How Great Is Allah?
Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Ayad Akhtar on Islamophobia, losing one’s religion and what Jerzy Grotowski has to do with any of it.
“I think there are folks who would say, and I don’t disagree with them, that there’s something dangerous about this play going all over the country.”
I met Ayad Akhtar at the Atlantic Grill near Lincoln Center in New York on September 28, long before the events of Friday the 13th in Paris, to interview him for a profile in Newsweek. His play, Disgraced (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, and just had its West Coast premiere at the Berkeley Rep Theater), dances around questions of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism — with characters occasionally colliding, violently — and his novel American Dervish peeked into the same Pandora’s Box, establishing him as perhaps our most prominent Muslim-American author. Now the question is: Are you sure you want that title?
Sean Elder: I read that Disgraced is to be performed in 30 different regional theaters over the next 18 months.
Ayad Akhtar: In the next 24 months there will be 40, and worldwide over 50 productions… [Including] eight productions in Germany at three of the largest theaters in Germany. It’s totally insane.
SE That sort of popularity puts you in Arthur Miller country.
AA For like a year. [laughs]
SE Any thoughts about why this play is in such demand in all those different diverse places?
AA There are some practical things like it’s an easy play to put up, it’s a single set, it’s five characters, it’s multi-cultural, it makes a case that is exciting to theatergoers but also serving [the theaters’] diversity initiatives. When it’s done well it’s a play that delivers a lot of laughs and then a gut punch, so audiences feel like they’ve been satisfied even if they’re confused. All of those things are probably the main reason why it’s being done. I mean, the Pulitzer has a certain luster that makes it easier to sell tickets, and a Tony nomination for theaters here in this country. Beyond that, I don’t know. I think the play is seductive. I think the play, when it’s done well, makes you think that you’re smarter than you really are. [laughs] It certainly makes me look smarter than I am! I think there are folks who would say, and I don’t disagree with them, that there’s something dangerous about this play going all over the country. … The environment has gotten even worse than when I wrote it. I just hope that theaters will be thoughtful in how they market the play. Because if they’re not, I’m gonna suffer the consequences.
SE Because it could be misconstrued by people?
AA The thing about Disgraced is that it leaves you the freedom to think what you want. If you don’t like Muslims going into the play, you don’t have to like them when you leave. And if you’re inclined to see many sides of the issue, you’ll be given an opportunity to do that as well. It’s often advertised as being about Islamophobia, and it is, and it’s going to make you understand how bad it is. It might and it also might not … I’m an artist, I’m not a PR guy. I didn’t put out the message that Muslims are people too. … I feel like the play is a litmus test and it tells the audience member where they are on the spectrum. If they’re interested in having that experience and asking that question of themselves then they can; and if they’re not — you know, I’ve had people walk out of this play saying it’s pro-jihad, I’ve had people walk out saying it’s anti-Muslim. You could say anything about it….
SE This play is in what I call the exploding dinner party genre: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Gods of Carnage, nice pleasant evenings ruined by barbaric talk and primitive actions. Were you aware that you were venturing into those woods?
AA I was and I wasn’t. [An] early draft started as a monologue, with Amir addressing the audience. And that drifts into a recollection of a dinner party. At that point I wasn’t sure what the play was. And once the dinner party started to go on and on it was impossible not to think of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf etc. I didn’t want to write those plays over again, which is why I didn’t set the play over a single evening… I had other aspirations, I wanted to tell a story that had a little more of an arc and I wanted there to be a kind of historical dimension to it. Where you could get to the end of the play and there could be commentary within the play about what had happened. Which I felt over the course of a single evening would not be possible. …
SE Do you remember what your impulse was when you set out to write Amir’s monologue? Was it personal or did you have a character in mind that would want to say these things?
AA Writing this script was the first time I had the experience Faulkner talked about when he said, “I just follow my characters around and write down what they say.” There was a character who was compelling to me and I sat down and started writing; he seemed to have his own being and he just started talking. It took me quite a while to figure out why he was saying some of the things he was saying. For quite a while I thought it was just enough to let him say what he wanted to say and not to question it. After a while I had a better idea of why he was saying some of this stuff….
SE How many plays had you written then?
AA Disgraced was my first play. But I had written 10 screenplays and two novels and I had been working in the theater and directing… so I’d been around it a lot and thought a lot about dramatic structure. I just had never sat down to write a play. I always knew I would; I always knew I wanted to. And I always knew there was going to be a table in it. [laughs]
SE Why novels and screenplays first, given your background? You had a degree in theater, had studied with Polish theater guru Jerzy Grotowski?
AA I can’t understand it. I always knew I was going to write a play; I just never felt like I was ready. I don’t know why I felt like I was ready to write a novel; I wrote a 600 page awful first novel that nobody would read, myself included…. I think I had some resistance to the idea of the theater as the playwright’s form. I think I came of age in a theater that was a director’s vision, you know, the Grotowski-Andre Gregory school and I don’t know that I had a ton of respect [for playwriting]. … I came to understand how to think about writing a play much later. I also never went to school for writing. I went to film school and got a degree in film directing [from Columbia] and I also went to Brown and got a degree in theater, but it was really in acting. … I never wanted anyone to tell me how to write. I just wanted to somehow figure it out. It took me a long time and I’m still trying to figure it out. I think it also means the work sits oddly in the contemporary landscape in terms of what other people are writing in the theater. It’s not a literary play but it’s also not a commercial entertainment. … It’s this weird combination I just came to by myself, and I think it’s partly a result of never having studied.
SE If you start with the idea of Amir and then add some people at a dinner party, how do you decide who those other people are and what they’re going to be saying?
AA The good idea for a story for me is the confluence of three or four ideas… and one of the streams running into this river was a dinner party that had happened at my house, maybe three or four years before I started writing the play. And the composition of that dinner party was very similar to the composition of the dinner party in Disgraced. I think I was drawing on that… there had been a conversation about Islam, some things had been said where people were very surprised, there were some sorts of shifts in people’s relationships but it was nothing nearly as extreme as what happens in Disgraced. But it struck me as an interesting premise that a discussion about Islam could shift people’s relationships. It wasn’t a conscious choice on my part to represent the United Colors of Benneton [laughs]. … In terms of conflicts I had been writing a lot about Muslims and Jews. I had just finished a first draft of American Dervish when I started writing Disgraced….
SE Were you aware that having the Muslim attack his own religion would fly in the face of most liberal theatergoers, who read Rumi, listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan etc?
AA Amir is certainly aware of it and that’s why he does it. He’s certainly styling himself as the anti — whatever you think I am, I’m not that. In fact I’m three steps ahead of you… and in that way it’s kind of a portrait of my dad. My dad says some [pause] very questionable things about how he feels about organized religion. Sometimes it borders on an extremity I’m not sure is productive. … But Amir is a lawyer and you would be hard-pressed to listen to him in that third scene and not feel like he’s onto something . Is that an argument you can make for the Old Testament? Possibly. I’m sure there are people who have. But he makes it for Islam and he makes it at a moment when he’s making political use of it, because he wants to separate himself from all that. And what better way to separate himself than to prove he can be objective and disdainful? But there might be something underneath all that disdain.
SE And having him cuckolded, was that something where you wanted to crank up the volume on things?
AA No! I know it might feel like that. No, it was a revelation. It was something I feel like happened. Franz Fanon said in Black Skin, White Mask [that] by possessing the white woman he possesses white culture; by holding her breasts he enters into the birth of the white world, right? Emily is a symbol for Amir, she is a key of access to that world, to membership in that civilization. And I think betrayal of that bond is probably dramaturgically necessary; how it’s handled is maybe a matter of technique [laughs]. I’m working on this screenplay adaptation for HBO right now and … that story line is really so much more central to the experience of the viewer… I think the great strength of the play is the voice, and I think it’s the voice that just came out of me. Sometimes the dramatic unfolding of it requires a great deal of subtlety and nuance in the execution. Because there’s this percussive impact of the plot and the voice and there has to be something working against that somewhere. And that’s on the actors, the production… In the film we can go into different places.
SE You’re not doing a film version of the play for HBO?
AA Absolutely not. I’ve broken it up into four parts so you’re much better set up for the intricacies of what happens on that evening. …
SE You did grow up in Milwaukee; is there a big Pakistani-American community there?
AA Now, not when I was growing up. …
SE Was there a sense among Pakistani-Americans that you were airing dirty laundry?
