Profile: Jamil Kochai
Jamil Kochai’s short story “Nights in Logar” was recently selected for the 2018 O. Henry Prize. He graduated from the UC Davis Creative Writing Master’s program in 2017.
Are there one or two books that were pivotal to you becoming an author? Do you remember your first encounter with them? What did they mean to you?
One Hundred Years of Solitude was a big one. I read that novel in a trance, completely enthralled, turning from one page to the next, one character to the other, watching them live and grow and die, knowing them in my own life, from my own family, in my own histories (personal and political). In Márquez's Colombia, I saw glimpses and shadows of my own vision of Afghanistan. The adobe houses, the breathtaking beauty, the magic and the violence and the spirit. Here is a writer, I thought, who has truly captured the beauty and the horror of his homeland, and all I wanted to do, from that point on, was to imitate his feat. To write a One Hundred Years for Afghanistan, for Logar. It was an audacious dream, but it got me started.
What inspires you now? What keeps you writing?
Mostly, it's just the day to day stories that I hear from back home (Logar and Kabul). Who's getting married, who's feuding, who's escaping, who's dying, who's still searching for work, who's aligning themselves with whichever faction. But I'm also motivated by the political realities of the American occupation. How the occupation, and its violence, shapes the day to day stories of Afghans back home. I want that violence, and the effects of that violence, to be known. To be written and told. That's also why I write.
If you could choose one book for the present moment, what would you choose and why?
I would choose Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was held for fourteen years without charge or trial at Guantanamo Bay. His memoir was written while he was in captivity, so large portions of the text were omitted by the U.S. government. In this way, the book contends with the U.S.'s "War on Terror", state censorship, Islamaphobia, globalization, militarism, historical erasure, U.S. torture tactics, and our very understanding of how, and to whom, violence should be inflicted.