How Writers Redefined the War on Terror

As U.S. global power shifts, Zócalo is taking a look at what is emerging in its stead. “What Is the New World Order?” is a series of editorial essays and a public program, presented in collaboration with JLF Los Angeles, that draws on history, literature, and politics to help us understand the world’s next turn.

Is a “new world order” emerging as the U.S. abdicates its global leadership, as a recent New York Times essay put it?

Many analysts and scholars of global culture and world systems have argued, with increasing intensity, that U.S. superpowers are diminishing.

But if we look to fiction, we can see that writers have long understood the origins of a new world order and challenged the official narratives of this country’s wars and naked ambition abroad. Since Sept. 11, 2001, literature has unveiled the ensuing “war on terror” as more than a military project: It is also a story about who is dangerous, who wields power over sovereign peoples, and what violence is justified in the defense of “freedom.”

From The Iliad to Angel Down, a World War I novel awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, writers have wrestled with war and empire not simply as spectacle or triumph but as an experience of loss, violence, memory, and moral consequence. (Even Christopher Nolan and Emily Wilson would agree!) American writers like Mark Twain challenged the country’s early imperial ambitions. Twain warned that becoming an empire would decay the republic from within because of what was done without. Since, U.S. authors have produced an enormous body of antiwar literature, from Hemingway to Vonnegut to Phil Klay. Much of that took the form of what critic and writer Roy Scranton has called the trope of the “trauma hero”—middle-class white men in combat who come home traumatized—in order to convey to the reading public the horrors of the warfront returning to the U.S. and, hopefully, inspire anti-war sentiment.

The wars of the past 25 years inspired literature that has expanded on this tradition. Novelists and poets have created a foundational critique of war, not from the perspective of America’s traumatized war heroes or victims but from people living under American war and with the consequences of American empire in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and beyond.

These writers revisited Sept. 11 not as an isolated rupture in history, but as an event that came from somewhere—and one that had grave consequences. Their novels and poetry collections wield language to confront the new ways of waging American war: expanded surveillance and suspension of rights, detention, torture, and drone warfare. They complicated the simplistic, state-sponsored idea that “they hate us because they hate our freedom,” asking instead what histories of intervention, inequality, violence, and power might lie behind the official story.

Upcoming Experience

Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist highlights the financial arm of U.S. empire. Protagonist Changez, who has immigrated from Pakistan to the U.S. for college, goes to work at a high-powered Wall Street firm, traveling the globe to restructure companies. He soon realizes that he is a foot soldier, a “servant,” of the capitalist American empire. Changez narrates his story years after he has returned to Pakistan, to an unidentified American (“you”). The use of the second person is at times accusatory but mostly a way to address all Americans and their post-9/11 racist anxieties. “Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America,” Changez tells the American.

Changez’s work takes him to sites of U.S. imperialism, like Chile, which has its own “9/11”; on that day in 1973, the U.S.-backed dictator General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende. Changez also travels to the Philippines, which the U.S. colonized in 1898, one of many spoils of the Spanish American War. His journey becomes an education in moral consciousness.

Hamid casts the “fundamentals” of global finance as an ideology that enacts real harm on people at a grand scale, unmooring that word—“fundamentalist”—from its shorthand for a bogeyman Muslim who hates the U.S. and wishes it harm.

Other writers, too, took on the language that masked U.S. prejudices and brutalities.

Jamil Jan Kochai’s 2019 novel 99 Nights in Logar explores the war and occupation in Afghanistan through the ordinary lives of Afghan families. In Ahmed Saadawi’s 2018 novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, a stitched-together body made from victims of the U.S. occupation and sectarian violence wreaks gothic horror on civilians; the monster becomes a grotesque embodiment of the violence that produced him. Solmaz Sharif’s 2016 poetry collection Look takes the “U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms” and repurposes its bureaucratic language to expose the human violence it conceals. Philip Metres’ 2015 poetry collection Sand Opera similarly uses the testimonies of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the testimony of U.S. military personnel, and the Guantánamo Bay “Standard Operating Procedure” manual (hence the book’s title: S[t]andar Opera[ting]). Metres’ poems expose U.S. “enhanced interrogation techniques” for what they are: beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, waterboarding, and subjection to deafening noise, sleep deprivation, and sexual humiliation.

In “The Blues of Lane McCotter,” named for the prison administrator at Abu Ghraib, Metres opens: “four Iraqis at the gate / all of them missing / their hands or their / █████ story.” His use of redacted text juxtaposes the U.S. government’s secrecy alongside the atrocities of war it shirks accountability for. The black box obscures an element of physical violence but also a story, an entire life relegated to torture at an American black site.

When the state conceals the gruesome facts of war, the moral truths that writers try to arrive at become clearer.

So much language around Sept. 11 has acted in service of U.S. empire. The military code name for the tactical phase of the kill-or-capture mission of Osama bin Laden was “Operation Geronimo”—referring to the Apache leader whose raids against the U.S. military were only necessary because of Americans’ continued conquest of Native land. The use of “Ground Zero” for the site in lower Manhattan where the twin towers once stood adopts the language of nuclear war and, in the cultural lexicon, turns U.S. aggression—the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—into American tragedy.

Empire needs myths about who belongs, what counts as a civilization, which wars are necessary, and whose suffering can be tolerated. These myths often drive zealous missions couched in democracy doublespeak—benevolence! exceptionalism! freedom!—which makes the struggle against them a war over meaning. Like empires, books have ideologies; they insist on something.

While politicians spun fictions of WMDs and of liberating Iraqis and Afghan women, writers described the ugly asymmetry of its wars; naming the thing, shaming it. In the hands of writers who refuse the language of empire, the page becomes a place to counter state mythology, punctuate the constant drone of war, and reclaim a moral lexicon that affirms life.

Talib Jabbar is associate editor at Zócalo Public Square, and studies and teaches literature and critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz.

Primary editor: Sarah Rothbard | Secondary editor: Eryn Brown

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