3. Am I willing? Can I bear to narrate this into normality, forty hours after they crumbled and fell? To craft a story: and then, and then, and then? Will the words I’m spilling here seem fatuous or hysterical or naïve by the time they’re read? Likely so. I’m failing and relieved to fail. I’m disgusted with myself for consenting to try. Speculation feels obscene. So does this self-indulgent self-castigation. Except there may be some slim value in offering to a rapidly toughening future some hint of the white noise of one human imagination failing, on what they’re calling the day after, to yet meet the task at hand. The channel surf of denial and incomprehension: an extremely local report.
4. As a kid in this neighborhood it was a regular thing to walk to the Promenade to see the harbor and skyline. I’d go with my grandmother and she’d point out the statue, the ferry, Ellis, Governors. Later we stared from that perch as they assembled these erector-set-looking things, these twinned towers. Even then I was a New York purist, I preferred old things, and resented the dull Saltine boxes for dwarfing the Empire State. But they were mine anyway, I couldn’t help it. Big Apple, Abe Beame, Bicentennial, World Trade Center, my cheesy ’70s New York. A decade later, when I first married, I dragged a California bride to my city and we elevated to the roof of one of the buildings to exhilarate in the raw, dizzying wind of outer space. Yesterday, the erector set reappeared, just for a moment. Yesterday the same west-to-east wind that once nearly whisked newlyweds from the rooftop blew pulverized tower across the river and into my mouth. I’ve eaten my towers.
5. Back to the Promenade, back. I’ve abandoned the television five, six times now to walk to the edge and widen my recalcitrant eyes and mind again at the plume. On the way up Henry Street I gather one of the crisped papers twinkling everywhere to the ground. A printout on old-style, tabbed computer paper. 7WTC 034: World Trade Center, building 7, thirty-fourth floor, I guess. Kirshenbaum, Joan. “For any report change complete this section and return to ops support, data centre.” Joan Kirshenbaum, you contemporary Bartleby, if you’re reading this I’ve got your scrap of paper.
6. Dear reader, two Sundays in the future: You know vastly more than I do about what I mean when I say war. Do you envy me, living in this before, this last shred of relative innocence? I hope not. I hope I ought to envy you, the wild sweet peace you enjoy, the simultaneous epiphany of universal human amity and accord, the melting of all world guns into memorial sculpture which took place on, say, September 16, the miracle that occurred in place of the carnage I’m dreading today. Oh, I hope I ought to envy you, I hope I’m a moron.
7. Reality check. As I write, sirens wheeling past my window. I’m two blocks from Atlantic Avenue and the city’s largest Arabic neighborhood, which the cops have cordoned from traffic, anticipating and protecting against retaliatory chuckleheadedness. The radio’s telling of another building fallen—you know, just another large, unmemorable office building in lower Manhattan crumbling to dust, not a big deal these days, it happens sometimes, relax—It’s not like the twin towers fell down! The many, many things they’re not telling us on the radio fall into two categories: things they’re not telling us that we can pretty easily riddle out for ourselves like we’re picking up ears, we’re picking up toes, god have mercy we’re picking up penises and vaginas; and things they’re not telling us which we really can’t fathom like for instance what the hell all these presently rushing sirens are rushing toward.
8. The Promenade yesterday was full of people, more than I’ve seen since the tall ships were in the harbor, and yet all absolutely still and silent. Each one of us came and stood, rooted at the spot where we first got the plume in full view. Every third or fourth mouth covered with a surgical mask, those without masks feeling just that tiny bit sorrier for ourselves, but then again not really caring. That vast communal silence. I was doing better there, standing with others, rightly gathered into a commonality, a field of eyes, with mouths emitting if anything only those slight, undramatized moans.
9. At the Promenade yesterday in the gathered silence and stillness of many minds looking through haze at an altered city one woman, seated on a bench, elbows on knees, calmly, effortlessly tilted her head and vomited. The splash heard in the silence. The head tilted just enough to avoid chin-dribble. Eyes never breaking from the task of gazing, gathering the new information.
