by Ayad Akhtar
For a thoughtful man—at least one who’d evidenced instances of thoughtfulness with reassuring frequency over the years—the man seemed to be turning into an imbecile, his hodgepodge views like mental flatulence, one fetid odor after another. To push the metaphor: it had the logic of dysentery, an infection of his political consciousness occasioning wanton noxious discharge. And further: a child shits on the floor and sticks its finger in the feces, delights in the odor, and relishes the disgust in everyone else. Puerile pleasures, that’s what Father was learning again—we all were—and Trump was our tutor. I really can’t imagine that my father, this man I know and love, whom I still admire in so many ways, I can’t imagine he didn’t sense something was amiss. But somehow, he just kept looking the other way, seeking some worthwhile reason for the widespread abasement. Like others, Father started to wonder if this coarsening of our national life might not be a liberation, a required caustic, the dawn of some new era of political truth telling. Even during the unfathomable October of 2016, which saw the release of both the pussy-grabbing audio and Comey’s letter to Congress, weeks that cemented our status as the world’s laughingstock; even by late October, when Father’s faith in the man appeared to be faltering, finally tempered by Trump’s unremitting intemperance, the haplessness, the evident bad faith, the disgusting comments about women and their genitalia; even as late as a week before the election, I remember him telling me on the phone that Trump, flawed as he was, might still be the better choice. I couldn’t bear it.
“Dad. I don’t understand. I mean, what do you keep looking for in this guy? He’s a liar. He’s a liar and a bigot, he’s incompetent—”
“He’s not really a bigot.”
“Well, he’s got everyone fooled. I don’t understand what you see in him.”
“I told you before. He’s a wrecking ball.”
“You were on Facebook and you read a letter some kid wrote his teacher. I read that, too.”
“Made sense, didn’t it?”
“Dad! You’re not some coal miner’s son from West Virginia, or wherever the fuck that kid was from—”
“Language, beta. You need to calm down.”
“I’ll calm down when I understand why you don’t care that this guy, who is going to make our lives miserable if he’s president, why that doesn’t matter to you—”
“It’s not real. It’s all bluster.”
“How do you know that?”
“You know how I know. I know him.”
“You haven’t spoken to him for twenty years!”
“Eighteen. And would you calm down—”
“You’re counting?!”
“He’s looking for attention. That’s all. They’re saying he wants to start a new television channel.”
“Just answer me this, Dad. Just one thing. Just one. Doesn’t it matter to you that your children might be affected—”
“You’ll be fine—”
“Your sister in Atlanta, the aunties, the cousins—”
“Relax.”
“No, Dad. I want to know what you think. I know you don’t think you’ll have to sign up for a registry—”
“There’ll be no registry. You’ll see.”
“What about the travel ban he’s talking about? Hmm? What about when Mustafa and Yasmin can’t get on a plane to see us anymore?”
“I said, relax.”
“And after that? What comes next? How much longer before they tell you you’re not a real citizen because you weren’t born here?”
“Not happening—”
“Or me? Because I’m the son of someone who they decide should never have been given citizenship?”
“You’re famous. Nobody’s going to do anything to you.”
“I’m not famous.”
“You’re in the paper all the time.”
“Being in the paper in Milwaukee doesn’t make me famous. And I don’t see what that has to do with anything—”
“Besides. He’s not going to win.”
“Besides?”
“You’re smart enough to know that. He doesn’t even want to win. He’s trying to send a message.”
“I thought you said he was trying to start a channel.”
“Same thing.”
“He’s running for an election he doesn’t want to win so he can start a channel to send a message?”
“Exactly.”
“What’s the message?”
“The system is broken.”
The maddening thing about this sludge of self-involved sophistry was that it all made perfect sense to him.
“I have no idea what you’re saying, Dad.”
“I’m saying he won’t win. So you should calm down.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Nate Silver.”
“What if he does?”
“He won’t.”
“What if he does?! I mean, you’re still saying he’s the better choice.”
“He is.”
“Better how?”
“Lower taxes.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me—”
“If you made more money, you would understand.”
“I made more than you did last year.”
“It’s about time.”
“It sounds like you’re gonna vote for him.”
He paused. “No.”
“Sounds like you are. And I gotta say, I still don’t understand what your problem is with Hillary.”
“No problem. We need a change—”
“Is it that she’s a woman? I mean, she can’t get pregnant anymore, so that shouldn’t be a problem for you—”
“I don’t like your tone.”
“What would Mom say? If she was here?”
“About what?”
“How do you think she’d feel about having her pussy grabbed, too?”
“Out-of-bounds!”
“Is that how Caroline liked it? Did she love it when you grabbed her pussy?!”
“You are not talking to me like that, goddammit! Do you hear me!? I am still your father!!”
