Narratives of the War on Terror

Global Perspectives

Michael C. Frank, Pavan Kumar Malreddy, Michael C. Frank, Pavan Kumar Malreddy

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000073751
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literatur
• Categoria: Literaturkritik

Challenging the predominantly Euro-American approaches to the field, this volume brings together essays on a wide array of literary, filmic and journalistic responses to the decade-long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Shifting the focus from so-called 9/11 literature to narratives of the war on terror, and from the transatlantic world to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, the Afghan-Pak border region, South Waziristan, Al-Andalus and Kenya, the book captures the multiple transnational reverberations of the discourses on terrorism, counter-terrorism and insurgency. These include, but are not restricted to, the realignment of geopolitical power relations; the formation of new terrorist networks (ISIS) and regional alliances (Iraq/Syria); the growing number of terrorist incidents in the West; the changing discourses on security and technologies of warfare; and the leveraging of fundamental constitutional principles. The essays featured in this volume draw upon, and critically engage with, the conceptual trajectories within American literary debates, postcolonial discourse and transatlantic literary criticism. Collectively, they move away from the trauma-centrism and residual US-centrism of early literary responses to 9/11 and the criticism thereon, while responding to postcolonial theory's call for a historical foregrounding of terrorism, insurgency and armed violence in the colonial-imperial power nexus.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Transparency into opacity: Nadeem Aslam’s alternative to the 9/11 novel

Margaret Scanlan

ABSTRACT

Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) tell the story of 9/11 and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan from the perspective of people living in Afghanistan and the nearby border regions of Pakistan. Aslam, a British writer born in Pakistan, constructs a vital critical perspective reflecting his position as a human being living between two cultures. Like his audience, he is already familiar with the dominant Anglo-American narrative of 9/11, which includes the celebrated novels of Don DeLillo, Claire Messud and Jay McInerney as well as the often-rehearsed arguments of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Aslam rewrites that familiar account, transforming a transparent, ahistorical and even cinematic narrative into an episode in a complex religious, cultural and political history whose opacity he constantly evokes. He evokes the difficulties of interpretation, areas of mutual ignorance and distortions of propaganda and mass-produced popular culture that fill up the empty space where Samuel P. Huntington sees two civilisations clashing. Where Huntington sees two, however, Aslam sees many which, throughout a long history, have not only battled, but also nurtured, each other; as Édouard Glissant put it, people and cultures ‘can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics’.

Opacity and the 9/11 novel

Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man’s Garden (2013) tell the story of 9/11 and the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan from the perspective of people living along the Afghan–Pakistani border. Aslam, a British writer born in Pakistan, constructs a vital critical perspective reflecting his position as a human being living between two cultures. Like his audience, he knows the dominant Anglo-American narrative of 9/11, which includes the celebrated novels of Don DeLillo, Claire Messud and Jay McInerney as well as the often-rehearsed arguments of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Aslam rewrites that familiar account, transforming a transparent, ahistorical and even cinematic narrative into an episode in a complex religious, cultural and political history whose opacity he constantly evokes. He evokes the difficulties of interpretation, areas of mutual ignorance and distortions of propaganda and mass-produced popular culture that fill up the empty space where Samuel P. Huntington sees civilisations clashing. Where Huntington sees two, however, Aslam sees many civilisations that have long battled, but also nurtured, each other; as Édouard Glissant put it, people and cultures ‘can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics’ (1997: 190).

A novelist and postcolonial theorist from another part of the world, Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) illuminates Aslam. Born in Martinique, Glissant studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and participated in the French anti-colonial movement; he returned to Martinique in 1965, later dividing his time between Paris and the US, where he taught at Louisiana State and the City University of New York. Two key terms for Glissant were ‘opacity’ and ‘relation’. Sharing Edward Said’s distrust of the affiliations between knowledge and power, Glissant suspected that the Western enthusiasm for transparency, for discerning universal values and creating lingua francas, conceals a desire for mastery. Freedom, however, requires ‘a relation of equality with and respect for others as different from oneself’ (Britton, 1999: 11, emphasis in original). Yet the impossibility of articulating universal values never justifies isolation: ‘particularity is valuable only as long as it is outward-looking and related to other cultures and other values’ (11).

