by Ayad Akhtar
The other thing that she did was she introduced me to a lot of European modernism. And so I was reading, you know, Thomas Mann and Rilke and Kafka and the existentialists. I carried with me—for at least a good ten to fifteen years—this idea that writing in a universal way was writing like a continental European modernist. “Write what you know” is very good advice, but I didn’t take it for a long time because I thought, “Well, what I know is not universal, and nobody’s going to really care.” It didn’t seem worthy of this very high calling of the questions of the meaning of life and what have you. It took me a long time to work that out.
GG: The Who & The What was originally programmed as part of the Playhouse’s DNA New Work Series. The conversation we had afterwards was fantastically moving and exciting—a wonderful dialogue with the audience—and you shared a story about that transformation from thinking that what you were writing wasn’t worthy of sharing.
AA: I’m not sure exactly what the moment of realization was, but it was sometime in my early thirties that I started to sense that I was avoiding something about where I came from, about who I was. It was something I was avoiding in my work, but also something I was avoiding on the level of identity. I had enough presence of mind to realize that the best way to respond to this growing awareness was to just be still about it and to see what happened. And at some point, metaphorically speaking, I started to look over my shoulder at what I was running from. And at that moment there was this burst of creativity. I mean, it was an explosion. So the matter of working through personal psychological or identity issues actually happened through the work, or with the work. American Dervish came from that moment, Disgraced did, The Who & The What did, a novel I’m working on now, a film I’m writing now… all of that stuff came from that encounter.
GG: In rereading Disgraced and thinking about The Who & The What, I’m reminded of W. E. B. DuBois talking about double consciousness, the idea that people see themselves through the lens of the dominant culture. In an interview in American Theatre magazine, you talk about the ways in which Muslims are still very beholden to the way they’re viewed in the West.
AA: I’m not an apologist. I’m not involved in PR about correcting some impression that people have of Islam. My position is that, as an artist, I have to have the freedom to wrestle with my demons and my raptures and those of my community, and to celebrate and criticize in equal measure. And the best way to tell a good story about the world that I come from is not to worry about the politics of representation, except insofar as it’s relevant to the characters that I’m representing. That said, I think it’s a very long story. For a few centuries now, the West has had a dominant discourse that defines the Muslim “other” in a way that allows the West to justify its political practices and its sense of moral superiority. And so, in a post-9/11 landscape, where the Muslim “other” is even more pejoratively defined, what is the role of a Muslim American artist of some visibility in that discursive environment? And my relationship to that question is by no means obvious. Even to me, to be honest.
Post–World War II, a dominant discourse among the Jewish American community was, “What’s good for the Jews, what’s bad for the Jews?” Meaning, “Let’s not do things that are bad for the Jews.” There’s a similar thing going on now in the Muslim community, which is totally understandable. Unfortunately, I lose any credibility as an artist, not only with my audience but with myself, if I cater to a political ideology one way or the other. My calling is to try to tell the best, most truthful story in the most compelling way.
GG: Can you talk about the inspiration for The Who & The What?
AA: One day, I was taking a cab home and I saw—you know the little TVs they have in New York cabs?—I saw this ad for Kiss Me, Kate and I thought to myself, “What is this obsession with Taming of the Shrew?” It makes no sense! The gender politics of that play have no resonance for today’s audience. I understand them because that’s where I come from, that’s my culture. I mean, my mom is basically Kate! A nicer version, but, you know… So I thought to myself, “I should write a knockoff of Taming of the Shrew.” Where there’s two sisters, the older sister has sworn off love, the younger sister’s got a boyfriend, she wants to marry him, their father says, “You’re not marrying your boyfriend till your older sister gets married.” Coming into this whole thing, I wanted to write a relationship play about Muslim American matrimonial mores. That’s where the inspiration for the play came from. And then of course there’s this other thing, which is a meditation on the Prophet, and how the Prophet’s example affects how Muslims approach the questions of love and commitment and matrimony and relationships.
