The Impact of 9/11 on the Media, Arts, and

Entertainment

The Day That Changed Everything?

Edited by Matthew J. Morgan

With a Foreword by Rory Stewart

THE IMPACT OF 9/11 ON THE MEDIA, ARTS, AND ENTERTAINMENT

Copyright © Matthew J. Morgan, 2009.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2009 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN®in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above compa-nies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN: 978–0–230–60841–2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The impact of 9/11 on the media, arts, and entertainment : the day that changed everything? / edited by Matthew J. Morgan ; with a foreword by Rory Stewart.

p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–60841–2 (alk. paper) 1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Influence. 2. September 11

Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in mass media. 3. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in art. 4. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Social aspects. I. Morgan, Matthew J.

HV6432.7.I447 2009973.931—dc22 2009012784

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: December 2009

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

Contents

Foreword ixRory Stewart

Acknowledgments xv

About the Contributors xvii

Introduction 1Matthew J. Morgan

Part I New Narratives and the Media

1 Aggressive Action: In Search of a Dominant Narrative 9 Melvin J. Dubnick, Dorothy F. Olshfski, and Kathe Callahan

2 The 9/11 Attacks and the Social Construction of a National Narrative 25

Richard Jackson

3 The Battle of Narratives: The Real Central Front against Al Qaeda 37

P. J. Crowley

4 Islamic Terrorism: The Red Menace of the Twenty- First Century 51

Krista E. Wiegand

5 Escape from 9/11: Back to the Future of the Mass Society 63 James F. Tracy

6 The Resurgence of U.S. Public Diplomacy after 9/11 77 Nancy Snow

7 Leaving the Cave: Government, Culture, and the Information Age 89

Simon Moore and Donald Bobiash

viii CONTENTS

8 A Distracted Media: Sidetracked and Hoodwinked 99 Lisa Finnegan

Part II The Arts and Entertainment

9 Reading Afghanistan Post- 9/11 119 Sophia A. McClennen

10 9/11 in the Novel 141 Kristiaan Versluys

11 Poetry, a New Voice for Dissent 151 Marguerite G. Bouvard

12 “all language bankrupt”: On the Poetics of Solidarity 165 Marcy Jane- Knopf Newman

13 Libraries, Archives, and the Pursuit of Access 181 Rebecca J. Knuth and Michèle V. Cloonan

14 Hollywood 9/11: Time of Crisis 195 Thomas Pollard

15 Screaming Her Way into the Hearts of Audiences: Dakota Fanning as Post- 9/11 Child Star 209

Kathy Merlock Jackson

16 Sporting Spectacle and the Post- 9/11 Patriarchal Body Politic 221 Michael L. Silk and Mark Falcous

17 NASCAR’s Role Post-9/11: Supporting All Things American 235 Paul Haridakis and Lawrence Hugenberg

Index 251

12

“all language bankrupt”: On the Poetics of Solidarity

Marcy Jane- Knopf Newman*

Who’s the terrorist?I’m the terrorist?!

How am I the terrorist when you’ve taken my land?Who’s the terrorist?!You’re the terrorist!

You’ve taken everything I own while I’m living in my homelandYou’re killing us like you’ve killed our ancestors

You want me to go to the law?What for?

You’re the witness, lawyer, and the judgeIf you’re my judge, I’d be sentenced to death

You want us to be the minority?To end up the majority in the cemetery?

In your dreams!You’re a democracy?

Actually it’s more like the Nazis!

—DAM, “Meen Erhabe”

On July 1, 2008, Nelson Mandela and members of the African National Congress (ANC) were removed from the U.S. terrorist

watch list on the eve of his 90th birthday and some 14 years after the fall of the apartheid regime.1 The ANC was first classified as a terrorist orga-nization by the United States in 1986 as a way to punish its resistance movement dedicated to achieving equality and liberation. Likewise, the

* Marcy Jane- Knopf Newman is Associate Professor of English at An Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine, and author of Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison.

