British and American Representations of 9-11

by Oana-Celia Gheorghiu

  Nevertheless, as the matter of trauma has been extensively discussed in relation to Waldman’s novel , while acknowledging it as a definitive trait for American literature related to 9/11, it is politics , the public sphere and the way it regards America and the Other that make the novel stand as one of the most accomplished literary productions of the subgenre known as 9/11 fiction . This is the reason why the rest of the textual analysis in this chapter focuses on the idea of liberalism versus intolerance in the construction of the American characters , while the representation of the Muslim Other is to be elaborated upon in Chap. 5.

  Naturally, twenty-first century liberalism and proneness to righteousness entitle any civilised person to abide by the logic of Claire Burwell, who claims that the Muslim name Mohammad Khan attached to the memorial should not constitute a problem. ‘That’s a total betrayal of what this country means, what it stands for’ (Waldman 2012, 26), she says, hinting at the rights and liberties the Americans cherish so much. She is, as Waldman puts it, a ‘warm and inexperienced enthusiast […] enthroned by politicians who feared nothing more than appearing undemocratic’ (24). This statement seems to disguise a critique of liberal values, which are not embraced by the entire population, who would sooner regard the matter as an offence to the families of the victims and as ‘multicultural pandering’ (21). ‘Manhattanites who had always prided themselves on their liberalism confessed that they were talking to their therapists about their discomfort with Mohammad Khan as the memorial’s designer’ (160). It is also emphasised that there is a large gap between the liberal, open-minded New York and the rest of the country: ‘Every American has the right to create—it’s our birth right. We all understand that. We’re New Yorkers! But will the heartland? They’re much more narrow-minded’ (22). But is there, truly, so big a difference between the urban, refined America and its rural areas? The New Yorkers’ sense of superiority, their interiorised righteous ideas with regard to racial and religious equity, the support provided by human rights activists like Susan Sarandon are soon enough fiercely opposed by those who believe that accepting Khan’s project will make the Muslims ‘feel like they won. All over the Muslim world they’ll be jumping up and down at our stupidity, our stupid tolerance’ (22). The opponents are not few, nor are they all members of the lower strata of society, as the governor of New York is also openly against Khan’s memorial and tries her best to identify ways of diplomatically getting rid of it. If it were not for this exception, the novel might have left the sensation that it constructs a world in which the elites are liberal and the Others are not, in which the subalterns reject the common sense of the hegemons. The governor is portrayed as an ambitious woman, although New York has never had a woman in this position, so as to counterbalance the reality of the many public figures and media entities mentioned in the novel, thus accentuating the fictionality of the text. However, her attempts in this respect are not adroit, and neither are her authorial statements. The result is, as Lorentzen comments in his particularly critical review, a prose which ‘suggests the earnest fact-gatherer trying to figure out what fiction ought to sound like’ (2011, 28). It is difficult, despite the insertion of these artifices of fictionality , not to regard the novel as an extended New York Times article, which only vouches for a new politics of neorealism, for the bidirectional relation between fiction and non-fiction. Amy Waldman tries too hard to disguise a reality that pervades her novel, although it is precisely this pervasiveness of the real that makes her fiction a convincing mirror of the American post-9/11 society.

  In the first part of the novel, Claire’s interlocutors, members of the memorial committee who have selected the project, function as the voice of the American people. Although they make efforts to sound reasonable in their arguments against declaring Khan’s project the winner—‘we have to consider the associations people will bring to him’; ‘it could be a healing gesture’ (21)—they also resort to Islamophobic statements—‘he is unsuitable by definition’ (24); ‘this Mohammad hasn’t technically won the competition yet. I mean, there are safeguards built in, right, against criminals. Or terrorists’ (23)—which draws from the very beginning a much discussed parallel between Muslims and terrorists —and far-fetched comparisons: ‘if, say, Charles Manson submitted a design from prison, we would let him build it’ (23). The scene, crowded as it is with Islamophobic opinions based on the sole argument of the architect’s Muslim name, is then multiplied in many environments and settings, and Islamophobia gains momentum by the page. It is important to stress that Waldman manages, perhaps also as an effect of her professional association with The New York Times, to leave the impression that the novel reports a state of mind that her narrator just notes. It is this apparent objectivity that leaves the novel and the novelist alike untouched by the accusations of Islamophobia that dogged the other Western writers who dared to approach the subject.

