Homeland Elegies(107)
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 always and for everything, Annika Boras.