by Ayad Akhtar
—Toni Morrison
The trouble on campus began before I got there: someone at the college’s Muslim student union had a cousin who had had what he called a “run-in” with me. I recalled the episode well: on a cigarette break during an afternoon seminar on my work at a community college in Southern California, a young Pakistani-American man shared with me his recent forays into online activism. He and a cohort had used Reddit to crowdfund the production of a porn scene in which a well-endowed Pakistani-American male—played by a fellow student whose member fit the bill—had graphic sex with a blond white bombshell. (They’d been able to raise enough money to hire a professional porn star for the shoot.) The video was their counterattack on a group of 4chan bullies who were well known for mocking South Asians about their penis sizes on that anonymous internet image board. The video turned out to be a great success. It went viral, and the resulting deluge of outraged 4chan threads, the young man explained to me—not only without a hint of irony but also, apparently, with every expectation I would find all this admirable—had been truly “life-changing.” Which is to say: I had more than an inkling he might not take well to my asking just why it was he cared what anyone thought about his penis size.
The young man in question didn’t come back to class after the break, and a few days later, while rummaging about through the 4chan threads surrounding his video, I came across a thread he’d written describing his encounter with me, in which he called me an “arrogant asshole who apparently thinks writing stories about Muslims beating white women instead of giving them a good fuck” was “original.” He went on to say that he hoped, on my next trip back to Pakistan, somebody finally gave me what I deserved, namely, a “bullet in the head.” The thread ended with three face-with-tears-of-joy emojis followed by a half dozen exclamation points. My heart raced as I read it, but not because I was worried. It wasn’t the first time I’d encountered this sentiment about me online. I doubted it would be the last.
The young pornographer in training had a cousin who was a student at the liberal arts college in Iowa where Mary Moroni was now teaching—having left my alma mater a few years after I’d graduated for a position that gave both her and her partner tenure-track jobs. I’d been to visit her there amid the cornfields twice before, once for dinner while driving through, once at her invitation to give a reading. She’d invited me to campus again, this time to spend a day with her spring seminar students. After I accepted, she reached out to the religion department, a student theater group, and the Muslim student union. Two days later, the latter’s student president wrote her an email explaining that the Muslim students on campus found my work offensive and demeaning, and, as far as their organization was concerned, I would be considered an “unsafe” presence on campus. The email encouraged Mary to rescind the invitation and ended by threatening protests of any and all events associated with me if she didn’t.
In the four years since I’d seen her last, Mary’s feelings about teaching had changed. Back then, she spoke of her students with a frustration that surprised me. She had just come off a semester of trouble with her course on social issues in the nineteenth-century American novel when, for the first time in her career as a teacher, a group of students refused an assignment. Objecting to the presence on the syllabus of the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, they refused to read The Gilded Age. It was only the most outrageous example of a new self-righteousness in the classroom Mary had been dealing with for some time. She’d had some trouble with the matter of the third-person pronoun being used for an individual—she was an English teacher, after all, she tried to explain—but eventually got used to it. Then there was the semester she came under attack for teaching Emerson and Whitman. A pair of students did their presentations on both writers’ racist views, culling racist comments both made in lesser-known writings. A larger group canvassed her to replace upcoming readings in both authors’ work with other, less objectionable authors. She was reluctant to go that far, explaining that she knew Whitman had racist views; Abraham Lincoln did, too. One needed to be cautious about applying today’s standards to the past. Even the most progressive white abolitionists of that time had opinions about race anyone today would consider racist. When Mary refused to drop the writers from the syllabus, four of her students dropped the class in protest.
I remember sitting with her in her office shortly after the ruckus about Twain, listening to her complain about the students’ growing intolerance for difficult ideas. “It’s feeling more and more to me like cover for their laziness,” she said; there was more gray in her hair and a few more pounds to her, but even anxious, she still looked like an angel in a Renaissance fresco. “They take the class because they want to be writers, but they don’t want to read. Instead of owning it, they slap you with moral rhetoric about why you’re wrong to make them do something they don’t want to do. And don’t get me started on grades. If you don’t give them grades they think they deserve, you get reported.” She paused. “The worst part of it? I can’t give them the best of what I have. They don’t even know if they have the interest, because they’re not willing to know what they’re made of. I think back on some of what we did together. The work on your dreams? Suggesting something like that these days is career suicide. It’s disheartening enough to make me wonder if I shouldn’t be doing something else with myself entirely.”
