Ten Years Later: Elegy, Memorial, and Mourning
Ten Years Later: Elegy, Memorial, and Mourning
Feisal G. Mohamed: Mourning
This is not an assignment I relish for many reasons, not least among them being that any writing on this anniversary contributes to an over-emphasis on the historically transformative nature of 9/11. But I also must acknowledge that some things did change for me on 9/11. Like anyone else, I watched the twin towers fall in shock and disbelief. That quickly turned to a desperate hope that the perpetrators were not Arabs and Muslims, a hope soon to evaporate with the realization that for the foreseeable future Western hostility toward Islam would reach levels not seen since the age of Charlemagne. I never felt more Muslim, and I never wanted more not to be Muslim. (I tend to refer to myself as an “atheist Muslim”; it confuses some, but my Jewish friends get it.) In the midst of a monkish doctoral dissertation on the persistence of Pseudo-Dionysian angelology in the English Renaissance, I was on September 10, 2001 leading as inconspicuous and inconsequential an existence as one could wish for. For reasons entirely internal, I suddenly felt after 9/11 the glare of scrutiny, and in the time since have not avoided the opportunity to argue when necessary that not all Muslims conform to the paranoid caricatures intermittently surfacing in our time.
But my experiences are puny, and my perceived inconveniences don’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things. This is a time to lament lives unjustly cut short, and to mourn with those who have suffered actual losses. A decade’s worth of distance, however, might also allow us to reflect on the way we mourn and what it says about the state of our culture.
Consider for a moment the finest elegy in American poetry, and one written in the wake of this nation’s most brutal bloodletting, Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. Part of Whitman’s challenge is to remain true to his artistic principles by resisting elegy’s central idea of celebrating an exemplary life, or at least of locating exemplariness in something resembling a warrior-king. Elegy is typically aristocratic: it glorifies especially those whose estates might butter a poet’s bread, and thus praises the virtues of which nobles boast. Whitman’s ideas on a distinctly American poetry ostensibly reject the cultural legacy of feudalism, and seek to blow the spirit of democracy into poetry itself. The consolation offered at the end of Lilacs is not an apotheosis of the deceased Lincoln, but a recognition of the natural fecundity of which death is only a part. That recognition leads to consolation on all the dead soldiers of the Civil War:
I saw the debris of all the dead soldiers of the war;
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest—they suffer’d not;
The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
Whitman is coming close here to the insight on war that Anna Letitia Barbauld expressed so economically in her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven: “War’s least horror is the ensanguined field.” (Talk about significant anniversaries. The events of two hundred years ago described in that poem hit very close to home: an empire mired in foreign wars, afflicted with poverty beneath its glossy surface, and soon to have its historical moment pass as power’s limited attention span is distracted westward.) War turns our most fulfilling relationships against us: the ties of family, friend, and neighbor become the lashes of loss, mourning, and anger. The poet’s experience of consolation in Whitman’s elegy is also a recognition that long after wars end, deep suffering persists under the rhythms of everyday life.
But by focusing on dead soldiers in particular Whitman shows that he had not made a complete break with the martial ethic of chivalric virtue, so that in his poem we also find the seeds of our current affliction. In the past decade, the public imagination has been less preoccupied with the individuals who went to work that morning in the twin towers, and more preoccupied with the first responders who perished trying to save them and the soldiers who have died in this decade of war. We have poured unimaginable riches into unwise battles and turned flinty when the widows and orphans of 9/11 have been in need. We have become a culture that speaks of police officers and soldiers as though they are minor deities. Much as one does not doubt that many of these individuals perform their charges honorably, one must also wonder if this lavish affection for our modern-day legionnaires can coincide with the love of liberty for which our enemies are supposed to hate us.
That is a natural response in some respects. To gaze intently at the accountant, or salesman, or mailroom clerk who perished is to feel the precariousness of our own existence. It is to feel the world’s contingency in all of its terrifying indifference. Faced with that fear we turn to celebration of the preservers of order, though even then we turn our backs on those preservers when their suffering unsettles our need for comfort. The fear eager to be surrounded with armed guards is precisely the fear eager to ignore their human vulnerability.
Memorial is easy. Mourning is another matter. In its public form, grief overdetermines life with meaning; like pastoral elegy, it heaps onto the grave of the exemplary individual the tender flowers of our hopes. The hard work begins when stop blathering about heroism and look squarely at the human suffering caused by mindless brutality, ours and theirs. There will be much flapping about how war has not demanded enough sacrifice of us. Our moment of unity led to no buying of war bonds or collecting of rubber bands. What nonsense. The sacrifice of life is everywhere, here and abroad. Phony self-flagellation for our imperfect war effort will keep us lurching from one fight to the next, waiting for the demon contingency to stop haunting us.
In her recent reflections on 9/11, Former Director General of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller remarked that “terrorism is resolved through politics and economics, not through arms and intelligence”; that it is fundamentally unhelpful to declare war on terror, which will always exist in some form; and that the attacks were a crime and need to be thought of as such. On which anniversary of the attacks will these obvious truths be widely acknowledged?
Feisal G. Mohamed is an associate professor in the English department and in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois. His most recent book is Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism.
