55 pages • 1 hour read
Omar El AkkadAmerican War
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Excerpt 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “April, 2075—St. James, Louisiana”
Prologue Summary
Benjamin describes the extreme social and geographic transformations in the United States during the previous century. Climate change and rising sea levels force the populations of the Eastern Seaboard's biggest cities inland, while submerging virtually all of Florida and much of Louisiana. The nation's capital relocates from Washington, DC to Columbus, Ohio, where lawmakers pass the Sustainable Future Act prohibiting the use of fossil fuels nationwide. Their industries and traditions threatened, five Southern states—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas—secede from the United States, resulting in a Second American Civil War that kills 11 million people between 2074 and 2095. On July 3, 2095, the day the North and South are scheduled to sign a Reunification agreement, one of the few remaining Southern rebels releases a plague in Columbus that spreads throughout the country, killing 110 million people.
Benjamin belongs to the so-called Miraculous Generation born between 2074 and 2095. He escaped the consequences of war and plague because he moved to New Anchorage in the neutral state of Alaska at the age of six. Now a retired history scholar dying of cancer, Benjamin is ready to share the story of Sarat, a story he's kept a secret his entire life.
Chapter 1 Summary
In 2075, a few months after the start of the Second American Civil War, the Chestnut family lives in a converted shipping container in the rural parish of St. James, Louisiana near the new mouth of the Mississippi delta. The Chestnuts consist of Martina and Benjamin, their nine-year-old son Simon, and their six-year-old fraternal twin daughters Dana and Sara T., who goes by "Sarat." Sarat is a tomboy who resembles her African-American mother, while Simon and Dana more closely resemble their Mexican-born father.
Along with Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina, Louisiana is a "purple state," meaning that while it is geographically in the South, it is not a part of the Free Southern State coalition that seceded. That coalition is comprised of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, also known as "the MAG." Texas, meanwhile, fights a two-fronted war against the U.S. government to the North and Mexico to the South, which has since expanded its boundaries to include much of the Southwestern United States. Finally, South Carolina—the earliest state to revolt against federal fossil fuel guidelines—is completely walled off and quarantined due to a virus released there by the federal government. While the virus is designed to cause a temporary sickness and quell the rebellion, it ends up turning the state's residents into permanent zombie-like creatures.
While purple states are not part of the Free Southern State, many of their residents are deeply sympathetic to the secession cause. For that reason, Louisianans are required to apply for a work permit before relocating to the Blue States in the North, where there are more opportunities and less proximity to the fighting. At Martina's urging, Benjamin travels to Baton Rouge to apply for a Northern work permit.
Excerpt 1 Summary: “Federal Syllabus Guidelines—History, Module Eight: The Second Civil War”
Between each chapter, the author includes an excerpt from a primary source documenting the history of the Second American Civil War. Here, a Federal Syllabus is excerpted, which broadly summarizes the war's key events, beginning with the Rebel assassination of President Daniel Ki—a key champion of the Sustainable Future Act—and the killing of Southern protesters in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Though most of the fighting takes place during the first five years of the war, Southern insurgents continue to orchestrate acts of guerilla warfare and terrorism for many years. The Union and the Free Southern State eventually negotiate a "Reunification" that formally ends the war on July 3, 2095. During the Reunification Ceremony in Columbus, an unknown secessionist terrorist releases a virus that results in a nationwide epidemic, killing 110 million Americans in the North and South alike.
Chapter 2 Summary
It is late in the evening, and Benjamin still hasn't returned from Baton Rouge. Federal river agents arrive at the Chestnut homestead and inform Martina that Benjamin is dead after a Rebel "homicide bomber" detonated an explosive device at the Baton Rouge federal building. Devastated, Martina walks down the riverbank until she's far enough away that her children won't hear her. She falls to her knees, screaming.
Excerpt 2 Summary: “These the Calls of our Blood: Dispatches from the Rebel South”
The suicide bomber responsible for assassinating President Daniel Ki and thus igniting the war is a woman named Julia Templestowe. Mere days before strapping on a bomb and killing the president, Julia sits in a psychiatric ward recovering from a suicide attempt. Upon her release, Rebel recruiters approach Julia in a bar as she drinks alone, her "bandages still fresh around her wrists […] They kept watchers in the hospitals, where they looked for suicide attempts, and in the schools, where they looked for outcasts, and in the churches where they looked for hard-boiled extremists feverish with the spell of the Lord. From these, they forged weapons" (32).
