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Reimagining Traitors: Pearl
Abraham’sAmerican Taliban and
the Case of John Walker Lindh
MARIA-IRINA POPESCU
Pearl Abraham’s novel American Taliban uses the “true”story of John Walker Lindh, a
white US citizen captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan in ,toreflect on the
intense mediation of public trauma in the early days of the “War on Terror.”This article dis-
cusses the significance of American Taliban as a post-“/”work of literary fiction which,
by imagining individual agency and interrogating the relationship between a racialized
“Americanness,”treason and sovereignty, invites its readers to be critical of historical, political
and media narratives in the so-called “post-truth era.”
At the beginning of December , in a segment of Comedy Central’sThe
Daily Show titled “Operation Enduring Coverage,”American political satirist
Jon Stewart challenged his viewers to “try wrapping [their] spinning heads
around this one: meet twenty-year-old John Walker [Lindh], an American
citizen turned Taliban soldier, recently captured after the prison uprising in
Mazar-e-Sharif.”
Stewart was joined by American humorist Maurice “Mo”
Rocca, who satirized Lindh’s biography as “a recipe for radical Islamic funda-
mentalism. An intelligent child, growing up with not one loving parent, but
two loving parents, a family that’s making that difficult transition from
upper middle class to lower upper class …it’s textbook, Jon.”
Both
Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex. Email: mpopes@
essex.ac.uk.
Jon Stewart, “Operation Enduring Coverage: John Walker Lindh,”The Daily Show with
Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, Dec. ,atwww.cc.com/video-clips/wdcw/the-
daily-show-with-jon-stewart-operation-enduring-coverage---john-walker-lindh, accessed
Oct. .
Jon Stewart and Maurice Alberto “Mo”Rocca, “Operation Enduring Coverage: Privileged
Upbringing?”,The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, Dec. ,atwww.
cc.com/video-clips/tckowo/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-operation-enduring-coverage---
privileged-upbringing, accessed Oct. .
Journal of American Studies, Page of
©Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies . This is an
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licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/./), which permits unrestricted re-use, dis-
tribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
doi:./S
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Stewart and Rocca play with the common misconceptions surrounding the
“un-American Other,”who, in the post-“/”imagination, takes the shape
of the “Islamic extremist”or “terrorist”;
a necessarily repugnant figure, the
“terrorist”appears as socially inept, a loner with reduced intellect and inferior
education, originating from a broken family and an impoverished economic
background. The Daily Show segment identifies the American public’s confu-
sion when they were confronted with the paradox of an “all-American Other”
soon after the beginning of the “War on Terror”: a white, young, Californian
man from a wealthy, liberal family who was captured fighting for the
Taliban –which, in the polarizing discourse of the Bush administration, was
synonymous with fighting for Osama bin Laden himself.
This early post-“/”confusion, amplified by the swift military response
ambiguously named the “War on Terror,”brought into question the nature of
“home”and belonging in the US. Literary critic Richard Gray alludes to the
imaginary “Homeland”onto which US citizens were dislocated when he
argues that, post-“/,”“Americans find themselves living in an interstitial
space,”caught between “the culture(s) of the nation and the culture of the
global marketplace,”a space made more radical by the “encounter with terrorism
and the experience of counter terrorism.”
Since the attacks, post-“/”
American literature has been negotiating these encounters and attempting to
diagnose the nature of the crisis in various ways. The consensus in “/”literary
studies is that early novels, such as Jonathan Safran Foer’sExtremely Loud and
Incredibly Close and Claire Messud’sThe Emperor’sChildren,althoughsignifi-
cant in the American literary landscape in their own ways, failed to abandon
the exceptionalist lens which emerged in the immediate aftermath of the
attacks.
Gray is critical of such early literary “responses to crisis”because they
failed, he argues, both formally and politically, to imagine survival after “the
end of the world”without giving in to the “seductive pieties of home, hearth
and family”and to “the equally seductive myth of American exceptionalism”–
Following from Jacques Derrida’s assertion that “when you say ‘September ’you are
already citing”(Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with
Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press, ), ), throughout this essay I will use the label “/”inside quotation marks.
President George Bush Jr., Joint Session of Congress, Sept. :“We condemn the
Taliban regime. It is not only repressing its own people, it is threatening people everywhere
by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists. By aiding and abetting murder, the
Taliban regime is committing murder …The Taliban must act, and act immediately.
They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.”At www.theguardian.
com/world//sep//september.usa, accessed Oct. .
Richard Gray, After the Fall: American Literature since / (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell,
), .
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, ); Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children (New York: Knopf, ).
Maria-Irina Popescu
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and, implicitly, without dissolving “public crisis in the comforts of the personal.”
If, as Paul Petrovic argues, early fictional responses to “/”“occasionally
silenced instances of political resistance and overly fetishized national victim-
hood,”towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century the “/
”novel started undergoing a generic transition embodied in stories told
through “a more pluralistic and ambiguous lens.”
Later “/”novels incorp-
orate wider sociohistorical contexts of key events within more inclusive para-
digms of representation containing elements of “the fantastical, the allegorical,
the ethnic, and the international.”
“Second-wave”“/”novels, such as
Shaila Abdullah’sSaffron Dreams, Giannina Braschi’sUnited States of
Banana, and Cara Hoffman’sBe Safe I Love You, complicate the early “/
”literary canon by moving away from the American-exceptionalist lens of
victimhood and marginalization and towards a multiplicity of (possibly dispar-
ate) cultural perspectives –including military involvement in the “War on
Terror,”immigrant experience and identity, and the empire as a dominant
presence in the American imaginary.
Another “wave”emerging out of the
–period has been suggested by critics like Richard Gray and Elleke
Boehmer, who noted the new postcolonial context made visible particularly
by Joseph O’Neill’sNetherland and Mohsin Hamid’sThe Reluctant
Fundamentalist; according to Gray, the novels pursue a “strategy of deterritor-
ialization”which, “instead of stressing the opposition between, say, First and
Third Worlds, West and East, the colonizer and the colonized, [concentrates]
on the faultlines themselves, on border situations and thresholds as the sites
where identities are performed and contested.”
Elleke Boehmer calls for a
rethinking of terrorism as the postcolony’s act of resistance to the “colonial
formations of sovereignty, policing, and surveillance”and argues that “the
history of neoliberal globalization and America’s place within it”are “inextric-
ably entwined”with what Hamid notes as the imperialist agenda of the “War
on Terror.”
In this article, I examine Pearl Abraham’s American Taliban, a novel
which expands the “true”story of John Walker Lindh into a reflection on the
Gray, .
Paul Petrovic (ed.), Representing /: Trauma, Ideology, and Nationalism in Literature,
Film, and Television (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, ), x–xi.
Ibid., x.
Ibid., x–xvii; Shaila Abdullah, Saffron Dreams (Ann Arbor, MI: Modern History Press,
); Giannina Braschi, United States of Banana (Seattle: AmazonCrossing, ); Cara
Hoffman, Be Safe I Love You (New York: Simon & Schuster, ).
Gray, ,; Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (San Diego, CA: Harcourt,
); Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (New York: Harper Perennial, ).
Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton (eds.), Terror and the Postcolonial (Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell, ), ,.
Reimagining Traitors
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intense mediation of public trauma in a post-“/”world.
The text’s the-
matic concerns both echo and complicate the early post-“/”novel’s generic
propensity towards familial crisis. By highlighting themes such as the broken
contract between the individual and the state, the problematic equivalence
between “whiteness”and “innocence,”and the imperialist agenda of the
“War on Terror,”American Taliban destabilizes the myth of American excep-
tionalism and subscribes to the categories which define the later stages of the
post-“/”novel. With its focus on the interplay between fact and fiction,
mythology and history, and state fantasy and resistance, Abraham’s novel is
a timely warning against the oversimplifying discourses of the so-called
“post-truth era”; the text asks what it means to be “American,”“un-
American”or “anti-American,”and it encourages the reader to be critical of
historical, political and media narratives. Within the post-“/”literary
genre, American Taliban is innovative in its portrayal of the “all-white
American”homegrown “terrorist,”a gesture of resistance against the discourse
of white American innocence, victimhood and exceptionalism. As the point of
origin for the as-yet endless “War on Terror,”in itself a product of the inter-
play between fact and fiction, the “/”moment continues to dominate con-
temporary discourses. As John Duvall and Robert Marzec argue, post-“/”
literature matters because, “by imagining individual and political agency, con-
temporary narrative maps the fantasies that mediate the everyday experience of
empire and at curious moments extends an invitation for us to think historic-
ally.”
Works of post-“/”literary fiction such as American Taliban con-
tinue to resist these processes of mythologization and historical revisionism
used to justify the United States’imperialist agenda through stories that desta-
bilize racial hierarchies and privileged viewpoints.
