Fiction by Munir Hachemi translated by Julia Sanches, reviewed by Luke Shuffield
MUNIR HACHEMI WALKS THE LINE: THE MULAI IN THE MIDDLE

We know dystopian literature when we see it. Utopian, likewise. But is there wiggle room somewhere in the middle? What do we do with tall tales of our fellow humans going about their business in ways totally alien to our own, perhaps in ways that shock or disgust or frighten? Can the shape of a story appear to us both beautiful and ugly? 

This dangerous walk — not across a thick slackline that stretches inches above the ground, but between skyscrapers without a balancing rod — is what Munir Hachemi attempts in The Mulai. The novel, a slim little thing (171 pages) published by Coach House Books, sprints headlong through a narrative likely to either entice or rage-bait, depending on one’s predisposition. I confess that I land somewhere near equidistance, perhaps as Hachemi intends. There is much here to merit effusive praise, to be sure, but I maintain cautious reservations. The Mulai is a firecracker fantasy with scintillating prose and a titillating premise, but this tightrope treatise of linguistic adventure and cultural polemic may step sideways just enough to wobble. 

What is this “Mulai?” Is it a language or a people or something else? We’re told it’s all of the above, literally translated as “the tree comes” (and in fact, the book’s Spanish title is El árbol viene). A forgotten race of the descendants of terrestrial astronauts, marooned on a distant planet and cut off from their ancestral home, the Mulai and their selfsame language reconcile sci-fi and literary fiction. We’re bludgeoned with worldbuilding, though robust and strikingly coherent: ionizing radiation, the loudhailer, the scriptorium, the Dome, the Voyage, the Temple. Hachemi gives us glimpses of facts about the Mulai and their historical origin, progressively revealing just enough as we go. Those space-faring settlers abandoned their colonial mission, wrote a Libertarian Codex, established a fully independent civilization, and eschewed as much Earthly tradition as possible. Their progeny forgot their humanity startlingly quickly (in a couple of generations) and eventually came to regard their ancestors as gods, as the plural-within-singular honorific, “Dog.” Dog delivered “containers” of supplies for a while, and “wolves” (robots) tend the various machines on the new planet. The Mulai people now await the coming of the tree, the eschatological fulfillment of unspecific prophecy. Their world is enchanted and submerged in myth. They adapt to adaptation itself; change becomes their constant. 

The Mulai language evolved to the point of complete departure, and the calligraphy of glyphs became a strictly collective act (a characterization of writing that Hachemi cites in his Acknowledgements). It’s unique in both writing and speech, logogrammatically glyphic and accompanied by gestural signs, respectively. We’re treated to embedded examples of the former — sprawling geometric connections that resemble Mandelbrot sets or chemical compound notation. The level of creative detail, particularly linguistic invention, emits a whiff of Tolkien, albeit hyper-abbreviated. The overwhelming sensation one gets from the work is a hunger, like that of the archeologist, to learn more, to be immersed, to “get” it. With each little morsel of background context or verbal illumination, I felt a deep admiration for Hachemi’s imagination and a drive to keep reading. Like all great fiction of similar length, I respected the completeness of the project while wishing it lasted longer.  

We begin and end with the work as a hybrid mash-up of etymology and anthropology. Julia Sanches’ translation from Hachemi’s Spanish to our English is successful in its deliberate transformation. The chapters dance from third-person accounts to the first-person field journal of an archeologist named Dr. Cordovero, and the latter bears substantial footnotes “from the English translator.” These are not simple fourth-wall interjections of clarification, but substantive signposts. While they do remind us that we are not reading The Mulai in the original, they’re also making the case that the resulting English is a species of its own. We find explanations of wordplay and vocabulary (lobo, hacer, ser/estar, ordenador) that this archeologist’s text weaves in its Romance language, but the equally fictional translator is named as the real-world Sanches. There are layers to this that become nearly comical. Towards the end, a chapter opens with the acknowledgement:  

Excerpt from the journal of one of the first Mulai 
Translated into Mulai or invented in Mulai, or both, by Faida, 
Re-translated from Mulai into Spanish by the Archeologist 
And translated into English by Julia Sanches (141)

Yes, yes, we get it. We’re embedded here in a metatextual game of telephone. Translation is a radical act. The structure itself takes the form of argument. One almost thinks of John Barth’s “Menelaiad” and its tumbling, playful strata of nested quotations. Hachemi, you’re a clever one. But what’s it all for? Why are we here? The author answers us: “Only when we encounter the other can we truly see ourselves” (36).  