Chapter 3 Summary
Martina can't bring herself to tell the children what happened to their father. Instead, she tells them Benjamin is already up North making arrangements for their arrival. Martina's neighbor, Eliza Polk, tells Martina she may be able to convince a Rebel commander to let the Chestnuts stay at a widow's sanctuary in Vicksburg. When Martina meets the commander herself, he refuses, telling her "[Benjamin] wasn't martyred. He died" (37). The best the commander can offer is a spot at Camp Patience, a refugee camp in Iuka, Mississippi on the Tennessee border.
At first, Martina has no interest in uprooting her family to a refugee camp. However, when shelling from a nearby battle lights up the sky and knocks Martina off her feet, she packs up her family along with everything they can carry and races to the spot where the bus to Camp Patience stops. The family brings mostly necessities, but Martina makes sure to pack a small ceramic statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe that belonged to Benjamin. To reach the bus stop, the family must take a treacherous journey across the Mississippi River in Simon's rundown skiff.
"Many years later, in the tents of Camp Patience, Martina would silently curse the day she left her home and took her children willingly into the festering heart of the war-torn South. What she couldn't have known that morning was that the rebels, the federal troops, and the Mexican militias ultimately fought to a standstill; the violence never inched any further into Louisiana than it did on that brittle April day when the Chestnuts left their land" (46).
Excerpt 3 Summary: “Witness to Disunion: Early Journalistic Accounts of the Second Civil War”
In a local news article from March 15, 2074, a Charleston journalist reports on the killing of 59 Southern protesters by Federal soldiers at Fort Jackson, South Carolina—an event which, along with the assassination of President Ki, directly leads to the outbreak of the Second Civil War.
Chapter 4 Summary
After hours of waiting, the bus to Camp Patience finally arrives. On the way, the bus stops in Huntsville, Alabama to pick up refugees whose homes were destroyed by federal airstrikes. When the crowd learns that four of them will have to wait for the next bus—a result of the Chestnuts' last-minute addition to the Camp Patience intake roster—a riot nearly erupts. That evening, the bus finally arrives at Camp Patience, a "huge tent favela" (64) located on the border between the Free Southern State and Tennessee, which is Union territory. Because the camp is operated by an international aid group known as the Red Crescent, it is considered neutral ground. Inside, the camp is divided into four quadrants, depending on the origin of the refugee: Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina—the last of which houses those who managed to escape the state before it was quarantined. A Red Crescent employee tells Martina, "Row thirty-six, tent fourteen," […] "Remember that—it's your address now" (64).
Excerpt 4 Summary: “An Oral History of the Second American Civil War: Volume II, 2074-2080”
An ex-Rebel soldier from Alabama man shares his story of being the lone survivor of an attack by federal forces. After the attack, the man avoids nearby towns because he assumes the federal troops are there killing non-combatants. He goes on to explain how even Southerners who didn't take up arms hated the Union because of the atrocities they witnessed its soldiers commit: "I don't expect you to understand it. Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you. In the Red country the war happened" (69).
Prologue-Excerpt 4 Analysis
In building out the world of American War, El Akkad poses a provocative thought experiment: What if the challenges of the contemporary Middle East were transplanted to the American South? War, displacement, drone strikes, and terrorist attacks are all woven into the everyday lives of the individuals that populate American War. In establishing this milieu of chaos on American shores, the author encourages Western readers to step into the shoes of individuals struggling to survive in war-torn Syria or Iraq, perhaps even those whose proximity to violence causes them to become terrorists themselves.
In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, El Akkad makes clear that by telling the story of Sarat's evolution from sweet tomboy to mass-murdering insurgent, he has no intention of glorifying terrorism: "You're not on her side, you don't support her, you're not willing to apologise for her—but you understand how she got to the place where she is." (Miller, Laura. "American War by Omar El Akkad review - terrorism in a future US." The Guardian. 4 Oct. 2017.) By "un-otherizing" his terrorist protagonist and making her a citizen of the American South, El Akkad seems to conclude that Western readers will be more likely to empathize with her.
