Yes, an Afghan writer. No, not Khaled Hosseini.

Jamil Jan Kochai was born in a refugee camp in Pakistan and currently lives in the United States. He is originally from Logar, Afghanistan and both his books, 99 Nights in Logar (2019) and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (2022), are evidence that the province is heavy with more than just mountains and hides in its dirt tales as precious as its copper mines.

But unlike mountains and mines, tales aren’t visible on maps or liable to excavation missions or easily marketed to foreign audiences. Only someone with an appreciation for and intimacy with Afghan languages, traditions, clothes, food, trees, songs, and lore can put their ear on the Logari ground and listen to the footsteps of stories. And only a writer with the adventurous spirit of a 12-year-old boy (this is a compliment, I promise) can hypnotize readers by juggling commas, periods and paragraph breaks, jumping in and out of narrative loops, and switching languages like hats, all the while aglow with surrealism and magic.

99 Nights in Logar begins with a quote from Frantz Fanon: “Parler une langue c'est assumer un monde, une culture” —to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. Kochai’s prose is peppered with Pakhto terms he doesn’t italicize or explain, the lack of asterisks and footnotes leaving space for the readers to nestle in Kochai’s world and his culture. They enter and through immersion learn that Moor is mother and Agha is father, that kameez and partug and waskat aren’t words to be explained but items to be worn.

This choice might be alienating to readers who look for a palatable and easily digestible story. But for Afghans who are rarely represented as fully human, capable of experiencing tenderness and tenacity and delight and despair, and for readers who want to engage with Afghans without making them wring idioms off their tongues and change their wardrobes, Kochai’s style is an attempt at inclusion.

However, given the number of times Pashto is assumed as my native language, I must caution readers against taking the work of Kochai, or that of any Afghan author, as representative of all Afghans. Most of Kochai’s stories revolve around Afghans of Pashtun ethnicity which is not, in itself, bad. Given his familiarity with Pashto/Pakhto language and his summer trip to Logar in 2005 — a detail that makes a reader wonder if 99 Nights is autobiographical — writing what he knows is nothing Kochai should be faulted for. The novel’s narrator, the 12-year-old Marwand, admits early on that his Farsi is “shit,” implying that neither he nor the readers following him can take on the world and culture of Afghans who speak Dari/Farsi or any other non-Pashto language.

However, given the scarcity of Afghan writers and the dominance of Pashtun voices amidst those select few, we should be mindful not to generalize or homogenize. To me, a Hazara woman, Kochai’s work was touching mainly because I was raised next to Pashtun neighbors and sat next to Pashtun classmates. What Kochai has brewed smelled like Afghanistan in a way I can’t pinpoint but can appreciate. But, at least to me, Kochai’s tales didn’t smell like home.

Something else that gave these books a neighborly warmth is Kochai’s imitation of colloquial ways of storytelling (otherwise known as gossiping). His novel reads like a collection of short stories weaved together into a tapestry of myths, hadiths, Quranic stories, proverbs, and rumors. His collection of short stories reads like a novel in the making, made up of recurring motifs and characters. Like most Afghans I know, Kochai’s characters tell tales with an almost religious fervor, and love recounting events almost as much as they hate counting numbers. The characters narrate just as naturally as they live, blurring the line between tellers and their tales. Kochai takes his readers to a simpler time when one would hear a tale because they ran into someone, questioning our current relationship with storytelling and its conventions.

But my appreciation for Kochai’s experimentality still couldn’t calm the frustration I sometimes felt, especially with his novel, at being dragged this and that way by a narrative that branched out too widely for my comfort or concentration, leaving me unsure of which way to look and whose lead to follow. That the stories framed within the novel have titles of their own might have enhanced this vertigo, making me much too aware of Kochai’s authorial hand and of the usage of a trick that might have been more effective if it were left unexplained. Afterall, most colloquial tales don’t come with italicized titles, they flow in conversations like hot tea.

Trimming some of the smaller tales might have helped strengthen other, in my opinion, more flavorful elements of the novel. For example, I longed to learn more about what seemed, for the lack of a better word, magical in Kochai’s Logar: the land-induced sea-sickness, the trickster blue-eyed Thief, the dog who might not be a dog, the cities of bones and gold hidden in dark mountains, the agitated ghosts of missing limbs and dead family members, mazes that can trap and trick, and on and on.

But maybe the absence of sense and cohesion, irksome though it may be, is the point.

As a side note, I want to apologize to everyone who saw me sobbing in the library. In Kochai's world I found someone who, like me, searches for God not in the heavens but in the palms of their hands. Kochai’s work made me realize how lonely I sometimes get — lonely for the mountains of home and for children who believe in Allah not because of some grand miracle but simply because the lines in their hand, ۸۱ and ۱۸ make ۹۹ – the number of His names.

Writing about bombs and lullabies, Jamil Jan Kochai is a fine fellah who likes to play and plot and, being a self-respecting Afghan, will welcome you to his home and warm you with stories. Khana aabad.