Good People
Good People
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Patmeena Sabit on Good People
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
A news story that demanded a different voiceThe project began not with a story idea but with a year of academic research. As an undergraduate at McGill, Sabit wrote a thesis on honor crimes in Jordan and the government’s legal attempts to deter them. That groundwork meant that when, in 2009, they saw coverage of an Afghan family in Montreal charged with the honor killings of four female family members, they were reading it with a formed analytical lens. What they found in the coverage unsettled them for reasons that went beyond the crime itself.
I was struck by a couple of things. First was by the xenophobic, sensationalist, Islamophobic media discourse around these crimes, and second by the fact that a lot of the voices that were telling the stories were not voices from the communities where these acts or crimes had taken place. I wanted to explore not the fact of an honour crime but the possibility of one, and to explore the dynamics of how these crimes occur, through the voices of the community.
That phrase “the possibility of one” is where the book’s central gamble lives. Sabit never confirms whether an honor crime took place in the novel, and they were direct about why the ambiguity is the argument rather than a narrative withholding.
It wasn’t the fact that they did do it, it was the fact that they even could have. That this is even a possibility because it has happened before. And so that was the bigger point for me. [paraphrased from audio]
Alongside the question of media framing, a structural social observation pushed Sabit toward a community-wide cast of voices rather than a family portrait. They saw the crime, or potential crime, as produced by a web of pressures that extended well beyond any single household.
these crimes don’t occur in a vacuum. There is a dynamic within a family that is fed by a larger dynamic from the community.
That conviction is what made the interview-only format, in which every voice belongs to a community member rather than the family at the center, feel like the only honest shape for the book.
How they wrote it
Ten years, four books, eighty voicesThe scale of the revision process is genuinely hard to picture until Sabit quantifies it. The manuscript they finished in 2023 bore almost no structural resemblance to what they started in 2013, and the distance between those two drafts was not a matter of polish.
it took me 10 years to write the book. So I started in 2013 and almost to the months finish in 2023. And it’s not like I wrote one book. It’s for like, I wrote four books because there were so many moving parts with so many different voices that one, narrative line.
The all-interview form was not a concept Sabit arrived at from the start. They began with a conventional linear narrative and wove testimony through it. Two specific problems forced the abandonment of that approach, and they laid both out precisely when speaking to The Nod. The first was the absence of Zorah, the character who dies, from any post-death narration. The second was something they noticed when they re-read what they had already written.
when I went back and looked over the writing, the ‘interview’ sections to me felt more urgent. There was fire between the words, whereas the conventional linear parts felt dull and dead to me. So that’s when I began wondering if the story could simply be told through the voices and views of these secondhand characters.
Keeping the Sharaf family, the household at the center of the suspected crime, entirely silent throughout the book was, by Sabit’s own account, the hardest technical problem the structure created. Every reader impression of those characters had to be constructed entirely from what neighbors, acquaintances, and community members chose to say about them.
You don’t hear from them and that was the big challenge... the big challenge in terms of having these and they are the primary, they are the main characters, right? And how to make them come alive through these secondary characters without ever really hearing from them directly. [paraphrased from audio]
Even after settling on the interview structure, Sabit had to solve for information that no single character’s testimony could carry. Certain facts about the case needed to arrive without the distortion of a narrator’s perspective or allegiance. The solution they landed on borrowed from journalism rather than fiction.
I also realized that there needed to be accounts where it was just the facts as well... and I thought that these news articles and these news stories were just the perfect vehicle for that. [paraphrased from audio]
The title arrived last. For years the manuscript had no name. When Sabit finally found it, they found it inside their own pages, in a phrase their Afghan characters kept reaching for. In Pashto and Dari, the phrase carries social and moral freight that the English “good people” does not immediately signal to an outside reader.
Good people in Pashto and Dari is a phrase that means so much more than what it seems on the surface. When you say... those people are good people... you’re saying something about their social standing and their honor... I didn’t have a title for the book for the longest time... I was reading through one day and realized how many times the Afghan characters say good people, good people... it’s such a short way of saying so much about people. [paraphrased from audio]
The title became, in retrospect, the book’s thesis compressed into two words: a community judgment that is simultaneously a claim about morality, a claim about status, and a claim about who deserves protection.
On what the book is wrestling with
Who gets to be a reliable witnessThe multi-voice structure is not only a formal experiment; it is Sabit’s way of staging a philosophical argument about perception. They described the question driving the book’s architecture when speaking to MPR News’s Kerri Miller, and the framing is more epistemological than novelistic.
When I was creating the story, I was thinking … about the nature of perception and how reliable that is, and objective truth and if there is an objective truth to any one situation.
Where that philosophical question becomes a trap for the reader is in the act of deciding whom to believe. Sabit designed the competing narratives so that the reader’s own assumptions about credibility would become visible to them as they read. The reader is not a passive audience for the competing testimonies; they are being tested by them.
I wanted to examine how multifaceted and complex even the ‘objective truth’ of a situation can be, and to challenge the reader, as they’re piecing the story together for themselves from these opposing narratives, to question their own assumptions regarding which points of view they believe as credible and who they perceive to be the tellers of the truth.
Sabit also had to navigate the risk that a book about a suspected honor crime within an Afghan immigrant community would flatten that community into a single representative portrait. They anticipated the pushback before the book even reached readers. When their editor asked what the Afghan community’s response would be, Sabit was direct about what the book refused to do and what it was careful to insist on.
the Afghan community is not a monolith. No immigrant community is. The beliefs explored in the book are those of a very small segment of, in this case, the Afghan population in Virginia, where honour is paramount above all and judgements are extremely harsh.
Sabit has spoken about John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, a sequence that interweaves biography, newsreel fragments, and fiction to construct a portrait of American society, as the formal ancestor they did not fully recognize until after the book was well underway. The debt was absorbed before it was understood.
When I read The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos, just the way he wrote those three books, really expanded my consciousness of what fiction could be, and I didn’t realize until, you know, long after I had begun writing, how much that had influenced the texture of the book. [paraphrased from audio]
What they want us to sit with
Misconceptions we carry without knowing itSabit has described the book’s subject matter in expanding circles. At the center is a specific community navigating exile. But they were explicit, in the Psychology Today piece, that they wrote outward from that center toward questions any reader anywhere might recognize in their own life.
Good People is about the Afghan experience of exile and displacement and about what it means to be Muslim in the West. But it’s also about larger issues of families and loss and identity and prejudice and about the misconceptions that we all have about each other. It is my hope that the book will spark discussion and debate among readers about these very difficult topics.