September 11, 2001 feminist perspectives

Off Our Backs, Nov/Dec 2002 by Douglas, Carol Anne

September 11, 2001 Feminist Perspectives

edited by Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter

Spinifex Press 2002, U.S$19.95. www.spinifexpress.com.au.

What is the feminist response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ensuring War on Terrorism? Is there one feminist response?

An Australian feminist press has published this book, edited by Australian feminists Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter. It is a truly international book, with contributions from women on every continent. Diane Bell, an Australian feminist teaching women's studies at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., writes that it's good that this book comes from Australia; it's an instance of bell hooks' theory that important feminist work comes from the margins, she says.

It does seem strange that U.S. feminists haven't compiled anything comparable. Are we too close to the events? Are we too cowed by the Bush government? Have we been silenced? A number of the contributors to this book are U.S. feminists, and perhaps it's more appropriate that we appear in this international context rather than always controlling the medium. Articles by Jennie Ruby and me that were published in last fall's off our backs are reprinted in the book, and we both feel honored to be in such company.

I normally would not review a book in which I had an essay, but the political importance of reviewing this book greatly outweighed the fact that I contributed two of 500 pages.

Most of the contributions are actually about the repercussions of the September 11 attacks rather than the attacks themselves, but Robin Morgan's accounts of how New Yorkers at the time coped and supported one another are very moving. She saw streets littered with human body parts, and the bodies of thousands of sparrows that had been burned in the explosions. Still more moving was her statement that people she knew were prepared to offer refuges to Muslims and Arabs if they needed them. She notes that in some parts of the country, presumed Muslims and Arabs were attacked in the aftermath of September 11. A Lebanese-American convenience store owner was killed. A Sikh man was killed because he wore a turban.

It is good to know that only days after the attacks, Morgan remembered that hundreds of thousands of Tutsis were killed in Rwanda's genocide in the '90s while the world paid no attention. Why do people in the United States believe their lives are more valuable than others' lives?

Violence is a psychosis, Morgan writes, but it's a psychosis that contemporary incumbent leaders of most nations share with their insurgent opponents, she says. We must expose the mystique of violence, Morgan says, and stop seeing it as connected with excitement, eroticism, and "manliness."

Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchu Turn, a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, sent a letter to Bush that is reproduced in the book asking him to think about a different type of world leadership, one that relies on conscience rather than conquest. But the chances of his paying any attention to such a message were and are nil.

Not all of the September 11 victims' families wanted the U.S. government to retaliate. April Amundsen, whose husband was killed at the Pentagon, publicly pleaded for the government to refrain. Barbara Lee, an AfricanAmerican woman, the sole member of Congress to vote against giving Bush virtually unlimited powers to retaliate, writes that there are many means to end terrorism, and measures that spawn further acts of terror or do not address the sources of hatred do not increase the security of those in the United States.

Several contributors quote Mohandas Gandhi's saying that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

Of course most of the contributors to this book are pro-peace, but the editors do not impose a line. Coeditor Winter is honest enough to point out that when she went to Afghanistan in June 2002, she discovered that many Afghans are so grateful to be rid of the Taliban that they actually thank people from the United States for the bombing that has further demolished their already devastated country.

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), whose statements are published in the book, had a very different response. It has worked for many years against the Taliban and other fundamentalists, but it opposed the bombing.

Winter's piece tells how Kabul has been reduced to rubble. Two hotels still stand, but only one has hot running water. A few affluent homes remain, but most people are desperately poor. Imagine what it would be like if all of New York's tall buildings had been smashed and Central Park was full of rubble, and then you can picture Kabul, Winter writes.

The U.S. contention that Afghan women joyously threw off their burqas is untrue, Winter says. She didn't see any women walking in the streets of Kabul without their burqas. Some did have the face veil thrown back, but they were afraid to appear on the street without the burqas. When the women met in a conference, they doffed their burqas, but wore headscarfs under them. Appallingly, some westerners are already trying to bring them cosmetics and hair-styling-trying to move them from one subordinated role to another, Winter writes.