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In Shubnum Khan's debut novel The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, set amidst the Indian diaspora of South Africa, fifteen-year-old Sana and her father move into a dilapidated house by the sea that is haunted by a djinn. The djinn is the link between past and present, a connection between the 21st-century tenants and the immigrant family who lived there in the early 1930s. This mythic spirit serves as a manifestation of the Islamic history and culture brought to South Africa by the Muslim Indian émigrés — an unseen witness to their past and present lives.
In her CrimeReads essay, "Decolonizing the Gothic," Khan writes of her family history and the stories told by her grandfather, who emigrated to South Africa in 1935. Among the most potent and vivid of the stories and legends her family brought with them from India are those of djinns (also spelled "jinn" or "jinni," and etymologically the origin of the English word "genie"). Djinns are a race of spirits in Islamic ...
