Any of us who stood in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, felt a literal seismic change as immense towers collapsed profoundly into dust. After the seismic activity came the ripples: first the eerie ripples of human silence, followed by the ripples of first responder sirens, and finally, after what seemed like an eternity, ripples of speech. Early utterances, barely comprehensible, released primal emotions before giving way to more coherent calls to organization and action. We are still in the midst of these ripples, but the space between them grows larger as we move further away from 2001. Narratives intervene in the interstitial space between the concrete events situated on each ripple, helping to make sense of the tragedy, the aftermath, and the way that a single day, really just a few hours, forever altered American immigration narratives.
In the months and years immediately following the events of 9/11 novelists, poets, singers, and visual artists took to their mediums to work through the catastrophe and its cultural aftereffects. Edwidge Danticat, active in so many genres both before and after 9/11, explained some of these aftereffects on her identity as an immigrant:
One of the advantages of being an immigrant is that two very different countries are forced to merge within you. The language you were born speaking and the one you will probably die speaking have no choice but to find a common place in your brain and regularly merge there. So too with catastrophes and disaster, which inevitably force you to rethink facile allegiances. (112)
Danticat goes on to describe the ways in which she felt many immigrants became more solidly American in the wake of September 11, in part responding to an upwelling of patriotic writing (and TV, film, music, etc.) by rethinking their once-facile allegiances to America and choosing to strengthen those bonds through the experience they shared with other citizens. She describes immigrants hoisting American flags and visiting Ground Zero as a way to show their commitment to their American identities. And yes, there were other writers, indeed some of them immigrants, who chose instead to rethink facile national allegiances and write away from rather than into America.
As creative authors set about their work, so too did journalists, pundits, and politicians. While novelists methodically wrote their way through the crisis of 9/11, popular periodicals and programs were more reactionary:
The nineteen arrived in the U.S. at various times, several of them more than a year before the day⊠throughout their time in this country they moved about freely in a number of statesâFlorida, Arizona, California, Virginia, New Jerseyâand on the morning of September 11, each passed through airport security and onto their planes undisturbed. (Lee)
This profile goes on to describe that the nineteen men who have come to be known as the â9/11 hijackersâ all arrived in the USA on valid visas. Some visiting. Some students. All here legally.
Originally from Pakistan, [Faisal] Shahzad, 30, pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes in April [2009] during a citizenship ceremony in Hartford, Connecticut, having âpassed all the criminal and security checks needed to get a US passportâ (Clark). Shahzad has since been convicted of plotting and subsequently failing to detonate a homemade bomb in New Yorkâs Times Square. He remains an American citizen who will spend life in an American prison without the possibility of parole, and his profile ties his citizenship together with his attempted acts of terror.
âMr. Tsarnaev was a smart, athletic 19-year-old with a barbed wit and a laid-back demeanor, fond of soccer and parties, all too fond of marijuana⊠He gained American citizenship on Sept. 11, 2012, âand he was pretty excited about it,â said his first-year dorm mate, Mr. Roweâ (Wines and Lovett). Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, went on to discharge two homemade pressure cooker bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, killing three people and injuring over 260 others. As of this writing, this US immigrant is confined to the ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. He was convicted on April 8, 2015, for all thirty charges on which he was arraigned, and subsequently sentenced to death on June 24, 2015.
These three profiles, all from popular periodicals, highlight the proliferation of a connection between terrorism and immigration in the post-9/11 USA. The story is told over and over with different names: Mr. X came to the USA legally. Mr. X maybe even took an oath to become a citizen. Mr. X brought the USA to its knees with terrorism. Terrorists, whether suspected, convicted, or self-confessed, are public enemies poised to disseminate fear. They are endlessly profiled in popular periodicals and subjected to fodder on television and radio talk shows, perpetuating the glorification of these individuals while simultaneously linking terrorism and immigration. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the most recent example, has been featured on the covers of Rolling Stone, People, and other mainstream, highly circulated publications. 1 , 2 Unfortunately, these individuals and their statuses as both immigrants and accused terrorists have driven policy discussions in the twenty-first century, using fear as grist for the mill of immigration reform, allowing propaganda to dominate policy. On April 19, 2013, Charles Grassley, a Republican senator, said that the Boston Marathon bombings underlined the need to ensure that âthose who would do us harm do not receive benefits under the immigration laws,â (M.S.) echoing out as just one voice reflective of an American political body yearning for a better alarm system on the house of America, one set to shut out terror, terrorists, and terrorism and folding immigration into the fray. After the election of Donald J. Trump, this rhetoric and its resulting policies have only grown more intense. Among other policy changes, 3 forty-fifth presidentâs administration ended the DACA program, 4 with Attorney General Sessions citing the program as âput[ting] our nation at risk of crime, violence and even terrorismâ (Sessions). Alongside the revocation of standing immigration policy, President Trump issued Executive Orders 13769 and 13780, two versions of âProtecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States ,â also known as the âMuslim banâ because it limits travel to the USA from countries that are primarily Muslim (âProtecting the Nationâ).
This coupling of immigration and terrorism originates in political policy documents before bleeding into literature, therefore requiring an examination of how literary critics have conceived of the narration of 9/11 and its resulting policies over the past two decades. How have authors outside of immediate circumstances (such as journalism) responded to the 9/11 attacks? What trajectory have these narratives traveled throughout the developing twenty-first century?
Bimbisar Irom explains that âthe responses to the 9/11 attacks, originating from both the state apparatus and the ethical-aesthetic sphereâ are âattempts to appropriate the event into comprehensible modes of narrationâ (517). 5 Early scholarship on post-9/11 literature labored to make immediate sense of the event itself, but understandably lacked critical distance, remaining focused primarily on America and on narratives of trauma that suggested a national retreat into domestic self-exa...