In “Dead Mango Trees Go to Heaven,” the mango tree at the narrator’s family home is almost a character itself. I think the title arguably reinforces the idea that there’s something kindred and familial between humans and the nature they come-of-age around. Can you talk about what this title means to you, as well as the personification of this tree throughout the story?

The mango isn’t the national fruit of Bangladesh, but it might as well be. To be Bangladeshi is to spend your summers sucking mangoes dry under the beating sun. They’re messy and sticky and leave their pulpy juices smeared across your face, and I wouldn’t trade anything for it. For me and so many others, mangoes embody the joy, adventure, and sweetness of the Bangladeshi experience.

Growing up, my sister and I spent nearly every summer at our grandparents’ house in the town of Khulna, where they had a gorgeous garden that was home to an enormous mango tree. Or at least it seemed enormous to our awestruck childhood selves, who got as many mangoes as we wanted from a grandmother who held us tight in her soul. The fruit, the tree, the garden, the home - in my mind, they were sanctuaries I could always come back to and find unconditional love in. Over time, as our grandparents’ health deteriorated and my grandmother developed dementia, their house inevitably started becoming a little quieter, a little emptier. Fewer flowers grew in the garden every year, and rotting mangoes began clustering around the base of a tree that spent its summers alone. My grandmother died last year while I was in the United States, and it occurred to me that I will never really go back to the summer sanctuary that once was. The house is still there, and my memories of freedom and adventure still linger within its walls, but its beating heart - a phrase I use in the story - has fallen still and silent. The mango tree is likely dead too. I will never have one of her mangoes again.

Even things that seem so eternal, so indispensable, so abundant, like a giant mango tree whose love pulsed through its roots and sweetened its fruit, will slowly shrink down to its bones. You can’t cheat time.

Taking the topic of nature a step further, I was struck by how this story grapples with nature versus technology. These two things are so fundamentally different, yet both bear witness to our personal and collective histories. What, if anything, about this juxtaposition interests you and how is it central to this family’s context?

That’s an interesting interpretation. I didn’t consciously have technology in mind when I wrote this story. I personally interpreted it as an observation of the decay that comes with the passage of time, as well as the fact that the same decay lays the groundwork for the next generation of life. My father taught me that the universe operates in cycles, from the creation of stars to blink-and-you-miss-it human lifespans. That wisdom comes from Islamic scripture, and it has shaped my appreciation of the impermanent, cyclical nature of the world. The earth’s soil absorbs the dead and births new life.

Yet the interpretation of technology as a force that creeps up on nature and encroaches on our interactions with it, while at the same time becoming an ever-expanding part of our day-to-day reality, is certainly worth exploring. For many of us, the Internet has become as much of a fundamental dimension of reality as the physical world, perhaps even more so. The technology we use to access the digital world, like a phone or earbuds, has become as much of a vital human organ as an eyeball or an ear. What effect will this have on the way we perceive human experiences? What about how we remember them and preserve them? The mango tree in my grandmother’s backyard is a monument to the cherished memories I made in her home - memories that will forever shape who I am and how I perceive my childhood, life, and identity. What happens when our memories are more intimately linked to cyberspace than they are to things we can taste, feel, and touch? Another interesting observation was made in the 2024 book “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture” by Kyle Chayka. In the online age, the age of viral videos and hashtags and trendsetting influencers, what happens to the uniqueness of each individual human’s memories and experiences?

It’s difficult to discuss nature versus technology without bringing mortality into the conversation. Your short story “My God Will Kill Me” grapples with death and mortality, themes that also characterize “Dead Mango Trees Go to Heaven.” How do these themes shape your writing, and why are they important to you?

Another thing my father taught me, and this is also rooted in Islamic philosophy, is that there are two things humanity can never accomplish: 1) create life from non-life, and 2) cheat death. I think much of human culture, whether it be spirituality, politics, entertainment, war, economics, or any other aspect of being a part of society, comes from our awareness that we will die. That awareness has pushed us to consider our legacy - as a person, as a family, as a country, as an empire - and forced us to reckon with how we spend our very limited time being alive. We don’t often consciously realize it, let alone articulate it, but the fact that we are destined to die is a large part of why we do anything while we’re still breathing.

Other living things show signs of being aware of their own mortality. Elephants bury their dead. Ants have surreal funeral rituals. Mother whales carry around their dead children for weeks after they’ve passed. Heck, even the now-extinct proto-human species Homo naledi believed in some form of the afterlife, as evidenced by what they left behind. That means we aren’t even the only humans to have grappled with death. That blows my mind. This largely inspired my story “My God Will Kill Me”, in which non-human intelligence becomes advanced enough to recognize and resist death. A lot of my writing is centered around how we treat ourselves, each other, and the world, and I believe that fundamental responsibility emerges from the reality that we will all die one day. Inevitable death is one of the very few traits shared by all living beings, and perhaps the most universal truth of life. It reminds us we need to stick together.

In “Dead Mango Trees Go to Heaven,” the grandmother, Nanu, suffers from dementia. The narrator also expresses “but I had a feeling they knew,” as something of a refrain throughout the story. As a reader, I drew parallels between this refrain and Nanu’s dementia—how Nanu clearly still loves the narrator despite her inability to accurately comprehend certain elements of reality. In your eyes, does this posit that there are perhaps many ways of knowing that cannot be understood empirically? If so, what does this idea say about Nanu and the narrator’s relationship?

