Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar’s latest novel, “Homeland Elegies,” is a meditation on American identity through the lens of an American son and his immigrant parents. It is also a treatise on American economics, Muslim identity in this country, the power of dreams, and syphilis. We listen back to a conversation with Akhtar that was part of the Portland Book Festival put on by Literary Arts in 2020.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Pulitzer prize winning writer Ayad Akhtar has said he wanted to write a philosophical novel about 21st century America with the addictive narrative quality of reality television. He has succeeded wildly. His new novel, Homeland Elegies, which puts fiction and autobiography into a blender until you cannot tell one from the other, is absolutely a novel of ideas about unfettered capitalism, and bifurcated identities, and the meaning of home. It is also really hard to put down because it’s full of family drama, piles of money that are won and lost, celebrity cameos and salacious details. As he told the New Yorker this summer, his work, his Proust meets Jerry Springer. Ayad Akhtar’s earlier works include the plays Disgraced and The Invisible Hand, and the novel American Dervish. He joins us today as part of this year’s all-remote Portland Book Festival. Welcome to TOL.
Ayad Akhtar: Thank you, David. That was great. It was a great introduction.
Miller: Well then, let’s move on with the interview. I want to start with capitalism, money and monopolies and debt and class, because in terms of the number of pages of the novel and the fire behind those pages, those issues loom as large as anything that you write about in the book. How would you describe your overall thesis about our economic system right now?
Akhtar: Well, I think one of the arguments of the book is that there have been some very significant changes in American life socially over the past, say, half century, maybe two generations, let’s put it that way. And that those changes are substantially changes that have to do with economics. They have to do with the thinking about economics and what’s been permissible in the way incentives have changed, and the way that debt has enabled modern capital and modern capitalism to colonize and take over the entire planet. One of the things that I was very mindful of in writing the book was, the thing I often say about capitalism is that it’s very easy to criticize capitalism, but it’s even easier to enjoy its benefits. That paradox and sitting inside that and being able to write to the larger picture of what’s happening to the world. I do see a lot of the division, the populism, all of these sorts of things that we’re dealing with on a daily basis. I don’t see them as much through the angle of identity and human rights as I do, really, through the lens of economics.
Miller: To what extent, though, do you think that the ways that unfettered capitalism or increasingly powerful companies that essentially have monopolies over so much of our lives, including what we look at and how we take in the world, to what extent do you think that people are acting as if the capitalism is the problem?
Akhtar: It’s hard to say. I think that there’s an increasingly fascinating discourse that’s developing around systemic racism and its ties to capitalism, and this false belief that in order to address the issues of capitalism, we have to address the issues of systemic racism. I think that the inverse is true. I think you certainly can’t deal with racism in a systemic way unless we deal with the money flows in the society. But I think that the much larger problem for the entire planet, not just for any particular identity or any particular race, is the capitalist model itself. I think we have to figure out how we can meaningfully talk about this because (a), capitalism is not going away, and (b), if we don’t find a way to to articulate what the real issue is, and therefore what a real solution could be, we’re all going to be the worse for it.
Miller: I appreciate that. So, in your mind, is it capitalism per se, or is it specific policies that our country, and others have pursued? But especially our country, since that’s the focus of your book. Deregulation, or antitrust questions, or, the fact that we have let specific individual companies get so big and have tentacles in so much. Is it capitalism, or is it the way we have chosen to regulate the market?
Akhtar: I think it’s probably both on some level. But like I said earlier, I don’t think we’re going to be able to get rid of capitalism. So we have to look at the ways in which we as a society have meaningful checks against the ills that that capitalism has wrought. And you’re right to signal and identify some of those issues and themes that you brought up there, with scale really being the large one. I think that there has been an ideological shift in the country, where there’s been a dimming of what society provides and offers and guarantees its citizenry in our country. Increasingly, those things are available to consumers, presumably at the lowest price. This idea that giving the customer the lowest price is the end-all be-all of what the social contract is something that came into being in the late seventies and early eighties and began to create the atmosphere for companies that now, like Amazon or Facebook or Walmart or any number of a handful of companies, that control the deeper infrastructure of the evolving new economy. They provide customers presumably with sometimes free services or the lowest price or the quickest delivery or what have you, but in the process are killing communities, and really operating as a chokehold on the larger economic well being of the country.