—The New York Times Magazine, September 2001
Further Reports in a Dead Language
Thoughts that first ran through my head, all garbage now, like scorched paperwork over the harbor: Wow, it’s going to be hard to repair those tall buildings! Couldn’t Clinton just be president again? I mean really, that whole election thing was fun, but the real guy is alive, he’s healthy, can’t we just sort of slip him in there? One of those buildings couldn’t actually fall, could it? Could it? There were people on those airplanes! We just watched a lot of people die! Gore would be fine, just fine. My breath stinks. Didn’t brush my teeth. The people on the floors above the fire. God. The Pentagon, that’s like the ultimate symbol of something: fortress, geometry. Somebody really hates geometry today. Penta-gone. Traffic’s going to be a drag. There are people in the Pentagon. There’s really a LOT of people in the World Trade Center. It only looked like a small plane because you can’t credit the scale. It was a big plane. It’s still there, behind that cloud, it’s an optical thing. Only one tower, gosh, that’s going to look weird! I’d take George Senior. I’d take Nixon. I’d take a player piano, a balloon animal, a wind sock. But no, this sophomore Virginia Woolf crap is a failure, another blasphemy, and a total waste, I can’t go on with it, very sorry. Write that one yourself.
We’d abided so long in our shimmering impassive skins, sealed like airplanes ourselves, stationary airplanes: climate-controlled, with weather and pestilence and human frailty all sheltered inside. More than just the world’s largest filing cabinets, my other and I were bodies undertaking a long consideration of space, ticking off earth rotations, swatting birds. When after so very long the new body entered mine I was accepting, more than I might have predicted. Though I shivered I tried to permit myself to learn what it had to teach me, this intersection of presences. Beside me was another struggle with the same knowledge: two brides, two grooms. But the marriages were brief. The lesson opaque. No, J. G. Ballard crap isn’t going to do it, either, exaggerated empathy for the machines and buildings won’t help anything, won’t get me out of what I’m still trying not to feel.
I was invited to Turin, Italy, last spring for a citywide book festival. As I was driven from the airport to the hotel by my Italian hosts, I laughed at the billboards for the festival, which were visible everywhere in the city: They showed a face with eyes closed, pushed deep into the spine of an open book, as if to sniff or lick the joint of pages. “I guess that’s the way to get Italians interested in books,” I joked. “You have to suggest they’re something to eat or fuck.” Yesterday, here in Brooklyn, I walked into my local bookstore and talked with the owner, my friend Henry Zook. “People are reading,” Henry said hopefully. When I asked what they were reading he said, “Nostradamus, and books about germs.” Myself, I wanted to buy every book in the store and stack them into a windowless castle for myself, I wanted to stroke their papery bodies, I wanted, a little, to burn the store down. Language is metaphysics, and I hate metaphysics today. I hate the religious and philosophical lies which estrange me from the immediate life in favor of lost or imaginary kingdoms and gardens, in favor of paradisiacal or hellish afterlives, all lies. Today I want to eat and fuck.
—Rolling Stone, September 2001
To My Italian Friends
To my Italian friends,
In preparation for my visit to Mantua, which I’m anticipating with great pleasure, I find I’m asked again to speak on this question of how the world has changed since September 11. This isn’t surprising—in my recent visits to Barcelona, London, Berlin, and Amsterdam I was greeted with this question, and related questions, time and time again. In fa
ct, I’m grateful to be asked to write a few lines here, perhaps in the hopes of saying something which will satisfy my restless wish to eventually be asked a different question, one I’m better able to answer.