JOHN WALKER LINDH, THE WHITE “AMERICAN TALIBAN”:
MEDIA NARRATIVES
John Walker Lindh was captured on December , following the violent
confrontation in the Qala-i-Jangi fortress outside Mazar-e-Sharif between
Northern Alliance troops, supported by US forces, and Taliban prisoners of
war. As the first white-skinned American captured since the start of the
“War on Terror,”Lindh became a liability for the Department of Justice
and his story was singled out and widely reported in the mainstream media
upon his return to the US. A Nexis search stretching from September
Pearl Abraham, American Taliban (New York: Random House, ).
John N. Duvall and Robert P. Marzec (eds.), Narrating /: Fantasies of State, Security, and
Terrorism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), .
Maria-Irina Popescu
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until May in US newspapers returns results featuring John
Walker Lindh’s name in headlines and lead paragraphs;
in contrast, the
other US citizen captured at Qala-i-Jangi, Yaser Hamdi, a Saudi American
born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was virtually invisible in US mainstream
media, appearing only thirteen times in a search with the same parameters.
John Lindh became the object of fascination, the “bad white”of Westerns
who, despite failing to fully “attain whiteness”because of his association
with nonwhite Others, nevertheless reasserts the complexity of white
identity.
Lindh’s capture led to the rapid growth of two media narratives: one in
which he was the supervillain, an American “traitor,”and an “enemy
within,”and another in which he was a sweet, innocent, patriotic American
boy who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Initially,
Lindh was taken to a nearby hospital, where, after receiving first aid and mor-
phine, he was interviewed and filmed without his consent by CNN journalist
Robert Young Pelton. Two carefully selected minutes of footage were broad-
cast via satellite the next day; the image of this dirty, bearded, long-haired,
wounded and incoherent American prisoner of war was shown on television
screens across the country confessing, “my heart became attached to [the
Taliban].”
Lindh’s words were framed and delivered to the public as an
admission of treason and as a pledge of allegiance to the most dangerous
enemy of the US, Osama bin Laden.
The day after the broadcast of
Pelton’s two-minute interview teaser, John Lindh’s father Frank also appeared
on CNN, on the talk show Larry King Live, where he inaugurated this second
public narrative by describing his son as “nothing …other than a kid, a boy
really, who converted to a religion that I respect and seemed very healthy and
good for him.”
The New York Post oscillated between the two narratives and
Nexis search on “John Walker Lindh”in Headlines & Lead Paragraphs in US Newspapers,
custom dates: Sept. –May ,atwww.nexis.com/api/version/sr?sr=%%
hlead%john+walker+lindh%%%+and+date%%E%D--+and+%C
%D--%&csi=&oc=&shr=t&scl=t&hac=f&hct=f&
nonLatinChars=true&crth=off, accessed May .
Nexis search on “Yaser Hamdi”in Headlines & Lead Paragraphs in US Newspapers,
custom dates: Sept. –May ,atwww.nexis.com/api/version/sr?sr=%%
hlead%yaser+hamdi%%%+and+date%%E%D--+and+%C%
D--%&csi=&oc=&shr=t&scl=t&hac=f&
hct=f&nonLatinChars=true&crth=off, accessed May .
Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, ), .
Abraham, .
“Transcript of John Walker Interview,”CNN,July ,athttp://edition.cnn.com/
/WORLD/asiapcf/central///ret.walker.transcript, accessed Aug. .
Justin Pritchard, “Attorney of ‘American Taliban’Held in Afghanistan Releases Letter to
Family,”Associated Press, Dec. ,atwww.nexis.com/docview/getDocForCuiReq?
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called Lindh a “sweet American kid”
one day and a “US rat”the next.
USA
Today dubbed Lindh a “self-proclaimed holy warrior for the Taliban,”
whilst
the Daily News published a scathing piece on the online presence of the “turn-
coat Yank.”
Partisan media picked their battles on both sides of the Atlantic,
with left-wing, liberal broadsheet newspapers such as The New York Times,
The Washington Post and The Guardian joining Lindh’s parents’cause by
publishing articles and opinion pieces advocating leniency in the case and
lobbying for the presidential pardon as recently as the last year of the
Obama administration.
Although problematic and elastic, the labels “American,”“un-American,”
and “anti-American”indicate the type of identity assigned to an individual
in a discourse or narrative, and they speak of the individual’s place in the hier-
archical structure created by said discourse or narrative. The meaning of these
descriptors depends on the ideological and mythological framework from
which they originate. In the Lindh case, the meaning of the label
“American”emerges from the media narratives on both conservative and
liberal sides of the argument. Whether portrayed as a “traitor”or as a
“patriot,”Lindh is discussed within a framework in which “Americanness”
coincides with whiteness. In an article from , Sean Brayton analyses the
connotations associated with “race”in Time magazine’s coverage of the case
and identifies Lindh’s conversion to Islam as a turning point in the media nar-
rative. Lindh is afforded a type of “discursive redemption”in the shape of
lni=N-DKM-F-RJJ&csi=&oc=&perma=true, accessed March
.
Cathy Burke, “How ‘Sweet’American Kid Joined Taliban,”New York Post,Dec. ,at
www.nexis.com/docview/getDocForCuiReq?lni=K-BN-R-FN&csi=&oc=
&perma=true, accessed March .
John Lehmann and Niles Lathem, “U.S. Rat Gets Grilled as Two More Surface,”New York
Post,Dec. ,atwww.nexis.com/docview/getDocForCuiReq?lni=KX-FVF-R-
FNB&csi=&oc=&perma=true, accessed March .
Martin Kasindorf and Jon Swartz, “Calif. Man’s Capture as Taliban Fighter Stuns Family,”
USA Today,Dec. ,atwww.nexis.com/docview/getDocForCuiReq?lni=KG-
BWS-F-KK&csi=&oc=&perma=true, accessed March .
Helen Kennedy, “InternetTraces His Path to Taliban: Turncoat Yank’sSwitchfromHip-Hop
Fan to Islam,”Daily News, Dec. ,atwww.nexis.com/docview/getDocForCuiReq?
lni=MY-DVP-T-GGT&csi=&oc=&perma=true,accessedMarch
.
See, for example, Frank Lindh, “America’s‘Detainee ’: The Persecution of John Walker
Lindh,”The Guardian, July ,atwww.theguardian.com/world//jul//john-
walker-lindh-american-taliban-father, accessed Aug. ; Jane Mayer, “Lost in the
Jihad,”New Yorker, March ,atwww.newyorker.com/magazine////lost-
in-the-jihad, accessed May ; and Paul Theroux, “Pardon the American Taliban,”
New York Times, Oct. ,atwww.nytimes.com////opinion/sunday/
pardon-the-american-taliban.html, accessed May .
Maria-Irina Popescu
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nostalgic stories about his “regular”childhood in a mythologized all-white,
middle-class, Christian American suburbia –a story of redemption refused
to racialized Others such as Yaser Hamdi.
In narratives about his upbringing,
Lindh is distanced from American Muslims racially and geographically and
portrayed within the parameters of an “unthreatening, unassuming,”and
ultimately “innocent”whiteness.
Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen
R. Lugo-Lugo argue that a similar discursive “whitening”is employed in
Lindh’s sentencing memorandum, where “racially-coded descriptors used by
[expert witnesses such as Rohan Gunaratna] were employed strategically to
detach Lindh from other enemy combatants suspected to be terrorists.”
Through these stories set in a mythologized, racially exclusive, pre-“/”
nation, media discourses such as the one produced by Time magazine effec-
tively rewrite the boundaries of the US as “quintessentially white.”
As Anne R. Slifkin argues in an insightful article, the Lindh case is a
good example of collaboration between the political and journalistic discourses
with the purpose of focussing “public attention”by “giving high-priority
coverage”to a story through news and talk shows.
Slifkin aptly notes that
both sides of the debate were problematic and oversimplified: the liberal
media promoted the idea that a white, upper-middle-class young man could
be nothing but profoundly innocent, whereas the conservative media called
Lindh a “traitor”prior to the trial and without substantial proof.
Right-
wing publications, from USA Today to the Daily News, acted as a mouthpiece
for the political discourse of the Bush administration by explicitly portraying
Lindh as a high-profile “traitor,”especially prior to his indictment on
February . Rudy Giuliani, then mayor of New York City, said, “I
believe the death penalty would be an appropriate remedy to consider …
But I don’t know all the legal issues involved,”a statement which was reported
by the Daily News under the headline “Rudy: Death if He’s Traitor; Says
Evidence Suggests Taliban Yank’s Guilty.”
