There are so many different events presented in the different films and there is a blurring in the lines of what it means to be portrayed as victims or as perpetrators or as innocent or guilty. The film, in its entirety, challenges people’s preconceived notions about 9/11. I think the film must have been even more powerful right when it came out since people felt so confident in who they thought was guilty and who they thought was suffering. Other than the scene from India that I discussed yesterday, we discussed the opening scene from Iran at length.
This scene takes place in Afghanistan and shows a group of school children as they go through an average school day. This was a really powerful scene in challenging the way that we think about other cultures. The Afghani children don’t think about the conflict in America at all and are only concerned about the well that caved in a few days ago in their town. Right after the war, nobody spoke for Afghanis and this was an attempt the producer made to expose Americans to their voices. The students have no concept of Holy War or to their terrorist attacks on September 11th. Many Americans want to paint all Afghanis as complicit or guilty but it is clear that the children are clueless and that their teacher is in no way linked to terrorism (or even the concept of jihad). This makes me wonder, should the US have invaded Afghanistan? Should little kids and their parents suffer for something they don’t have any connections with? This scene was passed over since it was the opening and since there was not a lot of action involved; however, the message is powerful and unsettling.
This made me reflect on the Rebecca Stein lectures in ICS 125 where the class examined the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a perspective that wasn’t as pro-Israel as we are used to in the United States.(One that I am particularly accustomed to due to where I live: a village with a majority population of Jews). It is always important and unsettling to understand the opinion and the humanity of a people against whom you are fighting, perhaps that will lead to the end to the fighting and to finding a solution.
Hamid offers another take on 9/11 in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It is really interesting how he talks about America as a progressive country and how the attacks put them back into a sense of nostalgia, where they were looking to their history. America really did start to look at what made them different from the rest of the world right after the attacks instead of what they had been doing before which was looking for what made them the same. There was less of a sense of human understanding and more of a search for those who aren't American. (could the search for Arab terrorists be compared to McCarthyism??).
ReplyDeleteChangez is afforded the perspective of an outsider on the inside, in this sense, and he expresses sentiments which echo the Indian segment of the film we watched in class. The two main characters have trouble understanding why their American-ness, more specifically New York-ness, is jeopardized after attacks that they have nothing to do with.
Here is a passage that really struck me about the American sense of nostalgia:
"I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War; I, a foreigner, found myself staring out at a set that ought to be viewd not in Technicolor but in grainy black and white." (115).
Interesting question about McCarthy. I'm was also intrigued by your passing comment about Fanon.
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