The 1950s book that explains the War on Terror
In the weeks and months after America launched its ‘war’ against global terrorism, a list of books was compiled as a way to understand the psychology of the threat, the urge to hate, whether it was something particularly Muslim, whether the US deserved the hate, and what made the American empire so vulnerable.
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Conrad became instant interpreters of mindsets across the centuries because War and Peace, The Possessed and Secret Agent seemed to address similar issues, albeit in a quite different time: terrorism, violence, anarchism, revolution and the force of human evil.
An Auden poem, September 1, 1939, became one of the most cited literary works after 9/11, with the American media lingering on its prophetic tone about a New York September permeated by “the unmentionable odour of death” even as the narrator issues a heartening call to the “Just…(to) show an affirming flame”.
Then, as president George W. Bush’s invitation to every nation to join the United States in “civilisation’s fight” became more open-ended and amorphous in purpose and direction, came the post-9/11 books.
They tried to document what had really happened and what it meant, ricocheting from histories of Pakistan and the meaning of jihad to profiles of Osama bin Laden and detailed narratives on the war on terror.
One of the earliest American-Afghan personal stories of that period, Afghan-born-and-bred Tamim Ansary’s 2002 West of Kabul, East of New York, tried to bridge the gap between Islam and the West. Fictional attempts, sometimes painfully awkward as in John Updike’s 2006 Terrorist, attempted to depict alienation.
By then, Iraq had long been invaded, an act of war that Kofi Annan, UN secretary-general at the time, would later describe as “illegal”. Cue Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday, set against the anti-war protests in London.
Meanwhile, the story of mutual suspicions and myriad pinpricks of animosity between the Muslim world and the West continued to be re-imagined in different settings.
There was Mohsin Hamid’s masterful 2007 Lahore-based The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and three significant novels set in New York — Claire Messud’s 2006 The Emperor’s Children, Don DeLillo’s 2007 Falling Man and Amy Waldman’s 2011 The Submission.
As John Freeman, then editor of Granta magazine, put it in 2011, the previous decade had seen “an avalanche” of books. But having read “dozens of them”, he admitted to being struck by the feedback loop they generally created: “Even when I was trying to read my way out of the parochialisms of being American, I often read right back into them”.
For the war on terror library has always had a notable exception. It never included Paul Bowles’ The Spider’s House, possibly the only political novel on the relationship between Arabs and the West by an American who actually chose to live among Arabs for three-quarters of his life.
Bowles, who died in 1999 aged 88, made Morocco his home for more than half a century. His seminal novel The Sheltering Sky was made into a lush Bernardo Bertolucci film. But it is The Spider’s House, the most political of Bowles’ four major novels, that should be required reading as Joe Biden asserts “that the war in Afghanistan is now over” while pledging to “maintain the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and other countries”.
Read on at https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk on October 13, 2021.
