Regarding "American War"

American War: A Novel by Omar El Akkad. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. Clothbound, 352 pages.

For me, reading American War was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. Though Omar El Akkad's intended audience clearly includes Americans, he is not a citizen of these United States, and so his depiction of our future is designed to make us reconsider our world's present, not my nation's past. I, however, have only ever been an American, steeped in reflection on our history and the meaning of the Civil War since high school, and so a novel about the Second Civil War must read, for me, as a commentary on my nation's past.

By 2075, rising waters have drastically altered this country's geographical and political landscapes, driving coastal populations inland and the nation's capital to Columbus. South Carolina, as is its wont, threatened secession and so was subjected to a viral agent by the national government which led to a quarantine of the entire state. Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama actually did secede, with Louisiana and east Texas hotly contested. Secession's pretext, apparently, was the criminalization of fossil fuels, but one gets the impression it had just as much to do with all our old grievances.

That's where my cognitive dissonance settled in. The politics of American War have enough echoes of our past that I kept looking for analogies to the 1860s. However, El Akkad tells a story of refugees and radicalization, presumptuous interference by foreign governments, and the cultivation and molding of terrorists. In other words, he tells the story of the wars America has created in the rest of the world, particularly the Middle East. He sets it in my country, apparently, in order to draw from us a deeper sympathy than we might otherwise give to persons from foreign lands with foreign-sounding names.

Read that latter way, it's a fairly effective book. The dialogue is a little clunky, and I think he failed to get inside the heads of his female characters in a believable way. At the same time, all his characters and their choices make sense, including the one who commits the worst terrorist attack in history. I was reminded of the inherent offensiveness of the American presumption that we may interfere in other nation's affairs in order to gain what our leaders think to be an advantage. 

Despite what one of our presidents liked to say, they don't hate us because of our freedoms. They hate us because we've colonized their countries. If you don't understand that, then maybe it's time for you to read American War.