Miller: How has your own experience as a struggling artist and then a successful one shaped the way you think about money yourself?
Akhtar: That’s an interesting question. I’ve been writing about money and thinking about money for a long time, 25 years. I think in my early twenties, I realized that the big story in this country was money. In some ways that’s what Homeland Elegies is really about. It’s about a writer who comes to understand it, comes of age as a writer, comes into some degree of success, but also comes to understand how central money is to the American experience. Unlike my narrator, who does have my name and many of the facts of my life, but doesn’t always share my experience, he’s a little bit more successful than I am in some ways financially. But I think that one of the things that I have certainly understood as I’ve gotten older and, and seen the process of political ideology changing as people come to own more property, is that property does have a point of view. And when you own enough of something, you start to see the world through the perspective of that thing. To me, one of the big revelations [that] happened through the process of learning about money was understanding how much that point of view – that is to say, the point of view [that] property shapes policy and ideology in the world and how so many of the larger decisions that do get made – are not about human flourishing so much as they are about property value and property rights.
Miller: Can you help me understand the phrase that “property has a point of view”, because I’m still a little bit confused by [it]. What makes perfect sense to me, is, say if somebody rents their whole life and then they have enough money to buy a house or an apartment that they would desperately want to hold on to that new thing that they have, but it seems like that’s not what you’re saying.
Akhtar: So to use your analogy, I think if I’m a renter my whole life, I recognize the rights of tenants, and I recognize the abuses of landlords, and I see very clearly how the system needs to change in order for my life and those like me to flourish. That’s my point of view. If I then own a building – I am a renter and then suddenly I own a building – I suddenly start to see how landlords are abused by tenants and how I’ve got to make a mortgage, and how there is no guarantee that I’m ever going to get my rent paid, and how in some states I can’t even evict the people who are not paying rent, and how, if I’m not careful, I’m going to go under. So this shift in point of view – that is to say, the entire world perspective that I have – is entirely informed by my experience and where my money is coming from and where my money is going. To understand this process and how much political consciousness is tied up in ownership and tied up in the position one has within a society, and that every quarter of society has a legitimate claim to the political space of that society, but that this battle is a very real one. That’s something that I also am trying to give form to, and I hope [in] a much more vivid and fun way than the way I’m explaining it right now.
Miller: Well, let’s get to the fun way, specifically about money here, because your Ayad Akhtar character gets pretty rich in a morally dubious way that he’s not really a party to, but he also does not dig that deep into the mechanisms of this scheme. He happily leaves that up to the complicated and unscrupulous financial whiz who gives him something like an eight or ten-fold increase on his investment. Can you describe this character’s scheme?
Akhtar: Midway through the book, the writer, who again, like myself, has my name and many of the facts of my life, has written a play which wins a Pulitzer, as I also did. This becomes [the] entree into a whole other level of the society, like the money and the influential people who like to have friends who are artists so that they can brag about it and what not. He gets brought into this world and meets a financier by the name of Riaz Rind, who is a American-born Pakistani who is a hedge fund manager and who has come up with a kind of innovation. The innovation is that he and his company have bought lots of buildings in upmarket areas, and they are renting those apartments and those places. Then they are bundling all those rent payments into a bond and this has hit Wall Street.
The narrator, at this point, he has been along for the ride and he’s been hobnobbing with Riaz and with Riaz’ cohorts and friends. He spends time at George Clooney’s house and in Lake Como because of all of this. When the narrator’s mother dies, she leaves him $300,000 in her will, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. So he gives it to Riaz and Riaz invests it in a small company outfit that he’s taking public on the stock exchange. That’s the increase in value that you talk about. He buys shares for $2 and then it ends up selling it for $20 [or] something, so it’s a tenfold increase. It becomes a modest millionaire couple, $2.5 million I think is his net worth, but more than enough for a writer to spend the rest of his life and not not have to worry about anything if it doesn’t change his lifestyle.
