WHOSE WAR The Color of Terror
By John Edgar Wideman

Published in the March Harpers Magazine

Nobody asked me, but I need to say what I'm thinking in this new year in New York City, five months after the Twin Towers burned, after long stretches of fall weather eerily close to perfect-clear blue skies, shirt-sleeve warmth-through December, a bizarre hesitation, as if nature couldn't get on with its life and cycle to the next season, the city enclosed in a fragile, bell-jar calm till shattered by a siren, a plane's roar overhead.

I grew up in Homewood, an African-American community in Pittsburgh where people passing in the street might not have known each other's names but we knew something about each other's stories, so we always exchanged a greeting. We greeted each other because it feels good but also because we share the burden of racism, understand how it hurts, scars, deforms, but yes, it can be survived, and here we are, living proof meeting on the ground zero of a neighborhood street. The burning and collapse of the World Trade Center has conferred a similar sort of immediate intimacy upon all Americans. We've had the good luck to survive something awful, hut do we truly understand, as Homewood people are disciplined to understand by the continuing presence of racism, that it ain't over yet. There's the next precarious step, and the next down the street, and to survive we must attend to the facts of division as well as the healing wish for solidarity.

Staring up at a vast, seamless blue sky, it's hard to reckon what's missing. The city shrinks in scale as the dome of sky endlessly recedes. Piles of steel and concrete are whims, the vexed arc of the city's history a moment lasting no longer than the lives of victims consumed in the burning towers. The lives lost mirror our own fragility and vulnerability, our unpredictable passage through the mysterious flow of time that eternally surrounds us, buoys us, drowns us. Ourselves the glass where we look for the faces of those who have disappeared, those we can no longer touch, where we find them looking back at us, terrified, terrifying.

A few moments ago I was a man standing at a window, nine stories up in an apartment building on the Lower East Side of New York, staring out at a building about a hundred yards away, more or less identical to his, wondering why he can't finish a piece of writing that for days had felt frustratingly close to being complete, then not even begun. Wondering why anybody, no matter how hard they'd plugged away at articulating their little piece of the puzzle, would want to throw more words on a pile so high the thing to be written about has disappeared. A man with the bright idea that he might call his work in progress "A speech to be performed because no one's listening." Like singing in the shower: no one hears you, but don't people sing their hearts out anyway, because the singing, the act itself, is also a listening to itself, so why not do your best to please yourself.

And the man standing at the window retracts his long arms from the top of the upper pane he's lowered to rest on as he stares. Then all of him retracts. Picture him standing a few moments ago where there's emptiness now. Picture him rising from a couch where he'd been stretched out, his back cushioned against the couch's arm, then rising and walking to the window. Now visualize the film running backward, the special effect of him sucked back like red wine spilled from the lip of a jug returning to fill the jug's belly, him restored exactly, legs stretched out, back against the couch's cushioned arm. Because that's who I am. What I'm doing and did. I'm the same man, a bit older now, but still a man like him, restless, worried, trying to fashion some tolerable response with words to a situation so collapsed, so asphyxiated by words, words, it's an abomination, an affront to dead people, to toss any more words on the ruins of what happened to them.

I, too, return to the couch, return also to the thought of a person alone singing in a shower. A sad thought, because all writing pretends to be something it's not, something it can't be: something or someone other, but sooner or later the writing will be snuffed back into its jug, back where I am, a writer a step, maybe two, behind my lemming words scuffling over the edge of the abyss.

I'm sorry. I'm an American of African descent, and I can't applaud my president for doing unto foreign others what he's inflicted on me and mine. Even if he calls it ole-time religion. Even if he tells me all good Americans have nothing to fear but fear itself and promises he's gonna ride over there and kick fear's ass real good, so I don't need to worry about anything, just let him handle it his way, relax and enjoy the show on TV, pay attention to each breath I take and be careful whose letters I open and listen up for the high alerts from the high-alert guy and gwan and do something nice for a Muslim neighbor this week. Plus, be patient. Don't expect too much too soon. These things take time. Their own good time. You know. The sweet by-and-by. Trust me.

