[For this particular AmericanStudier, there’s no better way to think through another anniversary of September 11th, 2001 than to consider some of the many lessons we can learn from the best cultural work depicting that moment: Bruce Springsteen’s album The Rising (2002). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy pairs of songs from that vital work—please share your own responses, nominations for other vital 9/11 cultural works, and further thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On two
very different ways to push past stereotypes of Muslims.
It’s not
an easy subject to discuss, and of course one that can (and has) far too easily
lead to racial
profiling and hate crimes of all sorts (in 2001 and across the
decades since), but there’s no way to engage September 11th,
in cultural texts as in every form of conversation, without some portrayals of
Muslim extremist terrorists, and specifically of suicide bombers. I hope it
goes without saying to readers of this blog, and to anyone who knows me in any
context, that I would always argue—and not even argue, but simply state,
because these are true facts—that the 9/11 bombers in no way represented Islam,
nor their Muslim communities, nor Muslim Americans (they were not from the
United States at all, of course), and were just as fanatical
and hateful as any other terrorists, past
or present, foreign or domestic.
But in the case of September 11th, 2001, fanatical and hateful
terrorists calling themselves Muslims used suicide bombings to attack New York
City and Washington, and I repeat that no cultural works about that day or
those events can or should elide that complex but crucial layer to these
histories and those involved in (as well as, in the case of Muslim Americans
and Muslims worldwide, affected by) them.
One of the
most complex and interesting songs on The
Rising, the penultimate track “Paradise,” engages with
suicide bombers and bombings very overtly and centrally. The song seems to move
through distinct and equally ambiguous speakers in each verse, all dealing with
death and the losses and uncertainties it produces (including about whether
there is such a thing as the titular place beyond death), but the first verse’s
speaker is pretty clearly a suicide bomber, one who takes “the schoolbooks”
from a child’s “pack” (presumably the speaker’s own) and replaces them with “plastic,
wire, and your kiss,” all of which that speaker then takes to a “crowded
marketplace” where they will apparently detonate their bomb. We get no more specific
identifying information than that, but in an album so clearly focused on
September 11th, it is impossible not to think of this suicide bomber
as a Muslim extremist like those behind the 9/11 attacks. On the one hand,
then, this song seems to reinforce certain stereotypes about Muslims (if ones
linked to specific 9/11 contexts to be sure); but on another, it adds multiple
humanizing layers to those images, both in the opening verse (the relationship with
the child who is the speaker’s addressee) and in the song as a whole
(analogizing this bomber, at least in some ways, to the other speakers who have
lost loved ones, quite possibly in the 9/11 attacks).
Again,
complicated and difficult stuff, and if it were the only way that Springsteen’s
album engages with Muslims I think that’d be a missed opportunity. But it’s
not, and in the other overt such engagement, “Worlds Apart,”
Springsteen offers a vitally distinct vision of that global community. The
speaker and situation are similarly ambiguous, but to my mind the speaker is a
Muslim and Arabic man, perhaps from Afghanistan (a “dry and troubled country”
that longs for “Allah’s blessed rain,” and of course one very connected to the
aftermath of 9/11 as of 2002), in an interfaith relationship with a Western
woman (presumably an American one, given Springsteen’s own identity and the
album’s overall focus). I would argue that the song’s best verse, and one of
the very best on the album, is its second “Sometimes the truth just ain’t
enough, or it’s too much in times like this/Let’s throw the truth away, we’ll find
it in this kiss/In your skin upon my skin, in the beating of our hearts/May the
living let us in, before the dead tear us apart.” I’m not sure I need to say
much more after those potent lines, but will just add that that’s a reflection
on intimacy, identity, community, and times like 9/11 and its aftermath—for Muslims
and for all of us—without which this album would be sorely impoverished.
Next
RisingStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other 9/11 texts you’d highlight?
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