So it turns out that what was happening is that Riaz was like Goldman Sachs, selling debt, selling these bonds to municipalities or to companies or to individuals without disclosing fully that he, Riaz, and his company were on both sides of the deal, so that they would make money if those bonds were fine and they would also make money if those bonds were defaulted, if those debt payments were not due. He ends up selling.
There’s a long saga where Riaz grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His father was very traumatized by trying to open a mosque there, and the local community came out against him. Riaz has a vendetta that he is involved in where he’s taking revenge on municipalities across the country that are not allowing mosques to be built in their communities. So inadvertently, this is part of what is the scheme that leads to the narrator making so much money without him realizing it.
Miller: A revenge fantasy, in a sense tied to a capitalist critique.
Akhtar: Yes, and it’s also a sort of quoting Marlowe’s Tamerlane and Haji Murad. It’s a nodal point in a focal point for a lot of different things to be expressed. I think that one of the fascinating sort of juxtapositions for me with Riaz is that he’s really a fighter for Muslim rights in this country, and he’s somebody trying to change the discourse around Islam, and fight the so-called stereotypes and whatnot. At the same time, he’s also exacting and enacting revenge in a way that I think many people would find very sympathetic actually.
Miller: But the repercussions of that are interesting: he wants to punish these municipalities, and he’ll win either way. He’ll get money either way. But he would like to punish these places, these cities or counties that said, ‘no, you can’t build a mosque here.’ But what actually happens in the novel to these places that invest their money in his business?
Akhtar: Well, in some of those communities, the budgets are broken by these investments. They go belly up and all the government workers in the city government are getting minimum wage all of a sudden. Some people are not making any money, and public lands are being sold off, and public waterworks are being sold off. Again, it’s a metaphor for what’s happened to the country. Also to lay the blame – and this is something the narrator does – is he’s not clear with the reader about what his real feelings morally are about all of this stuff. I’ll do the same by saying that it’s not clear that Riaz is ultimately to blame, because those municipalities, the city councils that signed onto those deals, did so because they were getting kickbacks and they were having the sales force from the company buy prostitutes, get them hotel rooms of prostitutes. It’s a metaphor for the corruption that is rampant across the business sector and across so many parts of our society, and how business is done is increasingly through this kind of quid pro quo on a personal level. So I think that it’s an attempt to stage the moral rot that has set in as everybody is chasing their dollar.
Miller: I’m curious because I started by saying that you have said you wanted to write a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel about various ideas, and you did. Now your job for the last couple months has been to – I guess you can’t go around the country – but to virtually go around the country and to talk about this. As you’ve been doing that, how much have people wanted to talk about this critique, this exploration of unfettered capitalism, as opposed to some of the other ideas that are also absolutely in the book, about identity, about about being a Muslim in America before and after 9-11, about home, broadly about identity?
Akhtar: That’s generally been the experiences that folks wanna, if they know anything about me, which they don’t always [and] often don’t, but if they do, then it’s that I’m a Muslim American writer, so I must be writing about the downtrodden Muslim experience. That in some way, they identify is valuable, because they too feel that the victims in our society need to have their voices heard and whatnot. I don’t have any problems with that, but it is also not really what I’m ultimately writing about, though I think that it’s impossible for me to avoid some of these things, especially given that so much of my experience as an American is informed by some of the very things that those people are curious about. That is to say, folks who are interested mostly in issues of identity.
But I do think the argument of the book ultimately is that yes, I’m a Muslim writer in this country. Yes, it’s been hard after 9-11. And that says a lot about race in America, and it says a lot about some of the divisions in this country. But it wasn’t until I started to understand what was happening to all of us, not just those of us who were brown or black or or gay, that it wasn’t until I understand what was happening to all of us and started to see that larger picture that I could really make sense of what was going on in this country and why we had a total imbecile in the oval office. How is it possible that this happened? The identity analysis does not provide a key to understand why that happened.
Miller: So you said that you wanted to write this novel of ideas about America today that would be as grabby or as shiny as reality TV, or maybe as a social media feed.
Akhtar: Right.
Miller: I’m curious how much your experience, our experience, of the internet has affected the style of the book that you ended up writing.
