Homeland Elegies: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar

  How do I know this? Because I saw it on CNN.

  In late June of 1998, my father was traveling home from a medical conference in Key West. He had a layover in Atlanta and some time to kill before his flight to Milwaukee. As he settled in at a bar near his gate, he looked up at the screen, where he was as shocked as you can imagine to see the name and the picture of his dear friend from medical school. TERRORIST SPIES KILLED was the title running under the story. Father asked the bartender to turn up the sound. Then he pulled out his cell phone and called Mother back home. After that, he called me.

  The story reported that two brothers allegedly operating as spies for a Muslim terrorist network—the media had not yet taken to calling the group by its chosen name, Al Qaeda—had been killed in a pair of raids that were creating diplomatic complications with the Pakistanis. It wasn’t clear who had carried out these so-called raids, which—Father was to learn—consisted of nothing more than a bullet in the temple for Latif and Manan as each left home on a morning in early May. (Father said it was widely rumored in Pakistan that this was the CIA’s preferred method for local assassinations.) The CNN piece showed the nondescript two-story exterior of the clinic as well as the faded pea-green walls of a waiting room full of Peshawari poor—mostly women with children—where the camera lingered on the portrait of bin Laden. For CNN, clearly, this was the salient detail that conveyed the essential meaning of the story: poor brown ignorant hordes flocking to a malign manipulator who was stoking their rage against the forces of freedom and hope.

  The report failed to mention that Latif was an American citizen.

  Mother was distraught at the news. She took to bed, and she didn’t leave her room for days. Father was worried and asked me to come home. I obliged, but my presence did nothing to comfort her. She didn’t want comfort. I date my mother’s intensifying anti-Americanism to that summer, the summer when, in response to attacks on two US embassies in East Africa, Bill Clinton bombed a Sudanese medicine factory. When Mother—herself a doctor trained in the Third World—learned that the factory had been responsible for producing every ounce of Sudan’s tuberculosis medications, she was particularly incensed. She already despised Clinton for his indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky, and the attack on the factory came three days after Clinton’s disastrous address in which he admitted he’d been lying about the affair all along. She saw in this sequence a murderous cynicism: an American president under political siege distracts the nation by killing Muslims.

  In the last weeks of summer that August, she wrote in her diary of America as a foreign place, a place she didn’t recognize, didn’t like. She wrote in bitterness, even rage, and when writing about it wasn’t enough she picked up the phone and unloaded to me:

  “Doesn’t know what ‘is’ means. What kind of nonsense is that?”

  “That’s not exactly what he said.”

  “That is exactly what he said.”

  “He meant he was referring to the present tense. That technically, at that time, when he was speaking, he was not in a relationship with her.”

  “I’m not an idiot. I know what he meant.”

  “I wasn’t implying you were an idiot, Mom.”

  “Legal nonsense.”

  “He is a lawyer. They both are.”

  “With his fat nose and his fat wife.”

  “I’m not sure what that has to do with anything—”

  “Clinton is a liar. If he wants to lie about putting cigars where they don’t belong, that’s one thing. To kill people around the world to distract everyone from his lies, that’s another.”

  “I don’t know if that’s what he was doing—”

  “Of course it’s what he’s doing.”

  “They just bombed our embassies, Mom.”

  “You think that came out of nowhere? Hmm? When you push people and push them, and take advantage of their goodness and hope, when you use them for your own goals and throw them away, what do you expect? Do you expect them to send you roses?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “What is the other way?”

  “It’s politics. Nobody’s anybody’s friend. Everybody is using everyone else.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Pakistan took the money. For years they took it. What do you always say to me? Don’t ask anyone for money and don’t take it if they offer. It always comes with strings.”

  “The only strings were to beat the Russians.”

  “Apparently the strings also included not bombing US embassies.”

  There was silence on the line. “You’re different,” she said.

  “Different from what?”

  “From the child I raised.”

  I had never heard her say this. But the resignation in her voice made me think this was not a new thought.

  “Maybe that’s because I’m not a child anymore. I’m twenty-five.”

  “Latif was right. The longer we stay, the more we forget who we are.”

  “Uncle Latif is dead.”

  “You think I don’t know that?!” Her tone was sharp, wounded.

  “I just mean, maybe it’s better to still be alive, Mom.”

  “When we used to take you to the masjid back during the war, you were the first to put your allowance into the box for the mujahideen.”

  “I always thought it was going to help Uncle Latif.”

  “And that essay you wrote in class…”

  “Essay?”

  “About Gaddafi.”

  “Mom. I was in middle school—”

  “You called him a hero.”

  “Because I didn’t know any better.”

  “What you knew then is better than what you know now.”

  “Do we have to talk about this?”

  “He was the only one speaking up to the West.”

  “Is that why he bombed the plane to Scotland? Killed all those passengers? To speak up to the West?”

  “You don’t think they kill our people every day? Look at what they did to Latif. Who was doing their dirty work. He was their citizen! Can you believe that? They kill one of their own citizens who was fighting for them?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t anymore, Mom.”

