REBROADCAST: Author Omar El Akkad on “American War”

Local author Omar El Akkad recently won the Oregon Book Award for his latest novel “What Strange Paradise.” Today we listen back to a conversation with El Akkad from 2017 about his first novel “American War.” The book imagines a near future in which the country is fighting a second civil war.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. Omar El Akkad is a former foreign correspondent for Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper. He covered the Arab Spring in Egypt, military trials at Guantanamo Bay, refugee camps in Afghanistan, and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. You can see a lot of the themes from that reporting on display in his first book. There are drones, and suicide bombers, and teeming refugee tent cities full of desperate people grieving for lost loved ones, and hoping for a path to peace. But there’s a twist. El Akkad’s book is not based on his reporting, at least not directly. He wrote a novel, a terrifyingly realistic one that’s set in the second half of the 21st century. The novel is called American War, and it’s the story of the Second American Civil War, which in El Akkad’s telling ranges from 2074 to the year 2095.

El Akkad lives in Portland. He recently won an Oregon book award for his second novel, What Strange Paradise. So we thought we would take this moment to listen back to our interview about his first book. When we talked in 2017, I had him explain what prompted the Second Civil War.

Omar El Akkad: In the book, the Second American Civil War is fought about five or six decades from now, and it’s fought primarily over fossil fuel use. The America of the late part of this century has been ravaged by climate change. The East Coast is pretty well gone. The capital has been moved from Washington DC inland to Columbus, Ohio. Florida is gone. Southernmost Louisiana is about 100 miles north of where it currently is. And long after it would do any good at all, the federal government decides to impose a prohibition on fossil fuels as a way to combat climate change.

By this point, most of the world has moved on to other sources of fuel. Nonetheless, a number of southern states decided they would rather secded than go along with this. And that’s what sparks the war.

Miller: The book focuses on a lot of different lives, but the focus is on one family, that’s the Chestnuts. They come from southern Louisiana. It’s a place that you’ve actually covered as a reporter. What is southern Louisiana like right now?

El Akkad: Southern Louisiana, and I say this is somebody who’s visited a few times, certainly I didn’t grow up there and my experiences is as an outsider, it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. Both the geography and the culture is unique in a way that almost no other part of America that I’ve visited is. It’s gorgeous, and it’s timeless, and the state is losing about a football field worth of land every hour.

Miller: To what?

El Akkad: To a combination of things. Climate change, rising sea levels, the intrusion of saltwater that kills the plants whose root systems are holding the land together, countless miles of pipelines dug by the oil and gas industry over the past 100 years to facilitate the shipment of natural resources. The fact that the river, if left to its own devices, would move around like a kind of sidewinder and replenish the land with sediment, but to save cities like New Orleans, they’ve levied it in place, which means that that sediment doesn’t get redeposited, which means land thins out even faster. Combination of these effects leads to something along the lines of a football field of land loss every hour. It’s maybe the worst climate change catastrophe ongoing in the United States right now, and it gets very little coverage.

Miller: And that’s one of the reasons that you start the book, in I guess what would be New Southern Louisiana, because huge chunks of it 70 or 60 years from now are in the new Mississippi Sea, in your telling. Can you describe the Chestnut family?

El Akkad: The Chestnut family, when you first meet them at the beginning of the book, live in a repurposed shipping container by the banks of the Mississippi Sea, which is what the Mississippi River has become in southernmost Louisiana. They are largely isolated, in the sense that they have one nearby neighbor who is about a mile away, and nobody else really. And they live in a Louisiana that’s, in the context of the civil war, kind of a purple state, if you will. Technically, they’re still part of the union. They haven’t seceded along with Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia. But the population is very much sympathetic to that cause.

And when you first meet them, one of the defining aspects about that family in my mind is that they genuinely don’t care who wins this war. They have no interest in it. All they want is to go somewhere safe. The war is encroaching from East Texas, and when you first meet the family, Benjamin Chestnut, who is the father and the husband, is on his way to Baton Rouge to try and get a northern work permit, so that he can leave the Purple States, the family can move north. And all the family knows about the North is that it’s safe, and that’s all they care about.

