LR/RL
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Copyright © par l’Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée. Tous
droits réservés.
Walid Hamarneh
University of Western Ontario
That Tempestuous Loveliness of Terror
What can students of literature do?
And what can students of literature contribute to the discussion and
understanding of terror? Examine the insights of writers and poets in the phenomenon
of terror? This, certainly: Dostoevsky in The Possessed, Sean O’Casey in
The Plow and the Stars and The Shadow of a Gunman, R.L. Stevenson
in The Dynamiters, and Conrad in The Secret Agent and Under
Western Eyes have given us fine insights into the psychology of those who
commit acts of terror. Some knew terror more than others, some knew terror less
than them. It seems it doesn’t take literary fame to understand terror. A less
known writer like Ricarda Huch, in her novel Der letzte Sommer (1910),
describes a young teacher’s joining the household of a high ranking tsarist
official - responsible for protecting the governor - in order to kill the
governor. Almost sixty six years later, as if to prove that life imitates
fiction, the eighteen years-old Ana María González befriends Graciela, the
eldest daughter of the Buenos Aires Chief of police and notorious human rights
abuser, General Cardozo, a man responsible for the murder of many young
Leftists in Argentina. In due time Ana María plants a bomb under the General’s
bed, the General dies, and it takes only a few days for her corpse to be found
in one of the streets of the same Buenos Aires. If, as here, reality emulates
fiction, literary scholars can claim some authority in matters terroristic. Comparatists
- who think of themselves as mediators and translators between cultures - can
provide a critique of the dominant and hegemonic discourses of terror found now
in the air we carefully breathe. They - we - shoulder the responsibility of
opening the discussion of terror to include voices that are rarely heard, not
to mention listened to, in the jingoistic and undemocratic atmosphere of these
days. Before adding more words to the many, many pages written these days about
terror and terrorism, let me state that I am not writing about what happened
September 11, 2001.
I want to address at the outset two
questions: one concerns the possibility of representing terror and talk about
it in a meaningful manner, the other pertains to the way of approaching terror.
And from which standpoint do we address these questions: that of the terror
victims or of the terror agents? [end page 255]
Most studies by terrorism experts
emphasize approaches from the perspective of those who commit acts dubbed
terrorist. These studies look at terror in a way similar to that of research
physicians. Terrorism is a phenomenon to be studied and explained, but like
tumors and sicknesses, the ultimate purpose of explanation is eradication, with
the corollary: what cannot be destroyed by antibiotics has to be amputated. All
these studies, illuminating as they might be, have as ultimate value to serve
the powerful. There is no secret that these terrorism experts working at
universities and research centers act as freelance government employees. From
the perpetrators’ viewpoint - no public study, how else?
And here we are, textually speaking:
following that day in September, a set of unwritten protocols of writing about
terror and terrorism seems to have developed for writers conservative, liberal,
or radical. This ultimately non-denominational writer starts by condemning the
barbarous act and by expressing sympathy with the victims. Then attempts are
made to explain why happened what has happened and put the blame on some (body
or thing). Everyone I have read also states, one way or another, that this date
was a historic date. As I will not go
through these protocols of writing (not only because I am neither writing about
September 11 nor about terrorism from an “American” perspective), I want to
start by expressing my disagreement with the last hypothesis, namely as to the
historic significance of September 11. I think this date is neither excessively
important nor will it become so, despite the many attempts of the media and
educational institutions to make it one. If it has any importance, it is not
mainly due to the scale of the attack nor to its method. Nor is it mainly due
to being a change in who is pointing the gun against whom, as Chomsky and
others say. This act was just one further step in the integration of the
United States into the Global World System, which it has championed and lead
for many years. This globalization has been seen - by Americans and others - as
a continuous process of spreading American (and Western) products, material as
well as cultural and moral, all over the globe. This has entailed that others
had to adapt and change in order to fit within the system. If they didn’t they
would either gradually disintegrate and disappear or be crushed by economic as
well as non-economic means. Globalization also entails that what were problems
within national boundaries gradually became global. The United States, and to a
lesser extent Western Europe, had been relatively successful in preventing many
of these problems, which were never given entry visas, from crossing their
borders. Yet, as illegal aliens, these problems started to steal through the
borders. Globalization implies a generalized economy and a generalized culture.
It also implies generalized problems. Crises, strife, and problems that issue
from within specific national borders or even geographical areas do not need in
our times a World War to become generalized. This has too little to do with the
hypo[end page 256]thesis that what happened is the result of what the US
has done in the world (and what it will probably do for many years to come).
The US has been (in)directly responsible for many a massacre and terrorist
action perpetrated by its own instruments or by its allies or by groups which
it carefully supported and abetted. It will go on doing this as we see today in
the most recent allies of the United States and the democratic West, the
“freedom fighters” in Afghanistan.
