Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

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.

couldn’t understand what was so holy about the orgy of acquisition they called Christmas.

Difficulty had been the flint stone against which her powers of analysis were sharpened,

dream that imagines the flourishing of others as nothing more than a road sign,

by 1947, Britain’s long-practiced imperial strategy of divide and conquer resulted in the to some ill-conceived, to others God-ordained decision to carve off zones of the Indian motherland so that Hindus and Muslims would not have to live side by side any longer. Little matter that Muslims and Hindus had lived together for hundreds of years in India; after a century of British policies pitting them against each other, stoking a constant conflict for which the British Raj offered itself as the only containing force, the king’s empire could no longer ignore the fact that the social fabric was on the verge of coming apart.

Pouring all their creativity into finding new people to blame for old problems.”

Land was an earthly tie; faith a celestial one.

enacting a great American myth of demanding liberty or demanding death,

“The longer we’re here, the more I wonder…who I’m becoming.

even the late-morning sun seemed to color everything with a straw-taupe hue.

their faces lit up with a joy particular to each—

If all this sounds somewhat paranoid, I am happy for

you.

unusually abundant profusion of utility poles and sagging black lines defined all manner of helter-skelter perspectives through which to see the widespread disrepair.

It felt like there was more space inside me,

Fluency was like the conscious mind, the array of possibilities contained in the words you knew.

Wasn’t it the inheritance of my own unwillingness to find my place, my spiritual defiance repaid in rejection, in the rootless, haunted sense of having foundered in my life as an American?

I was going to stop pretending that I felt like an American.

It glowed and mocked me.

No purchase on her white flesh was enough to satisfy me. I wanted to own it. I wanted to destroy it.

fucked her with a fury I didn’t know I could muster,

advertising exclusivity by signaling its lack of interest in your business.

fall prey to the gap between the logic of their talents and the treachery of an American society that abandoned the weak and monetized the unlucky.

watched the incandescence of his rage brighten

She didn’t hold it against her parents that, as she put it, they couldn’t make their peace with the consequences of having had children in a culture that wasn’t their own. She saw their dilemma with compassion.

her father’s beloved Urdu ghazals drenched the family’s ears with loss, lamentation, lush and endless regret. His

Such was my habit, imagining the inner landscapes of others and drawing their portraits—ultimately—from the model I knew best: myself.

I’d never felt loved because I’d never known who was loving me

and never felt certain she knew whom or what she was loving.

Underneath it was a harmless but irritating indignity: my name was misspelled, a wayward letter misplaced from my last name into my first.

we merged onto the highway along the Mississippi—whose wide, winding surface glimmered a calm, glassy black in the moonlight