This is a country that prizes its mythology above all else.īut there is in its history ample proof that the United States tends to unleash its most self-destructive impulses immediately following – and in direct response to – those moments in which it seeks most boldly to achieve its stated ideals of freedom and equality. To observe the United States from this vantage point is to observe a place simultaneously coming clean and coming undone.Īny honest assessment of American life in this monstrous year must contend with a terrible unshackling of norms – a complete redefinition of which ideologies are worthy of public discourse – as well as the unsettling reality that none of this is new. I am an immigrant in a country that purports to be a melting pot but is in reality a crucible, a vessel of fierce and fiercely luminous burning. Here, I am part of a minority that constitutes the majority of the world: I am a person of colour. I come to peddle the fictional to a country whose reality has leapfrogged fiction.įor the past four years, I have lived in America, but America does not belong to me. Over the course of a six-month book tour that will cover almost every region of this country, I find myself fielding questions not about any allegorical merit my book may have, but whether in writing a novel in which Americans take up arms against one another I was taking a stab at predicting the future. I wrote the book two years ago and never intended it to be about the United States in a literal way, but its publication in 2017 nonetheless coincided with the death of both irony and analogy in American public life. This May, its owners invited me to speak about my debut novel, about a fictional second American civil war. The college town of Oxford, Miss., is home to one of the finest bookstores in America, Square Books.

Omar El Akkad is the author of American War.

The american war omar el akkad