The same newspaper reported
Attorney General John Ashcroft’s statement about trying to build a case of
Sean Brayton, “An American Werewolf in Kabul: John Walker Lindh, the Construction of
‘Race’, and the Return to Whiteness,”International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics,
,(), –,–.
Ibid., .
Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, Containing (Un)American Bodies
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, ), .
Brayton, .
Anne R. Slifkin, “John Walker Lindh,”South Atlantic Quarterly,,(Spring ), –
,.
Ibid., .
Bill Hutchinson, “Rudy: Death if He’s Traitor; Says Evidence Suggests Taliban Yank’s
Guilty,”Daily News, Dec. ,atwww.nexis.com/docview/getDocForCuiReq?
lni=P-KPX-T-GB&csi=&oc=&perma=true, accessed March
.
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treason as “Turncoat Could Get Death Penalty, Ashcroft Says.”
Although,
in Giuliani’s case, the Daily News reported an exaggerated version of a per-
sonal, albeit overzealous, opinion, Ashcroft’s statement suggested the
Department of Justice’s intention to hold Lindh responsible for the death
of Johnny “Mike”Spann, a CIA officer killed during the Qala-i-Jangi confron-
tation. The first American combat fatality in the “War on Terror,”Spann was
hailed by the CIA director, George Tenet, as “an American hero”and
inscribed in myth by Time’s Alex Perry’s Hollywood-style account of the
Qala-i-Jangi “battle.”
Given Spann’s reputation, Lindh was, indeed,
charged with conspiring “to kill nationals of the United States.”
Historical narratives of the confrontation are by no means more straightfor-
ward than their media equivalents. A month after the Operation Enduring
Freedom bombing campaign in Afghanistan started, the Northern Alliance
troops captured Mazar-e-Sharif; Taliban troops lost control of major cities
and thousands of fighters surrendered at Yerganak, where they were disarmed
and loaded into trucks.
Around five hundred prisoners, including Lindh,
were taken to Qala-i-Jangi to be interrogated by American intelligence
agents; the remaining prisoners were stripped, tied up and locked into airtight
truck containers headed for the Sheberghan prison. Accounts of the surrender
and transportation of Taliban prisoners are incomplete and raise questions
about American military involvement in practices that breach human rights,
and US accountability regarding their allies’conduct in the “War on
Terror.”
The statements widely disseminated in the mainstream media prior to
Lindh’s trial contributed to the creation of a hostile environment and
helped the Bush administration legitimize and normalize torture in the case
Corky Siemaszko and Richard Sisk, “Turncoat Could Get Death Penalty, Ashcroft Says,”
Daily News, Jan. ,atwww.nexis.com/docview/getDocForCuiReq?lni=XM-
CD-T-GB&csi=&oc=&perma=true, accessed March .
Vian Bakir, Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda-Building
Struggles (Farnham: Ashgate, ), . George Tenet, quoted in Duncan Campbell and
Luke Harding, “CIA Agent Named as First American Fatality Killed at Beginning of
Prisoner Revolt,”The Guardian, Nov. ,atwww.theguardian.com/world//
nov//afghanistan.duncancampbell, accessed Aug. . Alex Perry, “The Battle of
Qala-i-Jangi,”Time,Dec. ,athttp://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/
,,-,.html, accessed March .
United States of America v. John Philip Walker Lindh [], Indictment (US District
Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Crim. No. --A, Feb. ), at http://
news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/lindh/uswlindhcmp.html, accessed March .
John Barry, “The Death Convoy of Afghanistan,”Newsweek, Aug. ,athttp://
europe.newsweek.com/death-convoy-afghanistan-, accessed Aug. .
Ibid.; see also James Risen, “US Inaction Seen after Taliban POWs Died,”New York Times,
July ,atwww.nytimes.com////world/asia/afghan.html, accessed
Aug. ; and Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death (dir. Jamie Doran, ProbeTV, ).
Maria-Irina Popescu
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of suspected “terrorists.”
John Lindh was allegedly tortured by the US mili-
tary for fifty-four days before landing on American soil. At Camp Rhino,
where Lindh was held in a shipping container, military personnel took two pic-
tures of him, one showing the prisoner naked, blindfolded and tied to a
stretcher; the other showing five soldiers surrounding Lindh, whose blindfold
bears the inscription “shithead.”Lindh’s lawyers released both pictures to the
public as soon as they were granted access to them in April , although the
“shithead”photo is no longer in the public domain.
Peter Jan Honigsberg
notes that, although Lindh was mistreated, he was eventually “provided
with access to [his] attorneys and the due process protections necessary for
meaningful hearings,”which “demonstrates that the administration could
have done it right for all detainees.”
The high-profile character of this case
resulted in a harsh conviction for John Lindh, but it also saved him from
becoming what Donald E. Pease identifies as the “exception to the human con-
dition”or, in Giorgio Agamben’s words, the “legally un-nameable and unclas-
sifiable being”created by the USA Patriot Act.
From a legal standpoint,
despite initial interference, Lindh was afforded due process as a US citizen.
In the media, however misrepresented, he was always recognized as
“American,”because his whiteness rendered him visible in political, legal
and media discourses.
“AMERICAN,”“ANTI-AMERICAN”OR “UN-AMERICAN”?
The anxiety triggered by Lindh’s conversion from “American citizen”to
“Taliban soldier”is traceable back to Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis of the
“clash of civilizations”between the “West”and the “East.”
Writing
shortly after the end of the Cold War, Huntington locates “a central focus
of conflict for the immediate future”in the “clash”between the “West”
and “Islamic–Confucian states.”
David Holloway notes that the thesis
became popular after “/”as a “reassuring abstraction”which verged on
“outright romanticism”in its appeal to “an essential selfhood rooted in
Bakir, –.
Ibid., –.
Peter Jan Honigsberg, Our Nation Unhinged: The Human Consequences of the War on
Terror (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .
Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, ), ; Giorgio Agamben, States of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, ;first published ), –.
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”Foreign Affairs,,(Summer ),
–; and Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Simon & Schuster, ).
Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”,.
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collective, ‘blood’-based notions of identity.”
For the general public, the
phrase “clash of civilizations”appeared to simplify the incomprehensible
domestic and international context of the s and rendered it more manage-
able.
Huntington’s preference for binaries appealed not only to American
television (and to a President eager to attract fresh blood for the US military
in preparation for an open-ended “War on Terror”), but also to Osama bin
Laden –USA’s number one enemy post-“/.”
The “West/Islam”binary distilled from Huntington’s thesis became, in the
aftermath of the September attacks, the foundation for a contract
between the American state and US citizens famously summarized by
President Bush as “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”
To explore such contracts, Donald E. Pease introduced the concept of
“state fantasy”into the field of American studies; building on Jacqueline
Rose’s work of the correlations between states and fantasy in political
theory, Pease repurposed the concept of “state fantasy”to discuss the relation-
ship between citizens and the symbolic order inaugurated by the political struc-
tures in power since the end of the Cold War.
Pease defines “state fantasy”as
“the dominant structure of desire out of which US citizens imagined their
national identity,”and persuasively argues that “American exceptionalism”
was the fantasy which regulated the relationship between citizens and the
“Cold War state”between and .
The September
attacks provided a definitive conclusion to the Cold War and allowed the
Bush administration to inaugurate a new symbolic order at the “Ground
Zero”site and implicitly a new state fantasy, the “Homeland”–a state of
emergency and exception which “required the public to sacrifice their civil lib-
erties in exchange for the enjoyment of the state’s spectacular violations of the
rights of other sovereign states.”
It was American mythology, Pease argues, that provided the “master
fictions”the President Bush used to validate the state’s actions. Master
fictions and mythological themes “transmit a normative system of values
and beliefs from generation to generation”and are used by policymakers to
shape citizens’“understanding of political and historical events.”
Pease
maintains that “/”destroyed the “fantasy that the nation was founded
David Holloway, / and the War on Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
), –.
Ibid., .
For a detailed exploration of how Huntington’s“clash-of-civilizations”thesis influenced
Osama bin Laden please see Al Jazeera’s documentary The / Decade: The Clash of
Civilisations? (), Al Jazeera English, at www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeera-
world///.htm, accessed May .
President George Bush Jr., Joint Session of Congress ( Sept. ), at http://edition.cnn.
com//US///gen.bush.transcript, accessed May .
Pease, .
Ibid., –.
Ibid., –,.
Ibid., .
Maria-Irina Popescu
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on Virgin Land”and brought back the “suppressed historical knowledge of the
United States’origins in the devastation of native peoples’homelands.”
