British and American Representations of 9-11

by Oana-Celia Gheorghiu

  A much more obvious approach than that of constructing alterity through subtle elements of structure and chapter arrangement is, however, to focus on the Other directly, to create characters that can be unmistakably understood as representations of alterity, of the strangers among us. Owing to their large media exposure, the Muslim figures related to 9/11 which could be best exploited by writers to create fictional counterparts are Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the Al-Qaeda operation, and Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, the most prominent executant, better known in the Western world by his first and last name, which, in DeLillo’s novel, becomes a sign of anonymity through westernisation: ‘he received certain sums of money wired to a Florida bank in his name, first and last, Mohamed Atta, because he was basically nobody from nowhere’ (FM 172). While both are represented in Falling Man, the main is on a generic figure, with an equally generic name: Hammad. Without a real counterpart in the list of the 19 hijackers, as in Atta’s case, Hammad is a quintessential image of the Muslim Arab terrorist , as constructed in/by the mind of the Westerner, much more than Amis’s Atta, whose character was purposely created against the grain, and certainly a more balanced one than that of Ahmed, Updike’s terrorist , who subsumes all the available stereotypes and prejudices. DeLillo’s Hammad is not one of the sketchy representations of the Arab Muslim presented by the media either. The bearded ‘murderous fanatic’ seems to be neither the murderous type, nor a particularly fanatical one: he is just easily convinced to embrace a cause which he fails to fully comprehend even in his final minutes. This more intricate approach to this character and to his peers is nonetheless considered Orientalist (or ‘New-Orientalist’) by some Oriental scholars. A good case in point is the article ‘Writing Back to DeLillo’s Falling Man’ (2011, 119–29), by two Iranian authors, Hossein Pirnajmuddin and Abbasali Borhan, who set out to demonstrate that the novel has ‘a propensity to identify the signifier terrorism with the Orient , or more precisely with Islam as the signified’ (120), which deems the fictional work ‘an un-postmodern monologic narrative’ and ‘one of the writings of the (A merican) empire’ (129). Their claim is that, through his hegemonic and single-sided view of reality, through his categorising the terrorist events of 9/11 under the flag of Islam , DeLillo creates ‘a totality of its reality/-ies which repudiates the most important premise of the postmodern art: provisionality and relativity of truth(s)’ (126).

  The generous display of postmodernist terminology in the article, supporting the interpretation of some excerpts from the novel, seems to be missing the point; aside from the preposterous stigmatisation of the American novelist as un-postmodern, Falling Man is also presented as an Orientalist discourse bent on demonstrating that Islam’s inability ‘to adjust itself to the West’s modern developments indicates its inherent inferiority’ (123). This inability, not of Islam , but of a group of Islamists, is indeed alluded to in the novel, without it pointing to the categories of inferiority and superiority, but simply to difference. The authors’ stance is subjectively motivated by a few references made to Iran and its impact on fundamentalists in this novel (and in DeLillo’s previous writings), although in this case they actually remark a certain postmodern condition, that of recycling: ‘DeLillo’s novel is but a repetition of the bulk of discourses […] ranging from media narratives to scholarly books and articles [which] disseminate and keep in circulation this ideological proposition’ (127). So, it might be postmodern after all.

  That the three parts of Falling Man that deal with the terrorists represent Orientalist discourse is a claim better supported by the article quoted above, which at least provides textual evidence from the novel, although it is difficult to agree with the idea that the novel assumes ‘the classical structures of othering , silencing and marginalisation’ (129). Much more persuasive would be a reading of the construction of otherness as emergent from being threatened and traumatised by the Other . In other words, having resurrected the author—or, at least, having made him the product of his socio-cultural environment—the imprint of DeLillo’s Americanness cannot be denied in the construction of Hammad, Amir (the name given to Atta throughout McDermott’s account of the lives of the terrorists, and borrowed by DeLillo), and of their peers. It is indeed othering , but the real terrorists have ‘othered’ themselves by their act. Yet it is neither silencing nor marginalisation, as long as they are given focalisation in the text, although some seem to believe that ‘DeLillo trivializes the terrorists by minimizing the attention he pays to them’ (Rowe 2011, 123). On this reading, though, if Amis disregards Western sensitivity by writing a short story centred on Mohamed Atta, De Lillo does not give the Other sufficient space in a novel which is, after all, about the American trauma. It seems that there is no right way of fictionalising this topic.