Miller: Even though they have no real geopolitical concerns, they’re not political themselves, they don’t really care about this war, the war still comes to them and greatly affects all of their lives in pretty violent, terrible ways as the book goes on. I wonder if you could read us a short section. You write that this is excerpted from a book called “These The Calls Of Our Blood: Dispatches From The Rebel South.” That’s just one of a lot of different fictional, documentary style pieces of writing that you include in the book. Congressional testimony, government forms, and oral histories all made up, all buttressing the fiction. Would you mind reading this excerpt of this fictional book from your fictional book?

El Akkad: Sure. Excerpted from “These The Calls Of Our Blood: Dispatches From the Rebel South.”

“The waking hours were the most unkind. She lays still in bed, the mind aflame, the body paralyzed, unable to face the day. She clutched her mother’s butterfly brooch in her hand, its faded emerald stones smooth under her fingers. The nurses let her keep it after they ripped the pin from its back. This was in the days before - before Julia Templestowe became the rebel South’s first martyr, its first killer, the patron saint of its war. It is often forgotten: There’s always a before.

“The rebels recruited her with the bandages still fresh around her wrists. They found her in a bar on Farish Street across from the abandoned Alamo Theatre, its blue vertical sign missing its first and last letters. She was wearing a stranger’s throwaway dress, given to her by one of the nurses. She was drunk and alone once again with the terrible illness in her brain.

“They knew how to find the ones who are most likely to do it. They kept watchers in the hospitals, where they looked for suicide attempts, and in the schools, where they looked for outcasts, and in the churches, where they looked for hard boiled extremists feverish with the spell of the Lord”

“From these, they forged weapons.

“On the day the President was set to come to Jackson, they drove Julia to an abandoned farmhouse 10 miles south of the city, where they outfitted her for death. She was to go in the guise of a pregnant woman. Within the cavity of her false belly they packed a thick paste of fertilizer and diesel fuel, planted with seeds of iron nail. They called it a farmer’s suit. A wire ran up along her chest and back down her left arm, covered by the sleeve of her shirt, and ending at a detonator taped to her wrist.

“They’ll remember you forever, they told her. When this is over, they’ll build cities in your name.”

Miller: That’s a really good example of one of the things that’s so striking in the book. I think Americans are very used to thinking about suicide bombing and suicide bombers as being tied to a twisted vision, maybe a politically twisted vision of Islam. Here, it’s just one of many tactics that are completely American in this American war of the future. Why did you want to bring aspects of war that Americans may associate with very different cultures, and put them on our land?

El Akkad: I think in part because I was angry. And one of the necessities of the publishing industry is that the person who writes the book is necessarily removed from the person who talks about the book. A 32 year old wrote this book, a 35 year old is talking about it. And so I think back a lot about the mind frame I was in when I started writing the novel, and it had to do with a kind of deep seated anger at the way in which we, in this very privileged part of the world, are able to impose very exotic motivations on people far away, and live with the sense that those people over there are reacting in a way that we never would. When in fact, the only privilege that allows us to do that is that we, unlike people in, say, Afghanistan, have not been on the losing end of a war for 30+ years.

Miller: And even that war did not affect the homefront, people here. If you’re talking about the Vietnam War, there were no people in America, on American soil, who were threatened for their lives.

El Akkad: Yeah. And I mean, I understand the sense that in this part of the world, if a guy named Omar writes a book in which Americans are killing each other, there’s going to be some people who take it as a kind of very ugly wish fulfillment or something like that. But certainly, my optimism for this country, despite the many grotesque things that I see here, is almost unending. My standards for this country are much, much higher than the part of the world where I grew up.

Miller: I should say, you were born in Cairo and then you spent some formative years in Qatar.