Ah, so is Hachemi nothing more than this Cordovero, sent to report back to Earth, bumbling through the documentation of cultural confrontation? I submit that the novel actually forces the reader to become the archeologist while the author assumes a far subtler role, one which the Mulai call “gaoshar,” the community’s solely designated shamanic storyteller.  Cordovero is unreliable and commits downright malpractice in his ethnography, while Hachemi steps back and examines the history of the Mulai, somehow, both dispassionately and passionately. 

This is the tightrope-walk that eventually becomes as exhausting to observe as it undoubtedly was to write. Midway through, we’re treated to a chapter of Mulai fables, one of which I offer in full here, as it’d be a disservice to summarize or truncate it:

There was once a young gaoshar who wished his stories were written on paper. No one took him seriously, but he insisted on telling everyone that his stories were excellent and deserved to be put down on paper. One day he heard the voice of Dog summon him to the Temple. There, Dog told the gaoshar that they had another mission for him: instead of telling stories, he would dedicate his life to turning a crank that emitted a beautiful, monotonous sound. And so it was that the gaoshar spent the rest of his days turning that crank. Whenever some trinomial arrived, they would laughingly ask him to tell them a story, but his hands were occupied. Some saw him cry. As amused as the Mulai were, it was serious business: they couldn’t select another gaoshar while the current one was still living. Luckily, it didn’t take him long to die, turning the crank round and round by the grace of Dog. (88)

This passage gently reveals what Hachemi considers the “true calling” of the writer: the Sisyphean pushing of a boulder (or “turning a crank”) while everyone else is amused at best and possessed by pity at worst. Pity for the court jester, the village idiot, the old coot crying in the corner. Hachemi is confessing their own struggle — the futility, the frustration, the resistance that ultimately acquiesces to fate. I feel their pain. 

There is more here than scientific observation. Besides Cordovero’s confessionals, much of the story unfolds through the trials and tribulations of three Mulai women: Flukeh, Faida, and Sheipa. These characters occupy different times and narrative positions, and all leave their mark on the lives and legacy of their people. By driving the plot from the radical perspectives of particular females, Hachemi provides a more intimate look at a sociocultural environment that has already empowered them collectively (alien, indeed). The females of the Mulai society in general are matriarchal “carriers” (those capable of pregnancy), while the males are explicitly second-class: “everyone agreed it was a shame to be endowed with a penis” (63). Sex in general is completely divorced from procreation—all insemination is strictly artificial; vaginal penetration is the ultimate taboo, and the family as such does not exist. Sexuality is fluid, polyamorous, and often casual, depicted crucially in “trinomials” instead of couples and public orgies in place of private affairs. This carefree, hallucinogen-fueled, Woodstockian revelry ultimately proves too seductive for the archeologist to resist, but are we really meant to follow his lead?

Watch your step.

All this liberation and exploration might be well and good (while transgressive), if not for a particular scene of blatant pedophilia that ruins the entire vision of a peaceful and accepting sexual culture, with outright violence masquerading as harmless mundanity. There is no handwaving or dancing around the severity of the act; the archeologist himself (as adoring of the Mulai culture as he is) recoils when he witnesses it: “At first I felt nothing; then I was overcome with a disgust so intense I nearly vomited” (49). In the next breath, however, he proceeds to explain it away as non-sexual or even “didactic.” 

The author is similarly wishy-washy. The following is a response they gave to an interviewer when asked if the world of the Mulai is, indeed, utopian: 

Quizá en esa supuesta utopía podrían darse cosas que ahora mismo nos parecieran  negativas, como por ejemplo el incesto. O las relaciones sexuales con menores. En la novela no hay relaciones sexuales con menores como tal, pero no hay un concepto de  mayor de edad.¹

Hachemi’s explicit claim that the scene in question does not precisely rise to the level of “relaciones sexuales con menores como tal” is, quite frankly, equivocating in my view. So, too, is the hedging use of “parecieran” and the shrug-of-the-shoulders admission that the Mulai have no “concepto de mayor de edad.” If Hachemi primarily intends for us to perceive The Mulai as anything approaching a futuristic dream of freedom, this event destroys the effort. 

