Smothering the meaning with flags: Vijay Prashad remembers 9/11

 by Vijay Prashad On 9/11 I was buying a bicycle. When I got home, I heard about the devastation. My sister-in-law called. She was worried. I was teaching in New York then. Was I ok? I was fine. It became clear that thousands had died in the attacks. It was clear that the country was in turmoil. This was a sad event for New York City, for the Pentagon and for the families who lost their loved ones there and in the fields of Pennsylvania. [caption id=“attachment_81983” align=“alignleft” width=“300” caption=“Nobody learns from these acts of violence, no-one wants to ask what provokes them and why it is revenge that answers for them. Vijay Prashad”]  [/caption] But the enormous singularity of the event that held my neighbors did not come to me. I, like so many others in the Global South, had been privy to other disasters, other nightmares. For me there will always be 1984, when the massacres in Delhi took the lives of thousands of Sikhs. I was in Dehra Dun then, where the fires struck the small town. A Sikh family that ran a pharmacy saw their livelihood burned, as other Sikhs were killed. They had lost a pharmacy before, in the Partition riots of 1947-48, when they left what was to become Pakistan for India. They had the resilience to rebuild their lives, their fortunes. For me there will always be 1992-93, when I watched the soldiers of saffron kill Muslims at will in northern Delhi and in places like Seelampur. I spent a night in a temple during the curfew, and will never forget the young men of saffron return after their adventures, bragging and thirsting to return the next day. The sound of knives being sharpened remains with me. For me there will always be the scenes of bombs fallen on the cities of Kabul and Kandahar, Baghdad and Basra – before 9/11, in the 1980s and 1990s. I remember the faces of an Afghan family, refugees who took over our barsati in Green Park in 1993, broken by the violence and scarred by its unending hold on their dreams. These are all 9/11. After 9/11 came 9/12. Nobody learns from these acts of violence, no-one wants to ask what provokes them and why it is revenge that answers for them. Mircea Eliade, the scholar of religion, asks us how can we “tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history – from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings – if beyond them [we] can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning?” Is there no reason for all this? Is it because we don’t want to face the fact of these events that we are prone to making them into Myth, denying them the right to be historical, to tell us something of themselves? Do we fear them, cover them in patriotic flags and smother what they are trying to say, their meaning? Vijay Prashad is George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, CT. His books include Darker Nations: A People’s History of the World and Karma of Brown Folk_._