  Although New Yorkers are said, even in the novel, to be more open-minded than the rest of the country, especially than the rural Midwest, a panoply of characters is constructed so as to underline a centredness of the Americans that can easily translate as intolerance. Lou Sarge, the radio host who constantly assails Islam , leaving no doubts about his views, is in the habit of demagogically referring to what makes America great or, even more, to ‘what makes America , America ’ (97). When the question arises whether the illegals killed in the attacks should be mentioned on the commemorative lists or not, the shock-jock ‘roars’ that their names ‘will be spitting in the face of law-abiding Americans’ (97). Asked by Claire to keep an open mind towards the matter of Muslims, Sean, the Irish American , voices what can pass as a statement which, formulated or not, might have crossed the minds of many Americans : ‘My mind closed toward Muslims the day they killed my brother’ (113). This generalisation points in the direction Edward Said described in 2003 as representative of the American public sphere , heavily influenced by the press: all Muslims are terrorists. People are not interested in the demarcation line between a Muslim and a Muslim fundamentalist . To them, Islam is ‘a big phony… a violent religion’ (111), and bitter sarcasm is in its rights when it comes to this topic: ‘And they find out they picked a Muslim and they say, “wow, that’s terrific, what a message that will send to Muslims, that we’re their friend, that we have nothing against Islam , because what did Islam ever do to us?”’ (109). It goes without saying that Islam did not do anything to America , and that a handful of Islamists should be blamed for 9/11, but few really bothered in the years after the attack to spell out this difference. Such a feeble attempt is made by the mayor: ‘It’s nothing inherently wrong with being a Muslim … Islam is a religion of peace… The problem is that some people haven’t gotten that message’ (74). The narrative intervention afterwards is artful, as it draws the readers’ attention towards the double implication of the syntagm ‘some people’. Are these ‘some people’ the Muslims who radicalised and took a murderous course, or are they ‘the people who slandered the peaceful ones’ (74)? The latter suggests the radicalisation, not of the perpetrators, but that of the American victims who become aggressors. An interesting case is Debbie Dawson, a mother of three girls, whose main concerns before the attacks were soap operas and raising her girls. Not only does she join a radical group ironically abbreviated as SAFI (a word which means ‘pure’ in Arabic, but which stands in the novel for ‘Save America from Islam ’), but also educates herself—or that is what she believes—in matters of Islamic theology, which she inaccurately uses in her inflammatory speeches. During a protest against the adoption of Khan’s design for the memorial , held at the scene of the attacks, ‘the Rally to Protect Sacred Ground’ (the word ‘sacred’ is propagandistic, alongside with the reference to the dead of 9/11 as ‘heroes’), Debbie and her group of raging housewives bring posters and signs saying ‘no tolerance for the intolerant’, ‘Islam kills’, ‘Nuke ’em all and let Allah sort ’em out’ or showing pigs eating the Qur’an or turbaned men with targets superimp
osed on their faces (191–3). They claim to be ‘fighting for the soul of this country’, which Muslims ‘want to conquer’, as ‘Islam is not a religion . It’s a political ideology , a totalitarian one’ (193). This frequent confusion between Islam (as a religion) and Islamism (as a political ideology) is representative of the anti-Muslim discourse of a great part of the media , and it can be believed to have been interiorised by the average American . During the same protest, enraged by the presence of counter-protesters holding signs like ‘we are also Americans’, ‘Islam is not a threat’ and especially ‘bigots = idiots’, Sean tugs back the headscarf of a Muslim woman, a gesture that will be quickly copied around the country by intolerant men, making Muslim women hide in their houses even more than their tradition requires. ‘The next took place in Boston. The perpetrator didn’t flee—instead he waited for the police to arrest him so he could testify to the media : ‘I saw that guy do it on the news , and I thought we all need to be that brave, take a stand.’ More men copied him, and copycats copied the copycats, so within a week there had been more than a dozen incidents around the country’ (210). The liberal media warns against ‘a new, ominous strain of intolerance in the land’ (210), and SAFI tries to make a hero of Sean following a threat supposedly made against him: ‘This man has been threatened for being brave enough to speak up against the Islamist threat and against Mohammad Khan. Now he has had to flee his home. Donate!’ (211). The manipulative intention of the text is obvious—it conflates Islamism with the Muslim architect and suggests undocumented threats which forced Sean to leave his home and find shelter in Debbie’s house. In fact, what made him leave was his mother’s stereotype-burdened reproach ‘It’s Muslims that are supposed to mistreat women’ (201).