I'm sorry. It all sounds too familiar. I've heard the thunder, seen the flash of his terrible swift sword before. I wish I could be the best kind of American. Not doubt his promises. Not raise his ire. I've felt his pointy boots in my butt before. But this time I can't be Tonto to his Lone Ranger. Amos to his Andy. Tambo to his Bones. Stepin to his Fetchit. I'm sorry. It's too late. I can't be as good an American as he's telling me to be. You know what I'm saying. I must be real. Hear what I'm saying. We ain't going nowhere, as the boys in the hood be saying. Nowhere. If you promote all the surviving Afghans to the status of honorary Americans, Mr. President, where exactly on the bus does that leave me. When do I get paid. When can I expect my invitation to the ranch. I hear Mr. Putin's wearing jingle-jangle silver spurs around his dacha. Heard you fixed him up with an eight-figure advance on his memoirs. Is it true he's iced up to be the Marlboro man after he retires from Russia. Anything left under the table for me. And mine.

Like all my fellow countrymen and -women, even the ones who won't admit it, the ones who choose to think of themselves as not implicated, who maintain what James Baldwin called "a willed innocence," even the ones just off boats from Russia, Dominica, Thailand, Ireland, I am an heir to centuries of legal apartheid and must negotiate daily, with just about every step I take, the foul muck of unfulfilled promises, the apparent and not so apparent effects of racism that continue to plague America (and, do I need to add, plague the rest of the Alliance as well). It's complicated muck, muck that doesn't seem to dirty Colin Powell or Oprah or Michael Jordan or the black engineer in your firm who received a bigger raise than all her white colleagues, muck so thick it obscures the presence of millions of underclass African Americans living below the poverty line, hides from public concern legions df young people of color wasting away in prison. How can I support a president whose rhetoric both denies and worsens the muck when he pitches his crusade against terror as a holy war, a war of good against evil, forces of light versus forces of darkness, a summons to arms that for colored folks chillingly echoes and resuscitates the Manichaean dualism of racism.

I remain puzzled by the shock and surprise nonblack Americans express when confronted by what they deem my "anger" (most would accept the friendly amendment of "rage" or "bitterness" inside the quotes). Did I see in their eyes a similar shock and surprise on September 11. Is it truly news that some people's bad times (slavery, colonial subjugation, racial oppression, despair) have underwritten other people's good times (prosperity, luxury, imperial domination, complacency). News that a systematic pattern of gross inequities still has not been corrected and that those who suffer them are desperate (angry, bitter, enraged) for change.

For months an acrid pall of smoke rose from smoldering ruins, and now a smokescreen of terror hovers, terror as the enemy, terror as the problem, terror as the excuse for denying and unleashing the darkness within ourselves.

To upstage and camouflage a real war at home the threat of terror is being employed to justify a phony war in Afghanistan. A phony war because it's being pitched to the world as righteous retaliation, as self-defense after a wicked, unwarranted sucker punch when in fact the terrible September 11 attack as well as the present military incursion into Afghanistan are episodes in a long-standing vicious competition-buses bombed in Israel, helicopters strafing Palestinian homes, economic sanctions blocking the flow of food and medicine for Iraq, no-fly zones, Desert Storms, and embassy bombings-for oil and geopolitical leverage in the Middle East.

A phony war that the press, in shameless collusion with the military, exploits daily as newsy entertainment, a self-promoting concoction of fiction, fact, propaganda, and melodrama designed to keep the public tuned in, uninformed, distracted, convinced a real war is taking place.

A phony war because its stated objective-eradicating terrorism-is impossible and serves to mask unstated, alarmingly open-ended goals, a kind of fishing expedition that provides an opportunity for America to display its intimidating arsenal and test its allies' loyalty, license them to crush internal dissent.

A phony war, finally, because it's not waged to defend America from an external foe but to homogenize and coerce its citizens under a flag of rabid nationalism.

The Afghan campaign reflects a global struggle but also reveals a crisis inside America-the attempt to construct on these shores a society willing to sacrifice democracy and individual autonomy for the promise of material security, the exchange of principles for goods and services. A society willing to trade the tumultuous uncertainty generated by a government dedicated to serving the interests of many different, unequal kinds of citizens for the certainty of a government responsive to a privileged few and their self-serving, single-minded, ubiquitous, thus invisible, ideology: profit. Such a government of the few is fabricating new versions of freedom. Freedom to exploit race, class, and gender inequities without guilt or accountability; freedom to drown in ignorance while flooded by information; freedom to be plundered by corporations. Freedom to drug ourselves and subject our children's minds to the addictive mix of fantasy and propaganda, the nonstop ads that pass for a culture.