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Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its leader Yasir ’Arafat were awarded with the same dubious distinction on the U.S. terrorist watch list; ’Arafat was removed from the list only after he entered into negotiations with the state of Israel in 1988 and after ’Arafat explicitly renounced terrorism and recognized the state of Israel.2

Of course, as the axiom goes, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Mona Younis describes the inequity between liberation movements using armed resistance, as per their right under international law, and states using terrorism to quell indigenous uprisings:

terrorism is used to demonstrate to supporters that something is being done on their behalf. This applies equally to the state terrorism carried out by South Africa and Israel, which, as noted, in Israel’s case had caused thirty times as many Palestinian civilian deaths as PLO violence was responsible for among Israeli civilians. Although such acts were by no means the rule in Palestinian resistance.3

Terrorism as defined by South Africa under its apartheid regime, by the United States, or by the state of Israel is most often a word use to crimi-nalize and subjugate an occupied or colonized population.4 The epigraph to this chapter makes this point in provocative terms. The Palestinian rap group DAM, based in Lydd inside historical 1948 Palestine (what is now designated as the state of Israel), created this song in September 2000 in response to the beginning of the Al Aqsa intifada. DAM, which launched Palestinian hip hop, helped to create a movement and an anthem with this song in ways that traversed borders that normally keep Palestinians separated in their Israeli- enforced exile. While the song’s powerful chorus reverse the terminology to illustrate who is actually terrorizing whom, the line comparing Israeli state terrorism to Nazism is especially provocative, but it is equally instructive.5 For while the tactics that Israeli state terrorism resorts to may differ from that of Nazism, the end result remains the same: ethnic cleansing, exile, imprisonment, ghettoization. What DAM highlights in this song is the tragic irony that those who resist annihilation are criminalized for their struggle whether it is through arms or music.

Palestinians, since September 11, in particular, have experienced increased state terrorism at the hands of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) as well as armed illegal colonists in the West Bank, which has been sanctioned by the United States and European Union in their call to arms otherwise known as “the war on terror.” The state of Israel capitalized on this event with renewed vigor by through the discourse of terrorism as a way to further demonize and repress an entire population through

ON THE POETICS OF SOLIDARITY 167

various modes of collective punishment. Many of these battles have an impact on the Palestinian families whose loved ones are extra- juridically assassinated, massacred, kidnapped, and imprisoned without charge or trial, whose homes are demolished, whose economy is under siege. But there is also a rhetorical battle waging on the international stage. This conflict is waged in the fight over not only who has the power to define what constitutes terrorism, but also what are the limits of analogizing historical or political parallel contexts in an attempt to highlight the struggle for Palestinian liberation. In the United States one artistic voice stands out in performing this cultural work that links Palestinian oppres-sion and resistance to other parallel contexts. Suheir Hammad’s poetics, deeply influenced by multiethnic, Brooklyn- based hip- hop culture, offer her interlocutors various ways of understanding Palestinians through allusions to comparable political scenarios. Although her archive of poetry reveals a rich body of such analogies, this chapter focuses on two particular themes in an effort to consider some of the more menacing global manifestations of the “war on terror”: the United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, and Hurricane Katrina. In crucial ways Hammad’s poetry instructs readers how to understanding these links not merely by rendering Palestinians visible, but also by highlighting the ironies involved when the state dis-torts language to justify its rhetorical and political violence and to lend poetic and political solidarity to those who suffer a similar fate at the hands of the state.

In the aftermath of 9/11 the world’s focus shifted away from Durban, South Africa, and the WCAR. One week earlier, in the spotlight of the world stage then Secretary of State Colin Powell informed the media that

Today I have instructed our representatives at the World Conference Against Racism to return home. I have taken this decision with regret, because of the importance of the international fight against racism, and the contribution that the conference could have made to it. But, following discussions today by our team in Durban and others who are working for a successful conference, I am not convinced that will be possible. I know that you do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations of hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of “Zionism equals racism;” or supports the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust; or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel; or that singles out only one country in the world—Israel—for censure and abuse.6

This was not the first time that the U.S. government suggested that it was opposed to the ideas under discussion at the WCAR. Two months earlier the U.S. State Department indicated that it was not only resistant

