A Conversation with Debut Novelist Gemini Wahhaj

"I read novels because I want to become immersed in a world. I want the story to go and on so I can enter that world and believe the characters are real people."

This post is a little tardy - usually I send them out early in the morning - but both of the winter quarter courses I’m teaching are now in session, and it’s (semi-)controlled chaos here as students turn in their first papers and our discussion boards are festooned with bons mots. (That was a lot of “b”s for one sentence!)

This evening, I’m excited to share with you Bengali novelist Gemini Wahhaj’s and my interview about her debut novel, The Children of this Madness (7.13 Books).

Gemini and I worked with the same editor at 7.13, Kurt Baumeister, and we had a chance to do an event together at Village Well Books in Culver City, CA a few days after her publication date this past December. She took the time recently to answer for Bookish some of the questions we discussed on that day.

For a quick summary, I’m excerpting the jacket copy here: In The Children of This Madness, Gemini Wahhaj pens a complex tale of modern Bengalis, one that illuminates the recent histories not only of Bangladesh, but America and Iraq. Told in multiple voices over successive eras, this is the story of Nasir Uddin and his daughter Beena, and the intersection of their distant, vastly different lives.

As the U.S. war in Iraq plays out a world away, and Beena struggles to belong to Houston’s tony Bengali American community—many of whom serve the same corporate masters she sees destroying Iraq…with subtlety, grace, and love, Wahhaj dramatizes this mingling of generations and cultures, and the search for an ever-elusive home that define the Bengali American experience.

Published just last month, December 5, by 7.13 Books

Christine/Bookish: The Children of This Madness is told from two different points of view. Some chapters are in first person and some are in third. Would you tell us a little about why you decided to vary narrators and POVs?

Gemini Wahhaj: I was writing a large story with many characters that takes place over the course of a half a century. In each chapter I told a small story, carrying urgency and immediacy in the moment, to pull the narrative forward to its next point. I would choose whose story would advance the story best, which event, and which perspective. The story is about an idealistic Bengali boy, Nasir Uddin, who wants to grow up and pursue his dreams and make something of himself, do great things, sort of like the hero of the Apu trilogy by Satyajit Ray (based on the novel Pather Panchali by Bibhutibhuson Bondopdhyay). So it is a story of a romantic hero.

But in a chapter narrated by the woman Nasir Uddin marries, Rahela, we learn that she experiences him quite differently. I really liked the contradictions that came out of shifting perspectives, the way life is, that each person in our lives experiences us differently. Rahela is an ambitious, spirited young woman with big dreams of her own, but her daughter Beena experiences her simply as a dowdy, middle-aged woman and nagging mother. Writing this novel, I was drawn by the contradictions and gaps, showing the same character from different people’s experiences.

Gemini Wahhaj

CS: If I’m not mistaken, you began this novel when you were a Ph.D. student in creative writing at the University of Houston in 2003. How has it changed over time?

GW: I wrote the novel when I had just come to America. I wrote it fast, perhaps over two months. The chapters came easily, lyrically, almost seeming to flow out of me. I was telling the story of Bangladesh, through the perspective of an idealistic, romantic young man. In the twenty years since then, I have understood the challenges of writing to an American audience.

My American readers wanted an American angle, a dual narrative that would include characters and a plot set within America. The novel changed drastically in revision. I had to rethink the material in terms of what I wanted to tell an American audience. For example, this novel changed to include America in the story.

One of the main characters, Beena, lives in America and is trying to find a way to live here permanently, so the novel in some ways is about the irony that the children of the Bengalis who fought for an independent nation are now striving to become American citizens. Now that is central, the question of citizenship, what it means to be an immigrant in America. The book changed drastically, almost completely, in story structure and even language from where I had started.

For example, in writing the chapters set in Iraq, I felt that I was much more political and historical, stressing the brief period of an independent and thriving nation before global politics brought war and suffering. But I still miss the novel I wrote. Much like learning to assimilate as an immigrant, you lose the stories you wanted to tell in the first place, i.e. who you were before.

CS:  I’m impressed by the scope of The Children of This Madness—you cover more than 60 years of Nasir Uddin’s life and all of Beena’s. What were the biggest challenges of writing a novel that spans six decades and more than one continent?   

GW: Honestly, it wasn’t difficult at all. The chapters came naturally, organically, and I was completely and romantically immersed in this world while writing this manuscript. I love to read fat novels that were first published in installments. I become immersed in that world and in those characters, as if they are real people. I had that same experience writing my novel.

In each chapter, I was immersed in what was happening, and in that character’s experiences. I had a clear arc and a sense of the outline, but it wasn’t as if I had to plan it out in an intellectual way. Revising was much more difficult when I had to insert a dual narrative and balance out chapters so that I alternated between Beena and Nasir Uddin.

