There were no omens that could have prepared us for how a bright and beautiful New York City morning back in 2001 was to plunge our world into a volcano of violence. A horrific attack in one of the busiest, most bustling cities in the world gave fiat for two decades of a vengeful and savage War on Terror all across the Muslim world. We lost and we lost some more: lives, bodies, dignity, rights, voice, beauty and freedom.
As many will say, including myself, 9/11 was a defining moment for our time. But just as we reach into the past to understand our present moment marked by fascism, genocide, hatred, vigilante militias, an escalation in every form of prejudice and phobia, and an irreparable rupture from humanness, so we must stretch back into a time before September 11, 2001 to ask what brought us here: that inconvenient before.
In a quest to seek this elusive before, we must also search within ourselves. I am reminded of a brilliant piece of writing by Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinović in his collection Sarajevo Blues. In this lyrical wartime vignette called “Innocent Civilians,” and translated by Ammiel Alcalay, the poet spots a fashionable young woman with a “freshly bathed dalmation trotting over the crushed cement and broken windows.” Astounded by her casual joy as shells fall all around them, the narrator catches himself as he is about to declare her an innocent civilian.
“Of course she’s an innocent civilian, but not all civilians are innocent. There are those who, like retired couples, go out hand in hand for an evening walk in the middle of a war that they inspired, the course of its future in their heads. Of course, this business about civilians can get very complicated. You might run into a soldier point at the tip of his sneaker and the coagulated blood there that once belonged to a professor who thought that five thousand Muslim kids out to be killed.”
Today might be a good day as any other to ask if we are indeed innocent at all, if we have earned an exemption from blame in breaking apart our world. With the ongoing and unstoppable genocide in Gaza, the word “complicit” circulates: complicit media, complicit liberals, complicit governments, complicit universities, complicit businesses, complicit entertainment…but also, complicit me and complicit you. If we see ourselves belonging to this world and if these daily happenings distress us, it is time to reflect more and to resist more.
Recently, with the 25 years of 9/11 looming over us, we reflected collectively on the things we lost and the things we still carry. We organized a beautiful evening with Mohamedou Ould Slahi.
Few people have had to think about the legacy of 9/11 as deeply, or as urgently, as Mohamedou who spent 15 years as a prisoner at the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay. It was revealed that he had been subjected to “Special Programs” at Guantánamo, which amounted to a diet of torture at the hands of US servicemen and women, including sexual abuse, beating, near-drowning, stimulus deprivation, and plenty else. He sat down with Michael Bronner, journalist and screenwriter, who adapted Mohamedou’s Guantánamo Diary to film for a charged conversation about the path we’ve all been on as individuals, nations and a fractious global community since that awful day 25 years ago. But Mohamedou also about love, hope and forgiveness.
I invited my dear friend Zohra Saed to join me on the Radical Futures podcast. Zohra and I were both starting out in the doctoral program at the City University of New York located on 34th street in midtown Manhattan.
29. Becoming Afghan, Becoming American After 9/11: Featuring Zohra Saed
“You had to go and perform Afghan-ness,” scholar and poet Zohra Saed recalls as she speaks of the scary and difficult days soon after the towers fell in New York City. Afghanistan was suddenly in the spotlight as the location of 9/11 mastermind and head of Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden.
As I walked up Broadway, I saw the second plane hit the tower. The crowd gasped loudly and phones rang incessantly as I kept walking till I found myself in a small huddle of people outside the university building. We all stared up at the Empire State Building and wondered what awaited us. Zohra too had made her to the same building and had been subjected to a racist attack almost immediately by an older woman who will likely enter history as an innocent civilian. An Afghan-American who was already teaching Arab-American literature, Zohra was repeatedly asked that day if she was somehow responsible for the attacks. If you had Afghan heritage as Zohra did, the rest is literally history.
In this conversation, she speaks about how Afghanistan turned into a US-sponsored scam as Afghan-American youth were seduced by the American government with lucrative offers to go and fix the very country they went on to break for 20 straight years. Zohra recounts what was done and undone by 9/11 and by the War on Terror, the ways in which these tragedies also led to building new worlds and new collectives, and shares her own trajectory as a poet, publisher and a scholar of Central Asia.
Love and solidarity❤️🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure
More this month👇🏾
28. Palestine and the Collapse of American Journalism: Featuring Joe Sacco
Joe Sacco admits that he began to clash with many of the existing principles of journalism early in his career. He had graduated with a degree in journalism from a university in the US and had begun following the coverage of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.