Basically, it is a part of a plan to push the whole country towards powering itself by either solar, wind, or nuclear power and minimizing further damage/land loss from the heat or flooding from sea level rise. However, the South does not take well to what it sees as a dictate from the federal government and the government's militarized response to a large protest against the SFA. Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas manage to temporarily break away from the Union (continuing to burn the banned fossil fuels), with the former three states forming the Southern Free State. Of course, the government won't let these territories go easily and this struggle between the two sides and their respective factions provides the background for the personal struggles of our characters caught up in all this chaos.
In this context of bloodshed, cruelty, and hyper-partisanship, in which the United States uses the worst aspects of its foreign policy domestically as part of the war effort (drones, Guantanamo-like prisons and interrogation techniques for captured Southern insurrectionists/terrorists, militaristic responses to protest, contempt for Southern refugees or displaced persons in Southern refugee camps), is how our central protagonist, Sarat Chestnut, grows up. Sarat comes of age in the refugee camp known as Camp Patience with her mother Martina, sister Dana, and brother Simon, where living standards are low and refugees are dependent on aid that comes by ship from the faraway rich powers such as China and the Bouazizi Empire (the latter a unity of the African and Middle Eastern countries that fought today's Arab Spring, its capital in Cairo). {This inversion of circumstances between what used to be "developing countries" and more powerful "first-world" countries is an intriguing mechanism Akkad uses to humble the reader and instruct them in the horrors of war.}
Sarat is not aware of the larger context of her world until the mysterious character Albert Gaines, who provides the education Sarat has missed out on and opening her eyes further to the injustices committed against the Red (the South) by the Blue (the North). Basically, Gaines is analogous to a terrorist recruiter, shaping Sarat to be an assassin for the Southern cause. The event that pushes Sarat off the proverbial edge into terrorism is a massacre that takes place at the camp by Northern-allied militias as retribution for a killed Northern general. In this way, the larger destruction of the world by natural and man-made disasters echo the kind of pain Sarat feels and wishes to unleash upon all those who have wronged her. Anyone see a link to today's terrorism in the form of IS? After the massacre, Sarat is captured and sent to the Guantanamo-like Sugarloaf Detention Center, in which the North uses the horrific and discredited methods of torture used in the contemporary War on Terror in order to extract confessions from Sarat about various crimes she didn't commit. She is finally released after seven years, where she returns home to find her brother married and with a kid (her nephew Benjamin Chestnut, who provides the introduction and ending narration to his aunt Sarat's story). Around the same time she is released, the North has won the civil war.
"So Gaines pulled his ancient hunting rifle from its rack and set her to sniping soda cans on fence posts...Onto the tin cans her mind painted the faces of those Northerners that night in Patience, at at the hallucinated sight of them she was overcome by anger and a rabid desire to ruin those who'd ruined her. Rage rapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy." (El Akkad, 2017, p. 189)
Ultimately, even when Sarat appears to be healing and adapting to life outside of Sugarloaf, her many types of trauma cannot be buried. When Gaines's friend, a Bouazizi Empire agent known as "Joe" invites Sarat to exact her revenge upon the North and South alike via the release of a deadly virus at the Reunification Ceremony in Columbus. Sarat accepts and sends her nephew (with whom she had a complicated relationship, but genuinely loved) away ahead of time to the remains of Alaska in the neutral state of New Anchorage and does the deed, wiping out millions of people. That sends the country into ten further years of devastation from the plague before the remains of the American nation are able to pick up the pieces in the early 2100s.
In conclusion, whether or not you agreed with the lengths Sarat went to in getting retribution for the suffering she endures throughout the novel, El Akkad does a superb job of showing readers the devastating human and environmental costs of modern-day warfare in his vision of a proud America reduced by natural forces and in-fighting (as both domestic and international political and military conflicts have already taken a huge toll before climate change then wallops the country) to what today would be considered a developing nation-state. All in all, this book is a must-read, a warning against the continuing costs of contemporary short-term-oriented military, political and environmental policies.
Works Cited:
El Akkad, Omar. (2017). American War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
No comments:
Post a Comment