Elliot Ackerman has made a habit of channeling the voices of people from diverse and distant places. His debut novel – “Green On Blue” (Scribner, 2015) – centered on Aziz and Ali, two Pashtun boys navigating the physical and moral hardships wrought by America’s most recent war in Afghanistan. Notably, Ackerman told this story from the Afghan perspective, bringing readers “new understanding of the complicated layers within Afghanistan’s tribal society,” according to novelist Roxana Robinson.
In “Dark at the Crossing” (Knopf, 2017), which is available today, Ackerman inhabits the character of Haris Abadi, an Iraqi-American desperate to cross Turkey’s southern border into Syria and join the “Free Army” fighting against Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Like Aziz, Abadi’s journey is complicated. He is quickly turned back from the Turkish-Syrian crossing by military police and then robbed. Soon thereafter, stuck on the Turkish side of the border, Abadi befriends former Syrian refugee Amir and his beguiling wife Daphne. Confronted with conflict – his identity, his cause, the crumbling marriage of his new friends – Abadi re-evaluates the depth and truth of his own ambition.
Some comments about the books from a recently published interbview
Did the original idea for this story begin with a place you visited, an event you witnessed or maybe someone you met? What led you to write "Dark at the Crossing"?
This novel began at dinner with a friend, a Syrian revolutionary turned refugee. We sat at an open-air café in Gaziantep, or Antep as the locals call it, an industrial city in southern Turkey. His wife was meant to join us but she had called and they’d had an argument. “I was unfaithful and she’s never forgiven me,” he told me. He then explained that the infidelity was not with another woman but with the revolution: its ideals, its excitement, all that he had sacrificed for it, too much, abandoning the emotional core of his marriage for what ultimately became a lost cause. A revolution, like a marriage, is a journey of the heart. Marriage is letting go of two separate worlds in order to create a single shared one. When a marriage dissolves, a couple is forced to reimagine that world, to start again. In the novel, I endeavored to tell the story of the Syrian Civil War, a failed revolution, through the lens of an intimate, universal emotional arc: a failed marriage.
The book is an exploration of grief—the death of a child, the destruction of a cause, the individual’s search to assuage loss. Having spent nearly three years covering the Syrian Civil War, I have watched that conflict’s spiral into darkness. I have witnessed the central choice of any failed revolution, any failed relationship: whether to accept what’s ruined and begin anew, or to keep faith with an increasingly hopeless cause.
What was the writing process like for this novel, and how did it differ from "Green On Blue"?
In my writing, I am often drawn to complex political themes. Politics is, after all, an emotional realm. What I endeavor to do in a book is to take those complex political elements and distill them into a story of more intimate emotions. In this respect "Dark at the Crossing" is similar to "Green on Blue", a novel which is set in Afghanistan. Both books also deal with a central question, or action. In "Green on Blue" the central action is a murder. In this book that central action is a border crossing. When writing both novels, I knew early on that the story was the journey the characters take towards those respective actions. A difference between the writing of the two books was that in "Dark at the Crossing" I knew much earlier on how the story would end. Much of the heavy work was figuring the reasons for why it ended the way that it did, whereas in "Green on Blue" I didn’t understand the ending until far later in the writing process. There is a discipline to writing—at least there is for me. I believe in the importance of showing up every day to do the work so that the characters and story reveal themselves.
You are living a fascinating life – Marine infantry officer in Iraq and special operator in Afghanistan, CIA paramilitary operative and now writer based in Istanbul. I imagine a memoir or story about your military and journalism experiences would make for very interesting reading. Why have you chosen to write fiction?
Why doesn’t a landscape artist just take a photograph?
All joking aside, I write fiction because more than any other form of storytelling it deals with our interior emotional lives. But as you noted, I do write journalism as well. Many of the novelists I admire most—Greene, Malraux, Didion—also worked as journalists and if you read their fiction you will often find the antecedents of their novels in their journalism. That tradition is less common today, but I’m drawn to writing—both fiction and non-fiction—that is fully engaged with the world. In my work, I am trying to be similarly engaged across forms.