168 MARCY NEWMAN

to a serious discussion of Israel’s apartheid regime but also to a debate about reparations made to people or organizations in the African dias-pora for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In another communiqué from Powell’s office, his assistant informs us that Powell “stressed to the [UN] High Commissioner Mary Robinson . . . that he is anxious to see strong U.S. participation in the conference but that some serious work needed to be done to eliminate such issues as the ‘Zionism is racism’ proposi-tion or getting into slavery and compensation and things of that nature which would detract from the purpose of the conference.”7 It is perhaps expected, though, ironic that a conference fundamentally about racism and related hatreds such as xenophobia and intolerance would be shunned by one of the states that benefited—and indeed continues to benefit—from the effects of slavery.8 What is striking for my purposes is the link Powell makes between silencing discussion of Israel’s Zionist practices as a form of racism and censoring discussions about reparations for slavery that would affect people of African descent. On some important level it suggests an historical analogy between the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli racism and the suffering of African peoples at the hands of European racism—as well as the deeply provocative nature of both colonial histories.9 Neglecting to face up to these parallel histories threatened the United States, even if the threat was merely rhetorical.

In contradistinction, issues affecting African Americans and Palestinians have seemingly always been intertwined for Suheir Hammad. At the age of 14, when she watched the first intifada on the nightly news, accompanying these images were the sounds of groups like Public Enemy whose lyrics of resistance to police brutality and racism informed her understanding—as well as DAM’s—of oppression in a transnational framework.10 Lyrics from songs such as “Party for Your Right to Fight” were instructive for Hammad and it is not surprising that she gravitated toward rap artists like Chuck D’s Public Enemy who famously commented in 1988 that rap music is “the Black CNN.”11 Rap music became a way for her to see the connections across marginalized communities, something that CNN could never achieve and became a formative part of her iden-tity construction as she explains:

Chuck D’s thick voice mouthing the condition of oppressed peoples in neigh-borhoods similar to my own, the images of young Palestinian kids throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers helped me to understand my place in the world, my place in America, and my place in myself. I was of more than one place.12

Indeed, Hammad is of multiple places. The daughter of Palestinian refu-gees from Lydd and Ramle, she was born in Jebel Hussein refugee camp

ON THE POETICS OF SOLIDARITY 169

in Amman, Jordan. She arrived in Brooklyn, New York at the age of five in 1979 on the heels of the Iranian revolution as well as the birth of rap music, which excited her as a new form of storytelling.

Hammad’s poetic sensibility grew out of her love of music and poetry. Although she drew much of her inspiration from the emerging rap music scene, from her father’s love of Abdel- Halem Hafez albums she under-stood that

The English language is dry and deficient in the words of love, pride, hope, and spirit (that’s why Abdel- Halem sang in Arabic). There are just too many words for hate, poverty, hunger, and fear in English. Those are the words that wrap themselves around our tongues and squeeze the story out of them.13

Still, Hammad found the inspiration and the rhythm of her poetics not only in rap music, but also in the parallel struggles of African Americans she witnessed on the television evening news. Just as she watched the intifada from afar, she witnessed the brutal violence and criminaliza-tion of Black youth in the United States. As with music, Hammad was schooled in the poetics of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and African American poet June Jordan, whose poem “Moving towards Home” marked a transformative moment for her. The closing lines of Jordan’s poem read:

I was born a Black womanand nowI am become a Palestinian14

These three simple lines offered Hammad the power and possibility of engaging with difference across cultural barriers in a way that embodies political solidarity. The poem itself offered a critique of a New York Times article on the joint Lebanese Kata’eb and Israeli massacre of Palestinians living in Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in 1982.15 Jordan uses an anaph-ora in the poem insisting “I do not wish to speak” about the daily brutali-ties at the hands of Israeli and Kata’eb terrorism, all the while writing the unspeakable horror of massacre until she shifts to images that she says “I need to speak” about spaces, figured in the poem as domestic spaces, which are safe and which one can call home. Home, in particular, sig-nifies not the refugee camp in Beirut, but rather home as a symbol for Palestinian refugees’ right of return under United Nations Resolution 194.16 This poem enabled Hammad to see that the connections she made between these various struggles was voiced by one of the most promi-nent poets of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement. Jordan’s vision

170 MARCY NEWMAN

led Hammad to title her return the gesture by entitling her first book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black.

Hammad’s political coming of age merged with her musical and poetic sensibilities that grounded her writing in the spoken word poetry move-ment in the early 1990s when she began performing before live audi-ences in New York City. But in the wake of 9/11 Hammad’s poetry was catapulted on the national stage with her poem “first writing since.” The poem responded directly to the hijackings and the consequences of peo-ple affected by it in various ways. The poem was initially circulated on the Internet through e- mails and on Web sites and later on HBO television’s Def Jam Poetry.17 In the first episode of the first season, she read a short-ened version of the poem for a diverse live and television viewing audi-ence. In it she addresses the label of terrorist in some of the same ways as DAM, but Hammad’s poem is grounded in a localized American context as the fifth section of the poem makes clear:

one more person ask me if i knew the hijackers.one more motherfucker ask me what navy my brother is in.one more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed.one more person assume they know me, or that i represent a people.or that a people represent an evil.or that evil is as simple as a flag and words on a page.we did not vilify all white men when mcveigh bombed oklahoma.america did not give out his family’s address or where he went tochurch. or blame the bible or pat robertson.and when the networks air footage of palestinians dancing in thestreet, there is no apology that hungry children are bribed withsweets that turn their teeth brown. that correspondents edit images.that archives are there to facilitate lazy and inaccuratejournalism.and why when we talk about holy books and hooded men and death,why do we never mention the kkk?if there are any people on earth who understandhow new york is feeling right now,they are in the west bank and the gaza strip.18

The challenge to her audience here—both reading and viewing—is not only to get them to question the media images and rhetoric circulating in relation to 9/11, but also to do it in a wider context. The racist demoniza-tion of a population based on their identity—here Arab or Muslim and often specifically Palestinian—is made lucid through her allusion to the Oklahoma City bombings, which never led to any sort of singling out or

ON THE POETICS OF SOLIDARITY 171

conflation of white, Christian men in the way that Arabs, Muslims, and always African Americans are targeted by the state.19 Likewise, the long history of white- on- black violence by terrorist militias like the Ku Klux Klan figure here both as a way to empathize with her interlocutors and as a way to analogize with images of Palestinian children. In this way we see Hammad’s images as viewing the world macroscopically. Woven among these stanzas, then, are images that link communities vilified and scapegoated even as they suffer at the hands of state and militia inflicted violence. Moreover, these metaphors offer a reversal of the dominant dis-course in the U.S. media about just who is terrorizing whom.

The images in “first writing since” that reveal the heightened racial profiling affecting those who look Arab or Muslim is certainly an expe-rience that helps people of color connect to Hammad’s powerful use of allusions. The way she exhibits this through her poems is wide ranging as can be seen in “open poem to those who would rather we not read . . . or breath [sic].” As readers we are forced to bear witness with her to a history of slavery and genocide as well as modern- day manifestations of politi-cal repression. It opens with rich allusions to the past evidenced in the present:

fascism is in fashionbut we be styledressed in sweat danced off taino and arawak bodieswe children of children exiled from homelands descendants of immigrants denied jobs and toiletscarry continents in our eyes survivors of the middle passagewe standand demand recognition of our humanity20

The blend of images in this stanza reveals not only the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but also ethnically cleansed Arawak people of Antilles and the Bahamas who were forcibly removed from their land by the Caribs and later Spanish colonists; their language, Taino, now extinct, and the tribe removed to Guiana. Through the pauses in her lines she demands our attention to these survivors while alluding to some form of recognition, which can be read not only as a rhetorical acknowledg-ment, but also as a demand for reparations. She connects these historical references to more recent ones of marginalized immigrants in the United States, many of whom are political, environmental, and economic refu-gees and many of whom are exiled in the United States as a result of U.S. aggressions abroad.

