Tracing Loss in Times of Rapid Climate Change: Figures of Absence in Omar El Akkad’s American War

ABSTRACT Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) presents a dark vision of what the United States might devolve into if climate change, haphazard adaptation, and the political polarisation of the country continue unchecked. Analysing the four overarching facets of trace—visibility, materiality, environment, and human interaction—on the level of the novel’s narrative composition, the article argues that El Akkad offers more than just a cognitively estranged story about the making of a future American terrorist. Foregrounding the complex relationship between its central protagonist’s personal losses and the bitter war she fights in a climate-changed environment, American War deliberately employs what El Akkad has called “weaponized empathy” to allow readers to understand on a visceral level what drives people’s thoughts and actions once they have been robbed of the things and people they care for and embody the traces of what has been lost.

this landscape of loss that the novel confronts readers with Sarat Chestnut, "an innocent child living in neutral territory at its start and an embittered and extreme insurrectionist by its close", a woman who has been shaped into a terrorist by the world she lives in and what it has taken from her. 3 Representing positive emotions such as (place) attachment along with more negative ones such as pain, grief, and rage, American War interweaves the traces left behind by a carbon-fueled world with its foregrounded story about borders, brotherhoods, and suicide bombers.
In what follows, I will examine these traces from the perspective of cognitive ecocriticism, an interdisciplinary research field that draws on contextual and cognitive narratology on the one hand, and environmentally oriented approaches to literature on the other. I will first turn to cognitive narratology to elucidate on the level of narrative composition what Monica Class calls the "four overarching facets of trace: visibility, materiality, environment, and human interaction". 4 The following three sections will then take a closer look at how these different facets of trace appear in American War to demonstrate that El Akkad offers more than just a dark story about the making of a future American terrorist. Section two explores the novel's worldbuilding and the way it uses traces to make visible what has been lost due to climate change. Section three continues this investigation by paying attention to the materiality of absence along with the traces left behind on reshaped environments and disfigured human bodies. Finally, section four will turn to the final, and perhaps most important facet of tracehuman interactionwith a closer look at what El Akkad has called "weaponized empathy" and the work it does in his novel. 5 I will argue that by foregrounding the relationship between its central protagonist's personal losses and the war she fights in an estranged future environment, American War invites readers to viscerally experience the complex mix of affects that drive people's thoughts and actions once they have been robbed of the things they care for and are embodying the traces of what has been lost.

Reading Trace from the Perspective of Cognitive Narratology
Analysing traces in speculative climate fiction starts with a clarification of what exactly we have in mind when we speak of a trace. The German philosopher Sybille Krämer has defined it as a figure of absence. 6 Traces, Krämer suggests, do not show us the absent itself but rather direct our attention to the very fact of its absence. However, as Dominique Fliegler notes, "this does not mean at all that the trace is vanishing into the world of immateriality, because its perception is indispensably bound to the existence of substance". 7 There is thus materiality implicit in the trace, even if that materiality is no longer there. "The materiality of the trace", writes Fliegler, which could possibly be termed as indicating materiality, consists of the material context surrounding the trace … . The material becomes the medium by which one can converge to the immaterial, the trace is the agent between the present and the absent, functioning as a maker into the past. 8 3 Hartland, Review of American War. 4 Class, this issue. 5 Crawford, Interview Omar El Akkad. 6 Krämer, "Was also ist eine Spur?," 15. 7 Fliegler, "The Meaning of Traces, " 91. 8 Ibid., emphasis mine.
We might thus say that the trace is objectively there in the material world-not necessarily visible, but measurable, perhaps, by empirical scientific methods or indicating the former presence of that which created the trace. Krämer argues that it is also a question of attention and sensory perception, and of the interpretative skill of the beholder. Reading the visible tracks of a deer in the snow, for example, does not necessarily require scientific investigation. 9 But it does depend on the presence of an interpreting agent who notices the trace and, ideally, is knowledgeable enough to connect the imprint in the snow to the animal that left it behind.
In the case of literary traces, it is also a question of narration, since traces are silent if a narrator chooses not to mention them. One of the many fascinating aspects of literature is that it is up to the authors to decide what they mention and what they omit, thereby guiding the imagination of readers. Novelists and their narrators take advantage of this fact by distributing information strategically to enhance suspense, create surprise or, as it is the case in Percival Everett Glyph, to demonstrate to (American) readers that they are culturally biased in a way that leads them to assume that a protagonist is (by default) white unless it is specifically mentioned otherwise. 10 The things that are mentioned in a narrative will prompt readers to imagine them in a complex mental process that is influenced by their own personal and cultural situatedness and involves the mirror neuron system in the human brain in a process that the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese has called embodied simulation. According to Gallese, it is a "non-conscious, pre-reflective functional mechanism of the brain-body system, whose function is to model objects, agents and events". 11 When we engage with narrative art forms, our embodied simulation becomes liberated, that is, it is freed from the burden of modeling our actual presence in daily life … . Through an immersive state in which our attention is focused on the narrated virtual world, we can fully deploy our simulative resources, letting our defensive guard against daily reality slip for a while. 12 And once we refocus our attention in this way towards narrative immersion, we will not only be enabled to feel with characters but also to imaginatively perceive their surrounding storyworlds.
