American war

Author's name: Omar Al-Akkad

Journalist: You write in the book, "During war, you fight with guns, but during peace, you fight with stories." How did you come up with the idea for this dystopian novel? Omar Al-Akkad: I was listening to a political analyst at the time NATO forces invaded Afghanistan a few years ago. He was referring to a wave of demonstrations against the presence of US forces there. The broadcaster asked a question like, "Why do they hate us so much?" The analyst replied that American soldiers sometimes have to invade Afghan villages and search the houses there after emptying them of their inhabitants and placing them under armed surveillance, and that in Afghan culture, this is considered humiliating. I remember thinking, "Name me a single culture in the world that doesn't consider this an insult, name it?!" Then the train of thought took off, wondering: What would it be like if these peoples in the East lived the luxury of having their wars moved to the West while they sat back and watched from afar? It was the year 2074. The Second American Civil War had broken out after the continent had been divided into a dominant North and a resistant South; oceans and rivers had flooded, swallowing large parts of the landmass; the wars of the Middle East had ended with the formation of a political entity in North Africa called the Bouazizi Empire after the Fifth Arab Spring, dominating the world alongside China; and more than one epidemic had swept across the continent. Sarah (Sarat) Chestnut was six years old at the time, living in a broken-down shipping container with her family, while drones constantly hovered in the sky, raising the possibility of death at any moment. No schools, no education, no maps, no pictures. The world around her is in chaos, teeming with soldiers, rebels, informants, and foreign men carrying the goals of their distant countries. Sarat will grow up, cross rivers, live in tents, and carry rifles. She will be a symbol of the southern struggle for freedom, and she will take care of her people well. We will see the vast areas of fear she discovers within herself, the areas of love, revenge, and unconsciousness, and the extent of the fragmentation that a continent as diverse as America can be exposed to while the new Middle East sends it aid ships laden with blankets and canned food. We will meet a character we know before, but after the novel, she will remain throbbing in our chest with a mysterious pain, like a toothy tear.