When Jamil Jan Kochai, M.A. ’17, was 12 years old, he visited his parents’ native village in the Logar province of Afghanistan. It was a transformative experience for Kochai, who tapped into his memories for his debut novel, 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019). Part adventure tale, part coming-of-age journey, the book follows adolescent Marwand as he embarks on a trek to find the family guard dog who has escaped. He recently spoke with °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê×ÊÁÏ¿â Davis Magazine editor Jocelyn Anderson about storytelling.
How much of this story is based on true events?
A good deal of it. It came from this memory that haunted me for a long time. Back in Logar, I also had a contentious relationship with a guard dog named Budabash. One day he also somehow got out. We went out searching for him, but it got to this point when I got scared because we’d gotten so far away from the house. I stayed under a tree and waited for my cousins to come back. I ended up waiting for a couple hours. I remember the sun was setting, the village was darkening, the fields and the trees took on this beautiful hue that I can still see to this day. I kept wondering, what would have happened if I had kept going on the journey?
Was it important to paint your own picture of Afghanistan with this book?
Definitely. My time in Logar was one of the happiest times of my life. Logar is in this river valley nestled between huge surrounding mountains. It’s very lush, with a lot of trees and fields and streams. It’s a side of Afghanistan that I thought really never got shown in media back home. So for a long time, my desire was to show another side of Afghanistan, a more complicated image and all the beauty that the country has to go along with the very real political issues that are still very present there.
How did °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê×ÊÁÏ¿â Davis play a part in the development of the novel?
I went into my very first workshop there and turned in the short story, which ended up being the beginning of the novel. I couldn’t really get ahold of it, and it kept getting longer. After the workshop, every single person [told me] it wasn’t a short story, it was the beginning of a novel. That was almost a really frightening experience for me, because I went into the program with the intention of writing a short story collection. So I thought about it and I ended up coming to the decision that it was in fact the beginning of a novel. And so the whole development happened through these workshops. I ended up having the first draft [of the novel] as my thesis for my M.A. at °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê×ÊÁÏ¿â Davis.
What’s next for you as a writer?
I was finally able to get to my short story collection that I was intending to write at Davis. I spent the past two years at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and while I was there, I’ve been able to write a bunch of stories. Most of my work, to some degree, ends up circulating back around this little village in Logar where my parents came from. But I tried to broaden the settings as well, so I have stories that are set in West Sacramento, in Kabul — and at °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê×ÊÁÏ¿â Davis.