Discarding the idea that the world is ‘something obvious and transparent’ (Glissant, 1997: 85) allows us to acknowledge our own limitations as we better attend to others. For Glissant, poets and mathematicians develop ‘an axiom with the understanding that it is illuminating because it is fragile and inescapable, obscure and revealing … and … will be transcended’ (85). To accept the provisional frees us ‘to plunge into the opacities of that part of the world’ we see and find ‘the really livable world’ that ‘the fantasy of domination’ blocks (20, 28). Respecting opacity implies finding complexity and diversity in distant cultures; we see that ‘every Other is a citizen and no longer a barbarian’ (190).

Before turning to The Wasted Vigil and The Blind Man’s Garden, we should outline the limitations of the American 9/11 novels they implicitly criticise. Written by New Yorkers who lived through the attacks, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), for example, portray the day’s undeniable shock and its effects on survivors. DeLillo and Messud did not identify politically with the Bush administration, and doubtless did not mean their books to further neo-imperialism or seem complicit in the ‘fantasy of [American] exceptionalism’ (Duvall and Marzec, 2015: 6). They did not see their focus on psychologies and personal relationships as erasing ‘worldly affiliations’ and ‘even the public sphere’ (6) or reducing a public event to ‘a stage in a sentimental education’ (Gray, 2011: 134). Even so, some critics argue that these novelists reinforce the Bush administration’s ideology, and popular media coverage of the ‘War on Terror’, by discounting history.

In the patriotic narrative, evil men who hated democracy and civilisation attacked America ‘out of the blue’. In Judith Butler’s words, this version asserts that 9/11 has no ‘relevant pre-history’ (2004: 6) but is, as Kamila Shamsie argues, the ‘Ground Zero of history’ (2012: 158). Apocalyptic destruction had cost America its innocence; history changed forever. The notion that 9/11 remade the world bolstered arguments for unprecedented or extreme measures: curtailing civil liberties at home and accepting torture, extraordinary rendition and black sites elsewhere.

The Wasted Vigil

Although this American patriotic myth ignores Islamic realities, Aslam redirects our attention eastward simply by setting The Wasted Vigil in Afghanistan. The novel begins in October 2001 at Marcus Caldwell’s house, which evokes an idyllic image of classical Islamic civilisation even as it shakes when US bombs fall on nearby Tora Bora. Decorated in the style of Bihzad, the fifteenth-century Persian miniaturist, the house has five rooms, each dedicated to one of the senses; local legend claims it could teach djinn how to become human. Religious literalists interpret the Koran as forbidding all representations of nature and find the classical identification of humanity with sensual gratification repellent. Since jihadis and Talibani alike threaten the house, Marcus covers his walls with mud to conceal their paintings. The house also embodies another instance of cultural repression: Marcus’s wife, Qatrina, nailed to its ceilings an extensive collection of banned books, Islamic and Western, ‘to put them out of harm’s reach’ (Aslam, 2009: 9). These concealed treasures make the house a provisional marvel.

This threatened house, still standing at the end, like the Statue of Liberty in contemporary American life, reminds us of the civilisation’s possibilities if it could keep at bay the fanatics within its borders and the barbarians without. However, while the Lady’s lifted torch evokes another American image, the city set on a hill, Marcus Caldwell’s house, like Afghanistan, is a crossroads. Although rapes, murders and bombings occur at its gates, the house also shelters visitors and family who briefly experience that ‘really livable life’ to which Glissant alludes. The characters who meet there represent the warring factions in Afghanistan: David Town, a CIA agent; Casa, an orphan jihadi raised in madrassas; Lara, a Russian art historian who is searching for traces of her dead brother Benedikt; and Dunia, a heroic schoolteacher killed by her neighbours. That these characters remain unaware of their links to each other, that Lara’s brother for example was Zameen’s rapist, is only one more example of the opacity of history.

