“Cli-fi”—literature about climate crisisFootnote 1—is becoming increasingly popular, its relevance driven by immanent and global climate disaster. Increasing as well is the recognition of a need to articulate and account for the physical and mental toll of prolonged states of emergency caused by climate disruptions. E. Ann Kaplan calls cli-fi “pretraumatic” literature. “Pretrauma” is her word for “future catastrophic events” whose imagined effects create diagnosable symptoms of trauma (anxiety, hypervigilance, dissociation, nightmares, flashbacks, and so on), in contrast to current working definitions of trauma in the field of mental health, where the only official diagnosis is PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, which identifies trauma-related effects as derived from a past event (1). Kaplan published Climate Trauma in 2016, but already, in 2025, the disastrous future she predicted has become the disastrous now. The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that “[c]limate change has [already] caused substantial damages, and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater and coastal and open ocean marine ecosystems,” and the “extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous assessments” (Pörtner et al.). The effects of climate crisis are deeply material, affecting the body and its survivability first and rippling out through food webs, transportation pathways, national borders, economic matrices, entire ecosystems, and finally the planet itself. Such effects are both physical and rooted in the imagination, as conceptions of impending disaster. Fiction’s capacity to narrativize affective physical and mental states makes it a particularly powerful medium for giving voice to the ordinary trauma of human and nonhuman life within the extraordinary crises of the twenty-first century.Footnote 2
While cli-fi describes future worlds and future disasters, one of its most important contributions to the present lies in its ability to capture the somatic experience of living through ongoing traumatic events. Trauma fiction historically has focused on past events, often on single-event traumas, attempting to understand, perhaps to heal from, the effects of the past event in the present day. Dominick LaCapra explains that trauma fiction allows readers to imaginatively participate in “working through” traumatic events with the goal of being able to “distinguish between past and present and to recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the future” (21, 21–22). If human beings are to have a future not subsumed by the traumatic past, we must be able to work through the traumatic event. What happens, however, when the trauma is ongoing in the “here and now”? In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant offers this caution: too often, trauma narratives emphasize the singular event at the expense of paying sufficient attention to the “ordinariness” of the systems that create and perpetuate trauma in the first place (9).
Climate change is both “natural” in the sense that it involves organic behaviors of wind, water, and heat, and “unnatural” in the sense that it has anthropogenic causes and its effects are unevenly distributed along fault lines of political and economic inequalities. The “slow violence,” to use Rob Nixon’s phrase, of attritional, exponential ecosystem degradation, disease, and death caused by systemic and ongoing practices can be difficult to comprehend with necessary urgency. By dramatizing an emergency that feels ordinary—until it does not—cli-fi asks readers to imagine extinction-level disaster and then to work backward through the structural and systemic social, racial, and economic violences that brought it about. One might think, for example, of the ecologically focused lyrical descriptions of human-caused ecosystem collapse in N. K. Jemison’s Broken Earth trilogy and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or of the provocative images of interplanetary colonial resource exploitation in Octavia Butler’s Parable series and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. It is this capacity, Stephanie LeMenager says, that makes cli-fi so important in the early decades of the twenty-first century: it can show us “what it means to live through climate shift, moment by moment, in individual, fragile bodies” (225).
Paying attention to the structural (“what it means”) and the individual (“fragile bodies”) is a difficult and, at times, fraught practice. Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War (2017), is a particularly compelling case study for how cli-fi can speak to the structural and affective nature of current and ongoing traumatic systems in the context of a rapidly changing climate. Specifically, American War is a cli-fi novel that stylistically evokes trauma narratives while exposing the limits of such narratives’ traditional focus on victims of single-event trauma. In this paper, I use queer affect theory to inflect trauma studies as an approach that allows for a reading of this novel and, perhaps, for readings of cli-fi more generally that balances attention between the structural causes and consequences of ongoing trauma with the lived experiences of climate trauma on individual bodies. To understand the asymmetrical affective reality of climate trauma, it is necessary to understand its impacts on human bodies and local communities; at the same time, to engage in meaningful advocacy or intervention, one must understand the structural undergirding of that asymmetrical suffering.
At first glance, American War appears to be a cli-fi novel written in the mode of a traditional trauma narrative. Anne Whitehead describes the common literary techniques used in trauma fiction to depict the neurophysiological effects of trauma, “to narrate the unnarratable” (4). Such literary techniques include disruptions to conventional linear sequencing of events (6), fragmentation (34), and “collective memory” in the form of external accounts, such as news reporting, that contextualize the event (74). American War deploys each of these techniques; the novel is a framed narrative, commenced years after the main events, presented as an account of the end of the Second American Civil War between southern “Red” states and northern “Blue” states.Footnote 3 The main narrative is then disrupted by “found” documents, such as oral histories, newspaper stories, interviews, correspondence, and transcripts of legal proceedings, creating the sense that this manuscript is a compendium of collective memory about the war and its catastrophic aftermath.
