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  • September 11: Green and White
  • Michael Reid Busk (bio)

On my writing table, the squash’s slow bleaching continues, white climbing its northern hemisphere. Were the world mapped onto the spherical squash, the spot where I sit would be on the minty, speckled verge, as would the classroom a few miles away where 13 years ago this morning, my classmates and I were waiting for our freshman seminar professor, who was atypically late. I was 17 years old. The squash is green and white, colors found in the flags of nearly every Arab nation. Our professor hurried in and told us to follow him. In the building’s lounge, we crouched to watch a tiny TV just in time to see the second tower fall. I had never been to New York City, nor outside the continent, and only a handful of times had I traveled outside Indiana, a state white in winter and green in summer. In Islam, white represents peace and purity, while green represents life and fertility (and was also the Prophet Mohammed’s favorite color). Today, other militant Sunnis control an Indiana-sized crescent of territory in northern Syria and northwestern Iraq, another region that would be on the verge, were the globe mapped onto the squash. Iraq was historically called the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization. The crescent is a symbol of the pan-Arab movement, inspired by the moon, which desert traders used to navigate on their nocturnal treks across Arabia. On the morning of September 11, 2001, our seminar class was scheduled to discuss The Odyssey, the tale of one man’s trek back to Europe from what later would be called the Middle East. The militants today call their territory a caliphate, harkening back to the Umayyads who in the eighth century controlled a crescent-shaped swath of territory that stretched across the Middle East and North Africa into Europe, [End Page 127] a centuries-long greening this newer caliphate would like to repeat in the digital age, at digital speed. They too see it is as a greening, a flowering of Islam, while the West sees it as a bleaching, a brutal homogenization. The more homogenized parts of the squash are less beautiful, but if you look more closely, you see variation and irregularity beneath the surface, impossible to see at a distance. The northernmost territory of the squash, its Arctic Circle, is still quite green, and it will be the last to fade, if it fades at all. For a century, the Arctic ice has been melting, the green overtaking the white. For many centuries, European explorers attempted to find a sea route under Greenland and over Canada to Asia, the famed Northwest Passage. Greenland is white and Iceland is green, and legend has it that earlier explorer Erik the Red named them such so that colonists and conquerors would head to icy Greenland and stay out of his verdant Iceland. In high school, I read The Odyssey and The Iliad and enjoyed the former more, preferring travel to warfare, motion to stasis. The explorers who sought the Northwest Passage were lured by the prospect of trade with the warm, exotic Orient: China, India, the Ottoman Empire that controlled the territory formerly ruled by the caliphate. One of the most tragic attempts to locate the Northwest Passage was that of Sir John Franklin, whose expedition set sail from Greenwich in 1845 and was caught in ice off King William Island in the fall of the following year. Many of those who did not freeze or starve died of scurvy, and one can imagine a sailor hallucinating the arrival that would never come, on the shore of a land warm and fertile, where the trees hang heavy with fruit, pomegranates and melons and green limes that would halt the withering of the sailors’ gums. In the intervening years since college, I have traveled to the Middle East, the farthest being the Amman airport, where I saw through the terminal windows the unbroken desert, squinting at a glare I had only ever experienced in snow. Apparently more men died trying to find Franklin’s lost expedition than died in the expedition...

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