Jonas Hassen Khemiri's The Sisters: A Swedish-Tunisian journey through family curses, secrets, and the search for home

“I first heard Evelyn Mikkola’s voice in my head five years ago,” recalls Jonas Hassen Khemiri from his office in a co-working space in Brooklyn, New York.

“I was on my way to a meeting with my publisher in Stockholm, and I saw her on the subway, and normally, when you start imagining you can see your characters, it’s a good sign.”

The 46-year-old Swedish-Tunisian author, playwright, and creative writing lecturer has just concluded a whirlwind US book tour for his latest novel, The Sisters.

It is the first time he has written a novel in English; his previous five books were all in Swedish. Jonas tells The New Arab that when his protagonists — the Mikkola sisters Evelyn, Anastasia, and Ina — spoke to him, it was in English.

“The sisters were very clear about the fact that they would not give their stories to me unless I wrote them in English,” he smiles.

“And as you know, you can’t fight your characters. If you do, there are consequences. They always win.”

The result is a 638-page novel charting the lives of Evelyn, Anastasia, and Ina, who are brought up by their Tunisian mother, a carpet saleswoman called Selima, who is estranged from their Swedish musician father.

While Selima is out trying to sell hand-knotted rugs, the eldest sister, Ina, acts as a surrogate mother to the girls — the responsible, practical sibling.

Anastasia, the youngest, is the free spirit who dabbles in drugs, pulls all-nighters, and lives out of a room in an artist collective.

Finally, there is Evelyn, who subverts all the tropes about the ignored middle child; in a room full of strangers, she never fails to make herself the centre of attention.

Selima believes they are under a family curse — that everything they love will one day leave them — which is why they never stay in one place for long, constantly moving from town to town and school to school.

As her mental health declines and her behaviour becomes increasingly paranoid and erratic, this instability strains the sisters’ relationship with their mother to the point that they all eventually move out.

The real Jonas behind the pages

The novel’s chapters rotate between the third-person limited narrative of one of the Mikkola sisters and the first-person narrative of the male protagonist, whose name is… Jonas Hassen Khemiri.

Jonas first hears of the Mikkola sisters as a young boy and befriends Evelyn as a teenager. Across the decades, his life repeatedly crosses paths with theirs.

It is not just their shared Swedish-Tunisian heritage that draws him to them; he senses something more, hinted at by his parents, who allude to a shared history between Selima and his Tunisian father yet refuse to reveal the details.

When Selima inevitably moves the sisters again during their teenage years, Jonas becomes obsessed with finding out how Evelyn is doing — not the obsession of a lover, but something else he cannot quite put his finger on.

As the Mikkola sisters go on a research trip to New York City and Evelyn goes missing, it is Jonas who helps find her — and it is Jonas who helps the sisters break their family curse.

Ultimately, his connection to the sisters is revealed, and they find a sense of home in each other.

A quick look through the real Jonas’s public Instagram account reveals that events that take place in Jonas’s chapters mirror events in the author’s life — photos of the real Jonas with his long black hair, working as a receptionist in New York City; a snapshot of Jonas hanging out with his Tunisian grandmother in Jendouba; a dedication to his late father, who sold watches, fixed broken TVs, and drove subways.

So, is The Sisters semi-autobiographical? Are the Mikkola sisters real? What is truth, and what is fiction?

The blurring of what is personal memory and what is fiction is, Jonas says, all part and parcel of his work.

“Very often, there is a Yunas [Jonas] character in my work. Rarely is it 100% me. Often, it’s some version of me. But the interesting thing is to try to see what happens to that Yunas character. If you look at him — how he has changed over these 22 years — he is never the same. He keeps changing. So maybe part of my literary project is to try to remind the reader — and myself — that you can never trust that name.”

Upon reflection, what makes The Sisters so immersive is the way in which each of the novel’s seven parts covers a shorter period of time.

This, alongside the short chapter length, makes the 600+ page novel devourable in the same way one might order a triple-patty beef burger — doubtful they will be able to eat the whole thing, only to wolf it down in minutes.

The secret behind this structural choice, Jonas explains, is that it mirrors the way time seems to pass more quickly as one gets older.

“When I was writing The Sisters, I had a strong feeling that time accelerated. I asked myself what that would look like on the page," he shares with The New Arab.

"As writers, we tend to think that plot is the most powerful tool in driving a novel. I come from a different perspective. I like to ask how we can think about structure in a new way,” he says.

Journeys of identity

Beyond its structural brilliance, The Sisters offers a chance to reflect on the author’s complex cultural identity. 

Since its release, Jonas has been celebrated for his talent as a Swedish novelist. Yet Western literary reviews seldom acknowledge that, in addition to being a Swedish writer, he is also a Tunisian writer.

This aspect of his identity may be overlooked, particularly given the growing appetite among Arab readers in the diaspora for English-language Arab literature.

“I’m not sure what my identity is at the moment,” he reveals.

“I was born in Stockholm. My father is Tunisian. My mother is Swedish. I’ve lived in New York for four years. I write in English and in Swedish. Whenever I go to Tunisia, I feel almost at home.

"Whenever I go to Sweden, I feel almost at home. When I get stuck behind an open bridge in Brooklyn, I feel strangely more at home than in both those places, even though I’ve only lived here for four years!”

In many novels that centre Arabs in the diaspora, the Arab protagonist reaches early adulthood and embarks on a journey to the homeland, where they finally connect with their Arab roots.

In The Sisters, both Anastasia and Jonas return to Tunisia, their paths narrowly missing each other, but no reawakening occurs. Anastasia experiences a sexual awakening, while Jonas seems even more uncertain about what home is.

And it is this concept of being mixed-race, of not feeling anchored to a physical home, that the novel explores so adeptly without feeling forced or preachy. Jonas says it is something he often finds he has in common with his fans.

“The readers who seem to cling to my words oftentimes have spent a lot of time thinking about what home means. I think they have found alternative ways of finding a home," Jonas says.

"For me, when I was young, I found a lot of potential homes in books. Sometimes the books I read when I was young felt more real and more like home than the apartment I was living in. So, the dream is that my book could do that for readers,” he explains. 

Fatherhood and absence

As much as The Sisters is about the Mikkola sisters and Jonas, in some ways, it is also about Jonas’s father.

The Arab immigrant dad who had great dreams and sacrificed those personal dreams — in this case, Jonas’s father is an aspiring writer — for the economic stability of Europe. The Arab dad, who over the years becomes increasingly deflated and believes the solution to all his problems is to move back to his homeland.

In the novel, Jonas’s father separates from his mother and becomes an absent father. Yet, despite his father letting him and his brothers down, Jonas continues to seek validation even as an adult.

Jonas says that, in many ways, the act of writing Jonas’s chapters was cathartic.

“It wasn’t until I started writing my own memories that I realised that some of the memories from my parents’ divorce were painful,” he shares.

“I’ve tried to write them in Swedish for many years, and I’ve never been able to. But once I switched to English, something just clicked, and I found I could," he explains. 

“In my family, it was very clear that we could talk about certain things, and then there were certain subjects that were hidden or secret. And so, if you grow up in that kind of environment, especially in a multilingual environment, one of the things that happens is that it becomes very clear that words have enormous potential power.”

The Sisters is published by Sceptre Books and is out now

Yousra Samir Imran is a British Egyptian writer and author based in Yorkshire. She is the author of Hijab and Red Lipstick, published by Hashtag Press

Follow her on X: @UNDERYOURABAYA