12 August 2026

Fiction as anthropology as auto-ethnography

Munir Hachemi’s second novel The Mulai shows us how radical literature can be

“As though viewed from the hidden side of the moon, Asia, Europe and America all find, in Japan, images of themselves profoundly transformed,” Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote. In imagining a distant planet whose human society is an inverse of our own, Munir Hachemi’s second novel The Mulai seems to have been inspired by the Straussian practice of anthropology as auto-ethnography. Its protagonist, the archaeologist Dr Cordovero, seeks to use his observations of a forgotten civilisation far from his own to ask what he can learn of himself.

The Mulai are descendants of an expedition whose original mission might have been inclined towards settler colonialism and terraforming the landscape to resemble Earth and support human life in the wake of climate wars at home. Abandoned and with food supplies dwindling, they have come to find a new way of being.

Time, on this red-pebbled planet with its distinct weather cycles, is measured in moons. The Mulai relate to one another in threes, forming trinomials, and they conduct marriage, birthing and death ceremonies that are a distant echo of our own. They repeat their prayer in three: “The tree comes, the tree comes, the tree comes” – and worship an entity called the Dog. There are growers, gaoshars (storytellers) and a scriptorium where pieces of text and composition are rearranged, shredded and added to. Anthropological accounts of these findings are arranged in the book like mathematical sequences. Hachemi introduces other voices and texts – academic references as well as perspectives from the Mulai themselves – and sense is constructed among these shifting sands.

We are introduced to characters who have broken away from Mulai norms, who take voyages big and small, away from their thermo-regulated domes to “the Temple”, where one Mulai, Faida, embarks on a translation project. Hachemi is interested in the figure of the outsider, whether writer or anthropologist, who sits apart from their community – but creative insight often arrives from a more active participation in shared experiences. Faida’s work, once she tries “engaging in small talk, mirroring the other person’s laughter and everyday gestures, turning all these rituals into metaphors for her translation”, becomes much easier. There are thoughtful and generative asides here – on etymology and morphology, on Chinese calligraphy, on AI, on humour, on shitting and pissing, on our underlying assumptions of sex as penetrative, on the notion of diaspora.

Dr Cordovero observes: “I’m unsure if the Mulai are familiar with the concept of literature. If by literature we mean the complex cultural mechanism that exists in our societies, then no, I believe they are not; but if we mean the playful or hedonistic use of language, then yes, they absolutely are. When they perform their dances; when they sit in a corner and mutter words, letting themselves be swept up by them and then arriving at new words that will either be passed on to the community or else vanish in a matter of minutes.” In this spirit of collaborative meaning-making, the six opening epigraphs of the novel read like a group manifesto, swerving from the structuralist theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and Ursula K Le Guin’s collectivist grammar, to Borges and – less well known in the English-speaking world – Rafael Pinedo and Juan José Saer.

The novel’s translator, Julia Sanches, deftly imagines her own creative practice into the work, upholding the fictional architecture of the book via footnotes and becoming a character within the novel – all of which points to the subtle power dynamics and hierarchies implicit in the publishing of a text. We wonder what has been left out or not understood, the spaces lurking in the text’s many redactions and ellipses.

Faida’s translation, entitled The Domes We Do Not See, is revealed, finally, joyfully, to be a reworking of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Faida has “grasped only some parts of it”, according to a fictional academic source, “or… all of it but not in the same way that we do”. It echoes our own experiences of reading Hachemi. Through Faida and Sanches, Hachemi frames reading, and writing, as a source of delight – an active, anxious and deeply transformative ritual of connection. It is a hopeful vision of what literature can look like.