Internment

The camp is situated in a particularly stunning, remote stretch of the Sierra Nevada desert. From the moment Layla arrives, she is taken by the stark beauty of the snow-tipped mountains, the umbrella night sky plashed with stars, and the rugged arrangements of giant boulders. She is her father’s daughter, with the heart of a poet. “The landscape is bleak,” Layla records as the caravan approaches the gates of the camp, “but undeniably beautiful” (61).

What puzzles Layla, however, is how nature could be so beautiful and yet the camp so ugly. She asks, “Can nature be ironic?” (166). What Layla learns during her stay at the camp is how nature may be alluring, its accidental collisions of lines, shapes, and colors stunning to an appreciative eye, but ultimately nature is indifferent. Reflecting the sobering credo of the turn-of-the-last century naturalists—among them Stephen Crane whom Layla quotes—for Layla nature is not immoral; it is indifferent to the human evil the camp represents. For all its intoxicating beauty, the landscape has no sympathy concerning the chaos created by humanity.

Later when Layla is assigned work detail in the camp’s vegetable garden, she relishes the generous warmth of the sun, basking in it during the hours spent outside the claustrophobic confines of her family’s trailer. She savors thrusting her hands deep into the treated soil of the garden and carefully planting seeds. For her, the process suggests her own efforts to build a coalition of protesters among the camp detainees. She wants nature to confirm her efforts and to endorse the campaign for freedom. But she understands nature has no sense of what is happening at the camp; it is serene in its indifference and chilling in its determination to abide—despite humanity, not because of it. Nature thus aggravates Layla’s already profound sense of the camp’s remoteness and her own psychological sense of smallness and helplessness. As she argues, “The simple loveliness of the sky and sun and mountains makes me feel like nature is complicit in my country’s betrayal, its lack of interest itself amoral” (61). She understands that her appreciation of the beauty of nature will be forever marred by her memories of Mobius” (226).

The conventional wisdom is that the age of reading is long over. Some propose that Millennials and their successors are the first generations of so-called a-literates—people able to read but without much interest in reading—and that visual media and digital communications have made the written word an amusing and irrelevant act of nostalgia. Ahmed begs to differ. Internment is a novel, not a protest march, a petition, a law or a film. More specifically, it is a novel full of writers, teeming with quotes from fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The work is designed, by the author’s own admission, to spur readers to take action in the name of what is right. That resistance begins with words. Layla is a writer, and her resistance to the evil of the camp begins with her sitting down one sleepless night and writing down her observations about the camp operations—writings that will be secreted out of the camp and ultimately launched into the broad expanse of social media.

“Have you read any Nietzsche?” Layla asks Ayesha early in her time at the camp. It is perhaps an odd question when posed in an illegal internment camp for Muslim Americans where survival is most people’s sole concern. But when Ayesha, who hesitates to believe that a ragtag group of misfit teenagers can do anything to close the camp, voices her concerns, Layla asks whether she is familiar with Nietzsche's quote, “All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with and I can turn the world upside down” (163). Here, the novel endorses the power of language to effect change in a world. The novel is threaded with references to Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Jane Austen, Dante, John Lennon, Ursula K. LeGuin, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Miller, and other writes who inspire Layla. In turn, Layla uses the power of words to inspire the camp detainees. In truth, poets do not topple governments or close relocation camps. But poets inspire those who do. Writers give voice to those who cannot find their way to adequate expression; they give voice to a culture at pitched moments when it is undergoing massive change, both for the good and for the not-so-good. In writing an essentially cautionary tale to her own troubled and troubling era, author Ahmed affirms what her novel affirms: the power of the word not to change the world—that is the overripe rhetoric of idealists—but rather to effect change by raising awareness and inspiring action.