Reading the U.S. Torture Footnotes
How might we understand mourning, when the event has yet to end? When the injuries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew?—Saidiya Hartman
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Following September 11, 2001, I returned to Edmond Jabès. At an earlier period, he had provided me with the language of the void, the necessity of the scream: “What is the story of the book?” “Becoming aware of a scream.” An attack on U.S. soil, as the headlines screamed, threatened all those aliens—legal and illegal—present in the U.S. A Kenyan friend had to escort her brown colleagues in upstart New York to the supermarket. My university sent concerned emails to all international students: to have an un-American name or accent was newly dangerous. “Our ties to beings and things are so fragile they often break without noticing.” I needed Jabès to map a social that was rapidly changing: I started watching congress proceedings on TV. I parsed political speeches for the words “American citizen” and “American soil,” for the protections… Read More...