A phony war but also a real war, because as it bumbles and rumbles along people are dying and because like all wars it's a sign of failure and chaos. When we revert to the final solution of kill or be killed, all warring parties in the name of clan tribe nation religion violate the first law of civilization-that human life is precious. In this general collapse, one of the first victims is language. Words are deployed as weapons to identify, stigmatize, eliminate, the enemy. One side boasts of inflicting casualties, excoriates the other side as cowards and murderers. One side calls civilians it kills collateral damage, labels civilian deaths by its opponents terrorism.

From their initial appearance in English to describe the bloody dismantling of royal authority during the French Revolution (Burke's "thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists . . . are let loose on the people") the words terror and terrorist have signified godless savagery. Other definitions- government by a system of coercive intimidation-have almost entirely disappeared. Seldom if ever perceived neutrally as a tool, a set of practices and tactics for winning a conflict, terror instead is understood as pure evil. Terror and terrorists in this Manichaean scheme are excluded even from the problematic dignity of conventional warfare.

One side's use of terrorist to describe the other is never the result of a reasoned exchange between antagonists. It's a refusal of dialogue, a negation of the other. The designation terrorist is produced by the one-way gaze of power. Only one point of view, one vision, one story, is necessary and permissible, since what defines the gaze of power is its absolute, unquestionable authority.

To label an enemy a terrorist confers the same invisibility a colonist's gaze confers upon the native. Dismissing the possibility that the native can look back at you just as you are looking at him is a first step toward blinding him and ultimately rendering him or her invisible. Once a slave or colonized narive is imagined as invisible, the business of owning him, occupying and exploiting his land, becomes more efficient, pleasant.

A state proclaiming itself besieged by terrorists asserts its total innocence, cites the unreasonableness, the outrageousness, of the assaults upon it. A holy war may be launched to root out terrorism, but its form must be a punitive crusade, an angry god's vengeance exacted upon sinners, since no proper war can exist when there is no recognition of the other's list of grievances, no awareness of the relentless dynamic binding the powerful and powerless. Perhaps that's why the monumental collapsing of the Towers delivered such a shocking double dose of reality to Americans-yes, a war's been raging and yes, here's astounding proof we may have already lost it. It's as if one brick snatched away, one sledgehammer blow, demolished our Berlin Wall.

Regimes resisting change dismiss challenges to their authority by branding them terrorist provocations. In the long bloody struggles that often follow, civil protests, car bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, guerrilla warfare in the mountains, full-scale conventional military engagements, blur one into the other. At first the media duly reports on the frightening depredations of terrorists-Algerian terror, Mau Mau terror, Palestinian terror, Israeli terror, South African terror-then bears witness as fighters from the Mau Mau, the Palmach, the P.L.O., emerge to become leaders of new states. George Washington, inaugurated as America's first president only a few blocks from the ruins of the World Trade Center, would have been branded a terrorist if the word had been invented in 1775. Clearly not all terrorists become prime ministers or presidents, but if and when they do they rewrite the history of their struggle to attain legitimacy. This turnabout clarifies the relationship between power and terror. Terrorists are those who have no official standing, no gaze, no voice in the established order, those determined by all means possible to usurp power in order to be seen and heard. Some former terrorists survive to accomplish precisely that. Others survive long enough to decry and denounce the terrorist threat nibbling at the edges of their own regime.

The destruction of the World Trade Center was a criminal act, the loss of life an unforgivable consequence, but it would be a crime of another order, with an even greater destructive potential, to allow the evocation of the word terror to descend like a veil over the event, to rob us of the opportunity to see ourselves as others see us.

The terror that arises from fear of loss, fear of pain, death, annihilation, prostrates us because it's both rational and irrational. Rational because our sense of the world's uncertainty is accurate. Rational because reason confirms the difference between what is knowable and unknowable, warns us that in certain situations we can expect no answers, no help. We are alone. Irrational because that's all we have left when reason abandons us. Our naked emotions, our overwhelmed smallness.

Terror thrives in the hour of the wolf, the hour of Gestapo raids on Jewish ghettos, of blue-coated cavalry charges on Native-American villages. Those predawn hours when most of us are born or die, the hour when cops smash through doors to crack down on drugs or on dissidents, the hour of transition when sleep has transported the body furthest from its waking state, when our ability to distinguish dream from not-dream weakens. Terror manifests itself at this primal juncture between sleep and waking because there we are eternally children, outside time, beyond the protections and consolations of society, prey to fear of the dark.