Four years later, though, her frustration had given way to compassion. Most of her students, she now recognized, were dealing with some very real form of anxiety or depression—or both. They trusted no one and expected that everyone and everything was taking advantage of them. As Mary saw it, they weren’t wrong. The university was a case in point: Tuition had risen another 4 percent the year prior. Inflation was below 2 percent. Why the gap? Because the college had taken on more debt to build a new gym and renovate the faculty club. Better facilities attracted better teachers and students, justifying higher tuitions; more cash flow meant the college had an excuse to take on more debt. This vicious cycle was being passed on to the students: the cost of coming to campus had just broken $70,000. Her students were carrying more debt than she thought many would ever be able to repay. It made sense that they didn’t want to work for their educations anymore. They were paying more than most Americans made in a year; wasn’t that work enough? College was now a customer experience, not a pedagogical one; and what the college customer wanted was only what had been advertised to lure them: physical comforts, moral reassurance, unceasing approbation. Mary believed deep down they knew it was a con, knew they were marks, knew not to trust a world that was now nothing more than a marketplace—but no trust in the world meant they had no basis for trusting themselves. Her students spent so much of their time in class—when they weren’t on their phones—wondering what was real that it was hard to arrive at a discussion of anything substantial. Platitudes and pornography commanded their days. As she saw it, much of her work now was about teaching them cognitive basics: how to recognize what was worth paying attention to; how to suffer through boredom; how to discern rhetoric from reality, discomfort from defense.
All this came up in the conversation we had at her six-acre homestead twenty minutes outside of campus, where I showed up on an unseasonably warm morning in March of 2019 and found her in the vegetable garden, tending to the soil. Her work in the garden was like meditation, she said as we headed for the house, which was something else she was making more time for every day. “And I finally got rid of my smartphone. Strictly a flip phone for me now.”
“Hard to text on those, isn’t it?”
“Small price to pay for my brain,” she said, holding open the door to a mudroom filled with gardening tools. In the kitchen, as she filled the kettle for tea, she shared the latest news from the Muslim student union: I was already aware she’d visited with some of the students there, aware she’d discovered none of them knew much about me or my work other than what they’d been told by the young pornographer in training’s cousin. I was
also already aware that Mary encouraged them to read some of my writing and, if they still had issues, to pen a letter she would deliver to me, which I’d agreed to respond to in public. What was new was that the letter hadn’t yet arrived because something else just happened: overnight, posters depicting me against a photograph of the burning towers appeared around campus. Mary believed they were inspired by a similar poster depicting Representative Ilhan Omar that had gone up in West Virginia a few weeks earlier; she pulled open a kitchen drawer and laid a crinkled eight-by-ten color image on the table between us. She was right: it was more or less the same image used in the Omar poster—a photo of me, seated, superimposed awkwardly beneath the image of the towers on fire. The caption along the bottom read: PROUD OF 9/11.
I couldn’t hide my shock. “How many of them are up on campus?” I asked.
“We don’t know exactly, but the kids from the Muslim student union went around, found a dozen or so, took them all down. Now that this is happening, they’re getting behind you.”
“Jesus.”
“I spoke to the dean this morning. We’ll have security with us today and tomorrow morning for our talk.”
“I doubt that’s necessary.”
“Maybe not, but I don’t want to take any chances.”
* * *
That afternoon, I sat in on Mary’s senior seminar while two security officers stood guard outside the classroom door. Inside, a dozen of her students led a discussion about that week’s reading assignment: Whitman’s Democratic Vistas. They were all startled that the poet’s portrait of the nation 150 years ago was one they still recognized, a country of endless energy, enterprise, and breadth—both natural and human—but ensnared in a materialism from which it couldn’t seem to escape. Back then, Whitman worried America’s preoccupation with the business of making money would lead to the failure of its historic political mission. On his remedy, the students were less agreed. Most thought Whitman naive to believe that future American poets and writers could inspire the nation to a nobler idea than money, something higher that could inspire us all to put our material abundance to more generous use. Some of the students did not believe there was a remedy; for them, the die was cast; remunerative individualism was our national character; we would never overcome it. For others, the looming climate crisis would provide the necessary larger idea. Change was coming to the system because it would have to. Only Mary still believed that art would play an essential part. I found the session engaging and invigorating, and when it was over, I told Mary I didn’t recognize the students she was so worried about in that classroom. An embarrassed smile crept across her lips: “I don’t want to take too much credit. But I have had all of them for at least two semesters before they take that seminar. We’ve had time to get into the practice of thinking.”
Over dinner that night at the local pasta place, Mary asked about my father. She knew he’d left the country; I’d written her about it. I told her he was struggling with his health, which wasn’t great, and so a trip back to see me wasn’t likely.
“You can go see him, though, right?”
“They won’t give me a visa.”
“Who won’t?”
