The Jamaluddin Aram Interview

Interview with Jamaluddin Aram, author of Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on a Wednesday

Jamal, although you’ve made films and have published short pieces, Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on a Wednesday is your first novel, and we know very little about you. Tell us a little about yourself.

I was born on a rainy day of some year that I cannot remember. I grew up when there was a war, and went to school in the morning, carrying a red leather bag that smelled of stale bread and butter. In the afternoon, I made carpet with my brothers. For play, I kicked a ball around, shot marbles, or chased stray dogs. For reading, read the Quran. For music, listened to the cadence of warm spring rain on the clay roof, or the Call to Prayer, or the call of junk collectors at midday. I finished school and began to fall in love so frequently that it burdened the heart. To lessen the torment, I picked up a flute. A neighbour saw me and said, “If you play that thing, you’ll die young.” The war had not killed me, I was not going to let a piece of dry reed do it. So I dropped the flute and took to drinking very strong black tea and writing free verse poetry in Farsi. Then two or three short stories. But all along I dreamed of acting for film. I enrolled in a documentary filmmaking workshop, hoping it would open a door to acting. It didn’t. I rediscovered the pleasure of writing while at Union College. This time I wrote in English. I still, every so often, ask my friends who are successful film directors to cast me. They laugh. I go back to writing.

There is an oral tone to the writing in your novel, and as I read, I was constantly aware of the stories and poems I’ve read by Afghani writers. The language is dense and poetic, and that richness masks the undercurrents of violence. Your writing feels is clearly deeply rooted in Afghan culture and literature. Can you tell us a little more of the writing and the cultures of storytelling that inform this book?

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The oral storytelling tradition permeates every aspect of life in Afghanistan. When a child is born, the parents say the Call to Prayer in his ears. When that kid is an old man and dying, people gather in the room at his deathbed and recite from the Quran, which is rich in folktales and magical stories.

As you can see this is partly due to the fact that Afghanistan has been entrenched in religion. And religion at its core is a system of made-up beliefs. Stories are deployed to reinforce this belief. In central Afghanistan there is a place called Band-e Amir, a series of deep blue lakes. There is a segment of jutted rock some ten, fifteen stories high, cracked and sheared by rain and wind for thousands of years. Some people firmly believe that Ali, Prophet Mohammad’s cousin and son-in-law, sliced this piece of mountain with a sword. I once visited this area, and tried to imagine Ali, a relatively short man with a sword, hacking at the mountain. I could not. But the failure of my imagination does not change people’s beliefs. They tell that story to their children, and they in turn to their children, and the legend grows older and stronger with time.

Partly, we owe the oral tradition to the travellers who passed through Afghanistan, like the merchants of the Silk Road. In the dimness of the caravanserais, they told and retold fables and legends of faraway lands. When they got back on the road, their stories stayed behind and began a life of their own.

Today when friends run into each other on the street, they do not say, “Let’s have tea and chat.” They say, “Yak chai bokhorem o qesa konem—Let’s have tea and tell stories.”

Those stories told over tea never follow a linear path. It is gossipy. It jumps ahead. It goes back in time. It involves anecdotes and side stories that do not immediately relate to the topic in hand, but enrich the main narrative in ways that only such telling could. And that is the kind of storytelling that colours Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday.

Nothing Good Happens in a Wazirabad on Wednesday brings the war to the personal, and nowhere is this more evident than in the lists of items people buy from the store. These lists give us a clear sense of who the people are and the things and places from outside Wazirabad—other than the war, of course—that shape the lives of these people. There is something reverent, almost nostalgic, about these lists. How do you see the purpose of the many lists we encounter in the book?

To me lists are like extended metaphors. You place things in proximity that would not go together otherwise. Cardamom and glue and rat poison and hair wash clay, for instance.

On practical terms, like metaphors, lists are economical. Unlike metaphors, they speak and reveal simply and plainly. One of my teachers, April Selley, once said: open the fridge of your character. You’ll know who they are by the items they stock in their fridge.

The lists in this book perform a similar function. Knowing who buys what gives you a glimpse into their professions, their financial status, and domestic problems. If you are buying rat poison, you must have pest problem. If you are buying candles, you cannot afford gas to light a lamp at night. If you are scenting your tea with cardamom and savour it with Haji Hassan candies, you have money.

Ultimately, this is a story about survival and what it takes to survive unspeakable horrors. The family feuds are a rejection of the larger war that happens the background. Tell us more about the interplay between these small-scale feuds and the larger war.

I have an American friend who has not talked to his brother in over ten years. The American Civil War ended in 1865.

I am of the belief that family feuds exist wherever there is a family. They have nothing to do with war. Such feuds existed before the wars had begun and will continue to exist long after the wars have ended.

