Homeland Elegies Quotes

The established majority takes its "we" image from a minority of its best and shapes a "they" image of the despised outsiders from a minority of their worst.

A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.

Constantly defining yourself in opposition to what others say about you is not self-knowledge. It’s confusion.

America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is, a place still defined by its plunder, where enrichment was paramount and civil order always an afterthought.

The established majority takes its we-image from a minority of its best, and shapes a they-image of the despised outsiders from the minority of their worst.

Isn’t it? I mean, when I first read this, I thought, ‘This is it. This is what we’re up against.’ In this country, the white majority is basically blind to the worst in themselves. They see themselves in the image of their best, and they see us in the image of our worst.

She was put off that everyone always asked where she was from and never seemed bothered that they had no idea what she was talking about when she told them.

Because being American is not about what they tell you—freedom and opportunity and all that horseshit. Not really. There is a culture here, for sure, and it has nothing to do with all the well-meaning nonsense. It’s about racism and money worship—and when you’re on the correct side of both those things? That’s when you really belong.

You see, bhai, the effects of war are always personal, but in fact, war is the least personal thing there

As always, the interpretation has more to do with the one interpreting than the one being interpreted

That’s why we’re behind. Because Muslim laws were trying to take care of wives and children! We’re behind because we cared more about what happened to people than money!

the very movements of our minds transformed into streams of unceasing revenue for someone, somewhere.

When the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly. —Toni Morrison

Companies keep finding ingenious ways off bait and switch of the permanent corporate lie, that the customer - rather than profit at any and all human cost - is king.

I was lost and broke and felt persistently humiliated and under attack in the only country I’d ever known, a place that the more I understood, the less I felt I belonged?

The established majority takes its we-image from a minority of its best, and shapes a they-image of the despised outsiders from the minority of their

Constantly defining yourself in opposition to what others say about you is not self-knowledge. It’s confusion. That much I’d figured out by the time I was in high school.

a tradition of endless American self-congratulation.

money comes with its own point of view; what you own, when you own enough of it, starts making you see the world from its perspective.

If all this sounds somewhat paranoid, I am happy for you. Clearly you have not been beset by daily worries of being perceived —and therefore treated— as a foe of the republic rather than a member of it.

Even suffrage was monetized, true political power lying not in the ballot box but in one’s capacity to write a check. We were now customers first and foremost, not citizens, and to buy was our privileged act.

Trump was no aberration or idiosyncrasy, as Mike saw it, but a reflection, a human mirror in which to see all we’d allowed ourselves to become. Sure, you could read the man for metaphors—an unapologetically racist real estate magnate embodying the rise of white property rights; a self-absorbed idiot epitomizing the rampant social self-obsession and narcissism that was making us all stupider by the day; greed and corruption so naked and endemic it could only be made sense of as the outsize expression of our own deepest desires—yes, you could read the man as if he were a symbol to be deciphered, but Mike thought it was much simpler than all that. Trump had just felt the national mood, and his particular genius was a need for attention so craven, so unrelenting, he was willing to don any and every shade of our moment’s ugliness, consequences be damned.

There is a culture here, for sure, and it has nothing to do with all the well-meaning nonsense. It’s about racism and money worship—and when you’re on the correct side of both those things? That’s when you really belong.

Every good story has the same shape. The beginning establishes a goal, the more tangible the better. In the middle we watch the fight toward that goal. The end is what happens when it’s been reached, or when reaching it’s finally failed. What I always say when I teach is: the longer the middle, the better the story. The middle is when we still don’t know the outcome. That’s when we care the most about what’s happening. The longer you can keep the audience engaged in the pursuit without actually resolving that pursuit—that’s real mastery.