“Pakistani consulate. I was in Israel last year. I don’t have the stamp on my passport, but somehow they’ve got a record of it. So no visa. ‘Are you a Jew lover?’ was what someone there asked me.”
“What did you say?”
“What I’ve always said to it: Muhammad loved them; why shouldn’t I?” Mary laughed. “As much as I want to see my father, it’s probably for the best. I’ve been seeing a woman who has an uncle high up in Pakistani intelligence. He told her I shouldn’t go. They’ve got a file on me, and someone’s decided my work violates the country’s blasphemy laws. Which means they could make my life very difficult if they wanted to.”
“Exile’s hard.”
“Exile?”
“One way or the other. Right?”
It took me a moment to realize what she meant. I lifted my glass. “To exile,” I said with a smile.
“To exile,” she said. We drank.
* * *
That night, I couldn’t sleep and found myself on my computer, browsing 4chan well past midnight. It didn’t take me long to discover a new video posted by the young pornographer in training. It was called “Long Tom” and featured the same well-endowed South Asian fellow, but now with a different naked white woman. She was fellating him in what looked like a museum lobby—in front of a statue of Thomas Jefferson. The edit alternated a series of Dutch angles of the oral sex in the museum with images of the Constitution, all to the beat of a fife-and-drum march that served as the video’s musical score. It was hard to tell how ironically any of this was meant, which was maybe the reason it was hard not to laugh. I wasn’t alone in finding it amusing: the post had over twenty-five thousand replies.
I doubt there were even twenty-five people in the auditorium the next morning to hear Mary and me speak. Most of her students from the seminar were there; a half dozen from the Muslim student union; and a handful of aging “townies” who, I was told, showed up to everything like this on campus. The same two security guards checked everyone’s coats and bags at the door, then stood in back scrolling on their smartphones as Mary and I conversed for an hour, mostly about capitalism, the collapse of our national politics, and what part (if any) an artist could play in helping shape the world anew. As usual, I was dour on that subject. America had always evinced deep strains of anti-intellectualism; life had never been easy here for artists and thinkers of any conviction. I quoted Emerson, who bemoaned, in the 1830s, that he couldn’t sit down to think in this country without someone asking if he had a headache. There were chuckles. Mary knew the passage—she’d been the one to point it out to me a quarter century earlier. She accepted that there were challenges but believed there was reason for hope. After all, here we were, still quoting Emerson. She proceeded with an eloquent defense of the imagination and its uses that inspired more than a few of us in that room.
During the Q&A that followed, an older white man stood up in the back row and explained that he’d come to the event having heard something about me on the radio. He’d expected to hear what he hoped would help him make better sense of the seemingly endless problems in the Muslim world. But here he was, and all he’d heard was a lot a criticism of America. “I mean, if you don’t like it here,” he said, “I don’t really understand why you don’t just leave…”
There was sudden jeering from the students in the front row. I stopped them. “The gentleman is free to ask a question. I’m free to give him an answer.” I looked back at him: “Where exactly, sir, were you thinking that I might go instead?”
“That part’s not my problem. I’m just saying, I don’t get why you’re here if you think it’s so darn hard.”
He sat down and waited for me to respond.
It took me a moment to speak; I didn’t expect to be emotional, but I was. I saw Mary watching me, love in her eyes. When I finally spoke, my voice was unsteady: “I’m here because I was born and raised here. This is where I’ve lived my whole life. For better, for worse—and it’s always a bit of both—I don’t want to be anywhere else. I’ve never even thought about it. America is my home.”
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Acknowledgments
I want to thank: Judy Clain, Sabrina Callahan, and the entire team at Little, Brown, Julie Barer, Michael Taeckens, Mark Warren, Mary Cappello, Shahzia Sikander, Marc Glick, Chris Till, Martha Harrell, Mike Pollard, Matt Decker, Lisa Timmel, Oren Moverman, John Landgraf, Daniel Kehlmann, Jennifer Egan, John Burnham Schwartz, Liaquat Ahamed, Nimitt Mankad, Shazad Akhtar, Andre Bishop, Jim Nicola, Oskar Eustis, Indhu Rubasingham, Chris Ashley, Donna Bagdasarian, Don Shaw, Melis Aker, Chris Campbell-Orrock, John Ochsendorf, Mark Robbins, and the American Academy in Rome—and a
lways and for everything, Annika Boras.
About the Author
Ayad Akhtar is a playwright, a novelist, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the recipient of an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of four plays and a previous novel, American Dervish, published in more than twenty languages and named one of the best novels of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews. He lives in New York City.
ayadakhtar.com
Also by Ayad Akhtar
American Dervish
Disgraced
The Invisible Hand
Junk
The Who and the What