The
state’s“symbolic response”to “/,”inaugurated by President Bush’s address
to a joint session of Congress and to the nation on September ,
replaced “Virgin Land”with “Ground Zero”and the “Homeland”“as the
governing metaphors through which to come to terms with the attack”;
the metaphors started becoming historical facts through the military cam-
paigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The media narrative of an all-white America facilitated by the Lindh case
constitutes an attempt to revive the Cold War image of a country in which,
in Pease’s words, “gender, class, race, and ethnic differences were massively
downgraded as threatening to national unity,”an ideal of national identity
built “out of exceptionalist norms [which] had deployed the coordinated
myths of the Frontier and the Melting Pot in which the state’s assimilationist
paradigm overrode questions of diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and multicultural-
ism.”
It is out of this mythological framework that Lindh’s“anti-American”
character emerges: his family’s liberal approach to parenting, which afforded
their son access to a multicultural, multiracial America (at least in virtual envir-
onments, if the proximity of Lindh’s all-white suburbia did not allow for it),
coupled with Frank Lindh’s“failed”masculinity (Lindh’s parents’divorce on
grounds of Frank’s homosexuality is a recurrent trope in media narratives
about Lindh’s childhood), is used, in Time articles and in mainstream
media in general, as overarching causes for Lindh’s“anti-American behav-
ior.”
Lindh’s conversion to Islam during his adolescence is constructed as
a reaction to these “flaws”in his upbringing –an assumption which implies
and reasserts his intrinsic “innocence”(i.e. whiteness). Brayton argues that
Lindh’s harsh sentencing punishes not only legal transgressions, but also a
“betrayal of whiteness,”a disavowal of “the boundaries of American normativ-
ity”in a post-“/”US riddled with cultural anxiety.
In Lindh’s case, the
label “anti-American”is necessarily linked to his “Americanness,”to his
“whiteness,”because it implies a disavowal of the “all-white America”myth
and of the American exceptionalist fantasy “retroactively assigned to the
distant origins of America.”
As a member of this racially exclusive “Virgin
Land,”Lindh also complicated the parameters of the newly inaugurated
“Homeland”state fantasy, which permitted the state of emergency to
extend its jurisdiction to the entire globe under the pretense of protecting
an already “displaced”nation from foreign violations.
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Brayton, “An American Werewolf,”–.
Ibid., .
Pease, .
Ibid., –.
Reimagining Traitors
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Yaser Hamdi’s case is a good example of an “un-American”presence as
defined within the parameters of the mythological and ideological framework
of the “Homeland”state fantasy. If, in the media narratives surrounding John
Walker Lindh, “American”is synonymous with white and “anti-American”
implies a white American’s disavowal of whiteness, “un-American”is a label
which describes a presence deviant from this imagined American order. In
Hamdi’s case, his “un-American”nature is reasserted in the absence of “dis-
cursive-redemption”narratives in the media, virtually complete invisibility
both in the media and in the legal system (and, implicitly, the absence of
due process and the immediate allocation of the “enemy combatant”
status), and the contesting of his citizenship by civilian groups. Pease identifies
this “entrenched distinction between white Americans’governmental belong-
ing and the passive belonging of minoritized populations”as part of a hierarch-
ical structure of social rankings, which allows for “ad hoc exemptions from the
law on the basis of race and cultural difference.”
In the post-“/”state of
emergency, the citizenship of white Americans appears to have priority over
nonwhite forms of citizenship, especially, as Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-
Lugo note, over “those already associated with criminality.”
After being interrogated by American agents and passing various post-
capture screenings, during which he openly stated his place of birth, Yaser
Hamdi was sent to Guantánamo Bay in February , where he remained
for almost three months before officials recognized his US citizenship. He
was the first American citizen to be declared an “enemy combatant”and he
was held incommunicado, without access to counsel or to his family, and
with no charges filed against him.
After two years of detention on naval
brigs in Virginia and South Carolina, a Supreme Court trial, and a plea agree-
ment with the government in which he consented to renounce his US citizen-
ship, Hamdi was eventually released and deported to Saudi Arabia. Although
Lindh and Hamdi were captured at the same time, the latter remained invisible
to the public eye and was not afforded due process; his story did not kindle the
media’s imagination to the same extent Lindh’s did.
Although mostly absent from newspapers, Hamdi’s story did catch the eye
of a non-profit group, Friends of Immigration Law Enforcement. With a
mission to prove Hamdi’s“un-Americanness,”the group contested the valid-
ity of his US citizenship in court. They filed a motion arguing that the
Fourteenth Amendment does not cover children born from migrants residing
in the US on temporary work visas (as was the case of Hamdi’s family) –with
Ibid., ,, n. .
Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo, Containing (Un)American Bodies,.
Honigsberg, Our Nation Unhinged,-.
Maria-Irina Popescu
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the addition that Hamdi was “not an American in any real sense of the
word.”
By contrast, despite his Irish ancestry and refusal to identify
himself as an American when interrogated by CIA operatives at Qala-i-
Jangi, Lindh’s own US citizenship never came into question.
Put side by
side, the stories of the two American Taliban prisoners of war captured by
US troops on December could not be more different. Hamdi’s citizen-
ship was ignored, contested and eventually stripped away after three years of
incarceration without any charges, because the colour of his skin and his ances-
try did not match his captors’idea of what “American”looks like.
As Pease demonstrates, the constructions of racial or ethnic difference have
been used historically to underline the American/un-American dichotomy and
to support structuring metaphors of the American experience, such as “Virgin
Land”or “Manifest Destiny,”including exceptionalist convictions that the US
was different from European empires in its refusal to acquire colonies.
Traumatic historical realities of both domestic and foreign policies disavowed
from twentieth-century historiography –such as massacres of native popula-
tions; slavery; lynchings; ethnic cleansing of migrants; the economic exploit-
ation of refugees; “the struggles of Asian, Hispanic, and American Indian
groups for recognition of their equal rights”; internment camps for Japanese
Americans; attacks on civilians in Dresden, Tokyo and My Lai; nuclear holo-
causts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki –tell of the racialized Others onto whom
the state displaced its “social catastrophes”and of the ways in which the US
achieved “imperial governance”whilst continuing to define itself in opposition
to European imperial powers.
Lindh’s case complicates these fantasies, not
only because he needs to be “racialized”in media discourses to appear threa-
tening, but also because he was captured in the so-called “Middle East,”an
Othered geographic and symbolic space onto which the state of exception dis-
placed the trauma of “/.”
JOHN WALKER LINDH VERSUS JOHN JUDE PARISH
Pearl Abraham uses details of Lindh’s biography to create a narrative inspired
by the idea of a white-as-universal American identity, or what she calls, in an
essay detailing the creative process behind writing the American Taliban novel,
“the American religion,”which starts not with “unknowable jihad, but with
Emerson and American Transcendentalism, [and] with Whitman’s celebrated
“Group Files Motion in U.S.-Born Taliban’s Case; Moves to Have Yaser Hamdi Declared a
Non-citizen.”U.S. Newswire, Aug. ,atwww.mexis.com, accessed May .
Mark Kukis, “My Heart Became Attached”: The Strange Odyssey of John Walker Lindh
(Washington, DC: Brassey’s, Inc., ), .
Pease, .
Ibid., ,,, n. .
Reimagining Traitors
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search for the self.”
In this seemingly problematic statement, the writer
claims the universality of a specific“America,”a homogeneous space spiritually
and culturally inaugurated by white Christian men and historically devoid of
other belief systems –more specifically, of Islam, swiftly relegated to the status
of “un-American”through the phrase “unknowable jihad.”However, in
American Taliban, Abraham uses this imaginary white American space not
to endorse the Manichean “us-versus-them”discourse of the Bush Doctrine,
but rather to interrogate and complicate it. By linking individualism or “the
celebrated search for the self”with this homogeneously white America,
Abraham recognizes what Richard Gray calls “the challenges to selfhood
posed by various forms of injustice –the denial of people as individuals
because they were of the ‘wrong’race or gender.”
The writer demolishes
Huntington’s“clash-of-civilizations”thesis by locating the source of the
conflict not in Othered culture, but in the United States’historical disavowal
of its “nonwhite”citizens’individuality and selfhood.
John Jude Parish, the protagonist of American Taliban, is an able-bodied,
heterosexual, wealthy white American teenager growing up in a liberal and
secular nuclear family. He inhabits what Donald Pease identifies as the sym-
bolic order structured by the myth of the “Virgin Land”associated with the
national security state of the Cold War and with the American exceptionalism
state fantasy of the pre-“/”US. Pease traces the origins of the “Virgin
Land”metaphor, which “refers to a space that coincided with the nation’s pre-
revolutionary origins wherein European settlers’grounding assumptions about
America were inscribed,”to the s, the early days of American studies as an
academic discipline.
The “Virgin Land”metaphor supported American
exceptionalism by turning the landscape into a “blank space, understood to
be the ideal surface onto which to inscribe the history of the nation’s
Manifest Destiny.”
