Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Loss, Foreign Life, Trumpism
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
If you are looking for a page turner, keep looking, this
book is not it. But if you are willing
to put up with bad writing by a good author in order to understand something
essential about American culture and where it is heading and why, and, as a
bonus, to understand something essential about the complications of having a Moslem
heritage in the U.S., this book, told from the perspective of a very self-revealing
(without necessarily being insightful) first generation Pakistani- American, might
be just the ticket for you.
This book, not quite a memoir – perhaps a Roman a Clef? - shares some characteristics with other
books told by outsiders from clans that don’t allow for divulging anything to
outsiders – Hillbilly
Elegy comes immediately to mind, but so does Bill
Clinton’s autobiography (I did not write about this – I was not posting
when I read this book). All three books have
very intelligent authors; good raconteurs each, who fail to deliver.
All three figures fail to deliver in a similar way for
similar reasons. Akhtar, J.D. Vance, and
Clinton overshare. They focus on the
details of what happened and they tell the story as if they could get it
absolutely accurately. It is as if they
don’t want the reader to be thinking and imagining along with them. When an author is on his game, he doesn’t
worry about whether the story is accurate – he or she is more concerned with
the experience of the audience and getting the story to make sense in their
minds – as they construct it - than caring about getting the facts absolutely
straight. The author is confident that what
they are relating is what happened because this is the story that will make sense
to the actively involved reader.
These three authors do not have the confidence of knowing
that their readers will believe them. Or
perhaps they fear that they readers will believe them – or both. When you come from a place of discomfort with
who it is that you are – for Vance, the Hillbilly ethic strongly supports him
as long as he keeps what he has to say inside the family – similarly for
Clinton – a Southern child of divorced parents playing at belonging with the
rich and powerful – and Akhtar cites the example of Salmon Rushdie and his Satanic
Verses as a means helping us empathize with his discomfort in articulating
the secrets that he is telling.
In contrast, Lisa
Halliday, in Asymmetry,
also a book, like each of these three, about power differential, is able to
comment on the dominant culture without losing her ability to write smoothly,
elegantly and powerfully. But it is a
book by a woman writer exposing another writer – a powerful man – to the
world. She is not violating the rules of
her feminist/protestant dominant culture community when she uses the power of
her writing to empower herself by describing her part in the complicated dance
of the relationship with the other author. Perhaps more to the point, Tara Westover, in Educated,
eloquently exposes men and her own highly valued Church of Latter Day Saints community to scrutiny. These two women’s
membership in the Oprah Openness club, or perhaps just their status as women in
a male dominated culture, seems to protect their writing from the clunky flaw
of needing to control it.
All five authors, though, share the vantage point of being
the outsider to the dominant culture.
And the outsider has a privileged position from which to view the
foreign culture. Like de Tocqueville in his
take on America, or Freud’s (or any of a host of other male authors) on the
minds of women, these five author’s positions as outsiders provide a unique
view of our culture. Unlike de
Tocqueville and Freud, though, each of them is also a member of the culture that they are
critiquing.
American exceptionalism has necessarily afforded us significant
blind spots. Any narcissistic position,
indeed perhaps any position that allows us to take pride in our accomplishments,
has the potential to induce in us the wish to occlude our failings. All five of these authors bend over backwards
to expose their own foibles – and the foibles of their own cultures in pointing
out the foibles of those who are the primary focus, and it is interesting that,
in this small sample, it is the men who seem most clumsy about doing this.
This book begins with the dislocation of the
protagonist. We are lead through the
election of 2016. It returns, to me at
least, like a bad dream. The absurdity
of the idea of Trump as president. That
simply couldn’t happen, could it? And
yet the protagonist’s father imagines that it will – indeed he hopes for
it. And this makes no sense to the
protagonist. How could a foreigner like
his father, from a Moslem country, be in favor of a man who directs hate
towards men like them? We begin this book, like
the protagonist, and presumably the author, off balance.
Akhtar is perhaps most clumsy in his description of enjoying
pleasures that are valued in our culture and forbidden in his own. He is better at describing his experiences
with alcohol, mostly offered by fellow Moslems, than he is at talking about
sex. Here his openness is clumsy in part
because it seems that he is feigning comfort with it. In our culture, I imagine we are embarrassingly straightforward about sex to the Moslem sensibility. So when he talks about his sexual experiences,
as he identifies with the dominant culture, having rejected his birth culture, the experiences are related as if he doesn’t feel any shame – I think because he doesn’t
resonate with our own discomfort about it; he doesn’t realize that the public
openness about sexuality is at odds with our private, and still strongly held Puritan,
Catholic, but also just plain personal feelings about how private and
uncomfortable sexuality is. He doesn’t
realize how rare and powerful for us, in our culture, his experience of pure
lust and its consummation is for us – his writing suggests, instead, that he is
bringing coals to Newcastle - we feels, as he would like to - comfortable with our sexuality.
