When Therapy Becomes a Novel, And a Novel Becomes Political

By Andy — 2026-08-24 — Literary News

Two lives in one body is exhausting. Faraaz Mahomed knows this the way you know a recurring headache.

He lives between Johannesburg and New York, between his work as a clinical psychologist and human rights researcher and his work as a novelist. In his debut, Mother/Land, his protagonist Salim does something similar—a law professor split between Cape Town and New York, watching both cities move forward without him quite landing in either one.

When Damon Galgut, who won the Booker Prize in 2021 and then—this part matters—did line edits on Mahomed's manuscript anyway, asked him about the crossover between psychology and fiction, Mahomed's answer was simple. What is therapy if not storytelling? Both live in the gap between what someone says and what they mean.

His unpublished first novel was about a therapist sitting in a room with a patient, both of them circling the oldest question: what makes a life worth living. That book taught him something. The couch and the page are not so different. They're both spaces where you pretend nothing is at stake while everything is.

With Mother/Land, though, something else clicked together.

The novel moves across generations and continents, anchored to a brutal recent history. Mother/Land deals with forced removals under apartheid's Group Areas Act, with Rhodes Must Fall, with Black Lives Matter. These are not small abstractions. Mahomed's own great-grandfather was dispossessed—and that family rupture becomes the wound his novel keeps opening. The personal becomes political not because someone decides it should, but because it already was.

What he noticed in writers like Abdulrazak Gurnah and Hisham Matar is that they find "really personal ways of connecting with the political." It's not a technique. It's inevitable. When you've lived inside a dislocation, you see dislocation everywhere. You see how the massive historical wound and your mother's silence and your brother's illness are the same wound wearing different clothes.

The exhaustion he mentioned earlier—that's the thing. Living split like that, neither place quite feels formed, neither place feels whole. There's always a dearth. You observe the patent similarities between worlds that pretend to be different, and you notice the subcutaneous psyche beneath the surface differences. In New York and in Cape Town, the undercurrent is the same.

Writing hasn't made him more or less neurotic. But it has given him something his life couldn't: an outlet. A place to put the weight of carrying two lives at once.