September 12, 2023: AmericanStudying The Rising: “Paradise” and “Worlds Apart”

[For thisparticular AmericanStudier, there’s no better way to think through anotheranniversary of September 11th, 2001 than to consider some of themany lessons we can learn from the best cultural work depicting that moment: BruceSpringsteen’s album The Rising (2002). Sothis week I’ll AmericanStudy pairs of songs from that vital work—please shareyour own responses, nominations for other vital 9/11 cultural works, andfurther thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On twovery different ways to push past stereotypes of Muslims.

It’s notan easy subject to discuss, and of course one that can (and has) far too easilylead to racialprofiling and hate crimes of all sorts (in 2001 and across thedecades since), but there’s no way to engage September 11th,in cultural texts as in every form of conversation, without some portrayals ofMuslim extremist terrorists, and specifically of suicide bombers. I hope itgoes without saying to readers of this blog, and to anyone who knows me in anycontext, that I would always argue—and not even argue, but simply state,because these are true facts—that the 9/11 bombers in no way represented Islam,nor their Muslim communities, nor Muslim Americans (they were not from theUnited States at all, of course), and were just as fanaticaland hateful as any other terrorists, pastor present, foreign or domestic.But in the case of September 11th, 2001, fanatical and hatefulterrorists calling themselves Muslims used suicide bombings to attack New YorkCity and Washington, and I repeat that no cultural works about that day orthose events can or should elide that complex but crucial layer to thesehistories and those involved in (as well as, in the case of Muslim Americansand Muslims worldwide, affected by) them.

One of themost complex and interesting songs on TheRising, the penultimate track “Paradise,” engages withsuicide bombers and bombings very overtly and centrally. The song seems to movethrough distinct and equally ambiguous speakers in each verse, all dealing withdeath and the losses and uncertainties it produces (including about whetherthere is such a thing as the titular place beyond death), but the first verse’sspeaker is pretty clearly a suicide bomber, one who takes “the schoolbooks”from a child’s “pack” (presumably the speaker’s own) and replaces them with “plastic,wire, and your kiss,” all of which that speaker then takes to a “crowdedmarketplace” where they will apparently detonate their bomb. We get no more specificidentifying information than that, but in an album so clearly focused onSeptember 11th, it is impossible not to think of this suicide bomberas a Muslim extremist like those behind the 9/11 attacks. On the one hand,then, this song seems to reinforce certain stereotypes about Muslims (if oneslinked to specific 9/11 contexts to be sure); but on another, it adds multiplehumanizing layers to those images, both in the opening verse (the relationship withthe child who is the speaker’s addressee) and in the song as a whole(analogizing this bomber, at least in some ways, to the other speakers who havelost loved ones, quite possibly in the 9/11 attacks).

Again,complicated and difficult stuff, and if it were the only way that Springsteen’salbum engages with Muslims I think that’d be a missed opportunity. But it’snot, and in the other overt such engagement, “Worlds Apart,”Springsteen offers a vitally distinct vision of that global community. Thespeaker and situation are similarly ambiguous, but to my mind the speaker is aMuslim and Arabic man, perhaps from Afghanistan (a “dry and troubled country”that longs for “Allah’s blessed rain,” and of course one very connected to theaftermath of 9/11 as of 2002), in an interfaith relationship with a Westernwoman (presumably an American one, given Springsteen’s own identity and thealbum’s overall focus). I would argue that the song’s best verse, and one ofthe very best on the album, is its second “Sometimes the truth just ain’tenough, or it’s too much in times like this/Let’s throw the truth away, we’ll findit in this kiss/In your skin upon my skin, in the beating of our hearts/May theliving let us in, before the dead tear us apart.” I’m not sure I need to saymuch more after those potent lines, but will just add that that’s a reflectionon intimacy, identity, community, and times like 9/11 and its aftermath—for Muslimsand for all of us—without which this album would be sorely impoverished.

NextRisingStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other 9/11 texts you’d highlight?