But I agree. Besides greed—the mother of all vices—and human stupidity, we go into wars because we think our survival is under threat. Therefore, at the heart of every conflict, be it family wars, or the ones involving soldiers in uniform with guns, lies the fact that one party thinks they are in the right, that their truth is truer than the truth of those they should overcome, and that they must survive.

You can see that in this book when Gulcheen realizes her father and brother have wronged her. She has grown to be an old bachelor merely because the patriarchs in the family thought no suitor was good enough. She goes against all the norms, leaves her father’s house and asks the local Bonesetter to marry her. Her decision comes at a high cost, but we humans live on more than water, air, and bread. We are capable of making the biggest sacrifices for what gives meaning to our existence.

In an article for the Globe and Mail, you’ve spoken about the annual tulip festival in Mazar-e Sharif. Tulips are the Afghani national flower, I believe, and on many levels, the structure of Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on a Wednesday reminds me of tulip petals: loosely arranged around the receptacle from which the stamen and the pistil can arise. In other words, the several chapters/stories/sections fold around the heart of the book. Tell us a bit more about how this structure came about and how that influences how we read this story.

That is an interesting way to look at the structure of the book. It certainly goes against the conventions of the form. The only conventional way you can read the book is to swap the places of characters and the setting. Instead of following a central character(s), you follow Wazirabad. That way Wazirabad becomes a person and the many characters become places. But that is not so conventional, is it? And that kind of reading demands active participation.

I think it was Anuradha Roy, the Indian novelist, who said, “Chapters in a book are like different rooms in a house.” Or something to that effect. Or maybe she said something completely different and I understood what I wanted to understand. Anyway, I like to imagine chapters in a book as rooms in a house. And inside those rooms, yet other rooms exist, those of the sentence. I am a very slow writer. So I explore the inside of a sentence like one would explore the interior of a room entered for the first time, observing the light filtering through thick patterned curtains, the undisturbed layer of dust around a vase of dead flowers on the nightstand, the wrinkled sheets in the unmade bed, the faint fragrance of a woman long gone, all the while open to surprises.

That is my goal with any piece of writing. This book was no exception. I believe that we read literature not merely for plot. If we did, we would simply read a page-long summary of a story or the title of a poem. But we read books that are hundreds of pages. We want the characters’ experiences, commitments, and dreams to enrich us, to echo our deep human emotions, and to colour our imagination. And if a book is written with care, we want it to awe us at the turn of every page.

This is a story about a small community and how rumours and news travels through such places. You write elsewhere about the invasion of Mazar-e Sharif in 1998, and the senseless violence that accompanied that battle. In Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on a Wednesday, violence is less viscerally present, yet it is also never absent. Here, for the most part ordinary people go about their ordinary lives. But one cannot get away from the war: We are constantly reminded of the war, yet you speak of it as if it is far away, even as it impinges on the lives the people in Wazirabad. Can you tell us a bit more about the interaction between the day-to-day events of the novel and that which is far away, the war?

Our species’ secret of survival, while bigger and stronger creatures have perished, hints at the fact that we are masters of adaptation. When threatened, we devise ways to mitigate danger. How do you mitigate something as colossal as a war? Especially when wars happen as frequently as they do in Afghanistan, and continue as long as they do? Well, you learn to counter it with something even more fierce and powerful: life. You cannot end the war, but you can live urgently and passionately. And that is what the people of Wazirabad do. They are aware of the armed conflict, yet they cling on to life as if war did not exist. They play, fall in love, get sick, nurse grudges, pray, dream, gossip, work, die and reborn.

I want to turn to the Wazirabad of the title: Wazirabad is located right beside the Kabul International Airport, as strategic lynchpin during the war. In other words, Wazirabad is at the heart of the war and the struggle for the soul of Kabul. None of this is ever noted in the novel, but this history is clearly important. Can you elaborate a bit on the importance of what remains unsaid?

There has been an overwhelming amount of literature written on the Afghan conflict. I did not wish to repeat what had already been said, neither did I have the desire to. Wars are rich men’s endeavour. And the people I am interested to write about eat their supper and barely have anything to spare for breakfast the next day.

So this book is filled with the unsaid. It tells a story that for so long was deemed unimportant and had remained in the shadows, paled by the terrible beauty of the war.

In addition, I did not want to anchor the story in a fixed place or time. It is only in the flaps that you read the book takes place in the early 1990s. There is no explicit mention of that in the book. Because I wanted Wazirabad to stand for any village or town across Afghanistan across time. It could take place in the 2000s when part of the country was engaged in fighting the Americans. It could be taking place somewhere now where people are fighting the Taliban.

This is to say that war affects the common man in the same way, regardless of time and place. 