At an earlier time in the nation’s history, the federal government would never have allowed the naked corporate grab then under way; in the late ’60s, even a potential 8 percent market share was cause for the courts to block the merger of two grocery store chains in Los Angeles. The judges explicitly sided with those who stood to lose their jobs and their businesses—even if the grocery merger might mean lower prices for consumers. Bork destroyed this way of thinking. In 1978,

capitalism, Mary, clearly interrupted by her own tantalizing thought, looked up from the floor at which she usually gazed as she spoke—her left hand characteristically buried in the pocket of the loose-fitting slacks that were her mainstay—looked up and remarked almost offhandedly that America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is, a place still defined by its plunder, where enrichment was paramount and civil order always an afterthought. The fatherland in whose name—and for whose benefit—the predation continued was no longer a physical fatherland but a spiritual one: the American Self. Long trained to worship its desires—however discreet, however banal—rather than question them, as the classical tradition taught, ever-tumescent American self-regard was the pillaging patria, she said, and the marauding years of the Reagan regime had only expressed this enduring reality of American life with greater clarity and transparency than ever before.

It was my first time back in Pakistan since 9/11, and I found a country very different from the one I remembered. Any love or admiration for America was gone. In its place was an irrational paranoia that passed for savvy political consciousness. Looking back at that trip, I see now the broad outlines of the same dilemmas that would lead America into the era of Trump: seething anger; open hostility to strangers and those with views opposing one’s own; a contempt for news delivered by allegedly reputable sources; an embrace of reactionary moral posturing; civic and governmental corruption that no longer needed hiding; and married to all this, the ever-hastening redistribution of wealth to those who had it at the continued expense of those who didn’t.

College was now a customer experience, not a pedagogical one; and what the college customer wanted was only what had been advertised to lure them: physical comforts, moral reassurance, unceasing approbation. Mary believed deep down they knew it was a con, knew they were marks, knew not to trust a world that was now nothing more than a marketplace--but no trust in the world meant they had no basis for trusting themselves. Her students spent so much of their time in class--when they weren't on their phones--wondering what was real that it was hard to arrive at a discussion of anything substantial. Platitudes and pornography commanded their days. As she saw it, much of her work now was about teaching them cognitive basics: how to recognize what was worth paying attention to; how to suffer through boredom; how to discern rhetoric from reality, discomfort from defense.

Bork, along with economists like F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan—figures whose work I had never studied or even read until after that night in Harlem—advocated not the conservation of traditional structures but the abolition of them; they wished to eliminate all real checks on private enterprise; and they believed, in contradiction not only to all common sense but also to Gödel’s theorem, that the Market could be depended on to regulate its own aberrations and idiosyncrasies. In other words, however much Bork and others like him may have inveighed against personal liberties in the public sphere, they were positively gaga over individualism’s most wanton, unfettered forms in the private sector. Indeed, I’ve come to think that the central political paradox of our time is that the so-called conservatives of the past half century have sought to conserve almost nothing of the societies they inherited but instead have worked to remake them with a vigor reminiscent of the leftist revolutionaries they despise.

She didn’t speak because, like me, she was used to the sermons and family dinners replete with complaint about murderous American meddling; worry over Muslim land and lives lost; praise of Hitler and rage against Israel; self-reproach about the pathetic state of our own imperial destiny. Like me, she’d heard many times that a figure would rise among us to overthrow the illegitimate rule of these Europeans and neo-Europeans, that we were destined to take the world back from these spiritual ghosts one day. They’d turned their back on God for money, and we knew that could only end badly. They were a category of human with no measure beyond themselves. They honored nothing. It was no surprise the very planet itself was dying under the watch of their shortsighted empire. The day would come when we would take it all back and restore to it a rightful holiness

I mean, is that incredible?” Emily said, watching me. “You’re not kidding. What is it?” She held up the bottle. “Twenty-three-year Pappy Van Winkle. The holy grail of bourbons. I’ve heard about it, of course—but I’ve never had any.” “How much do you think that costs?” Julia asked. “If you can even get it. They make, like, seven hundred bottles of it every ten years. I have no idea what they charge at the distillery for it, but there’s someone on eBay selling an unopened bottle for fifteen thousand dollars.” Emily turned to me. “We ended up at Riaz’s the other night. I mean, his place—it’s unbelievable.

The established majority takes its we-image from a minority of its best, and shapes a they-image of the despised outsiders from the minority of their worst. “Whose quote is it?” “A sociologist named Norbert Elias.