Akhtar: Oh, I think it substantially affected it. I think I’ve been observing something shifting in my own attention for quite some time, and I have been wanting to reflect that. The way that I worked with that was to always be attuned to the ways in which I was losing interest in what I was doing. Sometimes I would get bored with what I was doing mid-sentence. So there was a technique that I was using to stay on top of my own attention and to keep myself absorbed in what I was doing by constantly shifting expectation and also making sure on every page to have enough of a lower delight or a lower attraction, if you will, [so] that we would move from page to page, section to section, off the afterglow of these sensational, sex driven or money driven – as you said earlier – these sensory delights.
There was something else that I was paying a lot of attention to, which was the use of particular words. One of the things that social media has taught those who have studied it with some rigor is that the use of particular words in feeds actually tend to increase traffic. There are specific words, but they have more to do with their emotional resonance. So the juxtaposition and the constant curation from page to page of making sure there were enough words that were going to really cathect and ensnare the reader’s attention and move them through. Again, that reader is me. I wasn’t thinking of some theoretical reader; I was trying to keep myself engaged. But I was doing that with an attention to a different kind of focus and concentration that I had learned from spending so much time on these devices.
Miller: What about the way you think about the attention of a dramatic audience? I mean, the time it takes to be in a theater it’s dwarfed in general by the time it takes to read a novel – say, two hours versus, I don’t know, days and days or weeks. But on some level, as the author, I imagine you think intensely about maintaining the focus of your audience.
Akhtar: Totally.
Miller: So how do those interact with each other?
Akhtar: Well, I think one of the things that I love about playwriting is that I spend so much time in the theater once the play is on its feet, watching it with an audience. On Broadway, we get three weeks of previews where we can rewrite. So I spend every single day... I mean, that’s the most critical part of my creative process. It’s that the play is basically written in some form. It now has an audience. And night after night I can see what the effect of that play is on the audience, and I can rework it. So I’m very attuned to this feedback mechanism, sort of keeping the audience’s attention. I’m a playwright – maybe somewhat unique in the contemporary landscape – who’s really, really preoccupied by the moment-to-moment need to hold the audience’s attention. I think it’s something that’s more akin to what you would see in a musical, the way that some musicals are directed. I think a lot of plays…
Miller: Or maybe stand-up.
Akhtar: Yeah, exactly. As opposed to straight theater where I think there are writers who really don’t have any issue with the audience floating in and out of the experience and sort of latching on when they want to and whatnot.
Miller: Why is that so important to you that they have to be hyper engaged every minute as opposed to…
Akhtar: I don’t know. I don’t know, Dave. I just … I’m not in it to be bored. I just have always felt that that absorption – that pure absorption of the reader, of the viewer – is something that I aspire to, because it’s what I love so much. When I lose a sense of myself and I lose any sense of time and I am completely inside the building of expectation, the delivery of expectation, or the misdirect or the redirect of my attention … When I’m in that process, I feel most alive, oddly. I’m always trying to recreate that; it’s a personal poetics. I would never advise anyone else to be so neurotic about it. But I really, really am.
Miller: If there’s one issue that’s come up more than any other in everything I’ve seen about this novel, in reviews and in interviews, it’s a focus on your decision to blend pure fiction, fabricated everything, with real details about your life or your family’s life. It’s led some interviewers, sometimes in cringey ways, to try to get at what is real and what is not. Has that desire among readers to ferret out the, quote/unquote, “truth” surprised you? Or was that what you were expecting?
Akhtar: I think that I was expecting it to some degree. I think the extent to which it’s happened has surprised me. It’s interesting. I certainly knew that I was doing something by doing it this way. I knew that I wanted to find a form that was going to mirror this collapse of fact and fiction … that was going to stage the process, on the one hand, of truth decay and, on the other hand, of this curation of the self that we are involved in every day on these platforms and increasingly in our lives, where we are curating these images of ourselves for the world’s consumption and also for our own sort of mirroring. That process seemed to me central to what this book was going to be trying to do, and again, in a form that was going to substantially not be dis… you couldn’t tell the difference between fact and fiction.
