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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire  18.36 (Fall - Winter / automne - hiver, 2001):255-61 


 

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.