BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH
October. By September 12th, the promise of financial support was tenuous at best as New York City officials and private foundations were scrambling to help the numerous people and organizations in need. Being here in New York, I experienced first-hand the tragedy of September 11th. While I personally did not lose anyone from this event, it had an effect on everyone living in New York City: the smell of the smoldering ruins, the Twin Towers missing from the New York skyline, the police and military presence, and the tentativeness and newly-discovered vulnerability that New Yorkers felt that no outsider could ever feel in exactly the same way. It was a physical and psychic cost that forever changed how we lived, how we travelled, and what we think about when we look at our children. New York City would never be the same again. As others have observed, the widespread public soul-searching of writers in the days and weeks after the attacks became an important gauge of the public position of the writer in the contemporary world. Why was it that writers were called upon to explain or offer insights into the events? In what way would they be able to offer accounts any more illuminating than one’s own experience of 9/11? And how could the writer offer any more than what was offered by the endless reportage and documentaries of the day? What readers seemed to look to writers for, in the aftermath of September 11th, was a unifying narrative to make sense of their own chaotic responses to the events. This was the impetus behind my wanting to document this event through literature, and thus, “AWAKENINGS, Bridging the Cultural Divide, In the Aftermath of September 11, 2001, Writers and Activists Speak Out” was born. The idea was to bring Arab, Arab American, Jewish, Israeli and Afghan writers together in one is-
sue for an open discussion about what happened on September 11th and what continues to happen on a daily basis in the Middle East. While I experienced some difficulties — some Arabs and Jews did not want to be in the same issue with each other, and problems finding Afghan writers for inclusion in the issue — overall, the open submission call went extremely well. As a result, I met some really wonderful people. In the Arab American community I discovered writers such as Nathalie Handal, Elmaz Abinadar, Leila Diab, D.H. Melhem, Mohja Kahf, Hayan Charara, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Naomi Shihab Nye, Munir Akash, Khaled Mattawa, and Elie Chalala, founder and editor of Al Jadid, an Arab American literary publication. I hooked up with Israeli writers Karen Alkalay-Gut, Yair Mazor, Ronny Someck, David Lisbona and the late, great Ami Isseroff (who passed away this year), founder and director of MidEastWeb, a cross-cultural website that opened dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. Jewish American writers such as Ammiel Alcalay, Morris Dickstein, Myra Sklarew, Barbara Goldberg, and Jean Nordhaus were extremely helpful and insightful. The original cover, “Solitude,” a painting by Lois Walker captured the essence of 9/11. Overall, the issue promised to be groundbreaking, but little did I know when putting it together that we would not be able to publish it. By November 2001, people were fighting over funding in New York City. Organizations located in Lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center were given higher priority, as were people who lost loved ones or were directly affected by the event, including businesses that were left in shambles. Besides facing a highly competitive field, as a brand new nonprofit organization, we simply did not have the resources and the know-how to wheel and deal in this environment. This was compounded by the reality that
funders were pulling away from publishing, and, as funding opportunities grew scarce (beginning in the late 1990s), many literary magazines ceased to exist due to lack of funds. But I always hung on to the “almost” completed manuscript of the AWAKENINGS’ issue, with the hopes that someday I would be able to do something with it. Since then, the publishing arena has evolved into a digital world. Bringing back phati’tude Literary Magazine as a print-on-demand publication provided us the flexibility to do what we love to do while reestablishing ourselves in the market, earning income and acquiring funding, which we began to do in 2010. With each September 11th anniversary, I always thought about publishing the AWAKENINGS issue. Will it be the second anniversary? The fifth? The eighth? With the tenth anniversary of September 11th coming up, I knew that this was the right time to revisit and publish the issue, but where to begin? The original manuscript was worked on shortly after the attacks, so while the immediacy of the writing worked then, it no longer worked now. When I flipped through it, I realized that there were a lot of things that we didn’t know and the content reflected the speculation, anger and political commentary of its time. I had also departed from phati’tude’s then standard format by dividing the magazine into sections that presented the world before 9/11, during 9/11, a cursory discussion about war in general, Afghanistan and the future. Also, the issue itself was well over 300 pages and needed to be pared down. I didn’t quite know how to go about this and realized I needed a fresh perspective, so I looked for interns to help shepherd the project along. The interns, who were children when the attacks occurred, would have an entirely different take on September 11th and I thought their out-
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