9/11 and the Graphic Novel

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation turns the 9/11 Commission report, the findings of the bipartisan committee appointed by the President, into a graphic novel. It takes the events, the testimonies, and the time lines of the terrorist events and puts them into a comic book format. The graphic novel amounts to a pastiche of the elements included in the report and images deriving from both the artist's imagination and ones mediated by broadcast and print media coverage from both the day of the attacks and political figures of the time. I want to think through what the effect is of putting the report into this aesthetic realm. Turning it into a comic should open the discussion of 9/11 to new audiences, but does it have the effect of reopening the tragedy to new interpretations?

If viewed as a reopening of the discussion, the novel can be seen as an ethical endeavor to further understandings of the tragedy. Consequently, readers may have a new engagement with the event that offers the opportunity for new responses to be formulated from a position of heightened knowledge and the awareness of diverse perspectives. However, by channeling such familiar images, mostly from media coverage, does it simply reinforce existing sentiments? The project mimics the goal of the 9/11 Commission Report, a book that attempted to report rather than engage with the event. But as a work of art, is not the burden one step further, to engage the event, rethink it, ask new questions? I don't know that the graphic novel has this impact.

U.S./Somalia Links, Associative Meanings

Nuruddin Farah has complicated ideas about the U.S.'s role in Somalia, and he forms associations in his novel that bring those complexities to the fore. He sees the difficulties of international intervention in his country, as well as the necessity. Farah, however, makes a distinction between helping the other and helping one's self. Farrah points to the difficult relationship between the effort on the ground in the U.S./U.N. intervention, and the media portrayal of the situation that has the ability to sway public opinion. Farah posits the idea that American foreign policy is as much a TV show as anything else, "a circus for the benefit of prime-time TV back home." The link between the media and American identity makes it hard for motives to be seen as altruistic (all the more appropriate that I use an image from a movie to begin this post).

The complexity of the situation is also written in religious terms. One of Farah's protagonists explains his "misgivings about saints and angels ... especially as I fear that people describe the Yankees as 'good angels' come on a humanitarian mission, to perform God's work here. Do you think Yankees ceased being angels, because of the conditions met here, conditions that wouldn't permit them to perform any work but Satan's? When do angels cease to be angels and resort to being who they are, Yankees?" Farah embeds religious terms in the political questions in an way that draws the two together.

The links he forms ask the crucial questions. How does the media influence foreign policy and subsequently the lives of individual Somalis? How can humanitarian goals be forgotten so quickly when things begin to go wrong on the ground? And then link the two - the media, humanitarian ideals gone wrong - an ethical imbalance?

Inhabiting Political Art

Must an artist inhabit the role she presumes to represent? How does this role connect to the political revolutionary?

Bile, one of Nuruddin Farah's protagonists in Links, explains, "an artist representing an image cannot presume to be an artist unless he is able to be the very figure being represented. Likewise, a man with a radical image who's spent years in detention for political reasons must act forthrightly and without fear of the consequences."

The comment links the artist and the radical. Both must act forthrightly and without fear to have an impact. But, what does it mean to be the figure being represented? An artist can inhabit the revolutionary role with an imagination that builds characters, scenes, and story through links to the real. Or, the artist can be the firgure represented and present a realist version of events from personal memory in order to convey a political point. The artist can be either inside or outside, but either way must present a threshold for the reader to pass through, which evokes meaning and provokes response. How does the artist reach that point?

The Falling Man

Google "falling man" and this image comes up time and time again. I will follow suit and post the image, but with the pertinent question: is it ethical to post this image? Also, how does the photograph function today?


DeLillo's novel Falling Man refers to this famous picture. In the text, a performance artist recreates the photo by placing himself at strategic locations around the city and jumping from a building tethered by a single rope. In the process, he assumes the position of the man in the photo. DeLillo's text asks the important question: "Falling Man as Hearless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror" (220).

I believe DeLillo is asking us to remain shocked out of our daily routines, not to let 9/11 become simple history, and relearn the lessons of the event each day. Is this giving too much value to terrorism? Is performance art that interrupts our daily lives an important aspect in postmodern society? If art does not interrupt, what will?

Turner Hospital's Question of Finding Testimony to Terror

Trauma contains within it an essential ambiguity. The terrorist act invokes this absence. The various networks within our society - media, government, ngo's - capitalize on the absence to foreclose the meaning of the event. They ursurp the voices of the dead and fill in their own discourse in what amounts to realpolitik. Yet, the question remains, how do we see the event for what it is, finding testimony to trauma?

"The dead never stop telling stories. Those whom we have betrayed, no matter how pure our intent, how scrupulous our reasons, they tell their tales to us night after night, which is why some of you will lose all capacit to sleep" (270). Janette Turner Hospital understands that the story lies with the dead, the intefral insight of Primo Levi comes through here. But somewhere between the loss of testimony and the foreclosure by outside means is an ethical way forward, investigating the event and responding to it. Giorgio Agamben explains that it is in understanding the absence and directing our attention to the middle ground. "Survovors bore witness to something it was impossible to bear witness to," according to Agamben (13). With this understanding, is Due Preparations for the Plague seeking a new ethical territory to respond to the essential absence that terrorism provokes? Are "due preparations" not simply ways of preventing terrorism, but ways of dealing with the aftermath?