GG: As a writer whose job it is to interrogate things like ideologies—which by definition don’t like to be interrogated—how do you hope to start a conversation?
AA: One of the great things about doing theater is that I can write a play, and then a group of students in Pakistan or Indonesia can sit around a table and read it, and then decide they want to do it. If they can’t get a theater to do it, they can do it in a basement, and they can invite people over. I hope that folks find The Who & The What meaningful, entertaining, and interesting enough to engage with it. It’s a different way of fostering dialogue. Writing a play is a completely different kind of engagement with the world because you’re engaging other people to engage with the world. The Enlightenment was spread in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through a process that was similar—basically what we now call book clubs. Folks would get together and read the latest by Voltaire, or by Rousseau, and would discuss it and then would pass the book to another person. And it’s that sort of movement of consciousness through living dialogue and embodied exchange that I think is so central to the theater.
GG: Like The Who & The What, your play Disgraced also explores the concept of Muslim American identity in contemporary times, though it is less a comedy than The Who & The What. How have audiences responded to that play?
AA: There have been a lot of different responses. The one through line I’ve noticed is that people are incredibly moved by the play. This is going to sound very pretentious, but… I remember reading Aristotle on tragedy years and years ago, and his definition of catharsis has to do with expression of emotion through pity and terror. “Terror” being key. And terror, as he defines it in his paradigmatic anecdote, is when the Furies arrived onstage, women were miscarrying in the aisles. [Laughter from the audience] Right? Who wants to go to a theater like that, right? [More laughter] Well, I do!
But shocking for shock’s sake is not particularly interesting to me, personally. When Aristotle is talking about women miscarrying in the aisles, he’s talking about a religious sense of awe. In the Islamic tradition, the word for “God-fearing” is the same as for “awe of God.” And if you can begin to provoke that numinous dimension for an audience, then I think you’re actually trying to open them up to a deeper level of existence.
I am trying to write to the universal. That is what I’m trying to do, period. Stories that say “Muslim Americans and Muslims are people too” can’t necessarily reach everybody in the audience where they live and breathe. It can illuminate things for them, but it can’t necessarily force them to ask the deepest questions of their own lives. What I hope I’m discovering is that by writing from the particular that I know—that I find fascinating and that I have a lot of love for and a whole lot of problems with—I can perhaps open onto the universal. Which is something that I couldn’t do before, when I was trying to write in some universal way.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many helped bring this work to life. First and foremost, Chris Ashley and Gabe Green and everyone at La Jolla Playhouse, where this play first saw the light of day. Paige Evans and Andre Bishop and the amazing staff of LCT3 / Lincoln Center Theater, where it found its finished form. Judy Clain, Terry Adams, Nicole Dewey, and the rest of Little, Brown and Co., for this edition. My indispensable agents Chris Till and Donna Bagdasarian. And of course,
Marc Glick.
A play is a collaboration with so many artists. Kimberly Senior, my director from day one. Bernie White, ever Afzal. The amazing design teams in La Jolla and New York: Jack Magaw, Jill BC Du Boff, Elisa Benzoni, Jaymi Lee Smith, Emily Rebholz, Japhy Weideman. Casting directors Sharon Bialy and Gohar Gazazyan on the West Coast and Daniel Swee on the East Coast. And the wonderful actors who participated at every stage of this process: Greg Keller, Nadine Malouf, Tala Ashe, Meera Rohit Kumbhani, Karen David, Dieterich Gray, Sheila Vand, Monika Jolly, Jolly Abraham, Ryan O’Nan, Faran Tahir, Stephen Plunkett, Roxanna Hope, Demosthenes Chrysan, and Anitha Gandhi.