Elaine Scarry reminds us that such imagined perception depends on at least two elements of narratives: (1) the sensory outcomes of a given thing as they are experienced by the narrators and characters whose minds we inhabit and (2) "the material conditions that made it look, sound, or feel the way it did". 13 That is, when something-let's say a wolf-is mentioned in a text, we will imagine the way it looks, moves, and sounds. Our imagination will be guided by our own previous experiences with (representations of) wolves and by the narrator's verbal evocation of the animal's material presence. It will also be guided by the sensory perceptions and affective response of characters. If a character finds the track of a wolf and is terrified, that affective response will inform our imagined perception of the animal through processes of empathetic sharing. We may not agree with the character's attitude towards the wolf, but we will simulate his sensory perceptions of it and emotional responses. 14 Research on embodied simulation in language understanding suggests that we do not only see such imagined perceptual objects before some inner eye but that we literally feel them in our bodies. Neuroscientist Arthur Jacobs and literary scholar Raoul Schrott explain that reading the sequence of letters that makes up the word 'radish' causes various sensoryresponse areas of the brain to become active, while 'ball' also causes movement centers to be active, and 'kiss' serves those that deal with emotions. The brain [thus] experiences events it is actually only reading about, and this power of simulation (mimesis, reliving) is an important basis of immersion, the neuronal substratum of the 'cinema of the mind'. 15 How much mimetic detail readers need to be able to simulate the bodily-perceptual feel of a narrative environment depends on their previous experiences and related emotional memories. It is also influenced by the degree of their alignment with and allegiance to various literary characters. 16 But it is clear that at least some information about the characters, the plot, and the storyworld is required to allow readers to imagine them.
However, in terms of reader engagement, the things that are not mentioned are just as important as the things that are. The German theorist of reception, Wolfgang Iser, famously highlighted the importance of what he called the "gaps" in literary texts. In Iser's view, these gaps-things that are left out, skipped, or only alluded to-engage the reader's imagination at least as much as the things that are there; it is the unwritten implications that invite readers to be active and creative. 17 What a narrator leaves unsaid or only hints at is in fact of the utmost importance to reader engagement, according to Iser, because it challenges us to use our own imagination to complete the narrative in a meaningful way.
Psychologist Richard Gerrig explains this imaginative process in terms of simulation. Readers, he writes, "must use their own experiences of the world to bridge the gaps in texts" and must invest their own emotions in order to "give substance to the psychological lives of characters". 18 These mental and physical performances of readers will be idiosyncratic to some degree, fueled by personal experiences, by historical and socio-cultural contexts, and by their immediate reading environments. Referring to the psycholinguistic research of Rolf Zwaan, Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen suggest that readers rely on "situation models" for these performances, which are in turn "constructed from 'experiential traces' left by prior embodied interactions with the world". 19 Narrative traces of things that aren't (or are no longer) present in a speculative future storyworld are thus co-constructed by authors, texts, and readers, and doing so involves at least two kinds of simulation processes: the involuntary embodied simulation that is triggered by 14 Depending on the nature of the narrative, and its use of focalization, we may also share the wolf's perceptions and feelings On the role of anthropomorphism in attributing consciousness to non-human characters, see chapter 4 of Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies. 15 Jacobs and Schrott, "Captivated by the Cinema of Mind," 130. 16 Smith, Engaging Characters, 84. 17 Iser,The Implied Reader,276. 18 Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds, 17. 19 Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen,With Body,[6][7] what is on the page, and the more deliberate, cognitive mode of simulation that draws on readers' previous life experiences. A look at the opening section of American War illustrates both of these processes.

Pictures of Loss: The Visibility of a Trace
Before its narrative even begins, American War confronts readers with the visible traces of an absence. The first page of the novel shows the following two maps Figure 1: At first glance, what might be most obvious to readers is the United States' changed southern border with Mexico and the "Mexican Protectorate" covering the entirety of today's Arizona as well most the territory of Texas, New Mexico, California, Nevada, and about half of Utah. As a visual help for their imagination, traces of the old state lines are still discernable and a darker colour marks the territory of the "Free Southern State" (covering most of today's Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia). What is no longer visible, however, and what gives the shape of the continent an eerie new outline, is the state formerly known as Florida. It is gone, entirely under water, with the exception of the "Sugarloaf Detention Facility"a prison built on top of today's Sugarloaf Mountain, which, by 2075, has turned into an island sticking out of the rising Atlantic.
