The True American

Sunday Book Review


Pledges of Allegiance

‘The True American,’ by Anand GiridharadasBy AYAD AKHTARMAY 8, 2014
Continue reading the main story Ten days after 9/11, self-professed “Texas loud, Texas proud” Mark Stroman walked into a Dallas mini-mart, pulled out a gun and asked the brown man working behind the counter where he was from. The hesitation in the clerk’s reply was enough to unleash Stroman’s hatred for Muslims, whom he referred to as people with “shawls on their face.” Stroman pulled the trigger, but his victim, Raisuddin Bhuiyan, an enterprising immigrant from Bangladesh — and a Muslim, indeed — would survive. The other two victims from the fortnight’s vigilante shooting spree, immigrants from India and Pakistan, would not. So begins Anand Giridharadas’s “The True American,” a richly detailed, affecting account of two men bound, as it turned out, by more than just an act of violence.

Bhuiyan’s misfortune served as an introduction to certain stark realities of American life: The day after being admitted to the hospital, he was asked to leave. The injury was serious, yes, but he was told he would be fine. What Bhuiyan didn’t know was that, without insurance, the hospital assessors saw bills mounting that weren’t going to be paid. They saw a “fledgling immigrant and gas station clerk,” Giridharadas writes, and assumed he wouldn’t be good for the money. One of the many satisfying twists of this trauma-filled book is that he would be. Another is the conclusion Bhuiyan comes to about American debt: that it “contradicted those attributes of the republic for which he had left” Bangladesh. In America, debt “bound you to history, and kept you who you were, and replaced the metaphor of the frontier with that of a treadmill.”

With Stroman identified and apprehended, the tale begins its tack toward deeper emotional waters. The author’s questioning, compassionate account of the trial and subsequent sentencing opens us to the possibility that Stroman — despite his rabid racism, his swastika tattoo and passion for Hitler, despite his avowed and continued pride in having killed “Arabs” — is not just a monster. He is also the product of a cycle of poverty and neglect, with a mother who once told him she had been $50 short of having the money required to abort him; a young charge turned over to a state system of detention and incarceration from which he sought, at times with great heart, to escape. Giridharadas’s ability to initiate the reader into this humane perspective serves him well for the book’s narrative centerpiece, which begins once a jury sentences Stroman to death for murdering one of his other victims.

Bhuiyan, after leaving behind a promising career as a Bangladeshi Air Force officer in order to toil behind mini-mart counters and, later, at a local Olive Garden — where he learns to become an expert at suggesting wine pairings to customers, despite, as a practicing Muslim, not drinking alcohol himself — decides that the inauspicious American welcome will not be a deterrent to fulfilling his American dream. Once healed enough to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, he’s reminded of a promise he made to his Lord as he lay behind the counter on that fateful day, covered in his own blood: “If you give me my life back today, I will . . . dedicate my life for others.”

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“Others” comes to mean, for a time at least, Mark Stroman. Inspired by a message of mercy he found in the Quran and in tales of the Prophet Muhammad’s life, Bhuiyan defines a course of action as unlikely as it is inspiring: He will work to have his attacker spared from death row. It is a great strength of Giridharadas’s telling that Bhuiyan can often seem as inspired by himself as he is by his mission, and that the message of Islam’s inherent mercy comes to seem more important to him than the humanity of the man who so clearly denied Bhuiyan his own.

Just as Bhuiyan finds in his faith a transformative and inspirational power, Stroman’s confrontation with inevitable death effects a similar change. Moved by Bhuiyan’s work on his behalf, tormented by his years on death row — days so lacking in human contact, a fellow prisoner went insane, pulled his own eye out and ate it — Stroman begins to find a version of love and empathy. He is profoundly moved by a passage from Viktor E. Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”: “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.’ ” As with Bhuiyan’s mission, one is left to wonder about how much of Stroman’s change is calculated self-presentation, a tension that only strengthened this reader’s engagement with the material.

A story that could have told itself, and bluntly — with the march to mercy and forgiveness as inevitable as the orchestral swells in an issues-driven Hollywood weepie — becomes something more expansive. Giridharadas seeks less to uplift than illuminate. And the unexpected connections he draws can be remarkable: Bhuiyan, a victim of what the author aptly calls “an American version of tribal law,” reaches back into his own tribal Islamic background to “seek support for showing Stroman forgiveness.” Elsewhere, Giridharadas writes of the music playing on Dallas’s countless country music radio stations, music each man would have listened to, hearing with decidedly different ears the same reminders: “To stay simple no matter how fortune blessed you; never to forget your God; to distrust the temptations of the corrupting metropolis; to live for family; to grow better than you used to be.”

Bhuiyan, Stroman. Extremes along the continuum of American identity, each an example with much to tell us about who we are. The one, an immigrant who, by dint of pluck and abilities, comes to embody some of the best of our nation’s values, as well as a trace of that unseemly, self-­promoting daemon so central to the American self. The other, born and raised in Texas, defined by the narrow creed of his love for motorcycles and guns and naked women, reveals the costs of a nation beholden to ruthless competition and relentless individualism, a society that winnows out the less capable, the more damaged, and where festering rage seeks a violent discharge. Which of these men is the “true American” of the title? That there is no simple answer to that question is Giridharadas’s finest accomplishment.

THE TRUE AMERICAN



Murder and Mercy in Texas



By Anand Giridharadas



319 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95.