  Although DeLillo’s novel has almost imposed itself as a canonical text in the critical assessment of post-9/11 fi ction—which owes only partly to the author’s acknowledgement as one of the leading contemporary authors, and much more to the intricacies of a text which can be tackled from many perspectives (trauma , identity, politics, art, to name only a few)—not many critics discuss the relevance of the three chapters in the text. References to Hammad and the other terrorists are rather fleeting. A first thorough analysis in this direction is the chapter ‘Collapsing Identities: The Representation and Imagination of the Terrorist Falling Man’ by Sascha Pölhmann. Pölhmann’s thesis is that Falling Man ‘ultimately fails to leave dominant ideological frameworks […] and, despite its occasional resistance, does not succeed in imagining the terrorist as anything other than an Orientalist construction of an Islamist terrorist’ (2010, 51), owing to the fact that DeLillo ‘does work with binary oppositions’ (53) between the American victim and the Islamist aggressor. Nevertheless, the critique is not targeted at DeLillo’s alleged inability to represent a realistic terrorist but at making caricatures out of the terrorist characters (viz. Said). Focus is laid on the American characters’ ideological representations of their Other, and less on the parts exclusively dedicated to the group of hijackers, which are regarded as ‘echo[ing] both crude jihadist propaganda and Western clichés of Islamist paranoia, anti-Semitism and blind hatred of the West’ (60). While neither fully agreeing nor fully disagreeing with the opinions of Pölhmann, nuancing seems necessary in order to demonstrate that DeLillo’s approach is subtler than the traditional Orientalism he is accused of, which requires a closer look into these specific parts of the novel.

  The subchapter ‘On Marienstrasse’ (FM 77–83) interrupts the American characters’ discussion on Bin Laden quite abruptly, looking instead through Hammad’s eyes into the lives of the Hamburg group of Muslim terrorists . It sets out with a mise en abyme, a subtext intended to mirror the following developments, but also to underline the political purpose of the terrorists’ actions, hidden under a powerful pretext of religiousness. Hammad listens to the story of an old baker with whom he prayed in a mosque ‘on the second floor of this shabby building with graffiti smeared on the outer walls and a setting of local strolling whores’ (FM 77–78). This squalid setting is in itself a sign of otherness, of inadaptability. Generally, the representatives of various minorities—whether having fundamentalist tendencies or not—inhabit the slums of the great European cities, be it for economic purposes (lower rent prices) or to be alongside their peers, in self-imposed isolation. Clearly, the Hamburg group, in both fiction and reality, chose the poor neighbourhood as an ideal place for plotting and holding clandestine meetings, but the dilapidated image of the area contributes to the ingrained Occidentalist stereotyping of the city as a place of perdition. The old baker, formerly a rifleman in the Iraqi army during the conflict with Iran, recollects the appearance on the battlefields of thousands of little boys armed with Kalashnikovs: ‘they were the martyrs of the Ayatollah, here to fall and die’ (77). These many deaths helped the man understand that what was really happening was not an effect of an assumed heroic sacrifice for the Qur’an , bu
t ‘a military tactic, ten thousand boys enacting the glory of self-sacrifice to divert Iraqi troops and equipment from the real army massing behind front lines’ (78). What seems to be implied by the story, which Hammad retells during one of the plotters’ meetings, is that the 19 hijackers directly involved in the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon were, in fact, cannon fodder, just like ‘the boy soldiers running in the mud, the mine jumpers, wearing keys to paradise around their necks’ (80), not for the glory of Allah , but for the political purposes of their rulers. The image of the boys reappears, cyclically, in the moments before the crash of the plane into the North Tower:He thought of the Shia boys on the battlefield in the Shatt al Arab . He saw them coming out of trenches and redoubts and running across the mudflats toward enemy positions, mouths open in mortal cry. He took strength from this, seeing them cut down in waves by machine guns, boys in the hundreds, then thousands, suicide brigades, wearing red bandannas around their neck and plastic keys underneath, to open the door to paradise. (FM 238)