El Akkad: Yeah, I basically was born in Egypt and grew up in the Middle East until I was 16. And that’s when I came to Canada. And I’ve been living in the States now for the better part of four years. But what I think about when I think about these sort of very far away people who happen to be suffering is that they’re not fundamentally different. War makes us ugly the same way. It makes us vengeful the same way. And that was the sort of central thesis of the novel.

Miller: One of your characters speaks that thesis. He says “The universal slogan of war was simple. If it had been you, you’d have done no different.” Is it fair to say that that could be your slogan too?

El Akkad: I think so. It’s a thesis I hope never to be in a position to see proven or disproven. You don’t wish war on people. But you do wish empathy on people. And I wanted to get at this sense that, for the last 16 years, we’ve lived in a very us versus them world, with no gray space in between. And I wanted to get at this idea that the gray space exists, and it’s possible to understand why somebody does something without necessarily taking their side.

Miller: As I mentioned, you were a foreign correspondent, you were a reporter. You reported on a lot of different kinds of things, including on war. Do you think you could have accomplished your mission to try to tell people in North America about that if you hadn’t been writing fiction? If you had been doing reportage, or nonfiction, or essays?

El Akkad: I don’t think so. For me, journalism is primarily concerned with answers. By necessity when you do reporting, you’re looking for answers, what, where, who, when.

Fiction, for me, is about the other side of that coin. It’s about the questions. There are no answers in this novel. I don’t provide them, I don’t go out of my way to try to provide them. I wanted to ask questions. I wanted to explore ideas. And that’s where fiction for me serves a very fundamental and necessary purpose. You get to learn a lot about people from the sort of questions that they’re willing to explore, and the ones that they’re not.

Miller: I had a really painful realization when I was reading the book that, even though I have watched documentaries and read books and magazine articles about the wars that have been started by my country since 2001, and I feel like I’m relatively aware of what my country has done and why, somehow reading this book gave me, in its own weird way, even though it’s about something made up happening in an imagined future 60 years from now, it gave me a deeper sense for what war might be like.

El Akkad: I always come back to this thing that Borges once said about all literature essentially consisting of tricks, and that no matter how good a writer is, eventually the tricks get found out. He was talking about much, much better writers than I’ll ever be. But the central trick of American War is a “turnabout is fair play” kind of thing. Almost everything in the book is filtered through this very grotesque lens, a deliberately grotesque lens. But that doesn’t mean that some version of that didn’t actually happen. In the book, there are these things called the Birds, and they’re basically drones, they’re military drones that, for some reason, the federal government has lost control of. And so they just fly around the southern states, and they drop their payload at random.

Miller: And they do that for years and years and years until they run out of their bombs, and they still just fly around.

El Akkad: They fly around. Obviously, that’s a work of fiction on my part, that’s an invention on my part, but it’s not invented from nothing. If you live in Yemen, or you live in Syria, you live in Afghanistan, that’s not imaginary. A drone dropping a bomb on the wrong place is not an abstract thing. And so I took a lot of these elements, and I did two things with them. I cast them close to home, and I sort of extrapolated to a very grotesque place.

Miller: One thing you didn’t do though is extrapolate technology to a very great extent. There are some things that we don’t have now. I think there is more advanced solar technology and maybe nuclear technology, you don’t really dig into that. But for the most part, less so than most books I’ve read that imagine the future, this is not about some kind of whizbang, tech filled future. It’s a very recognizable world, that technologically is either very similar to ours, or in some ways even less technologically advanced. How did you come to that decision?

El Akkad: There were three reasons. The first has to do with my ability or lack thereof. I don’t have the talent to make technology sound literary. I don’t know if other readers have this problem, but if I see the word iPad in a piece of fiction, that brings me to a grinding halt.

Miller: There’s something about this is about the poetry of the language, you mean?

El Akkad: Yeah, about the way the language sounds in my mind when I read it and when I write it. And I don’t know if writers 100 years ago felt the same way about the word automobile or something like that. But for me, technology is very hard to make lyrical, or to sort of present in that way. That’s a minor concern.

The second reason had to do with just preserving some kind of element of suspense in the narrative. Anytime your characters have smartphones, they can just check their smartphones. The ability to get lost is taken away. The first thing I try to do is try to figure out a way to get rid of everybody’s smartphones.