However, the novel subverts readers’ expectations of trauma fiction both stylistically and through its challenging protagonist, a perpetrator of atrocity. The narrative focuses on the short and brutal life of Sarat Chestnut, a queer Black and Hispanic woman who becomes the war’s horrifying apotheosis when, in 2095, she volunteers to be the infected body that starts a pandemic responsible for 110 million deaths. Sarat’s story illuminates the tension between understanding structural causes of trauma and empathizing with the affective experience of it. Through that tension, American War suggests that the profound impacts of systemic trauma on individuals require empathetic engagement even, and especially, in cases of reactive violence.
Throughout the novel, Sarat’s body is focalized as a site of both torture (inflicted trauma) and mass destruction (inflicting trauma). As the novel progresses, the narrative symbolically associates her with an increasingly damaged natural world, suggesting the implication of the individual somatic experience of trauma within larger systemic collapse. Applying queer affect theory is a helpful lens through which to view the novel’s representation of trauma in the form of Sarat’s physicality and affective state. Sarat is denied much in the way of subjectivity, so only by paying attention to her body can readers interrogate the narrator’s judgments about Sarat. The novel’s erasure of her subjectivity is part of its larger arguments about the destruction of biosystems and populations rendered vulnerable by American capitalism, driven by fossil fuel and exploitative overconsumption. By denying readers access to his protagonist’s thoughts, El Akkad constructs a narrative that asks readers to employ an essential tool for reading trauma: affective empathy. Such readings of trauma—that is, readings that do not seek cognitive understanding of the other’s condition or the catharsis of having “worked through” a trauma, but rather readings that generate the “hard” feelings of unprocessed, ungrievable, and ongoing trauma—permit readers to affectively engage with the enormity and exigency of the slow crises of climate disaster.
Trauma Fiction and (Failures of) Witnessing in American War
Read through the dual lenses of trauma studies and queer affect theory, American War unfolds as a story about multivalent traumas, each impacting the protagonist along different axes of vulnerability. Sarat, a queer woman of color, is a product of three intersecting crises: first, she and her family are displaced from their Louisiana home by flooding; second, as a stateless climate refugee, she is recruited as cannon fodder for an ongoing conflict; and third, as a fighter for the Red states, she is arrested by the Blue states and classified as a terrorist. Sent to the Sugarloaf Detention Center (a facility whose atrocities are based on historical practices of extraordinary rendition and torture at Guantanamo Bay and other “black sites” in the war on terror), Sarat is a stateless and rightless noncitizen, a person whose torture and death are legally sanctioned.Footnote 4 Through Sarat, the novel draws explicit attention to how readers approach victim-perpetrators and where the moral imperative to bear witness begins and ends in narratives about systemic traumas.
Trauma fiction, according to Cathy Caruth, is literature posing an imperative call, that suffering be seen and heard. This imperative demands a “new mode of reading and of listening” to both the “language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering” (10). Early trauma theorists such as Caruth, LaCapra, and Shoshana Felman, all of whom come from backgrounds in Holocaust studies, emphasize the imperative for readers to bear empathetic witness to trauma. Because El Akkad’s protagonist becomes a perpetrator of mass atrocity, the novel forces readers to contend with the costs and consequences of empathizing with victims and agents of systemic and ongoing trauma. Doyle Calhoun contends that literary depictions of suicide bombers disrupt the rhetorical bind used for public conversations about terrorism—namely, that acts of terror defy empathetic imagination, that they exist beyond ordinary human capacities to understand. He begins his article with the example of women suicide bombers as figures who both compel empathic understanding of the structural causes of terroristic violence and are silenced by the imperative to render terrorism “beyond the pale of understanding” (287). Recounting an incident where a British member of Parliament publicly expressed empathy (not, it should be noted, sympathy) for a Palestinian woman suicide bomber, Calhoun cites the Israeli embassy’s outraged response: “We would not expect any human being—and surely not a British MP—to express an understanding of such atrocities” (286). The refusal of empathy is here couched as a moral imperative; and indeed, without reference to the causes or consequences of state-sanctioned violence, what possible understanding can there be for a Palestinian woman suicide bomber? Calhoun asserts that “[w]orks of fiction acknowledge and enact the naked truth” (288) that understanding structural violence—in this case, a historical act of terrorism—requires humanizing the perpetrators of that violence (299). Picking up on Calhoun’s assertion, I contend that, in American War, El Akkad pitches such affective empathy as a critical first step to understanding ongoing, systemic traumas.
