Blood, destiny, and ‘Disgraced’

Disgraced portrays the relationships among four seemingly assimilated young urban professionals in New York: a Pakistani-American lawyer, his WASP wife, a Jewish art curator and his wife, an African-American lawyer. Although these four colleagues outwardly seem good friends, by the final curtain their ancient tribal enmities have bubbled to the surface — inevitably, Akhtar suggests — with destructive consequences.

Such a disaster could surely occur wherever people of divergent backgrounds cross paths, even in a civilized melting pot like New York. Yet my wife and I have experienced similar cultural encounters, in the U.S. and abroad, with precisely the opposite result.

Some years ago, for example, we became friendly with an Iranian-born professor and his wife who had settled in Philadelphia. Like the lawyer Amir in Disgraced, our friends had escaped a repressive Muslim regime and had forsaken Islam to embrace secular humanism. As we got to know them, our ancient tribal enmities did not bubble to the surface. Quite the contrary: My wife and I — both the products of pure Jewish bloodlines extending back beyond Moses — gradually came to realize that we shared more ideas and feelings with this Persian couple than we did with many of our Jewish friends (and certainly more than with the Jewish mobs currently marching through Jerusalem chanting “Death to Arabs”). So why are some people paralyzed by the blood ties of the bigoted past while others have broken free?

Putin, Xi and self-loathing

To BSR reader Gerald Riesenbach, Disgraced exposes “the very difficult issue of how we overcome the influence of our parents” as well as the guilt suffered by those who reject their parents’ teachings. To therapist SaraKay Smullens, Disgraced demonstrates “that all prejudice is born of grave feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing, which becomes, for understandable reasons, inbred in a culture, and then each feeds the other” — prejudices and hatreds that were instilled with “mother’s milk” and consequently can’t be intellectualized away. (Read their letters here.)

These are surely valid points. I may have sounded flippant when I suggested that four such urbane characters would have turned to a therapist for help, but in fact this is precisely what therapy is about: the difficult work of digging out the immobilizing neuroses of the past so we don’t transmit them to the next generation as our ancestors have done.

Akhtar invites us to empathize with Muslim fury — surely a useful exercise, since anger fueled by humiliation seems to be a recurring theme in Muslim and/or Arab culture. The same theme seems to recur in other cultures as well. Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China have solidified their power by fixating on their people’s alleged past humiliations at the hands of the West. Or think of Garry Trudeau’s fictitious Afghan warlord, who explains, “I’m essentially a man of peace. I just have a few scores to settle — mostly from the 14th century.”

One last wish

Yet national humiliation plays little or no role today in the cultural narrative of many other peoples — the French, say, or the Spanish or the Czechs. The culture of the Jews, supposedly history’s great victims, laments their persecution and genocide, but humiliation is rarely mentioned. The British pride themselves on their phlegmatic stiff-upper-lip response to disasters large and small: even the loss of their global empire.

You know the old joke about the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the Russian who’ve been granted one last wish before their execution? The Frenchman replies: “I wish to spend a weekend in Paris with my mistress.”

The Englishman replies: “I wish to take a walk through the Cotswolds with my dog.”

The Russian replies: “I wish that my neighbor’s barn should burn down.”

I wish Akhtar had explored this question: Why do some cultures seem to stew in their resentments while others shrug them off?

The joke above notwithstanding, cultural narratives aren’t fixed in stone. Germany and Japan were once the world's most militaristic societies; today, they rank among the world's most pacifist societies. The French and the English hated each other for centuries. The French and the Germans hated each other for centuries. As Sam Katz’s recent documentary Urban Trinity vividly reminded us, America’s Protestants violently fought the arrival of Irish Catholics, who in turn fought the arrival of Italian Catholics, who in turn fought the arrival of Polish Catholics. America’s German Jews and Russian Jews similarly once detested each other. Cultural hostilities that seemed so central only a few generations ago are all but forgotten today.

He crossed social boundaries

The 20th-cenury real estate mogul Albert M. Greenfield (the subject of my recent biography) gleefully flouted the conventional notion that society functions best when people stick to their own kind. Instead Greenfield crossed social, religious, and ethnic boundaries with impunity. In the 1920s he formed a friendship with Dennis Cardinal Dougherty, the Archbishop of Philadelphia from 1918 to 1951, that led to the greatest real estate expansion in the archdiocese’s history. In the 1930s he joined with the Catholic contractors Jack Kelly and Matthew McCloskey to transform Philadelphia’s moribund Democratic party from an appendage of the Republican machine into a viable opposition. In the 1950s he joined hands with WASP mayor Richardson Dilworth and Quaker city planner Edmund Bacon to transform Philadelphia’s historic district into the vibrant upscale neighborhood we know today as Society Hill. He racially integrated Center City’s hotels and hired Philadelphia’s first black bus drivers. He put women in charge of some of his companies, which was unheard of at the time. In the process of forming these and many more “odd couple” alliances, Greenfield demonstrated the rich rewards — not only financial but also psychological — that await people willing to venture beyond their immediate familiar circles.

Of course such an effort entails risk — just as reaching inside oneself to dig out the cancers of our families and cultures involves tremendous risk. It involves the courage to confront what SaraKay Smullens calls "grave feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing” within ourselves rather than project our anger onto our neighbors. Whatever flaws I may have found in Disgraced, Ayad Akhtar deserves our gratitude for pushing that risk/reward question to the forefront of our conversation.