  The image of the boys wearing keys to paradise is negatively construed by the two Iranian authors mentioned above as being a typical Western construct with no connection to reality, one inspired by the famous memoir of Azar Nafasi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2004) and other Orientalist texts (2011, 127). Whether this aspect is true or not is less important, especially at the fictional level; what matters is the fact that the image is meant to reinforce the idea of sacrifice in Hammad’s mind, as the character had previously seemed unconvinced about their cause, despite pursuing it fully. In his final moments, Hammad’s thoughts sound as if he were trying to reassure himself: ‘How could any death be better? Every sin in your life is forgiven in the seconds to come. There is nothing between you and eternal life in the seconds to come. You are wishing for death and now it is here in the seconds to come’ (FM 239). Pölhmann is right when he mentions that this specific fragment actually imitates the translated words from Muhammad Atta’s letter which circulated in the media under the heading ‘Last Words of a Terrorist’, which were also quoted in the lyrics of the song ‘Jihad’, composed and played by American thrash metal band Slayer (2010, 60–2).Unlike Martin Amis , who imprints regrets on Muhammad Atta’s final seconds, as a form of fictional vengeance against the perpetrator, DeLillo refrains from speculating whether Hammad found his inner peace and eternal life or not, because, in an artful twist, focalisation shifts from the aggressor (Hammad) to the victim (Keith Neudecker). The reader witnesses the former’s death and the latter’s survival in the course of the same sentence (FM 239). Hammad is left behind, in the past, where he belongs, and the last pages of the novel concentrate on the future, on the life during and after the unimaginable.

  To return ‘On Marienstrasse’ and ‘In Nokomis’, prior to the attacks, the two episodes are not as important for their account of the terrorists’ deeds, which closely follows the official version of The 9/11 Commission Report and the journalistic investigation of McDermott, as they are for their display of imagined Occidentalist thinking about the men gathering to fight for Islam , to ‘struggle against the enemy, near enemy and far, Jews first, for all things unjust and hateful, and then the Americans’ (80). Their accusations against the Jews verge on absurdity: ‘They studied architecture and engineering. They studied urban planning, and one of them blamed the Jews for defects in construction. The Jews built the walls too thin, aisles too narrow’ (79). The idea is questioned even from within: ‘Hammad wasn’t sure whether this was funny, true or stupid’ (79), but it is indicative of a general state of mind. Of course, a critic intent on demonstrating DeLillo’s Orientalist bias may consider such statements, as well as those related to the West (‘everything here was twisted, hypocrite, the West corrupt of mind and body, determined to shiver Islam down to bread crumbs for birds’ (80) or ‘here they were in the midst of unbelief, in the bloodstream of the kufr’ (174)),18 as being the fruits of the imagination of an Occidental; however, the fictional utterances easily find close equivalents in the statements documented in the theoretical section on Occidentalism. Nonetheless, it is true that the Western authors make use of the statements regarded by the West as the most absurd, which underlines the alterity of Islamist thinking. For example, Qutb’s wrath against the American lawns, quoted by Martin Amis, is also used by Don DeLillo: ‘this entire life, this world of lawns to water and hardware stacked on endless shelves, was total, forever illusion. […] People water lawns and eat fast food’ (173). In stark opposition to these superficial pleasures, ‘they received instruction in the highest jihad, which is to make blood flow, their blood and that of others’, although the less convinced Hammad ‘ordered takeout at times, undeniably; every day, every five days, he prayed, sometimes less, sometimes not at all, [and] he watched TV in a bar near the flight school’ (173).