My heart was pounding. He was right. I’d crossed a line. I was in pain. I was trying to hurt him. I hated what was happening. To him. To the country. To me. I wanted to tell him I was sorry. That it hadn’t been me speaking. Not really. That this was what Trump was doing to all of us. But I didn’t. I knew he wouldn’t understand.
* * *
On Election Day, I was in Chicago. I’d been invited to teach a class at Northwestern, so I voted a week early, at the church in Harlem where I’d cast my vote for a Democrat four out of the last five presidential elections. I remember the almost ebullient buzz on campus that day, the thrill of knowing the madness with Trump would finally be over. I didn’t admit to anyone my lingering fears that he might not lose. I’d observed a change in myself in those last few weeks before the election, a new, narcotic dependence on my phone, an aching that wasn’t even for the phone itself but for the daily clatter of outrage about Trump it delivered. I remember feeling—through that last fortnight before Election Day—a hunger to be haunted. Night after night, I dreamed of the man. I’d ejaculated in a nightmare about the Trump wives and daughters, a cabal of buxom blondes who took turns putting lipstick on my penis. Every morning I awoke and reached for my phone. I’d never experienced such pervasion. I felt Trump as closely as I felt myself, medium and message all in one. I worried it wasn’t only me. If others were feeling as I did, I worried that boded ill. The improbable saga of this campaign, its whiplash reversals, its perverse pleasures—didn’t a story this insane require an ending commensurate with the madness? The writer in me knew that stories are made of movement, not morality; demand conclusion, not consonance; and often conjure into being the very terrors they are written to wish away. As a writer, I knew this. But there was the needle at the Times, and the winding-path ribbon at FiveThirtyEight. Both assured me I was wrong.
Until they didn’t.
As I watched the returns, Wisco
nsin alarmed me. I knew it well and knew that the already reported precincts were where most of Hillary’s support would come from. I couldn’t understand why the commentators continued to pretend that the swelling numbers for Trump in Wisconsin were anything other than decisive. It would be another hour before that Times needle swung in the opposite direction and Nate Silver’s ribbon turned bright red.
I called home at 10:30, once it was clear to me Trump was going to win my home state and likely the election. Father picked up. He’d been drinking. I couldn’t gauge his mood.
“Are you watching?” I asked.
“Looks like he’s gonna win,” he said, slurring. On the television, John King was showing the tally from Sheboygan County, where Father had a clinic. “Sheboygan, too?” I heard him ask, confused.
“Did you vote?”
“What?”
“Did you vote, Dad?”
“What business of yours?”
“I don’t know. We’ve talked about it enough.”
“Goddamn right we talked about it enough.”
“You sound upset.”
“Huh?”
“You sound upset.”
“He’s winning. Don’t you see?”
“Didn’t you vote for him?”
“I told you, goddammit, I’m not talking about this.”
And then he hung up on me.
He never would tell me how he voted, but the shame I heard in his voice was unmistakable. I think he was admitting to me, that night—in the only way he could—that he’d done it. Despite knowing better, he’d voted for Trump.
I’ve wondered what he might have been thinking as he stepped into the all-purpose room in the quaint town hall of the suburban enclave where he lives, a room likely filled that day mostly with the whites he thought too concerned with their summer vacations; I’ve wondered, as he walked into that room and showed his ID and took his place in line—did he know yet? Or when he stepped into the voting machine, drew the curtain, and stared at the cleft column of names—what was he feeling? What moved him to lift his hand for the tiny lever on the red side and press down on it? I’ve wondered if some part of him didn’t really believe he was doing it, or believed it wouldn’t matter—for wasn’t it a foregone conclusion at that point that Hillary would win? And if he voted for Trump only because he really thought she would win, what was he really trying to say? What private thought or feeling was he honoring? What fidelity did he not want to betray? I don’t think it was misogyny; he loved Benazir Bhutto, was gutted by her killing. No. I think it was his enduring love of Trump.
What was this attachment to the man? Was it really just the memory of the helicopter rides, the spacious suite, the hooker, a tailor’s tape, a lapel pin? Could it really be so banal? Or were those things standing in for something else, something more encompassing and elusive? Father always called America the land of opportunity. Hardly original, I know. But I wonder: Opportunity for whom? For him, right? The opportunity to become whatever he desired? Sure, others, too, but only insofar as others really meant him. And isn’t that what Mary was saying all those years ago? That our vaunted American dream, the dream of ourselves enhanced and enlarged, is the flag for which we are willing to sacrifice everything—gouging our neighbors, despoiling our nation—everything, that is, except ourselves? A dream that imagines the flourishing of others as nothing more than a road sign, the prick of envy as the provident spur to one’s own all-important realization? Isn’t this what Father saw in Donald Trump? A vision of himself impossibly enhanced, improbably enlarged, released from the pull of debt or truth or history, a man delivered from consequence itself into pure self-absorption, incorporated entirely into the individualist afflatus of American eternity? I think Father was looking for an image of just how much more his American self could contain than the Pakistani one he’d left behind. I think he wanted to know what the limits were. In America, you could have anything, right? Even the presidency? If an idiot like Trump could get hold of it, couldn’t you? Even if you didn’t want it? After all, the idiot apparently didn’t want it, either. He just wanted to know he could have it. Or maybe the emphasis there needs to shift: he wanted to know he could have it.