The premise of the novel is that it is a record of Sarat’s life compiled from various historical documents, such as court transcripts and newspaper accounts, by Benjamin Chestnut, a professional historian of the Second Civil War and Sarat’s nephew and only surviving family member. However, at the end of the novel, Benjamin reveals that his account of his aunt’s life and fatal choice is based on her actual diaries. The diaries, he says, begin, “When I was young, I lived with my parents and my brother and my sister in a small house by the Mississippi Sea. I was happy then” (El Akkad 333). The words “I was happy then,” isolated and without explanation, appear above the first chapter’s first paragraph. The novel proper then picks up in the third person omniscient: “The sun broke through a pilgrimage of clouds and cast its unblinking eye upon the Mississippi Sea” (9). Far from being a record of Benjamin’s exhaustive research about Sarat, in other words, Benjamin’s narrative was actually precipitated by Sarat’s personal testimony—a testimony that has been intentionally silenced. In his rage and horror at his aunt’s action, Benjamin explains that, having found her diaries, he does the only thing left that can “hurt her”: he burns the diaries (332). Because Benjamin destroys Sarat’s diaries and narrates “her” story from an omniscient perspective that elides much of her thought processes, Sarat’s body becomes the contested site of competing imperatives—to witness her suffering and to revile her for the suffering she causes. In the novel’s prologue, Benjamin, now an aging man dying of cancer, wanders the waterfront and imagines his dead aunt emerging from the water, “a hulking bronzed body, her back lined with ashen scars, each one a testimony to the torture she was made to endure, the secret crimes committed against her.” Claiming that his narrative will be a story not of war but of “ruin,” he indicates that what follows is the narratological equivalent of her body’s scars: a testimony to her suffering (6). Instead of telling Sarat’s story, he has told a story about Sarat.
Replicating the systems that erase her, Benjamin’s narrative renders Sarat nearly mute, a mentally opaque body “mapped” by scars, which metaphorically allow readers to “map” the intersecting conditions of her illegibility. Insight into Sarat’s thought processes is limited to short lines of dialogue, rendering her life and experience inarticulate and inarticulable. For example, when Sarat is released from Sugarloaf, she returns to her brother Simon’s house, where she meets Karina, his wife, and her nephew, Benjamin. After her first night, Benjamin brings breakfast out to Sarat, who is sleeping in a shed. She wakes in terror, backs into a corner, and stares at the boy. He tells her he brought breakfast, and, after what seems to be an attempt to articulate what she wants to know, she says, “I forgot your name” (270). Because Benjamin narrates the scene, readers are not given insight into Sarat’s affective world, but her body’s physiological terror upon waking in a new place and her efforts to connect to her new present through naming and understanding her interlocutor are all clearly depicted.Footnote 5 While showing readers the behavioral spore of Sarat’s suffering, Benjamin nevertheless violates what Caruth calls the imperative of trauma fiction: to bear witness to or to record the testimony of traumatic suffering.
Despite its stylistic conventions evoking trauma fiction, then, the novel turns the empathic and cathartic narratological function of “working through” trauma on its head, ultimately inculcating the reader against cognitive empathy for the traumatized protagonist. By the end of the novel, readers realize that the narrative is a performative refusal to bear witness, an obviation of testimony, a repudiation of any kind of “working through,” or sense making, or organizing of traumatic events. The only explanation readers are given for Sarat’s culminating act, to become a bioweapon, comes from a letter Sarat leaves with Benjamin. “I told you once that a well-set bone grows stronger,” she writes. “The opposite is also true” (328). Her justification, in other words, is a repudiation of any rationale, implying that her act was taken not for any articulable reason, but because she was “broken.”
In one of the only times Benjamin tries to understand his aunt’s actions, he recalls a memory of her attempt to regain the ability to submerge herself in water after her release from Sugarloaf. Sarat was waterboarded there, and so water triggers post-traumatic stress episodes for her, but she forces herself into the water. Below its surface, in a self-administered exposure therapy ritual, she undergoes a transformation and emerges from the water as if regenerated in some way. Benjamin connects the expression on her face when she emerges from water to what he imagines she might have felt when she became patient zero, wheeled into the reunification ceremony. Knowing her death was inevitable and that she would destroy millions with her, she must have felt “an overwhelming relief,” he thinks, like “the opposite of drowning” (333). These interpretations of her decision and her rationale are, of course, Benjamin’s. When Benjamin asserts in the prologue that this is not “a story about war. It’s about ruin,” readers gather that this novel is about the spiraling consequences of trauma: on the individual, broken and not given the care they need to heal; on communities sundered by systemic trauma; and on the world itself (6). There can be no “working through,” no organization of the traumatic event or deeper understanding of Sarat’s actions, because all that is left are the ruins of the world she created.
