The Children of This Madness
a novel by Gemini Wahhaj
Pub Date: December 5, 2023, ISBN Paperback: 979-8-9877471-4-8, ISBN eBook: 979-8-9877471-5-5
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 US 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-recently widowed engineering professor Nasir Uddin journeys to America not only to see Beena and her new husband but the many former students who make up the immigrant community Beena has come to view with ambivalence. 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.
About the author
I am a Bangladeshi American writer living in the US. I wrote my debut novel The Children of This Madness as a new immigrant in the US, while I was a graduate student in the creative writing program at the University of Houston and war raged in Iraq. I am grateful to publish the novel in December of this year, in the 20 year anniversary of the Iraq war, about Bengalis living in Texas, and their complicated history with both Iraq and the US.
Praise for The Children of This Madness
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Wendy J. Fox Electric Literature
Once part of a family of five, Beena and her father are the only survivors. A bombing in Bangladesh kills Beena’s mother and middle brother; her youngest brother died as a child years earlier after a car accident when the family was living in Iraq. As Beena completes her studies in literature in Houston, she mourns for the loss of so much of her family and worries over her stubborn, aging father. In the wake of the violence that has left Beena motherless, she marries—in part because she cares for the man, but also to avoid being set up with a Bengali businessman who works for a corporation that profits from war-time conflict. As the 2003 invasion of Iraq escalates, Beena struggles to balance caring for her father, her grief, her new marriage, while wondering where she fits into it all. Told in dual perspectives from Beena and her father over decades, The Children of this Madness captures the destabilizing impact that
geopolitical forces have on actual people. Against a backdrop of loss, migration, and an exploration about what it means to find happiness, Wahhaj’s novel is unforgettable.Read more -
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni author of Independence and The Last Queen
A heartfelt yet clear-sighted novel about the gains and losses of immigration, both personal and
political, The Children of This Madness masterfully explores the fascinatingly different worlds in which a father and a daughter exist, and what happens when these worlds collide.Read more -
Nell Freudenberger author of Lost and Wanted and The Newlyweds
This extraordinary novel has the texture of lived life, with all its ruptures and complications.
Nothing in Wahhaj’s propulsive story has been packaged for a foreign audience, nothing feels
manipulated or forced. The Bangladesh she describes (but never romanticizes) is at once
sumptuously beautiful and, in colonialism’s wake, heartbreakingly corrupt. Rather than moving
in one direction and looking back with regret, Wahhaj’s nuanced characters are buffeted here and there by the convulsions of geopolitics and war, trying to figure out what it means to be at home in the world.Read more -
Antonya Nelson author of Funny Once and Bound
The elegant, twined narrative of THE CHILDREN OF THIS MADNESS offers the reader an intimate view of a complicated familial, and geopolitical, drama. I’ve always found fiction the best, most compassionate and honest resource for learning about the real world. Wahhaj’s novel is a wonderfully useful addition to my own education. I really enjoyed reading this; the author made a very complicated situation lucid and moving.
Read more -
Tanaïs author of In Sensorium and Bright Lines
In The Children of This Madness, Gemini Wahhaj weaves a moving, powerful story across
generations and continents. Through the lives of a Bengali father and daughter reckoning with
their dreams and what they’ve lost, this work is an essential new addition to the Bengali
diasporic literary landscape, one that deepens our understanding of how delicate internal
struggles come head to head with seismic historic events. As inheritors of centuries-long
imperialist, colonial power struggles, the interconnected and vividly drawn relationships at the
heart of this novel reveal to us the ways in which desires for freedom and material security are
inevitably, and tragically, entangled in the machinations of war and power. We remember by
reading Wahhaj’s work that love and memory is what remains when all else disappears.Read more -
Fady Joudah author of Tethered to Stars and Alight
Centered around the US invasion and destruction of Iraq, The Children of This Madness shows us how the Global South enters the empire or, rather, how the empire assimilates the Global South. In clear-eyed staccato style, Gemini Wahhaj insists on a humane narrative here and elsewhere. Houston, Texas represents. But Iraq and Bangladesh are essential, reminding us that there’s a world out there larger and more connected than the time-space capsule in which imperial wars exist. A fantastic novel. Unbeholden to the market powers that normalize destruction in the name of culture.
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