The Impact of 9/11 on the Media, Arts, and Entertainment

The Day That Changed Everything?

Edited by Matthew J. Morgan With a Foreword by Rory Stewart

9/11 ON THE MEDIA, ARTS, AND ENTERTAINMENT Copyright Matthew J. Morgan, 2009.
THE IMPACT OF

All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United Statesa division of St. Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 9780230608412 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The impact of 9/11 on the media, arts, and entertainment : the day that changed everything? / edited by Matthew J. Morgan ; with a foreword by Rory Stewart. p. cm. ISBN 9780230608412 (alk. paper) 1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001Influence. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in mass media. 3. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in art. 4. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001Social aspects. I. Morgan, Matthew J. HV6432.7.I447 2009 973.931dc22 Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. 2009012784

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Contents

Foreword Rory Stewart Acknowledgments About the Contributors Introduction Matthew J. Morgan Part I New Narratives and the Media 1 2 Aggressive Action: In Search of a Dominant Narrative Melvin J. Dubnick, Dorothy F. Olshfski, and Kathe Callahan The 9/11 Attacks and the Social Construction of a National Narrative Richard Jackson The Battle of Narratives: The Real Central Front against Al Qaeda P. J. Crowley Islamic Terrorism: The Red Menace of the Twenty-First Century Krista E. Wiegand Escape from 9/11: Back to the Future of the Mass Society James F. Tracy The Resurgence of U.S. Public Diplomacy after 9/11 Nancy Snow Leaving the Cave: Government, Culture, and the Information Age Simon Moore and Donald Bobiash

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CONTENTS

8 A Distracted Media: Sidetracked and Hoodwinked Lisa Finnegan Part II The Arts and Entertainment 9 Reading Afghanistan Post-9/11 Sophia A. McClennen 10 9/11 in the Novel Kristiaan Versluys 11 Poetry, a New Voice for Dissent Marguerite G. Bouvard 12 all language bankrupt: On the Poetics of Solidarity Marcy Jane-Knopf Newman 13 Libraries, Archives, and the Pursuit of Access Rebecca J. Knuth and Michle V. Cloonan 14 Hollywood 9/11: Time of Crisis Thomas Pollard 15 Screaming Her Way into the Hearts of Audiences: Dakota Fanning as Post-9/11 Child Star Kathy Merlock Jackson 16 Sporting Spectacle and the Post-9/11 Patriarchal Body Politic Michael L. Silk and Mark Falcous 17 NASCARs Role Post-9/11: Supporting All Things American Paul Haridakis and Lawrence Hugenberg Index

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all language bankrupt: On the Poetics of Solidarity

Marcy Jane-Knopf Newman*

Whos the terrorist? Im the terrorist?! How am I the terrorist when youve taken my land? Whos the terrorist?! Youre the terrorist! Youve taken everything I own while Im living in my homeland Youre killing us like youve killed our ancestors You want me to go to the law? What for? Youre the witness, lawyer, and the judge If youre my judge, Id be sentenced to death You want us to be the minority? To end up the majority in the cemetery? In your dreams! Youre a democracy? Actually its more like the Nazis! DAM, Meen Erhabe

n July 1, 2008, Nelson Mandela and members of the African National Congress (ANC) were removed from the U.S. terrorist watch list on the eve of his 90th birthday and some 14 years after the fall of the apartheid regime.1 The ANC was first classified as a terrorist organization by the United States in 1986 as a way to punish its resistance movement dedicated to achieving equality and liberation. Likewise, the
* Marcy Jane-Knopf Newman is Associate Professor of English at An Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine, and author of Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison.

