Homeland Elegies Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Overture: To America

  A Chronology of the Events

  Family Politics I.: On the Anniversary of Trump’s First Year in Office

  II.: On Autobiography; or, Bin Laden

  III.: In the Names of the Prophet…

  Scranton Memoirs IV.: God’s Country

  V.: Riaz; or, The Merchant of Debt

  Pox Americana VI.: Of Love and Death

  VII.: On Pottersville

  VIII.: Langford v. Reliant; or, How My Father’s American Story Ends

  Free Speech: A Coda

  Discover More

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Ayad Akhtar

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2020 Ayad Akhtar

  Cover design by Lucy Kim

  Cover images © Shutterstock

  Cover copyright © 2020 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Author photograph by Vincent Tullo

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  ISBN 978-0-316-49643-8

  LCCN 2020930304

  E3-20200724-DA-NF-ORI

  For Mark Warren and Annika

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  I can only make things up about things that have already happened…

  —Alison Bechdel

  Overture: To America

  I had a professor in college, Mary Moroni, who taught Melville and Emerson, and who the once famous Norman O. Brown—her mentor—called the finest mind of her generation; a diminutive, cherubic woman in her early thirties with a resemblance to a Raphaelesque putto that was not incidental (her parents had immigrated from Urbino); a scholar of staggering erudition who quoted as easily from the Eddas and Hannah Arendt as she did from Moby-Dick; a lesbian, which I only mention because she did, often; a lecturer whose turns of phrase were sharp as a German paring knife, could score the brain’s gray matter and carve out new grooves along which old thoughts would reroute, as on that February morning two weeks after Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, when, during a class on life under early American capitalism, Mary, clearly interrupted by her own tantalizing thought, looked up from the floor at which she usually gazed as she spoke—her left hand characteristically buried in the pocket of the loose-fitting slacks that were her mainstay—looked up and remarked almost offhandedly that America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is, a place still defined by its plunder, where enrichment was paramount and civil order always an afterthought. The fatherland in whose name—and for whose benefit—the predation continued was no longer a physical fatherland but a spiritual one: the American Self. Long trained to worship its desires—however discreet, however banal—rather than question them, as the classical tradition taught, ever-tumescent American self-regard was the pillaging patria, she said, and the marauding years of the Reagan regime had only expressed this enduring reality of American life with greater clarity and transparency than ever before.

  Mary had gotten into some trouble the previous semester for similarly bracing remarks about American hegemony in the wake of Desert Storm. A student in the ROTC program taking her class complained to the administration that she was speaking out against the troops. He started a petition and set up a table in the student union. The brouhaha led to an editorial in the campus paper and threats of a protest that never actually materialized. Mary wasn’t cowed. After all, this was the early ’90s, and the consequences of astringent ideological fire and brimstone—or sexual abuse of power, while you’re at it—were hardly what they are today. If anyone had a problem with what she said that afternoon, I didn’t hear about it. The truth is, I doubt many of us even understood what she was getting at. I certainly didn’t.

  Worship of desire. Tumescent self-regard. A colony for pillage.

  In her words was the power of a great negation, a corrective to a tradition of endless American self-congratulation. It was new to me. I was accustomed to the God-blessed, light-of-the-world exceptionalism that informed every hour I’d ever spent in history class. I’d come of age in the era of the hilltop city gleaming for all to see. Such were the glorified tropes I learned at school, which I saw not as tropes but as truth. I saw an American benevolence in Uncle Sam’s knowing glare at the post office; heard an American abundance in the canned laugh tracks on the sitcoms I watched every night with my mother; felt an American security and strength as I pedaled my ten-speed Schwinn past split-level and two-story homes in the middle-class subdivision where I grew up. Of course, my father was a great fan of America back then. To him, there was no greater place in the world, nowhere you could do more, have more, be more. He couldn’t get enough of it: camping in the Tetons, driving through Death Valley, riding to the top of the arch in St. Louis before hopping a riverboat down to Louisiana to fish for bass in the bayou. He loved visiting the historic sites. We had framed our photos of trips to Monticello and Saratoga and to the house on Beals Street in Brookline where the Kennedy brothers were born. I recall a Saturday morning in Philadelphia when I was eight and Father scolding me for whining through a crowded tour of rooms somehow connected with the Constitution. When it was over, we took a cab to the famous steps at the museum, and he raced me to the top—letting me win!—in homage to Rocky Balboa.