Whereas to Father, not forgetting who he was would have meant not forgetting he was Punjabi, to Latif it meant never forgetting he was Muslim. Land was an earthly tie; faith a celestial one.

could identify with not wanting to admit them if they did. As ever, interpretation has more to do with the one interpreting than the one being interpreted.

day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.

the friends and family medicated for despair, anxiety, lack of affect, insomnia, sexual dysfunction; and the premature cancers brought on by the chemical shortcuts for everything from the food moving through our irritable bowels to the lotions applied to our sun-poisoned skins.

My father first meet Donald Trump in the early ‘90s, when they were both in their midforties—my father the elder by a year—and as each was coming out from under virtual financial ruin.

America had begun as a colony and that a colony it remained, that is, a place still defined by its

I’d observed a change in myself in those last few weeks before the election, a new, narcotic dependence on my phone, an aching that wasn’t even for the phone itself but for the daily clatter of outrage about Trump it delivered. I remember feeling—through that last fortnight before Election Day—a hunger to be haunted.

Father always called America the land of opportunity. Hardly original, I know. But I wonder: Opportunity for whom? For him, right? The opportunity to become whatever he desired? Sure, others, too, but only insofar as others really meant him. And isn’t that what Mary was saying all those years ago? That our vaunted American dream, the dream of ourselves enhanced and enlarged, is the flag for which we are willing to sacrifice everything—gouging our neighbors, despoiling our nation—everything, that is, except ourselves? A dream that imagines the flourishing of others as nothing more than a road sign, the prick of envy as the provident spur to one’s own all-important realization? Isn’t this what Father saw in Donald Trump? A vision of himself impossibly enhanced, improbably enlarged, released from the pull of debt or truth or history, a man delivered from consequence itself into pure self-absorption, incorporated entirely into the individualist afflatus of American eternity? I think Father was looking for an image of just how much more his American self could contain than the Pakistani one he’d left behind. I think he wanted to know what the limits were. In America, you could have anything, right? Even the presidency? If an idiot like Trump could get hold of it, couldn’t you? Even if you didn’t want it? After all, the idiot apparently didn’t want it, either. He just wanted to know he could have it. Or maybe the emphasis there needs to shift: he wanted to know he could have it.

Elsewhere, I’ve referred to Trump’s ascendancy as the completion of the long-planned advent of the merchant class to the sanctum sanctorum of American power, the conquering rise of mercantilism with all its attendant vulgarity, its acquisitive conscience supplanting every moral one, an event in our political life that signals the collapse not of democracy—which has, in truth, enabled it—but of every bulwark against wealth-as-holy-pursuit, which appears to be the last American passion left standing. De Tocqueville would not be surprised. My father is no exception. Trump is just the name of his story.

the time had come to start listening beyond my hopeful heart.

Whatever you think you are now, when you finish that book, you will be something different.

I knew they wanted me to see more. But what to tell them? That I was lost and broke and felt persistently humiliated and under attack in the only country I’ve ever known, a place that the more I understood, the less I felt like I belonged? What was the point?

I’d never felt loved because I’d never known who was loving me and never felt certain she knew whom or what she was loving.

She moves with labored effort of one summoning strength she doesn’t really have.

So tell me. Why’d we fall behind?” “The corporation. Plain and simple.” “The corporation?” “The Romans created the corporation. It enabled them to protect assets from being redistributed after an owner’s death. Which meant money could have the time to really grow, take on its own center of gravity. We had no way to do that. Muslim inheritance laws are very clear. After death, the estate has to be divided among the wives and heirs. Because there was no loophole to get around it, businesses didn’t outlive their founders. Everyone wrote short-term contracts with each other, because you were always afraid parties in a deal would die, and you’d have to go to the wives and kids to be made whole. One-off deals were the rule, as there was no good way to shelter long-term ventures. Which meant no path to long-term material investments.” “We didn’t have any correlate for the corporation? I didn’t know that.” He shook his head: “Complete liquidation of assets in every generation until the late eighteen hundreds. Do you have any idea what that meant for private enterprise? And it only changed once we finally took a page from the Europeans and built a corporate concept of our own. But at that point, their money’d been growing for six hundred years! That’s banks and industries with a half millennium of accrued capital.

Danyal was but one of many I’d seen fall prey to the gap between the logic of their talents and the treachery of an American society that abandoned the weak and monetized the unlucky. You had to be brain-dead not to know you couldn’t really flourish in this country without inordinate amounts of cash or extraordinary luck.