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Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its leader Yasir Arafat were awarded with the same dubious distinction on the U.S. terrorist watch list; Arafat was removed from the list only after he entered into negotiations with the state of Israel in 1988 and after Arafat explicitly renounced terrorism and recognized the state of Israel.2 Of course, as the axiom goes, one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter. Mona Younis describes the inequity between liberation movements using armed resistance, as per their right under international law, and states using terrorism to quell indigenous uprisings:
terrorism is used to demonstrate to supporters that something is being done on their behalf. This applies equally to the state terrorism carried out by South Africa and Israel, which, as noted, in Israels case had caused thirty times as many Palestinian civilian deaths as PLO violence was responsible for among Israeli civilians. Although such acts were by no means the rule in Palestinian resistance.3

Terrorism as defined by South Africa under its apartheid regime, by the United States, or by the state of Israel is most often a word use to criminalize and subjugate an occupied or colonized population.4 The epigraph to this chapter makes this point in provocative terms. The Palestinian rap group DAM, based in Lydd inside historical 1948 Palestine (what is now designated as the state of Israel), created this song in September 2000 in response to the beginning of the Al Aqsa intifada. DAM, which launched Palestinian hip hop, helped to create a movement and an anthem with this song in ways that traversed borders that normally keep Palestinians separated in their Israeli-enforced exile. While the songs powerful chorus reverse the terminology to illustrate who is actually terrorizing whom, the line comparing Israeli state terrorism to Nazism is especially provocative, but it is equally instructive.5 For while the tactics that Israeli state terrorism resorts to may differ from that of Nazism, the end result remains the same: ethnic cleansing, exile, imprisonment, ghettoization. What DAM highlights in this song is the tragic irony that those who resist annihilation are criminalized for their struggle whether it is through arms or music. Palestinians, since September 11, in particular, have experienced increased state terrorism at the hands of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) as well as armed illegal colonists in the West Bank, which has been sanctioned by the United States and European Union in their call to arms otherwise known as the war on terror. The state of Israel capitalized on this event with renewed vigor by through the discourse of terrorism as a way to further demonize and repress an entire population through

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various modes of collective punishment. Many of these battles have an impact on the Palestinian families whose loved ones are extra-juridically assassinated, massacred, kidnapped, and imprisoned without charge or trial, whose homes are demolished, whose economy is under siege. But there is also a rhetorical battle waging on the international stage. This conflict is waged in the fight over not only who has the power to define what constitutes terrorism, but also what are the limits of analogizing historical or political parallel contexts in an attempt to highlight the struggle for Palestinian liberation. In the United States one artistic voice stands out in performing this cultural work that links Palestinian oppression and resistance to other parallel contexts. Suheir Hammads poetics, deeply influenced by multiethnic, Brooklyn-based hip-hop culture, offer her interlocutors various ways of understanding Palestinians through allusions to comparable political scenarios. Although her archive of poetry reveals a rich body of such analogies, this chapter focuses on two particular themes in an effort to consider some of the more menacing global manifestations of the war on terror: the United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, and Hurricane Katrina. In crucial ways Hammads poetry instructs readers how to understanding these links not merely by rendering Palestinians visible, but also by highlighting the ironies involved when the state distorts language to justify its rhetorical and political violence and to lend poetic and political solidarity to those who suffer a similar fate at the hands of the state. In the aftermath of 9/11 the worlds focus shifted away from Durban, South Africa, and the WCAR. One week earlier, in the spotlight of the world stage then Secretary of State Colin Powell informed the media that
Today I have instructed our representatives at the World Conference Against Racism to return home. I have taken this decision with regret, because of the importance of the international fight against racism, and the contribution that the conference could have made to it. But, following discussions today by our team in Durban and others who are working for a successful conference, I am not convinced that will be possible. I know that you do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations of hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of Zionism equals racism; or supports the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust; or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel; or that singles out only one country in the worldIsraelfor censure and abuse.6

This was not the first time that the U.S. government suggested that it was opposed to the ideas under discussion at the WCAR. Two months earlier the U.S. State Department indicated that it was not only resistant

