It’s as if, by an act of collective prayer, we have willed it into existence. That’s what Zadie Smith sardonically wrote about the genre now known as the 9/11 novel. In the twenty years since that fateful September morning, writers of fiction in the West have responded to the tragedy in various ways, from the domestic to the political.
Among the titles often mentioned are Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, Amy Waldman’s Submission, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s House and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. (The less said about John Updike’s Terrorist, the better.) It looks like the 9/11 novel is in danger of becoming another generation’s Great American Novel.
A welcome shift of perspective can be found in the works in English of novelists from elsewhere. Take those who have spent formative years in the Indian subcontinent, for example.
Some have specifically incorporated the events of September 11 from the point of view of outsiders. Others have taken as their urgent subject a post-9/11 world in which, as Deepa Kumar writes, Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” rhetoric became the ideological basis for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as domestic attacks on Muslims and those perceived as dangerous.
Of these, it’s Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist that’s often cited, with good reason. This powerful work highlights ambiguities that go beyond standard East versus West oratory. It bravely brings out the narrator’s contrarianism, especially when he says of the World Trade Centre collapse that “despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased”.
In Home Boy, H.M. Naqvi also locates his protagonist in New York City at the time. The novel is notable for its swaggering voice portraying the antics of “metrostanis”, young men of Pakistani origin living it up in the Big Apple. Everything changes on 9/11, exposing them to the downside of the immigrant dream: when societies feel threatened, outsiders are met with heightened suspicion and hostility.
The stark and anguished contrasts of Nadeem Aslam’s work are markedly different. His The Blind Man’s Garden and The Wasted Vigil tell of families and friends in Pakistan and Afghanistan torn apart by the brutality of fundamentalism and the opposition to it. Aslam writes of zealotry in florid prose, calling for a return to a more culturally inclusive time. This view can, in a sense, reinforce existing prejudices on all sides.
Sundered families and companions are also central to Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows. Here, the approach is considerably more calibrated and ambitious. Her characters live through historical hinge moments such as the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, India’s Partition, the Russian advance into Afghanistan, and finally, the so-called war on terror after 9/11. In her attempt to put this last episode into context, Shamsie writes movingly of loss, longing, and shared histories.
Others have shown how comparatively small-scale acts of terrorism can have large-scale repercussions. They do this without resorting to glib us-versus-them binaries.
In Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, the shockwaves of a 1996 blast in a New Delhi market ripple outward over the years, up to and after 9/11, unravelling ambitions and solidifying trauma. In Bilal Tanweer’s The Scatter Here is Too Great, splintered narratives erupt from an explosion at a Karachi train station, engulfing victims, witnesses, and family members.
What happens when fundamentalism as a marker of identity is pushed to the limit? Kiran Nagarkar explores this in his overblown God’s Little Soldier. After a series of ups and downs, the little soldier of the title declares that “his true religion is neither Islam nor Christianity; it’s extremism”.
More recently, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning intertwines the narratives of three people from different backgrounds in an unnamed city resembling Kolkata. After a terrorist attack on a train, one of them is picked up and incarcerated for sedition. The novel, though, can be somewhat simplistic in portraying the lives of people during a fevered time.
To be sure, A Burning is not specifically related to 9/11 and the forever wars. It does, however, capture the claustrophobic environment that followed in their wake, one of shrinking civil liberties, mass surveillance and greater polarisation. The effect was global; as Salman Rushdie writes in Shalimar the Clown: “Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else…Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete.”
The fallout also reached corners of SF and speculative fiction. In Sami Khan’s Aliens in Delhi, ISI and RAW agents come together to face threats from extra-terrestrials, discovering secrets about Bin Laden, among others. In Usman Malik’s short story, The Vaporisation Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family, Lahore is crippled by drone attacks as “blood-children” spread across the region “like vitriolic tides rising to obliterate the planet”. And in Sami Shah’s Reap, drone operators in New Mexico surveilling Taliban activities are alarmed by the appearance of a predatory djinn.
A rash of racy thrillers sprang up as well, more so after the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Many showcased intrepid intelligence operatives in face-offs with vindictive terrorists across borders. For Bengali writer Sirsho Bandopadhyay, though, “Indian writers are not very comfortable or confident about writing on terrorism”. This, one can assume, is in reference to those living and working in India.
“When put in the right perspective, ‘terrorism’ poses quite a few uneasy questions,” Bandopadhyay wrote in a piece for Scroll. “But is this uneasiness being reflected in our literature?” This was a call for novelists to respond to extremism of all kinds, external and internal. His own novel, Tero Nadir Pare, explored how overseas attacks affect individual lives here.
Be it from America or elsewhere, perhaps even 20 years is too soon for a “great 9/11 novel”, if such a definition is possible or desirable. After all, Tolstoy’s War and Peace was published half a century after the Napoleonic Wars it deals with.
Maybe one should pay heed to the apocryphal anecdote about Zhou Enlai, who was asked about the impact of the French Revolution by Henry Kissinger in 1971. The former Chinese premier allegedly declared: “Too early to say.”
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