I wouldn’t see it until our private lives had consumed the public space, then been codified, foreclosed, and put up for auction; until the devices that enslave our minds had filled us with the toxic flotsam of a culture no longer worthy of the name;

until the bright pliancy of human sentience—attention itself—had become the world’s most prized commodity, the very movements of our minds transformed into streams of unceasing revenue for someone, somewhere.

short, I wouldn’t see what she saw back then until I’d failed at trying to see it otherwise, until I’d ceased believing in the lie of my own redemption, until the suffering of others aroused in me a starker, clearer cry than any anthem to my own longing.

Father’s enthrallment with candidate Trump, first nascent, then ascendant, then euphoric, then disappointed, then betrayed and confused, and finally exhausted, a gamut of intensities whose order and range are proper to the ambit of all addiction—

but of every bulwark against wealth-as-holy-pursuit, which appears to be the last American passion left standing.

if, in some substantial way, a dream was actually the experience of language in the body—then the spine, or central axis of our neurologic lattice, was likely where much of our dreaming took place, a cognitive sap running from the roots of the body up into the branches of the brain.

the System was fully evolved, by which he meant optimally effective and efficient. It specialized in the manufacture of debt, which was the

collective good was determined solely by benefit to the consumer

two ways to conquer and enslave a nation: one is by the sword, the other by debt

great enabler of capital, the surest means to, yes, indenture the vast hordes of the lower and middle class (and the nation’s youth) to the process of money’s growth.

It's feeling more and more to me like cover for their laziness,' she said; there was more gray in her hair and a few more pounds to her, but even anxious, she still looked like an angel in a Renaissance fresco. 'They take the class because they want to be writers, but they don't want to read. Instead of owning it, they slap you with moral rhetoric about why you're wrong to make them do something they don't want to do. And don't get me started on grades. If you don't give them grades they think they deserve, you get reported.' She paused. 'The worst part of it? I can't give them the best of what I have. They don't even know if they have the interest, because they're not willing to know what they're made of. I think back on some of what we did together. The work on your dreams? Suggesting something like that these days is career suicide. It's disheartening enough to make me wonder if I shouldn't be doing something else with myself entirely.

There is a culture here, for sure, and it has nothing to do with all the well-meaning nonsense. It’s about racism and money worship—and when you’re on the correct side of both those things? That’s when you really belong. Because that’s when you start to represent the best of what they think they are, to come back to your quote.

But in order to understand it, you’ll need to know at least this much: by 1947, Britain’s long-practiced imperial strategy of divide and conquer resulted in the to some ill-conceived, to others God-ordained decision to carve off zones of the Indian motherland so that Hindus and Muslims would not have to live side by side any longer. Little matter that Muslims and Hindus had lived together for hundreds of years in India; after a century of British policies pitting them against each other, stoking a constant conflict for which the British Raj offered itself as the only containing force, the king’s empire could no longer ignore the fact that the social fabric was on the verge of coming apart.

Before the Second World War, the British paid ample lip service to the idea of self-government in India, but granting full independence was never a serious option. The Raj was the jewel in His Majesty’s crown; giving it up was unthinkable. But by 1947, the British nation was exhausted and traumatized by German bombing; discouraged by the loss of so many of its soldiers; shocked by the desertion and mutiny of its Indian servicemen; benumbed by unprecedented winter cold and an energy shortage that had the population shivering and its factories shuttered; broke, owing not only the Americans for the money that was keeping its economy afloat but India, too; and disgusted by the growing violence between Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs for which it took no responsibility, violence that would shortly lead to a bloodbath of historic proportions. Overwhelmed by these troubles at home and in its disintegrating colony, Britain concluded that exit from the subcontinent was the only option.

plunder, where enrichment was paramount and civil order always an afterthought. The fatherland in whose name—and for whose benefit—the predation continued was no longer a physical fatherland but a spiritual one: the American Self. Long trained to worship its desires—however discreet, however banal—rather than question them, as the classical tradition taught, ever-tumescent American self-regard was the pillaging patria, she said, and the marauding years of the Reagan regime had only expressed this enduring reality of American life with greater clarity and transparency than ever before.

I’m just trying to help. I love you, and I’m worried. That’s all this is. Love.

