Homeland Elegies

by Ayad Akhtar

A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.”

For now, let me try to stay alive and just say these three things: as Muslims, (1) we are more affected by the example of the Prophet than we realize; (2) we are shaped by the stories we tell about him in ways that elude our daily understanding; and (3) there will be no meaningful philosophical shift in the sociopolitical substratum of the Muslim world until the example of the Prophet and the text of the Quran are exposed to a more robust interrogation of their claims to historical truth.

Looking back at that trip, I see now the broad outlines of the same dilemmas that would lead America into the era of Trump: seething anger; open hostility to strangers and those with views opposing one’s own; a contempt for news delivered by allegedly reputable sources; an embrace of reactionary moral posturing; civic and governmental corruption that no longer needed hiding; and married to all this, the ever-hastening redistribution of wealth to those who had it at the continued expense of those who didn’t.

This led to Modi era in India

I kept at it. I soon discovered that if I moved too much after I woke up, any memory of my dreams would vanish. Then it wouldn’t matter if I picked up my pad, because there would be nothing to note. I told Mary this was happening, and she suggested that it was only the angle of my spine that mattered. If I didn’t move my spine, she said, I wouldn’t lose the dream. Then she added that even if I did end up changing the spinal angle, all I had to do was find it again. The dream would return. I didn’t believe her.

living by the nocturnal glow of my dream life has proved rich, beguiling, instructive; it has given me ample occasion to question the nature of time, riddled as my dreams have been through the years with prognosticating encounters and apprehensions; but even these hints of the uncanny have not made up the most miraculous bounty of all this interrupted sleep. My dreams have taught me much about myself. I’m not sure I could sum up either the benefit or the challenge any better than Montaigne does in “Of Experience”: I take it for true that dreams are honest reflections of our inclinations; but there is art to making sense of them.

The established majority takes its we-image from a minority of its best, and shapes a they-image of the despised outsiders from the minority of their worst.

Constantly defining yourself in opposition to what others say about you is not self-knowledge. It’s confusion.

There is a culture here, for sure, and it has nothing to do with all the well-meaning nonsense. It’s about racism and money worship—and when you’re on the correct side of both those things? That’s when you really belong. Because that’s when you start to represent the best of what they think they are, to come back to your quote.”

literature, theater—was in part the pursuit of something as simple as my mother’s gaze, a gaze she gave happily to books. Was it a coincidence I, too, had sought the comfort of books as a child? Wasn’t I seeking her attention? Isn’t that what I really wanted as I would sidle up to her warm body on the couch as she read, a book of my own in hand? So many times, I didn’t even read, I just pretended to, wanting to be close to her. I vividly recall one snowy afternoon, the bright winter glare reflected in my mother’s eyes as they scanned page after page, and me, watching her sidelong, jealous of the object that so commanded her being, wishing I, too, could find some way into the rapture of that avid gaze.

Cheery pessimism. Or weary idealism. Take your pick.

Locality itself was in decline, as dollars were drained from the American heartlands and allocated to points of prosperity along the urban coasts. In the South, it was in farming that you saw the worst of it. People—black, white, or brown—couldn’t live off their land anymore. Corporate consolidation led to larger and larger tracts and the increasingly automated systems required to water and harvest them. Prices for produce dropped, yes—but so did the tax base. There’d never been more jobs that paid so little, most of which went to migrants who didn’t object to making a pittance.

money comes with its own point of view; what you own, when you own enough of it, starts making you see the world from its perspective.

“So what’s it about?” “Giving them a thing to fixate on. It’s classic storytelling. A visible, tangible goal. That’s what gets an audience rooting for a hero.” “Tangible?” “Every good story has the same shape. The beginning establishes a goal, the more tangible the better. In the middle we watch the fight toward that goal. The end is what happens when it’s been reached, or when reaching it’s finally failed. What I always say when I teach is: the longer the middle, the better the story. The middle is when we still don’t know the outcome. That’s when we care the most about what’s happening. The longer you can keep the audience engaged in the pursuit without actually resolving that pursuit—that’s real mastery.” “So maybe he doesn’t want a wall.” “Wouldn’t surprise me. As long as there isn’t a wall, he’s got an antagonist. The people stopping him from building it.”