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to a serious discussion of Israels apartheid regime but also to a debate about reparations made to people or organizations in the African diaspora for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In another communiqu from Powells office, his assistant informs us that Powell stressed to the [UN] High Commissioner Mary Robinson . . . that he is anxious to see strong U.S. participation in the conference but that some serious work needed to be done to eliminate such issues as the Zionism is racism proposition or getting into slavery and compensation and things of that nature which would detract from the purpose of the conference.7 It is perhaps expected, though, ironic that a conference fundamentally about racism and related hatreds such as xenophobia and intolerance would be shunned by one of the states that benefitedand indeed continues to benefit from the effects of slavery.8 What is striking for my purposes is the link Powell makes between silencing discussion of Israels Zionist practices as a form of racism and censoring discussions about reparations for slavery that would affect people of African descent. On some important level it suggests an historical analogy between the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli racism and the suffering of African peoples at the hands of European racismas well as the deeply provocative nature of both colonial histories.9 Neglecting to face up to these parallel histories threatened the United States, even if the threat was merely rhetorical. In contradistinction, issues affecting African Americans and Palestinians have seemingly always been intertwined for Suheir Hammad. At the age of 14, when she watched the first intifada on the nightly news, accompanying these images were the sounds of groups like Public Enemy whose lyrics of resistance to police brutality and racism informed her understandingas well as DAMsof oppression in a transnational framework.10 Lyrics from songs such as Party for Your Right to Fight were instructive for Hammad and it is not surprising that she gravitated toward rap artists like Chuck Ds Public Enemy who famously commented in 1988 that rap music is the Black CNN.11 Rap music became a way for her to see the connections across marginalized communities, something that CNN could never achieve and became a formative part of her identity construction as she explains:
Chuck Ds thick voice mouthing the condition of oppressed peoples in neighborhoods similar to my own, the images of young Palestinian kids throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers helped me to understand my place in the world, my place in America, and my place in myself. I was of more than one place.12

Indeed, Hammad is of multiple places. The daughter of Palestinian refugees from Lydd and Ramle, she was born in Jebel Hussein refugee camp

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in Amman, Jordan. She arrived in Brooklyn, New York at the age of five in 1979 on the heels of the Iranian revolution as well as the birth of rap music, which excited her as a new form of storytelling. Hammads poetic sensibility grew out of her love of music and poetry. Although she drew much of her inspiration from the emerging rap music scene, from her fathers love of Abdel-Halem Hafez albums she understood that
The English language is dry and deficient in the words of love, pride, hope, and spirit (thats why Abdel-Halem sang in Arabic). There are just too many words for hate, poverty, hunger, and fear in English. Those are the words that wrap themselves around our tongues and squeeze the story out of them.13

Still, Hammad found the inspiration and the rhythm of her poetics not only in rap music, but also in the parallel struggles of African Americans she witnessed on the television evening news. Just as she watched the intifada from afar, she witnessed the brutal violence and criminalization of Black youth in the United States. As with music, Hammad was schooled in the poetics of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and African American poet June Jordan, whose poem Moving towards Home marked a transformative moment for her. The closing lines of Jordans poem read:
I was born a Black woman and now I am become a Palestinian14

These three simple lines offered Hammad the power and possibility of engaging with difference across cultural barriers in a way that embodies political solidarity. The poem itself offered a critique of a New York Times article on the joint Lebanese Kataeb and Israeli massacre of Palestinians living in Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in 1982.15 Jordan uses an anaphora in the poem insisting I do not wish to speak about the daily brutalities at the hands of Israeli and Kataeb terrorism, all the while writing the unspeakable horror of massacre until she shifts to images that she says I need to speak about spaces, figured in the poem as domestic spaces, which are safe and which one can call home. Home, in particular, signifies not the refugee camp in Beirut, but rather home as a symbol for Palestinian refugees right of return under United Nations Resolution 194.16 This poem enabled Hammad to see that the connections she made between these various struggles was voiced by one of the most prominent poets of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement. Jordans vision

