What a Wonderful World: The White Mosque: A Memoir by Sofia Samatar (2022) hasn’t actually been on my TBR for very long; I just couldn’t wait any longer! I’ve been a fan of her poetic prose since reading her 2013 novel A Stranger in Olondria.
“A pilgrimage has a trajectory: the end is already known. But I’m interested in the randomness of movement. More than just interested: I’m desperate.”
The title of the book references the whitewashed church of a nineteenth-century group of Mennonites, who followed their leader to Uzbekistan, where they settled to await the return of Christ which their leader had predicted for 1889. Samatar, whose mother is Mennonite, began to research this fringe group and their long journey; the memoir begins when she is on a tour of Uzbekistan, but it’s not only about the trip, it’s also a thoughtful reflection on her own past and identity, a mosaic of history and memory. And, the best part, unexpected connections and insights along the way.
The tour was organized by a Mennonite group, so as Samatar writes of the associated memoirs she’s researched for this trip, she intersperses times when their guides read sections of the same memoirs aloud on the tour bus. This results in a vivid overlay of the past over the present. The historic travelers, leaving Russia because they were no longer protected from the military draft by the tsar’s decree, travel doggedly across the desert, knowing that the government of the place they want to settle does not want them but heading their anyway. There is epidemic illness, and the death of their children from disease and hardship; they are attacked and cast out by soldiers; they endure having their crops destroyed and their houses robbed, even a murder. Even after their prophet was proved wrong, more than once, and lapses into mental illness, they stayed until cast out. Their journey was harrowing and didn’t improve much after they settled, but it’s a compelling narrative. The contrasts with the comfortable tour bus and a valley that was desert in the past, but now is crammed with irrigated crops, throws their travails into sharp relief. I felt I understood Mennonites more, as when Samatar points out the determined pacifism of the “Bride Community” under attack, and the pain of separation when some of the community acknowledge they cannot stay, and depart for new lives in America.
I know this is not the cheeriest book, yet at the same time it’s clear-eyed, thoughtful, and compelling as she thinks on communities, being part of communities, and being being broken from them. Some of the chapters are very short, more like meditations spinning off from the previous section of narrative. It feels poetic, which makes sense, as Samatar is also a poet. I loved this book, and recommend it highly; for me, it resonated with today as well as with the past. “In the collective will to harmony, personal failings are subsumed, caught up, stripped of significance, transformed into music. From this inside, this concord feels like grace. It only hurts if you’re outside.”
If you’re an audiobook reader, a friend highly recommended the audio version, which is read by the author herself.
An excellent interview with Samatar at the Chicago Review of Books.