Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

  “Here you go,” Mark said as he pulled to a stop under the hotel awning. The fare was just under seven dollars. I fumbled through the bills in my wallet and handed him a ten. He put it in his mouth as he pulled a thick wad of singles from his shirt’s breast pocket to make change.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “Keep it.”

  He looked startled, his jaw slack with what I took for a disproportionate surprise. He thinks I have money, I thought as he thanked me with a deferential, distant nod.

  Mary’s Lattice, or Nightwork

  Up in my room, I spent two hours on my daily writing practice of making detailed notes about the day, then I went out to Thai for dinner. The restaurant was the only occupied storefront on the block, and its luxuriant stone-and-bamboo interior belied the squalor outside. Through the window, I saw a cop standing over a homeless man across the street, trying to wake him. It turned out the man was actually dead. As I walked home after dinner, two EMT workers were loading the shrouded body into an ambulance emblazoned with the image of a crucifix on a mountain.

  Back at the hotel, I made more notes as I watched the Patriots demolish the Redskins, then I went to bed. For many years—and still back then, but no longer—I used to sleep most nights with a notepad within easy reach on the bedside table and a tiny pencil tied to my index finger. It was a technique I’d learned from Mary Moroni, an aid to recalling my dreams, the presence of the pencil against my finger a sensate reminder—in those dimmest moments of faint arousal after a dream—not to fall back asleep but to reach for the bedside pad and make note of whatever I could recall. Mary had learned the trick from a follower of Lacan’s Parisian seminars, a woman she’d studied with in the early ’80s during a semester abroad at the Sorbonne. It was apparently a trick Lacan himself had used. Noting her dreams—Mary told me as we brought to a close an afternoon of prosodic analysis of Leaves of Grass—had helped her begin making sense of the unconscious, though using that term, she said, she believed was problematic: “I know it must sound silly to hear me say that sitting under the collected works of Freud.” She glanced back at the block of beige volumes lined up in a lower corner of the mammoth bookshelf towering behind her. “Anyway, that’s what Jenny”—Jenny was her girlfriend—“always says to me: ‘If you hate Freud, why do you spend so much time reading him?’”

  “Why do you?” I asked.

  “I don’t hate him, for starters. Do I think he was wrong about a lot of things? Yes. Women, especially, though not only. And what he was wrong about he was really wrong about. Was he power-hungry? Yes. Was he a misogynist, a drug addict? Yes, and probably. But none of that changes the fact that he was a genius.”

  “Should I read him, too?”

  “Absolutely.” She turned in her chair and pulled out one of the beige volumes. “They’ll probably be worth more when I die if I keep the dust jacket in good shape,” she said as she slipped it off. “Like I said, it’s not that everything he says is right. But he was the first one through the door. And despite his failings, he still went deeper than most ever will.” She handed me the naked book across her desk: VOLUME IV (1900) THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS.

  “I used to dream a lot as a kid,” I said. “Intense stuff. But then it stopped. I haven’t had a dream in years.”

  “You’re still dreaming. You’re just not remembering them.”

  That’s when she showed me the trick with the pencil.

  She suggested a short one, so that night, I snapped a new Dixon Ticonderoga number 2 in half and sharpened the jagged end before affixing it to my index finger with Scotch tape. It looked like the silliest of makeshift splints. (Luckily, my roommate at the time spent most nights with his girlfriend.) But Mary was right. Three times that first night, I woke with images in my head, the pencil proving enough of a prod to reach for the pad and start writing. As I scribbled in the dark—the scrawl would be hard to read the next morning, but it didn’t matter; simply having written the dreams out had somehow fixed them in my mind—a spool of dream pictures poured forth, one recollected bit leading to another, then to a forgotten chunk, then to another dream I hadn’t recalled even having until I was already in the process of noting it. It felt like there was more space inside me, I remarked to Mary the following week, more space than I ever realized.

  Her smile seemed to say she knew exactly what I meant.

  For the next month, our weekly study hour would be mostly taken up with talk about the unconscious. The reason she didn’t like that word, she explained, was because it mystified rather than evoked. One had a sense of a thing that resisted meaning or formulation, something that wished to remain obscure, something often defined by Freud for his own purposes. She thought none of this productive. And while she wasn’t advocating for any single way to reconceive the great Viennese thinker’s concept, she had her preferred metaphors. One was the dictionary. The latest edition of the OED—which had come out three years earlier, in 1989—had 290,000 entries in it. Most people didn’t know more than twenty thousand, she said. To know half that was to be considered fluent. Fluency was like the conscious mind, the array of possibilities contained in the words you knew. The unconscious, she suggested, was like the mass of words you didn’t. 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. She liked the metaphor of a dictionary, for it implied a task, that of learning the language richly and deeply—though what she didn’t like about it was connected to this as well, the implication of something fixed, something that began and ended, that could be contained in a book you could hold in your hands. Her recent readings in mathematics had given her what she thought was an even richer way to reimagine the Freudian unconscious, she explained over coffee at the student union, where we’d ended up after one of our sessions in her office. She pulled a thick textbook from her bag and opened it to a page showing various diagonal and bulbous graphs; each diagram was labeled some form of mathematical “lattice.” In these plots of interrelated lines, she spied visual corollaries of the human nervous system, the filigreed mesh of our perceptive apparatus. Each lattice graph emanated from and returned to a single point, which she likened to the prefrontal cortex—the seat of our conscious personality—which, she said, was informed by everything that teemed along the body’s vast neural network but which barely registered most of it. “As an artist,” she said, addressing me now as an aspiring writer, “the more you can dwell along the weave, feel the lattice at work, the closer you’ll be to the vital, vivid stuff.”

  In noting my dreams those first few weeks, I was already making my own sense of what she might have meant by this, recognizing the way just remembering whose voice had last spoken in my head before I awoke could lead me back not only into the body of a dream but also, as I wrote it out, to the pieces and patches of the past—the threads of memory—from which it had been woven: a voice would lead to the insinuation of a room; recalling the room to the memory of a copper-colored rail alongside a hospital bed; to the nurse who tended to me for a month when I was sick with typhoid at the age of two; to a plate of ravioli tossed, at three, into a trash can when my mother went to answer the front door; to what were likely the first stirrings of my sexual desire at four, awakened by my aunt Khadija, an almost dead ringer for my mother, her sister—Freud was right!—sitting in a sunlit square as she read in our family room in Milwaukee.

  The vivid stuff onto which I was stumbling was certainly vital, but only to me, I reported back to Mary. Who else would care about any of it? And if no one else cared, why should I? To what purpose all this self-absorption?

  Mary responded as if she expected the skepticism. For the next few weeks, our literary hour would be filled with neurophilosophical speculation. Analysis of the Whitman phrase and Freudian code gave way to talk of Wittgenstein’s language games and the phenomenology of perception à la Merleau-Ponty. The bo
dy’s form and function shaped the mind’s possibilities and ordered our grammar; our thinking could not be divorced from the bodies in which it took place. Dreams, she said, had been her best way into that simpler, more primal perception of being. What she saw and felt from that perspective felt more vivid, yes, and ended up being more enduring. I defied Mary to defend her assignment with facts—and statistics! I was a scientist’s son, desperate, at the very least, for reasoned arguments to justify all this navel-gazing. She asked if the visionaries we’d studied—Whitman and Woolf, Black Elk—ever bothered to rationalize their surrender to the deeper currents of human experience. No, I said. They didn’t seem to care in the least. “Then why do you?!” What a question to pose to a twenty-year-old!

  I kept at it. I soon discovered that if I moved too much after I woke up, any memory of my dreams would vanish. Then it wouldn’t matter if I picked up my pad, because there would be nothing to note. I told Mary this was happening, and she suggested that it was only the angle of my spine that mattered. If I didn’t move my spine, she said, I wouldn’t lose the dream. Then she added that even if I did end up changing the spinal angle, all I had to do was find it again. The dream would return. I didn’t believe her.

  “Just try it,” she said. “See if it works.”

  Sometime around sunrise the next morning, I woke up, my head swirling with images. I rolled over to pick up my notebook. All at once, the pictures were gone. I remembered what Mary told me to do. Rolling back to where I’d been, I restored the angle of my resting spine, and just as suddenly, thoughts and pictures and feelings flowed into me unbidden. The dreamscape was alive again. All of it. I reached for the pad and started to write.

  The next week, when I told Mary her suggestion worked, she seemed amused by my incredulity. Then she went on to explain that, if what she believed was true—if, in some substantial way, a dream was actually the experience of language in the body—then the spine, or central axis of our neurologic lattice, was likely where much of our dreaming took place, a cognitive sap running from the roots of the body up into the branches of the brain. I didn’t question her proposition or the metaphor she was using to paint it. The technique of retrieving a dream by re-creating the angle of my spine was proof enough to me that what she knew was real, whatever the reason.

  I would stick with this form of nightwork for the quarter century to come. In time, I would come to concur with Mary’s thoughts about language in the body, and I would spend years and days making my own sense of just how such a language could be apprehended. Like Mary, I would closely study Freud’s early attempts to decode dreams—attempts glossed and argued over by the entire psychoanalytic tradition to follow—and marvel that his techniques still yielded worthy, enduring insights. I’m not prepared to make any grand claims here, though I will say this: living by the nocturnal glow of my dream life has proved rich, beguiling, instructive; it has given me ample occasion to question the nature of time, riddled as my dreams have been through the years with prognosticating encounters and apprehensions; but even these hints of the uncanny have not made up the most miraculous bounty of all this interrupted sleep. My dreams have taught me much about myself. I’m not sure I could sum up either the benefit or the challenge any better than Montaigne does in “Of Experience”:

  I take it for true that dreams are honest reflections of our inclinations; but there is art to making sense of them.

  * * *

  That night in Scranton, I dreamed about an upcoming wedding. My father and I were arguing over the invitations. He wanted to use postage stamps that bore the images of various Christian saints. It made me angry. Then I was in the midst of a group of pilgrims on a stormy night. We made our way slowly along a narrow path on a steep hill. Many of us were clutching staffs to brace ourselves against the gusting wind. A few of the staffs had crossbars attached, but they were askew, not forming proper crucifixes. At the top of the hill, there was a grave, but everyone was surprised to see it was just an empty hole. The dead man had decided not to show. Someone complained this is what the dead often did in Kashmir. I awoke to a feeling of failure and threat.

  At a coffee shop the next morning, I ordered a cup of tea and a Danish and sat down to work through the night’s dream notes. In the decade and a half since Mary’s assignment, I’d logged, annotated, and interpreted literally thousands of my dreams. The process I went through to make sense of them—as Montaigne puts it—still bore the influence of Mary and Freud. As Mary taught me to do with a poem, I started with the structure, then I worked through each of a dream’s salient details by free association. With the dream I’d had the previous night, the structure wasn’t obvious to me: a pairing of episodes without a clear thread to connect them—first the argument with my father about the wedding, then a procession up a hill path that led to an empty grave. No clear thread, I thought, though the sense of futility and failure I’d felt on waking—which lingered an hour into the morning—unified my experience of both parts. Perhaps working through the details, I thought, would prove more fruitful: the wedding seemed an obvious reference to one upcoming in my family. My parents had, themselves, been arguing about it just that weekend at Seneca Lake. My mother’s older brother—my uncle Shafat—was remarrying. His first wife—Bilqis, a Pakistani—had discovered he was having an affair with a white American woman and left him. Now Shafat was marrying the mistress. Mother was disgusted by the whole thing and couldn’t believe my father wanted to attend the ceremony; Father, for his part, thought my mother’s reaction childish. Shafat and Bilqis had never been happy together. What was the problem? Wasn’t it better for them to separate, especially now that one of them had found someone to be happy with? By invoking my father’s support for Shafat’s wedding and casting me in my mother’s role in their argument, the dream seemed to be alerting me to some sympathy I shared with my mother on the matter that I was unaware of.

  Then: the hill and narrow path. Something about the path reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the Great Wall of China. As I noted this, I suddenly remembered—as if the simple act of writing summoned the memory—a hill in the Punjabi village where my father grew up, at the top of which stood the small mosque that my grandfather led when he was still alive. Was this the holy ground toward which we pilgrims were making our way? At the summit was an empty grave. I’d seen a dead body loaded onto an ambulance just the night before, an ambulance painted with the image of another holy hill, Calvary. The dream’s makeshift crucifixes and the empty grave suddenly seemed to cohere, summoning the tale of the abandoned tomb of Christ.

  As I scribbled, I remembered something else: my father always said he wanted to be buried back in his village when he died. But Father’s village was in Punjab, not in Kashmir, as this grave was in the dream. I lingered for a while on the mention of Kashmir, the dream’s closing detail. I wrote around it. About how little we had talked of Kashmir in my Punjabi home, aside from the usual Indo-Pak chatter about the rightful owners of that disputed land, whether Pakistan or India, and how devious had been the British strategy to leave the matter unresolved, a site of perpetual conflict at the heart of their sometime colony. I wrote about the odd pink Kashmiri chai—served with salt, not sugar—that my father sometimes prepared when guests called. Neither association yielded any insight. I persisted, freely associating to the place, the word, the name, its constitutive phonemes. It wasn’t until I gave up, closed and stowed my notebook, and was sitting on a toilet seat reading latrinalia on the stall door that I recalled: Shafat—my remarrying uncle—had come to America after a stint in the Pakistani army. His sister, my mother, sponsored his green card. I remembered her worries about how long the process seemed to be taking, which especially concerned her given that there was new trouble brewing with India and that Shafat was then stationed where the fighting was likely—in Kashmir. All at once, the dream’s deeper structural logic was clear to me: it began with a hidden reference to Shafat, and it ended with one, too!

  Shafat’s complicated
saga in this country deserves a treatment all its own, but here’s the piece of it I must share now to convey why, as I sat on that toilet in a Scranton coffee-shop bathroom, my dream made sudden poignant sense to me: three years after 9/11, Shafat, a handsome, fair-skinned Pakistani man of above-average height, with a head of wavy hair he doused with tonic and combed flat against his skull; a military man by disposition and an engineer by training who was then working for a construction-crane manufacturing outfit in northern Virginia, where he was liked and his work was valued (as evidenced by the fast track of his multiple promotions and his $200,000-a-year salary); an amateur handyman who watched This Old House and spent whole weekends fixing up his two-story saltbox colonial; a reader of the classics who’d gone to the finest boarding school a lower-middle-class family in Pakistan could have afforded, where he’d read Baltasar Gracián’s The Art of Worldly Wisdom, whose timeless and canny moral guidance he claimed to live by; a champion bowler on his school cricket team; a father to three sons who loved him enough not to abandon him after he married his mistress, despite the anguish this would cause their equally beloved mother; this Shafat, a criminal to his wife, perhaps, but in no way to the state, would end up in a Norfolk, Virginia, jail one night, where he was beaten purple by a fellow inmate egged on, he alleged, by two cops who sat and watched as they drank beers. Earlier that night, after a beer of his own, Shafat had made the mistake of talking politics at a local bar where he liked to go, not far from the naval base. Perhaps it was his own army background that made him feel more at ease in this military town than he ever should have allowed himself to feel. I certainly doubt he’d had only one beer, as he’s always claimed, and I can’t help but wonder what Gracián would have made of his decision to share a tale about being assigned to a detail that picked up a covert American shipment at an airfield in Quetta in the late 1980s: two crates of new, mint-crisp $100 bills he said they’d been ordered to deliver to US allies in Afghanistan. They drove the crates to the border, where they were met by the man who would later be known to the world as the evil one-eyed Taliban cleric Mullah Omar but who, back then, was just another member of the mujahideen fighters battling the Soviet enemy. Omar had already lost his eye to a piece of shrapnel, which, legend had it, he cut out of its socket with his own knife. After the victory over the Soviets, Omar returned home to Kandahar and rose to prominence as an opponent of the corrupt warlords now in charge of much of the country. Omar was particularly incensed by the pedophilia widespread among the tribal elites. He and his vigilantes staged a series of guerrilla campaigns, freeing children kidnapped and held as sex slaves by various militia leaders, and word of these righteous exploits sent his popularity soaring. Such was the beginning of the movement that would come to be known as the Taliban. Or so Shafat explained to the bargoers around him, adding that, as much as we hated the Taliban in this country—and we had good reason; he wasn’t denying that—we might do well to remember that those same people had once been on our payroll. They weren’t always the monsters folks now made them out to be.