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led Hammad to title her return the gesture by entitling her first book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black. Hammads political coming of age merged with her musical and poetic sensibilities that grounded her writing in the spoken word poetry movement in the early 1990s when she began performing before live audiences in New York City. But in the wake of 9/11 Hammads poetry was catapulted on the national stage with her poem first writing since. The poem responded directly to the hijackings and the consequences of people affected by it in various ways. The poem was initially circulated on the Internet through e-mails and on Web sites and later on HBO televisions Def Jam Poetry.17 In the first episode of the first season, she read a shortened version of the poem for a diverse live and television viewing audience. In it she addresses the label of terrorist in some of the same ways as DAM, but Hammads poem is grounded in a localized American context as the fifth section of the poem makes clear:
one more person ask me if i knew the hijackers. one more motherfucker ask me what navy my brother is in. one more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed. one more person assume they know me, or that i represent a people. or that a people represent an evil. or that evil is as simple as a flag and words on a page. we did not vilify all white men when mcveigh bombed oklahoma. america did not give out his familys address or where he went to church. or blame the bible or pat robertson. and when the networks air footage of palestinians dancing in the street, there is no apology that hungry children are bribed with sweets that turn their teeth brown. that correspondents edit images. that archives are there to facilitate lazy and inaccurate journalism. and why when we talk about holy books and hooded men and death, why do we never mention the kkk? if there are any people on earth who understand how new york is feeling right now, they are in the west bank and the gaza strip.18

The challenge to her audience hereboth reading and viewingis not only to get them to question the media images and rhetoric circulating in relation to 9/11, but also to do it in a wider context. The racist demonization of a population based on their identityhere Arab or Muslim and often specifically Palestinianis made lucid through her allusion to the Oklahoma City bombings, which never led to any sort of singling out or

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conflation of white, Christian men in the way that Arabs, Muslims, and always African Americans are targeted by the state.19 Likewise, the long history of white-on-black violence by terrorist militias like the Ku Klux Klan figure here both as a way to empathize with her interlocutors and as a way to analogize with images of Palestinian children. In this way we see Hammads images as viewing the world macroscopically. Woven among these stanzas, then, are images that link communities vilified and scapegoated even as they suffer at the hands of state and militia inflicted violence. Moreover, these metaphors offer a reversal of the dominant discourse in the U.S. media about just who is terrorizing whom. The images in first writing since that reveal the heightened racial profiling affecting those who look Arab or Muslim is certainly an experience that helps people of color connect to Hammads powerful use of allusions. The way she exhibits this through her poems is wide ranging as can be seen in open poem to those who would rather we not read . . . or breath [sic]. As readers we are forced to bear witness with her to a history of slavery and genocide as well as modern-day manifestations of political repression. It opens with rich allusions to the past evidenced in the present:
fascism is in fashion but we be style dressed in sweat danced off taino and arawak bodies we children of children exiled from homelands descendants of immigrants denied jobs and toilets carry continents in our eyes survivors of the middle passage we stand and demand recognition of our humanity20

The blend of images in this stanza reveals not only the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but also ethnically cleansed Arawak people of Antilles and the Bahamas who were forcibly removed from their land by the Caribs and later Spanish colonists; their language, Taino, now extinct, and the tribe removed to Guiana. Through the pauses in her lines she demands our attention to these survivors while alluding to some form of recognition, which can be read not only as a rhetorical acknowledgment, but also as a demand for reparations. She connects these historical references to more recent ones of marginalized immigrants in the United States, many of whom are political, environmental, and economic refugees and many of whom are exiled in the United States as a result of U.S. aggressions abroad.

