Last night I finished the book INTERNMENT by Samira Ahmed. This book is brave, extremely frightening, immensely profound, and a must read for everyone you know.
From GoodReads:
Rebellions are built on hope.
Set in a horrifying near-future United States, seventeen-year-old Layla Amin and her parents are forced into an internment camp for Muslim American citizens.
With the help of newly made friends also trapped within the internment camp, her boyfriend on the outside, and an unexpected alliance, Layla begins a journey to fight for freedom, leading a revolution against the internment camp's Director and his guards.
Heart-racing and emotional, Internment challenges readers to fight complicit silence that exists in our society today.
Internment has already been optioned by The Gotham Group and Chariot Entertainment to become a movie.
The most frightening part of this story is that it felt like it could become real. It's a tale of division and fear, Islamophobia and racism, power and compliance... It is at once a stark warning and a call to action. Young adult readers will love how gripping this story feels.
This book shines a light on what has happened in the past and what could, very easily, happen again given our political climate.
Some of my favorite parts:
There are a million shards in my heart, but the one that really stabs is having my damn phone taken away. Maybe it's dumb to think of it this way, but it's not only my phone. It's all my pictures, every memory of school and tennis team and David. I stifle my sobs. Dread clutches me, but so does anger. They didn't merely take my phone; they took my voice, my choice.
There are seats on these trains; they're not cattle cars - like the kind I've seen in history text books - carrying people to their deaths. But we are being forced onto them with no real idea of where we're going or what to expect at the end of the line. I feel pressed. Like when we read The Crucible last year. I couldn't wrap my mind around Giles Corey being pressed to death - stones being laid upon his chest, one after another, to make him admit to witchcraft, and he refused to speak except to say "More weight" when they urged him to confess. That's what the air feels like in this car, why it feels hard to breathe. We're being pressed by fear and hatred and the law.
I wonder if others felt this way - the Japanese Americans who were imprisoned during World War II. Did they also feel this surreal separation from the experience, like they were detached from their bodies, watching themselves enter this camp, like ghosts, shades of who they were? Did they wonder how long they would be here? Could they have imagined it would be years? Did some try to block it all out, compartmentalize, imagine that it was only one more day? Because we aren't even through this giant electronic gate yet and I feel like my real life is already a million miles away.
"Look what we've done?" I respond. "Look what you've done. Nothing. You stood by during the election, thinking that none of this would come to pass, that the racism and xenophobia running rampant during the campaign was hot air. And then you stayed silent while your rights were stripped away, and you quietly packed your things and let yourselves be taken prisoner. All of you. All of us. We've offered ourselves up in some kind of twisted Abrahamic sacrifice. But no lamb will be offered instead of us. It's our necks waiting for the ax to fall. We have to be our own miracle -" My mom clamps her hand over my mouth, silencing my speech.
In American Lit class once, we discussed America as a metaphor tying it into how the country is represented in books, movies, songs. You know, America is a melting pot. America is a mixed salad. America is a shining city on a hill. America is the country where a skinny kid with a funny name can defeat the odds and become president. But America doesn't seem like any of those things anymore. Maybe it never was.
Maybe if I keep my eyes closed, this version of the world will vanish, and Mobius and the Exclusion Laws will fade into the smoky blur of my nightmares. I think of all the people throughout history who found themselves in a place like this, stepping out from the shadows, raising their voices. Finding their courage, facing their fears so that they could be free. There were so many we lost, the ones who were taken, cut down, for the color of their skin, or the religion they practiced, or the person they loved.
The Author's Note at the end of the book should be required reading.
No moment in American history exists in a vacuum. Nationalism and fascism are not new; indeed, they are a part of American soil. This fact gave birth to this novel. The events in Internment - though they take place "fifteen minutes" into America's future - are deeply rooted in our history. You are bearing witness to them now, in our present.
America is a nation, yes, but it is also an idea, based on a creed. I hold these truths to be self-evident. That the concept of our nation is neither musty nor static. That it is malleable. That every day we can shape it and stretch it to form a more perfect, inclusive union. America is us. America is ours. It is worth fighting for.
Get this book for every young adult you know.
For a better understanding of power... how to acquire it and how to keep it... watch What Machiavellian Really Means on TEDEd
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