  While Amis subverts the image of the fundamentalist brainwashed by the power of religion , constructing an Atta who is neither religious, nor political, but merely evil, DeLillo bestows upon Hammad both doubts and a propensity towards a normal existence—he even had a girlfriend whom he sometimes wanted to marry, he used to eat too much and pray too little, while knowing all along that ‘he had to fight against the need to be normal; he had to struggle against himself first, and then against the injustice that haunted their lives’ (83). There are at least three possible interpretations to account for Hammad’s normality. Firstly, his can be an image meant to thwart that of the evil terrorist created by the media. Secondly, in opposition to the first supposition, he can be precisely that Other who appears to be harmless and proves extremely dangerous in the end—as is often the case with terrorists and serial killers described in hindsight by their neighbours or colleagues as quiet and polite people. At one point in the novel, Hammad wonders if the simple American people, ‘the people jogging in the park… these old men who sit in beach chairs’ even notice him: ‘He wonders if they see him standing there, clean-shaven, in tennis sneakers’ (173). Thirdly, Hammad may represent the very image of the ‘normal’ Muslim turned to terrorism by the political manipulation of the religious constraints imposed by the Qur’an. In this context , Atta, Amir in Falling Man, acts as a trusted leader and as a manipulative conscience.

  Amir is undoubtedly the representation of the real pilot of the American Airlines Flight 11, being introduced as follows: ‘Amir spoke in his face. His full name was Mohamed el-Amir el-Sayed Atta’ (80). He speaks of changing the world by first changing one’s mind, and about the sense of losing their history while ‘being crowded out by other cultures, other futures, the all-enfolding will of capital market and foreign policies’ (80). For Hammad, Amir is a ‘very genius’ (79), ‘his mind was in the upper skies, making sense of things’ (81), he thought ‘clearly, in straight lines, direct and systematic’ (175) and his words ‘sounded like philosophy’ (176). In fact, he is sketched as a voice of Islamist manipulation, someone for whom ‘the others exist only to the degree that they fill their role we have designed for them’ (176). He is respected by the other Muslims for having made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and it is from his position as a hajji that he alleviates his men’s fears of disregarding the Qur’an by committing suicide, as well as Hammad’s doubts about this being the only way he could accomplish anything (‘But does a man have to kill himself in order to count for something, be something, find the way?’ (175)):The end of our life is predetermined. We are carried toward that day from the minute we are born. There is no sacred law against what we are going to do. This is not suicide in any meaning or interpretation of the word. It is only something long written. We are finding the way already chosen for us. (175)

  Once convinced, the men no longer have ‘the burning spirit of the days on Marienstrasse; they were beyond that now, in full and determined preparation’ (172). Even Amir puts an end to his Islamic propaganda: ‘Amir had stopped talking about Jews and Crusaders. It was all tactical now, plane schedules and fuel loads and getting men from one location to another, on time, on place’ (173). His ma
nipulative aims have been attained: Hammad’s discourse shifts from questioning their deed to uttering the credo of the jihadi fighter, who thinks of himself as above others because of his willingness to sacrifice: ‘We are willing to die, they are not. This is our strength, to love death, to feel the claim of armed martyrdom’ (178). This statement, although inserted into a literary piece that may be considered Orientalist, is, in fact, an example of typical Occidentalist discourse, which sets forth the dichotomy between selfhood and otherness and, at the same time, insists on the inferiority of the latter. This is the control mechanism represented not, to be sure, by the Qur’an in its entirety, but by the literal interpretation of some of its verses, inculcating young men through the persuasive voices of political leaders, leading to the most unfortunate outcomes. Hammad is just an image—perhaps stereotypical at times—of these young men who choose to end their lives while taking the lives of many innocent others as a result of one of the most powerful forms of manipulation: religious indoctrination. However, this is not to say—and DeLillo does not say it anywhere—that this image is representative of all young Muslim men, but only for those who, in the spirit of the novel , turn themselves into falling men (figuratively and literally speaking).