172 MARCY NEWMAN

Generations of exiles described here, forcibly removed from their land under a variety of circumstances builds to a crescendo three stanzas later when Hammad builds upon these images and histories to reveal modern modes of enslavement through the prison industrial complex:

in a state of policecops act as pigs treat men as dogs mothers as whoresthe bold youth of a nation hungry and coldan entire nation of youth behind bars grown oldthe mace and blood did not blind wewitness and demand a return to humanitywe braid resistance through our hairpierce justice through our eyestattoo freedom onto our breasts21

The constellation of images in this stanza describe the state of affairs for refugees and immigrants alike under state scrutiny that criminalizes people of color and the working poor, particularly those who have fled as a result of U.S. foreign policy and economic practices abroad. The image of the first stanza of the “Middle Passage,” in particular, is directly tied to the image of imprisonment as a modern form of slavery targeting people of color in the United States. In this context, the repetition of the demand for humanity suggests the ways in which the subjects of her poems are always already dehumanized. She follows this stanza with one that is replete with images of resistance, justice, and freedom often written or tattooed on the body as connected to the very desires and objectives that lead to the criminalization of youth of color in the first place. The collec-tive voice in her poem is significant, in part, because this poem does not make central references to Palestinians. Thus, her voice ensures a solidar-ity with whom she identifies and for whom she demands justice.

Importantly, images of incarceration appear frequently throughout Hammad’s poems. As a poet devoted to giving voice to those who the state would rather silence, she regularly features their struggle in her poems as well as writes poems for organizations such as Critical Resistance, which is dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex.22 In what is one of her most powerful poems, “letter to anthony (critical resistance),” she takes on some of the most politically charged subjects through an empow-ering poem that reveals the distorted ways in which people become crim-inalized. The poem is written in the form of a letter to Anthony, a “puerto rican rhyme slayer”23 who has spent his youth behind bars in an American prison. The poem opens with a stanza that plays with the phrasing of a prison operator one has to endure when calling a loved one who is behind

ON THE POETICS OF SOLIDARITY 173

bars. Rather than replicating the operator’s language she negates it to highlight how deceptive rhetoric can be when twisted to its inverse, thus hiding the truth. This becomes important for the ways in which she, too, sees herself in Anthony and other friends behind bars whom she portrays in the poem. Moreover, she uses abrupt line breaks in the poem to reveal the ways in which prisons work to inhibit any form of intimacy. But it is in the second section of the poem that Hammad’s voice begins to develop a chorus that in some ways rivals DAM’s lyrics in terms of provoking her interlocutors into rethinking language and its meanings:

i have always loved criminalsi tell people who try to shameme into silence24

For an average American audience the notion that one loves “crimi-nals” must certainly be jarring. The first utterance of this theme is not expounded upon, though, for another four stanzas. Instead, she moves into a series of images designed to demonstrate what imprisonment does to youth, to humanity. These lead into a poetic analysis of the prison sys-tem. She repeats this refrain one more time before contextualizing just why she loves criminals:

i have always lovedcriminals and not only the thuggedout bravado of rap videos and champagnepopping hustlers but my fatherborn an arab baby boyon the forced way outof his homeland his mother exiledand pregnant gave birth in a campthe world pointed and saidpalestinians do not exist palestiniansare roaches palestinians are two legged dogsand israel built jails and weapons anda history based on the absence of a peopleisrael made itself holy and chosenand my existence a crimeso i have always loved criminalsit is a love of self25

At the beginning of this set of stanzas, Hammad uses enjambment to heighten the anticipation of the refrain by breaking the line differently than in the previous two stanzas. The pause here forces us to emphasize

174 MARCY NEWMAN

the image of criminals. She then blends the aspects of hip- hop culture and the ways it gets demonized before interrupting this thread to tell the story of al nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 when Zionists eth-nically cleansed Palestine to create a settler colony for European Jews.26 These initial images should easily register as specifically Palestinian for informed readers—images of expulsion and exile, of being born in a refu-gee camp. But the crux of the poem and her specific insistence of her father as Palestinian bears out in the next stanza. The utterances of Palestinians punctuating this stanza serve to render him visible and human in the face of Zionists—rendered here as those who deem themselves “chosen”—who at once render Palestinians as inhuman and nonexistent. The irony of these offensive images of Palestinians is the way in which they are used interchangeably by Zionists as these images all come from historical and current utterances from a variety of Israeli texts.27 Both the poet as speaker of the poem and her father as figured in the poem demonstrates the reality of Palestinian existence, ironically presented as a problem for Israelis who simultaneously deny their presence and build jails to ware-house Palestinians to criminalize an entire population.28 It is in this con-text that we begin to see not only why Hammad’s love of criminals is a love of self, but also how she works to eliminate the boundary between the inside and outside of what constitutes criminality.