Yes. I think that’s right.
Elsewhere, I’ve referred to Trump’s ascendancy as the completion of the long-planned advent of the merchant class to the sanctum sanctorum of American power, the conquering rise of mercantilism with all its attendant vulgarity, its acquisitive conscience supplanting every moral one, an event in our political life that signals the collapse not of democracy—which has, in truth, enabled it—but of every bulwark against wealth-as-holy-pursuit, which appears to be the last American passion left standing. De Tocqueville would not be surprised. My father is no exception. Trump is just the name of his story.
Footnotes
1 I found Trump’s description oddly poetic. Father always said he found the man sharp. It was a measure of how far Trump had finally fallen in his eyes by the fall of 2019 that, when I told him I was writing these pages, he offered to get me into the office where he no longer worked—at that point, he was retired—so I might be able to peruse Trump’s medical file. Though tempted, I didn’t see the need. Father remembered so much of his time with “Donald” and remembered it so well; he could call up details of even the most trivial exchanges with a vividness usually reserved for the recollection of a great romance.
II.
On Autobiography; or, Bin Laden
Not quite ten years after 9/11, I wrote a play in which an American-born character with Muslim origins confesses that as the towers were falling, he felt something unexpected and unwelcome, a sense of pride—a “blush” is how he describes it—which, he explains in the play’s climactic scene, made him realize that, despite being born here, despite the totality of his belief in this country and his commitment to being an American, he somehow still identified with a mentality that saw itself as aggrieved and other, a mind-set he’s spent much of the play despising and for which he continually uses, to the chagrin of those onstage (and many in the audience), the term Muslim. Later, the play’s only other character of Muslim origin refers to the 9/11 attacks as something America deserved and a likely harbinger of more to come. When the play went on to win a Pulitzer and be performed around the country, and then the world, the one question I would be asked more than any other—and which I’m still asked fairly often—is how much of me is in it. Over time, I’ve gleaned that what I’m usually being asked is whether I, too, felt a blush of pride on September 11, and, if so, whether I believe America deserved what it got; and finally, if I, like my character, think that further Muslim attacks on America are likely. When they ask if the play is autobiographical, what people are really asking me about is my politics.
For years, I deflected. Had I wanted to write an autobiography, I could have done so; had I wanted to write an anti-American screed, I could have done that, too. But I hadn’t done either. Wasn’t that enough? Apparently not. To most of my questioners, I discovered, my demure evasions were really affirmations. My choice not to disavow having had such feelings myself was taken as a tacit confession of guilt. Why else would I stay silent? In other words, while those asking couldn’t identify with having feelings like this, they certainly could identify with not wanting to admit them if they did. As ever, interpretation has more to do with the one interpreting than the one being interpreted.
Realizing my reticence was proving counterproductive, I tried a different tack: For me to indulge the question—I would say—and point away from the work back to the life of the one who created it only undermines the particular sort of truth that I believe art is after. Art’s power, unlike journalism, has little to do with the reliability of its sourcing, I would say. Finally, I would quote D. H. Lawrence: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.” For a time, this seemed to work well enough.
Then, in November of 2015, some four months into his candidacy, Trump announced he’d seen Muslims celebrating in Jersey
City on the day of the attacks. My agent’s phone started ringing. I turned down a request to appear on Bill Maher’s show to discuss the claim, and two days later, I declined a similar invitation to appear on Fox & Friends. But the questions kept coming as people now cited my play as proof of a deeper, alarming truth about the American Muslim response to 9/11. My evasions started to seem irresponsible to me. Wasn’t it important for me to say something substantial? But what? The sentiments expressed in the play had, of course, come from somewhere, but how to express the complex, often contradictory alchemy at work in translating experience into art? The only thing I could put simply was that there was no simple way to put it. There was no straightforward way to speak of the tortured vein opened up in my family by the killing of the man I believe my mother was in love with most of her life—not my father but one of his best friends from medical school, Latif Awan. It was during my mother’s grief over Latif’s murder that she would make comments that led to the lines in my play, comments in which I would educe not only the startling depth of my mother’s divided loyalties but also the contours of the deepest fault line, I believe, separating so much of the so-called Muslim world from the so-called West. Just a few words, but ones for which I had a lifetime of context. I’d buried both context and tale inside the play I wrote, masking its true source from the audience. I didn’t believe a more obvious rendition would meet with greater understanding. I still don’t. But I suppose we’re about to find out.