American War thus opens by way of multimodal storytelling, which encompasses the integration of "nonverbal modes such as (the reproduction of) visual images like photographs or paintings, graphics, diagrams and sketches". 20 Before the verbal narration of the novel even begins, it has already communicated to the reader on the visual level an important and devastating absence in the dystopian world of 2075, present only in the traces it has left behind on the map and through the reader's perceptive and cognitive ability to relate those traces to current maps of the U.S. that still include the state of Florida. According to El Akkad, the future world depicted in his novel is "an analogous America" that allows him to speculate not only about the climatic and geopolitical future of the country but also about its potential social, economic, and emotional consequences. 21 Since the map of the country's drastically changed coastline and political space is placed opposite the first page of the novel's "Prologue", readers will likely have it on their minds when they start reading. A first-person narratorunnamed at this pointtells them that, when he was young, he "collected postcards", keeping them "in a shoebox under [his] bed in the orphanage". 22 Having spent most of his life "studying the history of war", the narrator "found some sense of balance in collecting snapshots of the world that was, idealized and serene". 23 He also tells readers that, over the course of his life, he repeatedly considered getting rid of the postcards, "worried that someone, a colleague from the university perhaps, would see [them] and think it a kind of political statement". 24 Keeping photographs of the past has become a potentially dangerous act by the time the narrator, a historian, writes down these lines, comparable to "the occasional secessionist flag or gutted muscle cars in the old Red country-impotent trinkets of rebellion, touchstones of a ruined and ruinous past". 25 The narrator is a Southerner by birth, who arrived in "New Anchorage-the neutral state" at the age of six and since then has been silent about his childhood in the American South. 26 The only things left from that time are the postcards he has collected, but unlike the map, their visuality is evoked using verbal imagery: 20  My favorite postcards are from the 2030s and 2040s, the last decades before the planet turned on the country and the country turned on itself. They featured pictures of the great ocean beaches before rising waters took them; images of the Southwest before it turned to embers; photographs of the Midwestern plains, endless and empty under bluest sky, before the Island exodus filled them with the coastal displaced. A visual reminder of America as it existed in the first half of the twenty-first century: soaring, roaring, oblivious. 27 The postcards all feature natural environments that the reader is cued to imagine through embodied simulation, only to then be told that they are no longer there, ruined by human activity. The rising sea levels, the wildfires, the influx of climate refugees-these are all the results of anthropogenic global warming. Readers are prompted to imagine both the existence of these places and their subsequent destruction, taking advantage of the fact that merely mentioning the before-and-after states will trigger images in readers' minds.
The narrator's collected postcards, then, are visual traces of a past remembered with a sense of nostalgic longing. Edward Casey reminds us that "nostalgia, contrary to what we usually imagine, is not merely a matter of regret for lost times; it is also a pining for lost places, for places we have once been in yet can no longer reenter". 28 But things are even more complicated here, since the narrator longs for lost places that, in the world of the contemporary reader, are not yet gone and yet they are cued by the text to share the narrator's (future) feelings through embodied simulation. I will turn to narrative empathy, as this process is usually called, in more detail in the final section of the paper-important here is that, even if such empathetic sharing is successful, there will necessarily remain some kind of incongruency since the narrator feels nostalgic about a bygone world that, for the reader, is still present. Jennifer Ladino has called this phenomenon "anticipatory nostalgia": a future-oriented form of eco-nostalgia that is based on the anticipation of future loss and regret. 29 In readers, it may lead to "solastalgic distress", an "eco-sickness" that, according to philosopher Glenn Albrecht, results from the "recognition that the place where one [currently] resides and that one loves is under immediate assault". 30 The postcards thus likely also engage readers' sensory imaginings and cognitive processing in ways that are different from those of the narrator. While for the narrator, they are visual traces left behind by a material environment that is already gone, the contemporary reader of the novel may engage in what the science fiction scholar Tom Moylan has called "an enlightened triangulation between an individual reader's limited perspective, the estranged re-vision of the alternative world on the pages of a given text, and the actually existing society". 31 Which is to say that readers may grasp that, unlike the narrator, they are still in a (temporal) position to do something about the matter. Like all environmental science fiction and much of climate fiction, American War uses extrapolation and cognitive estrangement to give readers a sense of what is at stake and make those stakes emotionally salient. 32 And it uses the visuality of trace-be it through the 27 El Akkad, American War, 3-4, emphasis mine. 28 Casey, Getting Back into Place, 3. 29 On anticipatory nostalgia and environmental loss, see also Slovic, Going Away. 30 Albrecht, "Solastalgia", 45. On solastalgia in climate fiction, see Kiernan, "Situating Solastalgia within Climate Fiction" and Weik von Mossner, "From Nostalgic Longing". 31 Moylan, Scrabs, xvi-xvii. 32 On the use of extrapolation and cognitive estrangement in environmental science fiction, see Otto, Green Speculations, 9. On such strategies in climate fiction, specifically, see Mehnert, Climate Change Fictions; Trexler, Anthropocene Fiction; Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies, chapter 5. multimodal use of an actual image or verbal imagery-to mark absences and connect its estranged and impoverished future to the rich familiar world of the contemporary reader. There is, however, another dimension to the narrator's remembrance of the world depicted in the old postcards. While he feels nostalgic about lost American environments, he seems to be more ambiguous about the human society that thrived in that lost past: "soaring, roaring, oblivious". 33 We learn that he belongs to "what they call the Miraculous Generation: those born in the years between the start of the Second American Civil War in 2074 and its end in 2095". 34 If this seems cynical, the narrator uses the same laconic voice to explain that "defining its generations by the conflicts that should have killed them" is nothing unusual in the history of the United States, and that his generation is no exception. We are the few who escaped the wrath of the homicide bombers and the warring Birds; the few who were spirited into well-stocked cellars or tornado shelters before the Reunification Plague spread across the continent. The few who were just plain lucky. 