But the third and main reason is that I never intended to write a book about the future. It’s set in the future by necessity, because the sea levels have risen 60m and there’s a new empire on the other side of the planet, and I needed time for those worlds to marinate. But I didn’t really want to write about the future. And in fact, all my experiences covering war have led me to believe that being on the losing end of the war is like stepping backwards in time. And so the South of the book, even though it’s set 60 years in the future, feels like the past.

Miller: Were there specific stories or images from war you’ve covered that have made their way in in a filtered, fictionalized version into this book?

El Akkad: Certainly. A few very directly. There’s a major refugee camp in the South called Camp Patience in this book. And there’s a scene where there’s a polio vaccination worker is going around handing polio vaccinations, and because nobody at the camp has ID cards, every time she sees a little kid - the polio vaccine doesn’t work once you’re over five years old - and so to figure out if they’re over five years old, she gets them to put their arm over their head. And if their hand covers their ears, she thinks they’re older than five. All of that is based on time I spent with the polio vaccination team in Kandahar where they did these things. The layout of the tents in Camp Patience is based on time I spent at the Kandahar Airfield, and also at a place called Camp Justice, which is where they keep the media at Guantanamo Bay. A lot of the visual language of the book is based on things I saw while reporting.

Miller: When you were a reporter at those times, were you looking with the novelist’s eye? Were you imagining that you would at one point turn those raw materials into fiction?

El Akkad: My strength as a reporter was always the writing more than the reporting. I’m not good talking to people, which is a ridiculous thing for a person who spent 10 years as a reporter to say. But I always had that anxiety. Early on in almost every reporter’s career, they can tell you stories about, there’s been a murder and you’re sent to the grieving victim’s house to knock on the door. It’s a miserable experience, and I was never any good at that. There are some reporters who can just do that, and they’re very good at it.

My strength was always the writing. I’ve been writing fiction since I learned how to write. This is the fourth novel I’ve written, it just happens to be the first one that I ever tried to get published or show to anybody. But I would write fiction throughout the course of my career, and it served as a really important way to vent, and to sort of work muscles that otherwise I wouldn’t get a chance to.

Miller: What were you venting?

El Akkad: At the heart of this book was that idea that we have that privilege to pretend that people far away are suffering in an exotic manner. But there are so many variations of that. Most of what I found myself most angry about had to do with the sort of people who can’t distinguish between the truth and what they’d like the truth to be, who I consider to be some of the most dangerous people on earth. And inevitably, as a reporter, you would get into situations where you would where people would tell you things that they fundamentally believed, and believed that the act of believing made it true. And so all the variations and consequences of that task, of being unable to distinguish between the truth and fiction, were things that stuck with me.

Miller: I wonder if you could read another section here. You mentioned being in a refugee camp and writing about a refugee camp. You have a section about the aid packages that are sent from the superpowers on Earth that have filled the vacuum left by the dissolution of the US.

El Akkad: Blankets saturated every aid shipment to Camp Patience. Boxes upon boxes of burly fabric that scraped the skin like sandpaper. Even in the deadest of winter there was no need for blankets, so instead the refugees fashioned from them room dividers and tablecloths, foot mats and drawer lining. Still, there were more blankets than anyone knew what to do with. Folded piles of blankets lay beneath the twins beds and above the filing cabinet. They were useless as bartering currency, subject to an inflation even worse than that of the Southern Dollar.

And yet, the anonymous benefactors across the ocean in China and the Bouazizi empire kept sending more. For the life of her, Martina, could not imagine what the foreigners thought the weather was like in the Red. But then, she couldn’t even imagine the benefactors as people. They existed in another universe, not as beings of flesh and blood, but as pipes in some vast indecipherable machine, its only visible output these hulking aid ships full of blankets.”

Miller: You mentioned actually going to refugee camps as a reporter. Did that experience affect the writing of that paragraph?

