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In the winter of 2016, in a classroom on the ground floor of the English department where I teach, my colleagues and I gathered to hear Sofia Samatar give a job talk for a tenure-track teaching position. The classroom had once been part of a large indoor pool, specifically the shallow end, whose only remnant now was not the smell of chlorine but the gradual slope where we sat in tiered rows of seats with Samatar standing in front of us, in the deepest part of the room.
It was no ordinary academic job talk. Instead, we found ourselves in the hands of a gifted storyteller, inviting her audience into a remarkable true tale. A faded black-and-white photograph popped onto the screen, a building in a bare yard. But what was this building? At one time, Samatar explained, it was a church, part of a Mennonite settlement in Central Asia. Muslim country. The locals called it “the white mosque.” In the late 1800s, Mennonites trekked there from southern Russia, following a trusted zealot named Claas Epp, Jr., who promised his people the Second Coming of Christ in this spot on the map. Many followers and their children died along the way. The implications were startling. The photograph and Samatar’s storytelling hummed with histories buried beneath all we cannot see from the surface, and how, when we scratch that surface and begin to ask questions, we might confront the strangeness of the stories we tell ourselves in order to make up a life with purpose.
The White Mosque: A Memoir, now out in paperback, is a 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist and winner of the Bernard J. Brommel Award. Earlier this fall, as Samatar traveled to universities and bookstores to talk about her memoir and her new co-authored book, Tone, we corresponded over email.
Erica Cavanagh
Let’s begin with the title. What does The White Mosque as a title and a place mean to you?
Sofia Samatar
On the surface, the meaning of the title is quite simple: “the White Mosque” is a translation of Ak Metchet, the name of the village in Uzbekistan where a group of Mennonites settled at the end of the nineteenth century. My book tells the story of my 2016 trip to Uzbekistan to research this history, and the title reflects that. But the thought of a small Christian village called the White Mosque—it’s also complex and strange.
There are a couple of different stories about how the village got its name. The first one I heard was that the village was named after the Mennonites’ whitewashed church: to the local population, largely Muslim, the church was a white mosque. I love the way this image layers different faith traditions together. I was drawn to this history because of my own background—my family is Mennonite on one side, Muslim on the other—so I found the idea particularly arresting and powerful.
Erica Cavanagh
Near the beginning of the book, you write that you’re used to being told your different identities can’t be combined and describe your own identity as “the shattered self.”
The shattered self is such a striking image. How does a shattered self happen? I’m thinking of a line from Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, where the narrator says, “My mother wants me to lead a readable life.” Is a shattered self another way of saying one is not readable? That one doesn’t fit an established or recognizable type?
Sofia Samatar
I love that quote, and that book! Yes, in some ways it’s a question of legibility for me, rooted in the experience of growing up as a mixed kid in the 1970s. People used to ask me, “What are you?”
Of course, there are many forms of shattering, many ways to feel unreadable or unreal. Some people are regularly questioned and singled out for how they look, how they dress, their accent, their gender expression, and so on; but others experience alienation without standing out in any particular way. People can be shattered by exile, the breakup of families, illness, even the passage of time. I think there’s a level at which everyone is shattered.
Erica Cavanagh
It seems the journey you undertook was in part an effort toward piecing together a mosaic of shards that are both personal and part of larger, scattered histories. I’m interested in which parts of the research and writing process put you closest to what you call “the perception of wholeness.” And why is the word perception important to you as opposed to leaving it as wholeness?
Sofia Samatar
The word perception is important because the wholeness is not real! Not for anyone. I went on this journey to research a Mennonite village in a Muslim khanate hoping to achieve a sense of wholeness, searching for a way to feel less scattered and strange. And I found all these figures from the past who lived multifaceted, unpredictable, undisciplined lives. The Mennonites who settled in Central Asia, who learned to speak Uzbek and Tajik. The Swiss traveler Ella Maillart, roaming the mountains in the 1930s, smoking her pipe. Langston Hughes toting his gramophone and records around the country, writing poetry, publishing The Weary Blues—the first American book in Uzbek translation. I mean, is this wholeness? It seems more like an openness to new experiences, to change, that makes simple wholeness look not only impossible for humans, but undesirable. I have to say it’s not something I’m looking for anymore. And that’s a direct result of writing this book.
Erica Cavanagh
From your answer, it strikes me that a mosaic, too, offers a perception of wholeness. In the writing business, creating a narrative mosaic runs counter to many editors’ manuals that advise “edit toward a single main focus”; “don’t have too many subjects.” The White Mosque doesn’t abide by these rules. Alongside the story of your modern-day bus trip to Khiva, your book also pulls in meditations on Western photography’s role in eugenics, the remarkable medieval astronomer-ruler, Ulugh Beg, and actress Irene Worth, to name a few. You’ve recovered a library of forgotten histories and put them in book form.
