Nine Eleven and America’s New Slave Narrative

I’m reading slave narratives in both African American Lit, and Survey of American Lit. They are these amazing things: stories of slaves who became free. Some, albeit very few, bought their freedom. Some escaped. Some were granted their freedom or were bought by other people in order to free them.

It really is amazing, reading these stories of people were were ignorant of the concept of “something better,” who were slaves, and remained slaves, until they learned of something better. A concept of freedom, a concept of self as opposed to part of a collective consciousness. The stories, although varied in experiences, are essentially the same.

They intellectually sleep through their slavery. They are exposed to some sort of knowledge, some sort of idea of freedom, and the thought of liberty is born. They experience intellectual and emotional freedom far before they ever experience the physical or geographical nature of freedom. And they are awakened.

The irony lies in the fact that once freedom is obtained, things actually become more, and not less, difficult for the now free men and women. Once the awareness is there, the ex-slaves tell us, the conditions under which they serve as slaves become far less tolerable. Once they’re physically free, they must now provide for themselves with very few of the needed tools to support themselves.

And then there is always the thought of other slaves. The ones left behind, the ones still in chains.

Some of the ex-slaves actually returned as free merchants, actively working in the slave trades. Others, a bit more sensitive to their position, perhaps, worked to free others.

Today marks the anniversary of the infamous “9/11.” I wasn’t going to blog about it because I don’t particularly like to get into politics, but something in me wouldn’t let it go. I remember the tragedy; I’m fairly certain that a vast amount of the world, much less America, remembers the tragedy.

I also remember the hatred that followed. The shopkeepers and gas-station attendants who were assaulted after the attack on the Trade Towers. I remember the doctors being whispered about. I remember the racial and ethnic slurs.

What’s worse, I remember uttering some of those slurs. I remember the seething anger, and the rage and the sense of “How DARE they?” that followed in the wake of the attack.

It’s been six years as of today. Six years, and the whisper of “9/11″ is still a festering wound in the heart of America.

Six years, and I’m not angry, just monumentally sad. I have not forgotten those people who have died, but I realize that this act of violence is not unique. It was a grand gesture, sure, and thoroughly attention-getting. It was an act of terrorism, strategically chosen to inflict fear.

And I’m left to wonder how can any act of violence NOT be seen as an act of terrorism? Why do some, because of the grandiosity of the method, rate complete coverage for six years while no less terrifying, if smaller scale, things keep happening and we quickly forget about them because we don’t have someone else to blame it on? Every rape, every murder, every assault is a singular act of terrorism. We try. It’s this ethnic group, or that ethnic group. It’s someone different from us.

We’re sleeping. Anesthetized by hatred, by fear, by wounded pride and by self-justified righteousness. We’re in the Matrix, plugged into our lives while dreaming of a world that is so far from harmony it is absolute dissonance. The only way that we can win through war is by total obliteration. We have become slaves to vengeance, to revenge. We have become slaves to our emotions, this anger and hatred that begets blindness to our sameness.

Reason, Percy Bysshe Shelley argues, is the relation of one thought to another. It lies in finding the differences between things. Imagination, on the other hand, is not only the relational thought process, but the creation of new thought. Poetry, a product of the Imagination, is founded in finding similarities.

It is not in exploiting our differences that we shall be freed. Only in our similarities will we find peace.

Where is our epiphany? Where is our freedmen to lead us home, out of the battle zone and into the heartland?
Where is our Christ, our Buddha, our Baha’u'llah? Our peace makers and our educators? Where is our William Blake, our Percy Bysshe Shelley? Where is our T.S. Eliot, begging for reassembly?

They’ve been here all along. Small voices in the wilderness cry out, and the cry spreads. That is how the American Slave found freedom.

The thing about the slave narrative is that one must actually be free in order to write it.

I realize I’m on a soap box, and for that I apologize, although for my words, I do not. I realize that this may come across as some ranting woman, an anti-Veteran woman (which I’m not), or, perhaps worse, an anti-victim woman. I’m not that, either. I am deeply grateful to those who have served our country. I mourn for those whom we have lost.

I just dream of something better.