The biggest challenge was to suddenly impose a new structure on the novel, writing new chapters, and then super-imposing the alternating chapters. I felt quite lost for years trying to track the flow of each plot and how the two narratives interacted with each other.

I also had to come up with a whole story set in America. That was only possible after I’d lived in America for twenty years, because by then I had a lot to say about the experience of living in America, and I was ready to tell a story set there.

And yet, the arc was always very simple and straightforward in my mind. On the one hand, the romantic young Bengali man Nasir Uddin is full of hope and dreams for his country. He moves away from superstition and ghosts and djinns toward science and progress, bringing electricity to his village, but the logical progression of his dreams is that his children and his students all end up in America pursuing the dream of becoming American citizens. His daughter Beena is trying to make a life in America, and she is desperate for her father to join her, making her dream complete.

But when he gets to America, both their dreams fall apart. The contradiction between the aspirations of Bengalis pursuing independence and dreams for their nations on the one hand, and the Bengalis of the twenty-first century, whose greatest success is to become citizens of Western countries, becomes painfully clear.  

CS: What are we to make of Beena’s feelings for the young Bengali engineer Khaled? I wanted to know more about this wrinkle in the story. Was he an actual rival to Roberto, Beena’s husband, in her heart of hearts?  

GW: Hmm. I want to say this is a romantic story, so that more readers want to read it. But I honestly couldn’t bring myself to feel in a romantic way about either Khaled or Roberto, perhaps because I couldn’t imagine an immigrant’s life in America as being romantic? I know this is very cynical of me, and I apologize. My own experience of living in America has been just being lost and confused about where I am and how to live here. I ended up staying in America because I got sick and I believed the only place I would be safe was here. I have made so many friends and received so much love and support, and I have enjoyed so many aspects of life here, but, overall, the experience of being an immigrant is one of overwhelming loss and confusion. I think that is why Beena can’t make up her mind about whether she wants to marry Khaled or Roberto.

She hardly knows Khaled, but she wants to think that by marrying a Bengali man, she would be able to hold on to some of the romantic attachments she has to her homeland, although Khaled himself feels no connection to Bangladesh. And Roberto is her dear, beloved friend, so one would think that it would be easy to fall in love with him, but I think that because he is not Bengali, he represents to her a final break from living as a Bengali woman, and therefore it is difficult for her to fall in love with him.

I think when we fall in love, our notions of romance are tied to notions that we inherit from birth or absorb from culture. My ideas of romance are firmly rooted in old Bengali cinema and novels, which is very provincial of me. Also, I think in the old days, people believed in structures and traditions, and we don’t believe in those things anymore.

My favorite romantic stories are Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. But already, by the 1920s, Age of Innocence, House of Mirth, and Ethan Frome are so much more cynical about love and romance.

CS: Meals and cooking are frequently described in this novel. Was this decision due in part to a desire to evoke a sensory response in your readers as much as possible? 

GW: I think food is a big part of Bengali identity. Bengalis think about food and prepare food all day. I have been reading a lot of Bengali fiction, and I was surprised to see that food is very important in Bengali novels as well. It was important for me in any scene to describe what people were eating. It was just natural and organic. I have heard that sometimes South Asian writers use food to make their work appear exotic, but I had no such ambition. I think for me food was an important signifier.

For example, Nasir Uddin is from Jessore, where winter is associated with the harvesting of dates. Villagers drink date juice and make a variety of sweets using date juice. And so much of people’s lives are about rivers, fishing, cooking fish, eating fish, and ghosts who come to fishermen looking for fish.  

CS: You write short stories too and have a collection, Katy Family, coming out in 2025 from Jackleg Press. Do you prefer writing stories to writing novels?  

GW: I love writing short stories. It feels like a very specific, very high art form. I would write a novel to describe a more complex world and tell a much more complicated story, like the story of a nation, a historical event, or a very complicated experience, such as the experience of being an immigrant and raising children in America.

I read novels because I want to become immersed in a world. I want the story to go and on so I can enter that world and believe the characters are real people.

Author bio: Gemini Wahhaj is associate professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Zone 3, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Apogee, Silk Road, Night Train, Cleaver, and Concho River Review, among others. She has received the James A. Michener award for fiction at the University of Houston, and the prize for best undergraduate fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, judged by Philip Roth.

An excerpt of her young adult story “The Girl Next Door” was published in Exotic Gothic, Volume 5, featuring Joyce Carol Oates. She was senior editor at Feminist Economics and staff writer at the Daily Star in Bangladesh. Other publications include prose in Scoundrel Time, Chicago Quarterly Review, Arkansas Review, Allium, Valley Voices, and the Raven’s Perch.