Analogizing these histories and current political realities in her poetry, Hammad’s work demonstrates the very linkages that Colin Powell, for instance, would rather not be articulated. The same may be said of her most recent work linking Palestinian refugees to those internally displaced peo-ple devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In “on refuge and language” Hammad draws similar parallels to those in “letter to anthony”:

I think of my grandparentsAnd how some called them refugeesOthers called them non- existentThey called themselves landlessWhich means homelessBefore the hurricaneNo tents were prepared for the fleeingBecause Americans do not live in tentsTents are for Haiti for Bosnia for RwandaRefugees are the rest of the world29

These images of forced removal, of homelessness reveal the striking similarity of people forced from their homes as a result of catastrophic events, catastrophes produced by man not by nature. In either context it is useful to consider historian Ilan Pappe’s suggestion that we challenge the

ON THE POETICS OF SOLIDARITY 175

term an nakba as catastrophes are merely events producing sudden disas-ter. Whether one is considering the premeditation of Zionists to massacre and expel indigenous Palestinians or the deliberate malfeasance of the American government to rehabilitate the levees in New Orleans in antic-ipation of a hurricane, in either scenario we must acknowledge that we are dealing with attempts to ethnically cleanse an area of its inhabitants based on both racism and white supremacy.30

The situation of Hurricane Katrina certainly had devastating con-sequences for the people of New Orleans, but its connection the “war on terror” is directly linked to the further marginalization of people in the Gulf Coast as well as in Palestine. Indeed, on the first anniver-sary of the hurricane, when tens of thousands of people were still denied their right to return home, the little aid that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) promised had still not been disbursed.31 And yet that same summer—on the heels of the anniversary of the storm—new homelessness and devastation besieged Gaza and Lebanon, due to Israeli aggression, and the U.S. government the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency gave the IOF $210 million worth of JP- 8 fuel to cover the costs of its genocidal war rather than lend any financial or infrastruc-tural support to the survivors of Katrina.32

The ways in which Hammad represents the interconnectedness of homelessness and refugees to Palestine by way of allusion as well as directly to Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia is important as it helps to empha-size the role that the state plays in neglecting populations around the globe and at home. But as Hammad makes these linkages in poetry, other Palestinian refugees made them financially. Where as the U.S. govern-ment failed the people of New Orleans, Palestinians in Ramallah’s Al Amari refugee camp raised $10,000 to aid the victims of Katrina.33 That Palestinians could see plainly how people of color in New Orleans were criminalized by the state, especially in areas like the Lower Ninth Ward, and lend solidarity—is significant to be sure. Perhaps it was far more lucid for outsiders to see the way the state rendered already marginalized peo-ple criminal through practice as well as through language; most famously the different discourses used in the media to describe people searching for food: white people “found” food and people of color “looted.”34 In many ways, though, the damage that these media representations inflict Hammad’s poetry corrects. And it connects as in her first poem after the hurricane, “A Prayer Band,” in which she anticipates what would become of New Orleans in startling ways:

tonight the tigris and the mississippi moanfor each other as sisters

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full of unnatural thingsflooded with predators and prayersall language bankrupt35

Imagining that the Tigris River in Iraq is connected to the Mississippi River offers readers other ways to imagine those devastated by U.S. will-ful destruction and neglect respectively. Yet, despite her powerful words lent as a gesture of solidarity to the people of New Orleans and Iraq she deems “all language bankrupt” now. Despite all the analogies and images she produces to reclaim language and render it meaningful, the shock of the hurricane as well as the U.S. response to it leaves her bereft. And yet her lines of poetry hold in them a premonition of just how deeply Iraq, New Orleans, and indeed Palestine would become intertwined in the aftermath.