What writers or people do you admire? Why?
There are many writers whose work I admire, but I don’t believe your question is about work, but rather who I admire as a person and this is a more difficult question, one that is intimate, because to say that I admire someone in the public eye who I do not know well would be dangerous as I might only be admiring their outward facing persona. So to tell you whom I admire, I will answer more personally and perhaps tell you the traits that I value most and try to express in my own life:
I admire my mother, a writer herself, for her commitment to her work over many decades. I admire my father, a businessman and entrepreneur, for his tenacity and vision. I admire my brother, a gifted mathematician and former Olympic wrester, for finding the improbable connection between the two and then excelling at both.
This novel began at dinner with a friend, a Syrian revolutionary turned refugee. We sat at an open-air café in Gaziantep, or Antep as the locals call it, an industrial city in southern Turkey. His wife was meant to join us but she had called and they’d had an argument. “I was unfaithful and she’s never forgiven me,” he told me. He then explained that the infidelity was not with another woman but with the revolution: its ideals, its excitement, all that he had sacrificed for it, too much, abandoning the emotional core of his marriage for what ultimately became a lost cause. A revolution, like a marriage, is a journey of the heart. Marriage is letting go of two separate worlds in order to create a single shared one. When a marriage dissolves, a couple is forced to reimagine that world, to start again. In the novel, I endeavored to tell the story of the Syrian Civil War, a failed revolution, through the lens of an intimate, universal emotional arc: a failed marriage.
The book is an exploration of grief—the death of a child, the destruction of a cause, the individual’s search to assuage loss. Having spent nearly three years covering the Syrian Civil War, I have watched that conflict’s spiral into darkness. I have witnessed the central choice of any failed revolution, any failed relationship: whether to accept what’s ruined and begin anew, or to keep faith with an increasingly hopeless cause.
What was the writing process like for this novel, and how did it differ from "Green On Blue"?
In my writing, I am often drawn to complex political themes. Politics is, after all, an emotional realm. What I endeavor to do in a book is to take those complex political elements and distill them into a story of more intimate emotions. In this respect "Dark at the Crossing" is similar to "Green on Blue", a novel which is set in Afghanistan. Both books also deal with a central question, or action. In "Green on Blue" the central action is a murder. In this book that central action is a border crossing. When writing both novels, I knew early on that the story was the journey the characters take towards those respective actions. A difference between the writing of the two books was that in "Dark at the Crossing" I knew much earlier on how the story would end. Much of the heavy work was figuring the reasons for why it ended the way that it did, whereas in "Green on Blue" I didn’t understand the ending until far later in the writing process. There is a discipline to writing—at least there is for me. I believe in the importance of showing up every day to do the work so that the characters and story reveal themselves.
You are living a fascinating life – Marine infantry officer in Iraq and special operator in Afghanistan, CIA paramilitary operative and now writer based in Istanbul. I imagine a memoir or story about your military and journalism experiences would make for very interesting reading. Why have you chosen to write fiction?
Why doesn’t a landscape artist just take a photograph?
All joking aside, I write fiction because more than any other form of storytelling it deals with our interior emotional lives. But as you noted, I do write journalism as well. Many of the novelists I admire most—Greene, Malraux, Didion—also worked as journalists and if you read their fiction you will often find the antecedents of their novels in their journalism. That tradition is less common today, but I’m drawn to writing—both fiction and non-fiction—that is fully engaged with the world. In my work, I am trying to be similarly engaged across forms.
What writers or people do you admire? Why?
There are many writers whose work I admire, but I don’t believe your question is about work, but rather who I admire as a person and this is a more difficult question, one that is intimate, because to say that I admire someone in the public eye who I do not know well would be dangerous as I might only be admiring their outward facing persona. So to tell you whom I admire, I will answer more personally and perhaps tell you the traits that I value most and try to express in my own life:
I admire my mother, a writer herself, for her commitment to her work over many decades. I admire my father, a businessman and entrepreneur, for his tenacity and vision. I admire my brother, a gifted mathematician and former Olympic wrester, for finding the improbable connection between the two and then excelling at both.
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