This week the Guardian newspaper has published a series of short stories written by contemporary authors from around the world who examine the post 9/11 world.
Temple of Tears by Geoff Dyer looks at the breakdown of a relationship in San Francisco as the towers fall on the other side of the country. Our Dead, Your Dead by Kamila Shamsie takes us to Karachi, where a group of young journalists try to figure out how to mark the anniversary as bombs explode around them. The Second Death of Martin Lango by Helon Habila from Nigeria is an intriguing tale of possible mistaken identity. Echo by Moroccan born Laila Lalami looks at a woman’s attempt to reconcile herself with her parents’ past and deal with the reaction to her own beliefs. Second Skull by Rob Magnuson Smith examines the fallout of the Iraq war on one tragic family. And Willl Self’s iAnna introduces us to a new breed of psychiatric patient who can only interact with the world by assuming she is viewing it through an I-Pad.
What intrigued me about these stories was that they weren’t focused on the attacks themselves but rather what comes after, what happened next.
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| New York 2008 |
Events like those that happened ten years ago in America inevitably make you take stock. This weekend, we were visited by some of our best friends. As we sipped our wine late into the night, we remembered where we had all been this time a decade ago.
I was about to turn 23. I had been living in London for just under a year. I was single and I had yet to meet my future husband. Each day I rode the Central line from my rented flat in Stratford to my office in Tottenham Court Road. I was working in my first job in publishing for a small independent publisher. My office was a four story London town house just off Bedford Square in Bloomsbury. When I started my job, most of my work was done by fax and it had only been a few months since internet connection was fed to all computers in our little office.
On this day, just after lunch my colleague bounded up the three flights of stairs to my desk on the very top floor and called out, “Look at the news. A plane has just flown into the World Trade Centre”. The BBC website was struggling with the flow of traffic but we were online when we watched with horror as a second plane arced round in the sky and hit the second tower. It was the first time I had watched news happening live online.
Ten years on, we live in a world of 24 hour news. Events are lived out before our eyes. Technology has advanced with break-neck speed and we now carry slick mobile devices that allow us to surf the internet wherever we might be. The internet has become as necessary to our modern lives as running water, and is now a bloated and overwhelming cacophony of voices. We talk about the “War on terror” and Islamophobia. Wars, started in the months after those tragic days, are still rumbling on in the dusty deserts of the middle east.
As human beings, we like decades. They are neat. We box things into ten year gaps, fashion, music and events. We use them as labels. We give them more emphasis than other anniversaries. But as I read these six stories I couldn’t escape the feeling that today is not a day to close the box on ten years. We will always be living in a post-9/11 world.
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| Central Park, New York in 2008 |
You can read the short story collection on the Guardian website by clicking on the link below:
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Thanks for your comments! Mrs Gold