AA There’s an episode I talk about quite a bit. I did my very first big Q&A with Chris Jones at the Chicago Tribune in March 2012. Dervish had come out, Disgraced had come out, to this crazy amazing review [in the New York Times], theaters across the county wanted to do it and Lincoln Center was negotiating for the rights to do the play and I had my first big Q&A; there were about 300 people there. In the front row were a line of Pakistani-American mothers who had come from the suburbs to hear me speak. They’re all lined up in the front row, looking at me askance, arms crossed. …. At the very end of the interview one of them raised her hand and said, “We all drove in from the suburbs; we all read your book for our book club; none of us are going to speak to you except for me. And I just want to tell you that we need to understand what it is we need to do so that our children don’t turn out like you.” … Luckily Chris Jones had something to say: “This reminds me of the reaction some had to the very first works of Philip Roth from the older Jewish community.” I have another play, The Who and the What, that’s about a devout Muslim family, very wealthy family that owns a taxi company in Atlanta who has two daughters; it’s a riff on Taming of the Shrew. Older daughter doesn’t want to get married; father tells younger daughter you can’t get married until you convince your big sister that she has to get married. This sets in motion a comedy of sorts. The older daughter is a writer with writer’s block; she’s been writing a novel about the prophet; it’s a historizing, humanizing biography of the prophet. The representation [of Mohammed] is very controversial. The father and the sister don’t know [about her plot], this comes out, and the shit hits the fan. I have a friend, big fan of my work; born here, parents from Pakistan. He went and saw the play in Chicago and said, “I was so angry with you. I couldn’t’ accept you criticizing us the way you did in public!” I said, When Italian Americans do it you laugh and say, “How human!” He said, “Well, that’s different.” I said, “How is that different?” He said, “They were laughing at us.” I said, “They’re laughing with us because they recognize themselves!” … I think the community is not used to being represented. … They may recognize what they see but that’s for us to know; it’s not for other people to know because maybe they’re going to use it against us and think we’re bad. … I think you just need a generation of writers who do this and a younger generation comes along and says, “We were interested in those people and think they got it all wrong, we’re going to get it right.”
Roth broke ground for me. I was reading Roth, Bellow, Chaim Potok, watching Woody Allen, watching Seinfeld — those were the artists who made me understand, Oh, this is how I can write about my community, which is an American community but also an ethnic community; it’s a religious identity and it’s one that has it’s own aesthetics and it’s own humor and textures… Chaim Potok was writing about Hassidic Jews in Brooklyn and I remember reading him as a teenager and thinking, I’m reading about my own people. I know these people, I see them every weekend. They’re Muslims in Milwaukee but they might as well be Hasidim.
SE Were your parents observant?
AA Not really. It was basically American Dervish, my mother with this sort of odd devotional denomination, doesn’t pray and has some weird ideas about [Islam]. My dad was totally not interested. And I got fascinated by it as a kid. Like Hayat [the young protagonist of American Dervish], he shares three letters of my name. …[Between the] ages eight and 12. I was a little less intense about it as I got into my teenage years and then I had a high school teacher junior year who got me into reading all that European stuff, Camus, Kafka, Dostoyevsky. And my childhood faith cracked. … Once I start reading all that stuff I started to put a lot of distance between the literalist belief in heaven and hell, and what might be going on with all this stuff.
SE Were you aware in high school that your cultural, familial experience was something you wanted to mine as an artist?
AA No. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Who’s going to want to read about that? And the great modernist writers my teacher had me read, Robert Musil and Thomas Mann? Were they writing about Muslims in Milwaukee? They were writing about castles and famous artists and Tonio Kroger, Faustus. I tried to be the kind of writer I could never be for a good 15 years, before stumbling into my own subject matter by realizing I had been avoiding it all along. And also trying to write like some highbrow modernist; that first novel … a 600-page attempt to rewrite The Book of Disquiet [Fernando Pessoa]; plotless philosophical meditations on the machinations of the market…. I was trying to write a book that would make me feel important… and at some point in my early thirties I started to think I was avoiding myself, or avoiding my life and the corollary was that I was avoiding certain questions about who I really was. Similar to Amir, actually; still me with less violence. Maybe less self-loathing.
SE Faulkner said he discovered “my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.”
AA Exactly, and you just have to come to that [realization]. It’s a maturation process; it’s always there but your access to it [is not]. And when I did have access to it I had actually acquire some craft, which was nice because I could actually explore it with craft. Rather than thinking, I feel I have to write about this but I don’t know how to.
SE Was there a point where you felt like you identified yourself as a Muslim-American writer?
AA I had a moment when I realized what I had been running from… I had my postage stamp; I had my day when I found my postage stamp, so to speak, in the closet. And it was this sort of rush of inspiration that came with that moment and it was so rich, and there was so much that came up. All of the work I do now actually comes from that moment [when he was living in Harlem, in 2006]. It was just this dawning psychological realization and then the access to all of these characters and stories and textures and feelings of the wool that suddenly available to me. And it was like, Oh, I have to start writing! I wrote American Dervish, the first draft of Disgraced, then I wrote another draft of American Dervish, then I wrote The Invisible Hand, then I wrote The Who and the What, then I started another novel, then I won the Pulitzer… and I have more works in that vein I want to finish.
SE Was there something that triggered it?
