War in America
by Lucy S
Imagine that entire portions of this country have disappeared under water and that the use of fossil fuels has been outlawed in many states. And then imagine that these events have sparked a second civil war in the United States and that this war sets off a disastrous plague. This is the scenario created by Omar El Akkad in his debut novel, American War. El Akkad comes to fiction writing after many years as a journalist covering stories on the war in Afghanistan, military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the effects of climate change along the southern coast of the US. His deep understanding of these real world conflicts seems to greatly inform and sustain American War. El Akkad brings us to the 2070s when the United States is embroiled in another civil war, brought about less by political differences or racial divides, than by climate and science, creating a refugee situation and a need to fight over remaining land. Fossil fuels are the biggest divider as the North no longer uses or allows them and the South won’t let them go. El Akkad’s plot seems entirely plausible given our present-day events. So much of what is in American War, biological warfare, drones, suicide bombs, torture, refugee camps, can be found in any source of news today.
While his book makes a strong commentary on current political, ecological, and social situations, at it’s heart the story really belongs to El Akkad’s main character, Sarat. We meet Sarat Chestnut as a 6 year old living in Louisiana and follow her through refugee camps, imprisonment and a life after the war set on revenge. In an interview in Bookpage, El Akkad said, “I never intended to write a book about America or war; I intended to write a book about the universality of revenge. I wanted to explore the idea that when people are broken by war, broken by injustice, broken by mistreatment, they become broken in the same way.”
The tragic events in Sarat's family life and the horrors of war that surround her entire existence leave her so thoroughly broken that she has no choice but to seek revenge. The question this powerful novel then asks is, how much revenge will be enough?
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