You’ve written about your experience of the fighting in Mazar and how your parents wait for news of your uncle—news that can only come by word of mouth, but never comes. In Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on a Wednesday word of mouth and rumour fill the pages. People use every opportunity to tell their dreams, or to spread gossip. Soon we are barely able to keep fact and fiction apart. How do you see this aspect of the book reflecting our (western) world, where disinformation and gossip is everywhere? What warnings, if any, should we take from this?

Wazirabad is a small, close-knit community. One thing that weaves their lives together is gossip. But as mentioned early on in the book, in Wazirabad rumours and gossip are born when people search for the truth.

Regardless of our geographic placement, it remains our duty as thinking beings to seek the truth. It is a virtue to not readily accept what we hear and see, but stay curious and question. Religion is a good example. Those who seek and constantly question the existence of God eventually will have a better relation with the divine when they find an answer. A pleasure those who inherit God from their forefathers will never get to experience.

In a time when information is in flux, and easily available, the search for truth not only becomes necessary but an obligation.

People in the novel—the militiamen, for instance—cling to the conflicts and schisms of the past to fuel their hatred and violence in the novel’s present. Someone once told me that immigrants are welcome in Canada, but that they should leave the conflicts of their past at the door when they arrive. I am not sure that is possible, for past traumas affect how we engage with the world, regardless of where we find ourselves. How does your own past affect how you live today, and how does that manifest itself in Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on a Wednesday? What can Canadians take from this story to make their world a better, more equitable place to live in?

I agree with you. I do not believe anyone willingly looks for traumatic experiences. Quite the contrary. It is in our pursuit of peace that we run into wars, pain when we look for comfort, heartbreak when we seek love.

We like to think we are in control of things, but we are not. There are greater forces, which affect us in ways we can never imagine. This could be unrequited love, a sickness, an event as small as seeing someone you looked up to act indecent, or finding yourself in the middle of a civil war. But all these moments, traumatizing they may be, they shape us in the only way we could be shaped. Without them, we’ll be different people; perhaps happier, but shallower; healthier, but lacking the wisdom and the virtue of acceptance that comes with suffering; you might be innocent, but unaware of the strength, resolve and patience in you that guide you through the slow and the steep of life.

Like most people of my generation and my father’s generation and my father’s father’s generation, I did not have an easy childhood. I do not wish upon anyone the circumstances I have been through, but if I had the chance to go back in time, I would not change the slightest detail of it. It is perfect in its dark, messy, troubled way. I am a better person for them. And, therefore, a better citizen of Canada and the world in large.

I believe we all have the capacity for generosity; we just need to free up that space in our heart whether that’s accepting and welcoming newcomers into our communities; whether that is forgiving ourselves for past mistakes; or extending grace to those around us and accepting them with the sum of their weaknesses and strengths.

Almost every newcomer has to start life from scratch upon arrival at their new country of residence. I have not seen a single person sitting around complaining about this fact. They accept and get on with it and build a new life. Can you imagine how much courage, sacrifice, and largeness of heart and soul that requires? And Canada is a much better, more tolerant, more persevering place because of it.

Only once that I can recall do you venture out of the streets of Wazirabad, when Husnia and Sikandar go to the doctor in the wealthy part of town. The contrast between these worlds is stark, and Husnia encounters a kindness from the doctor she rarely experiences in Wazirabad. The episode draws a stark contrast between their lives in Wazirabad and those of the people who live in the rich parts of the city. Can you talk a bit more about the contrasts between these two cities.

Wealth or the lack of it colours our mannerism. The gynecologist lives in a big house made of marble and stone greened with fruit trees and flowers. The doctor has a barber, dressed like a diplomat, who drops by to cut the doctor’s hair at home. And when the doctor talks to his daughter, their tone is formal. No doubt, he is kind to Husnia, but that kindness is wrapped in a formality that Husnia is unfamiliar with.

In Wazirabad, however, the texture of kindness is unique to that place and its inhabitants. A rough kind of kindness sculpted by harshness of destitution and poverty. As if the more the world takes away from people, the more people are willing to share with each other. The Bonesetter reads peoples’ dreams and listens to what burdens their heart. He is like a therapist who offers his services free of charge. Aja gives Seema newspapers to practice calligraphy on. The Mason, at times a very violent man feared by everyone in the neighbourhood, speaks to Seema in a tone of respect that rarely anyone extends to a child.

Life in the wealthy part of town may be comfortable, but it lacks the messiness that weaves people’s dreams and stories together like in Wazirabad.