AA I don’t know; there is wonderful thing that Kierkegaard says: “Someday the circumstances of your life will tighten upon you like screws on a rack and force what’s truly inside you to come out.” At that time I was married and my marriage was falling apart; I was languishing, I’d been writing for so long and making no headway; I felt like my work wasn’t fertile… I felt like I had the strength to maybe start looking at myself in a different way and maybe gave up on some of the fictions I was trying to concoct to make myself feel I was somebody other than who I was. I kind of gave up on wanting to be a great writer. … What was standing in the wake of all this was greater access to me. … I think also the end of my marriage, that as a big thing for me. We’d been married for ten years. And I think that forced me to ask a lot of questions about myself. …
SE Was your ex of a different faith?
AA Yes, French, born Catholic but not believing….
SE There are conflicts between Jews and Muslims reflected in your work, also your life?
AA Dervish was a young Muslim writer coming to terms with the fact that Jewish writers taught him how to write. That’s an interesting paradox… The Times review was a one of the great experiences of my life. I remember I got down on my knees and looked at the sky and thanked the Lord. [Times’ critic Adam Langer] picked up on that, [referred to] the Jewish-American experience, Neil Simon, …
SE And now you are working on a new novel?
AA 15–20,000 words in; when the Pulitzer hit everybody wanted to do my plays and I haven’t been able to get back to it. Dervish takes place 10 years before 9.11 and the new novel takes place 10 years after. It deals with two characters who are like brothers, they grew up together, and one goes off and makes a tremendous amount of money in the financial world and the other is someone who’s telling his story. It’s a saga of a lot of what’s happened in the Muslim community since 9.11. I think it’s more along the lines of the book people are hoping I would write. [laughs] … I have a sense of where it’s going and what’s going to happen. But I think I’ll probably find a way to piss off my community again. Unintentionally! …
SE Were there more encounters like the one you had with the aunties?
AA Yeah, with a Muslim scholar. They were doing Q&As after another performances at the Goodman; he went to one of those and apparently laid into the play and me and the cast was quite shocked. I texted the theater; why would you invite a Muslim scholar? If Genet was doing Our Lady of the Flowers, would you invite a priest? Why would that person be inclined positively? But because we live in this environment where, “Oh, this is your community! Muslim stuff. You must all think this is great!” It doesn’t make any sense except in this very binary atmosphere. Sometimes theaters will program the play and they’ll get some backlash from the local groups they’ve reached out to. And they’ll ask me, “Do you realize — ?” And I’ll say, “What do you mean, ‘Do I realize?’ I’ve been dealing with this for a while. The council on American-Islamic relations in Chicago has convened a committee to deal with the complaints in the Muslim community about the last play I did in Chicago, The Who and the What, because there were complaints about the representation of the prophet. …
SE Early in American Dervish some Muslim students walk out of a college class in Islam when the professor speaks of archaeologists finding an edited version of the Koran, a book that is supposed to have no author but God. Did that upset Muslim readers?
AA Yes but that was on page six. On page two, Hayat eats sausage and 40% of Muslim readers put the book down. “Why would I eat a book about a guy who eats sausage? I don’t have anything to learn from this guy!” …
SE Is it the literalist, fundamentalist reading of the Koran that threatens people?
AA I don’t know… but in having that conversation, we Americans refuse to look at what we have done. For example how we have screwed up the entire situation in the Middle East; we created that situation. In some very real way, we created ISIS. All of that’s true. But then you look at the Koran, is the Koran creating ISIS? It’s the blind side of a weird American exceptionalism that seems to run us aground time and again. The literalist interpretation of the Koran is a sclerosis on the Muslim community. That’s my interest. I don’t care what sclerosis it is on the western [world]. … The fact that there is this rigid, unthinking, long-standing tradition relating to the Koran is part of a deeper problem in the Muslim world. And that is what I’m trying to address, through American Dervish and Disgraced. Unfortunately those works rarely find their way into the hands of Muslim readers, who on page two put them down anyway. [laughs]
SE Were you aware that Muslims were going to have this reaction?
AA To be honest, I didn’t think anybody was going to read this stuff. I got to the point where I was in my mid-30s and I thought, I’m going down with this ship but I’ve got to do this! I don’t know how long I can sustain but I’m inspired; I f feel like for the first time in my life I’m writing for myself, writing with my voice, and I don’t want to give this up. I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing it, but I’m going to try. … When American Dervish was the big book at the Frankfurt book fair in 2010, it sold in 18 languages, and was suddenly going to be published all over the world I thought, What the hell is going on here? …
SE When someone asked me what American Dervish was about I said, “Losing my religion.” But isn’t that the theme of nearly every coming-of-age novel? It’s a universal story.
