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BOOKS I READ: Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar (2020). An immigrant doctor’s American-born son seeks success as a playwright and a writer, mining his Pakistani-American heritage for the drama that comes from living in America as a brown-skinned Muslim. His dual-culture perspective is a lens into what is ailing the country. He feels the thrust of a consumerist and monopolistic society that is leaving in its wake a debt-ridden collective.
Homeland Elegies is autofiction. We encounter Trump’s presidency, Akhtar’s Pulitzer, and other current events. The reminder on the cover that this is a novel and not a memoir, often makes one wonder what is made up and what isn’t, such as the scene at a gas station that is utterly unsettling. There, Akhtar and his father are confronted at the counter by a bigot. According to the racist with a gun, Akhtar’s inability to park correctly, to park between the lines, is why people who don’t look like him don’t belong in America. As the confrontation escalates, Akhtar’s rage rises. He says, enough to want to kill this man. With no choice, he quickly pulls away, a powerlessness that eats at him for years.
Akhtar bares many foibles, with a rawness that if both fresh and rotten. The jovial Uncle Sam looks in the mirror and sees a mendacious, conniving, mean creep, with pockets stuffed full of dollar bills. Especially disconcerting is his visit to his mentor’s classroom, where his former professor shares that a group of her students refused an assignment on Mark Twain. Other students complain about her teaching Emerson and Whitman. She posits that their moral rhetoric is a cover for their laziness. Later on she comes to understands her students’ position, which she claims is driven by their anxiety and depression, trusting of no authority. They are paying $70,000 a year for “physical comforts, moral reassurance, unceasing approbation” and not a pedagogical experience. Quite a pessimistic view of higher education and the future of the homeland.
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