Ayad Akhtar had passed his 40th birthday when he published his first novel in 2012. In the intervening years, the author and playwright has won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and two Obie Awards, as well as seeing multiple plays through sold-out Broadway runs.
Now, Akhtar has published his 2nd novel, Homeland Elegies. Already, the timely story of a Muslim-American family has earned the author widespread praise. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a profound and provocative inquiry into an artist’s complex American identity.” It comes at a time when the complexity of identity is thrown into harsh light, and award-winning literature offers ways to explore these problems.
Ayad Akhtar learned the ropes before launching his own creative career
Long before he would publish a novel or see his own plays produced onstage, Akhtar sat behind the scenes. He studied drama and religion at Brown University. Then, he moved to Italy to study under the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski.
After a time, Akhtar moved back to the states and earned his MFA from Colombia University. From there, he took a number of opportunities in the theatre world, including directing and teaching acting.
When he finally made his debut as an author and playwright in 2012, he did so with gusto. Within a year, Akhtar published his first novel, American Dervish, and saw his first play Disgraced to the stage. The latter earned him both an Obie award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
A voracious curiosity molded an artistic soul
Though born in Staten Island, Akhtar grew up mainly in rural Wisconsin. His father, a cardiologist, moved the family there in order to open up a clinic.
“The people were good, smart, open-hearted,” he recalls of the primarily white suburb he grew up in. “They didn’t know where I was from or what it was all about, but, as long as I liked the Green Bay Packers, it was all right.”
Akhtar threw himself head-first into his interests. Despite coming from a secular family, he studied the Qur’an intently, alongside other religions, philosophies, and literature. But when it came time to write for himself, Akhtar soon shifted his focus inward.
“A few years after 9/11, I realized there was no way I could avoid—or recreate myself in stark opposition to—what I came from,” he explains. “That’s really when I found this subject. I’d been told, ‘Write what you know,’ but I thought that meant writing about New York or my friends on Wall Street—not what I really knew: where I came from and what I learned.”
Though he admits to having written a full manuscript before American Dervish, it never saw the light of day. Instead, his success came from his personal experience. His first novel was a coming-of-age story about a young Muslim man growing up in Wisconsin. His latest, a semi-autobiographical work about a man named – yes – Ayad Akhtar.
Ayad Akhtar dances with auto-biography in “Homeland Elegies”
Homeland Elegies begins with an open letter “To America.” The letter bobs and weaves furiously around Akhtar’s memories, and throws venom at the failures of America. From the get-go, the novel reads much like a memoir – but Akhtar gives the readers few clues as to what really happened and what didn’t.
“I wanted to find a form that would express this confusion between fact and fiction which seems to increasingly become the texture of our reality or unreality,” he explains.
“I wanted to reach a reader today who is addicted to the thrill of breaking news and absorbed in the Instagram scroll feed. That reader, of course, is me, the reader who has lost interest, in a way, in anything that is not sensational in that way. I wanted to write a philosophical novel, but I wanted it to have the thrill of a kind of reality TV serial.”
The result: a compelling, frenetic, semi-fictional memoir of identity, family, and the modern American Dream.
Buy Homeland Elegies here.
