Ayad #Akhtar, HOMELAND ELEGIES

Akhtar comes to grips with the meaning of being a Muslim in America. He asks the question: How do you become an American? Given the weighty question, it’s not surprising that he doesn’t come up with a clear-cut answer. Home Elegies is billed as a novel, but is it fiction or autobiographical? Akhtar himself admits it is difficult to translate experience into art.

 

On skin color

I felt a visceral disgust for the sickly tints of the white skin I saw everywhere around me, the blanched arms and legs, faces the color of paste, flesh devoid of warmth or human glow. He came to think of his own non-white skin as surpassingly strange.

 

On politics

Akhtar criticizes Democrats and Republicans. He scoffs both at Obama and Trump.

 

Was it a good thing that Obama, a black intellectual, was elected to the office of president? No, his concern for the country was marred by his superciliousness…[he]gloried in his pop-culture celebrity while bemoaning a system whose political dysfunctions prevented him from leading.

 

Was Trump the better choice? No, he just mirrored the national mood – nasty, brutish, nihilistic. He was an unapologetically racist real estate magnate embodying the rise of white property rights; a self-absorbed idiot epitomizing the rampant social self-obsession and narcissism that was making us all stupider by the day; greed and corruption…

 

Is this Akhtar speaking or his protagonist? You figure it out.