  But nowhere in the novel is manipulation better outlined than in the embedded sections of journalistic discourse. Obviously fictional, they nevertheless make up a realistic rendition of the tone used in the real press. Functioning as a vehicle which moves the plot forward, the unscrupulous journalist Alyssa Spier receives from an anonymous source the information that the design of choice may be the work of a Muslim . Her story is ‘killed’, as the editor of Daily News, the newspaper she works for, is persuaded to postpone its publication. Determined and sensing that her story is an incendiary one, Alyssa gets it to another publication, New York Post, considered inferior (‘Alyssa had always looked down on the Post, just as she knew the Times reporters looked down on her’ (75)). Alyssa is succinctly characterised by the narrator as a journalist who will do anything to get a story:She wasn’t a good enough writer for the blue-blood papers, nor was she interested in their stodgy, mincing version of news . A tabby all the way – that’s what she was. She had no ideology , believed only in information, which she obtained, traded, peddled, packaged, and published, and she opposed any effort to doctor her product. (76)

  When the story is run by the Post, its content is a signpost for the future nationwide development which will engage all categories of Americans , either hegemons or subalterns, and which will result in the tragic assassination of the Bangladeshi woman who eventually finds the courage to speak up. Although incomplete, Alyssa’s first announcement that a Muslim ‘has won the memorial competition’ (64) may easily qualify for an analysis resembling the Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth, CDA) applied to real press articles. According to Norman Fairclough, discourse or text is part of the categories of social practice, alongside the physical, sociological and cultural/psychological elements, and it acquires ‘a generative power , the power to socially produce, i.e. to work, in its textual moment’ (2000, 169). This ‘texturing’, as he terms it, is ‘ideologically determined by the existing relations of power and the power struggle’ (1995, 132), which makes appropriate its decoding by means of CDA .People live in ways which are mediated by discourses which construct work, family, gender […] which come to them through the mass-media (print, television, the internet). If the texts of early modern society were printed, it is this multi-semiotic discourse that constitutes the texts of late modern society. (Fairclough 2000, 165)