Even before Benjamin reveals that he has in fact destroyed Sarat’s testimony, however, the novel has already and consistently elided the voices of the noncitizens, the people of the defeated Red states. The “found documents” meant to record the lives of Red-state civilians in the novel, for example, replicate Benjamin’s erasure of testimony. They obfuscate rather than elucidate. Ostensibly testimonies or records, they instead effectively represent the narrative perspective of the reunited federal American government, the conqueror rather than the conquered. One excerpt from a letter by a detainee at Sugarloaf appears to offer readers an immediate window into the emotional reality of these Southern-affiliated prisoners. Yet this letter is mostly redacted. “When you refuse [orders], they take you to another room,” the unnamed detainee writes. “There—” it continues, and the rest of the paragraph is blacked out (243). Even in the fragments of oral histories, the interviewers are consistently unable to frame questions in a way that would clarify the collective, narratological memory. In one such record, the unnamed interviewee tells their Northern interviewer, “That’s what you Northerners will never understand. The real insurrectionists never fired a single shot.” The interview fails to clarify what the interviewee means by “real insurrectionists”—something that has become, rather than a descriptor of actions or incidents, an identity of trauma and suffering—and instead only asks if the interviewee bears any “lasting resentment” toward the North. All that is recorded in response is “[Laughter]” (69).
Trauma fiction attempts to record the unnarratable; American War makes unnarratable the very record of its history. While readers are not made privy to Sarat’s thoughts and motivations, or those of other victims of climate change or war, they are made witness to Sarat’s physical existence, through a narrative that refuses to record her emotions, thought processes, or felt experience of the world and that instead pays attention to her bodily reactions and facial expressions. That bodily testimony bears witness to the structural paradigm of the noncitizen—the body that can be both easily and legally destroyed. American War thus makes clear that trauma fiction’s literary devices—the framed narrative by the witness, the intertextual collection of historical or collective memory, and the fragmented testimony of the victim—are just that: devices. In the narrative of the colonized other, it is their absence from the historical record that bears witness to the failure of their societies.
In American War, therefore, the trauma testimonial poses complex ethical questions. Given that she is responsible for the deaths of 110 million people, does Sarat deserve empathy? Does her testimony deserve to be heard? Benjamin asserts it does not. But what is at stake in the denial of testimony? The answer lies not in what Sarat’s specific testimony would have shown readers but in the denial of any such voices justifying violence against citizens. The novel draws readers’ attention to the problem of the terrorist in the trauma narrative through Benjamin’s narratological decision to refuse readers access to Sarat’s own justifications, rationale, or emotional experience of her life and actions.
Not only is Sarat’s interior world erased from the novel, but Sarat says very little about her motivations. The most crucial choice of all is rendered as a repudiation of the Red cause. In the scene where Sarat agrees to be infected with the virus, she is told that she will be a “hero to the Southern cause.” Sarat responds: “Fuck the South and everything it stands for” (313). In addition to representing systemic and ongoing traumatic crisis, then, American War also refuses readers any easy categorization of its subject. Sarat’s act of terror is embedded in the pervasive crisis and impossible conditions of her nonlife.Footnote 6 Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s and Giorgio Agamben’s notions of “bare life,” Achille Mbembe describes the condition of what he calls the “living dead” of “late modern colonial occupation” (91). Mbembe defines this condition using the real-world example of Palestine; without stretching from the occupation of Palestine too far, El Akkad imagines a near-future United States where the state renders stateless its own citizens. For Mbembe, “[t]o live under late-modern occupation is to experience a permanent condition of ‘being in pain’” (91). Sarat’s body, a “monolith” of scars, maps that pain.
While Benjamin’s decision to burn her diaries means that readers are not permitted to know her own rationale for becoming a bioweapon, the novel shows enough of her engagement with acts of violence to trouble the idea that Sarat is an unthinking agent. She may not articulate her reasoning, but she is capable of reason, affection, and desire. Despite growing up in a displaced persons camp, a noncitizen who has only known “bare life,” Sarat demonstrates acts of justice, love, and even clever military strategy; she saves Layla, her sometime girlfriend; Marcus, a fellow refugee who becomes an (enemy) Blue soldier; and her nephew, Benjamin. She is also deeply strategic in her own right, figuring out a way to assassinate a high-ranking Blue officer while she is still a teenager. After her “kill,” Joe, a citizen of the fictional Bouazizi Empire who has become an ally of the Red recruiter and war leader Albert Gaines,Footnote 7 congratulates Sarat on her victory. “It’s no victory, it’s one man dead,” Sarat responds (El Akkad 229). She is aware of the limited strategic relevance of one death in a decades-long war; but this response, her refusal to celebrate even a minor “victory,” suggests that she also takes little pleasure in killing. Of course, any reservations or sense of purpose she has remain fairly opaque.
