The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is an exploration of characters grappling with the ghosts of war and displacement—and one that speaks to the political landscape we reckon with today.
Kochai, an Afghan-American writer, shapes and reshapes his material through a variety of formal techniques, including a fantasy of salvation through video gaming, a darkly surrealist fable of loss, a life story told through a mock résumé, and the story of a man’s transformation into a monkey who becomes a rebel leader...Like Asturias, Kochai is a master conjurer...The collection’s cohesion lies in its thematic exploration of the complexities of contemporary Afghan experience (both in Afghanistan and the United States), and in the recurring family narrative at its core: many of the stories deal with an Afghan family settled in California...Kochai is a thrillingly gifted writer, and this collection is a pleasure to read, filled with stories at once funny and profoundly serious, formally daring, and complex in their apprehension of the contradictory yet overlapping worlds of their characters.
It doesn’t pay to try to connect the characters and stories too literally. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak is better taken as a whole, a brilliant, crazy quilt exploring filial devotion, religious beliefs, family, history and the effects of endless war. It’s also an education of sorts on the history of Afghanistan and the culture of Afghan Americans, although this is no primer for the non-Afghan reader. Kochai peppers his writing liberally with language and references that are up to you to look up if you don’t understand.
American literature is necessarily littered with meditations on violence—its ubiquity, its marrow-deep kinship with this country’s mythology of frontiers tamed and destiny manifested. But although Jamil Jan Kochai’s writing touches on these themes, his profound and visceral short-story collection, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, is much more an interrogation of another central facet of modern American violence: its absurdity. More than almost any other work of fiction I’ve read in the post-9/11 era, Kochai’s collection lays bare the surrealism that colors nearly every interaction between one of history’s most powerful empires and the people it considers disposable. By using a fantastical style to describe the ordinary lives lost over the course of the war, Kochai brings into relief the farcical nature of a conflict in which an army can investigate itself for the death of phantom terrorists killed remotely from a control room. The result is a dark literary impeachment, a fable in which the emperor is missing not clothes but a conscience ... Simply detailing the scope and nature of the War on Terror’s carnage is one thing, but Kochai, whose stories feature anthropomorphic monkeys who instigate revolutions and a child’s severed limbs dutifully reattached by his mother, opts for a far less-traveled road, creating a world so preposterous that the violence seems like just another type of everyday absurdity. In a vacuum, Kochai’s characters and scenes would come off as ludicrous, but framed against the past two decades, they reveal how inured we’ve become to the strangeness of war. The book’s central means of indictment is to show us just how terrifyingly routine violence became for anyone who lived through the U.S. military’s prolonged campaign in response to the September 11 attacks ... In clumsier hands, such subject matter might result in monotonously dour pieces of fiction...Kochai achieves the opposite. The stories in this collection are wildly divergent in form and style, veering from surreal to photorealistic to, in some cases, both at once ... Kochai’s fiction speaks to the human need to make sense of overwhelming violence—who survives it and who doesn’t; who is held culpable and who isn’t. Such questions are often considered the domain of distant others, but Kochai makes his readers confront them head-on. His stories aren’t about some faraway people. There’s no such thing as faraway people.
