By Jordan Blumetti

From the moment he first picked up a pen, Jamil Jan Kochai has been drawn to the fantastical elements of storytelling. Born to Afghan refugees in a camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, Kochai’s family had endured the ruthless Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, and eventually emigrated to America, trailing a long shadow of violence and war-torn trauma. The fact that some members of his family survived when others didn’t always seemed miraculous—if not magical—to him. Growing up in Sacramento, California, Kochai was far from his ancestral homeland, but would listen intently as his father recited Afghan folktales, passages from the Quran, war stories, and family histories—a blend of fact, fiction, and fable from which his writing takes direct inspiration.

Kochai received his masters degree from UC Davis, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His critically acclaimed debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar, was published in 2019, and employs a series of interconnected stories set amid the Afghan-American war. His latest book, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, contains a spellbinding mix of surrealism, dark humor, and auto-fiction with characters beset by the ghosts of war and displacement. In September, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. He will attend the National Book Awards on November 16th in New York City alongside his fellow nominees.

Read our exclusive interview with Kochai below, and stay tuned for more National Book Awards coverage.

What inspired you to write The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories?

To be honest, most of my fiction comes from my family. I come from a storytelling tradition, and so much of what I write is adapted from stories that I grew up with in terms of folktales, the Quran, or stories about the Prophet. Much of my inspiration also comes from my family’s own historical and personal narratives, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, how they endured the war, and fled to Logar. My family is primarily who inspires me, and their style of oral storytelling, too—that’s a voice I try to capture in my work.

Some of the events depicted in these stories seem unimaginable and yet undeniably real. They’re also incredibly personal. How did you find the emotional space and distance from your family’s history to write with such a universal lens?

I’ve grown up with incredibly harrowing and often violent stories about my family’s experiences during the Soviet occupation, but I was raised in America so I was always outside those narratives. In order to understand them, I would have to understand their stories. But it also felt impossible in this way. How do you connect or empathize with them on this level when nothing you’ve experienced comes even close? 

In my fiction writing, I’ve had to come to terms with the impossibility of understanding atrocity, empathizing with someone who’s been traumatized, and trying to find different ways in the medium of storytelling to overcome that boundary. In [the story] “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” there’s a sense of distance between the father who’s living near the war and the son who is far outside of it. In that story, I try to let the protagonist connect with his father through the medium of a video game. The maneuvers in my storytelling come down to an attempt to understand something that’s almost incomprehensible.

Is this one of the reasons your writing often has a surrealist element to it?

A big influence of mine is Gabriel García Márquez. He once said (and I’m paraphrasing) that as magical as my stories sound, they don’t compare to the real things you see in my village. I share that sentiment. The stories my family used to tell me about the war contained an unthinkable amount of violence. It comes very close to the absurd. For decades, my cousins lived under the fear of being killed by flying unmanned killer robots [ed note: drone strikes], which seemed like science fiction. For that reason, it can feel very natural for me to take a story and veer into the absurd or magical.

In the title story, a line about Hajji Hotak reads: “His living — while his brothers died, while his sister died, while his cousins and friends and neighbors all died — has haunted him his whole life.” The characters in the rest of the stories in this collection are similarly haunted. Was the notion of “haunting” always the point of departure for this book, and what does the term mean to you?

At times I feel like I’m writing about the same things over and over again. It always does come back to this notion of people being haunted by the past or loved ones or trauma. When I was growing up we had a photograph of my father’s younger brother. He was 16 when he was killed during the war. My father was very close with him. And we had this photo up in our prayer room of a person I’d never met, who died ten years before I was born. And yet I knew more things about him than I knew about some of my living relatives. I was living in the states, playing video games, and doing all of these American things and yet everything I know about storytelling origins or about my family conception was rooted in the war and everything we’ve lost in it. My stories have to begin with trying to figure out who or what the characters are being haunted by.

Tell me about the experience of finding out you had been nominated for the National Book Award. With whom did you first share the news? 

I was in the Logar Province in Afghanistan with family when I got the news. It was late at night, and I was flipping through Twitter. All of the sudden, I was tagged in a post from the National Book Foundation, but I couldn’t actually see what I’d been tagged in because the internet connection isn’t great in the rural countryside. I jumped out of my seat and rushed out to the orchard in front of my family’s house because it’s one of the only places I can get decent service. And then I read the tweet, which said I had made the long list. I rushed back inside and my cousins said a long prayer for me. And then a couple weeks later I learned about the short list. It was an incredible honor, and a huge surprise, and quite an eventful way to find out.

Do you feel more pressure as an author now that you’ve been recognized by this nomination?

I’m trying to compartmentalize as much as possible. I just make attempts to continue focusing on my writing. When my students ask me about publishing, I tell them that there will be good years and bad years. There will be years when your book doesn’t sell at all, and you’ll have years when you’re nominated for awards and you’ll be on cloud nine. But you always have to just focus on the work, no matter what.