Cairo Post

He was seven when - in the Nakba of 1948 - he fled from Birweh, his village in the Galilee. At the age of 12, living in Deir el-Asad, in what had become Israel, with a reputation as a precocious child poet, he was asked to compose a poem for a public reading. The occasion was the celebration of Israel’s "Independence Day" and the poem he read described the feelings of a child who returns to his town to find other people sleeping in his bed, tilling his father’s lands. He was summoned to the military governor who told him that if he continued to write subversive material his father’s work permit would be revoked. That incident set the tone, I think, for Darwish’s life.

 Ahdaf Soueif in The Guardian on the death of Mahmoud Darwish.

Fredric Jameson wrote soon after 9/11 that one could say that the event had not yet fully happened.

Six and half years later, 9/11 has happened enough that the United States occupies Iraq and continues to bomb Afghanistan. There is a government tome that might signify 9/11’s happening, The 9/11 Commission Report, and it recommends, among other things, that "Americans should not be exempt from carrying biometric passports or otherwise enabling their identities to be securely verified when they enter the United States." So surely the event has happened, or why else would Americans need biometric passports?

But we don’t have those yet. Nor has the United States yet engaged "with its friends to develop a common coalition approach toward the detention and humane treatment of captured terrorists," like the Report also recommends. Jordan and Egypt, some of our closest friends in the Middle East, do the most brutal things to our captured terrorists, bearded men whom the CIA pick up in Europe and fly to Cairo or Amman to have their testicles electrocuted, and much worse, until a piece of uncorroborated knowledge can be extracted and, maybe, used in another government tome, like The 9/11 Commission Report.

The "problems in the U.S.-Saudi relationship" have not been "confronted, openly," either, and yet Rudy Giuliani recently campaigned for president under the banner of what he did as mayor of New York when 9/11 happened. But without yet confronting the problems in our relationships with Saudi Arabia, with Pakistan, or with any other "terrorist sanctuary" to "engage the struggle of ideas," how did Giuliani campaign? Because we haven’t confronted those problems, 9/11 cannot have happened, fully — it has not reached its recommended end points, in the frame of the government’s tome.

But, then again, Giuliani had to drop out of the presidential race. He never really had much of a chance, after all pinning his hopes on what he did when 9/11 happened. He has made millions doing business in the Middle East since leaving office in New York, with Guiliani Partners LLC, apparently consulting in countries like Jordan, perhaps on how best to electrocute terrorists’ testicles. Does consulting on that make Rudy Giuliani sure that 9/11 has happened? As sure as he was in autumn 2001, when he oversaw the cleanup of the rubble of the World Trade Center, which burned for a hundred days?

One of this week’s short readings for "Literature of 9/11." 

I have been reluctant to comment on the recent ‘events’ because the event in question, as history, is incomplete and one can even say that it has not yet fully happened.

Obviously there are immediate comments one can make, in particular on the nauseating media reception, whose cheap pathos seemed unconsciously dictated by a White House intent on smothering the situation in sentiment in order to demonstrate the undemonstrable: namely, that ‘Americans are united as never before since Pearl Harbor.’ I suppose this means that they are united by the fear of saying anything that contradicts this completely spurious media consensus.

Historical events, however, are not punctual, but extend in a before and after of time which only gradually reveal themselves. It has, to be sure, been pointed out that the Americans created bin Laden during the Cold War (and in particular during the Soviet war in Afghanistan), and that this is therefore a textbook example of dialectical reversal. But the seeds of the event are buried deeper than that. They are to be found in the wholesale massacres of the Left systematically encouraged and directed by the Americans in an even earlier period. The physical extermination of the Iraqi and the Indonesian Communist Parties, although now historically repressed and forgotten, were crimes as abominable as any contemporary genocide. It is, however, only now that the results are working their way out into actuality, for the resultant absence of any Left alternative means that popular revolt and resistance in the Third World have nowhere to go but into religious and ‘fundamentalist’ forms.

As for the future, no one (presumably including our own Government) has any idea what the promised and threatened ‘war on terrorism’ might look like. But until we know that, we can have no satisfactory picture of the ‘events’ we imagine to have taken place on a single day in September. Despite this uncertainty, however, it is permitted to feel that the future holds nothing good for either side.

Fredric Jameson
North Carolina

11 September, the London Review of Books.

I just had to read a chunk of the 9/11 Commission Report for my transnational literature seminar, "Literature of 9/11."

We’re supposed to be writing less dismissive, more imminent responses to the readings. Last week was The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud. Next week is more of the 9/11 Report. What I wrote last night, after also reading the assigned Arundhati Roy article, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice":

I found the 9/11 Commission Report much easier to read as a comic book. Is it because I saw the day like most people did as picture, on the television and in news magazines? The comic, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, was done by two old illustrators and is available online at Slate. Its speech boxes are mostly pulled from the book. It reads like a graphic novel. Stan Lee says on the cover: "Never before have I seen a nonfiction book as beautifully and compellingly written and illustrated as The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation."

Who is reading this Report, which sounds often like David McCullough history writing. Too bad the figures are not older, like Washington or Teddy Roosevelt, some of McCullough’s usual characters. The narrative, based on the CIA and FBI’s corporate histories, provided in interviews and depositions and files, looks a lot like bin Laden does in the Graphic Adaptation: too phony, too much like the single villain, like it is the plot line of a Cold War serial. Where is Captain America?

Amazon.com describes the Graphic Adaptation as putting "at every American’s fingertips the most defining event of the century." Arundhati Roy writes in late September 2001 that 9/11 is a "monstrous calling card for a world gone horribly wrong." She does not say it is the defining event of the century. Instead she talks about the last two decades, from the previous century, and about America’s wars.

"The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank."

And the 500,000 Iraqi children dead from US sanctions and Madeleine Albright thinking it was "a very hard choice" but that "we think it is worth it."

In the Report there are strange metaphors provided by Sandy Berger and for some reason I imagine him in an office near the Capitol, or maybe in suburban Virginia, comparing counter-terrorism to muddy windshields for Lee Hamilton. There is the fear that this is set to script a national melodrama movie like "Pearl Harbor," which it will, thanks to Oliver Stone, with Nicholas Cage and "World Trade Center."

The Report’s readability reveals what it is trying to sell: the government providing the story, trying to prove it, laying some blame and defending itself.

In the book he recounts how he had just completed his Latin final when he meets a friend who announces excitedly that war has broken out and that the Israeli Air Force has already lost 23 planes: "Comments fly around, assured and doubtful. I tighten my right fist on the bottle of Pelican ink that is always with me in exams. Until this day I do not know why with my arm I drew a wide arc in the air and, aiming at the trunk of that palm tree, hurled the bottle of ink with all my strength so that in that midnight-blue collision it burst into fragments of glass that settled on the lawn."

Forty years later, I ask him if he knows why he did it and what he was feeling — excitement, anticipation, uncertainty, fear? Did he ever imagine that what unfolded could have done so?