General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Tell me about your 9/11. [View all]tishaLA
(14,176 posts)She lives in the Netherlands and was doing study abroad here in LA and was in a summer program I teach in, but she was born and raised in Afghanistan (I had another Dutch student that same year who was born and raised in Iraq; the program was designed to help underrepresented students acclimate to the rigors of university life--which in CA means lots of Latinx, African American, and poor students and in the Netherlands it means mainly Muslim students who are often immigrants). We'd read an article that day called "Explanation and Exoneration; or, What We Can Hear" about the way our stories about September 11th center us--as American, as a political position, as victims, etc.--and its author, Judith Butler, argues that we can only have a complex, comprehensive understanding of what the day means by decentering ourselves. So I asked her: as someone in Afghanistan, what was September 11 like for you?
And she started: "Oh, god. It was so hard to get out of Afghanistan after September 11 because the borders were closed and it made leaving almost impossible." Under the Taliban, she couldn't have formal schooling, but her mother had a secret school in which she taught other girls and her father, who had been a part of the government during the Soviet occupation, wasn't a favorite of the Taliban, so things were really rough for her family. She said that even as a young person, she knew things were reaching a crescendo when the Buddha statues were blown up and that it was only a matter of time.
After the attack, her father used every resource he had to get his family out of Afghanistan, but they had a circuitous route to the Netherlands.
I can't remember everything about the story she told, but I remember how it began and that she never once talked about September 11th as such, just the time before and the time after; it was a giant void in the narrative. But I told colleagues about asking the question and her amazing response because it made me feel like I deserved an award for my pedagogy. And that's my September 11th story.