Hayat spoke with poet and author Sofia Samatar about her unique background, writing style, and latest book, The White Mosque.
FM: You have a very unique background. How have you related to your heritage over time, and how has that changed in your life?
I do have a pretty unique background. My dad was Somali and my mother is an American of Swiss-German Mennonite background, so it’s pretty rare. I think there are like 6 of us, and one of them is my brother. It’s not a common combination.
I was born in 1971, so in this country, even just mixed marriages were not really common when I was a kid. They just hadn’t been legal everywhere in the country for very long. So growing up, I was very confusing to many people. People were always very confused by me, like…”what are you? Where did you come from? What’s going on?”
So I grew up with a feeling of being somebody who’s really strange, and really an outsider. But over time, I’ve changed my perspective on that. In fact, my memoir, The White Mosque, was a big part of my change in perspective. What I came to see through writing that book is that it’s not just me; everybody has a very complicated heritage. People sometimes think that their heritage is simple, is just one thing. But there are so many connections between people over space and time, so many migrations, so many movements and connections that really, everyone’s heritage is complex.
F: What elements of your heritage have influenced your writing the most?
That’s actually a really difficult question to answer, because when I think about influences on my writing…what I’m writing is influenced by what I’m reading. I’m influenced by a lot of different writers, and I read very widely so what I’m reading is not tied to my heritage. But in terms of the content of my writing, it definitely hasn’t been completely consistent. So I have a lot of stories with characters who are Somali-American, Somali immigrants, I have stories with characters who are Mennonite…I have all kinds of combinations or riffs of that, like characters who are Ethiopian Mennonites. Because my degree is in Arabic Literature, there’s also a lot of influence from Arabic literature and culture as well.
So it definitely comes into my writing in terms of the regions of the world and the cultures that interest me, which then come out in the characters in my stories.
F: What was the process for writing The White Mosque like? How did it differ from your previous work?
Oh, it was so hard. It was really hard.
It’s different from my previous work in a lot of ways. First of all, my previous work is all fiction, and The White Mosque is nonfiction. But moreover, my previous work is all speculative fiction, it’s all science fiction and fantasy. It’s in a made-up world or in the future. The White Mosque is in the here-and-now. Everything in it, to the best of my knowledge, is something factual, something that happened. So that was a big difference, it was a project that took about seven years, and that’s because there was so much research involved, especially because the area of the world that The White Mosque is concerned with is not an area of the world that I knew anything about beforehand.
In the book, I tell the historical story of these Mennonites from southern Russia, now Ukraine, who migrated to central Asia in the 19th century and settled in a village in what is now Uzbekistan. When I started this book, I didn’t know anything about Uzbekistan, almost nothing about Russia, just the basics. I don’t speak the languages. So it was a really intensive research process for me to really learn about this story and learn about the cultural context of the time. And then in 2016, I went to Uzbekistan for two weeks, doing a Mennonite heritage tour. We actually followed the path of these people from the capital into Khiva Which is now a province, but at the time was its own city. So that then became the real material of the book, the structure of the book is based around that trip; you open the book and I’m there.
F: What are some elements you find yourself going back to in your writing, in any medium? Is there consistency?
I’m always interested in something new, I’m always interested in something different, so I would have said there’s no consistency. But recently I had a conversation with another writer, her name’s Amina Cain, one of my favorite writers. We’ve been friends for a number of years and she knows my writing very well, and she said to me: I think of you as a writer of the epic. And I thought, “wow, maybe there’s something to that.”
Because my first novels are epic fantasy novels. They’re big stories, with lots of characters, people traveling over these wide spaces and interacting with different cultures. In that case, the cultures are all made up, all came out of my head. But then when I look at a book like The White Mosque, even though it’s nonfiction, it does have some of those Epic qualities. It’s a big historical canvas, people migrating, different cultures and languages meeting, and a lot of different elements are combined into the same story. I think that process of taking a large view that has space for including so many kinds of experience, different traditions and ethnicities. That’s definitely something that I see as consistent throughout my work.
FM: Are you working on anything now?
I am! I am going to have a couple of books coming out in the near future. One of them is called Tone, it’s a book about literature, a nonfiction, critical work. I would call it experimental literary criticism, in collaboration with my friend, writer Kate Zambreno. It’s about tone in literature, trying to discover exactly what tone is. That’s coming in Fall 2023.
In Spring 2024, I have a new work of science fiction coming out. It’s a novella, called The Practice, The Horizon, and The Chain, and it’s about a university in outer space.
Check out more from Sofia Samatar on her website.