Marcus Caldwell is the novel’s secular hero, perhaps a saint for those who value equitable relationships. Son of a British doctor murdered by Afghan tribesmen in 1934 and a nurse who worked there until 1939, he met Qatrina in Afghanistan. She studied medicine in London; he converted to Islam when they married; their daughter, Zameen, was later born in Afghanistan. Kidnapped by a warlord, Gul Rasool, Qatrina later rejoined Marcus but the Taliban’s insistence that she amputate his hand drove her mad. Qatrina was a painter and Marcus’s crime was retrieving some of her stolen paintings; later the Taliban, deeming their marriage invalid, stoned Qatrina to death.

Desperate searches define Marcus’s life. He searches for his kidnapped wife, and then for Zameen, held by local communists, then by Russian soldiers, and finally by jihadis, but she dies in captivity. David Town, once Zameen’s lover, tells Marcus about her son, Bihzad, born after a Russian raped her. Marcus is still searching for his grandson at the end, although the reader knows that he died with David Town in a suicide bombing. This is heroic madness, as a passage near the novel’s end suggests in recalling Marcus’s search for Qatrina. After reading a passage about Lichas discovering the bones of Orestes in ‘the workshop of an ironsmith’, Marcus, ‘in the madness of his mad heart … had wandered out … looking for … a place where iron was forged’ (296). By this point, Marcus’s conflation of his own search with that of an ancient Greek swallowed up in tribal war seems just.

Restoring history

Aslam’s most basic move is a historical one: restoring and making relevant that ‘prehistory of 9/11’ to which Butler points. We recognise some of its figures: Alexander, Tamerlane and Genghis Khan invaded Afghanistan long before Russians and Americans. Though violence inevitably followed, the text notes constructive links: before Buddhism came to Afghanistan, the Buddha, having no human face, was represented in symbols – ‘a parasol, a throne, a footprint’ (168). The calm countenance we associate with him emerged in Afghanistan, where Apollo’s face became a Greek legacy to Buddhism (168). As Glissant would say, two cultures that converged and coexisted wove its serene beauty. In the novel, Buddha often represents Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic history. Marcus tells Casa about the rhinoceros horn sutra discovered near Jalalabad in the 1990s; written on birch bark two thousand years earlier, it is ‘much older’ than Islam (208). Closest to home is a giant Buddha concealed in a former perfume factory behind Marcus’s house; Chinese pilgrims prayed there between the second to the seventh centuries (17).

Aslam introduces historical facts through dialogue and more conventional exposition, but his most characteristic historical insight is a fait divers, introduced without transition and bearing at most an ironic relation to the immediate context. Following no discernable chronology or narrative logic, he tells us that the Silk Road ran through the region where the novel is set; Cleopatra and Michelangelo prized lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan (14); in 288 BC, Greeks offered Kashmiri putchuk to Apollo (172); Ziryab of Andalusia added the fifth string to the lute (230); in 1504, Emperor Babur saw thousands of flamingos in Afghanistan (249). Such details respect Western readers’ implicit desire to learn while reminding them of their ignorance. Accustomed to a public narrative in which the World Trade Center attacks and the Taliban’s sheltering of Osama bin Laden are the only relevant facts, this text reminds us of how much more remains hidden.

