British and American Representations of 9-11

by Oana-Celia Gheorghiu

  All these point to Said’s subjectivity in relation to the Western world and to his assumed standpoint as Other (despite his American citizenship). Notwithstanding, the main means of mass communication, the media , do not only represent a communication vehicle, but also a manipulative force acting on the collective mindset. ‘Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth’, Huxley remarked in his bitter dystopia Brave New World (2006, 34). The media of today seem to have appropriated this principle, therefore they have come to impose a certain state of mind, a certain set of beliefs and, ultimately, a certain ‘truth’ on their audience. Now more than ever, one of these powerful ‘truths’ is that Muslim equals evil and Arab equals terrorism.

  To provide just two examples: the political activist and theorist Noam Chomsky cites from the leading article of The New York Times, 16 September 2001: ‘the perpetrators acted out of hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage’ (my emphasis). In his opinion, such statements are meant to ‘ignore all the facts and wallow in self-indulgent fantasies’ (2001, 28), yet this seems to be just another facet of the subjectivity which characterises Edward Said. The same publication cites President George W. Bush , who ‘vows to exact punishment for evil’ (Schmemman 2001). Chomsky chooses to regard the inflammatory discourse of The New York Times as proof of ignorance, and not as manipulation, although, even accepting the ‘heat of the moment’ excuse, it is obvious that the reference to any threat against freedom, prosperity and… universal suffrage could only stir up the masses.

  In keeping with the mindset promoted by the media , contemporary neorealist literature after 9/11 takes an Orientalist turn, enriching its gallery of characters with a new type: the Muslim ter rorist—either real (inspired from a real person, as is the case of Muhammad Atta) or imaginary. Approached from a psychological perspective, in an attempt to understand their motivations, the presentation of terrorists in Western literature did not begin in 2001. Worth mentioning for their plunge into the realm of terrorism before it became fashionable are Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) and Doris Lessing’s political novel The Good Terrorist (1985)—although the latter refers to the IRA and features a woman as its central character—and if one wants to go back even further in time, maybe even Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent. In direct relation to the present discussion, one should also take note of the young-adult novel The Terrorist by Caroline B. Cooney (1997), harshly criticised for ‘the inaccurate, offensive and stereotypical reference to Muslims’ (Associated Press Release, New Straits Time 17 February 2000), which unknowingly marked a new direction in fiction: the negative portrayal of Muslims living and plotting violent attacks in the Western world.

  As reality completely surpassed imagination on 9/11, afterwards making its way into fiction , the presence of the terrorist Other as a character or, at least, as its stereotyping in the thoughts and discussions of Western characters, become a familiar feature of post-9/11 fiction . Terrorism may be present either in a subtle form—as is the case of Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), which features a London living in the shadow of terrorism and which introduces a character (Baxter) who, with his savage irruption in the lives of the civil Perownes, may stand as a metonymical representation of the terrorist—though not a Muslim one—or in a brutally stereotypical manner, as in the much-criticised novel Terrorist by John Updike (2006), who constructs the ‘birth’ of a fundamentalist Islamist with minimum prior documentation (notorious in this respect is Updike’s admitting to the fact that he had read a Koran for Dummies in order to acquire some knowledge of Islam before he embarked on representing it in the novel). The vast list of stereotypes at work in Terrorist would, indeed, render it an excellent example of Orientalism in Saidean terms, but its inclusion in the corpus of this study has been deemed unsuitable on the grounds of its not making any direct reference to 9/11. Due mention should also be made of Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005), which has not been considered for similar reasons. Based on this criterion of relevance, the analysis of the presence of the Muslim Other in post-9/11 fiction has been, accordingly, limited to the short story The Last Days of Muhammad Atta by Martin Amis and the novel Falling Man by Don DeLillo, as pieces of fiction generally regarded as Orientalist and/or Islamophobic, and the novel The Submission by Amy Waldman , which has been regarded as providing a less biased image of the Muslim Other , despite or precisely because of its extensive reference to the stigmatisation of this category. As a counterpoint, giving a voice to the Other and looking for possible traces of Occidentalism , the final part is dedicated to the monologic novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), by a British author of Pakistani origin, Mohsin Hamid.

