The south has its own literature and, disturbingly, often its own version of history. Americans joke about the ability of many southerners to rattle off the names of their ancestors going back half a dozen generations. It’s not even past.” The same backward-looking frame of mind that makes it so hard for the south to shake off the dead weight of racism and cultural resentment also lends southern culture the nation’s most pronounced regional flavour, beloved in one form or another by even its most ambivalent natives: the sweet tea and collards, the delta blues and zydeco, the courtly manners and local dialects. The news from Charlottesville testified to the truth of Faulkner’s maxim: in the south, “the past is never dead.
Instead, El Akkad sets American War not just in America, but in the American south. A suave groomer provides her with education, training and weapons, and a terrorist is born. Violence and reprisals leave Sarat bereft and vengeful.
Sarat’s parents want to emigrate north, where the economic opportunities are better, but her father is killed in a suicide bombing and Sarat, her mother and two siblings end up in a refugee camp near a contested border. A handful of southern states, refusing to abide by federal laws prohibiting the use of fossil fuels, have attempted to secede from the union, setting off a second civil war. Its heroine, Sarat Chestnutt, grows up in a shack by the Mississippi, in a Louisiana eaten away by the rising Gulf of Mexico.
Set in the late 21st century, the novel imagines an America wrecked by war and the flooding brought on by climate change. The mission of Omar El Akkad’s first novel, American War, is admirable: to encourage western readers, especially Americans, to put themselves in the shoes of the world’s radicalised displaced people. The uniforms fit badly and it keeps flunking basic training. Other value systems, religious or political, might insist that art serve a theological or ideological cause, but the novel – in its origins a bourgeois enterprise – makes a poor missionary or soldier. This is one reason humanism regards art as sacred: it exists for its own sake. A novel, like a person, doesn’t have to have a purpose.
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