At the end of the day, it comes down to faith. People often associate that term with only religion, even though there is so much of our understanding of the world that we take on faith. And that doesn’t mean that those elements of reality that we accept on faith are somehow less valuable or less meaningful. What it means is that we should reflect on why we believe those things, what experiences have spurred us to believe in them, and accept that other people believe things on faith that we may not accept or even understand. The narrator has faith that her grandmother loves her more than life itself, even though Nanu cannot articulate it or even recall her name. Nanu has faith that her daughter and her granddaughter will always wait for her. At the end of her life and her mind, the concept of knowing anything has become fluid and baseless and fleeting, but the faith in her family’s love is unwavering. And this makes the destruction of the tree, which in her mind is a still-living embodiment of that love, all the more unbearable.

“Dead Mango Trees Go to Heaven” is set in Bangladesh, which is also your home country. How does your own relationship to Bangladesh show up in your writing, if at all?

My relationship with my home country is a source of both inspiration and something along the lines of shame, because it is a relationship I have not maintained. The books that gave me my love of reading at the age of six was the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine, and its classic Middle American setting informed my media diet for my whole life thus far. Having grown up immersed in Western literature and film, my “cultural background” is so far removed from the country I consider to be my home. My inner monologue is in English, and so are my dreams. American hip-hop plays in my head when I’m picturing my life as a movie montage. The posters on my wall are those of Bob Dylan, The Social Network, and the X-Men. Attending an American missionary-run school in Bangladesh as well as college in New York State certainly didn’t help me reconnect with my heritage. I’ve even been told my Bengali sounds like it’s spoken with an American accent. Unfortunately, it does.

As ridiculous as it sounds, it took some time for it to fully dawn on me that I am Bangladeshi. After years of writing stories set in places like Nebraska and featuring characters with names like Evan and Vanessa, I realized these stories are not mine. They’re stories that I had written from outside a window, looking into an American home that doesn’t belong to me and that I don’t belong to. Bangladesh is not just the place I’m from. It is a culture that has raised, shaped, and defined me, and the sooner I grasp that, the sooner I will find my actual voice instead of speaking in someone else’s. Over the last year or so, I’ve become more conscious of this reality and more attentive towards whose voice I’m actually writing in - mine, or just the many dozen Western authors I grew up reading? The sooner I accept that I can only tell my story, the sooner that story will be mine to tell.

Something that exists in the foreground of this story, albeit only a brief mention, is the Bangladesh Liberation War. Many of your essays (including the piece that won the 2024 James Augustus Award on an African-American Topic) center on modern liberation movements. Can you share more about what this topic means to you and why it’s important to explore in writing?

My mother endowed me and my sister with not just our love of literature but also an instinct to seek justice. I grew up learning about the struggles of women, religious and ethnic minorities, and other marginalized communities in Bangladesh from her, and her advocacy for those who are deprived of their voice deeply informed my own thinking on such matters. I don’t think a good writer can be selfish. Or, a selfish person cannot be a good writer. Writing demands empathy. It pushes you to consider perspectives outside the prevailing narrative, outside the culturally enforced comfort zone. It adds meaning and importance to the lives of others and spurs you to take an interest in others’ safety, dignity, and humanity. Narrow-minded storytelling is bad storytelling. A person who is convinced that only their own voice is worth listening to cannot ever tell a good story about anyone or anything else.

The value my family places on this empathy and solidarity has massively influenced what I write about and how I write about it. In eleventh grade, during which I was a foreign exchange student in Seattle, I witnessed the turmoil and torment my Jewish friends experienced after the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue massacre, the worst antisemitic attack in U.S. history. Six years later, I drew on that memory to write about Holocaust denial and disregard for Jewish suffering in much of the Muslim world, which is the longest and most detailed piece of writing I’ve ever produced. Similarly, the genocidal attacks on Gaza and the resulting humanitarian crisis that unfolded over the last year and a half spurred me to write about Palestinian suffering, self-determination, and hopeful liberation. One of the first non-fiction pieces I had gotten published was about the ethnic cleansing of indigenous communities in Bangladesh at the hands of Bengali Muslim settlers - my people.

Like I said, writing demands empathy. It demands self-awareness. There are people who are vastly better writers than I will ever be, who cannot share their writing with the world because they are torn from their homes, pushed to the sidelines of their communities, or imprisoned by a system that actively works to silence them. In the words of the Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul: “In order for me to write poetry that isn't political, I must listen to the birds. And in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.”

Lastly, I want to pivot to the numerous accolades your academic and non-fiction writing have garnered. Can you share more about how your experience in non-fiction writing translates to fiction writing, and vice versa? How does the process for writing one genre inform the other?

Both are experiments in and celebrations of written language. The late and great essayist Christopher Hitchens, whose work opened my eyes to the musicality of the English language, penned nonfiction in a way that felt as stirring, human, and adventurous as any fiction I’ve ever read. I believe the mission of writing, at least for me, is to tell a story in a way that not only uses written language but dances with it. 

Nonfiction writing is not just the transmission of facts, but an exploration of the stories you find in reality. I don’t see any reason why nonfiction cannot employ the varied cadences, harrowing cliffhangers, whiplash-inducing plot twists, and playful conversationality of fiction. That’s a skill I am working hard to hone, and I think writing in both genres has helped me appreciate, understand, and utilize the opportunities hidden inside the art of writing. I believe writing fiction has helped make my nonfiction feel more alive, nimble, and personal. On the flip side, writing nonfiction has helped me filter and communicate information in my fiction pieces while also encouraging me to not get lost in make-believe worlds. Real life is worth paying attention to, and it is so much more bizarre and beautiful than anything our imaginations can stretch to create.

Read Adeeb’s, “Dead Mango Trees go To heaven” in dulcet Literary magazine, vol. One, Issue No. 2