The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Short Stories / Jamil Jon Kochai / 2022

Goddam this is a good short story collection. Much as There, there by Tommy Orange captured the range of heat and friction in the urban Native experience, Jamil Jon Kochai’s characters wrestle with the whole of Afghanistan’s history as the cultural impact of Islam and the ever-present traumas of war, migration, and imperialism put their whole weight on their lives. Its hard to describe the magical realism of the collection, because Kochai somehow pulled off incredibly hokey and heavy-handed metaphors; in fact, these exact metaphor managed to capture sometimes horrifying, sometimes darkly humorous, sometimes gorgeous elements of the Afghani experience that beating us over the head with relentless realist trauma just wouldn’t be able to do. There’s a story, for example, where a couple keeps receiving portions of their boy child’s dismembered body. The father goes on a goose chase looking for a police officer or an official willing to do anything. The mother, on the other hand, slowly sews their son back together. Such a dark premise sounds like an awful, heavy-handed undergrad idea in summary. Kochai made this spellbinding. There’s a story where a gamer, who loves MF DOOM (apparently a favorite for men of color short story writers like Kochai and Orange), ignores his family’s worried and troubled cries as he binge plays Metal Gear Solid V, which takes place in Afgani villages, much like where his father grew up. I am especially grateful I read this pulsating collection after reading Max Blumenthal’s The Management of Savagery, which included a rather clinical history of Afghanistan. There’s a way political argument can summarize atrocity after atrocity  in a couple of bloodless paragraphs, where a fiction writer can yield a gallon of blood from a single poetic phrase. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories burns with the fires of Afghanistan’s history and glides with the slick ice of a master fiction writer’s pen.    5/5

The Management of Savagery / Max Blumenthal / 2019

I picked up this book looking to better understand the history of US intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East, as well as reactionary and perhaps revolutionary violent resistance against it. In order to contextualize Afghanistan, Blumenthal begins in the Cold War, when the US began arming tribal Islamists, including Al-Qaeda, who were frequently compared to US independence heroes and Star Wars rebels by interventionists. In particular, Blumenthal does a great job disentangling the ways the military industrial complex manipulates the media to sanitize allies, demonize targets, and muddy an admittedly complex terrain to audiences to justify intervention and pull Washington’s purse strings. Inevitably, Blumenthal ends up playing defense for the Assad regime in Syria, pointing out untrue propaganda against his regime, a move his critics see as apologetic but I see as simply nuanced. Blumenthal can be seen as a tankie by some, and that’s probably inevitable for a writer who spends so much time countering hyperbolic US propaganda against its enemy nations, who are of course as flawed and complex as any other nation. I particularly appreciated Blumenthal’s writing on the rise of Alex Jones, who had an early career as a 9/11 truther through documentaries like Loose Change, which I had watched as a middle schooler. I never connected the dots from Loose Change to the Sandy Hook massacre denialism to the rise of Trump. Blumenthal includes a skillful argument about how neocon and neolib US military interventions led to the rise of Trump by destabilizing once functional countries and increasing the amount of terrorism and refugees in Europe. This increase led to a rise in ultranationalism and xenophobia the far right thrives on. As someone who was too young during the 9/11 era and didn’t pay enough attention to the interventionist wars during the Obama era, Blumenthal provided an incisive and clarifying narration of the history I lived.  4/5