35 The narrator's very existence, old as he is now, cancer-stricken, disappointed, and close to death, in itself is a site of trace. If traces are "the marks left by an actor's or sufferer's passage", as Class has explained, then the narrator's mind and his once energetic body have been marked by the passage of the novel's protagonist, Sarat Chestnut. 36 The narrative situation of the novel therefore is important for its overall effect. Caracciolo and Kukkonen remind us that "focusing on experiences that we recognize as inherently private and first-person can have a peculiar effect: it creates a sense that the storyworld is experienced 'from' the protagonist's consciousness". 37 That certainly is the case in American War's Prologue, but things are complicated by the fact that its narrator is not the protagonist of the novel, even though he is embodied in the storyworld. His exact relationship to Sarat will become clear only much later in the story and is at this point kept as much in the dark as his name. What we do learn, however, is that he used to love Sarat, in fact still loves her at the time of writing, despite having been betrayed by her. "This isn't a story about war", he writes, "It's about ruin". 38 With that, his narration flashes back all the way to 2075 (the year given in the map) when Sarat is a six-year-old girl that is "still unbroken" and lives with her family in St. James Parish, Louisiana, only a few hundred feet away from the rising waters of the "Mississippi Sea". 39 The Presence of Absence: Oil Culture and the Embodied Materiality of Trace Even though the narrator admits to not knowing Sarat when she was still a child (he was not born until much later), he proceeds to describe the environment in which she grew up in a way that invites readers to imagine its material qualities: The coastal waters were brown and still. The sea's mouth opened wide over ruined marshland, and every year grew wider, the water picking away at the silt and sand and clay, until the old riverside plantations and plastics factories and marine railways became unstable. Before the buildings slipped into the water for good, they were stripped of their usable parts by the last of the delta's holdout residents. The water swallowed the land. To the southeast, the once glorious city of New Orleans became a well within the walls of its levees. 40 Immediately, the environment is identified by loss: loss of land, loss of home, loss of wealth, loss of life. It is worth noting that both the environment and the losses are not described in much detail, and yet the description is deeply evocative. Rich detail can aid in the mental effort of embodied simulation-especially if readers are not personally familiar with the object described. However, as Anežka Kuzmičová has argued, "there is no straightforward relation between the degree of detail in spatial description on one hand, and the vividness of spatial imagery and presence on the other". 41 Rather, readers' mental imagery and the illusion of presence in the storyworld arises from complex processes of sensorimotor resonance, as is the case in this passage. Coastal waters that are "brown and still" immediately give us a sense that something is off as they are supposed to be blue with white wave crests and teeming with movement and life. Knowing that this motionless, brown water is "swallow[ing] the land" likely adds to the unease, as is the imagination of New Orleans having turned into a "well". 42 Readers are also asked to imagine a marshland that is "ruined" and "unstable", formerly solid buildings "slip[ing] into the water", leaving barely a trace behind of their former existence and the lives of their inhabitants. Once again, there is ambiguity here since present-day St. James Parish is in the middle of the eighty-five-mile stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, known as "cancer alley", which contains over one-hundred-fifty petrochemical plants and refineries. 43 The water may be eating the land, but it is also swallowing an industry that has poisoned the land and the people, and that has greatly contributed to the climatic changes that are causing sea levels to rise. It is within this unstable, toxic, and disappearing environment that Sarat's impoverished family is trying to hold on to its own makeshift home: A hundred feet from the western riverbank, the Chestnuts lived in a corrugated steel container salvaged from a nearby shipyard. Wedges of steel plating anchored to cement blocks below the ground held the home in place. At the corners, a brown rust crept slowly outward, incubated by ceaseless humidity. A lattice of old-fashioned solar panels lined the entirety of the roof, save for one corner occupied by a rainwater tank. A tarp rested near the panels. When storms approached, the tarp was pulled over the roof with ropes tied to its ends and laced through hooks. By guiding the rainfall away from the panels to the tank and, when it overfilled, toward the land and the river below, the family was able to collect drinking water and defend their home from rust and decay. 44 As in the case of the larger environment, a few pieces of information about the Chestnut's home are enough to make clear that they live in precarious circumstances. Evoking the 40 Ibid., 11. 41 Kuzmičová, "Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative", 23. 42 El Akkad, American War, 11. 43 Castellón, Cancer Alley, 15. 44 El Akkad, American War, 13. mental image of a "corrugated steel container" that has been "salvaged" suggests that the family does not have the money to afford anything better. And yet, from today's perspective, their home is also remarkably self-sufficient. Not only is it equipped with (oldfashioned) solar panels, but it has also been outfitted for rainwater retention, suggesting a certain degree of oil independence.
Oil independence, both materially and emotionally, is an important theme throughout American War as it fuels the violent conflicts between those who are in favour and those who are against. Due to rapidly advancing climate change, the use of oil has been outlawed in the United States, leading to the secession of the self-declared "Free Southern State", which insists on its prerogative to continue polluting the atmosphere. This, in turn, has led to the Second American Civil War, which, once again, pits Northerners against Southerners. Meanwhile a new geopolitical force, the "Bouazizi Empire" in North Africa-a result of the Fifth Arabian Spring-trains and supports domestic terrorists in the seceded states to further destabilise the power position of the already weakened United States.
Arguably both cli-fi and petrofiction, American War thus not only shows a possible future America that is breaking apart over its oil addiction, but it also takes aim at current transnational conflicts. 45 As Martin Zähringer has noted, El Akkad's novel has turned on its head the current petro-geographic situation and projects the chaos that the U.S. has produced for decades in the Middle East back onto its own soil. 46 In the speculative future world of American War, the terrorists are Americans, and their racial and religious identities are mostly unclear, but the motivations that drive them to commit horrific attacks on other Americans retain recognisable traces of contemporary conflicts over oil and ideology.