Wasted Vigil also provides a more conventional pre-history of 9/11 and the US’s role in the region. Through Lara, Aslam draws attention to the Soviet–US proxy war in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in September 1979, installing a communist government. Although the US was not officially at war, the CIA worked closely with Pakistani intelligence in support of the rebels, or mujahidin. Throughout the eighties, as nearly two million Afghanis died, the CIA and the rich Arab monarchies trained and armed militants who were ideologically indistinguishable, to Westerners at least, from their Al-Qaeda counterparts, America’s most deadly enemy after 9/11. Peshawar, once the ‘second home of Buddhism’, became the ‘spy capital of the world’ after the Soviet invasion (111). David Town settles there, and although some of his CIA activities, such as financing schools, are benign, others endanger local people. When a bicycle bombs goes off years later, David recalls teaching ‘the rebels how to rig these up, to kill Soviet soldiers’ (132). David, as we know, fell in love with Zameen, and a series of deceptions that link his CIA role to their affair define his personal life. When he learns of a Soviet plan to bomb a refugee camp where a former lover of Zameen lives, David fails to warn him. Similarly, the CIA invited photographers to witness it so their footage could become anti-Soviet propaganda (118).

The Bush administration was understandably reluctant to remind citizens of how much money America had spent on the militants it now opposed. Aslam underscores the jihadis’ skill in repurposing American weapons to kills their donors. A ‘graduate of … training camps set up in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets’ planned the 1993 first World Trade Center bombing (146). Al-Qaeda sells unexploded Tomahawks to China ‘for millions of dollars’ (90). In 1986, the US gives a thousand Stinger missiles to Pakistan to be passed on to Afghan guerrillas, but in October 1987, one ‘narrowly missed a United States helicopter in the Persian Gulf’ (157). When three days later, two Afghanis are arrested in Pakistan for offering Stingers to Iranians for a million dollars each, the US threatens to audit weapons it supplied to Pakistan. To conceal its ‘alleged corruption’, the military intelligence agency ISI set fire to the warehouse storing them, ‘killing an estimated thousand people’ nearby (157).

Few Americans understand the troubled and shifting relationship between Pakistani citizens, especially on the border, and the various Pakistani governments allied with the US. The Pakistani Army’s profiteering from American weapons epitomises the relationship between the countries after 1979. Despite great power, the US cannot act in the Muslim world without local allies permitting operations inside their borders. To illustrate, Aslam places David Town at an embassy siege in Islamabad in November 1979. Students inspired by events in Tehran mob the building, setting it aflame, and then gather on the roof to prise open a hatch door leading to a third-floor vault where the Americans huddle. For five hours, the US Ambassador and CIA station chief plead with Pakistani officials to send troops to rescue the trapped Americans, but only a few appear. Later that evening, to the amazement of the trapped US citizens, President Carter telephones his thanks to General Zia; soon new CIA facilities in Pakistan replace the ones lost in Iran. Necessity made Zia, however corrupt, an essential ally.

The Islamabad siege points to frequent tensions between Pakistanis and their government. Zia took the American side against Iran, but many of his compatriots sympathised with hardliners like the Taliban or even the Shia Ayatollah, and sometimes had their own way. In Aslam’s telling, the ‘War on Terror’ perpetuates this dysfunctional alliance, keeping the Pakistani government in a virtual state of war with its own citizens along the border. Frustrated rebels complain, ‘we are the world’s seventh nuclear power … yet our government does the bidding of the Americans’ (Aslam, 2014: 151).

When Pakistani military help the US search for Al-Qaeda fighters hiding near the border, a former ISI agent who ‘feels nothing but revulsion at the Army and ISI for abandoning Afghanistan’ (28) is their bitterest enemy. The US government failed to understand this divide, asking ‘the Pakistani government to control the spread of … militant Islam within its borders – as though you can treat the government of a country as a friend but its people as an enemy’ (Aslam, 2009: 209). Even when American requests are heeded, their strictures backfire; jihadist tracts are widely available in Afghanistan because ‘at the behest of the Americans – the Pakistani government had recently banned such inspirational literature’ (275).

Aslam also insists on the regional importance of warlords with disputes unrelated to American ideological battles. He insists that US wars require tolerating not only local government corruption, but also organised crime. In the Golden Triangle, as ‘in the Afghanistan of the 1980s’, the CIA ignored their allies’ drug trafficking (123). Aslam emphasises America’s propensity for forming unstable ...