Standing in the Shadow of No Towers

Standing in the Shadow of No Towers The struggle for immigrant rights and lives after 9/11 defined a generation of South Asian art and activism, even if it felt at times like we were trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. By August, the Tribeca nightclub Vinyl had gone into a Peter Gatien-era meltdown. Time magazine ran a dramatic cover story the year prior (“What Ecstasy Does to Your Brain”) and the dancefloor had posters warning about plainclothes sting ops. There was still talcum powder on the floor for dancing, but euphoric substances had vanished. In all my Sundays of dancing at Vinyl, I had never thought of how close it was to the Twin Towers — until that Tuesday in September when, by nightfall, the pavement outside was stacked with plastic bags of socks, t-shirts, and sweatpants we had collected for tower survivors who were expected to be pulled out “any moment now.” We waited until midnight, and by then it was clear — no one got out alive. HBO Television, where I worked at the time, had a satellite office downtown. When I came out of the subway at Broadway-Lafayette, Amin Miah, the corner fruitseller who usually gave me the “best” banana, started saying in a frenzy, “Duita biman marse, ami dekhsi” (“two planes hit, I saw it” in Bangla). I spoke to him for a moment, looked down Broadway at the smoke plumes, and started walking to the office. It was 9:15am, I knew I was late for the staff meeting preparation, and most people on the street were also trying to get to work. I called Zahed Amanullah, co-editor of Altmuslim, because I figured that as a Berkeley resident, he may not know the news yet. His cellphone went to voicemail; later I learned he was in Cuba visiting José Marti’s grave when the tour guide said, “Something terrible — el cataclismo — has happened, we have to get back to the hotel.” HBO’s Interactive Ventures head, Kevin Dowdell, did his best to pass on a semblance of “normal.” He insisted the staff meeting would start on time, at 10am. Then the South Tower collapsed. We watched it through the window, and then everything started happening in slow motion. Everyone was trying to call family, school, and of course all the phone lines were jammed shut (later we learned the shutdown was actually protocol to keep lines free for emergency communication). My girlfriend at the time, artist Reiko Yamamoto, had no cell phone — most people didn’t, it was still 2001 — and I had no way to reach her, so I biked down to Tribeca to find her. As crowds of businesspeople ran up the street, covered in a white powder, I wondered why nobody was stopping me. Nobody knows what to do anymore, I thought. I arrived at Chambers Street and of course the office had been evacuated already — Tribeca was in the blast radius of the towers, so residents had the sense to shut offices and leave. It was another four hours before Reiko made it home. The first thing I said to her was, “Please, you have to get a cell phone.” It’s likely a lot of people got over their aversion to the still-novel device that day. The next week, I met comrades from South Asian activist organizations Youth Solidarity Summer (YSS) and Taxi Workers Alliance (TWA) outside a vigil. This was organized by Sreenath Sreenivasan of South Asian Journalists Association (SAJA) for a Sikh man who had been a victim of a hate-crime attack in the hours after 9/11. I had a tiny American flag attached to my bike handlebars. Filmmaker Dina Hossain had just finished work on a documentary about Leonard Bernstein for PBS and had started work on a new project on Islam in the world. The timing was absolutely eerie and she was hyper-aware of the loop of history. “Where did you get that flag?” she asked. “Somebody gave it to me, we are all mourning together,” I replied. Dina paused, looked at me, and said, “You will understand that you and I are not going to be allowed to be part of that ‘we,’ not anymore.” Some had longer memories. My cousin Hassan remembered being attacked in 1979 in California as an “Eye-ranian” as the hostage crisis dragged out. Poet Saba Waheed, who had met us at the Vinyl club 9/11 relief point, went home and wrote “when they started bombing…” — memories of the first Gulf War. She ended with “oh no, not again.” I thought she was being extreme. People were in shock, but why would they “nuke Eye-raq”? It took a few days for us to learn that there had been several Bangladeshi waiters working at the Windows on the World restaurant in the first tower. In the citadel of capital, theirs were among the many working-class deaths. The media asked for names, biographies, photos. I understood, at that moment, that “Bangladeshi” had been interpellated as “Muslim.” Those stories of Muslim victims of 9/11 became suddenly essential as the beatings of taxi drivers and shop owners continued. In response, we built up the all-American narrative of model minorities. When scholar Mahmood Mamdani published Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror three years later, I had the shock of recognition; I too had been one of those apologetic, get-along-go-along Muslims. We naively thought if we were polite in the face of Islamophobia, it would wilt. Our generation’s approach was to appeal to those in power — to ask, “allow us to go about life in peace.” Thankfully, Mamdani’s son, Zohran, had other ideas. Instead of appealing to the power structure, he worked his way up to being in a position to change the system itself. I lived in Hell’s Kitchen and was sufficiently freaked out by the idea of “another attack” to want to move out of Manhattan. The landlord was thrilled at the chance to raise the rent. He returned my deposit with alacrity. The Russian bouncer at the strip club next door looked at my moving truck and waved at me. He had a scar down his right eye and had “seen it all.” I wondered if he was a veteran of the Chechen wars. On the drive to the Brooklyn storage space, I thought of the magazine profiles that talked about presidents finding God. Surely God was merciful; all the Abrahamic faiths made the same claim. HBO had sponsored my green card application, and the card arrived in the mail in April 2001. It was an innocuous white envelope, and at first I thought it was a credit card offer from Burlington, Vermont. When I realized what it was, I called my immigration lawyer and asked if I could freely go to protests now (the Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo cases had thrown New York into a turmoil of protests against the police). My Oberlin College roommate, Saif, was not so lucky. His green card due date was the end of the year. After September 2001, all such applications were ensnared in the dreaded loop of the security check. Saif had the bad luck of having an extremely common Muslim-Bangladeshi surname. You can imagine how that security check went. His H-1B visa timing ran out, and he returned to Bangladesh to work in the business sector. In a way, many countries benefited from this “reverse brain drain” as many immigrants got fed up with these visa mazes and returned home. Working-class migrants did not have those options, and large extended networks back home often depended on the money they sent back. So by and large they stayed, despite the mass arrests on Coney Island Avenue, or crossed into Canada.