John C. Zacharis First Book Award
Ploughshares is pleased to present Jamil Jan Kochai with the thirty-first annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction.
This year’s judge was Ladette Randolph, Ploughshares’ Editor-in-chief. About the book, Randolph writes, “Jamil Jan Kochai’s novel 99 Nights in Logar is—in the tradition of the picaresque—by turns an absurdly hilarious and a deeply affecting story about family ties, the disruptions of war, and ultimately about the power of story to form and maintain a culture. Told against the backdrop of contemporary Afghanistan (before the US departure), Kochai’s novel is also a significant contribution to our understanding of the little-known lives lived in rural villages beset by the bewildering violence of war.” Kochai was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories 2021. Currently, he is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His next book is The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking, July 2022).
What was the inspiration for 99 Nights in Logar?
When I was twelve years old, I traveled with my family back to our home village in Logar, Afghanistan. One summer day, I remember, our vicious guard dog, named Budabash, escaped out onto the roads of the village, and my cousins and uncles and brothers and I went after him. But at a certain point, I became afraid of the journey and stayed with my brother beneath a mulberry tree in the middle of the village. This became a recurring memory for me. When I’d pray or before I went to sleep or especially while daydreaming in classes, this image of my brother and me, standing beneath this mulberry tree in Logar, deciding whether or not to continue the chase for Budabash—with the sun beginning to set, and all the roads and the clay compounds taking on this sort of purplish hue—it kept coming back to me. There was something haunting about it. I knew, even at the moment beneath the tree, that I was on the precipice of something unknown, but I was too afraid to seek out what it might be. And for a long time, even before I decided to pursue creative writing seriously, I knew there was a story there, just waiting to be unraveled. The premise and the setting and many of the characters were already there for me. All I had to do was figure out what would happen on the journey.
What did you discover or grapple with while writing the book?
When I first began to study fiction, the importance of agency was always stressed to me by my writing professors. I was taught that the plot of a story needed to be moved forward by the choices and desires of the characters. This would give the story a more organic momentum as the characters would make certain choices in order to attain certain desires and the consequences of these choices would, in some way or other, transform the character, or the reader’s perception of the character. In this way, especially when the character is forced to make a choice she doesn’t want to make, the reader (or even the character herself) is oftentimes given a deeper understanding of the character’s psyche. So as I started writing 99 Nights, I was entirely focused on moving the plot forward through Marwand’s choices. Would he choose to go on the adventure? Would he choose to abandon his brother? Would he choose to continue his battle with Budabash? When Zia wanted to head back home and Gul wanted to move forward, would he choose Zia or Gul? It was all about maintaining Marwand’s agency. He needed to move the plot forward. Eventually though, this sort of formulaic model of storytelling led me to a wall, a point in the story where I didn’t know what Marwand needed to do next, and for many months afterward, I tried one route or another, one decision and then the next, and it just kept coming out wrong.
I was stuck.
It was around this time that I first read the Arabian Nights and was able to absorb a completely different form of storytelling. Very often, in the Arabian Nights, the plot was moved forward—complications and conflicts were introduced—by the will of Allah. Fate was allowed to take part in the narrative in a way that I hadn’t seen very much in American fiction, which, to me, always placed so much of an emphasis upon agency and choices and psychological justifications (which has its own baggage rooted in European philosophies). But in the Arabian Nights, events occurred as they occurred, one event generating the next, due to prophecies and destinies and, of course, by the will of Allah, and it was all woven together so intricately and so beautifully that I was overwhelmed. Sure, sometimes it came at the cost of the agency of the characters, but agency, in my mind, is its own philosophical assumption, and, furthermore, I didn’t see why my novel couldn’t meld both forms of storytelling. The story driven by human “agency” and the story driven by “fate.” When I came back to my novel after reading the Arabian Nights, I finally realized how I needed to get Marwand out of the jam I’d written him into. Instead of forcing him and his companions to continue to be actors or agents, to choose some choice that would save them all, I would allow them, for a few pages, to behave passively. Fate would be thrown into the mix. And so, by the will of Allah, I sent them a few saviors to get them out of their jam, and from that point on, I tried to maintain a balance between allowing Marwand and the other characters to move the plot forward through their choices and actions, and also, from time to time, allowing fate or destiny to rear its head and give Marwand a push or a complication. After that, the writing just became so much smoother and, I hope, more pleasurable to read.
Walk us through your writing process for this project. What works for you as a writer? What do you find challenging, or even difficult, about writing?
In the beginning, I was very much attempting to force myself to write the novel. I would sit at my desk or at a table in a coffee shop and I would try to force words onto the page, whether they felt right or not. This wasn’t always a helpful technique, but it took me some time to realize that patience can be as useful as brute determination. I think discipline is important in writing. Sometimes you just need to shut everything off and put your fingers to the keypad and type away, but sometimes it helps to step away from the page. Read a few pages from a novel. If you’re having trouble with characterization, read a passage from [Leo] Tolstoy. For sentences, read a bit of [Gabriel García] Márquez. I have these writing “antidotes” in place whenever I find myself in trouble. At other times, it helps to step away altogether. I’ll talk to my father about his childhood in Logar. I’ll talk to my mother about her experience of the war. I’ll ask my aunt about Fremont in the ’90s. And, oftentimes, when I returned, I felt rejuvenated, and the writing became easier.
What authors or works have had the largest impact on your writing?
The Arabian Nights gave me the timeline for this novel. It allowed me to see that I didn’t always need to be moving forward with the plot, and that, in fact, there was this long tradition of digression, of storytelling just for the sake of storytelling. In this way, I was able to reorient how I was conceptualizing time. The story within the story is able to compress time and space and entire histories in a completely organic way. And so, I felt more comfortable limiting the timeline of the central plot. It didn’t have to be this huge eight hundred–page, thirty-year-long, multigenerational plot line (which I was actually considering). Ninety-nine nights, I told myself. That’s all I’d get to tell the story because I realized that I didn’t need to expand the actual timeline of the plot in order to make the novel an expansive project. I just needed a few stories within stories, and the book would expand within itself. Both historically and thematically. This was essential to the development of the novel.
Kim by Rudyard Kipling was also a surprisingly big influence. I definitely modeled parts of Marwand’s character (his straddling of two cultures, his interest in war and spies, his penchant for deceit and disguises) on the eponymous character of Kim. I discovered Kipling’s work later in my writing career (I didn’t grow up reading his stories), but I really can’t think of another writer that I despise and admire as much as this shitty old imperialist. His depiction of Afghans, in particular, is horrifically racist, and yet, (at least to me) his Afghan characters are some of the most complex and compelling to exist in English literature. His ability to draw upon both “eastern” and “western” modes of narration was also inspiring.
Finally, I’m pretty much obligated to mention One Hundred Years of Solitude. Everything I write ultimately exists in the shadow of One Hundred Years. My dream has always been to make a sort of Macondo out of Logar. Márquez’s exploration of colonialism and historical erasure and violence and masculinity and oral vs. textual forms of narration and war and legend and loss and ghosts and love have all been deeply, deeply influential.