The assembly of these different pieces, you write, reflects your “magpie condition.” In the midst of your journey your relationship toward this state of being changes: “The magpie condition, I realize suddenly, is not only about moving toward the apparently insignificant detail, it’s also about moving away from the main idea.” Tell us more about the importance of moving away from the main idea.
Sofia Samatar
Yes, I did want to include many different subjects in this book—I was convinced they all belonged, and it felt important to me, a sort of antidote to the shattering, to bring all these stories and scraps of history together. And as I worked on the manuscript, the notion of moving away from the main idea took on a political energy for me. The book became dedicated to the small and the obscure, as opposed to the grandiose schemes and terrors in the history I was writing about—Stalinism, Nazism.
But the writing process was harrowing. At one point I had all these quotes and anecdotes on index cards—about two hundred of them, I think. And I would just sit there shuffling and rearranging these cards. For hours, days! In a conversation with a friend, I called it the Nightmare Tarot. I hesitate to recommend this method!
Erica Cavanagh
I’d love to hear more about the “magpie condition.” How did you arrive at that term? What about the magpie’s way of being in the world resonates with you?
Sofia Samatar
It’s the combination of impulsiveness and deep interest, I think, that appeals to me in the idea of magpies stealing shiny things. This is not an accurate description of the bird, by the way! It’s folklore. But I love the image of these fleet and curious creatures, always drawn to some new flash of light. Magpies are thought of as collectors, too, and I’m an avid collector of quotations, stories, and unusual or foreign words. I have a lot of sympathy for these mythical birds who are so easily enchanted—and, of course, ever distracted from the main idea.
Erica Cavanagh
Writers often think of themselves as outsiders who make a home out of language. Do you think of language as a home, of books as homes, or is there another term you’re drawn to for describing the process of writing a book?
Sofia Samatar
I tend to think of writing as a space, as a practice that opens a space or landscape. So yes, it can be a home. It’s a technology for transforming time into space: you begin by living and thinking, days pass, you write, you distill the thoughts and experiences of your days in writing, and in the end there’s this object, a thing that occupies space, a book. You’re really generating two kinds of space: the physical space of the page, and the dreamscape the reader enters when reading.
Is this my home? Probably!
Erica Cavanagh
You reflect on the danger of being at home, too, of being too comfortable in one’s sense of home. You quote Theodor Adorno, for example, the half-Jewish philosopher forced into exile during the Nazi Reign, as saying, “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” Tell us more about how you were exploring that idea in The White Mosque.
Sofia Samatar
This idea of Adorno’s is very helpful for thinking about one’s relationship to a place. It points toward the danger of becoming too stable, too convinced of belonging. In studying the Mennonites in Central Asia, I was looking at people who were in search of a home, wanderers and migrants who sometimes crossed borders illegally, and who were eventually deported by the Bolsheviks. It’s a story that connects in many ways to contemporary conflicts over land, to how people can be victimized by borders. To not be at home in one’s home, I think, is to maintain a certain lightness toward a place, to keep the borders porous, to allow others to enter and exit.
Erica Cavanagh
This has been a particularly prolific period for you. Your collection Monster Portraits, a collaboration with your brother, the artist Del Samatar, came out in 2018. Then The White Mosque in 2022, and this year your book-length essay, Tone, a collaboration with Kate Zambreno, will be out in November, and your novel The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain will be out this spring.
What’s inspiring you these days? What kinds of questions and phenomena keep calling to you as a writer?
Sofia Samatar
I think a lot about genre. I write both fiction and nonfiction, and I’m always dreaming of ways to bring them together. The White Mosque was my attempt to write a memoir that feels like a novel, with embedded stories, a large cast of characters, and a combination of first-person and third-person storytelling. Of my forthcoming books, two are nonfiction and one is science fiction: Tone, a study of literary tone in collaboration with Kate Zambreno, just came out, and I have a book about writing, Opacities, arriving next year, as well as a science fiction novella called The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain. So I’m still working in different genres, but always looking for ways to deform them, to nudge them toward one another. The nonfiction books perform a kind of theater, playing around with voice and persona. And the fiction is deeply grounded in my daily life as a scholar and teacher, though it’s set on a ship in outer space.
I guess I’m still looking for my genre, which lies somewhere between fiction with footnotes and an academic essay with too much personal information. Along the way, I’m endlessly inspired by reading. I love myths, meditative essays, stories about struggling writers, off-kilter biographies, narrative poetry, quirky treatises on any subject, fairy tales, huge digressive novels, books that feel like someone’s private notebook, and anything about angels, robots, or ghosts.
NONFICTION
The White Mosque
By Sofia Samatar
Catapult
Published October 25, 2022
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