In Abraham’s narrative, the protagonist’s worldview,
motives and actions are fuelled by his faith in the American exceptionalism
state fantasy. The novel stretches from August to May , from
Outer Banks, North Carolina to Islamabad, Pakistan, and, post-“/,”to
Washington, DC, offering a fictional narrative which charts the transition
from the “Virgin Land”metaphor of the national security state to the
“Ground Zero”myth of the Homeland security state.
In the same essay on “The Making of American Taliban,”Abraham expli-
citly states her intention to tackle a question she believes has been repeatedly
Pearl Abraham, “The Making of American Taliban,”pearlabraham.com, Dec. ), at
http://pearlabraham.com/the-making-of-american-taliban, accessed Sept. .
Richard Gray, A History of American Literature,nd edn (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell,
), .
Pease, .
Ibid., .
Maria-Irina Popescu
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asked by the American public and tentatively answered by the media: why
would an educated, wealthy American like Lindh commit to violent jihad?
Her stated authorial interest lies in approaching the story from a new angle
by following the protagonist’s spiritual journey from secularism to Islam –a
task also undertaken by writer Jarett Kobek, who published, a year after the
release of American Taliban,afictional re-creation of “/”hijacker
Mohamed Atta’s life through the lens of architectural theory. Abraham’s
reflections on her creative process offer a starting point for elucidating the struc-
ture of American Taliban, a novel which, unlike Kobek’sATTA or even Don
DeLillo’sLibra, does not focus on a fictional version of a real historical figure,
but rather on a “duplicate.”
American Taliban does not rewrite John Walker
Lindh’s personal history; if anything, John Jude appears as an “enhanced”
version of Lindh, “cleaned”of some of the “flaws”the mainstream media iden-
tified as having led to the Californian’s“anti-American”behavior: John Jude’s
parents, Bill and Barbara Parish, are in a happy, heteronormative marriage; John
Jude himself is less spiritually inclined and more confident than Lindh is said to
have been. Moreover, John Walker Lindh is introduced as a different character
in the later chapters of the novel, allowing for an exploration of how the
American public perceived him and of the media narratives emerging after
his capture. Introducing Lindh as a different character enables Abraham to
refrain from providing a resolution to the story; John Jude Parish remains pris-
tine and it is up to the reader to decide how his story ends.
American Taliban’s pre-“/”narrative focusses on John Jude, an eight-
een-year-old who attempts to negotiate both his own identity and his
parents’expectations of him; for example, he rejects the “American Dream”
doctrine of financial success and the idea of “a life of earning and acquisition,”
meaning that, to satisfy his parents’ambitions, he believes that “proof of [his]
achievement would have to come from the media, with features in newspapers,
magazines, radio, and television.”
Although narrated in the third person,
John Jude’s story foregrounds his point of view –and it is his conviction
that his parents see him as the human embodiment of the notion of
American exceptionalism, since he is expected to be distinctive, unique, and
exemplary: “what they looked for from their son was originality and intellec-
tuality and a lifestyle shaped by the liberal humanist ideas in which, as [his
mother] Barbara liked to point out, he had been immersed from the instant
of his inception.”
John Jude begins to define himself in opposition to
Abraham, “The Making of …”.
Jarett Kobek, ATTA (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), ); Don DeLillo, Libra
(New York: Viking Press, ).
Abraham, American Taliban,,.
Ibid., .
Reimagining Traitors
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what he perceives as his parents’image of him and rejects their secularism,
which he criticizes as a negative consequence of modernity: “in their
attempt to grow beyond superstition, in their enlightened embrace of the
rational, [humans] abandoned knowledge of the extraordinary, the hidden,
the transcendent, the whatever.”
Yet these gestures of rebellion quickly dissolve when met by his family’s
unmitigated support: his parents enthusiastically encourage him to pursue any-
thing he finds intellectually stimulating and they provide financial backing for
John Jude’s plans to move away, first to Brooklyn, then to Peshawar. With vir-
tually no obstacles in his path, the protagonist develops his own fantasy, in
which he would become what Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence
call the “superhero”of the “monomyth”prevalent in the American pop
culture of the late twentieth century, a “supersaviour”replacing a Christ
figure rendered unconvincing by scientific rationalism.
The “superhero’s”
self-proclaimed role is to return “a hope of divine, redemptive powers”to a
secular world where faith has been “eroded,”a world which matches John
Jude’s criticism of his own immediate surroundings.
Attracted to knowledge
and faith in equal measure, but unable to define himself in opposition to a
fixed Other within the boundaries of an unconditionally accepting commu-
nity, John Jude commits to a fluid identity and refuses to follow an established
path: he challenges himself “to remain eternally in process, to forever become
though he doesn’t yet know what,”and “to pursue only what is of immediate
personal interest.”
He formulates his ethos as “Whitmanian all-embrace. He
would be all-knowing, omnivorous, omniscient, omnificent.”
Through this,
the interplay between fact or “reality”and fiction (as well as the “slippage”
from one to another) is established from the beginning as one of American
Taliban’s key themes.
There is no moment in the novel representing a more powerful actualiza-
tion of this blurring of lines between what is “real”and what is imagined
than the post-“/”scene (set on December ) in which Barbara
Parish learns about the capture of an American citizen called John Walker
Lindh. By this point, John Jude had been missing for months; the scene
shows his mother reading the front pages of morning newspapers, all featuring
“an American. Named John. Naked. All bones. And bleeding. But why were
his hands twisted and bound between his legs?”
Barbara is confronted
with the image of a tortured body, bound, broken and bleeding, which not
Ibid.,.
Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Press/Doubleday, ), xx.
Ibid.
Abraham, American Taliban,.
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Maria-Irina Popescu
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only embodies the brutality of the state’s response to the September
attacks, but also bears a striking resemblance to her missing son. The visual
proof that the American state punished one of its own people, and implicitly
broke the contract between the nation and the state established through the
discourse of the “Homeland”fantasy, is simply inconceivable for Barbara; a
nation which perceives itself as traumatized and displaced by foreign attackers,
as well as completely innocent, could not, Abraham suggests, withstand such a
shock.
Barbara attempts to reconcile this traumatizing realization with the more
personal tragedy of her missing son by imagining that the “American
Taliban”the headlines refer to is indeed John Jude, a line of thought inaccess-
ible to her husband Bill:
This isn’t John, he said.
Read it, Barbara heaved. It’s John.
Yes, but not our John, not John Jude.
It could be, she sputtered.
But it’s not.
It might be.
What do you mean? Bill asked. What are you talking about?
When Barbara insists that the body on the front page “could”or “might”
belong to John Jude, she reasserts her conviction that the state will not
protect American citizens, as it promised, and thus her son, and anyone
else’s child, is in danger of being punished. Through this moment and its nar-
rative consequences, the novel American Taliban imagines a scenario in which
the bond between the individual and the state fantasy breaks through the
intervention of personal tragedy. Although the image of the captured
“American Taliban”on the front page of newspapers evokes a “real”photo-
graph taken by military personnel at Camp Rhino, Abraham’s novel
employs a chronology which deviates from the timeline of historical events:
not only were the Camp Rhino photographs not taken until December
, but they also remained classified until April , when Lindh’s
lawyers filed a motion for discovery.
Such historical inaccuracies are
woven into the theme of the broken contract between individual and state
fantasy, destabilizing the novel’s initial claims of faithfully replicating a slice
of history.
This unsettling of the timeline embedded in the “official”historical narra-
tive, and implicitly of the fact–fiction binary, is also apparent in the story of the
surrender and the uprising of the captured Taliban fighters at the Qala-i-Jangi
prison. Although the historical narrative places the Taliban fighters’surrender
Ibid., –.
Bakir, Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance,–.
Reimagining Traitors
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on Saturday, November, and the prison uprising between November and
December, the fictional account condenses the week-long confrontation into
the twenty-four hours of Thanksgiving Day, on November . These
anachronisms accelerate the progression of events, bringing the storyline up
to date with the historical date of Lindh’s capture on December, whilst con-
veying the extreme distress of the Parishes, for whom John’s absence from the
family dinner provides the absolute confirmation that their son is in danger,
since “Thanksgiving was John’s favorite holiday, he had never missed a
single one, and if he could, if he were anywhere near an Internet connection,
he would send turkey tidings. Or he was on his way home to surprise them.”
The interrupted family Thanksgiving tradition provides a domestic vignette
exemplifying the displacement of the individual from the American exception-
alism state fantasy governed by the myth of the “Virgin Land”; in the fictional
universe of American Taliban, the son’s absence from the family Thanksgiving
dinner table inaugurates a new space in which myths of family, national unity
and tradition have been abandoned in favour of a “War on Terror.”