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Generations of exiles described here, forcibly removed from their land under a variety of circumstances builds to a crescendo three stanzas later when Hammad builds upon these images and histories to reveal modern modes of enslavement through the prison industrial complex:
in a state of police cops act as pigs treat men as dogs mothers as whores the bold youth of a nation hungry and cold an entire nation of youth behind bars grown old the mace and blood did not blind we witness and demand a return to humanity we braid resistance through our hair pierce justice through our eyes tattoo freedom onto our breasts21

The constellation of images in this stanza describe the state of affairs for refugees and immigrants alike under state scrutiny that criminalizes people of color and the working poor, particularly those who have fled as a result of U.S. foreign policy and economic practices abroad. The image of the first stanza of the Middle Passage, in particular, is directly tied to the image of imprisonment as a modern form of slavery targeting people of color in the United States. In this context, the repetition of the demand for humanity suggests the ways in which the subjects of her poems are always already dehumanized. She follows this stanza with one that is replete with images of resistance, justice, and freedom often written or tattooed on the body as connected to the very desires and objectives that lead to the criminalization of youth of color in the first place. The collective voice in her poem is significant, in part, because this poem does not make central references to Palestinians. Thus, her voice ensures a solidarity with whom she identifies and for whom she demands justice. Importantly, images of incarceration appear frequently throughout Hammads poems. As a poet devoted to giving voice to those who the state would rather silence, she regularly features their struggle in her poems as well as writes poems for organizations such as Critical Resistance, which is dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex.22 In what is one of her most powerful poems, letter to anthony (critical resistance), she takes on some of the most politically charged subjects through an empowering poem that reveals the distorted ways in which people become criminalized. The poem is written in the form of a letter to Anthony, a puerto rican rhyme slayer23 who has spent his youth behind bars in an American prison. The poem opens with a stanza that plays with the phrasing of a prison operator one has to endure when calling a loved one who is behind

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bars. Rather than replicating the operators language she negates it to highlight how deceptive rhetoric can be when twisted to its inverse, thus hiding the truth. This becomes important for the ways in which she, too, sees herself in Anthony and other friends behind bars whom she portrays in the poem. Moreover, she uses abrupt line breaks in the poem to reveal the ways in which prisons work to inhibit any form of intimacy. But it is in the second section of the poem that Hammads voice begins to develop a chorus that in some ways rivals DAMs lyrics in terms of provoking her interlocutors into rethinking language and its meanings:
i have always loved criminals i tell people who try to shame me into silence24

For an average American audience the notion that one loves criminals must certainly be jarring. The first utterance of this theme is not expounded upon, though, for another four stanzas. Instead, she moves into a series of images designed to demonstrate what imprisonment does to youth, to humanity. These lead into a poetic analysis of the prison system. She repeats this refrain one more time before contextualizing just why she loves criminals:
i have always loved criminals and not only the thugged out bravado of rap videos and champagne popping hustlers but my father born an arab baby boy on the forced way out of his homeland his mother exiled and pregnant gave birth in a camp the world pointed and said palestinians do not exist palestinians are roaches palestinians are two legged dogs and israel built jails and weapons and a history based on the absence of a people israel made itself holy and chosen and my existence a crime so i have always loved criminals it is a love of self25

At the beginning of this set of stanzas, Hammad uses enjambment to heighten the anticipation of the refrain by breaking the line differently than in the previous two stanzas. The pause here forces us to emphasize

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the image of criminals. She then blends the aspects of hip-hop culture and the ways it gets demonized before interrupting this thread to tell the story of al nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 when Zionists ethnically cleansed Palestine to create a settler colony for European Jews.26 These initial images should easily register as specifically Palestinian for informed readersimages of expulsion and exile, of being born in a refugee camp. But the crux of the poem and her specific insistence of her father as Palestinian bears out in the next stanza. The utterances of Palestinians punctuating this stanza serve to render him visible and human in the face of Zionistsrendered here as those who deem themselves chosenwho at once render Palestinians as inhuman and nonexistent. The irony of these offensive images of Palestinians is the way in which they are used interchangeably by Zionists as these images all come from historical and current utterances from a variety of Israeli texts.27 Both the poet as speaker of the poem and her father as figured in the poem demonstrates the reality of Palestinian existence, ironically presented as a problem for Israelis who simultaneously deny their presence and build jails to warehouse Palestinians to criminalize an entire population.28 It is in this context that we begin to see not only why Hammads love of criminals is a love of self, but also how she works to eliminate the boundary between the inside and outside of what constitutes criminality. Analogizing these histories and current political realities in her poetry, Hammads work demonstrates the very linkages that Colin Powell, for instance, would rather not be articulated. The same may be said of her most recent work linking Palestinian refugees to those internally displaced people devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In on refuge and language Hammad draws similar parallels to those in letter to anthony:
I think of my grandparents And how some called them refugees Others called them non-existent They called themselves landless Which means homeless Before the hurricane No tents were prepared for the fleeing Because Americans do not live in tents Tents are for Haiti for Bosnia for Rwanda Refugees are the rest of the world 29