AA A wonderful story that is emblematic of something that has happened time and again with American Dervish; I was in Denver at the Tattered Cover bookstore and met a young fellow in his 30s who had driven 150 miles for the reading. He came up to me afterwards and said, “I grew up in Indiana in a Pentecostal house; your book is the best book I’ve ever read about what it’s like to try and leave a community.” He was gay and he wept as he was hugging me. And I thought, That’s what the book is about. It’s about the experience of losing your religion, losing your community, but still feeling connected to that past and those people. Still being filled with love for it but feeling separate from it. That’s the story I was trying to tell… but because of the cultural politics and because there are so few prominent Muslim voices in this country, it suddenly is like Islam for Dummies. … Then people say, I don’t get it; he’s not explaining why it’s good! …
SE What did your parents think of the book?
AA Much like the father character in American Dervish, who brags that he’s never read a book in his entire life, calls it staring at paper, I have every suspicion that my father has not read the book. My mother, on the other hand, read it very quickly a few months before it was published and she called me and said, “I want to talk about something and I never want to talk about it again. I was very happy to see you understood that everyone was doing the best they could.” I said, “That’s beautiful, Mom, thank you.” She said, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” … Like in the book there’s a kind of broadmindedness about them. They’re both tortured, as all of us are, but they’re not stuck to the ideas of what they think life is. …
SE Do you identify yourself as a Muslim?
AA I take a lead from my smart Jewish friends and say I identify as a cultural Muslim. Which means I feel informed and formed by the ethos and mythos and the mindset and the spirituality of the Muslim tradition, without believing in the literal truth of any of its tenets. I don’t believe that the prophet’s utterance is the sole and definitive purchase on reality. I don’t believe being born a Muslim is a greater blessing than being born Hindu or whatever. I lost that exclusive relationship to my faith early on. I often say I am not a believer of my faith, I am a reader of my faith. … I search for wisdom and perspective in the text; I don’t search for the injunction, the reassurance that I will ultimately be okay. I’m probably not going to be okay. [laughs]
SE Do you identify with other Muslim-American writers of your generation. Do you feel part of a class?
AA I wouldn’t say no but I wouldn’t say yes. I haven’t encountered anyone’s work that is feeding me the way the Jewish-American writers work is. Not yet…. Rushdie is his own way… Midnight’s Children and Satanic Verses made a huge impact on me in my early years. But he’s writing about a different experience, he’s not writing about the American experience. …
SE Can you tell me about studying with Grotowski? I read him as a senior in high school, in 1972, when he was regarded as a prophet in some theater circles.
AA In 1969 he stopped doing theater; in the 1970s he was working in the Polish forest. Once he moved out of the forest he kind of disappeared for a while; he was at Irvine, ended up in Italy for last 15 years of his life. It was a tiny work center. He’s one of two people I know who married supreme intellectual capacities to an absolutely unbending will and almost a need, I think, to shape the reality around them to the purposes of their work. He set the bar so high for me, in terms of what was possible as an artist, that through focus and hard work you really could affect some kind of change in the nature of reality… You enter into their reality. And it’s an interesting place to be. …
SE Were you there as an actor?
AA At the time he was using ancient performance technique and ancient ritual; there was no distinction. Performers in religious ritual were often entering into shamanic states of consciousness. The central insight he’d had [in the early 70s] was that performers in their fullest state of being experience their bodies and their selves in the kind of presence that if they could only live with that in their lives would be extraordinary. So what is it about performance that gives us access to another state of being? How to do that in life? … He tried to find an answer to that question [through] an exploration of ancient performance techniques [including] Voodoo: In Italy at the time I was working with a 50-year-old voodoo priestess initiate as an assistant. … We were working on our acting in that we were using our bodies and our voices, but we were not doing it for an audience. We were doing it in the tradition of what can performance transfer in us… Its’ a lot of mumbo-jumbo, but there is a lot of rigor in the approach…. It was my first experience of shifts in my consciousness…. Strictly speaking it was not really artistic work except in so far as the enduring preoccupation of literature is liberation: liberation from illusion, liberation of the self from otherness. …
What was fascinating about Grotowski was he seemed to have mastered the technique of taking you to the top of Everest. He could get you to the top and have an experience of awareness that was life-altering. What he spent very little to no time doing was showing you how to get down from the top. … So much of the work for me, to have had those experiences at such a young age, was [asking] what the hell is the connection to life? What am I supposed to do with this? … I’ve still got to make a living! That’s been the great legacy for me of Grotowski: [after] these extraordinary experiences I then have to understand through other experiences, working on my craft, what the connection between these things could be…