To a child alone, startled from sleep by a siren, the hulking bear silhouetted in the middle of the dark room is real. The child may remember being assured that no bears live on the Lower East Side of New York, may know his parents' bed is just down the hall, may even recall tossing his bulky down parka over the back of the chair instead of hanging it neatly in the closet like he's been told a million times to do, None of this helps, because reason has deserted him. Even if things get better when his mother knocks and calls him for breakfast, the darkness has been branded once again, indelibly, by agonizing, demoralizing fear, by a return to stark terror.

For those who don't lose a child's knack for perceiving the aural archaeology within the sound of words, words carry forward fragments, sound bites that reveal a word's history, its layered onomatopoeic sources, its multiplicity of shadowed meanings. Terror embeds a grab bag of unsettling echoes: tear (as in rip) (as in run fast), terra (earth, ground, grave, dirt, unfamiliar turf), err (mistake), air (terra firma's opposite element), eerie (strange, unnatural), error (of our ways), roar-r-r (beasts, machines, parents, gods). Of course any word's repertoire is arbitrary and precise, but that's also the point, the power of puns, double entendre, words migrating among languages, Freudian slips, Lacan's "breaks," all calling attention to the unconscious, archaic intentionality buried in the words.

But the word terror also incarcerates. Like the child pinned to its bed, not moving a muscle for fear it will arouse the bear, we're immobilized, paralyzed by terror. Dreading what we might discover, we resist investigating terror's source. Terror feeds on ignorance, confines us to our inflamed, tortured imaginings. If we forget that terror, like evil, resides in us, is spawned by us no matter what name we give it, then it makes good sense to march off and destroy the enemy. But we own terror. We can't off-load it onto the back of some hooded, barbaric, shadowy other. Someone we can root out of his cave and annihilate. However, we continue to be seduced by the idea that we might be able to cleanse ourselves of terror, accomplish a final resolution of our indeterminate nature. But even if we could achieve freedom from terror, what would we gain by such a radical reconfiguration of what constitutes being human. What kind of new world order would erase the terror we're born with, the terror we chip away at but never entirely remove. What system could anticipate, translate, or diffuse the abiding principle of uncertainty governing the cosmos. Systems that promise a world based on imperishable, impregnable truth deliver societies of truncated imagination, of history and appetite denied, versions of Eden where there is no dreaming, no rebellion, no Eros, where individuality is sacrificed for interchangeability, eternal entertainment, becalmed ego, mortality disguised as immortality by the absence of dread,

Power pales (turns white with terror-imagines its enemies black-invents race) when power confronts the inevitability of change. By promising to keep things as they are, promising to freeze out or squeeze out those not already secure within the safety net of privilege, Mr. Bush won (some say stole) an election. By launching a phony war he is managing to avoid the scrutiny a first-term, skin-of-its-teeth presidency deserves. Instead he's terrorizing Americans into believing that we require a wartime leader wielding unquestioned emergency powers. Beneath the drumbeat belligerence of his demands for national unity, if you listen you'll hear the bullying, the self-serving, the hollowness, of his appeals to patriotism. Listen carefully and you'll also hear what he's not saying: that we need, in a democracy full of contradictions and unresolved divisions, opposition voices.

Those who mount a challenge to established order are not the embodiment of evil. Horrifically bloody, criminal acts may blot the humanity of the perpetrators and stimulate terror in victims and survivors, but the ones who perpetuate such deeds are not the source of the terror within us. To call these people terrorists or evil, even to maintain our absolute distinction between victims and perpetrators, exercises the blind, one-way gaze of power, perpetuates the reign of the irrational and supernatural, closes down the possibility that by speaking to one another we might formulate appropriate responses, even to the unthinkable.

Although trouble may always prevail, being human offers us a chance to experience moments when trouble doesn't rule, when trouble's not totally immune to compassion and reason, when we make choices, and try to better ourselves and make other lives better,

Is war a preferable alternative. If a child's afraid of the dark, do we solve the problem by buying her a gun.

John Edgar Wideman is a novelist and a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His latest book is Hoop Roots (Houghton Muffin).

For a review of Wideman's 1998 novel "Two Cities" by Walter Mosley go to: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10
/04/reviews/981004.04moslet.html