Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11

4. The Internationalization of Conscience: Hemon, Barker, Balkanism

205 4. THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF CONSCIENCE Hemon, Barker, Balkanism The growing interest in racial profiling since the 9/11 attacks has led to a flurry of fictions concerned with the contemporary Muslim experience in the United States. Some of these fictions have more in common with Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist than with Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land in that they adopt a transnational perspective, even when the setting doesn’t extend beyond New York. H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy, for instance, opens with a conversation between three hip Pakistanis , with “their fingers on the pulse of the great global dialectic” (1), about America’s chummy relations with the Mujahideen, the subsequent civil war with the freedom fighters, and the radicalization of their progeny , the Taliban (13). Rarely has 9/11 writing showcased characters that are so “privy to the imperatives of wild men and the goings-on in farflung arenas of the world” (14). Naqvi’s Pakistanis do get assaulted with “A-rab” invective—the word “like a dagger thrust and turned” (30)—yet they seem more concerned with the violently deterritorialized condition of New York’s multicultural underclass than with the abuses of the War on Terror. The moral implications of this war are squared against jihad, “the struggle within—the struggle to remain moral and charitable” (67), a contrast that has otherwise remained outside the purview of post-9/11 literary ethics. After being detained for forty-eight hours on suspicion of terrorist intent, in order to put things in perspective one of the Pakistanis begins to discuss the Japanese internment, although it was precisely his historical expertise (especially on terrorist and insurgent conduct, from Sarajevo to the Tamil Tigers [147]) that aroused his interrogators’ suspicion in the first place. 206 the internationalization of conscience Naqvi’s is only one in a series of novels that have shifted the focus of post-9/11 literature from debates on American domestic affairs to a set of questions by which writers attempt to locate the post-9/11 experience in space and time. The issue of racial formation as a determining cultural marker in U.S. history has come sharply to the fore in these fictions, as has the transnational shape of post-9/11 discourses and the ways the terrorist attacks can be understood through the lens of other historical events of similar importance. Kazim Ali remarks in his lyrical novel The Disappearance of Seth that “history is written in stories one on top of the other,” forming an uneven palimpsest in which certain episodes “press their vision down on everything that came before” (60). In Ali’s narrative the 9/11 attacks reshape the legacy of the first Persian Gulf War (1990–91) and the missile attack against Baghdad. Yet it is the Bosnian War (part of the Yugoslav dissolution wars, 1991– 95) that has emerged as the most significant moment in this move toward contextualizing the 9/11 attacks, for a number of reasons.1 For one thing, the events in Bosnia have informed the idiom and imaginary of post-9/11 discourse partly due to the stylistic resemblances between visualizations of the Bosnian War and of the 9/11 attacks, both of which have been photographed by the same photojournalists and have reached the public through the same media outlets. Widely considered to have marked a turning point in the radicalization of Muslims in Europe, the Bosnian War also provides a frame of reference for studying the effects of peacekeeping missions and un interventionism on a global scale, and thus facilitates a critical understanding of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq in response to the 9/11 attacks. Additionally a growing body of literature has examined the immigration waves set in motion by the Bosnian conflict, as well as the media scrutiny that brought that conflict to international attention by putting a face, as it were, on the violence on the ground and providing the most comprehensive debate on the ethics of media witnessing since Vietnam.2 This chapter examines two novels that largely turn on the explicit and ethically charged juxtaposition of September 11 and the Bosnian War to probe the deeper phylogeny of moral dogmas mobilized in the War on Terror, as well as their entwine- 207 the internationalization of conscience ment with paradigms of sympathy and rescue whose scale of aggregation is no longer the nation...