There were points in the process where I thought that I would – like Philip Roth’s “Counterlife” or “Operation Shylock” – where I’d sort of pull back the curtain and then say, “Oh, well see, this was all a fiction.” But then I just realized there was no point in doing that; there was no real reason. With so much a part of our ethos and our culture right now this confusion around fact and fiction, that I didn’t need to. It would be putting a hat on a hat, if you will. But in not doing that, I certainly– even though on the cover of the book, the publisher went out of their way to make “A Novel” as big as the entire title and the name of the author, as if to really underscore. But it’s interesting; I think it speaks to the way in which, on the one hand, whatever you assert about yourself, even if you say you’re lying, people will believe. And we’ve just been through four years of that politically, where I think everybody knows that Trump is lying, and yet he says something and people believe it.
Miller: And maybe the opposite is true, increasingly, that whatever you assert yourself, if you say it’s true, that people are not going to believe it, which cuts both ways.
Akhtar: Yeah, I think that’s very, very true. I think that’s right. And I think that there’s a certain deconstructive mindset that approaches, as you say, anything that posits itself as a truth statement and looks for the way in which it’s false.
Miller: It’s so interesting to hear you mention Philip Roth just now, because I had been thinking about the connections between the two of you as I was reading this book. Because, as you mentioned, he too explored a, quote/unquote, “Philip Roth character” in a number of his books. He too was a non-Christian writer in a very Christian America and someone who was vilified and celebrated by, in this case, American Jews for what was seen as airing dirty laundry. It’s one thing for us to say bad things about our kind, but you shouldn’t do it because non-Jews or non-Muslims, they don’t understand with the same subtlety what you’re saying. That’s been said to you, from what I’ve read, and absolutely it was said to him. Do you see a connection between not being a member of the dominant American demographic and your decision to fictionalize yourself the way you did?
Akhtar: Oh, that’s interesting. Wow. Huh. You know what, that’s a really profound question. I don’t know how to answer that. What I could say is that I went to school on Philip Roth. So, to the extent that that’s true of Roth’s writings, it might be true of mine as well. I mean, it’s a good question–
Miller: He might hate that question. I mean, I don’t know if it’s true of his either–
Akhtar: No, I don’t hate it at all–
Miller: No, I said he might have hated it. I don’t know.
Akhtar: Oh yeah. Yeah, I don’t know. I think that that probably speaks to a level of analysis and awareness that I, as a writer, probably don’t have – that I don’t have that kind of awareness of my own procedures and my own way in the world to know whether I would need a defense like that in order to be able to lay claim to the center stage, if you will. But I will say that I was acutely aware that, in my own hands, a third person narrator, an obvious third person fictional narrator or an obvious first person fictional narrator, I would not be able to make the book feel as immediate as I knew I could with my own, quote/unquote, “voice” – a voice that was very much like me and that was using a lot of the stuff from my life, but that was also free to concoct and free to elide and free to contradict many of the things that were in my life. I think that maybe there’s a reason there that has some social genesis that I’m not aware of.
Miller: Dreams and trying to remember them and trying to make sense of them looms really large for your character in the novel. What is the power there, the value in doing that? [It’s] something that used to be more common I think – more commonly talked about among fancy literary people, and in some ways has fallen out of fashion, but not for your character.
Akhtar: In my early twenties, I started paying attention to my dreams. I had a mentor who suggested that it would be an interesting way for me to have a different understanding of the creative process. So I started assiduously keeping track of my dreams. I would remember up to nine dreams a night. For four years I did this. I was waking up every 45 minutes and writing down the dream that I’d had. I have literally boxes of thousands of dreams from that period and–
Miller: Your character had a pencil or a pen taped to his finger.
Akhtar: Yes, yes. I didn’t actually do that. That was a technique that I had learned that had been used by others. It was not something that I did myself. But again, that’s another way in which I’m using substantially facts from my life. But then I’m finding ways to, in that case, in a very small way, I’m gusting it up with something that didn’t happen, just for immediacy’s sake and an image that sticks with the reader, if you will.
Miller: How did doing that affect your life as a writer or your life, just… your life?
