
Maya Binyam
My second novel, Holy Fool, tells the story of two brothers, Benjamin and Joseph, who are separated as children and meet again, years later, as exiles in a settler colony. Like their biblical counterparts, Benjamin and Joseph are closely bound––and yet life conspires to separate them. As children, both buy into their village’s governing myth: that it is outside the world’s sphere of influence. But as they enter adolescence, they watch as the village becomes a locus of outside fascination, reshaping itself around the fantasies of those who conjure it from afar: their federal government, foreign aid organizations, and the international media, which spins a fiction about an emerging, faraway nation, holy and inevitable. The novel is invested in geographic interplay, and in mapping how liberation movements in one region, typically presumed to be contained within national borders, get recreated elsewhere, in regions that are physically very far away.