As the world clustered, transfixed, around television screens, watching and rewatching footage of a plane gliding into the top of New York’s twin towers and a tiny, anonymous man plummeting to earth, another scene was unfolding on the ground, as panic-stricken families stumbled through the smoke and rubble to gather up their children from schools and kindergartens.
Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly stood four blocks away with their daughter, watching the second tower fall “in excruciatingly slow motion”. As art director of the New Yorker magazine, Mouly knew that she would have to come up with a rapid response. “I felt that images were suddenly powerless to help us understand what had happened. The only appropriate solution seemed to be to publish no cover image at all – an all-black cover. Then Art suggested adding the outlines of the two towers, black on black. So from no cover came a perfect image, which conveyed something about the unbearable loss of life, the sudden absence in our skyline, the abrupt tear in the fabric of reality,” she later recalled.
“It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment…” wrote Martin Amis in the Guardian. “I have never seen a generically familiar object so transformed by effect… That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanised with malice, and wholly alien. For those thousands in the south tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.”
Journalism might be the rough draft of history, but from the start authors, artists and particularly novelists were called upon to do the drafting. And from the beginning they started jostling with each other. In that early piece, Amis sneered at the “wooden words” of thriller writer Tom Clancy; by the fifth anniversary of the attack, he would himself be publicly excoriated by his Manchester University colleague Terry Eagleton, for his writing on Muslim extremism.
Comedians, however, were warned to keep their mouths shut. After Bill Maher, host of the late-night talkshow Politically Incorrect, attacked the emerging rhetoric of the catastrophe, the show lost advertising and was axed. His crime was to point out, with the acuity of good political comedy, that lobbing missiles from 2,000 miles away, as the US had been doing for years with its “surgical strikes”, was cowardly, while staying on a plane as it hits a building was not.
Comedian Pete Davidson was seven years old when his firefighter father died in the rescue operation. He would go on to test the pieties surrounding the event by working the experience into his routines (and drawing boundary-stretching “roastings” from his peers). But it took a long time for standups to find their mojo again. Contributors to Too Soon: Comedy After 9/11, one of the many TV documentaries that will mark next week’s 20th anniversary, recall Saturday Night Live tentatively reintroducing the possibility of jokes 10 days after the attacks, with a spoof news report that the mafia had stolen more than 250 tonnes of scrap metal from lower Manhattan: “Well,” they said, “the mayor told us to go back to work.”
There’s a sense in which, in the west at least, much of the art created since that momentous day exists in its shadow and even that which pre-existed it has been recreated by it. “Out of the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the night, intensely massed and near. This is the word ‘loomed’ in all its prolonged and impending force,” wrote Don DeLillo, in what is arguably his great 9/11 novel, not 2007’s Falling Man, but 1991’s Mao II. “What does it even mean: the 20th anniversary? It seems to assume that things began on that day,” says the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid. “I think that ahistorical approach resulted in the disaster we’re seeing in Kabul now.”
On 6 November 2001, a TV drama that had been in production long before the day itself made its first appearance. Set over a single crisis-packed day, 24 starred Kiefer Sutherland as counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer, whose othering of Muslims and pragmatic approach to torture would become a reference point for debate around US foreign policy over nine series and 204 episodes. In 2007, Bill Clinton himself cited Bauer in a clumsily revealing TV interview, saying: “I think what our policy ought to be is to be uncompromisingly opposed to terror – I mean to torture, and that if you’re the Jack Bauer person, you’ll do whatever you do and you should be prepared to take the consequences, and I think the consequences will be imposed based on what turns out to be the truth.”
Spiegelman was among those whose initial shock curdled into rage at the misappropriation of the tragedy for political and economic ends. In 2004, he created a picture book based on his black towers cover, In the Shadow of No Towers, which depicted how the post-9/11 world had cleaved the “united states” into red and blue zones. “It seems axiomatic to me that the best response to a work of art is another work of art,” he said. His book duly became the inspiration for a symphony by the Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz, who challenged the idea (reinforced by many of the rock world’s early attempts to generate songs about the attacks) that musicians should steer well clear of politics. Fairouz subverted the patriotism of marching bands and trumpet solos with a wind ensemble that, by the third movement, was split into two distinct groups, reflecting the ideological chasm in Spiegelman’s book. “The cartoonish results, which approach cacophony, echo the brazen visual form of the graphic novel,” noted the Wall Street Journal.
