We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile.

—We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Being part of a family—and, by extension, a society—means inheriting and fabricating symbolic roles: narratives we are forced to perform to be seen and loved. As we enter the world and become conscious, we slowly squeeze ourselves into legible and sometimes sterile identities. Most of these are pre-assigned: the eldest son or daughter, the middle child, the youngest one, the only child, the “gifted” one, the fun one, etc. These roles precede our conscious will and often dictate who we are allowed to become.

In a way, our roles are supposed to help us fit in, belong and function. Maybe the need to assign or adopt them is simply a human way to survive reality—the patriarchal symbolic order we are made to conform to. To be named and validated by normative structures is a necessity, and the goal is recognition. With a recognizable identity, we gain access to safety, belonging, sanity, rights, and selfhood. But these labels also trap and fragment us. Late-capitalist performance culture constantly exposes us to a mind-numbing stream of binaries: toxic/healthy, self/other, mature/immature, rational/emotional, desirable/undesirable, and so forth. Yet no matter how aggressively we humans fragment ourselves, we cannot help but strive for wholeness—and we are actually capable of achieving it. We stubbornly remain more complex and irreducible, more multidimensional and whole than the roles we are pushed to perform.

A Swedish Novelist

Jonas Hassen Khemiri, born in Stockholm in 1978 to a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father, is one of the most important voices in Swedish literature today. With six novels, seven plays, and numerous short stories and essays to his name, he is not just a star at home, but his work and artistic persona have also turned out to be eminently translatable. After winning virtually every literary award his native country has to offer, along with major literary prizes and fellowships in Italy, Norway, France and Germany, he moved with his family to New York in 2021, where he now teaches creative writing at NYU.

Although it first appeared in Swedish in 2023, The Sisters, Khemiri’s latest novel, was originally written in English—a first for the author. The novel marks a significant shift from his earlier work. As he noted in an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, “these characters were adamant about speaking English, so I went, ‘Well, let me give you a chapter or two, maybe three, maybe 20 … maybe 637 pages.’ I was afraid of stopping, so I wrote the whole book in English.” The novel is currently longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award for Fiction, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English-speaking world.