But this does not account for what
happened September 11, nor does it provide a credible explanation to it. It is
true that certain forms of political Islam (as well as what is left of the
former communist world) are seen now as the most significant anti-systemic
movements in the new global world. But what happened is not the result of the
clash of civilizations nor of cultures. It is the beginning of the final stages
of the globalization of our planet. Terror, which has been a daily occurrence
and somehow a way of life for many people in the world, is now gradually
becoming a part of the way of life of people in the advanced world. What
aggravates this trend is America’s historical inability to see its own history
and politics with a critical eye, and its simplistic and almost naïve way of
perceiving and understanding the world. What does not appear on television is
something Americans do not know. And as the value of a human being is nowadays
measured by the average time allotted to him or her on the television screens,
the value of an American (and to a lesser extent other westerners) is at least
one thousand times more than that of others, if the latter have any value.1 America is also not (and will never be)
in complete control of the new global system. But America is opening the
Pandora’s Box of an Empire which is in the initial stages of decline, releasing
its fears on the world. These fears take the shape of multiple headed monsters
that regenerate and seem to be invincible. Well America, welcome to the real
world. This ugly world which America helped create and of which it wanted to
appropriate only the image of itself that was constructed in its social
imaginary is now looking America in the face.
What is Terror?
If it is true that we only define
that about which we know virtually nothing, then many can provide definitions
of terror. I, however, want to single out one aspect of this complex phenomenon
that I happen to know something about: the experience of terror. But how can we
talk about and represent the experience of terror when those who suffer from it
are either dead or incapable of speaking their own experience? To put some
method to this madness, let me be more specific. The experience of terror I am
talking about is one that plagues many millions on this globe and about which
little is said or heard. People in other parts of the world who are victims of [end
page 257] concerted and continuous terror do not make it into
the news unless they are political assets of ours. But these are the ones I am
interested in, not only because of their large number, but because it is those
who suffer most from their indigenous terrorism and who are the first victims
of the terrorist war against terrorism. My interest then is in terror as a way
of life. But contrary to the dominant approaches to terrorism that try to
explain it, I think we need to understand it. And although many have mentioned
this before, I need to restate it. Without understanding terror as a way of
life for victims of continuous terror we will not be able to understand how
people perpetrate acts of terrorism. We cannot simply explain this (or rather
explain it away) by describing those people as evil, crazy, or fanatic. There
are many lunatics, fanatics, and evil people everywhere in the world. And many
are to be found in the civilized west. But they do not commit acts of terror.
In order to
put this in proper perspective, let us start by examining some of the studies
concerning Islamic radical groups which are thought to be the hatching fields
for terrorism (I chose Islamic groups because they are now the devils incarnate
in the consciousness of most, if not all Westerners and because I know this
part of the world well enough). The late Alexander Scholch, Sa’d al-Din
Ibrahim, Alexander Flores, and a few others did empirical research in Egyptian
prisons and amongst Islamic activists in Egypt and the Palestinian occupied
territories. Their main findings were that most of those who joined these
groups came mainly from two societal constellations. The first is that of
bright and educated young people who come from poor urban or rural background
and who are frustrated by society’s lack of opportunities of social mobility.
Despite their education and abilities, the social institutions (over which the
state exercises almost complete hegemony) block any real chances of social enhancement.
The safety nets that were there especially during the 1970’s and early 80’s
(mostly the opportunity to go to one of the oil producing countries in the
Gulf) started vanishing from the early 80’s when economic uncertainties emerged
in the Gulf area. The second - larger - group of those attracted to these
radical organizations were people from poor rural background some of whom had
moved to the city slums, especially of Cairo and other large metropolitan
areas. As the state institutions (the friends and allies of the West and the
United States) were neither interested nor willing to provide basic services
and infrastructure to the rural areas or the new slums in the cities, activists
from Islamic groups started providing these services for free. Small clinics
provided medical services, while Mosques became distribution centers of clothes
and food as well as schools. It is from within such poverty plagued areas that
recruits were found who were willing to sacrifice their lives as they had
little to loose. Despair breeds desperate actions. [end page 258]
But when we
look at those accused of being the perpetrators of the attacks of September 11,
we notice that none came from the slums of Cairo or any other metropolis. Most
were from well-to-do if not affluent families in the Gulf (Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates). They also knew and lived in the west for extended
periods of time. And although it is too early to conclude from this that new
trends are developing (mostly due to the scarcity of accurate information), we
need to take such information seriously and try to question the adequacy of the
previous serious attempts to understand this phenomenon.
