In conversation with Mahmud Rahman
In the 1970s, Nigeria is flush with oil money, building new universities, and hanging on to old colonial habits. Abeer Hoque is a Bangladeshi girl growing up in a small sunlit town where the red clay earth, corporal punishment and running games are facts of life. At thirteen she moves with her family to suburban Pittsburgh and finds herself surrounded by clouded skies and high schoolers who speak in movie quotes and pop culture slang. Finding her place as a young woman in America proves more difficult than she can imagine. Disassociated from her parents and laid low by academic pressure and a spiraling depression, she is committed to a psychiatric ward in Philadelphia. When she moves to Bangladesh on her own, it proves yet another beginning for someone who is only just getting used to being an outsider - wherever she is.
Arresting and beautifully written, with poems and weather conditions framing each chapter, Olive Witch is an intimate memoir about taking the long way home.
Abeer Hoque is a Bangladeshi-American writer and photographer based in New York City. Her first book of fiction, The Lovers and the Leavers, was published by HarperCollins to critical acclaim. She also has a book of travel photographs and poems, The Long Way Home. She lives in New York City.
Mahmud Rahman was born in Dhaka and came of age during the upsurge of the late sixties that led to the creation of Bangladesh. During the 1971 war, he was a refugee in Calcutta. In his adult life, he has mostly lived in the U.S. A resident of California, he writes fiction, essays, and translates Bangla fiction into English. He is the author of Killing the Water: Stories and the translator of Bangladeshi novelist Mahmudul Haque’s Black Ice. He has completed a first novel, The Fiction Factory, set in contemporary Bangladesh and centered around themes of violence, image making, and propaganda.
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