Interviewing Premee Mohamed

Hellooo!

This week I’ve reviewed the excellent fantasy novel The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed which gives us a unique fantasy world, a very unique duo of characters and explores the horror of war in a very refreshing and much needed way. It was a pleasure to invite Premee back to the blog to discuss this book and what else lies in store for 2024.

How do you like to booktempt people into reading The Siege of Burning Grass?

I like to tell people “Well it’s an anti-war novel!” and wait as they process the fact that I haven’t said “It’s a war novel.” (Because, as I keep suggesting, every war novel is inherently an anti-war novel.)

We are so used to active warriors and resistance fighters in our fiction but in Alefret we get a pacifist as our lead character. What drew you towards Alefret as a character?

I think it was the appeal of trying to write a story in which the main character is participating in a story of his own, while all around him a completely different, much larger-scale plot is trying to progress not only without him, but with him as a barrier, or even an antagonist. So, to warmongers, who’s the ‘bad guy’ in a war? Not the enemy—but someone who refuses to fight. Maximum difficulty, maximum resistance, and maximum conflict simply by centering the story on someone who is not fighting the forces that be, but is still operating on his own agenda, which makes him a kind of immovable obstacle.

In Siege one character talks of writing a book that shows only the good side of war. Is this something you wanted to challenge how many genres handle this subject?

It was a little dig, yeah. It wasn’t hard for me to present Bunny as an out-of-touch aristocrat who actually thinks war can be a good thing (like some of the upper-class, military family members in my novella ‘The Apple-Tree Throne’). To me there’s an inevitable recognition that any so-called ‘glory’ or ‘honour’ that’s supposedly possible in war comes from either skill in murdering people, or in ordering other people to murder people. (Or torturing, abducting, imprisoning, starving, enslaving, colonizing, etc etc etc. These are not skills anyone should be proud of.) I just cannot see how anyone presents war as a positive act, or even a necessary act, in fiction, without getting so black-and-white (“The other guys are literally not human! It’s okay to kill them!” “It had to be done!” “Only death solves the problem!”) that it seems almost a parody. And of course that’s how you do see a lot of war writing, particularly from real historical people: imperial pomp and pride, manifest destiny, the excitement of colonizers who are waging war to increase their holdings, not killing people ‘like themselves.’ I wanted to get as far away from that as possible in ‘Siege,’ but I really could not resist shining a light, for a second, on people who think like Bunny. 

We are used in fiction to know one side may be worse than the other but, in this novel, we also discover that both Varkal and Med’ariz empires are both not the greatest of places. How hard was it to ensure no side could be taken?

I wasn’t really doing it deliberately; I think it just came out of trying to make both sides as complicated as possible for the characters, if that makes any sense? Sometimes I want to write stories where characters find a clear path from the start to the end, but in this case I wanted their routes to twist and turn and narrow and be impossible to see or trust, and to have people realize that some of them were in the same story and some would have to branch off onto other paths. I just wanted complication, complication, complication, obscurity, difficulty. So both sides have to have good things and bad things, to be making decisions that seem to have good or bad motives, to be telling stories that make them look good or bad and can’t be verified. In fiction we’re supposed to think something like “Orcs vs. elves = cheer for the elves, because orcs are OK to kill (brutish, animalistic, horrible, not people.” I wanted readers to at least briefly consider the other option, which is “People vs. people = look someone very much like you in the eye and decide whether you can murder them or not.”

Alefret gets a shadow in the form of Qhudur our fanatical soldier. How did he evolve, and did you always know how we would turn out as the story progresses?

I came up with Qhudur exactly alongside Alefret, I think… someone who not only represents his side but represents war itself, killing itself, and is just so aware of this and so proud of it, that you know instantly that there’s something wrong with him and exactly what it is. He’s the barrier to the barrier to war: Alefret. He’s the enemy of the enemy. He takes his responsibility very seriously and he was chosen for that because he already had that personality. I always knew he was going to end the way he did, but I wasn’t positive, almost till I was writing the end, exactly how that was going to look in terms of the events of the story. I think what eventually cemented his fate was that I happened to write ‘Siege’ in chronological order, and right around the time I was about to hand it in, the Ukraine-Russia invasion happened, and all of a sudden I was surrounded by the news stories, images, statistics, interviews, photos, podcasts. I was writing an anti-war novel during a war. And I kind of thought: What do I know about Qhudur’s personality, how would he react during this? That gave me the last insight into his character that I needed for the end. He seems one-dimensional because fanatics always are. They are proud of existing in that single dimension.

Many of your stories explore survival in the face of someone with greater power – a dictator, inter-dimensional gods and demons and here the apparatus of war. What brings you back to this theme in your work?

Partly I think it’s realism—none of us, here in the real world, has much power. We’re making choices in our lives every day that are so, so limited, and the reason they’re limited is because real people in power, often people we put in power, have taken away the other ones. We can move only so far, or only so drastically, along so many axes, before we’re snapped back into our tiny boxes by the forces controlling us. Money, time, security, health, safety… whatever it is. We don’t have control over so much of that. So in fiction it always feels natural to me to say: survival is the number one goal, over everything else, explicitly rather than implicitly. And partly I think it’s an important element of horror that seeps into much of my writing even when I don’t think (as in this case) that I’m writing a horror story: what do you do when you do have to fight, but against an opponent that you know you can’t defeat? It’s already removed your agency and autonomy; you’re reacting practically on an animal level now. Core of so many horror books, horror movies. You fight back using whatever you have, and maybe that’s not enough, maybe everybody dies at the end. It’s the fighting that matters. It’s that we don’t have a story if people simply lie down and tell the slasher “It’s okay, you can kill me.” To me that’s fiction’s greatest trick: making us feel that fighting for survival is the best we can do, but to preserve our own lives, to want to preserve our own lives, is worthwhile and noble.   

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more in this time of weird social media?

I have three more books out in 2024! There’s ‘We Speak Through the Mountain’ from ECW Press, which is the sequel to my 2021 novella ‘The Annual Migration of Clouds.’ There’s also going to be a mini-collection including a new novella entitled ‘One Message Remains’ from Psychopomp, and a novella from Absinthe Books, ‘The Rider, the Ride, the Rich Man’s Wife.’ I’m also going to be doing talks for the Bocas LitFest, When Words Collide, Cymera, and more cons and festivals. It’s going to be a busy year! I’m pretty lax on my newsletter (oops) but I try to keep my website updated, so that’s one good way to keep up — www.premeemohamed.com. I’m also on Bluesky most of the time these days (social media is weird) and my handle is my website.

What great books have you read recently?

I really loved Simon Jimenez’ ‘The Vanished Birds,’ a beautifully written, imaginative, intensely emotional space opera! I think that’s the best book I’ve read this year. I’m already dreaming of a re-read. I also enjoyed Isaac Fellman’s ‘The Two Doctors Górski,’ a super dark academia novella. I wished it were ten times longer but it’s like a perfect little gem at its current length.