Akhtar: Well, it affected me profoundly. And it’s something that I continue to do. I don’t wake up every 45 minutes anymore, but I do keep track of what’s going on at night in my dream life. I’ve discovered so many things that I think I have a deeper understanding of and many things that I still can’t explain and can’t make sense of. I’ve often been totally confounded by the collapsing of the spacetime continuum that close attention to my dreams has brought me into connection with. I will often dream of things that happen well before they happen. And then when they happen, I realize, oh, well, then that was what that dream was about; I thought it might have been about something else. But I think that more substantially, and certainly more helpfully, it’s helped me to understand a different kind of consciousness, something closer to a poetic space or poetic consciousness, as opposed to a literal or rational consciousness. As an artist, it has been helpful and it’s attuned me to texture and rhythm. It’s attuned me to subliminal meaning. It’s attuned me to structure in different ways than I would have been if I hadn’t paid such close attention to my unconscious, so to speak.
Miller: For your character in the novel, it seems like there is a connection in craft between the way he captures some of the details in dreams and the way he captures, in a kind of journal, in a notebook at the end of the day, what’s happened, where there’s a real focus not necessarily on the overall shape of the story but on individual small details that will then, he argues, prove more important to really understand what happened. There was one small but endearing and indelible detail for me in the novel that really stood out, which is [that] your character’s mother becomes, in the US – I should say in Wisconsin, where you grew up – becomes a huge fan of polka music and not just famous polkas.
Akhtar: No, decidedly not the famous polkas.
Miller: Yeah, she’s a nerd. She has a deep knowledge of local polkas in one particular part of rural Wisconsin. What did they mean to her?
Akhtar: Well, that’s something that again, a detail that’s shared from my life with my mother. She was a big fan of polka. I still don’t fully get it. I think that what my narrator in the book suggests is – and this is an interpretation that I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it’s something that the narrator offers – is that the music spoke to the continuation of an old world tradition in the new world. It was a group of people who were really trying to keep something of that old world alive. My own mother, I think, was very homesick and never felt that she really quite belonged here and always felt that she wished in some ways that she was back there, back in the old world where she came from. So I sort of, or my narrator sort of muses that that’s what the meaning of her attachment to polka is. But, yeah, you got me. I don’t know.
Miller: Do you listen to polka since she passed away?
Akhtar: No, I don’t. I don’t really like the stuff very much other than the fact that my mother liked it.
Miller: There are essentially two endings to this book. There is the end of the family narrative, the main bulk of the novel, where your father’s character has returned to Pakistan. And then there is a coda, where your character is giving a speech at a college. In the first ending, your father’s character says, “I’m glad to be back in Pakistan, Beta. I’m glad to be home.” In the second, your character says, “America is my home.” Those are the very last words of the novel, sort of a double ending. How did you decide to end the book with these two very different statements about home?
Akhtar: That last chapter about my father, which comprises a quarter of the book and is really substantially the emotional meat of the book, is really the relationship between myself and my character and my father. The day that I finished that chapter, that very long chapter, about him in a malpractice lawsuit in Western Wisconsin – my father hit his head, ended up in ICU and died shortly after. This is before I wrote this short coda about him being back in his home in Pakistan. One of the things that he was doing in the last two years of his life as he was drinking himself into a daily stupor was reminiscing and wishing that he was back home in Pakistan – what he was calling “back home,” which he never did. Throughout his adult life in this country, almost 50 years that he spent here, he never referred to Pakistan as back home. This was his home, America. This is where he came, where he wanted to be. He loved it. But at the end of his life, he just wanted to go back there. He didn’t want to be here anymore.
Miller: Could I interrupt just one second? I want to be a respectful interviewer, but I’m not sure if you’re talking about your real father or the character in the book right now.
Akhtar: No no, I’m talking about my real father.
Miller: Okay.
Akhtar: Because, in the book, he doesn’t talk about going back home.
Miller: Yeah.
