Excerpt from Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Love for America and a firm belief in its supremacy—moral and otherwise—was creed in our home, one my mother knew not to challenge even if she didn't quite share it. Like both Mary's parents—as I would later learn from Mary herself—my mother never found in the various bounties of her new country anything like sufficient compensation for the loss of what she'd left behind. I don't think Mother ever felt at home here. She thought Americans materialistic and couldn't understand what was so holy about the orgy of acquisition they called Christmas. She was put off that everyone always asked where she was from and never seemed bothered that they had no idea what she was talking about when she told them. Americans were ignorant not only of geography but of history, too. And most troubling to her was what she thought connected to this disregard of important things, namely, the American denial of aging and death. This last irritation would yield a malevolent concretion over the years, a terror-inducing bête noire that saw her to her grave, the thought that growing old here would mean her eventual sequestering and expiration in a "home" that was nothing like one.

My mother's views—however rarely voiced—should have prepared me to understand Mary's dyspeptic take on this country, but they didn't. Not even my Islam prepared me to see what Mary saw, not even after 9/11. I remember a letter from her in the months following that terrifying day in September that changed Muslim lives in America forever, a ten-page missive in which she encouraged me to take heart, to learn what I could from the trouble ahead, confiding that her struggles as a gay woman in this country—the sense of siege, the unceasing assaults on her quest for wholeness, the roughness of her route to autonomy and authenticity—that all these had been but fires beneath her crucible, provoking creative rage, tempering sentimentality, releasing her from hope in ideology. "Use the difficulty; make it your own" was her admonition. Difficulty had been the flint stone against which her powers of analysis were sharpened, the how and why of what she saw, but which I still wouldn't see truly with my own eyes for fifteen years to come, my deepening travails as a Muslim in this country notwithstanding. No. I wouldn't see what Mary saw until I'd been witness to the untimely decline of a generation of colleagues exhausted by the demands of jobs that never paid them enough, drowning in debt to care for children riddled with disorders that couldn't be cured; and the cousins—and the best friend from high school—who ended up in shelters or on the street, tossed out of houses they could no longer afford; and until the near-dozen suicides and overdoses of fortysomething childhood classmates in a mere space of three years; and the friends and family medicated for despair, anxiety, lack of affect, insomnia, sexual dysfunction; and the premature cancers brought on by the chemical shortcuts for everything from the food moving through our irritable bowels to the lotions applied to our sun-poisoned skins. I wouldn't see it until our private lives had consumed the public space, then been codified, foreclosed, and put up for auction; until the devices that enslave our minds had filled us with the toxic flotsam of a culture no longer worthy of the name; until the bright pliancy of human sentience—attention itself—had become the world's most prized commodity, the very movements of our minds transformed into streams of unceasing revenue for someone, somewhere. I wouldn't see it clearly until the American Self had fully mastered the plunder, idealized and legislated the splitting of the spoils, and brought to near completion the wholesale pillage not only of the so-called colony—how provincial a locution that seems now!—but also of the very world itself. In short, I wouldn't see what she saw back then until I'd failed at trying to see it otherwise, until I'd ceased believing in the lie of my own redemption, until the suffering of others aroused in me a starker, clearer cry than any anthem to my own longing. I read Whitman first with Mary. I adored him. The green leaves and dry leaves, the spears of summer grass, the side-curved head ever avid for what came next. My tongue, too, is homegrown—every atom of this blood formed of this soil, this air. But these multitudes will not be my own. And these will be no songs of celebration.

Excerpted from Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar. Copyright © 2020 by Ayad Akhtar. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.