Chapter 4 Summary and Analysis
Chapter 4: God’s Country
While driving home after a weekend spent with his parents, Ayad was pulled over because his car was emitting white smoke. Initially friendly, the state trooper helped him prop open the hood to inspect the source of the trouble. He recommended that Ayad have the car towed to a garage whose owner he knew. Because the officer seemed cheery and upbeat, Ayad decided to answer his probing questions more honestly than he typically did when faced with questions about his origin. He had learned after the September 11 attacks that admitting that his parents were Pakistani immigrants was often met with provocation and fear. He typically told people that his name was Indian, which elicited a far less antagonistic response.
When the officer inquired about the origin of Ayad’s last name, Ayad answered that the name was Egyptian. After being questioned further, he told the officer that his parents were born in India but had moved to Pakistan before moving to the United States. The officer’s tone immediately changed. He asked where Ayad had been born; lying, Ayad identified Wisconsin as his place of birth instead of Staten Island. After all, he had spent almost his entire childhood in Wisconsin. The officer began talking about the origins of the hijackers of the planes on September 11, pointing out that the leader himself was from Egypt.
As the officer excused himself to make a phone call, Ayad was certain that he was running a background check on him. When the tow truck pulled up, the officer returned and pointed out that Ayad had lied about his place of birth. Ayad negated this information, telling the officer that “it was a long story.”
Ayad learned that the garage would not be open until the following morning, at which time someone would inspect the damage and then contact him with an estimate. Stuck in Scranton overnight, Ayad settled into a hotel room and recalled the time he spent with Mary learning to analyze his dreams. Mary had encouraged him to read Freud, though she adamantly insisted that Freud got many ideas wrong; nonetheless, Freud’s work contained a depth that none before had touched. Mary persuaded Ayad years prior to sleep with a pencil in his hand and a notepad by his bed. When he woke up, he was to jot down all of the details from his dreams so that he could analyze them later.
That night in Scranton, Ayad dreamed about a wedding; this was followed by a dream of being in the midst of a group of pilgrims who made their way up a steep hill only to arrive at an empty grave. The next morning, Ayad tried to connect these dreams and realized that both were associated with his uncle Shafat. Shafat’s first wife, who was Pakistani, discovered that he was having an affair with a white woman and left him. Thus, Shafat was now preparing to marry his mistress, who also happened to be Christian.
Before meeting her, Shafat made an egregious error one night in a bar. He had chosen to talk politics and reminded those in the bar that America had once funded the group who later became the Taliban. Furthermore, he claimed that this group had not always been the “monsters” whom Americans now believed them to be. As he exited the bar, two officers confronted him, alleging that he had been reported for making threats against America. They took him to jail and locked him in a cell with a veteran who had not been taking his antipsychotic medications. The officers...
(This entire section contains 1262 words.)
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referred to Shafat as a member of the “American Taliban,” which proved just the spark they were looking for. As the veteran beat Shafat, the officers pulled up chairs and popped open cans of beer. Shafat ended up with broken ribs and internal bleeding.
It was not long after this attack that Shafat began an affair with a Christian, white woman; Ayad became convinced that Shafat’s interest in her was directly linked to the events of that night. Shafat would later convert to Christianity and try to convince other members of his family to do the same. To Ayad, this was his attempt to finally fit into a Christian land.
Ayad, who is not a practicing Muslim nor a believer in its tenets, also rejects the foundational principles of Christianity. In America, he claims, Christianity is woven into every facet of life—in deeper ways than the holiday festivities that include pastel eggs and decorated trees. As an outsider, Ayad finds that traces of Christianity can be seen in summer beach vacations, high credit card debt, men’s ties which made it difficult for him to breathe, and a range of verbs imitating those in the King James Bible.
The garage finally called with an estimate of nine hundred dollars to repair a head gasket. Ayad did not have the cash but had just enough available balance left on one credit card that he could pay for it. In fact, he was already carrying around fifty thousand dollars of debt to various credit cards and debt collectors. When he arrived to make the payment, the garage owner mentioned that he was the state trooper’s uncle. He then told Ayad that they had replaced not only the gasket but also the catalytic converter. His total balance due was actually twenty-five hundred dollars. Ayad protested, realizing that the owner was hustling him because of his origins. He threatened to call the police, and the owner encouraged him to do so, pointing out that his wife worked there. He threatened to hold Ayad’s car until he came up with the appropriate funds, and Ayad found that he had no choice but to call his bank and ask for them to raise his credit limit. They agreed but only under the stipulation that they would also raise his interest rate on the entire balance of fifteen thousand.
This experience was pivotal in Ayad’s development. While driving home, he was determined to stop living his life while pretending that he “felt like an American.”
Analysis
In this section, Ayad asks what it means to be an American. His own parents had immigrated legally and had held degrees and positions of affluence. Ayad himself was born in the United States. Yet after decades of living in America, he still feels that he exists distinctly outside America’s sphere of acceptance. He has learned to hide his origins so that he will not face too much hostility, carefully choosing his words so that Americans who don’t know the true history of the Pakistani people will feel more at ease around him. He has learned to keep his guard up as a means of protecting himself from those who became immediately suspicious after hearing his name.
After many years of effort, Ayad still cannot integrate himself into the rituals and customs that seem to be an innate part of the traditional American experience. Moreso, he has learned that he does not want such integration. Ayad looks at his uncle’s conversion as shameful, believing that he has chosen the path of least resistance in order to assimilate more fully into American culture. In his dream, Ayad symbolically compares this choice to Shafat’s being a “dead man” who has forgotten and abandoned his native land. Ayad won’t make the same choice; he is determined, much like his mother, to remain true to his culture and history.
