Gemini Wahhaj is the author of The Children of this Madness (7.13 Books, 2023) and Katy Family (Jackleg Press, 2025). With a sharp wit and a reassured voice, her writing is raw and unflinchingly honest. It was a pleasure to interview her about her writing journey.
Nabilah Khan: Your debut novel, The Children of this Madness was published in 2023. Can you describe your publishing journey and any challenges you faced in telling your story?
Gemini Wahhaj: It’s funny that you ask about The Children of This Madness, because I still live in the memories of my first novel. I was incredibly lucky that 7.13 Books published it. That opened my publishing career. Now I know that if I write more books, they will be published. I had an incredible journey with it, with lots of support, lots of readings, invitations to speak, and I thoroughly enjoyed the process. Yes, it’s everything I imagined to be a published writer! My editor Kurt Baumeister had written a novel about Iraq himself, so I think it jumped out at him out of the slush pile. Although I went to graduate school for creative writing and have many writer friends, I am an introvert, so I didn’t really know anyone in publishing. It was a huge honor and a matter of pride to be picked out of the slush pile, just on the merit of my manuscript. On the other hand, it’s my own ignorance that perhaps prevented me from trying earlier to go to publishers. I was under the impression that you had to have an agent first, but now many writers, including very famous ones, publish through small presses. The other part of the journey was that I kept changing the book, so now I still keep thinking about it, how it was originally, organically, and now it’s different.
Every time I read it, I take a pencil out, and sometimes while walking or driving I think, oh, that original beginning was correct. I think if I had advice for other writers, it would be not to seek too many opinions and edit twenty different ways every time. Just let the manuscript lie. While reading The Godfather, I was thinking how a story should start right away, and then I realized I had started it right away, with a huge conflict, but later edited it out. You can get very lost through years of workshopping. Workshops are for learning craft. You need your own eye to hone your own book and perhaps one day, a trusted editor.
There is a distinct sense of place in both your books which take place in Bangladesh, Iraq and the US. Why does place play such a significant role in the narrative?
I think place is very important in all books! Place gives the writer authority, and the reader feels grounded, and, also, place gives specificity. In The Godfather (sorry, now I’m obsessed with this book), I want to know where they go, which bridge they take, and where someone gets murdered. But for me, I also write to describe the mystery of human life. I am not very smart, so life always feels surprising and shocking, and I always think I wish someone told me things are this way. So, I’m still trying to figure out that strange experience of having lived in Iraq and then seeing that country bombed and privatized and sort of colonized although now it’s starting to heal again. Perhaps all my stories are trying again and again to figure out what that means, to have lived in a place and left it in one piece, only to look back from far away and see it destroyed. The three places are also intertwined for me because all my life in the US, the US was bombing Iraq. At one time, nobody even knew where Iraq was and then suddenly when I was in college, everyone was excited, gathered around the TV, watching bombings and cheering. Place works as a metaphor in my stories because it’s mystifying. I used to live in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, but now the place that surprises me the most is Houston. On the one hand, Houston is oil-rich and all our jobs depend on the oil economy to some extent. If oil does well, Houston does well. Our arts, parks—everything—is funded by wealthy patrons. On the other hand, Houston has experienced hurricanes, floods, and storms almost every year I have lived here, so in a way the economy that sustains us is also killing us. There are communities destroyed by pollution, respiratory illnesses, and cancer. There are other mysteries too. On the one hand, there are wealthy Bangladeshis living in the suburbs in gated communities, but we as new immigrants are not aware of the history of the place, certainly not Indigenous history, to whom these lands belonged, but also Texas was part of Mexico before, and there were historic Black neighborhoods. Houston is an odd mixture of people from all over the world: Immigrants from Central America, Africa, Asia, each with their own histories and aspirations and it’s really fascinating how the city is marked by all these different stories. I just don’t think you can supplant a story from New York to Houston, for example. If you think of movies like Terms of Endearment and Boyhood, they are marked by how life is in Houston. The same is true of Mo, which in season one, I think, was more a gaze at Houston, marking it with a different story. I also think stories are documentations of a certain time, stamped by time and place, so in a way, simply trying to write entertaining stories about Bangladeshis in Houston now, I am perhaps leaving behind an imperfect document of these times.
In both of your books, which character did you resonate with the most and why?
I think two kinds of characters: the underdog and the disreputable character. I don’t like explaining things in my stories but if I have a character nobody likes, for example, someone who shouts and gets angry, I can make them say exactly what I think. I also love having opposing characters because then they can fight it out and I can have sort of a dialectic. Often, the main character in my story is comfortable and ignorant, like me, I suppose, but it’s the people outside of those boundaries of privilege that are pushing on the story. In “Borders,” for example, Faria is a graduate student living comfortably in New York, but it’s the other two, Polly, who is the wife of an undocumented immigrant traveling to America for the first time, and Mr. Malik, the Dubai laborer, whom I care about most. I think with class and social aspirations we’ve lost our way a bit and my romance is always with the peasant, the laborer, the people who have to work hard all day every day to put food on the table for their families. Those are my favorite characters but they are never at the center, they don’t make it from rags to riches, to the center of the drawing room.