This symbolic order inaugurated in the novel’sfictional universe deviates
considerably from the one on which the “Homeland”fantasy is built.
Superficially, the displacement of the national population, which provides
the foundation of the “Homeland”state fantasy, is present in the shape of
both the missing son and the grieving parents who have lost their place in
the world. However, the novel destabilizes the historic American mythologies
post-“/”by refusing to validate the Manichean worldview at the core of the
fantasy, the “us versus them,”the “clash-of-civilizations”thesis and, essentially,
the imperialist assumption that there is a hierarchical structure which estab-
lishes white lives as superior to the lives of racialized Others. This is evident
in the narrator’s exposition of Barbara’s subjectivity: “This country was at
war, and even when there were no reports of anything particularly significant,
there was death. Somewhere overseas someone’s son was dying. Somewhere in
the world a mother would grieve. This kept [Barbara] awake.”
The charac-
ter’s grief, which starts with her son but extends to all the victims of American
aggression, disrupts the “Homeland”fantasy, reliant on “spectacles of vio-
lence”meant to remedy the traumatic memory of “lawless violence”against
native peoples (suppressed, prior to “/,”by the Virgin Land myth) by
transforming the American public “into the perpetrators rather than the
victims of foreign aggression.”
Within the symbolic order of the
“Homeland”fantasy, these spectacles, performed in Afghanistan and Iraq,
“redescribed imperial conquest as a form of domestic defense.”
However,
Abraham, American Taliban,.
Ibid., .
Pease, The New American Exceptionalism,.
Ibid., .
Maria-Irina Popescu
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by explicitly refusing to find pleasure in or to endorse the need for such aggres-
sion, and by implicitly disavowing the chance to participate in the state’s
power, the character of Barbara destabilizes the myths of American innocence,
displacement and need for protection embedded in the “Homeland”fantasy.
American Taliban uses scenes which re-create the media coverage of the
early days of the “War on Terror”both to provide the illusion of verisimili-
tude, of a historical narrative about the Lindh case faithful to the facts, and
to destabilize the truth claims of its own narrative constructions –since
these scenes tamper with the “real”media narratives prevalent in the
months following “/.”This echoes Jean Baudrillard’sreflection that,
since “reality is everywhere infiltrated by images, virtuality and fiction,”it is
necessary to acknowledge that “reality and fiction are inextricable, and the fas-
cination with the attack is primarily a fascination with the image,”turning “/
”into “something like an additional fiction, a fiction surpassing fiction.”
A constant slippage between fact and fiction, a device which fulfils the double
role of warning the reader against accepting any singular, homogeneous narra-
tive and of criticizing the practices of mainstream media, is visible in the result-
ing fictional universe. Following from Pease’s development of the “state
fantasy”concept, Duvall and Marzec argue that “the successful constitution
of the nation depends on an essential relationship to fiction and forms its exist-
ence in forms of fictionalization.”
This “fictive formalism”is actualized in
the literary text in a scene which shows Bill and Barbara “stunned in front
of their television sets tuned to CNN,”watching a fragment of Pelton’s inter-
view with Lindh;
a block of nonfictional text indented from the main body
accurately reproduces an excerpt from the interview transcript. In this case, the
fictional re-creation of the Lindh interview is a perfect duplicate of the “real”
footage; however, by mimicking media practices of framing the story by means
of decontextualizing footage, the novelistic discourse omits to describe the cir-
cumstances under which the interview took place.
An earlier moment in the novel sees Barbara and Bill watching the news
coverage on the Qala-i-Jangi uprising on Thanksgiving evening; the report
highlights “real”historical events, such as the loss of an “American CIA
agent,”“the first American casualty of the Afghan war,”and the fact that
US military fighter planes “were sent in to help the Northern Alliance
regain control of the prison compound.”
The death of “Mike”Spann,
referred to in the coverage, did not occur until November, three days
after the fictional dramatization of the media report is set. By means of
Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (London:
Verso, ), –.
Duvall and Marzec, Narrating /,.
Ibid., ; Abraham, American Taliban,.
Ibid., .
Reimagining Traitors
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such interventions in the timeline of the historical narrative that the novel
claims to replicate, Abraham warns the reader against accepting one fixed,
coherent story about the “War on Terror”(even the one offered by her
novel) and encourages them to seek facts from multiple sources.
A critique of mainstream media practices also emerges from such scenes
depicting the characters’experience of media coverage. The report on the
Qala-i-Jangi confrontation casts Afghanistan in the role of the aggressor and
the US in the role of the victim; it ignores all non-American casualties, empha-
sizing the death of an American intelligence agent as the single most significant
loss of life. The story normalizes the United States’engagement in asymmetric
warfare, presenting the use of advanced military planes against a limited
number of unarmed and wounded prisoners of war as an “American”
victory. Barbara’s reaction is critical of US forces (“This is awful, she said.
How can they?”), whereas Bill advises caution against accepting a single, coher-
ent, media narrative: “this is only one story. There are surely ten unreported
variations on this one.”
The narrator counters this partisan perspective by
reimagining the surrender of the foreign Taliban fighters in terms which
humanize them: “with aching bellies, exhausted and undernourished …sick
with dysentery, thirst, and the hundred-mile trek to Tahkt, they climbed
into the waiting Toyotas and stretched their useless legs …packed and
layered and marinated in Toyota sardine cans, paid for by oily Soviet and
US greed.”
The narrator’s interventions are not packaged as media
reports to remind the reader of the American media’s propensity in the
early days of the “War on Terror”towards promoting the myth of
American innocence and maintaining the official discourse of US military
aggression against Afghanistan as an act of retaliation and humanitarianism.
On the domestic front, Bill’s scepticism towards mainstream media practices
turns into “disgust”as he switches between various CNN channels broadcast-
ing reruns of post-“/”Larry King interviews with “the widowed and the
suffering,”“the motherless, fatherless, wifeless, husbandless, childless, shame-
less,”and footage of the Twin Towers falling in slow motion.
The narrator
describes Bill’s and Barbara’s distress as a means of criticizing mainstream
media practices of emotionally manipulating audiences and of reinforcing a
hierarchy of suffering within which the trauma inflicted by foreign aggressors
on US soil is replayed ad nauseam, whilst the trauma inflicted by US forces
“abroad”is conveniently ignored.
Ibid., –.
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Maria-Irina Popescu
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PEARL ABRAHAM’SAMERICAN TALIBAN:“AMERICAN,”
“ANTI-AMERICAN,”“UN-AMERICAN”
In the context of the John Walker Lindh case, the label “American”was
synonymous, in media and legal narratives, with whiteness, whereas the
“anti-American”label was brought about by a disavowal of whiteness, and
the “un-American”identity was linked to a deviation from an imagined
“all-white America.”The historical moment out of which these labels
emerged coincided with the aftermath of “/,”the early days of the “War
on Terror”and the inauguration of the “Homeland”state fantasy. Whilst
American Taliban features an attempt to reimagine what these labels
signified immediately prior to and after “/,”the novel, published in
, also incorporates the more critical interrogations of “Americanness”
which emerged towards the end of the twentieth century’s last decade.
Much like the Marin County, California that Lindh grew up in, imagined
in media narratives as a suburban utopia, the pre-“/”world that John Jude
inhabits in Outer Banks, North Carolina is racially exclusive and quintessen-
tially white, populated by surfers with “bleached white”hair and white skin
which has been tanned by the summer sun to a “dark honey”hue.
For
John Jude, as well as for the slice of the United States he grows up in,
“Americanness”is, yet again, equivalent to “whiteness”–although this is
not spelt out in the narrative until he moves to Brooklyn to study Arabic at
a school primarily frequented by “nonwhite”Muslim American teenagers:
“though they all spoke English and appeared American, they also didn’t
seem fully American; they were like some kind of hybrid. Maybe it had some-
thing to do with Brooklyn. They were urban, but not D.C.-style urban.”
John Jude perceives his classmates within fixed racial parameters: they are
“urban,”a label which carries the implication that they are “not white,”
and implicitly not “fully American,”despite speaking English as a native lan-
guage and wearing emblematically American Levi’s jeans; the homogeneous
group, who “eyed him warily,”also appears somewhat threatening.
The pro-
tagonist’s thinking is framed by racial hierarchies, thus replicating the mean-
ings attached to the labels “American”(i.e. white) and “un-American”(i.e.
a deviation from the imagined “all-whiteness”of the US) in media narratives
on John Walker Lindh.