By the middle of the 00s, film was beginning to process the experience, with the sort of variable results that are revealed by two releases from 2006. Both took their viewers back to the day itself. In the red corner was Oliver Stone, whose ground-set World Trade Center was criticised by Observer critic Philip French for simultaneously celebrating and exploiting love, family life and communal effort “in the manner of a second world war propaganda entertainment”.
In the blue corner was Paul Greengrass, whose United 93 was largely set aboard one of the hijacked planes. Greengrass’s background was in documentaries and he made use of its techniques to convey the horrifying happenstance of the day. A jittery camera on fly-on-the-wall duty observes fuel pumping into the aircraft’s tanks, a man running on to the plane just as the doors are closing, a girl applying lip gloss, while an elderly woman gets out her knitting needles (which, of course, would never be permitted on planes again). It was, wrote French, “gripping from first to last, partly because, like a Greek tragedy, we are only too aware of where everything is heading and partly because we are simultaneously taken back to that day that shook the world”.
The film’s climax, with some passengers desperately phoning home as others steel themselves to tackle the hijackers and divert the plane, recalled one of the most resonant literary-journalistic aperçus of the immediate aftermath. “There is only love, and then oblivion,” wrote the novelist Ian McEwan in the Guardian. “Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers.” But by the mid 00s, the generation of white, liberal and predominantly male writers to which McEwan belonged were starting to look hawkish in their post- 9/11 certainties.
McEwan’s novel Saturday centred on the march against the Iraq war in London in 2003, for which 2 million people are estimated to have turned out. Published in 2005, it told the story of a surgeon whose leisurely day of playing squash, cooking and making love to his wife is inconvenienced by the marchers. The initial critical consensus that it was another masterpiece was shattered by a review by the Irish novelist John Banville in the New York Review of Books. “Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong,” he wrote. “If Tony Blair – who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity – were to appoint a committee to produce a ‘novel for our time’, the result would surely be something like this.”
Sixteen years on, the combination of the novel itself and its adulatory reception seem to me to amount to a monument of sorts, providing an uncomfortably astute picture of the complacency, the collusion of high culture and low politics, which has landed us in the sad state we’re in today. Banville, however, resists such reappraisal. “Despite popular misconceptions – and much earnest but extremely bad work – art cannot give an immediate response to contemporary events,” he says. “It’s simply not equipped for that. And when artists try, they fail. Picasso’s Guernica is kitsch, as he came to realise himself in later years.”
Two years after Saturday, Mohsin Hamid signalled the emergence of a new – and more internationalist – literary generation with his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. He had written a “terrible” first draft, before 9/11, about a young Pakistani man working in corporate New York who, after a failed love affair, grows a beard and moves back to Lahore. “A few weeks later, the terrorist attacks of September 11 happened. My world changed. I wrote the novel again. And again,” he has written. His achievement was to make a sympathetic character of Changez, a Muslim academic firebrand whose ideological training ground turns out to have been Princeton and Wall Street, and whose objectionable views extend to being “remarkably pleased” by 9/11. In a sense, as one critic wrote, Changez “is the embodiment of the argument that says that America has created its own enemies”.
The chief virtue of Mira Nair’s 2012 film adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist was the casting of the actor and rapper Riz Ahmed as Changez. Ahmed’s film career had begun in Michael Winterbottom’s 2006 docudrama The Road to Guantánamo, as one of the “Tipton Three”, a trio of young British Muslims from the West Midlands who took on the US legal system after being captured in Afghanistan and then imprisoned and tortured in Guantánamo Bay. This was film calling power to account, as theatre had also begun to do with the emergence of verbatim plays. Pioneered at north London’s Tricycle theatre by the writer/director team of Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicolas Kent, these dramatised in scrupulous detail the miscarriages of justice occasioned by the west’s hunger for revenge.