Or does our humble gaoshar, this weaver of compelling fireside stories, rather intend to subvert our expectations and remind us that no culture, however intriguing, is ever above reproach? We must include ourselves in that admonition, of course. As Cordovero notes, “It’s often said we access new concepts through their resemblance to those we already know” (12). 

Hachemi continues in the same interview:  

No quiero que el lector esté cómodo leyendo. No quiero que piense “esto es una distopía” ni quiero que piense “esto es una utopía.” ²

This follow-up — that they intended to present the Mulai as neither clearly utopian nor clearly dystopian — is fine, and maybe they have accomplished that objective. However, I cannot fully shake the feeling similarly evoked by Aldous Huxley’s Island, the lesser-known utopian follow-up to the dystopian classic Brave New World. In that vision of Huxley’s, the children of a blessedly sheltered civilization are sexualized too, all granted some flagrant coronation of consent that real children are incapable of giving. Could that middle ground Hachemi aims to explore be naught but deceptive quicksand? Is the author deft enough to make it across? 

The tension between communality and individuality is another arena into which Hachemi confidently steps. Much of this push and pull manifests in the following or breaking of rules, and the Mulai (free as they may seem) have plenty of strictly observed rules, both large and small.  There’s the aforementioned vilification of the act of copulation, which can turn even a consensual encounter into a forbidden violation. They have a laundry list of sacred rites, place-based procedures that everyone knows and recognizes as culturally essential. A boy relieves himself away from the designated waste disposal system, provoking consternation and scolding. Beyond the habitable zone of the Dome, the “Brabat” are a race of exiled Mulai, withdrawn, cast out to the lesser domelets, who have lost the ability to speak. Divorced from society, they literally cannot communicate anymore. Faida wonders about the Brabat, “Were they also Dog’s creatures?” (37)

In certain moments, we suspect the obfuscation of commentary through the lens of genre-craft, like Faida’s observation of doors in the Mulai Temple, an extant architectural remnant of the astronauts’ colony: “‘Dog is obsessed with boundaries,’ she thought. With difference” (96). Right, so the Individual as such is an alienating golem of late capitalism, and we’d all be better off if we forgot the concept entirely? But then, the named women all redirect the course of the Mulai through their rugged and determined individualism, their courageous innovations and expeditions, away from all they’ve known for the sake of pure curiosity and discovery. Flukeh authors the “First Amendment” to the Libertarian Codex and says, “‘Beliefs… set boundaries that are also a map of the world’” (137). Faida recovers an astronaut’s copy of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and becomes obsessed with translating it. Sheipa “couldn’t shake the fear that… her noncompliance with Mulai rituals, could cost her everything she’d longed for” (117) and sets off.

So the communal values and rules of the Mulai are not immune to the very adaptive freedom they claim to treasure. Singular members of the race can become Great Women and merit dedicated chapter titles in an historical chronicle. The very existence of an historical account for these people is radical in its own way. Once again, Hachemi appears to be doing something more interesting than we may first suppose. 

So we have a utopian dystopia (or dystopian utopia) in which the intense subversion of familiar societal mores, combined with the indomitable human spirit that survives centuries of evolution, creates invigorating and fascinating collisions between people and ideas. Very well. I maintain a marked distaste for the apparent diminishment of the victimization of children, and while I appreciate Hachemi’s indication that the Mulai have their flaws, I would’ve respected a starker stance far more. The issue is too important, too precarious, for side-stepping. Now, are we to believe that something like the Mulai civilization is fatalistically certain, that our future will resemble it, whether we instinctively recoil from it or not? In the archeologist’s words: 

It gives us pleasure or suffering to imagine other possible worlds, but we should just accept that these worlds are inevitable, because our world is already another world that, like the tree, is coming, is always on the verge of arriving, is everywhere. (160)

Maybe we can rely on the avatars of the female Mulai characters to save us, to remind us that nothing is set in stone, not even change for the sake of change. And as for getting lost in the labyrinths of language and the futility of translation: the Mulai tell Cordovero, “misunderstandings are what allow us to communicate” (115). 

Embark on the treacherous path that Hachemi has laid before you, and you might just reach the other side. 

The Mulai, written by Munir Hachemi and translated by Julia Sanches, was published by Couch House Books in July 2026.