Akhtar: In the book, he doesn’t talk about it at all…
Miller: But he does [go back home]. So that’s why I got confused, and I knew that in real life he didn’t…
Akhtar: Sure. There’s a moment where he says something about, “you have land back there” and it’s supposed to be an illusion. But he doesn’t talk about it with any of the intensity or the longing that he did in real life. This father in the book is largely inspired by my father, but there are very, very significant ways in which he is not the same person. But in this particular instance, in this particular way, although he doesn’t talk about wanting to go back home to Pakistan, my real father did want to go back home. So when my father passed away, it was time to finish the book. It felt to me that there should be a bit of a story that returns him – that is to say, this fictional father that I wrote – returns him back to his, quote/unquote, “homeland” that my father – my real father on whom this character is based – where he wished to go. It was in a way me completing the story of my father that he couldn’t complete himself. Then I realized, in writing that, I knew that the book wasn’t finished. Because the book has to finish with the narrator. It can’t finish with his father. I knew that I was going to come back to the opening of the book, which is Mary Moroni, his college professor who is really a kind of ideological and philosophical Virgil, if you will, for the reader and for the narrator in the book, and is the person who sees America most clearly. She loves Whitman and she teaches this narrator how to see and come into political consciousness. I knew the book would have to end with her as well. So it ends in a college campus visit where he goes to visit his college mentor. But he’s now a writer and he gives a talk. That section is called “Free Speech.”
Miller: It’s a kind of literary gift to write a version of your father’s life, to create fiction where you let him do what he talked so much about wanting to do but did not do in real life. It’s a profound way to think about what you can do in a book. But going back to the line at the end, where there’s a man in the audience who speaks up after you’ve been talking at this college event, and he essentially says, “love it or leave it.” It’s impossible to separate that kind of a notion, that line, from pure racism or xenophobia. This is a white man telling a brown man that he doesn’t belong. But the sentiment has also, I think, become more common, apart from race or religion. Basically, that criticism of some aspect of our country – the way our country is functioning or not functioning – that it’s increasingly seen as unpatriotic. Where do you think that idea comes from?
Akhtar: Well, I think it’s a generational divide. I think that the ideology of America as an exceptional place, a city on a hill and all of that, that rhetoric corresponded, for a very long time, to an experience that our parents’ generation actually had.. and their parents.. where America was an optimizing force for them in their lives. Those ideas were not just platitudes. They corresponded to economic changes. This is where I always get back to the economics. I think that the younger generation – folks younger than me, Millennial generation and Gen Z – they hear all this stuff and they’re like, “It’s a lot of hooey; that’s not true. There’s no foundation in the economics. Our lives are not getting any better. People’s lives are getting worse.” I think the older generation sees that logic and that rhetoric and they think, “Well it was true for me, must be true for the country.” And I think younger folks say, “Well, it’s not true.” I think it’s really just a matter of people’s experiences. We go back to the metaphor of the tenant and the landlord: what you experience and where your money is coming from and how your bread is buttered shapes your point of view. So I think I do understand why folks of an older generation tend to take this kind of criticism and say that it’s in bad faith, and younger folks tend to look at the older folks say, “Are you clueless? I don’t understand what you’re seeing that I’m not seeing.” It’s a very real division.
Miller: So the word that I focused on at the end of the book, that double use of home, is what we’ve been talking about. But the title of your book is obviously slightly different. It’s a variation of homeland, which has a really different ring to it. What does the word homeland mean to you as apart from home?
Akhtar: Well, it’s a couple of different things that I’m playing with. One is the homeland – that is to say, the place where my parents came from, or Pakistan – and the elegy to that, the passing of that, because I no longer have any connection to that, as they are now gone. It’s a way of sort of subliminally mourning my parents, if you will, in the title. There’s also the homeland, as in the American homeland. That is to say, the unified idea of what we are and where we come from and what we are fighting for and what we believe in and the sort of passing of any collective agreement about that. There’s also homeland, as in homeland security, the Department of Homeland Security, a department created, really it seems, to make everybody’s lives miserable at airports for the last 20 years without any substantial reason. [It’s] a department created after 9/11 who’s… 15 years of that department were really about making Muslims’ lives miserable in this country. So the echo of homeland elegies in the homeland security or homeland insecurity, if you will, is another one of the meaning-currents running through that title.
Miller: It’s hard to remember how much you heard a word before 20 years ago, but I remember very well when the Department of Homeland Security was created in the aftermath of 9/11. At that point, it seemed just like immediate and instant propaganda. It was a word that I just don’t remember being a part of our daily lives before the creation of that new agency.
