9/11 and the Impossible Community of Tears | Louisa Yousfi
Could it be that the injustice of this world had damaged us so much that we were no longer even capable of weeping in the face of such carnage?
The following is an edited excerpt from In Defence of Barbarism: Non-Whites Against the Empire by Louisa Yousfi.
‘Heaven will avenge us.’ As the planes were crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, this phrase resounded within me. I had heard it just the evening before from my father’s lips. ‘Heaven will avenge us’, he had said in response to something on the TV news. I can’t remember what it was, but I do remember the prophecy, preceded by the words: ‘The Americans are the worst thing to have happened on Earth.’ The next day, when the attacks happened, it was: ‘I told you so!’
It was not an exclamation of pleasure, but rather disbelief: the very heart of the despised fortress had been stormed by a bunch of bearded men armed with kitchen knives. The Axis of Evil had struck the Axis of Good. The black man had once again killed the white woman. My father hadn’t predicted anything; he’d merely embraced the logic of the world and heard the rumble of what was to come. What happened had been threatening to happen for a very long time, so much so that it was like an over-inflated balloon bursting. To delight in it would have been to side with the enemy, but simple indignation was not an option either. Everything was confused and impossible to get straight. On the one hand, the symbolic power of the American skyscraper conjured up the millions of lives sacrificed with impunity in the building of this Promethean edifice – the ultimate symbol of triumphant modernity, imperialism, and all powerful capitalism. On the other hand, the unbearable images of those innocent figures hurling themselves into the void to escape from the flames could not decently be reconciled with our usual conceptions of justice. Amid all these confused emotions, we felt lost and concerned for ourselves. Could it be that the injustice of this world had damaged us so much that we were no longer even capable of weeping in the face of such carnage?
Our own consciences were caught in the trap of the Empire, but we had to be given a chance to express what we were really thinking, not just to ward off potentially devastating effects on ourselves but also to salvage something of the contents of our minds. For, in spite of the chasm that our conflicted thoughts threatened to open up in us, they nevertheless captured a certain truth and perhaps even a certain innocence. But that truth was drowned out by a hegemonic narrative that dismissed any alternative viewpoint out of hand, before we had even had a chance to formulate it coherently. Those who stood in judgement were unanimous: our failure to shed tears at the sight of these broken lives demonstrated that the evil had been in us from the outset. By failing to join in with the collective outpouring of emotion decreed from on high by the Western powers, we automatically situated ourselves in the camp of the terrorists and their barbarity. Prolonged exposure to this nauseating narrative almost gave it substance. What if we were unconsciously complicit in this horror? The less we were able to express what had gone through our hearts and minds, the more those thoughts and feelings became a source of danger for us. Because the feeling of confusion could not be aired openly, it rotted inside.
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We’re lulled by children’s stories: good against evil; civilization against barbarity. At that point, we can cry, but we can’t cry together. For, before the chaos, we were the radical Other for them; we were the ones who were going to drag them down into savagery, orchestrate the Great Replacement and colonize them back. And we’re now familiar with the routine, the shift that takes place: what if deep down we were complicit in what has just happened to them? To persuade them that this is not the case, we then do something odd: we remind them that blacks and Arabs were among the victims. Barbarians have been killed by the barbarians. Can’t you see that this doesn’t make sense? Can’t you see our tears are sincere? Actually, we are doing no more than revealing their own mentality: the reason they only believe our tears to be genuine when we’re mourning our own is because that is what they do: mourn their own, exclusively. One life in the West is worth how many lives in the South? The community of tears will never materialize because, in a sense, we have more that is universal in us than they do, despite all their boasts to the contrary. We carry on our conscience the millions of unmourned deaths precisely because we have failed to mourn them – we are only too aware that the Empire generates victims so that we can all live happily within it, but we’ve accepted the deal. We’ve averted our gaze from the shores from which we come. None of those images of the devastation of the South has prevented us from sleeping at night or loving our children. But when the devastation occurs in the West, all our inner conflicts rise to the surface. Why should we cry now, having failed to cry earlier for all the others? So many deaths have gone unmourned, so commonplace have they become, that the Empire has drained us of our tears, and the tank is still empty when it demands that we sympathize with its misfortune. It is something of a challenge to remain consistent and refuse to participate in the collective outpourings of grief, and such a refusal can certainly provoke disgust. But this attitude by no means betrays indifference, and still less a perverse satisfaction. Our torment in fact confirms the extent of our integration, though a certain seditious strain remains in us. Taking to its logical conclusion what the Empire has turned us into, we reluctantly end up confirming the oddness of our position, which is to say barbarians floundering between two poles of barbarity: the Empire and what feels like an inevitable act of revenge. We were not all Charlie [A reference to the slogan and hashtag ‘Je suis Charlie’ adopted in the wake of the terrorist attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.], partly because of the editorial and political connotations of that slogan, but perhaps above all because it played into the narrative that is trotted out after every Islamist attack – namely that the West has been attacked for what it is: its enlightened values and its zest for life, for dancing, for drinking, and for loving. But what we see is the ugliness of the Empire triumphing and invading us. To echo Ralph Ellison: When will these sleepwalkers finally wake up? What have they allowed themselves to become that they can live so blithely on a heap of ruins? That they can ignore the violence of the world for so long, until it suddenly shatters their lives? That it takes this atrocity, this fateful hour, before they give any serious thought to the ghosts that surround them? Did they really think the two orbits would never intersect? That, by carrying on obliviously with their lives, they would never meet one of those murderous ghosts?
‘Heaven will avenge us’, said my father, and it was not a prayer. He simply meant that there is a justice associated with every truth on Earth. And this justice did not take the vulgar form of the terrorist attack itself but rather everything that it revealed about this profoundly fouled-up world. ‘Heaven will avenge us’ was his version of the James Baldwin prophecy encapsulated in the title of his book The Fire Next Time, which, similarly, was neither a threat nor a warning but the expression of the permanent state of our inner beauty and the renewed promise to remain this side of the threshold – to risk a fire while at the same time controlling the urge. For this Baldwinian fire within us, which threatens to burn down everything, has to be kept under control without ever being allowed to go out. It has to remain a private barbarian spark that gives us courage for the struggle, sometimes against the fire itself.
In Defence of Barbarism: Non-Whites Against the Empire by Louisa Yousfi is out now.
The journalist Louisa Yousfi grew up in south-eastern France in the 1990s. She took a literature course at a crammer in Lille and then studied philosophy in Nice, ultimately enrolling in journalism school in Bordeaux. She was a conscientious student, following the advice of her working-class parents, who had emigrated from Algeria to France, to ‘focus on [her] studies first and worry about politics later’. This political engagement duly materialized when she joined the Parti des Indigènes de la République, an anti-racist and decolonial movement whose ideas had a decisive influence on her first published work, Rester barbare (now published in English as In Defence of Barbarism: Non-Whites Against the Empire. She is currently working on her first novel.
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A provocative, beautiful and defiant essay highlighting the pitfalls of integration in France by a talented young writer with North African roots.