Sarat’s act of terror stands as a final indictment of the “death-world” in which she lives, to use Mbembe’s term. In Necropolitics, Mbembe claims that Western democracies are economies built on slavery and colonization, institutionalizations of “bare life” (68). The state systems built on “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (68) create “death-worlds,” forms of “social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (92). In a death-world, the “lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom” become blurred, and so “[s]elf-sacrificers proceed to take power over their death by approaching it head-on” (92, 90). Thus, by turning his focus to the radicalized climate migrants made most vulnerable by shifting political and climatological demarcations, El Akkad’s novel is, indeed, a story about ruin. More specifically, it is a story about terror: the excess of pain and death erupting from the noncitizen in the death-world against the legible bodies of the citizen.
Sarat becomes a climate refugee in a displaced persons camp, where she is vulnerable to radicalization. Gaines attempts to persuade Sarat to fight for the Red cause through appeals to her pain, isolation, and hopelessness; his expressed empathy exposes to Sarat the injustice of the death-world she lives in. Gaines, however, seeks to replicate that precarity that makes radicalization possible, rather than change the necropolitical balance of power. Later in the novel, Adam Bragg, Sr., a Southern militia leader, talks about how Gaines recruited children to war: “He does this to all his little kids, makes them think it’s all about them—that the whole damn war turns on how they feel, what they lost, how they’re hurting. But it doesn’t,” he says (El Akkad 234). It is climate displacement, ongoing conflict, and militarized technology (like the “rogue” drone that kills Sarat’s twin, Dana) that harm the children; in claiming their pain can be rectified, purged, or avenged through violence, Gaines exploits children’s suffering all while perpetuating the systems that cause it.
Counter to Gaines’s hollow justifications of war, Marcus, another displaced child raised with Sarat in the camps but recruited instead by Blue forces, offers the only moral perspective on violent conflict. After her years of torture in Sugarloaf, when she sees Marcus again, Sarat greets him as a friend. They reconnect, and Marcus becomes distraught, seeing the physical ravages of torture on Sarat’s body. He traces a scar with his finger and says, “I did this.” When Sarat attempts to absolve him, saying she knows it wasn’t him, specifically, he says, “You can’t wear this uniform and not know what they did in Sugarloaf, Sarat. I’ve gotten by for a long time looking away, turning my head. And the truth is I never cared much about what either side did to the other because it’s a war” (294). Marcus is the only military character in the novel who recognizes an alternative to the exploitation of the pain of others: he takes responsibility for his role in the systems that perpetrate it. Although she chooses the path of perpetuating suffering rather than taking responsibility for it, Sarat also chooses to save Marcus from her final terrorist act (308).
Marcus’s one moment of responsibility, however, is a faint glimmer in a novel that trenchantly refuses to bear witness or take responsibility for systems of ruination. In order to commit her terroristic act, the infected Sarat is sent to the reunification ceremony, where her infected body will have the greatest epidemiological impact. A congressional hearing transcript recounts how it happened: at the checkpoint, one private orders Sarat, who is too sick to stand, to get up from her wheelchair. When she does not comply, he knocks over her wheelchair and threatens to shoot her. Private Martin Baker, whose father tortured Sarat at Sugarloaf, stops the other private from killing Sarat. He helps her back up and lets her through the checkpoint in Columbus, Ohio. In this instance, the excessive violence of the first private might have saved the lives of millions, had Sarat been killed before entering the crowded event space. The mistake, the congressional hearing concludes, is that “Private Martin Baker decides to show compassion.” A senator asks, “[C]an you imagine how many millions of lives would have been saved if he hadn’t?” (326) The novel with its omniscient narrative offers a reversal of a typical trauma narrative’s claims. The dominant and explicit interpretive voices of the novel conclude that it is compassion that is to blame for the pandemic, not any of the injustices leading to the incident itself. An act of empathy destroys the world: cruelty would have saved it. This is indeed an ominous reflection of the necropolitical conditions of the near-future United States El Akkad conjures.
