Prisoner of Zion by Scott Carrier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I purchased this book for full price (a rare thing for me) right after hearing Scott Carrier read from the book at our faculty convention. He is an interesting character, hard to define into a neat category--and so is this book.

Even if I hadn't heard him speak, I would have known this was going to be a good read just 14 pages in, during the 3rd section called Momosphere, where he says "I used to resist the church. I spoke out against it whenever...I had a chance. But one day a question entered my head--'What if, with the wave of a hand, I could wipe out all of Mormon history...would I do it?' It took me five seconds to realize I would never do it. I'd miss their stories for their mythic value. I'd miss the temple, even though I can't go inside...My identity, the person I have become, is a non-Mormon, an outsider other. If the Mormons were gone then who would I be?"

This passage identifies what I respect in Carrier and seek in others: someone whose life experiences have made them less (not more) likely to sweep aside some culture or belief system which is irritating, wrong, even unjust and discriminatory. To me this is to recognize our interconnections and that meaning is never solid, a modernized object, but rather rhizomatic, tenuous, and corrupted by sin.

Carrier jumps back and forth from stories about Utah and Mormons to that of Islam in the Middle East--interesting parallels if uneven and stretched at times. But then he brings the two strands of fundamentalism together in the last and best section (the one he read from at our convention): "Najibullah in America." It is the story of young boy he meets in Afghanistan, who translates for him and helps Carrier get his stories. Several years later, now at UVU as a professor, Carrier gets Naji to come to Utah, to live amidst another kind of fundamentalism.

The last section might be called the education of Naji AND of Scott Carrier as he helps Naji navigate life in America and to write in a new language with new rules of engagement. But it's also about Carrier's learning as he "settles" for a time as a teacher, at first hating it and then growing to like it even though he is still surrounded by young idealistic and naive Mormons. But the convention is too much for him ultimately--he said in his reading that he is leaving UVU, and the comforts of a salary and health insurance, for the Middle East. I'm both fascinated and bewildered by a person like Carrier who lives on the fringes. Ultimately happy for his voice.

A voice that ends on a somewhat, for Carrier, optimistic note. He argues that there is something going on with his students, having seen the financial crisis and murky motivations for war, who "now come more willing to listen to [his] point of view because they can see they're fucked." A mini-enlightenment in Orem, Utah? Maybe. Still, he admits to the complex forces in a uniquely Carrier-like way: "It's fucking hard to be compassionate, to see our enemy as no different than ourselves."

And here we circle back: Who indeed would Carrier be without the Mormons? Who would Christian Westerners be without Islam? Even who would we be without Al-Queda? Compassion is certainly absolutely fucking hard.

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