We learn that Sarat's father "sneaked into the country from Mexico" and that, while her brother and sister have "inherited the brown of her father", she is the darkest of the three children, having inherited "the black of her mother". 47 But the narrator is hesitant to tell us more about her racial identity or how it figures into the path she is going to take in the course of the narrative, thereby creating what El Akkad calls "negative space". What he wants, as "a brown immigrant" in the United States, the author has explained, is "the right to talk about-or not talk about-my identity as much as I want. And trying to get at that negative space, as a kind of right, is a difficult thing to do". 48 An Egyptian Canadian who lives in the US, and a journalist who has covered the war in Afghanistan, the Arab Spring revolutions, and the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, El Akkad refuses to foreground race or religion as the main markers of identity in his novel. 49 It is a refusal that has irked some commentators, such as Dan Hartland, who has stated that "the absence of race from the mindsets of [the novel's] Americans feels a curious oversight". 50 It may feel curious, but it is not an oversight. Rather, we can conceive of El Akkad's "negative space" as yet another "figure of absence", another kind of trace, and being able to read it may depend on the reader's pre-existing knowledge of a racialized 45 For the relationship between climate fiction and petrofiction, see Bergthaller, "Cli-fi and Petrofiction". 46 Irtenkauf, "Climate Fiction -Climate Cultures". 47 El Akkad, American War, 18, 56. 48 Crawford, Interview El Akkad." 49 Brady, "The Novelist Omar El Akkad." 50 Hartland, Review of American War. American society. 51 "Is [El Akkad] really suggesting that in less than sixty years a civil war might be fought in the USA in which race has no purchase whatsoever?" asks Hartland. The answer is probably no, but as unrealistic as it may seem, the near-omission of race calls attention to the fact that, in this future American Civil War, oil is the divisive issue.
Unlike novels such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) (2015), American War does not depict a future in which the end of oil was brought about by some kind of apocalyptic disaster that wiped out most of humanity and left the survivors with few choices. Instead, the ban on fossil fuels was brought about by political will and a democratic process that some Americans chose not to accept. 52 The part of Louisiana in which Sarat lives is in a particularly precarious position both politically, sandwiched as it is between the secessionist states and the rising sea, and economically: Once, fossil fuels were a worthwhile currency, valuable enough to keep the Louisiana and Texas refineries economically viable … . But as the rest of the world learned to live off the sun and the wind and the splitting and crashing of atoms, the old fuel became archaic and worthless. 53 As a result, the refineries were shuttered, and jobs are now rare. Sarat's family subsists on food rations and what they can grow locally, but the girl is too young to understand how the larger socio-economic situation conditions her existence; she spends her time mostly outside playing with her siblings along the muddy slopes down to the Mississippi Sea, until her father goes on a boat trip to Baton Rouge in the hope to get a work permit that would allow his family to emigrate north and then dies there in a suicide bombing.
Although she was only five years old at the beginning of this war, Sarat is thus a product of both petroleum culture and its demise. Stephanie LeMenager argues that the petroleum infrastructure has become embodied memory and habitus for modern humans, insofar as everyday events such as driving or feeling the summer heat of asphalt on the soles of one's feet are incorporating practices, in Paul Connerton's term for the repeated performances that become encoded in the body. Decoupling human corporeal memory from the infrastructures that have sustained it may be the primary ecological narrative in the service of human species survival beyond the twenty-first century. 54 The human body, here, is understood as in part socially constituted, its sensory interactions with cars and streets habitualized by thousands and thousands of repetitions. 55 Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error suggests that this makes sense also from a neuroscientific perspective, and so it is no wonder that Sarat is used to living with oil. 56 The muddy environment in which she grows up does not afford her with the personal experience of driving a car or the touch of hot asphalt, even though summer has become an 51 Krämer, "Was also ist eine Spur?," 15. 52 On the long history of American individualism and government skepticism in relation to petroculture, see also Schneider-Mayerson, Peak Oil. 53 El Akkad, American War, 34. 54 LeMenager, Living Oil, 104. 55 Connerton argues that "our mind is already predisposed with a framework of outlines, of typical shapes of experienced object" (1989,6), and that even if a revolutionary event (such as the end of petro culture) would occur, we are not complexly free from habitual bodily practices and associated social memories (13). 56 Damasio, Descartes' Error, xxvii. Damasio explains that "the organism interacts with the environment as an ensemble: the interaction is neither of the body alone nor of the brain alone" which is why "mental can be fully understood only in the context of an organism's interacting in an environment".