At the request of the New York Times I wrote a piece on September 12 and 13, a series of impressions, from my helpless window in Brooklyn, of the disaster that had fallen on our city. (The article was eventually cut in two, and the second portion of it was published in Rolling Stone.) The result was a pale scream of protest, nothing more—most of the novelists in New York were asked by one magazine or another to write something, and to me it seems our voices, at that moment, blended into one vast impotent scream. Still, I was proud to have written it, not for any illusion that it was illuminating or consoling for anyone else to read, but because the effort involved writing, doing my job. Like everyone else still alive in the city, my responsibility in the days following the disaster was to find a way to return to work, to reassert the collective reality of a city whose fragility had been revealed. To fail to resume work would have been to fail the community—the subway conductors had trains to pilot through the tunnels, the secretaries had to return to offices in buildings where bomb threats were being called in, in order to answer ringing telephones and copyedit legal documents, the Korean grocers had mangoes and papaya to set out for their Dominican and Puerto Rican customers. So, I sat in my house and did my feeble job, between bouts of self-pitying weeping. Since then I’ve been unable to speak on the subject directly with any intelligence, though I have stumbled through interviews all over Europe, against my own wish that a site of suffering be permitted a measure of silence, time, and even mystery.
I simply can’t answer your question. I don’t know anything you don’t know. The experience a year ago, which will be with me forever, is nothing more than the wing of history’s airplane grazing and tearing the scrim of unreality which had somehow still cloaked the world’s ongoing disaster from our eyes. It seems distasteful to me that New York’s suffering should be privileged as a revelation beyond a certain point, and that point was passed in October or November, at the very latest. Such naïveté, such historical amnesia, represents a thin trace of the impulse for reinvention which once fueled the American dream. But at this late date the American dream is only a kind of a cult or religion, and I’m not very fond of religions lately. Firemen who die like soldiers are tragic, even pathetically noble, but to exalt their deaths in the cause of belligerence is perverse and shameful, an inadequate parsing of the unexpected last line of the twentieth century’s horror-poem. So don’t ask how the world has changed—ask how I have changed. The answer is: I’ve changed slightly. I read my newspapers with increased horror and distrust, I regard the leaders of nations and movements with increased revulsion, I suffer increased shame at my own paralyzed inaction, and every day I give a quarter to the woman who sits on the corner of my block. The only question she asks—“Hey, do you have a quarter?”—is one to which I at least know an answer.
I look forward in September to being able to clasp your hands and kiss your cheeks, and to raise a glass of wine with you in consideration of what words can’t reach.
All best,
Jonathan
—book festival program, Mantua, 2002
My Egyptian Cousin
I’ve never traveled farther from New York than western Europe; Saad Eddin Ibrahim is an advocate of democracy imprisoned in Egypt. But Saad and I are both outlying members of the same sprawling midwestern family: Saad is married to my first cousin Barbara. His name is in the news and on the op-ed pages these days, if you’re looking out for it. A year ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a photo of Saad on its cover, in which he is seen peering from between the bars of his courtroom cage. But even such prominent items can be lost in the dispiriting muddle of Middle Eastern politics, so hard to keep in view amid yellow-alert warnings of poison-gas attacks, or alongside sniper headlines which further convince our fear-stupefied Western selves that anyone called Muhammad has a predisposition to run amok. Saad is a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo and the founder and director of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, which campaigns for a secular and democratic civil society in Egypt. Famous in Egypt for his controversial writing on minorities, and for his role as a presidential adviser and television commentator in the Sadat years, Saad came increasingly under attack in the official press during the Mubarak era. His defense of the persecuted Coptic Christians and his criticism of electoral corruption was, it seemed, tolerated because of his closeness to the Mubarak family—the president’s wife and sons had been among his students. But Saad, like Falstaff, may have known his president too well and not well enough. When he publicly warned against the possibility of Mubarak grooming one of his sons to succeed him, he was arrested, as an object lesson to other would-be activists. Mubarak perhaps did not so much initiate this action as withdraw his protection, allowing reactionary elements, who had long been calling for Saad Eddin Ibrahim to be silenced, to do as they wished.
