“The White Mosque: A Memoir” by Sofia Samatar
If reading is one of the more intimate encounters between two strangers (author and reader), then the reading of a memoir is one of the most captivating of those encounters. Unlike autobiography, which commonly depicts the passage of a life in a relatively linear, at times even dispassionate, narration, memoir is an invitation from the memoirist to the reader to enter into select, discrete moments in the span of the author’s life, moments that the author has determined have particular significance and consequence.
The memoirist may or may not recount such occasions chronologically, so that the memoir unfolds like a tapestry of the expanse of a life, threads and fabric intertwined and interwoven, occasions and episodes connected and overlaid with other memories and recollections. As a result, memoir is necessarily subjective, and speaks with a particularly emotional voice, exposing a vulnerability in the author who is entrusting the reader with confidential reflections and private insights. The reader, in turn, as a guest along the journey of memory, is obliged to honor those shared reminiscences, howsoever layered, accepting that the memoirist is recounting episodes as they have been authentically remembered and as they were personally experienced. A memoir curates such an expressive perspective on a life that its intermingling of intimacy, emotion, and sincere reflection, along with anecdotal narration, can offer any reader a literary experience that excites the imagination, inspires the heart, as well as enthuses the intellect.
One of those remarkable memoirs is “The White Mosque” by Sofia Samatar, an award-winning author of novels and short stories who is currently a professor of African literature and Arabic Studies at James Madison University in Virginia. Samatar was raised in Indiana as a Mennonite, a sect within the Anabaptist Christian denomination that began in the 17th century under the visionary leadership of Menno Simons, a former Roman Catholic priest who joined the expanding Reform movement in early modern Europe.
In accord with its founding tenets, Mennonites are committed to absolute pacifism (for which they have suffered persecution over the centuries) and “living simply.” Samatar admits to a moderate kind of observance of her faith as an adult (she describes herself as a “secular” Mennonite), yet her religious affiliation fully contextualizes her memoir. In 2016, Samatar, along with a company of other Mennonites, undertook a kind of “pilgrimage” to Central Asia, having been inspired to explore more about an extraordinary yet commonly deferred chapter in Mennonite history, sometimes identified as the “Great Trek”.
It is a story familiar to many religious traditions. In the 1880s, a self-appointed Mennonite prophet and fervent spiritual leader from Prussia, Claas Epps, Jr., persuaded a community of primarily Dutch-German Mennonites to travel with him to Central Asia to await the advent of Christ the Messiah, whom Epps had prophesized would return there in 1889. The band of disciples became known as the “Bride Community” and the struggles, hopes, and devotion the members committed to their leader’s prophetic visions create the frame and context of the memoir’s narration. Samatar and her fellow “pilgrims” follow the historical pathways and linger along the transient settlements of the Bride Community throughout the vistas and landscapes of the southern Central Asia, including the fabled Mennonite settlement of Ak Metchet, the “White Mosque”, in Khiva, Uzbekistan. The Muslim-majority local population so named that particular Mennonite village because each building — houses, the school, the church — was painted in a memorable shade of white.
In radiant prose, Samatar beguiles the reader into the worlds she encountered during her pilgrimage in Central Asia by conjuring in delicate prose sensate experiences from her travels: mysterious yet kindly faces peering out from aging, sepia photographs; iridescent blue domes cascading along a valley floor; trilling nightingales and skimming blackbirds saturating the air in a misty evening; felt-covered yurts; tawny wheat fields, and dusky stretches of desert. There are poignant descriptions of encounters with local people, pensive men and shy women offering tea and conversation; good-humored merchants keen to display resplendent, hand-woven rugs, and farmers singing ghazals in the fields and along rocky paths, and throughout, the fragrances and flavors of Central Asia pervade the memoir: dishes of sweet- spiced raisin rice; bowls of translucent honey; plates of sweet melons, mulberries, grapes and olives, and sprigs of basil.
Yet the journey of 21st-century Mennonites was for Samatar more than a review and recollection of a strange but compelling chapter in Mennonite history; rather, it became for her an opportunity of remembrance and reflection of her own life as well, discovering in the story and events of the Bride Community resonances with her own. So, for example, just as the followers of Claas Epps, Jr., came to recognize themselves as a cultural, religious and racial minority in the Eastern, Muslim-majority, Asiatic world in which they settled, so Sofia Samatar, in recounting the stories of the Bride Community members, quite naturally comes to reflect on her own displacement (her ‘magpie’ existence) and, on occasion, ‘outsider’ status, throughout her life: as a Mennonite of mixed race (her father was a Somali convert from Islam to Mennonite Christianity and her mother a Swiss-German Midwesterner with a long family connection to the Mennonites); as a bookish, shy child who dreamed of Tolkien- designed worlds inhabited by elves and wizards, while enduring the reality of a typical American high school; as a media scholar and accomplished writer within a religious community that has historically frowned upon literary and artistic production other than with religious intent.
As Samatar describes each portion of her pilgrimage, she discovers echoes of and connections to her own life, and invites the reader to read long the intricately bound threads of a human life with other human lives, interweaving her life to Sufi spirituality to the films of Irene Worth to the novels of Gertrude Stein to Central Asian cinema to the poetry of Langston Hughes to the experiments of early photography. Samatar’s memoir is a bountiful cornucopia of generational relationships, spiritual landscapes, artistic creativity and visionary enthusiasm, and so becomes a passionate — and absorbing — meditation on identity, meaning, beauty and belief.
June-Ann Greeley, Ph.D., is Professor of Languages, Literature and Catholic Studies at Sacred Heart University. She is trained in classical languages and literature and Medieval Studies, specifically late antique and medieval theology and literature, religious and intellectual history, and classical/medieval (Latin) poetry. Dr. Greeley translates and interprets late antique, Celtic and medieval Latin theological and literary works and explores late antique and medieval spirituality, including the literature of medieval women, medieval mystics (Christian and Sufism); sacred art and architecture; medieval and modern Celtic authors; the emergence of Islam in medieval Europe; Dante Studies, and global medievalisms.