Post-“/,”the novel’s narrative focus switches from John Jude’s encoun-
ters with Otherness to how Bill and Barbara Parish negotiate their own moral
grounds relative to the “American,”“un-American”and “anti-American”
assigned identities within the newly instated symbolic order. For example,
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Reimagining Traitors
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Barbara is concerned that “John would be returning to a changed world, a
different America,”in which his affinity with Islamic culture and his friends
of Muslim faith would not be tolerated; although she acknowledges the
sense of injustice underlying this “different America,”she nonetheless lays
the blame on her son’s“new friends,”who, she believes, convinced him to
fight “for someone else’s cause that he didn’t begin to understand.”
Similarly, Bill notes that “/”politicized both local and global communities
to the extent that “no Arab institution anywhere in the world was without a
position,”yet he starts from the assumption that the institution his son
attended in Brooklyn could be responsible for sparking John Jude’s interest
in “Islamic politics.”
Both Bill and Barbara struggle to uphold liberal
values in the context of their son’s disappearance; although they are both scep-
tical towards their son’s“innocence,”they maintain the belief that his status as
an “American”is exceptional. In American Taliban, the September
attacks function as a pivot, leading both Barbara and Bill to recast the
actions and traits they deemed “American”in their son as “anti-American.”
If John Walker Lindh’s capture validates the Parishes’unspoken conviction
of John Jude’s culpability, it also marks the moment when Bill and Barbara
adopt radically different perspectives in how they define their son relative to
the “American”and “anti-American”identities. More specifically, for his
father, who grounds his convictions in the legal system, John Jude is, like
Lindh, a “traitor”who will eventually be caught fighting with the enemy in
times of war, whereas Barbara begins to see John Jude as an “American”
hero. Bill’s approach is pragmatic: he assumes that John has been captured
by US military personnel and contacts a reputable criminal defence lawyer
in preparation. Barbara fills in the gaps using her imagination and links her
son to Lindh, because the two “probably know each other with their same
smartass talk.”
The televised interview with Lindh leads her to perceive
“this John”as a replica of “her John”; she interprets Lindh’s statements as
boastful and disrespectful, and she is “repelled [by], attracted [to], and
afraid all at once”of these attributes which bring to mind her son, whom
she thinks of as an embodiment of the quintessentially “American”rebellious
spirit.
An obstacle in Barbara’s quest for answers is what she perceives as Lindh’s
“death wish”:“To be an American and speak so calmly of your own death, to
offer yourself up as a martyr for Islam, to make martyrdom your goal, it was
incomprehensible, especially for a contemporary American, unaccustomed to
such sacrifice.”
By associating “martyrdom”with “suicide terrorism,”
instead of military service, she draws a direct link between Lindh and the
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Maria-Irina Popescu
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perpetrators of the September attacks; she is more sympathetic, but
she sees both Lindh and her son as “terrorists.”Barbara uses Christian refer-
ences to decode the story of the “American Taliban”; she interprets the front-
page photo of a captured Lindh, tied to a stretcher, as a representation of both
Christ and her son John Jude: “with his wounds and his nakedness and the
bindings that nailed him to the stretcher, [he] resembled Jesus Christ,
resembled her own John.”
W. J. T. Mitchell’s analysis of the Christian sym-
bolism of torture and mockery echoed in the Abu Ghraib photographic
archive of tortured bodies is pertinent here; Mitchell notes that, because
Christ is simultaneously a torture victim and an enemy of the state (who
“represents a rival claim to sovereignty”), his crucifixion has to assume the
shape of a “mock coronation,”a“carefully choreographed spectacle that
simultaneously ‘raises him up’as a crowned sovereign, and ‘brings him
down’to the level of a common thief.”
This association allows Barbara
to attach meaning to her loss and it pushes the reader to reflect on the
subtler ideological and iconographical nuances of the “War on Terror.”
Barbara is critical of what she assumes to be the government’s decision to
disseminate the photograph in the public domain because it makes martyrdom
attractive by employing well-known Christian tropes: “she would have cen-
sored this image for evoking what every child knows as Christ on the cross,
what every child comes to understand: that Christ fulfils himself in his crucifix-
ion, becomes distinguished in death,”and, at the same time, the photograph
constitutes “a photo-op for jihad.”
She is critical of Lindh himself for
having modelled himself after “all martyrs,”from “Jesus [to] Jeremiah [to]
John Brown,”and for “proving himself their descendant”; she is enraged by
what she perceives to be the successful transcendence of his human condition:
“he has created himself in the image of martyrdom, with features in symmetry,
eyes well paired with nose, nose with mouth, a harmonious face good to look
at.”
As the image of a captured Lindh gradually becomes superimposed onto
the fading memory of John Jude, Barbara finds solace in the belief that her son
was “a genius”deemed “a danger to non-man, the system.”
By incorporat-
ing the facts about John Walker Lindh communicated by the mainstream
media into a mythological framework of “American”heroes and Western
Christianity, Barbara creates a personal fantasy in which her son John Jude fea-
tures as an “American Christ”figure. John Jude, impenetrable in his presence
only as a memory, emerges again, for Barbara at least, as an “enhanced,”
Ibid., .
W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War on Images, / to the Present (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, ), –.
Abraham, American Taliban,.
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Reimagining Traitors
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flawless version of Lindh, one who did not give into the temptation and was
therefore not corrupted by the “enemy.”
This personal fantasy also acts, as the novel approaches its conclusion, as a
replacement for the “Homeland”state fantasy which validates, in Pease’s ter-
minology, the emergency state’s“monopoly over the exception,”or exemption
from the rules it enforces.
Initially, Barbara does not interrogate the circum-
stances in which the “American Taliban”photo was taken or its purpose, and
she does not even consider the possibility that Lindh was tortured by US
agents. Convinced that the American judicial system is fair and humane, in
contrast to “barbarian”Middle Eastern equivalents, Barbara argues, “I’d
rather have my son incarcerated anywhere in the US than leave him rotting
in some tribal prison.”
Her failure to imagine that US institutions could
employ torture, refuse due process, and generally engage in breaching
human rights, especially in the case of an American detainee, is a type of reac-
tion embedded in the “Homeland”state fantasy, a tacit acceptance of the fact
that the state must do whatever is necessary to protect its population from an
enemy constructed as fighting by different rules. As starts with divisive
statements from the Bush administration and constant transfers of “enemy
combatants”to Guantánamo Bay, Barbara becomes increasingly more critical
of the US government. She ceases to perceive the US as a guarantee of freedom
and safety and develops the conviction that John has already been captured or
killed by either American or Afghan forces: if he was captured by the US mili-
tary, “they weren’t telling”; if he remained in Afghanistan, “he’d been left
behind as Dostum’s prisoner, and he was now without arms and legs or
minus his tongue so that he couldn’t write or couldn’t talk. Or he was one
of the many dead in the compound at Qala-i-jangi.”
She imagines US
guards as efficient, clinical and concealed, and their Afghan counterparts as
partial to brutality, torture and dismemberment. As she perceives both sides
as violent, unjust and entirely unaccountable for their actions, Barbara
reaches a point of disavowing the emergency state.
As the contract between individual and state fantasy deteriorates and
Barbara negotiates her traumatic experience by creating a new fantasy, the
most “anti-American”presence as the novel concludes is the emergency
state itself. In line with the presence at the core of Barbara’s fantasy, which
emerges out of superimposed images of Lindh and memories of John Jude, a
key concluding scene, set on May , focusses on Lindh’s life in prison.
In a unique switch in narration from third person to first person, the scene
features the most explicit critique of the post-“/”US in the novel:
Pease, The New American Exceptionalism,.
Abraham, American Taliban,.
Ibid., –.
Maria-Irina Popescu
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“This is the age of oil, the age of the corporation, the age of terrorism, the age
of martyrdom. It is surely not an accident that I am describing one and the
same age.”
This statement draws a direct link between America’s economic
hegemony, global ambitions and aggressive foreign policy as the narrator por-
trays the state as a perpetrator of terror.
The scene, set in the cell block where Lindh is detained, shows a prison
guard interrupting the Muslim inmates’collective prayer: “Where do you
think you are? Where DO they think they are? This is no mosque in
Medina, this is an American prison goddammit paid for by the American
people, so keep it down, shutthefuckup.”
This scene explicitly represents
Muslim detainees being deprived of their human rights. The narrator
reminds the reader, not without irony, that the scene was set “in an
American facility nine miles from the White House, where our president wor-
ships his own God.”
As demonstrated by both the prison scene and the
earlier reference to a photograph of Lindh captured which was printed on
the front pages of national newspapers almost immediately after being
taken, American Taliban offers a story which is not about acts of torture
taking place in the shadows, away from the public eye; instead, the novel pro-
poses a narrative in which tortured bodies come into focus almost immediately
after the “punishment”was inflicted, a narrative dominated by so-called “ter-
rorists”in which the American state emerges as the most “anti-American”
character. Abraham’s novel interrogates and complicates the “American,”
“un-American”and “anti-American”identities assigned to Selves and
Others both pre- and post-“/”and encourages the reader to do the same.