In July 2000, after raids on his home and on the Ibn Khaldun Center, Saad and twenty-seven of his students and colleagues were charged with accepting foreign funds for the purpose of defaming Egyptian society in a documentary film and a paper on election-rigging. The European Union, which supplied the funds in question, has since endorsed their use in four separate affidavits. The laws under which Saad was prosecuted were framed in an attempt to stem the flow of funds for subversive Islamist activities. He was tried before a special court set up after Sadat’s assassination to deal with terrorists, but which is increasingly used to persecute homosexuals, members of religious minorities, and advocates of free speech. My cousin Barbara described the courtroom in a letter to me:
The scene can only be experienced, it is nearly impossible to describe: throngs of reporters blocking the line of vision between lawyers and the bench, cell phones going off every two minutes, lawyers dressed in “robes” that once were styled on British barristers’, but now a tradition so long forgotten that glued-on cotton balls stand in for ermine ruffs. Janitors shuffle around in plastic flip-flops among years of cigarette butts asking us for baksheesh—during the proceedings—for “cleaning” the room. The defendants stand in an iron cage for the duration of the hearings, but the grill is so broken down that we can pass notes and coffee in to Saad at any time.
Five of Saad’s students and colleagues were convicted along with him; most have now been freed having served nine months. Saad’s captivity, though, still serves a purpose. I have tried to understand it this way: Imagine that the president of the United States, rather than ignoring the bee stings of a dissident leftist—Noam Chomsky, say, or Ralph Nader, perhaps Michael Moore—had him imprisoned. Astonishment would quickly give way to fear of speaking out. The incarceration of one person, the right person, can be an act of the most ruthless efficiency, chaotic kangaroo-court tableaux notwithstanding. So Saad, a sixty-seven-year-old scholar in failing health, faces six more years of imprisonment. An appeal hearing this month appears to be his last hope (short of a Mubarak pardon) of being spared.
My cousin Barbara spent her childhood in the Chicago suburb of Palatine and met Saad in 1967 when she was his student at DePauw University in Indiana; they were married in 1971 and moved to Cairo, where their two children grew up and where she is a director of research with the International Population Council. Her father—and mine—grew up on farms in Iowa and Missouri: Our grandfather was a traveling salesman who dealt in farm equipment and supplies. That she was able to make such a move may have something to do with the 1960s. Among the many international groups to send representatives to Washington, D.C., on October 25 for a Free Saad Eddin Ibrahim rally was the Duck, a group of Saad’s former students and colleagues from DePauw, named for the Fluttering Duck—a coffeehouse, at the corner of Center Street and Vine in Greencastle, Indiana, where the lecturer and his midwestern acolytes used to hang out. In a recent e-mail circular, the Duck reminded members
to send notes of protest to the Egyptian embassy, in order to help the Ibrahim family “to keep on keeping on.”
I first met Saad sometime in the ’60s, when I was five or six years old. I clearly remember him visiting our house in Brooklyn as early as 1971, and then more clearly still at Lethem family reunions held at various sites in Kansas, Arkansas, and Missouri on through the ’70s. I understood his place in my life, and in my family, through a lens of “ ’60s consciousness” inherited from my parents. This inheritance was for me effortless and, until recently, unexamined. My mother was New York Jewish and, behind that, a mix of High German–assimilated and Polish-Russian shtetl; my father was midwestern-Protestant nothing, with distant Scots-English roots, and by the ’70s had become a practicing Quaker, partly in protest against the Vietnam War. The real religion in our house, though, was a combination of art and protest and utopian internationalist sentiment. Through the Friends Service Committee and through our connection with the Guardian, a Communist newspaper, our family took in lodgers from all over the world—I remember particularly a Rwandan Tutsi and an Okinawan. Intermarriage, of any sort, was felt to be heroic, and Barbara, with her Egyptian family, seemed absolutely heroic. So did my fabled aunt Molly, the dark horse of my mother’s family, who’d fled New York and married a Mexican, and then set up as a folk artist in Arizona. Even the midwestern Lethems were obsessed with their purported trace of Native American blood—my legendary great-great-grandfather, named Brown, was said to be half Oglala Sioux.
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