These images of forced removal, of homelessness reveal the striking similarity of people forced from their homes as a result of catastrophic events, catastrophes produced by man not by nature. In either context it is useful to consider historian Ilan Pappes suggestion that we challenge the

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term an nakba as catastrophes are merely events producing sudden disaster. Whether one is considering the premeditation of Zionists to massacre and expel indigenous Palestinians or the deliberate malfeasance of the American government to rehabilitate the levees in New Orleans in anticipation of a hurricane, in either scenario we must acknowledge that we are dealing with attempts to ethnically cleanse an area of its inhabitants based on both racism and white supremacy.30 The situation of Hurricane Katrina certainly had devastating consequences for the people of New Orleans, but its connection the war on terror is directly linked to the further marginalization of people in the Gulf Coast as well as in Palestine. Indeed, on the first anniversary of the hurricane, when tens of thousands of people were still denied their right to return home, the little aid that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) promised had still not been disbursed.31 And yet that same summeron the heels of the anniversary of the stormnew homelessness and devastation besieged Gaza and Lebanon, due to Israeli aggression, and the U.S. government the Pentagons Defense Security Cooperation Agency gave the IOF $210 million worth of JP-8 fuel to cover the costs of its genocidal war rather than lend any financial or infrastructural support to the survivors of Katrina.32 The ways in which Hammad represents the interconnectedness of homelessness and refugees to Palestine by way of allusion as well as directly to Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia is important as it helps to emphasize the role that the state plays in neglecting populations around the globe and at home. But as Hammad makes these linkages in poetry, other Palestinian refugees made them financially. Where as the U.S. government failed the people of New Orleans, Palestinians in Ramallahs Al Amari refugee camp raised $10,000 to aid the victims of Katrina.33 That Palestinians could see plainly how people of color in New Orleans were criminalized by the state, especially in areas like the Lower Ninth Ward, and lend solidarityis significant to be sure. Perhaps it was far more lucid for outsiders to see the way the state rendered already marginalized people criminal through practice as well as through language; most famously the different discourses used in the media to describe people searching for food: white people found food and people of color looted.34 In many ways, though, the damage that these media representations inflict Hammads poetry corrects. And it connects as in her first poem after the hurricane, A Prayer Band, in which she anticipates what would become of New Orleans in startling ways:
tonight the tigris and the mississippi moan for each other as sisters

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full of unnatural things flooded with predators and prayers all language bankrupt35

