ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on September 11 poetry, which has been less intensively studied in the past decade and a half, even though it was the first literary genre to emerge out of the dust of the Twin Towers. The terrorist attacks assumed significance for Arab- and Muslim-American poets not merely on account of the sheer magnitude of the disaster-that is, not merely based on the extent of the destruction and the number of victims, some of whom were Muslims working in the Twin Towers. Beirut and Baghdad are invoked as much to call to mind the victimhood of Arabs and Muslims as to insist on European-American culpability in past and present. Hammad expresses her grief as well as her own local patriotism welling up in the wake of the attacks, as she 'never felt less American and more new yorker-particularly brooklyn'.