Terror as a
way of life
The
experience of terror for many of us who live in the civilized West is generally
mediated through text or image. Forms of violence in these societies have been
minimized as far as possible and a different logic of the pacific negotiation
of exchange became the name of the game. This could only occur with the state
holding a monopoly on the threat of violence and with an increasing level of
substantive power in these societies.2
In some cases, the unlucky ones experience terror as witnesses who happen to be
caught up in “nasty” situations in some faraway corner of this earth. Even in
the most extreme and rare cases where a few experience it firsthand (like being
kidnapped), this is mostly a deviation from the normalcy of their lives. As
traumatic as such an experience can be, it remains an Erfahrung. No
matter how painful such an experience may be, I think it is different (though
not necessarily less destructive) than another mode of experiencing terror that
has befallen a large number of people of the globe especially during the latter
part of the past century.
Terror in
many parts of the world has been technologized and perfected. In the past fear
was a pre-emptive regulator. Fear, thus, inhibited people from doing certain
things they were not supposed to do (or at least not to be caught doing). With
the new technologies of terror especially under conditions of the state and its
tentacles monopolizing violence and the threat of violence, fear is first
internalized as self-inflicted censorship - a self-defense mechanism that
allows for lives to be lived comfortably and unthinkingly. Self regulation and
self-coercion become the apriori to any public activity. Despite such an
internalization (which still needs societal reminders every now and then), an
innermost private space is conscious of the rules of the game and somehow resists
them. But the internalization of terror is just a step towards its
naturalization. The fear resulting from terror in life and life in terror turns
terror from the sphere of the extraordinary, the abnormal, the rare, into the
sphere of the daily, the always expected, the norm. The experience of terror
thus becomes the organizing principle of a person’s modes of behavior and
thinking. As it organizes the latter accord[end page 259]ing to the
“logic” of terror. it becomes “normal” to expect that one will be treated as
guilty until some authority deems (or rather dooms) him or her innocent. It
becomes “normal” to expect to be hurt or insulted for no obvious reason. And if
one is lucky and deemed innocent by the powers that be then one ought to be
grateful in the extreme. But you can die for no reason; you can also stay alive
in terror for no reason. No one knows who is lucky, those who die or those who
stay alive. At that level the experience of terror reaches the intensities of
truly lived experience - Erlebnis.
Under
conditions of internalization of fear resistance which was internal and
unspoken remained alive though not well. But under the conditions of
naturalization of fear one can not talk anymore about resistance. Not that
people become totally subordinated and not that life becomes totally
controlled. Such are illusions of totalitarianism that can only sprout from a
mind totally corrupted by the ideologies of liberalism. Due to the
naturalization of terror, resistance becomes also organized according to the
logic of terror. And such a logic is
the only one that really makes sense under such conditions. Many a discussion
and a dialogue on al-Jazirah television station showed that. Liberals,
humanists, leftists, rightists, and others could not contradict the basic
premise of the Islamic radicals that all attempts to improve, reform, change,
adapt, innovate, or reinvent the despotic state in many countries has failed.
Their argument as to terror being the only viable mode of resistance was merely
a corollary of such a conclusion.
Under
conditions like these, it goes without saying, concepts like the sacredness of
human life does not only loose its appeal, but is no longer relevant. Add the
salt and pepper of some religious theology of reward in the afterworld to that
and terror is no longer an ethical problem. The lived experience of terror
transforms mundane horror into metaphysical terror in which the crumbs of
ethics melt into thin air.
As long as such
conditions perpetuate throughout the world (the democratic west shoulders some,
if not all responsibility for this) it is difficult to see things changing
other than to the worse. Morlochs are not of one shape and color. And they are,
after all, the creation of our imagination (with due apologies to the
intellectual rights of Wells). As long as we do not think this terror because
we do not see it, do not directly feel it, and of course do not know of it
through television and the media, the routes of escape envisaged and thought
through by the generals and politicians will only have temporary and negligible
success, though no value. If this terrorism takes an “Islamic” clothing today,
it will have another tomorrow, yet a third after that. So let the generals and
politicians know that their war against terrorism was lost even before they
declared it. [end page 260]
Notes
1 The most accurate measure of the value of a human
being is how much time the person gets on television when s/he dies or is
subjected to extraordinary conditions. This alone tells us enough about the
hypocrisy of the democratic world and the whole discourse of human rights and
the fundamentally silent discourse of stardom. But as we are not in the
business of assigning blame, we should emphasize that this is also telling of
how much governments and political institutions in the peripheral countries and
nations value their citizens.
2 These are the concepts of Anthony Giddens. Tony G. is
representative as he is rumored to be the “brain” behind the only person who
kept his job under the Clinton and Bush Administrations as White House
Spokesman, Tony B.