American War

“You couldn't just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?”
“Come now,” said Yousef. “Everyone fights an American war.”

One of the most intriguing aspects of American War is its author, Omar El Akkad: Born in Cairo, raised in Qatar, El Akkad eventually moved to Canada with his family and became a journalist with the (progressive national daily) Globe & Mail newspaper. Reporting on the Arab Spring, embedding with the Canadian army in Afghanistan, witnessing the Guantanamo Bay trials – every bit of unique and timely eyewitness knowledge El Akkad has is woven into this speculative fiction about an upcoming second American Civil War. With a fascinating and well crafted Prologue and intriguing early chapters, I thought that bringing a global perspective and voice to an examination of the mounting and increasingly nasty partisanship seen in American politics just might be both interesting and important. But once it really gets into the conflict – explaining its origins and how it plays out – I, as a Canadian, couldn't buy the trajectory of violent tribalism; I can't imagine what Americans themselves make of it. In the end, despite now residing in Oregon with his wife, perhaps El Akkad isn't American enough to have written this book.

An empire is when many small countries become part of one big country, willingly or otherwise. An empire is what we used to be.

The novel's narrator is a Civil War scholar – one of the Miracle Generation who was born during the conflict and survived both the fighting itself and the devastating plague that followed – and interspersed with his narrative are excerpts from government documents, speeches, memoirs, etc. We quickly learn that as climate change raised the sea levels in the mid-twenty-first century, flooding coastlines around the globe and causing mass internal migrations, the world came together to sign the Sustainable Future Act; essentially outlawing the use of fossil fuels. And this is what causes the South to rise again: making a rather loose comparison to slavery, the Southern states (of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia; “the Mag”) protest that their economy would be devastated if they stopped producing and using oil (at the beginning of the war, Mexico annexed Texas and what was left of the flooded Southwest, so what I think of as oil country isn't in the picture at all). And what might have been a brief skirmish became a twenty year war when a suicide bomber assassinated the President at an armistice meeting. This assassination and escalation are in the recent past as the narrator begins his story, which focuses on six-year-old Sarat Chestnut and her family: refugees from Louisiana who at first thought they were fortunate to be transported to a tent city, Camp Patience, in neutral Tennessee; but as the years drag on and Sarat and her brother are indoctrinated in the politics of despair and revenge, the reader understands that this is how insurgents are bred.

What is the first anesthetic?
Wealth.
And if I take your wealth?
Necessities.
And if I demolish your home, burn your fields?
Acknowledgement.
And if I make it taboo to sympathize with your plight?
Family.
And if I kill your family?
God.
And God...
...Hasn't said a word in two thousand years.

As a teenager in the refugee camp, Sarat is befriended by an older man who feeds her honey and caviar and poisons her mind:

I sided with the Red because when a Southern tells you what they're fighting for - be it tradition, pride, or just mule-headed stubbornness - you can agree or disagree, but you can't call it a lie. When a Northern tells you what they're fighting for, they'll use words like democracy and freedom and equality and the whole time both you and they know that the meaning of those words changes by the day, changes like the weather. I'd had enough of all that. You pick up a gun and fight for something, you best never change your mind. Right or wrong, you own your cause and you never, ever change your mind.

And apparently, this – a dispute over fossil fuel use (and, ironically, the rich and powerful from both sides continue to use gas to power their cars and boats throughout the war) and foreign meddlers who profit from encouraging an us-vs-them mentality – is all it will take to prompt and sustain a decades-long Civil War. And I didn't buy it. I didn't understand why it was these three states that attempted to secede (and poor South Carolina – the site of an infection, the entire state is quarantined, but those who fled before the walls went up are notably “the meanest sons of bitches on the front” and “no war in the history of South Carolina had ever ended, they were fighting them all at once”), and while I liked the irony of the Bouazizi Empire (after the Fifth Arab Spring, the Northern African and Middle Eastern states deposed their dictators and united into one empire) running guns to the rebels in their aid shipments, I can't imagine these three embargoed states facing down the the rest of the American military for decades (and, yes, I understand how insurgents have prevailed against the American military from Vietnam to Afghanistan, but this is the future military, brother-against-brother, and I don't buy it).

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.

What I primarily didn't understand is what's left out of the book: Since this is set sixty years in our future, I don't understand how there aren't any big technological advances; the Civil War starts in 2074, and while there are improvements in solar power, people are still driving old gas-powered cars and boats, and getting their news on tablets and radios. Where are the robot soldiers or virtual reality or interplanetary space travel or anything else we seem to be on the cusp on? And what's going on in the rest of the world? It is noted that China is a superpower, the only reference to Russia is that they've ended their wars of expansion, and I found it weird that if the Bouazizi Empire has united the Arab states, there's zero mention made of Israel. And perhaps most glaringly absent is any reference to race relations in America: El Akkad has reported extensively on the Black Lives Matter movement, but other than Sarat being of mixed Black/Latina heritage, race isn't mentioned at all; it plays no role in the second Civil War. I'm not even American and this doesn't seem to me to be a book that understands America.

Perhaps the longing for safety was itself just another kind of violence – a violence of cowardice, silence, submission. What was safety, anyway, but the sound of a bomb falling on someone else's home?

And yet, despite frequent aphorisms and the many problems I had with the situation's underpinnings, I did enjoy the writing in American War; I still think it's a really interesting idea, and especially from the point-of-view of this particular author and what he uniquely brings with him. I liked the character of Sarat, liked the use of the scholarly narrator and the found documents to fill in the history, was satisfied with the actual plotline. In the end, however, I don't think this book lives up to its promise; it's not, ultimately, more important than, say, The Hunger Games.