I benefited from the insights of so many: Don Shaw, Steve Klein, Ami Dayan, Poorna Jagannathan, Dan Hancock, Shazad Akhtar, Shirley Fishman, Gaye Taylor Upchurch, Eric Rosen at Kansas City Rep, Seth Gordon at The Rep of St. Louis, Polly Carl, Natasha Sinha, Michael Pollard, Madani Younis at the Bush Theatre in London, Amanda Watkins at the Araca Group, Stuart Rosenthal, and Jerry Patch and Annie MacRae at MTC.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the support of Ritu Sahai-Mittal and Manish Mittal, as well as the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AYAD AKHTAR is a screenwriter, playwright, actor, and novelist. He was nominated for a 2006 Independent Spirit Award for best screenplay for the film The War Within. His plays include Disgraced, produced at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater in 2012 and recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He lives in New York City.
… AND HIS NOVEL
American Dervish was hailed by People as “a particularly fresh and touching coming-of-age story.” Following is an excerpt from the book’s opening pages.
Mina
Long before I knew Mina, I knew her story.
It was a tale Mother told so many times: How her best friend, gifted and gorgeous—something of a genius, as Mother saw it—had been frustrated at every turn, her development derailed by the small-mindedness of her family, her robust will checked by a culture that made no place for a woman. I heard about the grades Mina skipped and the classes she topped, though always somewhat to the chagrin of parents more concerned with her eventual nuptials than her report card. I heard about all the boys who loved her, and how—when she was twelve—she, too, fell in love, only to have her nose broken by her father’s fist when he found a note from her sweetheart tucked into her math book. I heard about her nervous breakdowns and her troubles with food and, of course, about the trove of poems her mother set alight in the living room fireplace one night during an argument about whether or not Mina would be allowed to go to college to become a writer.
Perhaps it was that I heard it all so often without knowing the woman myself, but for the longest time, Mina Ali and her gifts and travails were like the persistent smell of curry in our halls and our rooms: an ever-presence in my life of which I made little note.
And then, one summer afternoon when I was eight, I saw a picture of her. As Mother unfolded Mina’s latest letter from Pakistan, a palm-sized color glossy tumbled out. “That’s your auntie Mina, kurban,” Mother said as I picked it up. “Look how beautiful she is.”
Beautiful, indeed.
The picture showed a striking woman sitting on a wicker chair before a background of green leaves and orange flowers. Most of her perfectly black hair was covered with a pale pink scarf, and both her hair and scarf framed an utterly arresting face: cheekbones highly drawn—gently accentuated with a touch of blush—oval eyes, and a small, pointed nose perched above a pair of ample lips. Her features defined a perfect harmony, promising something sheltering, something tender, but not only. For there was an intensity in her eyes that belied this intimation of maternal comfort, or at least complicated it: those eyes were black and filled with piercing light, as if her vision had long been sharpened against the grindstone of some nameless inner pain. And though she was smiling, her smile was more one concealed than offered and, like her eyes, hinted at something mysterious and elusive, something you wanted to know.
Mother posted the photo on our refrigerator door, pinned in place by the same rainbow-shaped finger magnets that also affixed my school lunch menu. (This was the menu Mother consulted each night before school to see if pork was being served the following day—and if, therefore, I’d be needing a bag lunch—and which I consulted each school morning hoping to find my favorite, beef lasagna, listed among the day’s offerings.) For two years, then, barely a day went by without at least a casual glance at that photograph of Mina. And there were more than a few occasions when, finishing my glass of morning milk, or munching on string cheese after school, I lingered over it, staring at her likeness as I sometimes did at the surface of the pond at Worth Park on summer afternoons: doing my best to catch a glimpse of what was hidden in the depths.
It was a remarkable photograph, and—as I was to discover from Mina herself a couple of years later—it had an equally remarkable history. Mina’s parents, counting on their daughter’s beauty to attract a lucrative match, brought in a fashion photographer to take pictures of her, and the photo in question was the one that would make its way—through a matchmaker—into the hands of Hamed Suhail, the only son of a wealthy Karachi family.
Hamed fell in love with Mina the moment he saw it.
The Suhails showed up at the Ali home a week and a half later, and by the end of their meeting, the fathers had shaken hands on their children’s betrothal. Mother always claimed that Mina didn’t dislike Hamed, and that Mina always said she could have found happiness with him. If not for Irshad, Hamed’s mother.