"extended season, which burned from March through mid-December". 57 But the steel container in which she lives, the tarp and rainwater retention tank, the solar panels and the old fridge that is powered by them-these are all material remnants of petroculture, and Sarat has gotten habituated to them even though she lives in a world in which the use of fossil fuels is illegal. If "the material becomes the medium by which one can converge to the immaterial", and the trace "the agent between the present and the absent, functioning as a maker into the past", 58 then the material dimensions of trace here include Sarat's own mind and body. 59 In order to drive that fact home, the narrator, who, as readers will eventually learn, is Sarat's nephew Benjamin Chestnut, uses a speculative form of what Linda Hutcheon has called "historiographic metafiction" to tell the story of how the country went to war against itself over oil and how his aunt came to be a terrorist as a result of that. He ntersperses the narrative chapters with (fictional) historical documents which provide a seemingly objective account of events that, from the reader's perspective, unfold in the future. 60 These documents are presented as material remnants, and thus as traces in the way they have been conceptualised by Paul Ricoeur, that help the narrator-and the reader-to puzzle together a story that is not supposed to be told, a story of personal and collective trauma caused by an addiction to oil and the attempt to overcome it. 61 The official perspective presented in these documents contrasts sharply with the shocking intimacy of Sarat's personal story. The first chapter, which introduces Sarat and her family, is followed by such a "historical" document, excerpted from the United States "Federal Syllabus Guidelines-History, Module Eight: The Second Civil War". 62 Written in somber prose, it recounts the official version of the events leading up to the war, including "the assassination of President Ki by secessionist suicide bomber Julia Templestowe in Jackson, Mississippi, in December of 2073", the "sporadic guerilla violence for another half decade", and the "secessionist terrorist" who managed to "cross the border into Northern territory and unleash a biological agent", causing a nation-wide epidemic that killed 110 million Americans. 63 The secessionist terrorist in question is Sarat, and the remaining chapters of the novel aim to help readers understand her reasons for an attack of such monstrous proportions by giving them access to her consciousness, thereby cueing what El Akkad calls "weaponized empathy". 64

Traces of Human Interaction: Weaponized Empathy and Personal Loss
As mentioned earlier, the construction and understanding of narrative trace is in part channelled through readers' empathetic engagement with focalizers, be they narrators 57 El Akkad, American War, 13. 58 Ibid., emphasis mine. 59 In this sense, El Akkad's novel uses what Marco Caracciolo calls a negative strategy: "the postworld emerges as the narrative negates (i.e., subtracts, or pares down) some of the salient characteristics of the preworld-features with which readers are familiar through their everyday reality." Caracciolo, Narrating the Mesh, 79. 60 Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 105. 61 Ricoeur writes that "to the same extent that the trace marks the passage of an object or a quest in space, it is in calendar time and, beyond it, in astral time that the trace marks a passage. This is the condition of the trace, as conserved and no longer in the process of being laid down, to become a dated document". Ricoeur, Time and narrative, 120. 62 El Akkad, American War, 30. 63 Ibid., 30 and 31. 64 Crawford, Interview El Akkad. or characters or both. 65 In her influential Empathy and the Novel, the literary theorist Suzanne Keen demonstrated that such empathic engagement is at the very core of what makes fiction an immersive and often engrossing read. 66 Moreover, narrative empathy has also been considered a central factor in promoting prosocial behaviour and moral development. 67 As Aleida Assmann and Ines Detmers note in their introduction to Empathy and Its Limits, it has been rediscovered in recent years as "an overlooked and underestimated genetic, mental, and emotional disposition" and redefined "as a highly important social resource in a world faced with the challenges of globalization and the limitations of an endangered eco-system". 68 Yet as the title of their book suggests, the confidence in the positive effects of empathy has also been met with criticism due to empathy's well-researched familiarity bias.
As Keen explains in Empathy and Reading, "the human capacity for empathy doesn't automatically extend beyond our immediate tribe to distant or dissimilar others or to the inanimate world", which, in the eyes of its critics, makes it a poor tool of moral reasoning. 69 Philosophers such as Jesse Prinz, literary scholars such as Elaine Scarry and Amy Shuman, and psychologists such as Paul Bloom have all been critical of empathy because, as Bloom puts it, "empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism". 70 Keen, too, has been critical of overconfident claims about literature's potential to make readers more moral or altruistic, but she nevertheless recognises its ability to expand their empathic capacity: Skillful creators, who use their own empathetic imaginations to call invented beings out of thin air, can evoke authentic sensations of recognition, compassion, indignation at injustice, and even empathy for insensate elements (such as a crumbling cliff, eaten by a rising ocean). 71 Literary texts, Keen suggests, can deliberately cue us to feel not only with human and nonhuman others we might not ever befriend in real life but even with (the vanishing of) inanimate matter. Evoking Gayatri Spivak's notion of "strategic essentialism", Keen explains that "strategic empathizing occurs when an author employs empathy in the crafting of fictional texts, in the service of 'a scrupulously visible political interest'". 72 65 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 25. James Phelan reminds us that all narrators "can-and do-perceive, can and do act as our lenses on the story world, [even] without being physically present in it" (Phelan, "Why Narrators Can Be Focalizers," 58). That is why even authorial narrators can function as focalizers, allowing readers to simulate their perception at moments when no perceiving agent is located within the storyworld. 66 Keen, Empathy and the Novel, "Narrative Empathy", Empathy and Reading. 67 See, for example, Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity; Hoffman, Empathy and Moral Development. 68 Assmann and Detmers "Introduction," 1. 69 Keen, Empathy and Reading, 240. 70 Bloom, Against Empathy, 9. Prinz, "Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?"; Scarry, "The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons", Shuman, Other People's Stories. For critical engagements with empathy from a postcolonial perspective, see Eder, "Postcolonial Theory and Globalized Empathy," and Roy, "Finding the Empathetic Genre." Fritz Breithaupt has alerted us to the fact that, like many theorists before him, "Bloom's condemnation of empathy only works by first setting up a straw man, namely empathy as the motor of moral and just behavior," which is an unduly limited understanding of it. Breithaupt, The Dark Sides of Empathy, 9. 71 Keen, Empathy and Reading, 240. 72 Keen, "Narrative Empathy", 83, emphasis mine. Spivak's concept of strategic essentialism refers to the "strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest" (214). It is a political tactic employed by minority groups, usually in a postcolonial context, that involves emphasizing a shared identity for political reasons even though strong differences may exist between members of these groups.