  The Theory of ‘Islamismophobia’ in Literary Practice: ‘We Respect Muhammad, We Don’t Respect Muhammad Atta’

  Once upon a time, during the Elizabethan Age, there was a group of university-educated ‘lads’ who had the merit of updating and improving mediaeval drama with their learned classical methods. Their names, most of them rarely remembered today outside the world of Renaissance Studies, were Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd and Marlowe. Later on, in the full bloom of Romanticism, the history of literature records another group of unconventional and scandalous university-educated ‘lads’: Byron, Shelley and Keats. Last but not least—since history repeats itself, the history of literature is also allowed to do so—contemporary English fiction features a new ‘boys’ club’ (although the boys are already in their late 60s, and although British columnists and academics alike have started wondering whether ‘they still have it’): Ian McEwan , Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis . Outspoken and political, atheists or agnostics, ‘the Big Four’ still dominate the literary world and the press headlines. The only one of them who has not been awarded a Booker Prize yet, Amis , is the Byron and the Marlowe of our times, which is not to say that he is the most gifted of the four, but only that he is, probably, the most controversial, outdoing even the author of The Satanic Verses, whose controversy—though major—is largely owed to Ayatollah Khomeini and his fatwa.

  Amis’s opinions on Islam , which he started to spread unsparingly in the press soon after 9/11, not always in the most politically correct terms, have brought him numerous accusations of racism, although, as McEwan said in his defence, equating anti-Islamism with racism is ‘a poisonous argument’ (The Telegraph 2010) meant to ‘close down debate’ (The Guardian 2007) much in the way in which critics of the Soviet Union were labelled as fascists during the Cold War. The sentence between quotation marks in the title of this subchapter is repeated twice in Amis’s piece published in The Observer to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11 , suggestively entitled ‘The Age of Horrorism’.13 The author visibly strives to make a clear distinction between Islam and Islamism:We respect Islam – the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism ? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination. Naturally we respect Islam . But we do not respect Islamism , just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta. (A mis 2008a, 50, emphasis added)

  However, a few days before the publication of this article, Amis had managed to sound extremely radical in an interview for The Times. The controversial statement has repeatedly been quoted, including in Terry Eagleton’s preface to his second edition of Ideology: An Introduction. The respected Marxist critic, a colleague of Amis at the University of Manchester, denounced the latter’s words as ‘barbaric comments’ which were ‘not the ramblings of a British National Party thug, but the reflections of the novelist Martin Amis , leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world’, while also making reference to Kingsley Amis, who was, gratuitously enough, regarded as a ‘racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals’, from whom Martin would have learnt ‘more than how to turn a shapely phrase’ (2007). As a parenthesis, Amis responded in a simila
r manner to these ad hominem accusations (The Independent , 11 October 2011), describing Eagleton as ‘an ideological relict, unable to get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx’ and as ‘an embarrassment to the academic profession’. But let us return to the declaration which stirred the public opprobrium against Amis , as it is much more relevant to the present discussion than a scandal within British academia:There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan […] Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs—well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. (Amis in Dougary 2006, 6–7)

  In a letter to The Guardian (12 October 2007), Amis retracts his affirmations, saying that ‘harassing the Muslim community in Britain would be neither moral nor efficacious’ and that his earlier words were prompted by a state of mind which soon wore off. Not entirely cautious, but pointing to the distinction between religion and the political and violent engagement in its name, more precisely, between Islam and Islamism , in his conversation with the New York Times Book Review editor Rachel Donadio, Amis asserts that he is not Islamophobic but Islamismophobic,14 reiterating the slogan ‘We respect Muhammad, but we don’t respect Muhammad Atta’. As if he tried to prove valid the hypothesis that the two opposing poles of the East/West dichotomy accuse each other of virtually the same shortcomings in the relation to their respective Other, the author repeatedly accused of racism and intolerance describes jihadism as ‘racist, homophobic, totalitarian, genocidal, inquisitorial and imperialistic’ (2008, 31).

  In relation to the discussion of Orientalism and Occidentalism, Amis seems to be an Orientalist by the book (Said’s). He makes his prejudicial standpoints available to his large readership in order to participate in the public debate, his created worlds aiming ‘to pattern and shape and moral point’ (Amis 2008a, 13). His opinions are often informed by ready-made conclusions. For example, in his research for the short story under the lens here, he discovered that the 19 devout Muslim hijackers had been visited by strippers and call-girls in their days of hiding in Florida, before the fateful 9/11, information which he gave credit to on the grounds of his belief that ‘they’re hugely hypocritical in their hearts’ (Amis in Dougary 2006, 7). Without being explicitly mentioned in the text of the short story, such information burdens it with implications of sexual frustration and inadequacy, inscribing it, as Lionel Barber (2008) remarks in his review of The Second Plane, in the Amisian theme of manliness and male insecurity, rather than turning it into an attempt at penetrating the mind and motives of the terrorist.