El Akkad: Almost everywhere where there is some kind of ongoing conflict, there is that imbalance. In that particular section of the book, I wanted to get out this idea of the difference between intent and knowing, I guess. There are lots of people in this part of the world, in the privileged part of the world, who have incredibly good intent. But there’s a difference between intent and knowing.

Miler: In this case you mean, for example, knowing what people would need, knowing to go to the book’s example, that these blankets, even if they’re well meaning, will serve no real purpose in this refugee camp?

El Akkad: Yup. Or even the times at which you choose to distribute food rations in a Muslim country during Ramadan. There’s certain elements of helping from a distance, or empathy from a distance, versus up close empathy. And that was sort of what I was trying to explore with that section.

Miller: Obviously the issue of slavery was at the heart of the first Civil War, so it’s striking that race doesn’t really play a role in your future war. Why not?

El Akkad: I think about that a lot, because almost everything in the book lives as a kind of analogy. And so when I dealt with those issues, I tried to deal with them in an analogous way. But I was also new to the United States. I now live in a country where I wake up and, every day, I’m given new evidence to suggest that I can’t begin to understand the magnitude of the racial sins in this country, and the extent to which they linger.

The Chestnut twins are half Black, half Mexican. And when I was initially thinking about that, I wanted them to come from two different backgrounds the way I feel that I do, because I’ve never had a satisfactory answer to the question where are you from? I was born in one country, grew up in another, I’m a citizen of a third, and now live in a fourth. And when you introduced me, you said Omar El Akkad, but that’s not really my name. My name is Omar Mohamed [untranscribable], and it involves a number of letters that can’t be said in the English language. And that sense unrootedness had to do with with my decision making on on what the background of my central character would be.

And this isn’t only in respect to her race, but also in respect to her sexuality, which is mentioned in the book, but which she never justifies or talks about at length. She is who she is, and she does what she does, and I and I leave it at that. And I think about the idea of the right and obligation to talk about these things, versus the right not to talk about them. I’m a Muslim man living in the United States and I and I have a lot of things to say about what that means, but I also reserve the right, I believe, to be, to simply be, which is afforded to the majority population in this country.

Miller: As opposed to having to answer or explain what Islam is, or to be a spokesperson for one group that you may happen to be a part of. To just be.

El Akkad: Absolutely. And I’m not here to defend the book, and certainly in issues of how it deals with race, it may well be that I failed completely. That may well be the case. And I’m not saying for a second that any criticism on that front is not valid. Only that I was thinking a lot about the extent to which, if you are labeled as something in this country, you are then expected to be only that, and talk about only that.

Miller: There is another way to look at this, which is that in a book that has a lot of death and destruction and mayhem and revenge, which we’ll get to, that you could argue that there is one small way in which the country has improved, which is that we’re less obsessed with classifying people. We’re less a country that is about white supremacy in the narrative you have crafted. There are a lot of other ways in which people are terrible to each other. But it seems less a question of race. You could see that as a hopeful idea of a possible future.

El Akkad: I mean, it’s certainly a possibility. But I would be lying to say that that idea of supremacy, and white supremacy wasn’t on my mind when I was writing this book.

Early on in the book, a gentleman shows up to take Benjamin Chestnut to Baton Rouge, where he can go and look for a Northern work permit. And this gentleman shows up on a fossil powered skiff, which is technically illegal because Louisiana is still part of the Union, the Union has prohibited fossil fuels. And this gentleman has a fortune that was passed down to him, and he lives very comfortably because his family, dating back generations, had a number of fossil fueled car dealerships, and so on and so forth. And he lives off of that now, even though he has to do so a little more surreptitiously than before. That wasn’t my attempt to talk about fossil fuels.

Miller: That was about race and class.

El Akkad: That was about the extent to which you benefit from these horrors. That you’re beneficiary to them even if you don’t participate in them actively. Even if that part of history has passed you by, you still benefit, and it is a privilege that is afforded to you. And so when I talk about the idea that a lot of the book lives in the form of analogy, that’s the sort of thing I talk about. But in many cases, it may well be the case that it was beyond my talent to sort of express that in a clear way as I would have liked.

