World Literature as World History in "The Invention of Yesterday"
Tamim Ansary’s latest publication, The Invention of Yesterday, emerges from two of his lifelong passions: literature and history. This new book functions like a map. Instead of transportation routes, it tracks how intersecting developments—linguistic, cultural, political, economic, medical, etc.—around the world coalesce into a single narrative.
Guided by the belief that “history begins with language,” Ansary combines narrative craft with historical content to answer the book’s central question: “if history is a story that we’re telling one another, what is its plot?”
In a way, The Invention of Yesterday is a large-scale project in defamiliarization; Ansary disturbs our deeply rooted, stable assumptions of the past, resuscitating history through the vast creative potential of language. In 600 words, Ansary shows that above all else, human history is driven by interconnectedness.
Human history is driven by interconnectedness.
Ever the unconventional historian, Ansary dethrones time, stripping it of its traditional role of ordering information. If a history textbook is a closet, then time and dates are usually the shelves and rods, organizing everything. Historians tend to be neat, which is to say they harbor a compulsion to chronology. (Think about the overuse of timelines.) Ansary breaks this occupational curse. Dates and locations are vague if he mentions them at all. You could say Ansary’s closet of world history is filled with giant, all-purpose tubs. These tubs are not time but points of overlap and connection between world narratives. (Imagine, a tub with a peeling sticker labeled, “Hephthalite Huns + Wei Dynasty Chinese.”) Dates and places are relegated to supplemental hangers and hooks—they’re useful but too neat to contain the complexity of everything that is history. And it’s supposed to be messy; after all, no one said history is a display cabinet.
No one said history is a display cabinet.
Ansary employs elements of narrative craft, those barely perceptible building blocks of good storytelling, to support his central conjectures on interconnectedness. In terms of diction, Ansary’s word choice is context-specific and accessible. His language molds to the slang of today’s readers while changing according to the world narrative, or as he calls it “constellation,” discussed at a given moment in the book. In doing so, he reinforces his point that we must understand people within the context of their cultural frameworks and world narratives (of which there are innumerable). You can see it in his use of the contentious term, “Third World,” which pops up during the Cold War and disappears in later sections. This careful treatment of language gives the impression of a narrator who doesn’t want to tell a single story but wants to understand the stories he has been given.
Time in the book translates to the narrative technique of pacing. The book starts out slow and gains momentum in proportion to human population growth. The larger the population of humans, the more they fracture off to form separate groups; the more complex their various cultural frameworks become; the more likely they are to bump into each other, both physically and ideologically; the more they conflict, clash, and co-create, eventuating in a chaotic world populated by the human equivalent of bumper cars with no brakes—barreling towards apocalypse with an ultimate mood of disorientation accurate to how time feels in modernity.
Ansary’s use of tone also generates a sense of disorientation. Humour becomes an important tool for destabilizing assumptions of distant historical narratives. With a laugh, the worst parts of human history soften. They become less scary, more human. Here he explains, in a surprisingly funny way, the military conditions in Western Europe that motivated the terrifying bloodshed of the Crusades: “Now, with the invasions waning and peace on the rise, the knights of Europe were all dressed up with nowhere to go.” Ansary also pokes fun at revered figures, essentially re-introducing them. No one is safe. Is there someone you really respect? A high achiever with a wholesome personality? According to Ansary, they may have been ugly, annoying, and/or an unqualified teenager. Sometimes the opposite is true—Ansary can make you appreciate someone you hadn’t known existed.
Another narrative technique Ansary uses with success is perspective. Ansary keeps up momentum even in history’s slower points, often by switching to first-person narration. This memoir style has a moving effect in scenes like the appearance of the first human languages. Narrating from hundreds of thousands of years ago, Ansary places himself, and by extension the reader, in an imagined scene around a fire with the earliest hominids: “For me, this thought—of language blooming and right behind it stories, art, religion, technology—produces a chill. I can almost feel myself there, huddled with a group of folks, all of us related, all of us a single—something.” Through perspective Ansary helps readers rewrite history into a story they are part of, right from the start. Just like that, he makes the oldest story new by making it his own—our own—allowing us all to take ownership of history.
“For me, this thought—of language blooming and right behind it stories, art, religion, technology—produces a chill. I can almost feel myself there, huddled with a group of folks, all of us related, all of us a single—something.”
But, naturally, he’s not completely unbiased: it’s impossible to miss that Ansary is Afghan American and that he writes from both Islamic and Western perspectives. Ansary is upfront about this, putting all of his passports (dirty laundry, whichever you may) on the table. But this does not mean he privileges Afghan or Muslim stories—more that he brings them into conversations they should have always been part of. Islam and the West are written together as part of a continuous, parallel, and overlapping history—as they should be.
Sometimes Ansary privileges the language of a particular worldview, revealing dangerous biases that undermine his authority as a historian. It was uncomfortable to see the phrase “Jewish activists” used in reference to Zionists with no context or explanation. Ansary likes to use language of a given constellation. In sections about the Cold War, the term “Third World” appeared with an explanation of its complicated origins. “Jewish activists” does not have a similar explanation. I can’t imagine Ansary, or any historian today, calling Columbus an “adventurer” without also mentioning his mission's devastation of Indigenous Americans. Similarly, a responsible historian should not call Zionists “activists” without also including representation from the Palestinian constellation.
The Invention of Yesterday has its flaws but is overall a strong historical text. The book untethers human history from time, nation, geography, and ideology to identify its beating heart in connection. In doing so, Ansary attempts to give history back to us, all of us, together.
Ironically, language remains a glaring obstacle to his goal: the book is only available in English. This prompts questions about translation. In the words of Ansary himself, “if ever-increasing interconnection is an important through line of history, there is nothing trivial about translation.”
Rating: ★★★★
THE INVENTION OF YESTERDAY By Tamim Ansary | 449 pp. | PublicAffairs| $28