The Children of This Madness

By and
Friday, March 15, 2024 | 6pm to 7:30pm
 
25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Room 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan
 

 
In The Children of this Madness, Gemini Wahhaj pens a complex tale of modern Bengalis, one that illuminates the recent histories not only of Bangladesh, but America and Iraq. Told in multiple voices over successive eras, this is the story of Nasir Uddin and his daughter Beena, and the intersection of their distant, vastly different lives.
 
As the US war in Iraq plays out a world away, and Beena struggles to belong to Houston’s tiny Bengali American community—many of whom serve the same corporate masters she sees destroying Iraq—recently widowed engineering professor Nasir Uddin journeys to America not only to see Beena and her new husband but the many former students who make up the immigrant community Beena has come to view with ambivalence. With subtlety, grace, and love, Wahhaj dramatizes this mingling of generations and cultures, and the search for an ever-elusive home that define the Bengali American experience.
 
 
Wahhaj will be joined in conversation with Tanaïs, author of In Sensorium: Notes for My People, and moderated by Prof. Chaumtoli Huq (CUNY School of Law).
 

Author Bio

Gemini Wahhaj is the author of the forthcoming short story collection Katy Family (Jackleg Press, Spring 2025). Her fiction is in or forthcoming in publications including Granta, Third Coast, Chicago Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Prime Number Magazine, Allium, Zone 3, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Apogee, Silk Road, Night Train, Cleaver, Concho River Review, Scoundrel Time, and Arkansas Review. She has a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she received the James A. Michener Award for fiction (judged by Claudia Rankine) and the Cambor/Inprint Fellowship. She is Associate Professor of English at Lone Star College in Houston.


Tanaïs is the author of In Sensorium: Note for My People, winner of the 2022 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, and the critically acclaimed novel Bright Lines, which was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize. They are the recipient of residencies at MacDowell, Tin House, and Djerassi. An independent perfumer, their fragrance, beauty and design studio Tanaïs is based in New York City. They are currently working on their forthcoming novel, Stellar Smoke.