Universitat de València​

 “The ‘forgotten victims’ of 9/11: the Culturally ‘Others’

in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007)

 and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)”

 

 

In December 2001, three months after the 9/11 attacks against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Don DeLillo wrote “In the Ruins of the Future”, an article in which he vindicated the role of writers to understand “what this day has done to us” (39) and to articulate a counter-narrative. However, for fifteen years now, American novelists have unsuccessfully strived to create this narrative that could be used to explore the main tenets and conundrums of the September 11 tragic events. As Richard Gray affirmed, “[i]f there was one thing writers agreed upon in response to 9/11, it was the failure of language; the terrorist attacks made the tools of their trade seem absurd” (2011, 1).

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Similarly to what happened in the United States during the 1960’s (Roth 1961, Barth and his “death of the novel” 1967), novelists have felt that the strikes against the core of America outshone their faculties to create inspiring narratives. Thus, Carroll affirms that for writers such as DeLillo “the terrorist attacks of September 11 produced both a rupture in the teleological progression of modernity and a crisis of representation in which the standard tools of the writer’s trade were no longer sufficient” (2013, 108). According to Catherine Morley, “the September 11 terrorist attacks engendered a new form of narrative realism, a form of realism born of a frustration with the limits of language as an affective and representative tool” (2008, 295). Instead of pondering over the dangers of moral binarisms and globalized structures of power, most of the 9/11 fiction has circumscribed itself to interpreting these horrendous occurrences in terms of particular traumas, attempting to transform the painful events into “narrative memories” of individual suffering (Caruth 1995, 153).

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By retreating into domesticity and dwelling too much upon the healing processes of the victims (mainly Westerners), works such as Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close (2005), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006) or Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) exemplified their authors’ inability to reflect upon the social and political consequences of ignoring the cultural other. Cultural difference “so long a vaunted property of peoples claiming their right to recognition and empowerment within the multicultural nation of the West” (Morey 2011, 135), … is now “constructed as cause (and legitimation) of violence” (ibid.). Far from becoming “a site of struggle between cultures” (Gray 2008, 147), nearly all examples of 9/11 literature have occupied themselves in exploring the aftermath and its traumatic effects on white population, failing to circulate a critical stance against the established institutions, to overcome the dichotomizing discourse of us vs them and to confront the brutal episode in terms of alterity. Thus, Michael Rothberg speaks of the need “for what Bakhtin would call a ‘radical reaccentuation’ of given forms” (2008, 152-3) and vindicates the obligation of any 21st-century American writer to go beyond Gray’s claim of deterritorialisation of the novel (2008, 141). According to Rothberg, what is required of writers is “a centrifugal literature of extraterritoriality” (2008, 158). He argues that “[w]hat we need from 9/11 novels are cognitive maps that imagine how US citizenship looks and feels beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, both for Americans and for others” (ibid.).

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Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) constitute solid grounds to illustrate these issues. Completely integrated in American society and assimilated into American culture, Jassim and Salwa, and Changez, the protagonists of these novels, see their social and cultural positions challenged in the aftermath of the 9/11. Laila Halaby and Mohsin Hamid allow us to listen to the voices of those Arab-American citizens who suffered the effects of the senseless hatred against the “other” and the impact of the American state’s vindictive procedures in the wake of the attacks. Traditionally, 9/11 narrative fiction has featured the figure of the “other” as a Muslim terrorist. However, interestingly enough, in these novels, the individual “other” has become a victim of the powerful imperialistic system, a target of the irrational abhorrence of their race and provenance. Thus, by exploring the personal and political trauma of the “forgotten victims” of the 9/11”, I will delve into how alterity has changed its basis and how the story is displayed through different lenses, those of the “cultural other”, posing counter-narratives to the conventional approach.

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Elena Ortells is Associate Professor of English at the Department of English Studies of the Universitat Jaume I of Castelló, Spain. She is also the Head of the Department of English Studies. She has published articles in Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, Academic Exchange Quarterly, Culture, Language and Representation, Atlantis, and English Teaching: Practice and Critique, among other journals. Books published include La verdadera historia del cautiverio y la restitución de Mary Rowlandson. Traducción, estudio crítico y notas (2008), Truman Capote, un camaleón ante el espejo (2009) and Prisioneras de salvajes. Relatos y confesiones de mujeres cautivas de indios norteamericanos (2012).

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