Worship of desire. Tumescent self-regard. A colony for pillage. In her words was the power of a great negation, a corrective to a tradition of endless American self-congratulation

No. I wouldn’t see what Mary saw until I’d been witness to the untimely decline of a generation of colleagues exhausted by the demands of jobs that never paid them enough, drowning in debt to care for children riddled with disorders that couldn’t be cured; and the cousins—and the best friend from high school—who ended up in shelters or on the street, tossed out of houses they could no longer afford; and until the near-dozen suicides and overdoses of fortysomething childhood classmates in a mere space of three years; and the friends and family medicated for despair, anxiety, lack of affect, insomnia, sexual dysfunction; and the premature cancers brought on by the chemical shortcuts for everything from the food moving through our irritable bowels to the lotions applied to our sun-poisoned skins. I wouldn’t see it until our private lives had consumed the public space, then been codified, foreclosed, and put up for auction; until the devices that enslave our minds had filled us with the toxic flotsam of a culture no longer worthy of the name; until the bright pliancy of human sentience—attention itself—had become the world’s most prized commodity, the very movements of our minds transformed into streams of unceasing revenue for someone, somewhere. I wouldn’t see it clearly until the American Self had fully mastered the plunder, idealized and legislated the splitting of the spoils, and brought to near completion the wholesale pillage not only of the so-called colony—how provincial a locution that seems now!—but also of the very world itself. In short, I wouldn’t see what she saw back then until I’d failed at trying to see it otherwise, until I’d ceased believing in the lie of my own redemption, until the suffering of others aroused in me a starker, clearer cry than any anthem to my own longing.

limned with unruly hope, for

In expecting what she couldn't give me, hadn't I rejected what she could?

the provident spur to one’s own all-important realization? Isn’t this what Father saw in Donald Trump? A vision of himself impossibly enhanced, improbably enlarged, released from the pull of debt or truth or history, a man delivered from consequence itself into pure self-absorption, incorporated entirely into the individualist afflatus of American eternity?

Those unknown words and meanings—rhizomes of sound, radicles of signification—were like a body of forgotten roots still drawing sustenance from the dead matter of the lost languages buried in the living one we heard and spoke and wrote.

What’s a Nero complex, Auntie?” I asked. “Right. That’s something Albert Memmi talks about in his book The Colonizer and the Colonized. I’ll send it to you. He says that when you come to power through having usurped it, you’re never free of the worry that your claim to power is not legitimate. And this fear of illegitimacy, this sense of being haunted, it causes you to make those from whom you stole power suffer.

Cheery pessimism. Or weary idealism. Take your pick.

For now, let me try to stay alive and just say these three things: as Muslims, (1) we are more affected by the example of the Prophet than we realize; (2) we are shaped by the stories we tell about him in ways that elude our daily understanding; and (3) there will be no meaningful philosophical shift in the sociopolitical substratum of the Muslim world until the example of the Prophet and the text of the Quran are exposed to a more robust interrogation of their claims to historical truth.

Looking back at that trip, I see now the broad outlines of the same dilemmas that would lead America into the era of Trump: seething anger; open hostility to strangers and those with views opposing one’s own; a contempt for news delivered by allegedly reputable sources; an embrace of reactionary moral posturing; civic and governmental corruption that no longer needed hiding; and married to all this, the ever-hastening redistribution of wealth to those who had it at the continued expense of those who didn’t.

Some fifteen years earlier, in the mid-’90s, I’d somehow found myself at a dinner on the Upper East Side where a magnum of 1959 Château Margaux was opened for coupling with a main course of leg of lamb and where, once I’d tasted from the glass poured for me, I finally understood the logic behind spending thousands of dollars on a bottle of something to drink. I was no connoisseur. I couldn’t tell a berry note from a chocolate nose or discern the hint of spring flowers the dining guest beside me picked up, she said, developing as it sat in the glass. What I experienced was, perhaps, all the more remarkable for my having so virgin a palate. On my tongue, the wine disappeared almost magically into pure sensation, an absorbing congeries of rich and dusky hints—insinuations of bitterness tempered by the faintest echoes of something once sweet, now round and gathering—a developing flavor that revealed some ideal to which my every previous encounter with red wine appeared to have been pointing all along. And even more remarkable than this almost disincarnate sensation was the disincarnation itself, the effortless sublimation of liquid into pure savor, conveying me to the threshold of some essential idea of wine itself, a frictionless passage into the immaterial that felt, quite frankly, like something metaphysical