He is not bringing coals to Newcastle: he has genuine
insights to offer. His analysis of our
economic system – he portrays capitalism and its essential corporate
configuration of capital – as inconceivable in a Moslem system based on the
ethical need to divide assets among a man’s wives and children at his
death. He might be surprised to find
Benjamin Franklin was an ally, believing that assets should revert to the state
to prevent the kinds of accumulations that led to the ruling classes in
Europe. What Akhtar appreciates, that
Franklin did not, is that the capitalistic system, with all of its inherent
ills, has also been instrumental in the ascendancy of the Christian wealth and
technology over Moslem, and this is both a source of pride (in his identification with the U.S.) and shame (to his Moslem shape).
Perhaps it is the protagonist’s ambivalence about his
adoptive homeland – embodied in the conflict between his mother, who is openly
disdainful of it, and his father who is not only enamored of it in general –
but particularly of Trump and the Trumpian version of it. Through his mother, he is able to get in
touch with his pride in the fall of the towers on 9/11. It took me at least a year to appreciate the
elegance of the attack; before then, the closeness, shock, and terror of it
was too visceral to be able to get the distance to appreciate it. For Akhtar, too. His description of the discovery of the cross
that he wore in the days following 9/11 to avoid New Yorker's racist response to him is
poignant, as is the bravery it took to give voice to his mother’s pride in his
play, but all of that is portrayed as clumsily as I am portraying it here…
Part of the difficulty of integrating his mother’s and
father’s positions is Akhtar’s ambivalence towards his father. I would call the following a spoiler alert,
but because there is not a consistent narrative here, it feels more like
putting a random pair of jigsaw puzzle pieces together than spoiling a
narrative arc. His father has a secret
affair, and Akhtar has an unknown half-sister, with whom he himself almost
has an affair before seeing the picture of his father in her home. Somehow it doesn’t seem shocking that Akhtar’s
deeply moral father would have an affair with a woman who is native to the
country he loves – nor that he would become enamored of Trump based on a brief
professional encounter in which he experiences Trump as someone who is not the terrible
person others accuse him of being.
I am realizing that as I write this, the narrative that
is based on the life of the protagonist in the novel does not organize the novel’s
material in a way that we might have hope for.
The character at the center of it is torn in ways that are metabolized
neither by him nor by his alter ego, the author. This effect is not necessarily problematic; in
the same
way that September 11th viscerally communicated something about
the feelings of many members of the Islamic world towards the U.S., Akhtar’s
unintegrated understandings of his clashing cultural identifications sits
undigested in the reader’s gut, poking at us, not yet organized enough to direct
us, but uncomfortable enough for us to wonder if it is possible to reconcile
these competing aspects of what becomes our shared concern. We can no more discard aspects of our
increasingly shared competing identities than we can voluntarily lop off a
limb. Despite failing to bring us
smoothly into his world, he has deposited it, and all the messy aspects that
are part of it, in our laps. He says to
us, in effect, “Here, this is what I’ve got.
You deal with it.”
Part of the riddle of this author’s clumsiness may reside in
his method. He is, first and foremost, a
playwright. His method is to live his
life, and then to record it. He spends
two hours or more each day reconstructing what occurred during the day by
writing about it. He is trying to get it
right. And his ear is tuned to the
things that a playwright’s ear should be tuned to. He is listening to the rhythms of the
dialogue. He is trying to get how we
present ourselves to each other. He works primarily from the outside - the novel is a form that is intended to allow the writer to work from the inside.
At the same time, he has a muse – a writing teacher he
refers to at the beginning and end of the book.
She is a lesbian – and I think her sexuality is an important part of the
meaning of her identity for him. She
tells him to record and work to understand his dreams. And she has a description of the unconscious,
based on the OED, which feels liberating and real. She points out that the OED catalogues over
290,000 words, but most of us have a working knowledge of only 20,000
words. “The unconscious, she suggested,
was like the mass of words you didn’t [know].
Those unknown words and meanings – rhizomes of sound, radicles of
signification - were like a body of forgotten roots still drawing sustenance
from the dead matter of the lost languages buried in the living one we heard
and spoke and wrote (p. 104).” I think, when he is working from within, he hears the overtones, but doesn't quite know what to do with them - he passes them on to us, hoping we will be able to make sense of them.
This work is an elegy – a poem of grief. It is also presented as a piece of music,
with a finishing coda. Like a symphony,
it evokes powerful feelings, and like a play or a poem, it also evokes
thoughts. If I play with the masculine
voice of the author and contrast it with the feminine voices that are able to
articulate loss seamlessly, perhaps men often realize later in their
development that the world they are confronted with is not the one they had
imagined it would be. They are
unprepared to integrate the foreignness into their experience because it is
new. Our dislocation is unexpected
rather than part and parcel of our identity as foreigners in our own land.
The grief in this novel is real. The losses are real. The protagonist loses his mother. His father is now trapped back in his
homeland, Pakistan, and the protagonist can no longer safely travel there as he is labeled an enemy of the state. But this is an
elegy of a greater loss, one that we can, if we are strong enough, uncomfortably resonate with, especially if we are men. It is the elegy of living in a homeland that
is not our own, a place that has become unfamiliar. Perhaps whether we are fans of Trump, and see
him as a path to recovering what we had, or we are opposed to that vision, we
can recognize that we are all feeling broken.
Could an opera that would express our shared grief unite us in a common
purpose? Can we, especially we, as men,
withstand the knowledge that we, too, are destined to live in a foreign world?
Similar themes are evident in the current film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
