After Five Marine Tours, Elliot Ackerman Has a Different Take on Iraq
To judge from the available evidence, Elliot Ackerman isn't big on wasting time. At 36, he's already done five tours in the Marines, served as a White House Fellow, and worked as a reporter covering the Syrian Civil War. Recently he returned to Iraq, where he fought more than a decade ago, to report a feature that will be published in Esquire this spring.
As if that weren't enough, Ackerman is also a critically acclaimed novelist. In 2015, he published Green on Blue, his debut novel, which drew on his military experience in Afghanistan and was praised by the New York Times for presenting "a bone-deep understanding of the toll that a seemingly endless war has taken on ordinary Afghans who have known no other reality for decades."
Today, Knopf published Ackerman's second novel, Dark at the Crossing. Set along the border between Turkey and Syria, the story follows Haris Abadi, an Iraqi who earned his U.S. citizenship while working with American special forces during the Iraq War, as he tries to join the fight against Assad's regime. Hailed by Publisher's Weekly as "a timely and unsettling novel" that "presents a stark and multifaceted portrait of the civil war in Syria," Dark at the Crossing promises to be one of the most essential books of 2017.
Ackerman and I spoke recently about his new book, about the challenges of understanding the Islamic State, and about the ethics of so-called cultural appropriation. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.
Dark at the Crossing is the second book you've written from the perspective of someone who is, superficially at least, not at all like you. Why this approach?
It's actually not intentional. I think it's sort of a coincidence. Most of the fiction that I like to read is an assertion of the ways that we're similar, as opposed to the ways that we're different. I have this optimistic idea that you can imagine your way into anybody else's circumstances. But the thing about Haris Abadi—you'll notice his name is Haris instead of Harris, it's a somewhat American name—is that he is an American. He's an American citizen. He's this man of two identities. And the conflict between those identities plays out throughout the book. For him as a character, it was an exploration of which of those two conflicting identities was going to hold primacy over the other.
My first book really almost came as a reaction to having spent a bunch of time in Afghanistan and seeing how many Afghans were characterized. I wanted to provide a counternarrative to that.
Characterized where? And how?
In the U.S. media. In Afghanistan I served exclusively as an advisor to Afghan troops. And so, those guys were, in effect, my war buddies. We did all the things that guys have always done—fought together, bled together, mourned friends together. And then I came home, and they're not guys I can keep up with on Facebook or go get fifty-cent beers with at the local VFW. Those guys are in Afghanistan. I think that book in some ways was written as a last act of friendship toward them, to try to distill much of what they'd told me during long rides in a Toyota Hilux across the Afghan countryside and how they viewed the war, which was not an Americanized view of it.
So, I view the two books as very different. I recognize that in two cases, they are books that have non-native-born-American protagonists. At the same time, I think it's tough to be writing about anything that's going on in the world if you're only going to write from a completely American-centric approach. You have to have these characters come into books if you're going to write.
Without giving away too much, I'll note that there's a character in Dark at the Crossing who fights for the Islamic State, also known as the Daesh. It seems like you took pains to not make him a caricature of a certain vision of the Daesh.
Yeah, because it's boring. And it's overly simplistic. When I was in Gaziantep, a Syrian friend of mine who'd been an activist in the revolution was working for an NGO. We were all living in a house together. One night he comes home—we're having dinner and fixing it in the kitchen—and he comes up to me. This guy, his name's Abed, he speaks English with a perfect British accent because he spent time working at the British consulate in Damascus. He says, "Elliot, I met a guy today in the Akcakale refugee camp who I think you should meet."
I say, "Okay, Abed. Who's the guy?"
He says, "Well, you know, he fought for Al-Qaeda in Iraq but I think the two of you would really get along."
That turned into a piece that I did that ran in The Daily Beast. But it turned into a series of meetings. I met with this guy—his name's Abu Hassar—and we would just talk about our wars, and talk about what was going on in the world from his perspective. And why is his perspective not legitimate? Of course it's legitimate.
