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Reviews tagging 'Islamophobia'
The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai
6 reviews
just_one_more_paige's review
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
Graphic: Blood, Injury/Injury detail, Violence, Xenophobia, Physical abuse, Racism, Religious bigotry, Child death, Gun violence, Police brutality, Death of parent, Chronic illness, Islamophobia, Murder, War, Body shaming, Death, Grief, and Torture
Moderate: Rape, Classism, and Fire/Fire injury
jayisreading's review against another edition
5.0
Graphic: War, Death, Murder, Violence, and Grief
Moderate: Islamophobia
Minor: Rape
eslsilver's review
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.0
Graphic: Violence, War, and Murder
Moderate: Islamophobia
Minor: Rape
deedireads's review
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.5
TL;DR REVIEW:
The Haunting of Hajji Hotak is a fantastic collection featuring characters either from or in Afghanistan. I found it both wrenching and full of heart.
For you if: You like great short stories and/or want to read more Afghan-American literature.
FULL REVIEW:
The Haunting of Haaji Hotak is a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, and after reading it, I’m not surprised. It’s a masterful collection, equally wrenching and full of heart. I liked it a lot and am glad I read it.
Each of the stories in this collection focuses on characters who are either living in Afghanistan (usually the province of Logar), or else Afghan / Afghan Americans living in California. Some of them are loosely connected, orbiting around a man who built a life in California before an injury led to a workers’ compensation battle and financial hardship. Many of the stories also have different formats, which gave the collection overall more texture and helped each story stand out.
As he explores the ideas of survival, family, home, and the generational trauma of war, Kochai engages with the war on terror but purposefully calls attention to stereotypes by refusing to either refute or acknowledge them at all — his characters simply be, their stories simply are.
Kochai’s writing pulses with life, and there were a lot of stories here that really impressed me. The first one and the last one are especially noteworthy, as other reviewers have said, but I also really loved “Enough.” I actually listened to that one on audio while out for a run, and as soon as I finished it, I rewound and started it over from the beginning. Gutting.
If you’re a short stories person, this one is worth picking up.
Graphic: Islamophobia, Child death, and War
Moderate: Kidnapping
onewoman_bookclub's review
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Graphic: Child death, Islamophobia, and War
joann_l's review
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.0
For that reason alone, Kochai's collection of stories set in contemporary Afghanistan is powerful and worth any reader's time and attention. The narratives and characters in this collection humanize a subject that has too long been objectified and rendered inferior. The tales bring Afghans to life, force the reader -- in the best of ways -- to see and think of them as living, feeling, bleeding individuals, as tangible and as intimate with ourselves as our sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, parents, friends, lovers, husbands, wives, children. In these character's voices we can hear our own. Our own desires and fears are mirrors of theirs.
The stories are embedded in Central Asian Islamic and Colonial culture and history, but they also revolve around universal principles: love, marriage, ambition, identity, belonging. Afghans in these stories are college students sharing the same interests and experiences of growing up and out like all college students -- not merely tokenized international students who live on the periphery of campus life, transient and alien. In some of these stories there are young women seeking to understand their roles in society, in their families. They, like all of us, are torn by expectations imposed on us from within and without. The women in these stories are not foils to men or cutouts of the flattened, Orientalist idea of Islam; they are also not mindlessly rebellious, mimics of Western feminism. These women are accurate reflections of women everywhere and yet also unique in their Afghani-ness: contradictory, full of internal and external conflict, desirous and aware of obligation, selfish and selfless. The characters in Kochai's fiction -- women and men alike -- do not need to trade their Afghani selves for a Western one or a vice versa, even if there is tension between these identities. It is a tension that enhances, rather than subverts the narratives here. Tradition and modernity are not at odds in the real, lived world anywhere; that false binary is the fiction here! Kochai's nuanced depictions of women, youth, men, childhood, marriage, love, sex, and life-at-large made this a very satisfying read.
I also deeply appreciated that many stories depicted Afghans outside of Afghanistan in an authentic diasporic perspective. So frequently are Afghans (and other Asians and people of color in general) fixed into some faraway, non-Western, exotic location. In several of the stories Afghans are cosmopolitan, worldly figures, part of the global community in material ways beyond being an image on the television news. They are American, British, European in as much as they are Afghan. As with many other OwnVoice fiction, these stories make the poignant point that the hyphenated identity is true but simultaneously too simplistic of a label; national boundaries are not only porous, in cultural context they are fiction. (Of course, borders do exist in a material, political sense; passports are not obsolete artifacts!)
At the same time, there is a thread of distinctly Afghan experience threading through these tales, one that is grounded in global politics, colonial histories, Islam in its present forms, migration. That is its cohesion and its strength. The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is a must-read collection, especially for those who seek to understand a misunderstood community and want to excavate their identities beyond its contemporary political history and presence.
Graphic: Islamophobia, Death, Deportation, and War