The thought experiment is in many ways a direct rebuke to some of the theories that dominated political thought during much of the post-Cold War era, particularly Samuel P. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" theory. According to Huntington, there are massive cultural and philosophical fault-lines between Western Judeo-Christian civilization and the Muslim world that lay the groundwork for Islamic extremism. In Huntington's telling, there is something endemic to Muslim culture that causes the regions where this culture thrives to become breeding grounds for terrorism. He writes, "Islam's borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power." (Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1996.)
A significant amount of scholarship has arisen, particularly in the late 2010s, to counter these claims. In 2017's Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra views recent phenomena in the Western world—including Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—as signifying that the same resentments undergirding Islamic fundamentalists are now emerging on the other side of the globe. Mishra writes, "Gun-owning truck drivers in Louisiana have more in common with trishul-wielding Hindus in India, bearded Islamists in Pakistan, and nationalists and populists elsewhere, than any of them realize." (Mishra, Pankaj. Age of Anger. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.) It is this very idea that El Akkad seeks to explore with American War.
Unlike Clash of Civilizations and Age of Anger, however, American War is a work of speculative fiction, and therefore its hypotheses needn't be empirically correct but merely plausible. Perhaps the bigger question regarding the book's plausibility is not whether violent extremism could ever become a way of life for a significant portion of Americans. Rather, is it plausible that a devotion to fossil fuels would be the chief ideology undergirding a ruinous Civil War? Ideological divides do exist in the United States over environmentalism and the use of fossil fuels, and according to the Guardian, these divides have only grown between 1980 and 2019. (Millman, Oliver. "Political polarisation over climate crisis has surged under Trump." The Guardian. 11 Oct. 2019.) That said, environmental divides are in some ways divorced from the sort of divides driving the bleeding edge of polarization in America—divides that are conspicuously absent in American War.
For example, the book only mentions race on the rarest occasions, an interesting choice considering race is not only at the heart of numerous political debates in the 2010s but was also central to the First American Civil War. It is not until Page 40 that El Akkad addresses the race of the Chestnut family: "Of the three children, [Sarat] had the darkest skin; Dana and Simon had inherited the brown of their father, Sarat the black of her mother" (40). Aside from a brief scene later in the book in which Attic is reluctant to enter a predominantly African-American bar, the world of American War is depicted as post-racial.
El Akkad’s broader statement is that war and insurgency are less the direct result of ideology or identity, but rather a consequence of personal trauma and suffering. He makes this clear in Excerpt 2 when detailing the story of Julia Templestowe's recruitment to assassinate President Ki. When Templestowe is first mentioned earlier in the Federal Syllabus excerpt, the reader would be forgiven for thinking of Templestowe as an ideological diehard, driven to murder by her slavish devotion to the Southern cause. Later, she is shown simply to be a damaged individual recruited straight out of the suicide ward: "They knew how to find the ones who were most likely to do it. They kept watchers in the hospitals, where they looked for suicide attempts, and in the schools, where they looked for outcasts, and in the churches, where they looked for hard-boiled extremists feverish with the spell of the Lord. From these, they forged weapons" (32).
The idea that suffering only breeds more extremism is put into sharp relief in the Oral History section of Excerpt 4. The interview subject, a former Rebel fighter, says:
I don't expect you to understand it. Your side fought the war, but the war never happened to you. In the Red country the war happened. If you lived in the South during that war, maybe you were never forced from your home at gunpoint, but you knew someone who was. Maybe you didn't lose a loved one when the Birds came and rained down death with no rhyme or reason, but you knew someone who had. Now for most of people, just knowing wasn't enough to make them take up arms—not everyone can face the thought of getting shot or torn to bits by shrapnel or, even worse, getting captured and sent to rot in Sugarloaf or some other detention camp. But damned if it didn't make you want to do something (69).
From this perspective, it isn't an ideological devotion to fossil fuels or even a vague sense of Southern pride that drives insurrectionary activity. Rather, it is the proximity to or direct suffering of violence at the hands of an enemy invader. In turn, this further supports El Akkad's thesis that terrorism in the Muslim world is not so much a consequence of Islamic culture, but rather a response to the normalization of violence and injustice in many of these parts of the world.
