![]() How did your experiences as a journalist inform this novel, or shape some of the decisions that you made in terms of writing it in a future time period versus the present moment, or even the past? Zaina Arafat: You spent ten years writing for The Globe and Mail. I spoke with El Akkad about translating reality into fiction, “dystopian” narratives, and localizing the “exotic.” As a staff writer for Canada’s Globe and Mail, Akkad’s coverage of events in Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and Ferguson provide an incredibly effective and accurate underpinning and trajectory to the fictional events in this novel. Sarat is six-years-old when the war begins, and adopts increasingly radical ideological beliefs and actions as it progresses.Īs our own present-day political reality devolves, this imagined future starts to seem eerily plausible (the narrative also imagines foreign meddling that escalates the conflict in the United States, along with a resurgence of coal mining). At the center of the narrative is the Chestnut family from Louisiana, and their daughter, Sarat Chestnut. ![]() The war, which is recounted to us in the early 22nd century by one of its survivors, is characterized by drones, torture, refugees, extremism-in short, phenomena that we tend to locate elsewhere. ![]() In his debut novel American War, Canadian Egyptian writer Omar El Akkad imagines a not-so-distant future in which a second civil war-over a ban of fossil fuels imposed after climate change has led to massive flooding in the Southern states-has divided America into North and South. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |