Not Just Another Day
- By Jim Hicks
It is not, of course, every day in the life of an editor that an unpublished work arrives on one’s desk (or, these days, on one’s screen) that—from its opening lines to its last—is already irrefutable, both necessary and sufficient. Though I’ve been at this job for (do you remember that scene from the Herzog film?) “a little long while” now, it has in fact happened, well, precisely once. That day was the day I first came across Tabish Khair’s new novel, Just Another Jihadi Jane. A good day.
Earlier this week, the Massachusetts Review published a long excerpt from this novel as the sixth number in its e-book series, Working Titles. That was a good day as well.
Even after a mention of only the book’s title, you will understand that in this case the stakes are as high as they get. Khair’s story tells of two British-Muslim schoolgirls, the daughters of recent immigrants, who leave England to join the Islamist cause in Syria. In this world today, and on our shores in particular, the question of so-called “radicalization”—and the superficial, instrumental form of religious extremism often misnamed in this manner—echoes daily through the claustrophobic chambers of those social gathering places we call new media. That the behavior spawned in such forms of religion is as superficial and rootless as it is violent is a key theme of Khair’s work, and one more reason for reading him.
Given that this tale is told in first person, one may (and indeed should) wonder why a male author has chosen to write his fiction from a female point of view (or, for that matter, why an Indian immigrant in Denmark is writing from a Northern British p.o.v.). I do believe the bar is (and should be) higher for such an endeavor than it would be for a more straightforwardly autobiographical tale—just as it would have been had a non-Muslim chosen to write about Muslim identity. When you add an extra twist and spin or two to your Olympic competition high dive, it makes it tougher to cut through the water without an excess of splash.
Yet I also believe that the truth we find in a novel of this caliber is more essential than than the chatter of chat rooms, the jargon of journalists, and even the analyses of academics. You see, fiction really is one of the few things I do believe in, unreservedly and unashamedly. To put it as simply as possible, I believe that fiction may be the only way we ever get out of our skins, and that it may even be the only way to save them.
Obviously, this is one tall tale about a relatively short novel, and so far I’ve given you no reason at all to trust it. So imagine how pleased I was the other day to hear that I wouldn’t have to—and that ipse dixit in this case would win the day. And since we’re speaking of the present day, I won’t, of course, point you to a proof by Pythagoras or an argument of Aristotle. Instead, I’ll just cite a few lines from arguably the single most influential voice in contemporary Indian letters—a winner of India’s Padma Shri award just after he turned fifty—Amitav Ghosh.
Like many authors with readers in different markets across the globe, the novels of Tabish Khair often come out at different times, in different editions, in different places. With minor editorial differences (including a somewhat shorter title), Just Another Jihadi Jane is already out in India, and it will also come out in the UK roughly a month from now.
Readers in this country, however, must for now remain content with the eighty-or-so page extract the Massachusetts Review has just made available, and then somehow hold their breath until October, when the full novel will at last be published in the US by Interlink Books.
And so, ten days ago, when Amitav Ghosh tweeted that Khair’s new novel is a “must read,” I assume that every right-thinking person on the subcontinent rushed right out and bought the book. A few days after that, the great man followed through with a full review of Jihadi Jane on his blog. This review begins by simply stating the facts:
“Rarely has a novel seemed as timely as Tabish Khair’s Jihadi Jane. As the title implies, this is the story of a radicalized young British-Muslim woman who goes to Syria to join the jihad. The narrative is presented as a first-hand account, recounted to the writer by the protagonist, Jamilla. The form is ingenious: it circumvents all the problems of plausibility that such a project might otherwise have entailed.”
From there, Ghosh develops one essential theme in particular—that Tabish Khair’s experience as a university professor allows him to “grasp, as few have done, that the processes of studying and reading, and the successes and failures of various forms of pedagogy, are central to contemporary fundamentalism.”
My own encomium to Khair’s novel must end by confessing a certain degree of embarrassment. An additional claim that Ghosh makes—that “The setting of the novel is not so much Syria as England, the country in which its principal characters have come of age”—is indeed both insightful and essential to understanding the novel as a whole. Nonetheless, our Working Title excerpt is centered instead on the transition of Khair’s protagonists from England into Syria: we felt that, in order to do the full book justice—and also to give you a work that stands on its own—we needed to offer a microcosm of the novel’s macrostory.
And yet, though our focus does differ somewhat, readers of the first pages from Khair’s novel make available in the US will surely end in agreement with Ghosh’s final words on the subject: that “Jihadi Jane [is] a uniquely insightful account of a phenomenon that, for most of us, almost defies comprehension [. . . .] This powerful, compelling, urgent novel succeeds in being compassionate towards its principal characters without flinching from the full horror of their choices.”
Jim Hicks is Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review and the author of Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013)