In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir K. Puar connects Mbembe’s necropolitics with Judith Butler’s discussions of biopower and sex, arguing that necropolitics and queer theory are too often decoupled. Puar argues that reading these two forces in tension—death and life for the queer subject—suggests that queerness operates in Western democracies along the very axes of “normalization and banishment” that make up the “death-worlds” of the noncitizen and the lifeworlds of the sovereign subject (37). Like Puar, José Esteban Muñoz picks up on the language of queerness and state terror in Disidentifications, analyzing the fungible markers of queerness and terrorism. Queer figures, Muñoz says, are “traitors” to national order and by extension to nationalism. Visible queerness, then, becomes a performance of terrorism, an enacted threat to the stability of the cis and patriarchal nation-state. In an analysis of a drag performance in which the drag queen dresses as a glammed-up guerrilla fighter, Muñoz reflects on how the performance draws into visibility “the nation’s most dangerous citizens” (108). In other words, the queer body is a “traitor” to systems built on heteronormative models of property, ownership, and the rights of citizenship. In American War, Sarat’s erased subjectivity is counterbalanced by her visible body, with its largeness, its scars, its queer desires. Only in her physical alterity does her body become legible—if only as a prism that fractures narrative cohesion, shattering the legible categories of “terrorist” and “victim.”
Hard Feelings: Queer Bodies and Queer Systems in American War
At first glance an almost incidental aspect of her characterization, Sarat’s queerness is key to her embodiment. Sarat is introduced as a “hulking flesh monolith”—a descriptor both entirely corporeal and dehumanizing in its conflation of woman with stone (El Akkad 6). Sarat is consistently bodied, described in fleshly and material terms. When I claim that Sarat’s physicality “queers” the novel’s articulated arguments, I am using a theoretical conception for the idea of queerness, building on Jack Halberstam’s use of “queer” to reference a model of being “between embodiment, place, and practice,” a denaturalization and denormalization of the gendered spaces and sequences of life in heteropatriarchal society (5). Muñoz, in Cruising Utopia, claims that queer affective experience is essentially optimistic, even in its recognition of the wrongness of the affective world. Queerness is “that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing,” Muñoz says (1). Sarat’s very illegibility becomes the force that cracks open the traumatic and traumatizing systems of warfare and violence ossifying the omniscient narrative’s tonal objectivity. Her queer body, like a rock in a stream, reroutes interpretation, disrupts the narrative claims of its many record keepers.
Sarat’s queerness is not limited to her sexual and quasi-romantic relationship with Layla; her gender appears to be fluid, even if that fluidity is more directly a repudiation of binary gendered categories than it is explicitly connected to trans-ness. In one of the first articles on the novel, Bettina Huber notes Sarat’s “gender-subverting behavior,” citing the fact that Sarat names her sniper rifle after a woman “hero” of the Southern cause and uses nail polish to mark the rifle stock to record each kill she makes (94). Huber suggests that Sarat subverts “gender,” presumably meaning that Sarat subverts binary notions of gender. I suggest that Sarat is trans-coded, while the narrative stops short of identifying her as trans. To a certain extent, the reader’s limited capacity to understand Sarat’s queerness can be ascribed to the fact that her story is being refracted through the lens of a nephew, Benjamin, who had a child’s perspective of her. Yet there is equally no indication that Benjamin hides information about his aunt’s sexuality or gender from readers. Instead, the narrative offers readers indications of Sarat’s gender fluidity in a few suggestive, trans-coded scenes and in associations with the natural world.Footnote 8
Most trans-coded scenes take place during Sarat’s childhood and early adolescence, as one might expect. When they are children, Sarat’s twin, Dana, tries on their mother’s makeup, a common ritual of childhood mimicking the rituals of adults. Sarat is “confounded by what her sister was doing” (El Akkad 12). By contrast, their older brother Simon studies the “rituals” of his father to learn “what it means to be a man” (15). Sarat shows little interest in the rituals of either gender, or in either parent as a gendered model. While this suggests an internal alienation from both ends of the gender spectrum, some indications of explicit trans masc coding appear as well. Like many trans masc folks, Sarat is called a “tomboy” in her early childhood (12). As she matures, Sarat learns to desire the relative freedom and power associated with masculinity in the patriarchal and precarious world of Red state refugees. As an early indicator of her desire for power, even violence, she changes her name. Born “Sara T. Chestnut,” she chooses to rename herself Sarat after a teacher misreads the name, a decision made because “Sara ended with an impotent exhale” while “Sarat snapped shut like a bear trap” (10). Later, in the camps, having limited clothing, Sarat is “confined” to boys’ clothing, but finds them “liberating” (97, 98). In early puberty, she admires her older brother’s muscles, and readers are informed that Sarat “envied the malleability of boys’ bodies” and “longed to have a such a malleable, predictable body—one that could grow big and strong and yet not raise a single stranger’s eyebrow” (157).