  Although the journalistic pieces featured in The Submission are fictional, the realism at work throughout the novel is accentuated in their case, in the sense that their intertextual transposition from the ‘real world’ is so accurate that it may indeed determine identification by means of power relations. Fairclough assumes that ‘what people commit themselves to in texts is an important part of how they identify themselves’ (163), and the ‘paper beings’ in the novel (the Barthesian 1975 definition of characters is still irresistible) indeed identify themselves with the Islamophobic discourse of the media . This first article does away with the specific caution signalled by modality. It reads ‘A Muslim has won the memorial competition’ (Waldman 2012, 64), therefore it leaves no room for probabilities. The headline, alliterative, a stylistic device known to draw attention/lay emphasis since the dawns of literature , reads in caps: MYSTERY MUSLIM MEMORIAL MESS (65). It is easy for the unaware reader to identify a threat because of the nouns ‘mystery’ and ‘mess’, but something more powerful is added to the text through the absence of any punctuation: it makes the noun ‘memorial ’ appear as being modified by ‘Muslim ’, which announces a future development—the discovery that the project contains elements of the rectangular gardens from the Islamic world, symbolically associated with the Muslim paradise. It is just a step away from the press drawing the conclusion that the Muslim architect has actually imagined a memorial for the ‘martyrs’, that is, for the Muslim terrorists who brought about the catastrophe. The intention of the article is further enhanced by multimodality: a visual text often speaks a thousand words. The front-page image accompanying the article depicts ‘an unidentifiable man in a balaclava, scary as a terrorist […] with cold, hard eyes. Executioner’s eyes’ (65–6). Other elements of textual and visual manipulation are evident on the page where the article is featured. The rhetorical question superimposed on the site of the attacks is anything but a question. The tagline ADDING ISLAM TO INJURY? alludes to a clichéd idiom, ‘adding insult to injury’, that is, making a bad situation worse. Islam becomes an insult, which sets the tone for many op-ed pieces and opinions shared in the public sphere. One of them also belongs to Alyssa Spier, who, promoted to editorialist, fantasises about herself turning into a pop-culture icon like Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City, although ‘pondering terrorism or the Muslim problem […] didn’t exactly make for a seductive scribe’ (134). Mentioning Carrie’s aggressive sexiness and feminine independence, which made the television show’s name for many years, is a form of cultural embeddedness of a lower artistic form into the highbrow culture , which is specific to twenty-first century fiction , and can be seen as an attempt at effacing the difference, by incorporating the more democratic (read popular) cultural forms into the ivory tower domain of literature . But Alyssa is not Carrie Bradshaw—she is closer to what is usually defined as an Islamophobe, which becomes apparent from the first sentence of her op-ed: ‘The problem with Islam is Islam’ (136). The article takes the well-trodden path of describing ‘the religion’s violent propensities, its oppression of women, its incompatibility with democracy and the American way of life’ (139) specific to a press which allegedly attempted to raise public attention about the ‘Muslim menace’ (Said 2003, xvi). However, it soon takes a turn to scandal media, accusing Claire of nothing less than ‘metaphorically sleeping with the enemy’ (Waldman 2012, 140) because of her open support for Mohammad Khan. She will later try (and succeed to some extent) to make Claire change her mind by telling her a half-truth about the architect’s professional visit to Afghanistan , because, in her view, ‘fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace’ (205).

  Alyssa’s inadequate comments and her revisiting of the Islamic threat are much less effective in setting the ball rolling than an article in the ‘Art’ section of The New York Times proves to be. The art critic, versed in journalese, posits the hypothesis that Khan’s pr
oject ‘paralleled gardens that had been built across the Islamic world, from Spain to Iran to India to Afghanistan , over a dozen or more centuries’ (147). The Times-specific discourse is more nuanced than the blatant tabloid screaming of the Post. The author knows how to raise questions, carefully keeping the text under the empire of doubt, of ‘what if’, and yet resorting to his authority as an art critic to suggest that ‘some might say the designer is mocking us or playing with his religious heritage’ (148). With all its ‘probably’, ‘possibly’ and ‘perhaps’, with all its modal verbs—might, could—the article, resting on an appeal to authority (of the author as an art critic), eventually gets its message across: the Islamic gardens are ‘earthly representations of the paradise of the Quran—its “gardens beneath which rivers flow”’ (148). What follows is a media … jihad , with Fox News leading the hostilities—a panel of experts on radical Islam openly accuse Khan of having designed a graveyard for the terrorists , not for the victims, and of encouraging new martyrs—‘see, here’s a taste of where you’ll get if you blow yourself up’ (149). The next day, even the respected Wall Street Journal accuses the architect of ‘an assault of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage’ (149) and of an attempt at Islamisation, which is soon transferred into the public sphere , with Debbie Dawson and her Save America from Islam claiming that, although it was impossible for them to raise a mosque there, the Muslims have brought a Trojan horse to the memorial : ‘an Islamic garden, this martyrs’ paradise, it’s like a code to jihadis’ (149). One may easily note the way in which caution and tentativeness disappear once manipulation has reached its target.