  Love for America and a firm belief in its supremacy—moral and otherwise—was creed in our home, one my mother knew not to challenge even if she didn’t quite share it. Like both Mary’s parents—as I would later learn from Mary herself—my mother never found in the various bounties of her new country anything like sufficient compensation for the loss of what she’d left behind. I don’t think Mother ever felt at home here. She thought Americans materialistic and couldn’t understand what was so holy about the orgy of acquisition they called Christmas. She was put off that everyone always asked where she was from and never seemed bothered that they had no idea what she was talking about when she told them. Americans were ignorant not only of geography but of history, too. And most troubling to her was what she thought connected to this disregard of important things, namely, the American denial of aging and death. This last irritation would yield a malevolent concretion over the years, a terror-inducing bête noire that saw her to her grave, the thought that growing old here would mean her eventual sequestering
and expiration in a “home” that was nothing like one.

  My mother’s views—however rarely voiced—should have prepared me to understand Mary’s dyspeptic take on this country, but they didn’t. Not even my Islam prepared me to see what Mary saw, not even after 9/11. I remember a letter from her in the months following that terrifying day in September that changed Muslim lives in America forever, a ten-page missive in which she encouraged me to take heart, to learn what I could from the trouble ahead, confiding that her struggles as a gay woman in this country—the sense of siege, the unceasing assaults on her quest for wholeness, the roughness of her route to autonomy and authenticity—that all these had been but fires beneath her crucible, provoking creative rage, tempering sentimentality, releasing her from hope in ideology. “Use the difficulty; make it your own” was her admonition. Difficulty had been the flint stone against which her powers of analysis were sharpened, the how and why of what she saw, but which I still wouldn’t see truly with my own eyes for fifteen years to come, my deepening travails as a Muslim in this country notwithstanding. No. I wouldn’t see what Mary saw until I’d been witness to the untimely decline of a generation of colleagues exhausted by the demands of jobs that never paid them enough, drowning in debt to care for children riddled with disorders that couldn’t be cured; and the cousins—and the best friend from high school—who ended up in shelters or on the street, tossed out of houses they could no longer afford; and until the near-dozen suicides and overdoses of fortysomething childhood classmates in a mere space of three years; and the friends and family medicated for despair, anxiety, lack of affect, insomnia, sexual dysfunction; and the premature cancers brought on by the chemical shortcuts for everything from the food moving through our irritable bowels to the lotions applied to our sun-poisoned skins. I wouldn’t see it until our private lives had consumed the public space, then been codified, foreclosed, and put up for auction; until the devices that enslave our minds had filled us with the toxic flotsam of a culture no longer worthy of the name; until the bright pliancy of human sentience—attention itself—had become the world’s most prized commodity, the very movements of our minds transformed into streams of unceasing revenue for someone, somewhere. I wouldn’t see it clearly until the American Self had fully mastered the plunder, idealized and legislated the splitting of the spoils, and brought to near completion the wholesale pillage not only of the so-called colony—how provincial a locution that seems now!—but also of the very world itself. In short, I wouldn’t see what she saw back then until I’d failed at trying to see it otherwise, until I’d ceased believing in the lie of my own redemption, until the suffering of others aroused in me a starker, clearer cry than any anthem to my own longing. I read Whitman first with Mary. I adored him. The green leaves and dry leaves, the spears of summer grass, the side-curved head ever avid for what came next. My tongue, too, is homegrown—every atom of this blood formed of this soil, this air. But these multitudes will not be my own. And these will be no songs of celebration.

  A Chronology of the Events

  1964–68 My parents meet in Lahore, Pakistan; marry; immigrate to the United States

  1972 I am born on Staten Island

  1976 We move to Wisconsin

  1979 Iran hostage crisis; Mother’s first bout with cancer (with recurrences in ’86, ’99, and 2010)

  1982 Father’s first attempt at private practice

  1991 Father’s private practice folds; he declares bankruptcy, returns to academic medicine

  1993 Father first meets Donald Trump

  1994 Dinner with Aunt Asma; reading Rushdie

  1997 Father’s final encounter with Trump

  1998 Latif Awan killed in Pakistan

  2001 The attacks of September 11

  2008 Family trip to Abbottabad, Pakistan

  2009 Car breaks down in Scranton

  2011 Bin Laden killed

  2012 First opening of a play in New York City; meet Riaz Rind; Christine Langford and her unborn child die

  2013 Awarded Pulitzer Prize for Drama

  2014 Join the board of the Riaz Rind Foundation; meet Asha

  2015 Diagnosed with syphilis; Mother dies; Trump declares his candidacy

  2016 Trump elected

  2017 Sell my shares in Timur Capital; Merchant of Debt opens in Chicago; Father tried for malpractice

  2018 I begin to write these pages

  Family Politics

  I.