But her coding, though masculine in its desire for malleability, social power, and physical resilience, does not diminish her desire for feminine coding, either. At one point, readers are given a heartbreaking glimpse into her internal landscape when her sister calls her ugly. Their mother forces Dana to apologize for the insult. Dana grudgingly (and falsely) calls Sarat beautiful. Sarat is “dumbstruck,” too young to understand the nature of lying; having been called beautiful, “[s]he smiled” (13). Later, in Camp Patience (a refugee camp), Sarat rescues a turtle, whom she describes as a girl turtle. When questioned about the turtle’s sex, Sarat insists that the turtle is a girl because “she [Sarat] found her” (99). As a young adult, in a childlike and awkward first attempt at dominant/submissive sexual roles in her partnership with Layla, Sarat tells Layla, “You mine tonight.” Layla objects that she belongs to no one, but allows Sarat to stroke her hair and cuddle her (219). That night, Sarat’s nightmares of incarceration and brutality give way to her memory of her sister singing a lullaby: “It’s all right, beautiful girl, it’s all right” (220). In her intimacies, she craves nurture, to give and take power, and to be found beautiful.
It may be trite to call Sarat’s gender “fluid,” but the novel explicitly connects her with water and waterways, and with the larger implications of water in a climate-impacted world. Huber notes that women in the novel are consistently associated with the natural world, in a fairly typical conflation of the feminine with nature. But Sarat’s depiction contrasts with that of other women in the novel, who are affiliated with domesticated natural spaces, such as Karina’s gardens. Huber identifies the “double-coding of Sarat as the representative of both untamed nature and war” (93). Analyzing her dynamic connection to water specifically, Huber suggests that her co-option into violence exemplifies the novel’s arguments about “a possible future where anthropogenic climate change is ignored” (97). However, finding that Sarat’s affiliation with the natural world illuminates its victimization by contemporaneous fossil fuel–driven economies does little to explicate why Sarat—the embodiment of the “wild”—becomes a literally dangerous body by the end of the novel.
While the novel’s narrative strategy elides Sarat’s subjectivity for the most part, American War nevertheless makes one thing clear: Sarat is not drawn to death as an innate function of her nature. Rather, she is made into an instrument of death through the inescapable toxicity of her death-world. Yet, as a child, Sarat is fascinated by the “tiny living worlds” of wood planks, mosquitoes, fish in the river. She believes they are “the veins and arteries through which life’s magic flowed” (El Akkad 24). Born in Louisiana, she moves north with her family as climate refugees. The omniscient narrator describes the decades of levee work and concrete seawalls, evidence of the “optimistic notion” in the United States that human engineering could outwit rising sea levels without addressing the root causes (55), in a stunning and lyrical iteration of Berlant’s definition of “cruel optimism.” Water, loosed by climate change, becomes both threat and symbolic redemption. Waterways are indeed the “veins and arteries” of the world, essential for life on the planet, and their alteration is a symptom of dying ecosystems on a rapidly heating planet. After her release from Sugarloaf, Sarat is given a room with a view of the river at Simon and Karina’s house. Benjamin notes that Sarat “seemed to retract slightly at the mention of the river, as though some primal mechanism of defense deep within her had been triggered” (266). Confronting her water-triggered trauma, Sarat later stands in a river: the water “did not heal her wounds, it cauterized” (298). Connecting Sarat’s complicated experience of waterways as traumatized, traumatizing, and life-giving, Benjamin reflects that he had been “raised in the shadow of walls” by his protective and middle-class mother, but Sarat “was of the river” (272). The natural world, and particularly water, threatens human societies and has been a tool wielded for torture, but it is also necessary for nurturing human life. The novel suggests that what cannot be healed may yet be cauterized.
Like her association with water, Sarat’s queerness marks her as beautifully fleshed, a being of her world and present in it. She carries in her the possibilities of a way of life that is more loving, more tender, more joyous than the external world that cages her. During her release, the plane she is in flies over the Florida Sea, and though she cannot see it with her damaged eyes, she knows the sea “would remain real even if every last pair of eyes in the world went blind” (259). It is this emphasis on the dual potential of water, the dual potential of Sarat, that clarifies her ability to queer the novel. That is, because her voice is effectively silenced, she can neither advocate for nor justify her choices. All that the reader has to work with are Sarat’s refusals of identification with the claims of various political forces that seek to use her as, variously, a child victim, a guerrilla fighter, and a terrorist or martyr.
