{"id":58358,"date":"2024-11-22T10:00:02","date_gmt":"2024-11-22T16:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=58358"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:10:31","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:10:31","slug":"all-of-our-stories-were-war-stories-jamil-jan-kochai-and-kalyan-nadiminti","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/all-of-our-stories-were-war-stories-jamil-jan-kochai-and-kalyan-nadiminti\/","title":{"rendered":"All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our partner podcast <\/em>Novel Dialogue<\/a> invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season\u2019s signature question is: I<\/em>f you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be, and why?<\/i><\/p>\n

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Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California, and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States\u2019s War on Terror on television, and then visit your family in the very places that the US army invaded and occupied. These experiences shape the work of novelist Jamil Jan Kochai<\/a>, author of\u00a099 Nights in Logar\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories<\/em>, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Jamil joins\u00a0<\/em>Northwestern professor Kalyan Nadiminti<\/a>\u00a0and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about narrative form and the cycles of war.
\nWe begin by discussing the second person, a technique Jamil uses throughout\u00a0Hajji Hotak.\u00a0<\/em>He describes it as the most \u201cdangerous perspective\u201d 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\u00a0The Haunting of Hajji Hotak<\/em>, 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\u00a0Final Fantasy 7\u00a0<\/em>(who isn\u2019t?) and talks about how games like\u00a0Call of Duty<\/em> (a game he played more ambivalently) perform a recruitment function for the US army. He rewrites that vision of war in more complex terms in his own story \u201cPlaying 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.<\/p>\n

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