Omar El Akkad Interview.Pdf

KNOPF Q&A A conversation with OMAR EL AKKAD author of AMERICAN WAR Q: When did you begin working on American War, and was there a particular event you would say was the genesis of the novel? A: I started working on the novel in the summer of 2014 and fi nished the fi rst draft almost exactly a year later. Insofar as there exists a genesis moment, it came a few years earlier. I was listening to an interview with a national security expert conducted during the height of the NATO-led invasion of Afghanistan. At one point, referencing a recent wave of local protests against the U.S. military presence there, the interviewer asked something to the eff ect of “Why do they hate us so much?” The expert replied by mentioning that sometimes U.S. soldiers have to conduct raids in Afghan villages, and that during these raids they often turn the villagers’ houses inside out and hold the residents at gunpoint. In Afghan culture, the expert helpfully explained, this sort of thing is considered off ensive. I remember thinking, Name me one culture on earth that wouldn’t consider this sort of thing off ensive. Name one. It was that train of thought that led me to consider what it would be like if all these wars that the West has had the luxury of observing from a great distance were instead to take place at home. I wanted to view this war not through some disinterested lens, but rather through the eyes of someone on whose land the fi ghting rages, someone who can’t escape or dismiss it. At its heart, American War is a story about the life and death of a single character: Sarat Chestnut, a child of southern Louisiana, born and raised amidst the violence of a second civil war. It’s a story about her capacity for love, suff ering, and, ultimately, vengeance. And I think that, even across the vastest chasms of culture or geography, the things that drive us to love, suff ering, and vengeance are always the same. Q: How did you arrive at 2074 as the year your fi ctional Second American Civil War breaks out? A: I needed time for the fi ctional world in which the novel takes place to take shape. The global events that defi ne this world—chiefl y, the creation of a democratic pan-Arab empire, and the catastrophic KNOPF Q&A amount of land loss caused by climate change—are not particularly plausible in the next decade or two. Of course, the kind of sea-level rise I envision in this book greatly exceeds even the most alarming climate scientists’ projections of what the world will look like toward the end of this century (for now, anyway; who knows how those projections will change in the coming years). But to correct for that by setting this book hundreds of years from now would in my mind be an abdication of sorts; I never meant this to be a novel about the future. Q: There are clearly many factors leading to the events of the book, but the war really breaks out over a battle for sustainable energy. You have reported extensively on the fossil fuel industry. How did you settle on this as the defi ning rift of North vs. South? A: It seemed necessary that the war’s precipitating event be some injustice or looming calamity that, long after it requires any courage to do so, members of future generations will boldly declare they would have opposed. The obvious analogy in this regard is the central cause of America’s fi rst civil war. It is all well and good today for someone who would not have felt the monstrous eff ects of slavery fi rsthand to argue that he would have stood publicly against it. But, in truth, it is incredibly diffi cult and requires immense courage to call for the abolition of anything that drives a vast and lucrative economic engine (which, in the plantation-era South, is exactly what slavery was). Very few acts in human history rival slavery in terms of sheer human cruelty, and as such, that wasn’t my criterion when I went searching for an analogy. But as something many people are happy to benefi t from today, but will surely oppose once it becomes safe and acceptable to do so tomorrow, fossil fuel use seemed apt. Q: Your work as a journalist has also taken you to the wars in Afghanistan, to Guantánamo Bay, to Egypt during the Arab Spring; to Ferguson, Missouri. How does your experience covering war and also covering deep racial tensions inform this novel? A: Like all novelists, I’m an unrepentant plagiarist. There are all kinds of details in the book I stole and repurposed from things I saw and heard while I was on assignment. The style and layout of the tents in Camp Patience is based on an encampment in Guantánamo Bay called “Camp Justice,” and on the layout of the NATO airfi eld in Kandahar (the latter is also home to Emerald Creek, a reeking wastewa- ter ditch that makes an appearance in the novel). Other infl uences were less direct: watching tear gas and armed soldiers on the streets of Ferguson, not long after seeing the same images in Cairo, cemented something in my mind about the symmetry of injustice—the extent to which the success of entire social systems is often predicated on certain people’s stories being kept silent. Q: What is the most diffi cult thing you have covered? A: A few years ago, my newspaper sent me to cover a technology conference in Las Vegas. The conference was one of those self-congratulatory industry events where nothing newsworthy ever happens, so I decided to look for something else to write about. I learned there exists, beneath the Vegas Strip, an in- visible city—thousands of human beings with nowhere else to live who set up small makeshift homes in the storm drains and sewers. I went into this city, and there I met Richard and Cynthia, a married couple who on that day were busy rebuilding their entire lives—every now and then the fl oodwaters or the cops come through and sweep all their belongings away. They were kind people, and deeply in love. They’d done nothing wrong, they’d hurt no one; it seemed so plainly unfair that they or anyone KNOPF Q&A else should have to live this way. I’ve covered wars and uprisings and environmental disasters, but for reasons I know are probably inadequate, I still get the most upset when I think about Richard and Cynthia. Q: After working in journalism for so many years, why fi ction? A: Fiction has always been the world in which I feel least alien. I was in second or third grade when I discovered I had some talent for writing stories—or, more accurately, that I had absolutely no talent for anything else. My father was an avid reader and a kind of walking encyclopedia of Egyptian literature. In the Arabian Gulf, where I grew up, you couldn’t get your hands on any piece of culture—books, mu- sic, movies, anything—before the government censored it. I think I still have lying around somewhere my copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind, with the naked baby on the album cover entirely blacked out by some anonymous bureaucrat’s permanent marker. (A couple years later, In Utero came out and, sure enough, the censors blacked out the illustrated angel on that cover as well.) I don’t think my school library con- tained a single book that even mentioned Israel. When you grow up in that kind of environment, you soon start to suspect that all stories, beyond the joy or catharsis they inherently provide, also function as a cipher of sorts. Everything you need to know about a society you can glean from how that society tells its stories, whose stories it chooses to tell, and whose stories it chooses to silence. But I never thought I could make a career of writing. In college, I spent most of my time working at the school newspaper, and after I graduated I landed a summer internship at a newspaper in Toronto, which eventually turned into a full-time job. I worked at the newspaper during the day and wrote fi c- tion between midnight and fi ve in the morning. I stuck to that routine for the better part of ten years and four novels. The fi rst three were mediocre, but worse than that, they felt unnecessary; they had no teeth, so I never tried to get them published. American War felt necessary. Q: American War takes on many of the scarier truths of our time—the destruction of our environment, the escalation of technological warfare, the hatred of some Americans by other Americans— yet ultimately it is the story of a family and of one young woman in particular—Sarat Chestnut. What was your inspiration for this remarkable character? A: She’s the only one who came to me fully formed. Every other character I reworked over and over again, but the little girl at the start of this novel is almost entirely unchanged from the moment when I fi rst saw her. Her central trait, to me, is a defi ant curiosity; so much of her life is marked by a rebellion against unknowing. That, I think, is the tragedy of Sarat’s story: how her endless curiosity is turned against her, both by those who would take advantage of her for their own purposes and by the cruelty of the world she is forced to inhabit.

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