Warfare is about the use of bodies to destroy bodies. Queer theory is about the ways that bodies create spaces for being contrary to the normative world. At tension in Sarat’s very being, then, are the forces of destruction and of vibrant, world-creating imagination. As a child, Sarat instinctively “un-knows” the logic of warfare. Through her eyes, she queers the ordinary and systemic violence of her life. When she is playing with other refugee children at Camp Patience, she is dared to step into a creek known as Emerald Creek—an effluent creek contaminated by wastewater. She agrees, slips, and is covered in the filth and stink. Her mother chases her from their tent when she tries to return home, castigating her for becoming even dirtier in a world already so precarious. Marcus, her friend, tells her to apologize, but Sarat says, “I’m not sorry.” She explains herself: “They pretend like this is normal, like it’s normal to live this way. But it’s not normal” (107). She leans into the stink, literally: she wears filth on her body as a mute outcry against the fragility of their lives, the impoverished precarity in which they dwell. But the other children know only the camps, and none of them understand her vision. Without a baseline to compare their lives to, Sarat somehow is able to denormalize their reality.
Gaines attempts to radicalize Sarat by teaching her lyrics, a sort of script that trains her not to accept “anesthetics” to life. He explains that “wealth,” along with material necessities, family, even God, may be stripped away, and indeed have already been stripped from her (136). He teaches her to see the paucity and precarity of her life. However, Sarat responds to learning of her world’s precarity by recruiting other children to “liberate” material goods from the camp’s administrative buildings and distribute them to other refugee families. When Simon waterproofs his own family’s tent before a storm, Martina critiques her son for not waterproofing others’ tents (148). Sarat explains their mother’s anger to Simon, saying he should have helped others too. Simon responds that he didn’t have time to “waste” on tent waterproofing; he was hunting and killing a Blue soldier (156–57). Sarat instinctively privileges care for the community over the nationalism Gaines inculcates in her and in Simon. When Marcus and his father escape the camps to go work in the North, Sarat knows she should believe them guilty of desertion, or even treason, but “she wished only that he be safe there. That he live, that he simply live” (154). Even after her training as a Red guerrilla fighter, the first time Sarat sees an “enemy” Blue soldier, she thinks that he “was of the same species, the same breed” as she is (166). Her mental resistance to indoctrination and the violence of desperation, in other words, remains intact—until Sugarloaf.
For a life to be grievable, Butler claims, it must be apprehended as life. In Frames of War, Butler explains that a human “being” is a socially constructed concept; to be perceived as a being is to be perceived as one who is (being), and so social structures that ignore or erase entire classes or conditions of being render such lives ungrievable. Loss is predicated on a thing having “been” in the first place (3). Sarat, a child of war and climate disaster, is so illegible that her displacement, deracination, and torture are not “grievable.” A person treated like a pathogen, invisible yet dangerous, she becomes a biological weapon infecting the political state with her own body. But she began as a person who saw the veins and arteries of a still-living world, who did not see the world as it is but as it might have been.
Because of the novel’s refusal to bear witness to Sarat’s agency in how Sarat chooses to die and why she chooses that death, readers become complicit in the failed testimony of the novel. Refused cognitive understanding, readers find that all that is left is a deep recognition of pain. In Climate Lyricism, Min Hyoung Song calls out the importance of affective readings of texts that imagine not only the experience of impending disaster but more specifically our—readers’—bodily experience. Climate literature that draws attention to the affective body helps us understand that our “feelings of concern or anxiety or even terror are not something to apologize for, or feel ashamed about, or pretend don’t exist” (210). While Song’s book focuses on the power of lyricism to shift alarm into action, despair into resilience, resisting the association of climate disaster with apocalypse, American War leans into affective terror. Sarat’s silencing becomes the reader’s betrayal at the hands of the novel’s narrator. Betrayed, helpless, ill-informed, angry, unable to identify with Sarat or condemn her outright, readers have few options as they close the novel—few options, perhaps, but many difficult feelings. American War imposes an affective experience that not only resonates but amplifies, clarifies, and gives language to the conditions of the present American epoch.
American War projects the worsening effects of climate disaster and of conflicts in the United States over class, race, and resources to imagine the consequences of the necropolitical practices and policies of the United States intensified through domestic war and terror. Instead of presenting trauma as a state of exception, the novel presents it as an inarticulable and ongoing present, the “structural and ongoing” crisis Berlant describes (7). No story, fictional or otherwise, can create real-world action. It is people who act, not fictions. But El Akkad’s novel creates in readers an affective state from which action can be taken. Anger, after all, is an activated state. American War forces readers’ attention onto this one ungrievable life in order to ask of readers not that they cathartically work through trauma, nor that they bear silent witness, nor yet that they respond with either sympathy or condemnation. Instead, readers are confronted with narratological betrayal, replicating cycles of violence, and a call to recognize—and most importantly to feel—what Sarat felt: anger at the violence of the systems that made such mass death an inevitable sum in its calculus of pain.