Arguably, such political interest (though not always "scrupulously visible") is a typical feature of most climate fiction, and American War is no exception. 73 El Akkad has used an even more drastic term to describe the use of strategic empathising. "When I'm asked about literature in general", he has said in an interview, "the thing I come back to is the notion that literature is a form of weaponized empathy. It's to say: look through these different pair of eyes even though you don't have to". 74 He has also made clear that American War "started with a kind of thesis statement. It started as an argument: there's no such thing as a foreign kind of suffering". 75 Bloom, it can be assumed, would disagree, as he argues that "our empathy for those close to us is a powerful force for war and atrocity toward others", suggesting that there is indeed a kind of suffering that feels too foreign to us to care. 76 Perhaps that is why El Akkad decided to have his readers look through the eyes of an American woman whose mind and body have been so deeply scarred by the environment and the humans around her that all that is left to her in the end is that which is now gone but used to be there, the traces of what made her a terrorist.
As a child, Sarat is a "tomboy" who has what Rachel Crawford calls a "visceral relationship to the soil". 77 Despite the family's relative poverty, she is a happy and trusting child up to the point when her father is killed, and her mother takes her and her siblings north to Camp Patience-a refugee camp located on the Mississippi-Tennessee border and thus right along enemy lines-where Sarat spends the next six years of her life. Even there, she is resourceful, adaptable, and undaunted. She befriends one of the boys in the camp, Marcus. And she befriends Albert Gaines, a charismatic recruiter for the Southern rebels, who seduces her with the taste of real honey and tells her about the former geography of Louisiana, about American history, and about the Bouazizi Empire, which is now so powerful and attractive that "fleets of ragged little boats" are heading southward "from the European shore" across the Mediterranean Sea "full of migrants from the old Union countries"-another reversal of contemporary history. 78 It is Gaines who introduces Sarat to the Bouazizi agent Yousef Bin Rashid who supports the rebels, and it is because she has access to Gaines's underground office that she can save her twin-sister Dana from certain death when a Northern militia unit attacks Camp Patience and starts massacring the refugees. They do kill her mother and put a bullet into the head of her brother Simon, leaving him mentally impaired for the rest of his life. And Sarat's friend Marcus only survives because he and his father escape the camp to join the Northern forces.
The Camp Patience massacre, placed at the midpoint of the book, is the point of no return for Sarat. Overcome by grief and rage, she becomes what Gaines has groomed her for: a rebel fighter for the South who later kills one of the top generals of the Northern Union. "Every time she's subjected to damage", El Akkad has explained, Sarat's circle of trust closes a bit. When we first meet her, her circle of trust almost encompasses the entirety of the world. Then slowly it's just close friends and family. And then just certain members of friends and family. And then finally by the end of the book the only thing she trusts is her own sense of revenge. And that closing-in of things is kind of the central, emotional narrative of the book. The emotional arc of the book is how she responds to being damaged. 79 Throughout much of the narrative, Sarat responds to being damaged by reducing her circle of trust-and along with it her circle of empathy-and wrecking damage herself. She is a woman who fights back, who retaliates and accepts physical and emotional pain for that sense of revenge. This murderous and ruthless determination may in turn lead readers to attempt inhibiting their empathy with her.
In "Humanizing the Inhumane", Eric Leake differentiates between "easy" and "difficult empathy". While the former asks us "empathize with those who are seen as most deserving of our empathy" and is therefore "non-threatening", the latter requires more effort and "highlights how any move towards empathy is always a reach". 80 Difficult empathy, in Leake's understanding, asks us to feel along with morally grey and perhaps even unredeemable characters, and to understand what made them so. 81 I argue that this is precisely what El Akkad has in mind when he speaks of literature's "weaponizing" of empathy, which asks readers to "look through these different pair of eyes" to help them understand that "there's no such thing as a foreign kind of suffering". Given that Sarat is the main focalizer of his novel, the narrative situation never allows readers to distance themselves completely from her (unless they stop reading), and it is Sarat's own continuous suffering that allows readers to still feel for her, despite her murderous acts.
Not only does Sarat survive a massacre and lose her mother, but after she and her siblings are resettled by the Free Southern government in Lincolnton, Georgia, she must deal with a permanently brain-damaged brother and her sister is killed in a random drone attack. Moreover, she is captured by U.S. forces and survives various forms of torture-including the notorious waterboarding used by the United States against suspected Al Qaida members after the terrorist attacks on 9/11-during her long stay in the Sugarloaf Detention Facility. These are the things that Shadi Hamid has in mind when she writes that American War "interprets the American South by way of the Middle East". 82 Depictions of suicide bombers, drone attacks, and waterboarding evoke a whole epoch of American history in contemporary readers' minds although it is never explicitly mentioned in the novel. It is up to the reader to notice these narrative traces, fill in the gaps, understand what story they tell about a dark chapter of the American past and how exactly that past is then extrapolated into a climate-changed future, but with a domestic twist. 79 Crawford, Interview Omar El Akkad. 80  When Sarat is finally allowed to leave Sugarloaf, she is utterly disillusioned, withdrawn, and covered in scars. It is in this state that she first meets the novel's narrator, Benjamin, who is the son of her only surviving sibling, Simon, and his caretaker, a woman of Bangladeshi descent named Karina. Like her brother's brain damage, Sarat's physical scars are the embodied traces of the unspeakable things that happened to her and, in the wider sense, of the petroleum culture that is the root cause of climate change and the Second Civil War it has brought about. When she meets her childhood friend Marcus again, whom she last saw when he ran away from Camp Patience to join the U.S. Army, they share a moment of fraught intimacy that makes the connection explicit: He lifted his fingers to the place on her neck where on of her thin pink scars began. He traced it down to her shoulder.
"I did this," he said.