Whitman’s Democratic Vistas. They were all startled that the poet’s portrait of the nation 150 years ago was one they still recognized, a country of endless energy, enterprise, and breadth—both natural and human—but ensnared in a materialism from which it couldn’t seem to escape. Back then, Whitman worried America’s preoccupation with the business of making money would lead to the failure of its historic political mission

That’s something Albert Memmi talks about in his book The Colonizer and the Colonized. I’ll send it to you. He says that when you come to power through having usurped it, you’re never free of the worry that your claim to power is not legitimate.

time spent on the thorny matter of the Prophet’s historicity is taken as evidence not of one’s interest in truth but rather of one’s craven dependence on the West, which—one is summarily scolded—does not itself have left any sacred symbols of its own and therefore mars and makes a mockery of the only such symbol still unsullied by the destructive cynicism and faithlessness of the European Enlightenment.

But when you feed a monster, it grows. When it attacks you—because it always will—you have only yourself to blame.

the devices that enslave our minds had filled us with the toxic flotsam of a culture no longer worthy of the name;

pedantry,

The latest edition of the OED—which had come out three years earlier, in 1989—had 290,000 entries in it. Most people didn’t know more than twenty thousand, she said. To know half that was to be considered fluent.

The body’s form and function shaped the mind’s possibilities and ordered our grammar; our thinking could not be divorced from the bodies in which it took place.

in some substantial way, a dream was actually the experience of language in the body

For indeed, where some might see modernity or individualism or mercantile democracy or the heritage of the Enlightenment or an irreducibly complex and endlessly heterogeneous nation, we saw Christianity. To us, it was all Christian.

No, I mean also the department-store sales in January and the interest-charging credit cards used at them; and the vacations spent at the beach driven by the bizarre urge to darken one’s skin; and the shrill perfect fifths of a violin; and the notion that running a piece of toilet paper along your anus is enough to keep you clean; and the discomfort of working with a blade of cloth tied to your neck so tightly you can barely breathe; and the bikinis and knee-high skirts; and, of course, the needlessly happy ending to every story. I don’t think we were exactly wrong to see things as we did.

we all have views that aren’t open to debate.

And what really doesn’t help is how we end up using their contempt as an excuse to avoid our own failings.

In this era of capital’s unquestioned amoral supremacy, the only course-correcting moments of clarity—what passes for moral comeuppance, that is—are drops in stock price.

Like both Mary’s parents—as I would later learn from Mary herself—my mother never found in the various bounties of her new country anything like sufficient compensation for the loss of what she’d left behind.

Orientalism. Pride and Prejudice. The Muqaddimah. Death Comes for the Archbishop. The Wretched of the Earth.

You cannot make the world as you wish to see it; you cannot keep it the way you want it, not unless you are willing to fight to do it. That is the meaning of war.

Trump had just felt the national mood, and his particular genius was a need for attention so craven, so unrelenting, he was willing to don any and every shade of our moment’s ugliness, consequences be damned.

Tartar thistle,

But it was mostly clear to me we were not just castaways in some tohubohu bearing an ensign of meaning only for those desperate enough to concoct one: I felt mostly certain more was going on than met the eye—despite not having a real clue just what that “more” might entail.

It was from her that I first heard the analogy comparing love and arranged marriages to kettles of water pitched at different temperatures: the former already boiling, with no chance to get any hotter; the latter cold at the outset, requiring steady application to be sure but with ample room to heat up over the years.

David Rhodes, who has written what I consider some of the finest fiction about rural American life since Sherwood Anderson;

Giving them a thing to fixate on. It’s classic storytelling. A visible, tangible goal. That’s what gets an audience rooting for a hero.

Economic independence was essential to the battle for full rights; the money to sustain the struggle had to come from somewhere; most often,

I told Mary this was happening, and she suggested that it was only the angle of my spine that mattered. If I didn’t move my spine, she said, I wouldn’t lose the dream.