  On the Anniversary of Trump’s First Year in Office

  My father first met Donald Trump in the early ’90s, when they were both in their midforties—my father the elder by a year—and as each was coming out from under virtual financial ruin. Trump’s unruly penchant for debt and his troubles with borrowed money were widely reported in the business pages of the time: by 1990, his namesake organization was collapsing under the burden of the loans he’d taken out to keep his casinos running, the Plaza Hotel open, and his airline’s jets aloft. The money had come at a price. He’d been forced to guarantee a portion of it, leaving him personally liable for more than eight hundred million dollars. In the summer of that year, a long Vanity Fair profile painted an alarming portrait not only of the man’s finances but also of his mental state. Separated from his wife, he’d decamped from the family triplex for a small apartment on a lower floor of Trump Tower. He was spending hours a day lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling. He wouldn’t leave the building, not for meetings, not for meals—subsisting on a diet of burgers and fries delivered from a local deli. Like his debt load, Trump’s waistline ballooned, his hair grew long, curling at the ends, ungovernable. And it wasn’t just his appearance. He’d gone uncharacteristically quiet. Ivana confided to friends she was worried. She’d never seen him like this, and she wasn’t sure he was going to pull through.

  My father, like Trump, binged on debt in the ’80s and ended the decade uncertain about his financial future. A doctor, he’d transitioned into private practice from a career in academic cardiology just as the hostage crisis began. By the time Reagan was in office, he’d started to mint money, as he liked to put it. (The playful attack of his Punjabi lilt always made it sound to me more like he was describing the flavor of all that new cash rather than the activity of making it.) In 1983, with more money than he knew what to do with, Father took a weekend seminar in real estate investment at the Radisson hotel in West Allis, Wisconsin. By Sunday night, he’d put in an offer on his first property, a listing one of the instructors had “shared” with the participants on a lunch break—a gas station in Baraboo just blocks from the site where the Ringling brothers started their circus. Just what it was he needed with a gas station was the perfectly reasonable question my mother flatly posed when he announced the news to us later that week. To celebrate, he’d mixed a pitcher of Rooh Afza lassi—the rose-flavored squash beverage was my mother’s favorite. He shrugged in response to her question and held out a glass for her to take. She was in no mood for lassi.

  “What do you know about gas stations?” she asked, irritated.

  “I don’t need to know the day-to-day. The business is solid. Good cash flow.”

  “Cash flow?”

  “It’s making money, Fatima.”

  “If it’s making so much money, why did they need to sell? Hmm?”

  “People have their reasons.”

  “What reasons? Sounds like you have no idea what you’re talking about. Were you drinking?”

  “No, I wasn’t drinking. Do you want the lassi or not?” She shook her head, curtly. He tended the glass to me; I didn’t want it, either; I hated the stuff. “I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t expect you to support me. But in ten years, you’ll look back on this, you both will, and you’ll see that I made a great investment.”

  I wasn’t sure what I had to do with it.

  “Investment?” she repeated. “Is that like when you buy a new pair of sunglasses every time you go to the store?”

  “I’m always losing them.”


  “I can show you fifteen right now.”

  “Not the ones I like.”

  “What a pity for you,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm as she headed for the hallway.

  “You’ll see!” Father cried out after her. “You’ll see!”

  What we were to see were the subsequent “investments” in a strip mall in Janesville; another in Skokie, Illinois; a campground outside Wausau; and a trout farm near Fond du Lac. If you don’t see the logic in the portfolio of holdings, well, you’re not the only one. It turned out the haphazard purchases were all the advice of the seminar instructor, Chet, who’d sold him the first. All were financed with debt, each property operating as some form of collateral for the other in some bizarre configuration of shell corporations Chet came up with—for which he would be indicted in the aftermath of the S&L crisis. My father was lucky to dodge the legal bullet. Oh, and yes, we did have our obligatory copy of Trump’s The Art of the Deal on the shelf in the living room—but that wouldn’t be for a few years yet.

  My father has always been something of a conundrum to me, an imam’s son whose only sacred names—Harlan, Far Niente, Opus One—were those of the big California Cabernets he adored; who worshipped Diana Ross and Sylvester Stallone and who preferred the poker he learned here to the rung he left behind in Pakistan; a man of unpredictable appetites and impulses, inclined to tip the full amount of the bill (and sometimes then some); an unrepentant admirer of American pluck who never stopped chiding me for my adolescent lack of same: If he’d had my good fortune to be born here?! Not only would he never have become a doctor! He also might actually have been happy! It’s true I can’t seem to recall him ever looking as content as he did for those few middle Reagan years when—on the promise of the system’s endlessly easy money—he awoke each morning to find in the mirror the reflection of a self-made businessman. It would prove a short-lived joy. The market crash in ’87 initiated a cascade of unfortunate “credit events” that, by the early ’90s, reduced his net worth to less than nothing. I’d just started my second year of college when he called to tell me he was selling his practice to avoid bankruptcy and that I would have to leave school that semester unless I could secure a student loan. (I did.)