On his way back from filming The Road to Guantánamo, Wembley-born Ahmed was detained at Luton airport by customs officers who, he would later write in the bestselling anthology The Good Immigrant, “frogmarched me to an unmarked room where they insulted, threatened and then attacked me”. He wrote a song about the experience, Post 9/11 Blues: “We’re all suspects so watch your back/ I farted and got arrested for a chemical attack.”
The song drew him to the attention of the cultural disruptor Chris Morris, who put both Ahmed and his lyrics into his 2010 debut film, Four Lions, an edgy satire about a quartet of hapless terrorists from the West Midlands who manage to evade the equally hapless security forces, despite joining the London marathon dressed up as chickens and bears. At its Sundance premiere, the Hollywood Reporter described the film as “a brilliant takedown of the imbecility of fanaticism”, neglecting to mention the sinister mirroring that ends up with a bunch of Keystone anti-terrorist cops seizing the devout and peace-loving brother of Ahmed’s character, Omar.
In his Good Immigrant memoir, Ahmed usefully divided life as a post 9/11 actor of minority heritage into three: stage one, he wrote, is the two-dimensional stereotype – the minicab driver/terrorist/corner shop owner. Stage two is the subversive portrayal, taking place on “ethnic” terrain but aiming to challenge existing stereotypes. Stage three is the Promised Land, where he might even be allowed to play a character named Dave. This gradual admission into the club of “us” has played out in many areas of post-9/11 culture.
In her 2017 novel Home Fire, which won the Women’s prize for fiction, Kamila Shamsie wrangled the Greek myth of Antigone with recent political history. It featured a British Muslim home secretary a year before Sajid Javid landed the job. “Burnt Shadows [her 2009 novel] is more obviously influenced by 9/11 in so far as it starts and ends with a man in Guantánamo,” she says. “But yes – other than [home secretary] Karamat Lone – everyone else in Home Fire grows up in a world that is living the consequences of the war on terror. I wanted to look at what it meant for that generation of British Muslims to grow up knowing no other world except the one that existed post 9/11. My immediate interest was to look at how attitudes of Islamophobia and racist laws (citizen stripping) shape people’s lives – all that goes back to 2001.”
She was pleasantly surprised by the response. “I expected a great many more voices to say I sympathised with terrorists, but what I found instead was people wanting to understand human stories behind headlines. There was an interesting duality in the British responses – a number of British Muslims said, thank you for telling stories that resonate so much with our lives, whereas a number of non-Muslim Brits said, thank you for telling these stories; we had no idea these kinds of lives went on in the country in which we’re living.”
Two decades after the attacks, the twin towers are memorialised on what came to be known as Ground Zero by two square pools of water surrounded by 400 swamp white oak trees, following a Daniel Libeskind blueprint, as elaborated by the Israeli-American architect Michael Arad. A wedge-shaped glazed pavilion shelters an underground memorial museum that movingly incorporates twisted relics from the original towers.
But many of the people affected by the devastating long tail of the attacks don’t have the luxury of a permanent place of contemplation and pilgrimage. On 11 September 2021, a 12-foot-tall puppet, representing a nine-year-old Syrian refugee, will walk into Rome to be greeted by buildings lit up with projected paintings of her ruined homeland. The installation, by exiled Syrian artist Tammam Azzam, is just one of 100 community “welcomes” for Little Amal along an 8,000km route, thousands of miles from the site of the original strikes, not a centimetre of which hasn’t been touched by its fallout. Little Amal’s journey bookends the intervening period with perhaps the most enduring line in that very first journalistic response from Martin Amis, before the bombast set it: “The most durable legacy has to do with the more distant future, and the disappearance of an illusion about our loved ones, particularly our children,” he wrote. “The illusion is this. Mothers and fathers need to feel that they can protect their children. They can’t.”
