In Sofia Samatar’s latest book, The White Mosque, the author and James Madison University professor weaves stories from her life together with histories of a group of Russian Mennonites who migrated to what is now Uzbekistan. Ak Metchet, which means “white mosque,” is the name of the Uzbek village that was settled by 19th-century Mennonites known as the Bride Community, followers of a false prophecy of the second coming of Christ, their bridegroom. This eponymous mosque serves as an engine for wide-ranging explorations of identity, home, and belief, sparked by Samatar’s curiosity about the story that Ak Metchet might have become known as such because of the whitewashed church the Mennonites built there. It may be a mosque that is a church that is a village (that is now a book)—but that is just one telling of it.
From this central troubling of language to the vast unknowability of our lives, the author wonders, “How do you know whether you’re on a pilgrimage that will foster wholeness or just aimlessly roving?” Aboard a bus called the Golden Dragon, rumbling across Uzbekistan with other tourists on a Mennonite history tour, taking part in a very literal pilgrimage, Samatar puzzles the ways we build a sense of self and how we embrace community and history. “We are inhabited by archives, steeped in collective memory, permeated with images and impressions, porous to myth,” she muses. She examines the imprecision but also the joy that these stories and their imperfect language and interpretations afford us, probing the intersections of present and past, family and faith, Muslim and Mennonite, all juxtapositions reflected in her own life.
The child of a Somali Muslim who married a Mennonite missionary from Nebraska, Samatar recounts, “How often I’ve been told I’m false, impossible, unreal. Somali and Swiss Mennonite: no one can make it work.” She grapples with a “magpie existence,” cataloging her experiences as a child, a mother, a novelist, an academic, and someone whose life was inexorably shaped by beliefs she no longer adheres to. A person whose body was perhaps never fully accepted as part of the religion that is, to some, also an ethnicity, a white identity that overlooks the majority of contemporary Mennonites of color around the world.
Still, to think of The White Mosque as her memoir is to oversimplify and flatten, to overlook the light sparked by the conjunction of her own experiences with those of the 19th-century Mennonites. Rather, this is a speculative memoir, a multi-genre mosaic, and an outgrowth of Samatar’s other published books of speculative fiction, most notably her previous book, Monster Portraits, a fantastical yet autobiographical collaboration with her brother. A past finalist for the Italo Calvino Prize, her fabulist experimentalist style in fiction, now adapted to the nonfiction form of The White Mosque, is transcendent, a feat of transmogrification by means of poioumena, a work of metanarrative about the process of writing, which simultaneously transforms the act of reading into one of pilgrimage—or roving, albeit with aim and exuberance.
In her extensive research, Samatar traces the history of Mennonites, whose pacifism has led them to be “people leaving their homes time after time,” and for whom martyrdom is a prominent theme (see also the popularity of a “guess the martyr” game that the author played at Mennonite youth retreats). She tells of encountering Ak Metchet in a history class, forgetting it only to later encounter the story again in a photograph, which in turn motivated her to undertake years of research before and then again after the pilgrimage that forms the backbone of The White Mosque. She reads and re-reads the accounts of the pilgrims as well as the subsequent histories written about them. She finds in them the unerring faith of believers, and “language to shift the breath.” Samatar makes the choice to retell the past in the present tense, twice over, through the Bride Community pilgrims’ experiences, but also her own pilgrimage, which takes place in 2016. She inserts refrains back to previous sections, simultaneously echoing songs sung in a round and the process of working through a thought aloud, uttering words until the phrase has the intended mouthfeel.
Samatar often references other works; fragments of novels, biographies, poems, and songs seep in to create fractal re-imaginings, doggedly asking: “How do we enter the stories of others?” As readers, we are immediately alongside and, at last, fully immersed in this inquiry.
“To be very close to the very foreign is one definition of haunting,” writes Samatar, and The White Mosque is a vivid, feverish haunting that is alive with the same “historian’s alertness to those small details that clarify the past” that the author appreciates in her research. It makes her own book a captivating and compulsive read. A different writer might have concluded by framing the pilgrimage experience as life-changing, a dramatic moment of becoming, of self. Instead, Samatar squares off with this narrative expectation, naming it and then putting it aside: “I thought it was the promise of integration, of seeing myself as one, of finally claiming emphatically I Am, but instead I saw them, those others, how variously and chaotically They Were.” In the end, it feels like a vital reminder that the search for wholeness, for self, is never undertaken in solitude, is always informed by our communities, our ancestors, and the stories we inherit about them—just as much as the future will be informed by the stories we tell about ourselves.
