Art and suffering: four years after 9/11

The fourth anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York is approaching. For those New Yorkers without the constant reminder of a missing presence, a loved one who perished, the memory has lessened. But there is a new crop of fiction that seeks to immortalise the attacks and their aftermath. The trickle of 9/11 and terrorism literature that began only three months after the attacks has, following the discreet interval of four years, become a fairly steady stream.

Perhaps four is the catalytic number. It was 1998, four years after the Rwandan genocide, when a group of African writers visited the country for the purpose of writing about what had happened.

The project, Our Duty to Remember, was organised by Nocky Djedanoum, a native Rwandan who immigrated to Chad well before the 1994 genocide. From the beginning, his group met opposition. Rwandan writers were suspicious of them because they had not been there for the genocide, but two eventually agreed to join their project.

Also by KA Dilday on openDemocracy:

“Lost in translation: the narrowing of the American mind” (May 2003)

“Jacques Derrida: life beyond the margins” (October 2004)

“The Return of the King: Tolkien and the new medievalism”
(December 2003)

“The freedom trail”
(August 2005)

If you find this material valuable please consider supporting openDemocracy by sending us a donation so that we can continue our work and keep it free for all

When they presented their work in Rwanda in 2000, Rwandans who had lived through the genocide pelted them with angry questions, the South African writer Antjie Krog reported. They had harsh words for one writer, who came to present her book, a white woman who was in Rwanda when it all began, but was evacuated to safety in Belgium.

No one can deny someone’s right to write, but I suspect that the Rwandans who could not leave the country were taking issue with the exercising of a privilege available to many of us from the western world: the luxury to enter or exit their tragedy at will, to take away the parts which make our lives more dramatic, yet escape the horrid suffering.

I saw kernels of this in New York in the weeks after 11 September. I am a New Yorker, but I was over the Atlantic Ocean when the towers fell, returning to New York City from South Africa. The plane was diverted to Canada and the next day my fellow passengers and I rode a coach for ten hours back to New York. We returned to a city eerily silent but hardly somnolent – taut and tense and redolent with a scent the likes of which most of us had never known.

I re-entered New York quickly, but many other New Yorkers whom I knew could not. Some of them tried frantically to get back to the city, for no particular reason, not really to lend aid – New York, in a moment of grace, was overrun with volunteers – but to be in their city during its bleakest hours.

Or that’s the charitable explanation. As I talked to people on the phone, or read emails from the New Yorkers attempting to re-enter the state or country I thought I detected another motivation. The attacks were likely to be the most memorable event in New York history and they had missed it. There was a river of experience – fear, despair, pain – coursing through the city and we were stranded on the banks.

Many refused to accept it and for weeks after I heard stories from people of the ex-boyfriend who had had a meeting at the World Trade Center the day before, the cousin of a friend who had perished, the dead and newly dear college classmate, unseen and unremembered for the previous twenty years. (I do not exaggerate the need to connect to the drama of it – when New York had the massive blackout in the summer of 2003, I spoke to a young French woman who recounted her story of walking home to me, cheerily punctuating it with: “I missed September 11, but at least I was here for the blackout.”)

One thing became clear in the weeks after: simply because of the size of New York, statistics dictated that most of us were fortunate not to know any of the 3000 people who were killed. Yet New York is a city of people who want to be at the centre of any action; now, they grasped at tenuous links, desperate to have some immediate personal connection to the horror of it all. I took to announcing my truth bluntly: “I knew no one.”

I’ve been thinking about those strange, bruised weeks lately as more and more fiction writers begin to grapple with terrorism and 11 September. There is something that feels unseemly to me about the speed with which the fictionalised riffs appeared and I’ve been trying to figure out why. The writers who have taken on this topic are not unaware of this. In September 2003, two French novelists, Luc Lang and Frédéric Beigbeder produced books about 9/11 and, acknowledging that a two-year interval might seem inappropriate for those who had not lived it to recreate it and perhaps profit on it, each accused the other of taking the low road in his approach when interviewed together by a writer from the French newsweekly, Le Nouvel Observateur.

It is that, the claiming or stepping into the tragedy for the purpose of profiting on it – not necessarily for money but for vividness and inspiration – that is so discomfiting. It is a leeching that is almost impossible to do gracefully. The experience of the tragedy is so tenuous and fleeting that they can take away the heightened emotion yet escape the numbing suffering. The old curse – “May you live in interesting times” – may become, for a writer, a benediction.

There are those who would argue that art is not meant to be graceful and I acknowledge that. Art has always taken and been allowed many licenses. The first play I know of about 9/11 appeared three months later and was widely attended; the artistic output that began then has yet to abate and probably never will.

I’ve spent this essay giving you the uncharitable explanation for the literary focus and illusory connections to 11 September. The more charitable one is that people needed a justification for their fear when the fatal combination of rage, viciousness and ingenuity that periodically cuts a bloody swath across this world finally breached borders that seemed unbreachable. Why not the same fear and emotion following the massacres in East Timor or Bosnia or Rwanda?  Why now for all of us who call ourselves humanists?

I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between the charitable and uncharitable explanations – Theodor Adorno wrote that art’s greatness lay in its “power to let those things be heard which ideology conceals.”