  “Wasn’t anymore what?”

  “Fighting for them. Maybe that changed. Maybe that’s the reason—”

  She cut me off, her wounded tone intensifying: “They don’t have the courage to face death themselves, so they make us face it. Then they throw us away when they get what they want.” She paused; I stayed silent. When she spoke again, it was quietly; she was seething: “That man is not wrong. Our blood is cheap. They run around telling everyone else about human rights. But not for them. Look how they treat their own blacks.”

  “Mom.”

  “Turning us against each other. Making us spill each other’s blood. Just like the British.”

  “Mom.”

  “Taking what we have. Oil, land. Treating us like animals.”

  “Mom.”

  “He’s right. They deserve what they got. And what they’re going to get.”

  These last words were the lines that would end up in my play.

  The man she was referring to being right was, of course, bin Laden.

  Later, after the attacks in 2001, she would never admit to having said anything of the kind. Understandably. I think most of the Muslim world could not have imagined how terrible redress would feel, when it came. Not only to Americans but to those in the Muslim world as well. For despite our ill usage at the hands of the American empire, the defiling of America-as-symbol enacted on that fateful Tuesday in September would only bring home anew to all the profundity of that symbol’s power. Despite the predations on which it was predicated, the symbol sustained us, too. Many have disdained the American response to the attacks as childish, have seen these years of vengeful war as the murderous tantrums of a country too young, too protected from the world, too immature to understand the inevitability of death. But I think the m
atter is more complicated. The world looked to us—and now I speak as an American—to uphold a holy image, or as holy as it gets in this age of enlightenment. We have been the earthly garden, the abundant idyll, the productive Arcadia of the world’s pastoral dream. Between our shores has gleamed a realm of refuge and renewal—in short, the only reliable escape from history itself. It’s always been a myth, of course, and one destined for rupture sooner or later. Yet what an irony: when history finally caught up to us, it wasn’t just we Americans—or even mainly we Americans—who would suffer the disastrous consequences.

  III.

  In the Names of the Prophet…

  Di qui nacque che tutti i profeti armati vinsero, e i disarmati rovinarono.1

  —Niccolò Machiavelli

  1.

  I have an uncle named Muzzammil, who, for a fair stretch of my childhood, went by “Moose”—the least rejected of the countless attempts to simplify the phonetic conundrums of his name to those with no working knowledge of Punjabi. Since he immigrated to the San Diego area, in 1974, there’d been periods lasting from minutes to months when he was called, in no particular order, Muz, Muzzle, Mazz, Muzzy, Musty, Sammel, Sammy, Maury, Marty, and Marzipan, which led to Al, and then Alan—I kid you not—and, of course, Moose. The last was coined by a fellow biochemist newly appointed at the lab in La Jolla where Muzzammil worked, an Italian named Ettore, who’d dealt with his own travails in New World pronunciation of an Old World name and came up with the moniker that would stick. There was certainly something apposite about it. Moose was a plain, largish man with a flaring Roman nose that drooped to a bulbous end; his shoulders drooped, too; and, yes, there was a kind of homely, even lumbering majesty about him. We, American-born kids of our Pakistani-born parents, also struggled with saying his name, for though of course he was never Moose to us, our parents said his name one way, and he offered it to us—native American speakers with our own varying levels of Punjabi incompetence—in the bizarre, labored accent he’d come upon to make himself sound more American, his diphthongs flattened by ever-widening contortions of his lips, his affricates shoved so far forward he couldn’t seem to get through a sentence without baring unnecessary teeth. It wasn’t just hard to gather a coherent, repeatable sense of what he was saying when he said his name—I always thought it sounded a little too much like the brand-name laxative fiber my father used to take, Metamucil—it was also sometimes hard to understand what he was saying at all through that tortured soup of bizarre signs and sounds.

  I loved him. All the kids did. He was like one of us, willing to lose himself in our games, our worlds. I’d met him first in Pakistan, in my father’s village. He’d just been married, and he and his new wife, Safiya, had come to pay their respects to my father’s parents. I remember him showing me how to use a laundry basket to catch birds. We practiced on the chickens in the compound, then took it out to the village square to try it on the parrots. Magically, we entrapped a kingfisher. Muzzammil took hold of the bird from under the basket and handed it to me, its electric blue and blazing orange a wonder in my palms. Later, we saw much of Muzzammil in Wisconsin, as his work in pharmaceuticals brought him to Chicago for business. One year, he visited us around Halloween. Some of the neighborhood kids were over, and Muzzammil snuck into the fort of sheets we’d built in the basement, where he regaled us with a tale about a half lionfish, half child his biochem lab concocted for the military, which creature, he claimed, escaped from its tank and was now wreaking havoc on the local mouse population in La Jolla. I’m not sure we were particularly terrified by any of this, but he did a convincing impersonation of the creature eating a mouse that would remain a mocking motif—always reenacted with some attempt at his strange accent—among the crew of neighborhood kids for the months that followed.

