar (“duties included: leading sheep to the pastures near the Black Mountains”) who then becomes a labourer in Peshawar (“duties included: cutting and hauling wheat for twelve hours straight”).

This character travels to America to work in a series of demanding but unsatisfying jobs and, years later, ends up forlorn and unemployed (duties included: “waiting for the pain to ebb”). By listing activities and mental states, Kochai recreates a life of pathos and yearning that could well have been expanded into an entire novel.

The title story, placed at the end, is appropriately haunting. The narrator, an unidentified surveillance agent, is tasked with keeping tabs on an immigrant Afghan family in West Sacramento. Over time, he finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed in their daily routines.

The agent puts off updating his superiors, being engrossed in the family’s ambitions and arguments, and even plays a role during a pivotal moment towards the end. In this way, Kochai seems to be reminding readers of a shared humanity over and above the violence brought about by muddled foreign policy decisions.

There have been countless reports on the fallout of the occupation of Afghanistan. Kochai’s The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is a series of reports from the occupation of the Afghan mind.