Akhtar: Totally. I think that’s true. The American homeland – you never really heard that locution, right? That was Heimat; if anything, it was a kind of a translation of a German idea. It wasn’t really ever something that felt natively American. But of course, the generation of use of a word, it’ll become part of the vernacular pretty quickly.
Miller: Could you describe the epiphany – kind of dark epiphany – that your character has in the spring of 2016. There’s a long dinner, and then it ends with your character saying this line that “the time had come to start listening beyond my hopeful heart.” What did your character learn that led to that epiphany?
Akhtar: That chapter recounts an encounter with a Black American Hollywood agent, a very good friend of the narrator, who is actually a Libertarian or race-conscious Republican, if you will, if that makes any sense. That is to say, he believes he’s advocating for Black causes and Black rights. And, therefore, it means he doesn’t want to pay money to a government created by whites, which means he does not want to be taxed, which means he’s more inclined to vote for Republicans than Democrats, because they will lower his taxes, and then he’ll use the savings and pass them on to people who need them. It’s kind of weird inversion of the usual politics. [The] narrator meets this guy and they have a long dinner in Harlem where Mike Jacobs breaks down the political situation and explains and predicts that Donald Trump is going to be the next president. Basically, what he outlines is a picture of a country that resembles the country that Frank Capra saw in “It’s a Wonderful Life” if George Bailey were no longer alive, if Bedford Falls was called Pottersville and where old Potter was now the owner, the monopolistic owner, of all the real estate in what was then called Bedford Falls. All of the people would be under his sway, and they would all owe him money. It would be a police state rampant with drugs and prostitution. In a sense, what the narrator realizes is that that vision of American life – which is so horrible in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and doesn’t actually happen because George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart, does exist and he is a force for good – that in fact this country has become that nightmare vision, and that writing to what matters about the country today has got to mean writing about money in ways that are not about promulgating hope, because there is no hope for us if we’re going to continue to play this game where all value is monetary. That’s the realization that he has, and he realizes that his language is too marred, is marred by tenderness and yearning, and that he’s got to find a colder language. Of course all of this predates the writing of the book, so the book itself is the very colder language, shriller songs, jangled chords. That’s the book that you’ve been reading. In a way, that epiphany is an explanation of the language of the book.
Miller: But the language there is very specific because he doesn’t say it’s time for me to stop having a hopeful heart, it’s that he has to start listening beyond my hopeful heart. Is that another way to say that the character still has hope, but he wants to have clear eyes about reality?
Akhtar: Yes, exactly, exactly.
Miller: How… I know you hate these questions, but–
Akhtar: No, I don’t hate them.
Miller: No, no, I haven’t asked one yet.
Miller: But how close are you to that sensibility of thinking of yourself as an optimistic person despite what you see?
Akhtar: I get that question a lot. I’ve come up with an answer that I think is not too much of an evasion, but I think articulates very well where I sit in all of this, which is to say that I’m very, very optimistic and hopeful about things in my life and in my community and the folks that I meet and the work that I’m doing and the good – the enduring good – that I encounter every day, both through the immediate circumstances of my daily life and also of those around me. I see so much good in the world, and I see so much good so close at hand. That’s such a wonderful reason to get up in the morning and to keep doing everything and to keep fighting the good fight and believing in people and all of that. So that’s the way in which I’m an optimist.
And then, of course, I am fully aware that nothing I do is ever going to prevent me from dying. I am going to die. That awareness means that I am also a pessimist. Between those two poles is everything else. I think that there is a limited ability that we have to change the world. To some extent, this drift into chaos and what I suspect is going to be increasing strife in our society, is something that I can do my best, on a day to day basis, to see where I can sow good in my life. But I can also recognize that, in some larger sense, history is out of my hands and that history is not merciful. History is usually very bloody and that we, on this soil at least, have avoided much of that for a much longer time than most societies do. I can recognize all of that and be pessimistic about that drift and be optimistic about the other side of it. I think that being able to hold those two points of view at the same time, to me, that’s the art of living. It’s also the art of thinking and it’s the art of deeper feeling, I believe.
Miller: Ayad Akhtar, it was a real pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much for the conversation and for the book.
Akhtar: Oh, thank you, David. Thank you.
Miller: Ayad Akhtar. His new novel is called Homeland Elegies.
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