It's seven years today since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, Amira Nowaira* investigates some fictional representations of the events Like other human tragedies of greater or lesser magnitude, the 9/11 events seven years ago produced great trauma and unspeakable pain, some of which has been buried, perhaps, by subsequent layers of interpretation. In the words of Frank Rich of the New York Times, "today 9/11 carries so many burdens -- of interpretation, of sentimentality, of politics, of war -- that sometimes it's hard to find the rubble of the actual event beneath the layers of the edifice we've built on top of it." Perhaps overwhelmed by the enormity of the event and the political and military consequences to which it gave rise, literary writers were at first slow to respond. But soon there came a steady flow of novels and short stories, motivated either by a genuine desire to make sense of the disaster through writing about it, or by the temptation to jump onto the 9/11 literary bandwagon. A list of novels with predominantly 9/11 elements would include works like Windows on the World by Frederic Beigbeder, in which a father is imagined having breakfast with his sons at the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center on the fateful morning. Another novel, The Writing on the Wall by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, deals with a 34-year-old woman who finds a teenage girl crying amidst the rubble of the World Trade Center on 11 September, an experience that leads her to re-examine her own life. Similarly, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer presents a precocious nine-year-old boy who tries to find the lock to a key belonging to his father, who died in the attack. As he walks through New York he meets survivors whose stories echo in his mind and heart. Don DeLillo's Falling Man also enlists the reader's sympathy by employing the image of a man falling from the towers on 9/11. What all these works have in common is that they are written from the perspective of the "wronged" culture, in other words of Americans or westerners who feel that their homeland has been attacked and their peace of mind eroded. Understandably, they are written with a strong sense of outrage and frustration, sliding at times into melodrama. But while some of these works have fallen into cliché, others have tried seriously to grapple with 9/11 and its aftermath. While there have also been attempts to present the 9/11 events from a different perspective -- Martin Amis's short story "The Last Few Days of the Life of Muhammad Atta," for example, which tries to understand, though not to sympathise with, the alleged hijacker's state of mind as he piloted the plane into the Twin Towers -- very few literary attempts have been made to shed light on the impact that 9/11 has had on the Arabs and Muslims living in America both before and after 9/11. However, two novels published in 2007, Once in a Promised Land by Laila Halaby and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, attempt to do just this, and both of them have attracted wide acclaim, with Hamid's novel being shortlisted for the UK Booker Prize. Halaby's Once in a Promised Land presents the shattering effect of 9/11 on the lives of her two protagonists, Salwa and Ghassan, a married couple of Jordanian and Palestinian origins living in Tucson, Arizona. Both have achieved success in the US, Salwa as a banker and Ghassan as a hydrologist. The house they live in, the gym where Ghassan goes in the novel's opening pages, and the Mercedes they own all point to affluence achieved within the American context. Yet, the reality of Salwa and Ghassan's lives is anything but satisfying. After Ghassan is involved in an accident in which a young American boy is killed, he visits the dead boy's mother in an attempt to atone for the accident, and a conversation between the characters betrays the existence of continuing prejudice against Arabs in America. When the boy's mother discovers that Ghassan is Jordanian, she tells him: "when 9/11 happened, Evan [the boy] was freaked out, totally freaked out... ranted and raved about how Arabic people should all be kicked out of this country, rounded up, herded up, and thrown out. I ignored it for awhile, thought he was just scared.Then he started talking about how he wished he could kill an Arab -- my own son talking about killing someone! I sat him down and told him two wrongs don't make a right, that most Arabic people don't have anything to do with this. He wouldn't listen -- refused to. Talked like a bigot and I was so mad at him." While the reversal of roles here may seem contrived, the racist boy becoming the unintended victim of an accident in which an Arab man is involved, Halaby has the mother voice her disapproval of racist attitudes towards Arabs, thereby vindicating American culture and absolving it of racism. Implicit in this attitude is the view that despite mutual suspicions, good intentions exist on both sides. Though problems persist, she seems to be saying, the idea of the US as a "melting pot" offers hope that people will not be discriminated against. Good intentions of this sort are less in evidence in Hamed's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a far more intriguing undertaking. This novel also raises questions about East-West relations and the misconceptions that plague them, this time providing no easy answers. The novel charts the path of a young Pakistani (Changez), who goes from being a pro-western pawn to an easterner who has decided to realign himself with his original culture. The story unfolds as Changez talks in monologue fashion to a silent interlocutor, an American of dubious provenance, in a Lahore café. As he does so, the sinister dimensions of what he has to say become apparent. Polished, well-spoken and intelligent, Changez left Pakistan and his impoverished family in order to study at Princeton in the United States. Before 9/11, America seemed to be a kind of paradise where opportunity and success were readily available to outstanding young men from third-world countries. Changez's exceptional gifts were recognised, and he was offered a position with a prestigious firm. The possibilities for advancement seemed endless, even if Changez had become a cog in a capitalist machine. Changez's infatuation with America is described in detail as he makes his way to the top of the hierarchy in the wealthiest nation on earth. However, a turning-point comes with the attack on the World Trade Center. From being a pampered child of the capitalist system, Changez becomes persona non grata, someone regarded with suspicion and reserve. Changez's American dream is over: the promised land has turned its back on him, and he responds by turning his back on it. He tries to re-establish connection with his homeland and with its values by returning to Lahore. Disillusioned by his American experience, Changez undergoes rather more than just a change of heart and turns into an activist who leads anti- American demonstrations and tries to play a role in countering US hegemony. One reservation one might have about the novel is that this new role comes as a surprise to the reader, since at no point up to his conversion had Changez exhibited any attachment or ideological connection to his own culture. Indeed, before the events on 9/11, this easy-going young man had led a religion-free existence unhampered by creed or precept, and he had never seemed to yearn for the traditional values of his own culture. However, almost overnight he now turns into someone preoccupied by the dangers of American hegemony and its impact on the third world. This transformation may strike some readers as unconvincing, and they may also be unconvinced by the suggestion that the US would find Changez threatening enough to try to kill him. Yet more damagingly, the novel seems to re-assert and reinforce clichés concerning the East/West divide, and thus ends with a binarism as vacuous and simple-minded as Bush's division of the world into "good" and "evil" countries, the latter being those that do not side with America or that are hostile to it. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist all that happens is a switching of sides. No hope of rapprochement or reconciliation seems possible as East and West continue to eye each other across a chasm of mutual suspicion and misconceptions. * The writer is Professor of English at Alexandria University.