After the wedding, Mina moved south to Karachi to live with her in-laws, and the problems between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law began the first night Mina was there. Irshad came into her bedroom holding a string of plump, pomegranate-colored stones, a garnet necklace and family heirloom which—Irshad explained—had been handed down from mother to daughter for five generations. Herself daughterless, Irshad had always imagined she would bestow these, the only family jewels, on the wife of her only son someday.
“Try it on,” Irshad urged, warmly.
Mina did. And as they both stared into the mirror, Mina couldn’t help but notice the silvery thinning of Irshad’s eyes. She recognized the envy.
“You shouldn’t, Ammi,” Mina said, pulling the stones from her neck.
“I shouldn’t what?”
“I don’t know… I mean, it’s so beautiful… are you sure you want to give it to me?”
“I’m not giving it to you yet,” Irshad replied, abruptly. “I just wanted to see how it looked.”
Bruised by Irshad’s sudden shift, Mina handed the necklace back to her mother-in-law. Irshad took it and, without another word, walked out of the room.
So Irshad’s enmity began. First came the snide comments offered under her breath, or in passing: about how headstrong the “new girl” was; how she ate hunched over her plate like a servant; or how, as Irshad put it, Mina looked like a “mouse.” Soon to follow were changes to the household routine intended to make Mina’s life more difficult: servants sent up to clean Mina’s room when she was still asleep; the expunging from the family menu of the foods Mina most enjoyed; the continued flurry of mean-spirited remarks, though now no longer offered sotto voce. Mina did all she could to appease and placate her mother-in-law. But this only stoked Irshad’s suspicions. For as Mina tried to ply Irshad with submissiveness, the elder woman felt the change of tack, and read it as evidence of a cunning nature. Irshad now started rumors about her daughter-in-law’s “wandering eyes” and “thieving hands.” She warned her son to keep Mina away from the male staff, and warned her staff to keep their valuables under lock and key. (Neither Hamed nor his father—both terrified of Irshad—did anything to address the growing conflict.) And when the pleasure of verbal abuse wore thin, Irshad resorted to the physical. Now she slapped Mina, for leaving her dirty clothes strewn around her bedroom, or talking out of turn in front of guests. On one occasion, hearing an insult in a comment Mina
made about dinner not being as spicy as usual, Irshad grabbed her daughter-in-law by the hair and dragged her from the dinner table to throw her out into the hallway.
Fourteen months into this growing nightmare, Mina conceived. To escape the abuse and bring her pregnancy to term in peace, she returned north to her family home, in the Punjab. There, three weeks early, unaccompanied by her husband—who would not join her for fear of suffering his mother’s wrath—Mina gave birth to a boy. And as she lay in the hospital bed exhausted from her daylong labor, a man in a long dark coat appeared at the doorway just moments after her mother left the room to fetch a cup of tea from the canteen. He stepped inside, inquiring if she was Amina Suhail née Ali.
“I am,” Mina replied.
The man approached her bedside, an envelope in hand. “Your husband has divorced you. Enclosed are the papers that make this divorce official. He has written in his own hand—you will recognize the writing—that he divorces you, he divorces you, and he divorces you. As you well know, Mrs. Suhail—I mean, Ms. Ali—this is what the law requires.” He laid the envelope across her belly, gently. “You have just given birth to Hamed Suhail’s son. He has chosen the name Imran for the boy. Imran will stay with you until the age of seven, at which point Mr. Hamed Suhail has the right to full, undisputed custody.” The lawyer took a step back, but he wasn’t finished. Mina squinted at him in disbelief. “All that I have shared with you is in accordance with the law as it stands, this date of June 15, 1976, in the land of Pakistan, and you are entitled to a custody trial by law, but I would advise you to understand, Mrs. Suhail—I mean, Ms. Ali—that any fight will be a useless one for you, and will simply cost your family resources it does not have.”