An archaeologist travels to a distant planet to spend time among a mysterious community, a people who live in temperature-controlled domes, worship a deity called Dog, and repeat an elliptical phrase from which they draw their name: mulai, the tree comes. The descendants of a long-forgotten space mission, the Mulai have abandoned the social norms that once bound them to Earth. Over centuries of isolation, their language has become more about change than stability, and the ways they eat, write, reproduce, bury their dead and understand gender have all transformed into something almost unrecognizable. As the archaeologist records his attempts to understand their world – a strange negative of our own – questions of translation, meaning-making and the ultimate precarity of civilization come to the fore. Drawing on Borges, Le Guin and Calvino, The Mulai is a mind-bending work of metafiction whose interlocking puzzles resound with Munir Hachemi’s singularly playful and eclectic style.
‘A meditation on the mutability of identity and language … wild, insightful and impressive.’
— Publishers Weekly
‘Hachemi is a skilled, imaginative and versatile writer, capable of shifting between academic vernacular and poeticism…. [W]hen the pieces fall into place, the results are gratifying.’
— Fonie Mitsopoulou, Literary Review
‘In The Mulai, Munir Hachemi conjures a mythic future history with all the heartbreak, mystery and absurdity of truth. With cheeky brilliance (and with translator Julia Sanches as a hovering ghost-in-the-machine presence), Hachemi co-opts the tropes of ethnography and intergalactic colonialism to imagine a queer, eschatological Eden, where culture is story and story is an alchemical compost pile of language decomposed and recomposed.’
— Anne de Marcken, author of It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
‘A beguiling tale of Otherness that is not only a translation from another language but another planet, a story told so well that every familiar word feels as new as an alien horizon.’
— Anton Hur, author of Toward Eternity