Your publisher, Jackleg Press, describes Katy Family as stories that “deliver the reality and impact of isolation, materialism, and the looming climate disaster.” Can you elaborate on this?
Katy Family is both about Bangladeshis in America, largely Texas, and Bangladeshis outside of America who dream about coming here, how America appears in their imagination. In a sense, all immigrants are isolated, cut off from their homeland, but our success also isolates. When new immigrants arrive in the US, they live in apartments, socialize with others like them, and also go out into the city and mingle with people on the street but as they become more successful, they move out, they live in big houses, inside gated communities, until they see no one else. The Bangladeshi parties are also isolating because the parties themselves are about conforming and networking and rising to success, so there is no friendship, no allyship, no commiseration for failure. I guess, for me, capitalism and isolation are tied. Capital tries to destroy communities because communities offer solace and services to one another, and capital tries to break up communities and people having things like other people and common grounds to depend on so that they depend entirely on their wage labor. Strangely, this isolation is also a big part of the upper-middle class experience. The only real relationship the people in my stories have is with work, driving to work, driving from work, as they are slowly isolated from everything else. And climate disaster defines Houston—every year there are floods or hurricanes or winter storms—although I’m sure it defines other cities as well. Think of the fires in Los Angeles recently. The ugly oil rig on the cover of the book is the source of wealth for all the characters in the book, but it’s also the mark of all their ends.
The novel or the short story: which is your preferred literary genre and why?
I love the short story. To me, a story is an entertaining thing, like gossip, that you want to hear more about, like the story of a murder or a haunting or a detective story or an affair. I also love mystery, twists and turns, something revealed at the end. Without these elements, I don’t know why I’m reading a story. I’d much rather be listening to gossip about someone I know or watching a thriller on TV. But the short story is so brief that it can deliver a good mystery without having to deliver a whole world, a whole spy set up or detective story. It’s a small mystery, yet it’s a good mystery, a good twist and turn. I want to pull my hair out when writing a novel, because I have to deliver that mystery and action through 200 or 300 pages, but in a short story, I can have a pretty action-paced story and still have the space to do what I like best, which is ruminate, reflect, gaze at something and talk about something stunning.
In her article for Electric Literature, “11 Books by Bangladeshi Voices Beyond Its Borders,” Sarah Bari states that “South Asian literature is still starting to make space for itself in western publishing. Within that niche scene, Bangladeshi narratives are often mixed up with, left in the shadow of, or perceived through the prism of literature from India or Pakistan.” What is your take on this?
You know, I was perhaps more interested in this before, but I am less so now. What I mean is, I don’t want to contribute to mapping out Bangladeshi literature. I don’t think I am writing Bangladeshi literature. I’m simply writing about human life and mystery. Perhaps in my stories the characters happen to be Bangladeshi because that’s what I have permission to write about. I really felt slightly frustrated when publicists kept seeing my book as a Bangladeshi book, an immigrant book, as if it couldn’t be more. Books aren’t tour guides to certain continents. Sarah is correct that Indian literature has taken a front seat, but even so, the capitalist big publishing game is: If one Indian novel makes it, it’s going to be the only one. So, in a way, we’re all competing with one another to be different, unique, to make our voices heard above others. I also feel a lot of competition from other voices on Bangladesh because then I feel that my books aren’t as good as others, or I’m not an authentic voice, or my fiction isn’t serious enough, but really, we don’t have to cover the same territory. I would love to go and live in Bangladesh and write close to the earth and human sweat and experience, but as long as I’m stuck here, my mind is open to other experiences and other ways of seeing the world that have changed me. I don’t think other writers have my experience of seeing what I saw, being struck by what I saw. I can’t be Showkot Ali, for example, whose writings I love, but I can take that same wisdom and cast my gaze on the dirt of the public school world in America and write a pretty gritty story about that. I don’t know if I answered your question. My ambition is to get out of being seen as a Bangladeshi writer solely. I want to be Elena Ferrante or Mario Puzo!
What does being a writer mean to you?
Hmm. I see the world in a completely different way than most people. I am so different that I’m afraid to open my mouth because people might think what I said is very strange. Stories are a way to put these ways of seeing in writing, as I cannot in any human conversation. When I write a story I put down some of this and say, see, this is the way I see, or this is what I was thinking.
Nabilah Khan is a Bangladeshi-born Australian writer based in Sydney, Australia. Her short stories, essays and author interviews are regularly published in print and online in The Daily Star. In 2024, she was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. She is currently undertaking a Master of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney and writing her first novel.
Gemini Wahhaj is the author of The Children of this Madness (7.13 Books, 2023) and Katy Family (Jackleg Press, 2025). An Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston, her work has been published in Granta, Third Coast, River Styx, Chicago Quarterly Review, Press 53, Allium, Zone 3, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review and many other publications. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston.