Ayad AkhtarHomeland Elegies

Abstract

on to tell the story of “Two people, one tree, not enough land or light or love.” For that story to be told and for it to have any chance at a resolution, some things have to be put aside, glossed over, and reimagined so that the two people have the same claim to the one tree and the same right to light and love in that land. With my family divided on both sides of Lebanon’s southern border, I leave Shrapnel Maps disappointed, feeling that it is a story and a journey for someone else’s benefit, not mine. Nevertheless, I am certain that these poems will bring much enlightenment to an uninformed reader, an easy initiation into the Palestinian tragedy. When confronted with a neighbor who keeps high fences and whose children grow up “only around their own kind,” the Arab American in Metres’s collection thinks: “The Arab in me still wants to invite him in for tea. The American in me wants the Arab to turn and disappear in the falling snow.” Like this persona, we as Arab Americans are expected to contort the Arabs (and especially the Palestinian in us) into difficult spaces, package our trauma in palatable ways, translate our pain into the pain of others who are perceived as more valid or relatable. Shrapnel Maps left me with burning questions Metres himself poses in his afterword : “What do we say to those who remain in the thickets of suffering? What do we do in this brief space of our breathing?” And for a people gagged and erased, oppressed and dehumanized for three generations now, a poem is sometimes “the only space for breathing.” It is a space that does not tolerate diplomacy or compromise. For it then risks two things: relinquishing itself as poetry and muffling the voices it sets out to champion. Huda Fakhreddine University of Pennsylvania Ayad Akhtar Homeland Elegies New York. Little, Brown. 2020. 368 pages. HOMELAND ELEGIES is Ayad Akhtar’s second novel following American Dervish, published in 2012. In the interim, Akhtar has been a prolific playwright, with Disgraced winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2013. Akhtar continues to reinvent himself as a writer, this time in the genre of autofiction. He forewarns readers in the preface that he has fictionalized many parts of his life, drawing inspiration from Alison Bechdel’s quotation in the epigraph: “I can only make things up about things that have already happened.” This experimental novel is simultaneously a poignant reflection of the complexities of being a Muslim writer in post-9/11 America as well as a tender and funny tribute to his parents, particularly his father, whom Akhtar recently lost. Historical events like 9/11, the truck bomber in New York, and the rise of Donald Trump form the historical landmarks against which intense dramas of his personal and familial history are played out. In lieu of a plot, this novel follows an episodic structure, woven with many metafictional commentaries, dreams, diatribes, and debates about the critical reception of his works. In some ways, this is a reworking of the genre of the künstlerroman , a novel about the development of an artist. Homeland Elegies memorializes Akhtar’s father, a brilliant interventional cardiologist whose innovations had once brought him dizzying fame and patients like Donald Trump. The novel encapsulates Akhtar’s love-hate relationship with his father, beginning with their opposed politics in the 2016 elections. By the end of the novel, we see an exhausted Sikander, fighting grief over the loss of his wife, a gambling addiction, and an undeserved malpractice lawsuit, admit that he had been wrong about Trump. Interspersed between these episodes, we see the visceral antipathy for Muslims unleashed on Akhtar and his father after 9/11, which returns with greater fury after the rise of Donald Trump. There are several harrowing moments in the novel, when Akhtar and his family are deeply unsettled by verbal and near-physical Islamophobic abuse. Akhtar connects the rise of anti-immigrant and racist ideology to the failure of American capitalism to advance the hopes of working-class people in rural America. He reflects on the decimation of American manufacturing, the...