Miller: One of your characters near the end of the book says you fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories. What does that mean to you, as the creator of that character?

El Akkad: A few years ago, I was working on a story about climate change in southern Florida, and I decided to go up to Georgia because I wanted to do a story about a place called Kennesaw, where there’s a law on the books that symbolically requires every household to own a gun. Of course, completely unenforceable and so on, so forth. But I wanted to go and see the kind of community where that would be a law on the books.

And I remember driving past the border into Georgia, and there was a billboard on the side of the highway, and all it said, it just said one word, it said “Secede.” There was no “visit our website”, there was no nothing, it just said “Secede.” And I got to thinking about the volume of what is essentially a losing side of a war, and how high a volume those stories are spoken at, when in fact in American history, that doesn’t happen in foreign wars. Japan still symbolically can’t have a standing army. Germany has incredible restrictions on imagery related to what is the darkest chapter in its history. And that is part and parcel of losing a war. Conditions are imposed on you.

But I was fascinated by what happens when the person who loses the war looks and sounds like you. When they might be related, when they share the same land, and how much an easing of those restrictions takes place when the enemy looks the same. And so that had to do with this idea that there was a war in this country. It was a Civil War, and it was the bloodiest conflict in this country’s history. And the kinetic part of it was over. But the narrative never ended. And as long as that narrative never ends, the war is not fully over. It’s never fully over. And that’s where that line came from.

Miller: You mentioned that this is the fourth novel you’ve written, but the first one that you tried to have published. What was different about this one?

El Akkad: For one thing, it was substantially better. I mean, I’m not I’m not a great judge of my work, but it felt like it was better written and the narrative was stronger.

The main difference is that it felt a little more necessary. The first three books, I would finish them, and they had their strong points. They weren’t wholey terrible. But they didn’t feel necessary. I’m of the opinion that there’s really only two reasons to become a writer, vanity or necessity. Either have something to say, or you want to be heard. And American War, for all its flaws and all of the things I think of it now being removed from the writing, at least felt necessary. And that was the only reason it made it off the hard drive and tried to get it published.

Miller: Was it hard to begin the third novel, or begin this one, the fourth one, knowing that all the other hours and hours and hours of work that you put into the previous ones had resulted in, I assume, largely unread works.

El Akkad: The short answer is no. The publication process has been a surreal event for me, and it’s going on two years now from when we sold the book to when it actually sees the light of day. But when I was writing American War, I had no agent, I had no publisher, I had no expectation that it would ever go out into the world. And so, when I was writing the earlier books, there was an element of putting the work in, of working those muscles to a place that when I could use them for a proper purpose, they were strong enough to do the heavy lifting.

Writing for me is intertwined with anxiety and self doubt. And it’s not a particularly pleasant experience when I’m doing it. But it’s not that it’s an unpleasant experience because I don’t think I’m going to get published. It’s unpleasant because I find writing difficult.

Miller: What’s most rewarding about writing?

El Akkad: First of all, I have very few usable skills. I have a computer science degree, I can’t program my way out of a paper bag. So the sense of putting the work in feels fulfilling. The act of writing doesn’t feel fulfilling. But having written feels fulfilling.

Miller: That almost sounds like some kind of Calvinist thing, this work ethic, as opposed to the work itself. The fact that you’ve worked hard, that feels good?

El Akkad: Yeah. And I mean, I think there’s an obligation to be careful here. Because writing as a profession is not difficult. Working two minimum wage jobs to make ends meet is difficult. Writing is not difficult, it just happens to attract people who tend to find writing difficult. That’s an important distinction to make. But since I’m in the very, very privileged position where I don’t have to worry about where my next meal is coming from, not in a place where I need to take this job to make ends meet, I think I have some obligation to do the things that, even though I find them difficult, I keep coming back to them, which is what drew me to writing and what keeps me there.

