The Mulai

Novel · 176 pages · Paperback · 2026 · Fitzcarraldo Editions

He never learned to tell them apart

Dr Cordovero, an archaeologist, travels to the Mulai to study the descendants of a mission Earth stopped answering. He cannot tell one person from another. From that single failure he concludes the Mulai think and act as a single timeless being.

Munir Hachemi's The Mulai, translated by Julia Sanches, is built on that error. Cordovero confuses perception with knowledge. The confusion covers an entire society. The volume in front of the reader is his record of it.

Cordovero's distance from the Mulai is not as clean as his prose later suggests. "Fucking" is constant in this book, in and out of ceremony, and Cordovero takes part often enough that it stops being research. His body does not teach him the actual rule. Vaginal penetration is the one act that counts as contamination, and when he tries it, a Mulai woman stops him by force. The community answers with silence. He privately coins a word for what happened, dysfuck, the same reflex for classifying experience that later produces his theory of the Mulai.

Most of the book passes through his journals and reports. An editorial note follows an early chapter on Flukeh, the woman credited with founding the Mulai religion. It reveals that Cordovero chose the order of the material. He wrote or reconstructed much of it. The reader learns this after accepting one narrative as history. He supplies the theory that reduces the Mulai to a type, then controls the evidence that appears to challenge it.

The Mulai turned a failed mission into something coherent. Technical instructions survive as prayer. Supply drops are treated as gifts from Dog. The transparent shitters make the point physical, since waste feeds the recycling system. Cordovero still apologises for printing the word.

Most Brabat are Mulai who lose their way during the Voyage and later lose speech. Cordovero lets the label govern his account. He writes down the evidence against it anyway: they work the abandoned domelets more fluently than anyone inside the Dome. Flukeh proposes binding the scriptorium's shifting texts to named authors, and the community turns cold. She loses speech and leaves the Dome. Cordovero later records, unproven, that she was the first Brabat. The community leaves her name on the religion that drove her out.

Sheipa is a Mulai woman taken captive after the Brabat kill Doren and Calta in her trinomial. The line collapses. Her captor feeds her the cooked flesh of her partners. She kills the man who has been raping her and comes to while eating from his body. She speaks again at that moment. Mulai speech is restored through one act, which Cordovero associates with Brabat degradation.

Here the argument turns on itself. Hachemi sets out to show a classification manufacturing the degradation it claims to observe. Then he hands the Brabat cannibalism and rape as their principal narrative content. Sheipa carries the cost. She is fed her own people, raped, left pregnant, and made to eat again for the scene where the reversal happens. The novel makes its case elsewhere through grammar and anthropology, then extracts the proof from her body. She gets far less room to exist. Cordovero gets far more room to theorise about it.

The editorial note pays once. The reports that follow argue a case the scenes have won. The design shelters the book while they do it: a gap reads as mistranslation, an excess as Cordovero's compulsion to classify. This novel is pleased with its machinery. The invented vocabulary and the nested attributions are handsome, and they leave nothing that can be pinned down long enough to convict it.

Nothing in the sentences is difficult. The demand is on attention. A chapter that reads as testimony may turn out to be Cordovero's reconstruction. Sanches leaves the blunt words blunt. This stops the Mulai sounding like the anthropological subjects Cordovero takes them for. The character chapters work close to hunger and fear. The reports are dry and repetitive. A reader who came for Flukeh and Sheipa will wait a long stretch to get back to them.

The Mulai is a serious novel about who gets to describe another society, and it exempts itself from the question it puts to Cordovero. On Day 1517 he catches himself writing "we." He vows to stop. It is the nearest thing to a reckoning the book offers, entered in his own hand. He walks into the desert with the last word about people he spent years reducing to one.