Imagining that the Tigris River in Iraq is connected to the Mississippi River offers readers other ways to imagine those devastated by U.S. willful destruction and neglect respectively. Yet, despite her powerful words lent as a gesture of solidarity to the people of New Orleans and Iraq she deems all language bankrupt now. Despite all the analogies and images she produces to reclaim language and render it meaningful, the shock of the hurricane as well as the U.S. response to it leaves her bereft. And yet her lines of poetry hold in them a premonition of just how deeply Iraq, New Orleans, and indeed Palestine would become intertwined in the aftermath. On one level the National Guard units that would have been deployed to assist with the evacuation of the city were fighting in Iraq and killing innocent civilians. Those in the National Guard who returned to help spoke of New Orleans as akin to the Green Zone and guarded evacuees who were kept behind barricades filled with mud and sewage. What little relief efforts that have emerged resemble American neocolonial policies in that survivors are criminalized and those mismanaging reconstruction are the same contractors wreaking havoc in Iraq, among them Blackwater and the Israeli security company Instinctive Shooting International. 36 In some respects Hammads language, as is all of ours, is bankrupt in the sense that imagining how ones words could begin to resist the transnational networks that are all connected in rendering the poor, the homeless, the refugees marginal, criminal, terrorist. Perhaps this is one reason why Frantz Fanon argued that The poet ought however to understand that nothing can replace the reasoned, irrevocable taking up of arms on the peoples side.37 And yet Hammads use of the pen as a weapon in the very best tradition of resistance literatureas with Ghassan Kanafani before heris one of the tools needed as an additional mode of resistance to imperialist designs whether those are waged at home or abroad. For her language embodies the kind of solidarity necessary for Palestinians, in particular need to survive and to endure. The types of connections she forges in her poems, in the main, do not leave the reader feeling that all language is bankrupt. Rather, it leaves us with a renewed sense of purpose, restored, and inspired to join her in her project of connecting political struggles and resisting the powers that would rather see us separated.

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Notes
I would like to express my gratitude to those who helped me formulate ideas for this chapter: Rania Masri, Tamara Qiblawi, Dana Olwan, Nathalie Allam, Sirene Harb, Wendy Pearlman, Naji Ali, and Ian Barnard. 1. See Mandela Taken off US Terror List. BBC News. July 1, 2008. http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/784517.stm 2. See William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the ArabIsraeli Conflict (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 1993), 365375. It is important to note that there are still Palestinian resistance organizations that remain on this list. President Clinton, for instance, took legal action against fund-raising activities by groups and organisations that are loosely suspected of aiding terrorists. All Palestinian organizations (including, oddly, MarxistLeninist organizations that are lumped together with Islamic fundamentalist organisations), with the exception of Yasir Arafats Fatah movement, are now prohibited by law from engaging in any fund-raising activities on US territories. See Asad AbuKhalil, Change and democratisation in the Arab world: The Role of Political Parties, Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1997): 149150. 3. Mona N. Younis, Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 17. 4. There was a long history of the state of Israels support for the apartheid regime with respect to militaryincluding nuclearassistance. See Jane Hunter, Israeli Foreign Policy (Boston: South End Press, 1987). 5. Jackie Salloum, director of the documentary film Slingshot Hip Hop, which chronicles the evolution of Palestinian hip hop, particularly focusing on DAM, states that the leader of the group, Tamer Nafer regrets the inclusion of that line because, she argues, non-Palestinian audiences fixate on it the exclusion of the rest of the songs powerful lyrics. It is also important to understand DAMs resistance as coming from a context of 1948 Palestine in order to get a sense of the apartheid regime on that side of the so-called Green Line. See Jonathan Cooks Disappearing Palestine: Israels Experiment in Human Despair (London: Zed Books, 2008). For an understanding of the political logic that would lead people subjected to state terrorism to repeat those same acts see Mahmoud Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 6. Colin L. Powell, World Conference Against Racism. September 3, 2001. www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2001/4789.htm. Eric Mann explains the context further, There was widespread agreement that the issue of U.S. reparations to Africa, Blacks in the U.S., and the peoples of the African Diaspora for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade had to be the main focus of our demandsa position the U.S. government had vehemently opposed. Yet, the U.S. delegation had also cloaked its walk-out in mock outrage over Palestinian