  Muzzammil’s name came from the Quran’s seventy-third surah (or chapter), entitled Al-Muzzammil, or, literally, the Enfolded One. The chapter is short and at the outset paints a picture of our Prophet enfolded in his bedsheets, exhorted by God’s voice to resist sleep and rise to spend part of the night studying the Quran:

  O thou enfolded one!

  Rise. Stand in prayer the night, at least a little,

  Half—less or more; and recite the Revelation with care.

  We will send you the Word.

  For rising is hard and good, and night a time for study,

  The day consumed by your duties.

  Remember the Name of your Lord. To Him, devote yourself complete.

  To the Lord of the East and West; there is no Lord but He…2

  Though he was named for the Prophet, Muzzammil was in no way religious. As a chemist, he thought when you got down to the basics—to the molecules and their constituent atoms, that is—there really was no need for a God, Muslim or otherwise. Safiya, his wife, wasn’t so sure. I remember her making a case for faith at Thanksgiving dinner one year, an argument I would later discover was the same wager Pascal suggested one might want to make sure one got right. Safiya’s name, too, was drawn from the Prophet’s life. Her namesake was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a Jewish tribal leader in Medina whom the Prophet—after killing her husband in battle—would take as his eleventh spouse. The Prophet’s Safiya was supposedly a very beautiful woman, which is not exactly what I would have said of the Safiya I knew, at least not before saying other things about her: she was short; she was plump and calm; she brimmed with what seemed to me to be well-being. In opposition to the underlying, fractious despair of my parents’ hurly-burly, Safiya and Muzzammil seemed blessedly stable. I heard no sharp retorts, felt no wounded silences, saw two people who genuinely seemed to feel that life was better with the other in it. The looks of love between them would surprise me, discreet (or not-so-discreet) glances and half smiles exchanged over nothing, as he mixed sugar into his tea, say, or as she brushed flour from her cheeks while mixing and making chappatis, or as they held hands and shuffled along in their sandals on our summer walks through the neighborhood. He picked roses for her in the evenings from my mother’s bushes when they were in bloom. She would clip a blossom from the stem and wear it in her hair at dinner. On our living-room couch, they nestled much closer than I ever saw my parents do, their own alleged love marriage notwithstanding. Indeed, I saw enough of whatever was working between Safiya and Muzzammil to recognize, as I got older, all the unknowing American ado about the unconscionable injustice of arranged marriage as exactly that, a lot of ignorant fuss. Their marriage had been arranged. The first time they saw each other was the afternoon before they were engaged, when Safiya was marched into a living room to clear the tea setting so that she and her prospective groom could each catch a glimpse of the other. There was no reason for it to work, except that it did—though Safiya did seem to believe their union was emblematic of some more enduring truth about love. It was from her that I first heard the analogy comparing love and arranged marriages to kettles of water pitched at different temperatures: the former already boiling, with no chance to get any hotter; the latter cold at the outset, requiring steady application to be sure but with ample room to heat up over the years.

  They had one child, whom they would name Mustafa, a beloved patronymic on Safiya’s side of the family meaning “chosen one” and another of the Prophet’s many epithets. I have two cousins and an uncle named Mustafa. Indeed, of my twenty-two first cousins, fifteen have names taken from the Prophet or his circle; among my eight immediate aunts and uncles, the number is five. My mother’s name, Fatima, owes its stupendous popularity in the Muslim world to being the given name of the Prophet’s only daughter with his first wife, Khadijah—which is also the name of one of my mother’s sisters.

  I have two cousins named Ayesha. The first, Ayesha G, is a consultant for McKinsey who lives in Connecticut. She has three daughters with her husband, who is ten years older than she is and on his second marriage. He’s white and works in finance but converted to Islam for her sake, and so, instead of getting disowned by her parents for marrying o
utside the faith, Ayesha G is that rare conquering hero who’s succeeded in bringing one of their kind over to our side for a change. The other, Ayesha M, is a stay-at-home mom of five who splits her time between Islamabad and Atlanta, miserably married to her childhood sweetheart. Ayesha was the name of the Prophet’s favorite of his many wives, a woman—as we are taught in our tradition—of great heart and intellect. She was the daughter of the Prophet’s right-hand man, that pillar of staid, unquestioning support, Abu Bakr, the first outside of the Prophet’s family to convert to Islam in its earliest days and the first to lead the community after the Prophet’s death. The Prophet’s Ayesha is the subject of much love and lore, called the Mother of the Believers, and of course her betrothal to the Prophet at the tender age of six—the consummation of their marriage delayed until the onset of her puberty, at age nine (when the Prophet would have been fifty-three)—has been a subject of debate and derision for centuries. This story caused no undue compunction in my community until after 9/11, when we all started to realize how backward it made us look, idealizing what people here could only conceive of as child rape; we weren’t just risking derision but also bodily harm. Only then did the arguments about the reliability of the early sources go mainstream enough to become a subject of dinner conversation in my extended family. Which sounds about right. You don’t go looking to change a story that’s been working for you for a thousand years until you have a damn good reason to change it.