The Truths We Cannot Handle, The Terrorists We Cannot Disarm

Black Feminist Classics Series #1 -- June Jordan

Earlier this month, we marked 20 years since the attacks of September 11th. Arguably, it is the last time that our country acknowledged its vulnerability, and set about processing its grief. Did we do this in a healthy manner? In the main, No. Yes, every year including this one there were public remembrances, a reciting of the names of those we lost in the Twin Towers, at the Pentagon, and at Shanksville.

And then what we most wanted, what all of most want after the catastrophic event happens, is to feel safe and in control. Those of us who have experienced intense personal traumas know this feeling of hypervigilance, this never-ending need to anticipate the worst, to prepare for it, to steel oneself against it.

As statecraft goes, national trauma-induced anxiety became the pretext for the gargantuan expansion of our security apparatus, allowing endless obtrusions and proscriptions of our privacy. Today we hate that our phones listen to us, and track us around the internet. But daily we risk it all for the small comfort of knowing that if somebody always knows where we are and where we have been, we can never be lost.

(Where are we exactly? I feel lost.)

And then to re-insert control, to affirm the righteous of our rage, to feel powerful again, we identified an enemy and went to war.

In college, a friend, a Blasian pre-med major, once said to me that this was a curious thing about Western vs. Eastern medicine. Eastern medicine, she mentioned, tended to approach bodies as needing to find a fine balance of self, nutrients, and energies, and to approach problems as evidence that these things are out of balance. But in Western medicine, we understood health and disease centered around protecting our bodies from foreign invaders that breached the corporeal perimeter, wreaking all kinds of havoc. We tend to treat viruses, bacterial infections, and cancers — germs— in just this way — as the devastating, genocidal colonial invaders the early settlers were, come to decimate our indigenous environs. And we invent ever more sophisticated tools of medical warcraft to detect and devastate these invaders.

This is the story that we have told ourselves about vaccines for ever. That they are a ready nuclear force with sophisticated radar detection, able to aid our bodies in warding off and destroying foreign enemies.

But somehow for large swaths of the population, even people of color populations who are used to being the targets of U.S. wars, the narrative of protecting ourselves against invaders has not been working.

I don’t think our failure to go to war against this virus is about the fog of war or battle fatigue. I wish it were true, that we were tired of going to war. Because in that space, the one where — exhausted — we assessed the situation and recognized that how we fight and what we fight, has for the most part been wrong, it might inspire a bit of epistemological magnanimity — a return to the belief, that if we but knew better, we would assuredly do better.

The in/ability to reach this conclusion stares us in the face. Just so we do not forget: Not a month ago, we slinked home from Afghanistan, dejected, ourselves having been spoiled — soiled — by endless war. And to date, more than 650,000 Americans, 1 in every 500 of us, have died of COVID-19.

Why don’t we know better yet?

Of late, I have tried to find the ground beneath me — shifting as it has by the magnitude of the quake, (650,000 souls departed is a face-cracking yawn in the earth), this riptide of lost lives— by revisiting essays by Black feminists whose work we don’t talk about enough.

June Jordan and all her collections of essays plus a few of her collections of poetry have been at the top of my reading pile for more than a year. Her books —Civil Wars, Technical Difficulties, and On Call, have been strewn about my place, inserting themselves into my conversation, often without warning. I am learning to embrace my ancestors when they show up, to welcome them. Perhaps I leave the books open, lying around, letting Ms. June know she is welcome here anytime.

I purchased Some of Us Did Not Die, Jordan’s last collection of essays, published just after she died in 2002. Many of the essays are contained in previous volumes, but this collection and its title were inspired by and included the public writing and thinking Jordan did just after September 11th, 2001. “Some of us did not die” on September 11th, “we’re still here,” reads one of her poems, contained in a speech she gave at Barnard, that following November.

The question lingers: what will we do with this continuing gift of presence?

So many around us are dying, as many of sit home, dejected, spoiled by the one war we could fight and win, helping to make the world safer, but simply refusing to do with any level of collective will or efficacy.

And it was in revisiting another post-September 11th essay from Jordan that helped me to make sense of why, having been faced with a war of the self, a moment when the narrative that has shaped absolutely everything about what it means to be American — that there is the world, and the rest of us; that we are the global I, and everyone else is a global other; that having finally alighted upon an enemy that would fit this narrative of self — we are wholly impotent.

Jordan wrote,

“We, Americans, must not allow ourselves to become what we abhor: a terrorist force, furiously striking out at the known and the unknown poor peoples of Central Asia and the Middle East. We must not permit ourselves to act as terrorist people!”

But it is the penultimate sentence of this Black feminist jeremiad “Do You Do Well to Be Angry?,” written on 9/25/2001, that I sit with today:

“Sometimes, I am the terrorist I must disarm.”

It is this truth that so many of us cannot handle. Our inability to confront the terrorist that lives inside all of us, made us destructive in Afghanistan, robbing us even of pyrrhic victory, and its internecine impacts will continue to overwhelm our hospitals, saddle our children with sickness, and leave us bereft with grief.

How will we cope this time?