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jdscott50 's review for:
American War
by Omar El Akkad
Akkad's novel imagines a second Civil War in the United States. The old hatreds still stew in the distant future. Now, global warming pushes the United States into a second conflict. Water has flooded the coastal cities and seeks to claim more land. Meanwhile, the Federal Government restricts all use of fossil fuels to deal with the emergency. Except the South won't comply. War ensues, but instead of a decisive war, it becomes a stalemate. New technologies developed make the damage done just as devastating as the last Civil War. It's an endless war where America's fortunes are reversed. Instead of being the empire intervening in other countries, they are brought to their knees by their own strife. A strife that is far more devastating.
Akkad easily combines warfare that is going on around the world and placing it square in the United States. One can easily make comparisons to conflicts in the Middle East, particularly with the Israel and Palestine conflict. As we sit in the United States and read about drones in the news (or in books like The Drone Eats with Me) there is nothing more terrifying than seeing this technology used in the United States. It is a startling point to be made by Akkad that war is a universal language. Without seeking peace, there is no end to the pain of war. No one wins.
NOTES FROM
American War
Omar El Akkad
May 7, 2017
Chapter Nine
And what she understood—what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood—was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same—and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.
May 8, 2017
Chapter Nine
She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken protocols governing how she was expected to suffer. Total breakdown, a failure to grieve graciously, was a violation of those rules. But so was the absence of suffering, so was outright forgiveness. What she and others like her were allowed was a kind of passive bereavement, the right to pose for newspaper photographs holding framed pictures of their dead relatives in their hands, the right to march in boisterous but toothless parades, the right to call for an end to bloodshed as though bloodshed were some pest or vagrant who could be evicted or run out of town. As long as she adhered to those rules, moved within those margins, she remained worthy of grand, public sympathy.
May 8, 2017
Chapter Nine
Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.
May 8, 2017
Chapter Thirteen
Many years later, when her letter led me to the place of her buried memories and I read the pages she left behind, I learned all about the moments that filled in the blanks between those things I’d witnessed with my own eyes. And by the time I was done reading, I’d learned every last secret my aunt had to give. Some people are born sentenced to terrible inheritance, diseases that lay dormant in the blood from birth. My sentence was to know, to understand.
May 8, 2017
Chapter Fifteen
There’s this passage in one of the books Albert Gaines once gave me. It said in the South there is no future, only three kinds of past—the distant past of heritage, the near past of experience, and the past-in-waiting. What they’ve got up there in the Blue—what your wife wants, what our parents wanted—is a future.”
May 9, 2017
Chapter Sixteen
Why?” she echoed, bemused. “Because it was the right thing to do.” She chuckled. “Sarat told me you were a sweet boy. Benjamin, but you must understand that in this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t about who wins, or who kills who. In this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t even about right and wrong. It’s about what you do for your own.”
All Excerpts From
Omar El Akkad. “American War.” Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2017-04-04. iBooks.
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