Abstract
This chapter analyzes two exemplary poems by Suheir Hammad and D. H. Melhem, focusing on the aesthetic strategies that are applied to interrogate various kinds of “borders” and experiences of inclusive exclusion in the aftermath of 9/11. Hammad and Melhem counter the global differentials that render some lives highly protected and their demise the subject of mourning, while leaving others highly vulnerable and at the borders of our attention. They lend a poetic voice to Judith Butler’s call to reconceptualize human life and identity as relational and globally embedded rather than contained and “sovereign.” As such, the poems also present viable alternatives to the “frames of war” (Butler) that shaped the aftermath of 9/11, providing important contributions to a rethinking of transnational ties, the concept of sovereignty, and questions of global responsibility.
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Notes
- 1.
Poet, novelist, and scholar D. H. Melhem (1926–2013) was born in Brooklyn to Lebanese immigrant parents. She received numerous awards for her poetry and prose work, among them an NEH Fellowship, an American Book Award, as well as several nominations for Pushcart and Pulitzer Prizes. Palestinian American poet and activist Suheir Hammad was born in 1973 in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan. She moved to the USA at age five and grew up in Brooklyn. She is known for her appearance in the Def Poetry Jam TV series, spoken word, and hip-hop poetry. Liedeke Plate also emphasizes the “community-building” function of poetry in the aftermath of 9/11 (1) and Karen Alkalay-Gut describes a “conceptual transformation of the way people had understood their world and their position in it” as a “universal characteristic of the poetry of September 11” (262). For an excellent reading of Hammad’s 2008 Breaking Poems as articulations of fragmentation and reconstruction, see Sirène Harb.
- 2.
In Agamben’s words, homo sacer represents an “extreme form of relation by which something is included solely through its exclusion” (Sacer 18).
- 3.
For an overview of the critique that Agamben’s analogy between the Nazi concentration camp and processes that shape modernity triggered, cf. Folkers and Lemke. US history also yields a myriad of examples for states of exception and forms of inclusive exclusion, among them Japanese American Internment Camps during World War II, the Native American reservation system, and the institution of slavery . The creation of what the American Civil Liberties Union has recently described as a “constitution-free zone” along US national borders and coasts provides another example for a state of exception created by the US government within the national territory—one that potentially involves 66 percent of the United States population which reside in this terrain (qtd. in Miller 171).
- 4.
I am using the term “state of exception” in a broad sense: one that encompasses formally declared states of exception as well as what could be described as informal states of exception that do not operate on the basis of emergency laws. For example, states of exception created through global economic orders or through the differential distribution and selective withholding of the benefits of citizenship (i.e., what Aihwa Ong describes as “neoliberal exception” 3), all of which can create experiences of inclusive exclusion.
- 5.
For rhetorical attempts to occlude this, see, again, Butler, Kaplan , and Pease, “Homeland.” Butler’s concept of the “violence of derealization” (Precarious 33) is particularly pertinent when it comes to accounting for the effects of discursive omission.
- 6.
See, for example, “9/11” poems by authors such as Toni Morrison , Joy Harjo, Samuel Hazo, and Ishmael Reed—to name but a few. Cf. Gray and Däwes on post-9/11 American literature and fiction, respectively.
- 7.
Referencing Aristotle’s Politics, Agamben suggests in Homo Sacer that the coming-into-being of the polis is linked to the transition of voice to language. He thus poses a structural similarity between the relation of bare life to the polis and the relation between voice and language (7). In both cases, the relation of the former to the latter is defined by inclusive exclusion. This suggests that having language is the prerequisite for membership in the polis. Poetry, especially in its public dimensions, can therefore play an important role in counteracting processes of inclusive exclusion and forms of violence that are fostered by neglect and derealization. The specific role of literary texts in such contexts is not just that of fostering one among many competing versions of extra-literary “reality,” but also of transcending such ostensible “realities” by imagining alternative forms of participation and belonging. For a historical analysis of poetry’s public functions, see Franke.
- 8.
The poem circulated widely via e-mail and on the internet in the weeks following 9/11 (Rothberg, “Poetry” 152, “Seeing” 135). For previous discussions of “first writing since,” see Gray, Bauridl, and Jegić.
- 9.
Richard Gray suggests that the idea of a failure of language is common among writers after 9/11 (1), a notion also shared by Hammad (176).
- 10.
In analogy to my broad use of the term “state of exception” outlined above, I am using the term “bare life” in a broad sense, as referring to those who are excluded from the community not just by means of law, but also rhetorically, politically, or conceptually through what Butler describes as “the violence of derealization” (33–34).
- 11.
Rothberg describes these stanzas as a “comic and slightly blasphemous litany [that] attests to the poem’s commitment to working on multiple levels and mobilizing conflicting emotional responses” (“Seeing” 135).
- 12.
Gray makes a similar point, suggesting that Hammad “invokes bonds that are … local and transnational” (177). Jegić describes “[t]ransnational [h]umanity” as a “[c]ounter [n]arrative” established in “first writing since” and Hammad’s autobiographical writing (16–17).
- 13.
Hammad returns to this theme in her 2008 volume breaking poems.
- 14.
Plate’s Butler-informed analysis of “The Dead of September 11” suggests that Morrison also employs literary strategies that emphasize the communal fabric of human life. The poem promotes a Bakhtinian concept of language and suggests that “citation is the fabric not only of the text but also of humanity” (10). Yet more relevant to the present context, Plate refers to a Mohawk ironworker who expresses a concept of post-sovereign human existence that has much in common with Hammad’s and Melhem’s imagery when he suggests that “[w]e probably all have parts of you know all those people inside of our systems. I think that’s part of everybody’s responsibility that was there” (qtd. in Plate 13).
- 15.
I am quoting from the “Requiescant 9/11” section reprinted in Melhem’s 2005 collection New York Poems. A requiescant is a prayer for the repose of the souls of the dead.
- 16.
One example for capitalizing economically from the effects of 9/11 would be the rapidly expanding “border industrial complex” (Dear). Cf. Miller.
- 17.
The critique of U.S. politics becomes yet more explicit in the third poem of the section, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above St. Paul’s Chapel, and beside the Viewing Platform, Ground Zero, July 4, 2002,” which describes the U.S. as “a Country/sitting alone among nations, its eyes/made quiet, not by Harmony/but a sense of power, itself a Nature/rampant, unconfined, the guide of its own/moral being, self-righteous, self-defined” (lines 58–63). This solitary and sovereign nation state is juxtaposed with “another presence, interfused” that the speaker describes as “a Unity of Being–a bond,” which is exemplified by “roots that mingle in the dark/while reaching for the light of common life” (lines 64, 66, 70–71). This image of connectedness and mutual dependence is connected to the “London plane tree” in St Paul’s Chapel’s churchyard of the poem’s first stanza (line 4), one of the trees that ostensibly protected the chapel from destruction on 9/11.
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Spengler, B. (2018). States of Exception and Arab American Women’s Poetry After 9/11: Liminality and Community in Suheir Hammad’s “first writing since” and D. H. Melhem’s “September 11, 2001, World Trade Center, Aftermath”. In: Jacobson, K., Allukian, K., Legleitner, RA., Allison, L. (eds) Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_15
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