On one level the National Guard units that would have been deployed to assist with the evacuation of the city were fighting in Iraq and kill-ing innocent civilians. Those in the National Guard who returned to help spoke of New Orleans as akin to the Green Zone and guarded evacuees who were kept behind barricades filled with mud and sewage. What little relief efforts that have emerged resemble American neocolo-nial policies in that survivors are criminalized and those mismanaging reconstruction are the same contractors wreaking havoc in Iraq, among them Blackwater and the Israeli security company Instinctive Shooting International.36

In some respects Hammad’s language, as is all of ours, is bankrupt in the sense that imagining how one’s words could begin to resist the transnational networks that are all connected in rendering the poor, the homeless, the refugees marginal, criminal, terrorist. Perhaps this is one reason why Frantz Fanon argued that “The poet ought however to understand that nothing can replace the reasoned, irrevocable tak-ing up of arms on the people’s side.”37 And yet Hammad’s use of the pen as a weapon in the very best tradition of resistance literature—as with Ghassan Kanafani before her—is one of the tools needed as an addi-tional mode of resistance to imperialist designs whether those are waged at home or abroad. For her language embodies the kind of solidarity nec-essary for Palestinians, in particular need to survive and to endure. The types of connections she forges in her poems, in the main, do not leave the reader feeling that “all language is bankrupt.” Rather, it leaves us with a renewed sense of purpose, restored, and inspired to join her in her project of connecting political struggles and resisting the powers that would rather see us separated.

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Notes

I would like to express my gratitude to those who helped me formulate ideas for this chapter: Rania Masri, Tamara Qiblawi, Dana Olwan, Nathalie Allam, Sirene Harb, Wendy Pearlman, Naji Ali, and Ian Barnard.1. See “Mandela Taken off US Terror List.” BBC News. July 1, 2008. http://news.

bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/784517.stm 2. See William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-

Israeli Conflict (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 1993), 365–375. It is important to note that there are still Palestinian resistance organizations that remain on this list. President Clinton, for instance, took “legal action against fund- raising activities by groups and organisations that are loosely suspected of aiding terrorists. All Palestinian organizations (including, oddly, Marxist- Leninist organizations that are lumped together with Islamic fundamental-ist organisations), with the exception of Yasir ’Arafat’s Fatah movement, are now prohibited by law from engaging in any fund- raising activities on US territories.” See As’ad AbuKhalil, “Change and democratisation in the Arab world: The Role of Political Parties,” Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1997): 149–150.

3. Mona N. Younis, Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 17.

4. There was a long history of the state of Israel’s support for the apartheid regime with respect to military—including nuclear—assistance. See Jane Hunter, Israeli Foreign Policy (Boston: South End Press, 1987).

5. Jackie Salloum, director of the documentary film Slingshot Hip Hop, which chronicles the evolution of Palestinian hip hop, particularly focusing on DAM, states that the leader of the group, Tamer Nafer regrets the inclusion of that line because, she argues, non- Palestinian audiences fixate on it the exclu-sion of the rest of the song’s powerful lyrics. It is also important to understand DAM’s resistance as coming from a context of 1948 Palestine in order to get a sense of the apartheid regime on that side of the so- called “Green Line.” See Jonathan Cook’s Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiment in Human Despair (London: Zed Books, 2008). For an understanding of the political logic that would lead people subjected to state terrorism to repeat those same acts see Mahmoud Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

6. Colin L. Powell, “World Conference Against Racism.” September 3, 2001. www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2001/4789.htm. Eric Mann explains the context further, “There was widespread agreement that the issue of U.S. reparations to Africa, Blacks in the U.S., and the peoples of the African Diaspora for the Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade had to be the main focus of our demands—a position the U.S. government had vehemently opposed. Yet, the U.S. delegation had also cloaked its walk- out in mock outrage over Palestinian

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demands for self- determination and the charges that the Israeli state itself was based on racist ideology and practice—Zionism as Apartheid.” Dispatches from Durban: Firsthand Commentaries on the World Conference against Racism and Post- September 11 Movement Strategies (Los Angeles: Frontlines Press, 2002), 47. Moreover, one of Barack Obama’s first gestures as President was to continue the Bush policy of boycotting the WCAR conference for the very same reasons at the 2009 conference in Geneva. See Robert Wood, “U.S. Posture Toward the Durban Review Conference and the Participation in the Human Rights Council.” U.S. State Department Press Release. February 27, 2009. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2009/02/119892.htm.