Miller: I mentioned revenge earlier because it seems to me that, if you boil down this sort of sprawling plot, you could turn it into an ever escalating series of acts of revenge that lead to more and more death, and unhappiness, and then future acts of retribution that just get bigger and bigger. So, you’ve thought a lot about revenge, that’s at the heart of this book. Do you see a way that humans can break that cycle?

El Akkad: I do. It’s interesting you bring that up. The book’s narrative arc hasn’t changed that much over the number of drafts that I did before it got published. But the prologue and the epilogue did. The original first line of the book was “Revenge is recursive.” That was the original opening line of the novel. It’s a grim book. It’s not pleasant, it doesn’t come to a very uplifting conclusion. But it’s not hopeless. For me, hope is a matter of necessity. Hope is the only alternative to accepting that there exist immense power structures that would rather you not exist. So hope is necessary. I think it just requires an act or acts of kindness that are of equal magnitude to the cruelty. So when we talk about this country’s founding sins, I don’t think they’re insurmountable. I think they just require a measure of kindness and a measure of acknowledgement that is of equal magnitude to the cruelty, which is immense magnitude, and of course it’s hard work, but it’s not impossible.

Miller: But what you’re talking about is, to use a biblical phrase, turning the other cheek when you’ve been more than slapped, when your family has been massacred, and that we could go on and on and on with lists of atrocities, in the case of this book or in real life. You’re saying it’s not impossible, it’s not insurmountable, but it is profound?

El Akkad: Yeah. And profoundly difficult. I grew up in a part of the world where there is a conflict that has been raging decades before I was born, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I am now resigned, in part, to the possibility that will rage for decades after I die. I don’t have any kind of geopolitical solution or something to suddenly turn back decades of animosity. But I do think about the extent to which the profoundly difficult things are what matter. And at some point, yeah, there is an element of taking the high road, and there is an element that once you do take the high road, somebody will continue taking the low road, and you’ll get punished for it. And then what’s really difficult is continuing to take the high road after that. These are not easy things, but I think they’re necessary.

Miller: I understand that you recently became a father. You have a 5-1/2 week old daughter, Congratulations.

El Akkad: Thank you.

Miller: What’s it been like to get ready to, and then to welcome, new life into this world, as you’ve embarked on a lot of conversations about some terrible imaginings about the future?

El Akkad: There’s an element of newness to it that is so overwhelming that I don’t have a particularly profound thing to say about it. Obviously, there are ways in which the society I live in seep into my thinking. We have a brown daughter in America in an age where it almost seems to be a newfound freedom from the ugliest portions of society to take aim at those particular communities. That’s not something that’s not on my mind. That’s on my mind a lot.

But I think any time you have a family, and you have a child who is new to the world, you have an obligation to joy. And so I do these interviews, and universally we’re talking about death and destruction, and we’re talking about the very grim book that I chose to write. None of that filters into my thinking when I think about my child. When I think about my child, I am obliged to think about joy, and to create that environment as much as possible. So that’s all I can say about that five weeks into the process.

Miller: You said that hope is necessary. But what gives you hope? It’s one thing to say that we need to have it, but where do you get it from?

El Akkad: We’re we’re having this conversation today in a city, that not very long ago, suffered an immense tragedy, an act of mass murder rooted in white supremacy, rooted in a kind of ugliness that is pervasive and deeply cruel. But we also saw the best of what it means to be a human being in that tragedy.

Miller: Talking about the hate speech and then the three white men all who stepped in when two teenagers were bearing the brunt of this verbal abuse?

El Akkad: That’s right. And it’s telling in that situation that what inspired the hatred of this individual, what started it was the sight of two people he saw as fundamentally different from himself, but what enraged him enough to kill had to do with people who were very different from himself, fundamentally good in their hearts.

And so what I’m talking about here is the idea that there are fundamentally good human beings in this world. And I have very few talents, but at least I have the talent of latching onto that goodness and trying to become a better person by absorbing it. I still think there are more good people in this world than bad. And if it seems sometimes that the bad ones control the power structures, so be it. The numbers are on the good side.

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