American Taliban is innovative in its approach to problematizing the home-
grown “terrorist”character that emerges straight out of an imagined “all-white
America,”as well as in its thematic treatment of the broken contract between
the individual and the “Homeland”state fantasy in a post-“/”world.
“/”US novels generally avoid representing the “terrorist”character and,
when they do, they focus on “nonwhite”Arab or Arab-American presences.
A notable exception is David Goodwillie’s novel American Subversive,
which features a female white protagonist, Paige Roderick, who is perceived
as an “ecoterrorist”because of her involvement in violent protest actions
such as arson and damage to private property. However, even when under-
stood as an antistate gesture, environmental action remains associated with
white Western citizens and is not charged with the same Othering, “clash-
of-civilizations”nuances and racial hierarchies.
A substantial source of inspiration for American writers interested in creat-
ing “terrorist”characters in post-“/”novels can be found in the
Ibid., .
Ibid., –.
Ibid., .
Reimagining Traitors
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biographies of the perpetrators of the attacks themselves. For example,
Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, the hijacker and pilot
who crashed the American Airlines Flight plane into the North Tower
of the World Trade Center on September , is represented in three
significant “/”novels: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Andre Dubus
III’s The Garden of Last Days, and Jarett Kobek’s ATTA.
Falling Man features a cameo from Atta, described by Hammad, a fictional
Iraqi character who becomes one of the “/”hijackers, as “the man who
led discussions, this was Amir and he was intense, a small thin wiry man
who spoke to Hammad in his face …This was Amir, his mind was in the
upper skies, making sense of things, drawing things together.”
In The
Garden of Last Days, Bassam, a fictional version of a “/”hijacker, refers
to Atta as “Amir, who never smiles, who always watches the money and
wears too much cologne and never smokes.”
Whilst DeLillo and Dubus
imagine Atta through the lens of their fictional characters, suggesting he is
unrepresentable, Jarett Kobek makes Mohamed Atta the protagonist of his
novel, the highly educated and conflicted (anti)hero of a quest for redemption,
and attempts to provide a counternarrative to the state-sanctioned and media-
disseminated Othering story of “radicalization.”
In the case of novels which steer clear from using the “real-life”perpetrators
of the September attacks as inspiration and rely instead entirely on
fictional constructions, the “terrorist”characters are still imagined as racialized
Others. Arguably the most famous novel centered on an Arab American in the
process of becoming a “terrorist”is John Updike’s Terrorist; much like
American Taliban,Terrorist features a teenage protagonist, Ahmad, who
attempts to negotiate his own relationship with religion and politics –
although, unlike John Jude Parish, Ahmad carries his “un-Americanness”on
his skin and the world he learns to navigate is a highly divided American
society rather than an all-white suburban utopia. A more nuanced portrayal
of “nonwhite”Muslim individuality and the role of US foreign policy in
shaping a sense of selfhood, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant
Fundamentalist is also more ambivalent about the “terroristic”nature of its
protagonist, whose experience is understood in the context of traumatic histor-
ical moments in both the US (“/”) and India (the attack on the Indian
Parliament) in . The influence Changez decides to exercise on his stu-
dents cannot be easily pinpointed as a “call to arms,”an intellectual challenge,
or something in between; this allows The Reluctant Fundamentalist to inter-
vene in the literary landscape of US “/”novels as a force which complicates
Don DeLillo, Falling Man (London: Picador, ), –.
Andre Dubus III, The Garden of Last Days (London: William Heinemann, ), .
Maria-Irina Popescu
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the racialized, Othered Muslim subjectivity oversimplified in novels such as
Updike’sTerrorist.
The fiction of “crisis”of the early “/”novels tends, in David Holloway’s
words, to “sublimate contemporary anxieties about state activity, and about the
state’s jeopardizing of the safety of its citizens,”into stories about family and the
failure of parents to protect their children.
When discussed within Pease’s
theoretical framework, early “/”US fiction helped consolidate the
“Homeland”state fantasy by uncritically promoting the idea that the foreign
attacks violently displaced the entire population and destroyed Americans’
“way of life.”In its preference for a narrative which starts as a teenage
coming-of-age story set in a pre-“/”United States and develops into a
more explicit critique of the state’s response to the September
attacks, American Taliban offers an allegory for the transitions of the “/”
literary landscape, but engages with the historical and political “/”
moment explicitly. In early literary works, the attacks are merely alluded to or
sublimated entirely in allegorical narratives, whereas in post- novels
like American Taliban “/”is the pivot event at the core of the crisis.
That is not to say that early literary responses to “/”are completely
depoliticized; as Arin Keeble argues, when read outside the “reductive
binary”of trauma/politics, narratives of domesticity provide appropriately
politicized reactions to “/”and contain numerous elements of political,
international or transnational agendas.
It is true that, by switching focus from John Jude to Barbara and Bill Parish,
the American Taliban narrative echoes the early post-“/”novel’s propen-
sity towards the familial-crisis theme; nonetheless, Abraham’s novel compli-
cates this theme of domesticity by following Barbara’s rejection of the
“Homeland”state fantasy and by the stylistic choice of both representing
media coverage of the “War on Terror”and allowing the narrator to intervene
with historical exposition at key moments in the plot. Using these devices,
American Taliban fashions itself as a literary response to “/”with a
specific agenda: to encourage the reader to contextualize the historic
moment, problematize historic narratives, and become more critical of
media and political discourses. By switching focus from John Jude Parish
and introducing John Walker Lindh as a separate character in the later sections
of the book, the narrator breaks the relationship of causality within the
fictional world: the former’s actions have no consequences, whilst the conse-
quences the latter endures are not linked to any known actions. More broadly,
Holloway, / and the War on Terror,.
Arin Keeble, The / Novel: Trauma, Politics and Identity (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Co., ), –.
Reimagining Traitors
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this broken causality suggests a critique of the legal environment prevalent in
the US during the “War on Terror”: the state’s abuse goes unpunished
(actions without consequences), whereas the “unlawful combatants”held at
Guantánamo Bay are detained without trial (consequences without actions).
Pearl Abraham’sAmerican Taliban reimagines this historical scenario to fill
in the blanks of the Lindh case and problematizes the labels of “traitor”and
“Other”as fleshed out by the dominant “War on Terror”discourse. Questions
related to the possibility of fiction as a diagnostic tool, the role of the media in
contemporary myth production, the break of the cause–effect relationship
between historical events, and the influence of dominant political ideologies
on contemporary fictional and nonfictional discourses are central to
Abraham’s text. If the United States can produce “all-American”traitors
like John Walker Lindh, transgressive to the point of being perceived as
“the enemy within”a nation, is it possible that US presence and influence
outside the political borders of the country can also produce “homegrown ter-
rorists”? In this case, a theoretical precedent is provided by Richard Gray’s
concept of “the deterritorialising America.”
According to Gray, works of
literary fiction can show “how trauma, crisis may provide an intercultural con-
nection …either through exploration of the interface between cultures in the
United States,”“or through the mapping of America’s extraterritorial expan-
sion (the global reach of American culture and power), or both.”
This
hypothesis could provide the possibility of interesting future avenues for
research. How would the “American,”“anti-American”and “un-American”
assigned identities change when discussing literary texts which originate
from “an America situated between cultures”?
What would a “homegrown
terrorist”character exterior to the political borders of the US look like in a
“second-wave”post-“/”novel? Until sufficient distance from such
recent texts is possible, it is important to consider the benefits of adding to
the critical canon novels that previously eluded scholarship. Not only will
they bring a fresh perspective on the “/”genre, but they will also offer
clues about the evolution of American mythologies in the twenty-first
century and ways to resist the “Homeland”fantasy by destabilizing its claim
to power.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Maria-Irina Popescu is a final-year AHRC CHASE doctoral researcher at the University of
Essex. She has previously published in the European Journal of American Culture. Her thesis
examines how the “homegrown terrorist”is imagined in recent post-“/”American novels
Gray, After the Fall,.
Ibid., , original emphasis.
Ibid.
Maria-Irina Popescu
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and her research interests include US mythologies, contemporary literature, media and cultural
studies, human rights, and terrorism studies. Popescu would like to thank her supervisor,
Dr. Owen Robinson, for his endless patience, support and guidance, and the anonymous
reviewers for their excellent and insightful suggestions. Special thanks to Prof. Celeste-Marie
Bernier, Dr. Bevan Sewell and Lauren Mottle for their wonderful work on the Journal of
American Studies. Popescu would also like to thank Dr. Shohini Chaudhuri and Dr. Fatima
El-Issawi for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay.
Reimagining Traitors
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