  With Muhammad Atta , Amis does not construct a character that may stand as representative for the Muslim fundamentalist as the West sees him, as Updike does with his Arab-American terrorist in the making: quite the contrary, he deconstructs the familiar image of the Muslim devotee who is ready to die for a cause which he has been inculcated with by religion . This is not to say, of course, that Amis fails to apply many other Western-made stereotypes to Atta, but that, in forwarding a character deprived of the (feeble) excuse of being under the influence of religion as societal control mechanism and, what is more, imbued with a list of stereotypes and prejudices against the Western civilisation, he actually portrays an Occidentalist whose views on the Western Other resemble those of the Islamist theorist and leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood , Sayyid Qutb, which may be summarised as follows: ‘the Western society possesses nothing that will satisfy its own conscience and justify its existence’, being beset with ‘barbarism, licentiousness and unbelief’ (in 9/11 CR 2004, 51). In the short story, such ideas are forwarded in the discussion between Atta and an imam: ‘remember we are in the lands of unbelief’ (2008b, 110), ‘America was responsible for this and that million deaths […] power was always a monster and had never been a monster the size of America . There were blunderings and perversities and calculated cruelties: and there was no self-knowledge—none’ (110–1). Amis also makes extensive reference to Qutb in his essay ‘The Age of Horrorism’ (‘Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind’), which invites speculation that many of the ideas attributed to Atta in the short story might have been inspired by this father of Islamism:During his six months at the Colorado State College of Education (and thereafter in California), Sayyid’s hungry disapproval found a variety of targets: American lawns (a distressing example of selfishness and atomism), American conversation (‘money, movie stars and models of cars’), American jazz (‘a type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies—their desire for noise and their appetite for sexual arousal’) and, of course, American women. […] American places of worship he also detests (they are like cinemas or amusement arcades). (Amis 2008a, 59, emphasis in the original)

  However, Amis’s motivation to write a short story so closely connected to the attacks on the WTC, with the leading hijacker, Muhammad Atta , at the centre of the narrative , might have been at least partially prompted by the high level of interest about Atta in the media. One is bound to remember that, in the days after 9/11, the face of Muhammad Atta was all over the press, alongside with his personal belongings, discovered fortuitously (an aspect which no one seems too ready to believe): a four-page document in Arabic which describes the preparations for the attacks during the night before and the morning of 9/11, a flight manual, a copy of the Qur’an and the terrorist’s passport lying intact in the ashes of the WTC.15 While not having the slightest intention of discussing these unlikely findings as proof for one conspiracy theory or another, it is fairly obvious that they were used for reassurance purposes—to show the American people and the entire world that American intelligence was doing its job of uncovering the perpetrators, and also to give them that face of otherness required for the identification of the Other as enemy. The image of the zealot Atta , as inferred from the written plan of the attacks, interspersed with Qur’an verses and returning to prayer as a necessary step every other two lines, from the testament,16 which gives precise orders that no woman should touch his dead body or even come close to his grave, and the image of the ‘gentle and tender boy’17 uninterested in politics presented by his family, are subjected in Amis’s short story both to defamiliarisation, in the Formalist sense, and to the alienation effect, a derived concept developed by Brecht for theatrical performance, to render the observer not involved or sympathetic with the character. In the article ‘The Age of Reason was over… An Age of Fury was dawning’ (a title borrowed from Rushdie’s Shalimar), Robert Eaglestone asserts that, in its engagement with ‘the mélange of anxiety and anger that make up the West’s fuzzy understanding of the current crisis’ (2007, 19), Amis’s short story, just like other 9/11 fictional texts presented in the article, fails to address this very concern. His contention sets out, at least in Amis’s case, from the misled and misleading hypothesis that, in his imagining of the last hours of Muhammad Atta , Am is ‘tries to offer an insight into him’ (21). Although it is commonplace in many analyses of Amis’s sole contribution to 9/11 fiction to describe the British author’s text as an effort in the direction of a psychological (and even psychoanalytical) investigation into the mind of the terrorist , the view adopted here is that the narrative unwinds in an opposite direction: that of an extreme othering of the Other, of distancing the character as much as possible, according to its author’s belief that ‘suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it’ (2008a, 68), which is a way of saying that it is useless to attempt finding an explanation for the nature of such an extreme alterity . Amis himself puts it more than clearly: ‘it [the terrorist’s] is a mind with which we share no dis
course’.

  This reading of The Last Days of Muhammad Atta (henceforth TLD) is in complete agreement with Gray’s assertion that ‘Amis dehumanizes and, in doing so, puts the obscene acts of the terrorists beyond our understanding; they are acts performed by “them”, a demonized other’ (2011, 176). Therefore, the criticisms of Amis that it was reckless, inappropriate and even obscene of him to adopt the point of view of a terrorist , documented by Birgit Däwes in her article, ‘Close Neighbours to the Unimaginable: Literary Perspectives of Terrorist Perspectives—Martin Amis , John Updike , Don DeLillo’ (2010, 496), lose their object, as the literary production actually represents a counter-narrative which ‘subvert[s] conventional projections of villainy, thus contributing to a configuration of both the literary history of evil and of the larger imaginary of terrorism’ (502).