At times as I read, I felt as though I was rereading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where the fantastical cities of Marco Polo’s imagination all reflect in some way or another Marco Polo’s own city, Venice, and all these places of imagination lead us to a greater understanding of that magical city. The dreams and the rumours in Nothing Good Happens all merge to give us a sense of Wazirabad … but what is the essence of the city you want us to take away from the book?

I once saw a two-room house made of mud by the side of a road in northern Afghanistan. For kilometres in either direction there was nothing but rolling plains and a blue sky overhead. “Who lives here? What is life like in the middle of nowhere?” I asked myself as we drove past. I imagined myself in that adobe building. I lifted the corner of the curtain to peek at the snow in winter, listened to the wind lashing at the walls, and walked out of the narrow door into the heat of summer night. I imagined myself lying on a mattress under a window readying for sleep. But my imagination failed and I could not picture myself. An unfamiliar melancholy began to squeeze my heart.

Later, I realized that that is how a resident of New York City or London or Paris must have felt when driving past Wazirabad from Kabul International Airport.

But they never slept in the room I slept in, with the windows open and the sweet scent of senjid trees coming through the screen with warm night air. They never found themselves brimming with exaltation in a dim vestibule, about to open a letter written in a fragrant pen by a girl whose father was a spice merchant. They never experienced the slowness of days and nights where the only thing moving is time and the only sound is the sound of oneself growing old.

So Wazirabad is my two-room adobe house. And hopefully the readers will discover that life here is as rich in substance and magic as in anywhere in the world.

There’s a renewed interest in Canada in multilingual writing—perhaps fascination would be more accurate—that acknowledges and reflects the cultural and linguistic diversity of this country. I know my own creative thoughts come in several languages, and early drafts are often a mix of these languages that eventual make their way into English. Your own first language is Farsi. Did you write the book exclusively in English, or did sections develop in Farsi?

This is a great point. I read somewhere that a writer should know at least two languages. Or perhaps this is one of those things my memory is making up. Anyway, the idea is that you can travel back and forth between different linguistic universes. You allow these languages to mingle and pollinate and enrich your writing.

I wrote Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday entirely in English. But as you can see it greatly draws from Farsi and utilizes that language at every opportunity to seed, to create depth, to layer, to postpone. And I had a lot of fun doing it.

Elsewhere, you have written about how Jorge Luis Borges influenced your writing—specifically, about “The Circular Ruin” and the way in which the nested image of a biscuit tin in a Japanese picture introduced him to infinity. The challenge for you, I suspect, was how to move between spatial and temporal spheres without breaking continuity. Can you talk a bit more about that?

Yes, I referenced Borges’s “The Circular Ruin” in relation to “Let Hope Divert Them,” a short story I wrote for The New Quarterly.

Continuity to prose, however, is what beat is to music. It must exist. In what form? That is down to the author to decide. One can use discontinuity as continuity. If you start there, then the possibilities are endless.

You have pointed to many great writers—from Homer to Rabelais and Borges—who have influenced your writing in some way, but I want to push you out of that reflective look into the history of literature and turn to contemporary writing. In contemporary writing, who is doing great work, and what is or isn’t missing from fiction and other forms of literary art these days?

When it comes to reading, I am stuck in the world of the dead. It is a brilliant place, I must admit.

The little of the living writers that I read, I enjoy reading Orhan Pamuk, Anuradha Roy, Alice Munro, Colm Tóibín, and Kent Haruf—I must mention him, although he passed way in 2014. Not long ago I read The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai. It is a difficult, powerful book.

Photograph by Abdullah Tawakoli

“The harder the bookselling market gets, the quicker we learn to cater to the palate of the readers. So in the process we all start to sound the same and forget what it was that lured us into creativity in the first place: curiosity, taking risk and that reckless joy in traversing the unexplored.”

I am not an expert in literary criticism, neither do I read widely. But I do read deeply, so I might be very off the mark here as the works I sample in no way encompass the entirety of literature produced today. Still I think what we see less and less is that beautiful, unbridled madness you see in László, in Faulkner, in James Hawk, in Italo Calvino, just to name a few.

The harder the bookselling market gets, the quicker we learn to cater to the palate of the readers. So in the process we all start to sound the same and forget what it was that lured us into creativity in the first place: curiosity, taking risk and that reckless joy in traversing the unexplored.

But there is hope. You can see the above-mentioned qualities in Ebrahim Amini’s poetry. He is a poet from Afghanistan. He is modernizing ghazal, an old poetic form. While reading his work, you are grounded in the solidity of that ancient tradition, yet buoyant in the freshness of the theme and language, a cadence you will surely hear if you step out into the alleys and streets of Kabul or Mazar-e Sharif today. And above all he writes with so much heart, so much care. His poems are like taking a journey into the unknown, at the corner of each word and at the turn of every line, you are met with surprises that gladden the soul.