"No, you didn't." "You can't wear this uniform and not know what they did in Sugarloaf, Sarat. I have gotten by for a long time looking away, turning my head. And the truth is, I never cared much about what either side did to the other because it's a war and maybe that's all war is, is shredding the rules. But I can't do that when it's you. I did this." She took his hand, pulled it away from where it rested on her shoulders. She tried to remember how she'd gotten that particular scar, but in this moment the memory was unreachable. 83 Here, the scar is all that is left of the physical and emotional horror that Sarat has gone through. Not even she knows what agent, what materiality has caused "that particular scar"-it may have been the instruments of torture or just a thorn when she crept through the underbrush along the Georgia-Tennessee border to assassinate a U.S. general. Traces do not show us the absent itself but rather direct our attention to the fact that something has caused the trace. And it takes Marcus, who notices the scar, to direct Sarat's-and the reader's-attention to the visible, embodied signs of Sarat's past suffering.
The other person to direct readers' attention is Benjamin, the novel's narrator. A sixyear-old child by the time he meets his aunt, he is both intimidated and fascinated by her, who dwells in the garden shed and barely talks to him. Over time they develop a relationship, until Sarat ends up both orphaning him and saving his life when she arranges for him to be smuggled to safety in New Anchorage. For Benjamin, who does not yet know that his aunt's next step is to carry a deadly virus (provided by the Bouazizi agent Bin Rashid) to the Reunification Ceremony in Ohio that cements the defeat of the South, this is a betrayal of his trust in her and an unforgivable crime against her own family. It is only decades later, after he finds Sarat's diaries, that Benjamin learns the truth. "She was not some accessory or accomplice", he writes on the final pages of the novel. "It was her that did it", killing one-hundredand-ten million people in revenge. 84 "It was her last act of cowardice", he concludes 83 El Akkad, American War, 376. 84 Ibid.,497. about the written traces of his aunt's life, "forcing me to understand her, forcing me to decide what to do with the secret". 85 And so he decides, burning all but one page of Sarat's diaries but then writing it all down, erasing her voice with his own, and using the same weaponized empathy in order to "force" other readers to understand his aunt through the traces of her absence.

Conclusion
Reading trace in American War means noticing the remnants of past presences in a narrative about the future and using one's own knowledge and real-life experiences to fill in the gaps they point to. Analysing the various facets of these traces-their visibility and materiality in the narrative, and the lost environments and traumatic human relationships they bear witness to-allows us to develop a deeper understanding of both the novel's protagonist and the recent history and potential future the novel points back and forward to. As Min Hyoung Song has observed, history seems to repeat itself in El Akkad's novel, but the fact that a lab-engineered virus devastates the North after Sarat's act of terrorism refuses "any reader's hopes for a narrative of progress", even as other people in the storyworld "have found a way to persevere and make a living on a planet severely damaged by past destruction". 86 There is thus a trace of hope at the end of the book, discernable at the edges of the stories about the rise of the Bouazizi Empire and what readers know about Benjamin Chestnut's own long life in the neutral state of New Anchorage, a life he has been able to lead because of his aunt's apparent betrayal, which saved him.
This does not necessarily mean, though, that the novel is an enjoyable read or that the author intended it to be. And despite all her suffering, Sarat's moral transgressions might be too severe for her to ever become a sympathetic or relatable character. "I didn't want a character who people would apologise for, sympathise with, or even like", El Akkad has explained. "Sarat at the end of the book is not a character I like. The only thing I wanted was for people to understand how she gets to the place she ends up". 87 In Leake's terms, such "difficult empathy" is valuable because it "challenges our understanding of self and other", allowing us to comprehend a "wider range of human actions" along with their reasons and causes. 88 We could also state, with Rajini Srikanth, that it is a kind of empathy that "requires hard work-unflinching introspection, honest interrogation, complex analysis, and courageous risk taking" and that it is particularly called for when engaging with literature that deals with asymmetrical power relations. 89 American War deliberately challenges readers when it asks them to understand under which circumstances one-anyone-might become a terrorist and what ecological and political circumstances might produce such violent agents in the near future.
This then, is the central message of American War, one that many reviewers have lauded for its timeliness and its perceptive critique of American petroleum politics and oil imperialism. Whether readers are willing to succumb to the "weaponized" 85 Ibid. 86 Song, Climate Lyricism, 111. 87 Crawford, Interview Omar El Akkad. 88 Leake, "Humanizing the Inhumane", 184. 89 Srikanth, Constructing the Enemy, 3. empathy El Akkad employs in his novel may be another matter. Dan Flory reminds us of the difficulties people can experience "in engaging in an imaginative act concerning a moral claim stipulated by a fictional narrative", difficulties that may "make it impossible for us to imagine in the way the narrative directs us". 90 Such imaginative resistance can occur for a number of reasons, leading either to the deliberate inhibition of empathy or to imaginary inaccuracies concerning the identity of the fictional character. 91 As empirical research on another violent and deeply dystopian climate change novel, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife (2015) has shown, what readers take away from such narratives is mediated to a significant degree by their own pre-existing worldview and ideology. 92 A look at the current political climate in the United States shows deep rifts that may lead to more civil unrest and conflicts in the future, regardless of any literary warnings. If the events of January 6, 2021 are any indication, the union is already much more brittle than many had hoped. Taking climate change as its scenario, American War traces those fissures and cracks them wide open.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This work was supported by Austrian Science Fund: [grant number P 31189-G30].