7. William B. Wood, “The UN World Conference against Racism.” July 31, 2001. www.state.gov/p/io/rls/rm/2001/4415.htm.

8. For a cogent argument about the need for reparations see Randall Robinson’s The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2001).

9. For an overview of the parallel settler- colonial histories in what became the Americas and in Palestine see Fuad Sha’ban, For Zion’s Sake: The Judeo- Christian Tradition in American Culture (London: Pluto, 2005).

10. See Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip- Hop Generation (London: Ebury Press, 2007).

11. Quoted in Bakari Kitwana, “The Challenge of Rap Music from Cultural Movement to Political Power,” in That’s the Joint!: The Hip- Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 343.

12. Suheir Hammad, “A Road Still Becoming,” in Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, ed. Meri Nana- Ama Danquah (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 90.

13. Suheir Hammad, Drops of This Story (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), 56.14. June Jordan, Living Room (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985), 134.15. For an excellent history of these massacres see Rosemary Sayigh, Too Many

Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (London: Zed Books, 1994).16. See Naseer Aruri, ed. Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return (London:

Pluto Books, 2005).17. Def Jam Poetry also became a Tony- Award winning Broadway play in which

Hammad was included as one of the featured poets. See Danny Simmons, ed. Russell Simmons Def Jam Poetry on Broadway and More (New York: Atria Books, 2003).

18. Suheir Hammad, “first writing since.” Za’atar Diva (New York: Cypher Books, 2005), 100.

19. See Ward Churchill, “A Not So Friendly Fascism?: Political Prisons and Prisoners in the United States,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 1–54.

20. Suheir Hammad, Born Palestinian, Born Black (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), 81.

21. Ibid., 82.22. See http://criticalresist.live.radicaldesigns.org/ Also see Angely Y. Davis, Are

Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999).23. Hammad, “letter to anthony (critical resistance),” Za’atar Diva, 67.

ON THE POETICS OF SOLIDARITY 179

24. Ibid., 66.25. Ibid., 66–67.26. For a history of the genocidal way in which the state of Israel was created see

Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: One World, 2006).27. See Marcy Jane Knopf- Newman, “Interview with Suheir Hammad.” MELUS:

The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi- Ethnic Literature of the United States 31, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 71–92.

28. Since the illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, the Israeli government has imprisoned or detained approximately “700,000 Palestinians—almost one fifth of the Palestinian population living in the occupied Palestinian territory. Currently, almost 11,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons or detention camps, out of which around 9,000 are identified as political prisoners, including 326 minors and 94 women. Israel, in violation of several international conventions, continuously denies these prisoners their basic internationally recognized rights. Arbitrary arrests, imprisonment with no charges or trials, the absence of fair trials, torture, poor hygienic conditions, prohibition of family visits, and denial of medical treatment are all examples of the tragedy that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have suffered during the last 41 years.” See PLO Negotiations Affairs Department, “Palestinian Political Prisoners.” (August 2008): 1. www.nad- plo.org.

29. See Jordan Flaherty and Suheir Hammad, “Mourning for New Orleans,” Left Turn Magazine, September 9, 2005. http://www.leftturn.org/?q=node/612.

30. See South End Press Collective, What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation (Boston: South End Press, 2007).

31. See Institute for Southern Studies “One Year after Katrina: The State of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” Southern Exposure Special Report 34, no. 2 (2006).

32. See Frida Berrigan and William D. Hartung, “U.S. Military Assistance and Arms Transfers to Israel: U.S. Aid, Companies Fuel Israeli Military,” World Policy Institute, July 20, 2006, 2.

33. Associated Press, “Palestinians [sic] Refugees donate $10,000 to Katrina ref-ugees.” The Jerusalem Post, September 13, 2005. http://www.friendsunrwa.org/news1.html.

34. See the New York Collective of Radical Educators, “An Unnatural Disaster: A Critical Resource Guide for Addressing the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Classroom,” April 2, 2006, 9.

35. Suheir Hammad, “A Prayer Band,” Electronic Intifada, September 13, 2005. http://electronicintifada.net/cgi- bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/11/4173.

36. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 410, 438.

37. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 226.