Homeland Elegies: Grief is the difficult pathway to healing...

 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 11^th 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.

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