And if you were going to try to draw that character, why would you want to do it in an overly simplistic way? When I'm writing a character—even a character who is despicable —I think the onus is on me to write that character as though they were making their case in front of God. To give them all the urgency they can possibly have, to give them all the credibility they can possibly have, so that they can make their case. In the book, I hope the Daesh character makes his case. I mean, there's a case there.
Yeah, and it very much runs counter to the dominant portrayal in the U.S. media, where you see a lot of incomprehension. It's almost an embrace of incomprehension, like: We couldn't possibly understand their nihilist motives. Everybody falls back on that.
To settle for a lack of understanding is ultimately anti-intellectual. Whether you write fiction or you're a journalist, you should be able to parse someone's motives, and not conflate understanding with agreement.
Nine months ago, there were stories about how, in the Pentagon, they had convened a special task force to examine why people were joining the Islamic State. It was like: We just have no idea. How is this possible? To me that's absurd. What do you mean you don't understand why people would join the Islamic State? You recruit hundreds of thousands of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds to join the U.S. military and go across the world to countries they've never heard of to fight. You do it through J. Walter Thompson advertising campaigns, through things on social media. What do you mean you don't get it?
The Daesh have a campaign that says, "Come join us, ride with the caliphate." You know: "Be the prophet's companion! Save your homeland."
"A jihad of one."
You think: God, you have to be kidding me. Why do you need a task force? Why is this so difficult? But I think it's difficult because, again, often we conflate understanding something with agreeing with it. That if you're a super-far-left Democrat, and you say, "I understand why all these people voted for Trump," then that means you agree with it, or, vice versa, if you're a right-wing Tea Party person and you say, "I understand why all these people think Obamacare is fantastic," that means you agree with it. You can understand something without agreeing with it.
It reminds me of the great line from The Big Lebowski. Remember when they're driving the car and it's Walter and the Dude and they're having this argument, and Walter says to the Dude, "Am I wrong, dude? Am I wrong?" And the Dude says, "No, Walter, you're not wrong. You're just an asshole."
In the Daily Beast piece, you quote Abu Hassar saying, "If you lose your money, you can make a new business. If you lose your love, you can find another. Even if you lose your child, you can go to your wife's bed again. But if you lose your country, what can you do? How can you make another country?" It seemed to me that those are questions that might be in a lot of your characters' minds in the new novel.
In some ways in this book, I'm trying to convey what I saw as a very harrowing predicament amongst many of the Syrians who became friends of mine. And that's a predicament for folks who are democratic activists, who had gone out in the streets to protest a despotic regime and to demand more rights. It's sort of an irrefutable cause. How can you discredit them for wanting to do that? It then resulted in a level of chaos and disorder, and a revolution, which led to the complete dissolution of their country.
So you would sit there with many folks and the subject of the revolution would come up. And on the one hand you would see there was a lot of pride in what they had done. They had taken that stand and gone out in the streets and demanded their rights. But the result was the complete destruction of their country. So that experience completely cleft their heart and there's incredible internal conflict with them. Am I proud of this? Am I not proud of this? Should we have done it? Should we have not done it? And then, furthermore, the ones who are in southern Turkey are the ones who have fled.
I did a piece about some of Syria's diaspora of poets. And at one point one of them says to me, "You know, one of the great things about being here and being out of the country after the revolution is I can write anything I want for the first time in my life. I can say anything that I want in my poetry." And then he looked at me and said, "But the only problem with that is, without Syria, there is no Syrian poetry." And that conflict—there's no resolution to it. But that's what many of these people are living with. When you lose your country, how do you make a new country? It's also that emotional space: How do you ever feel whole again when this happened? I don't see any direct path for the folks who are going through this to feel whole.
There's a debate in some literary quarters about the ethics of what's called cultural appropriation. Whether with this book or with the previous novel, did you ever find yourself saying, "Wait a second, is there something fundamentally wrong about me telling this story?"
No, I think it's your place as an author to be an authority and to understand what it is you're writing about. And I felt very confident I understood what it was I was writing about. That idea, which maybe seems to be in fashion right now, to me is an incredibly cynical way to parse our literature—cynical in so much as what literature fundamentally does, or any good art does, is to assert that we are more alike than we are different. These areas of overlap are where great art can be made.
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