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7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

demands for self-determination and the charges that the Israeli state itself was based on racist ideology and practiceZionism as Apartheid. Dispatches from Durban: Firsthand Commentaries on the World Conference against Racism and Post-September 11 Movement Strategies (Los Angeles: Frontlines Press, 2002), 47. Moreover, one of Barack Obamas first gestures as President was to continue the Bush policy of boycotting the WCAR conference for the very same reasons at the 2009 conference in Geneva. See Robert Wood, U.S. Posture Toward the Durban Review Conference and the Participation in the Human Rights Council. U.S. State Department Press Release. February 27, 2009. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2009/02/119892.htm. William B. Wood, The UN World Conference against Racism. July 31, 2001. www.state.gov/p/io/rls/rm/2001/4415.htm. For a cogent argument about the need for reparations see Randall Robinsons The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2001). For an overview of the parallel settler-colonial histories in what became the Americas and in Palestine see Fuad Shaban, For Zions Sake: The JudeoChristian Tradition in American Culture (London: Pluto, 2005). See Jeff Chang, Cant Stop Wont Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (London: Ebury Press, 2007). Quoted in Bakari Kitwana, The Challenge of Rap Music from Cultural Movement to Political Power, in Thats the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 343. Suheir Hammad, A Road Still Becoming, in Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, ed. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 90. Suheir Hammad, Drops of This Story (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), 56. June Jordan, Living Room (New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1985), 134. For an excellent history of these massacres see Rosemary Sayigh, Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (London: Zed Books, 1994). See Naseer Aruri, ed. Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return (London: Pluto Books, 2005). Def Jam Poetry also became a Tony-Award winning Broadway play in which Hammad was included as one of the featured poets. See Danny Simmons, ed. Russell Simmons Def Jam Poetry on Broadway and More (New York: Atria Books, 2003). Suheir Hammad, first writing since. Zaatar Diva (New York: Cypher Books, 2005), 100. See Ward Churchill, A Not So Friendly Fascism?: Political Prisons and Prisoners in the United States, CR: The New Centennial Review 6, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 154. Suheir Hammad, Born Palestinian, Born Black (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), 81. Ibid., 82. See http://criticalresist.live.radicaldesigns.org/ Also see Angely Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999). Hammad, letter to anthony (critical resistance), Zaatar Diva, 67.

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24. Ibid., 66. 25. Ibid., 6667. 26. For a history of the genocidal way in which the state of Israel was created see Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: One World, 2006). 27. See Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, Interview with Suheir Hammad. MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 31, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 7192. 28. Since the illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, the Israeli government has imprisoned or detained approximately 700,000 Palestiniansalmost one fifth of the Palestinian population living in the occupied Palestinian territory. Currently, almost 11,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons or detention camps, out of which around 9,000 are identified as political prisoners, including 326 minors and 94 women. Israel, in violation of several international conventions, continuously denies these prisoners their basic internationally recognized rights. Arbitrary arrests, imprisonment with no charges or trials, the absence of fair trials, torture, poor hygienic conditions, prohibition of family visits, and denial of medical treatment are all examples of the tragedy that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have suffered during the last 41 years. See PLO Negotiations Affairs Department, Palestinian Political Prisoners. (August 2008): 1. www.nad-plo.org. 29. See Jordan Flaherty and Suheir Hammad, Mourning for New Orleans, Left Turn Magazine, September 9, 2005. http://www.leftturn.org/?q=node/612. 30. See South End Press Collective, What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation (Boston: South End Press, 2007). 31. See Institute for Southern Studies One Year after Katrina: The State of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, Southern Exposure Special Report 34, no. 2 (2006). 32. See Frida Berrigan and William D. Hartung, U.S. Military Assistance and Arms Transfers to Israel: U.S. Aid, Companies Fuel Israeli Military, World Policy Institute, July 20, 2006, 2. 33. Associated Press, Palestinians [sic] Refugees donate $10,000 to Katrina refugees. The Jerusalem Post, September 13, 2005. http://www.friendsunrwa. org/news1.html. 34. See the New York Collective of Radical Educators, An Unnatural Disaster: A Critical Resource Guide for Addressing the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Classroom, April 2, 2006, 9. 35. Suheir Hammad, A Prayer Band, Electronic Intifada, September 13, 2005. http://electronicintifada.net/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/11/4173. 36. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 410, 438. 37. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 226.