42 pages • 1 hour read
Samira AhmedInternment
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Importance of Hope
The night the armed soldiers arrive to relocate the Amin family, Layla is studying for her homeschooling class in literature. She reads an Emily Dickinson poem, which begins with the famous line, “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” The poem suggests both the fragility and necessity of hope in even the darkest time.
That refrain runs throughout Layla’s harrowing experience at the internment camp. At the darkest moments—as when the heroic Soheil throws himself against the camp’s electrified fence—Layla refuses to concede the need to hope—hope that the country at large will see the immorality of the government policy, hope that the guards already sympathetic to the internees will triumph, and hope that David will persevere in his efforts to open the eyes of the country through social media. “When people lose hope, that’s when the authorities know they’ve broken you” (122), she tells herself, as she begins to hatch plots of resistance and even escape in the early days of her internment. In recruiting a reluctant Ayesha, Layla tells her that if a person does not at least try to oppose tyranny, they are left only with “hopeless” (188) surrender. Layla is no deluded optimist. When she first suggests the protest at the Mess, Layla admits to David that she is “overwhelmed by the truth that [the internees] are powerless right now but [they] need hope that this is not the end of their story” (217). Rebellions, she tells a dispirited Ayesha the day of the protest, “are built on hope” (292).
As the weeks pass and conditions in the camp grow more desperate, Layla acknowledges the rage “burning inside [her]” (321) and the fear that she will never leave the camp. But she refuses to abandon hope. The Director concedes as much, taunting her to give up just before he begins his brutal interrogation: “Miss Amin, you think you have given hope to the Muslims of America…In reality you have brought nothing but death and chaos” (327-328). It is his most insidious argument. Samira Ahmed insists in the Author’s Note that she did not write the book to scare Americans about the subtle and not-so-subtle hate-speech found in many corners of American political and cultural life—nor is her aim to inflame revolution. Rather, in the story of Layla’s refusal to surrender her spirit, Ahmed, like Emily Dickinson, offers a testimony to the fragility and necessity of hope that moral decency, fairness, and tolerance can be more than a memory.
Patriotism Corrupted by Fear
The Director repeatedly takes pains to point out to Layla that the Muslims have been relocated to protect America from the threat they pose to the nation’s security. Before her family is relocated, Layla listens with growing anger at the rhetoric of a president intent on manipulating the “politics of exclusion” (17) as a way to secure power. Scapegoating elements of a nation’s diverse population who are innocent of any actual wrongdoing, as a way to distract from the very real work of addressing critical issues, is a brutal strategy of power politics that dates way before the Trump era Ahmed impliedly references. Layla herself points to the reality of both the Russian and Nazi pogroms against the Jews, the Jim Crow laws that oppressed African Americans, the federal government’s decision to relocate thousands of Japanese Americans after the Pearl Harbor attack, and more recently the sectarian violence in both Syria and Bosnia. She also references America’s ongoing debate over the border wall with Mexico and more broadly the general anti-immigrant drift of the 2010s.
In the Director’s view, if people facing a difficult time are given someone to hate, a bogeyman figure that they can blame for all their troubles, the people will gladly give up some element of freedom in return for the illusion of security. During his interrogation with a handcuffed Layla, he tells her, “Give them an Other to hate, and they will do what they are told” (328). The insidious logic of scapegoating, he tells Layla, is what keeps America safe. By manipulating people’s uninformed opinions and then directing them, without evidence or logic, at Muslim Americans gives the illusion of a government doing something to address problems. By encouraging xenophobia—the irrational but powerful hatred directed against those not perceived to be a part of America—the government and its authority figures deny Muslim Americans their humanity and the US Constitution its viability.
The book offers a cautionary tale against the coaxing logic of blaming Others, and of giving so-called “real Americans” a segment of people to hate. Such rhetoric reduces these Others to objects. Layla will not allow the Muslims in the camp to become anything less than people. At a dramatic moment in the closing showdown, Layla declares through her bullhorn that the internees are not some faceless mob. Rather she calls each of the internees by their names, giving them exactly what the camp robs them of: their identity.
The Need to Resist Wrong
In the novel’s impassioned Author’s Note, Samira Ahmed makes no qualms about the lesson her novel teaches to America in the years following Trump’s rise to political influence: “There are sides,” she says. “Make a choice. It’s not a simple task, I know. It takes courage to use your voice. To stand up” (381).
The story of Layla’s evolution into a resistance fighter depends on her discovery of the power of a single voice and the need for every individual to resist evil. Hers is a story of how an “I,” terrified and certain of its own powerlessness, becomes a “We,” unstoppable and defiant. The narrative of the camp experience reveals how any resistance begins with a single defiant voice that will over time nurture genuine and effective resistance, Layla uses the metaphor of planting a seed and then waiting patiently for the plant to grow. “This is our country,” she tells the internees, fifty in number, through the bullhorn, “And we’re taking it back” (355).
In this theme, there is a persistent optimism and a certainty that evil and wrongdoing, so much a part of history, is nevertheless an aberration. People are capable of tapping into an abiding moral integrity that recognizes evil as evil. Brainwashed by a culture bent on isolating Muslims, the American people, represented by the protesters, by David, and ultimately by Jake, side with the internees, and together they close the camp.
Take a side, Samira Ahmed demands of her readers themselves living in a dangerous and volatile age of hatemongering and scapegoating. Wrong demands a response. As devout as Layla’s mother is, her mumbled prayers to God to make conditions livable in the desert wasteland are another strategy of cooperation, and another way to allow evil to flourish. Going along is moral surrender. And even the example of Layla’s father, with his poetry that makes heroic the individual who stands up to the tyranny of evil, offers inspirational words only—the equivalent of bumper stickers and t-shirt slogans. It is Layla who stands up and defies authority. If you stand for nothing, Layla quotes an adage attributed to Alexander Hamilton, “you’ll fall for anything” (213). In turn, each of the novel’s heroes—Jake Reynolds, David, Soheil, the nameless internee who objects to the Director’s mealy praise of the camp’s purpose, and the protesters outside the main gate—takes a stand, often at great risk. The argument of the novel is clear: a single defiant voice, whether Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, or Sophie Scholl, is enough to challenge wrong and to inspire others. As Layla tells the internees before they head to the main gate, “The people united will never be defeated” (356).
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