Welcome back everyone,

I hope everyone has had a nice break over the holidays and truly treated them selves to well deserved treats. With a new year comes a new set of narratives and historical contexts to analyze trauma. The reference point in which we are working from this term is the war on terror, and we begin this very contemporary narrative of trauma from its most infamous catalyst, being the attacks of September 11th. As we could all see on the first day of class, we all had something to say, a story of where we were, a story of how the communities around us reacted and how we feel about the attack on the world trade centres currently. All of this aside, as a class we have been learning how nefarious and truly tragic trauma can be reflected in literature, even when words can neither quantify nor qualify the haunting feelings that linger.

We have been reading “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” which tells the story of a boy searching for a lock to a key that his dad left him after perishing in one of the World Trade Centre. As a class, we unanimously wrote about this book despite all of the other readings we could have written on last semester. As a large group of people completed a textual analysis about the purpose and implications of the book a small minority looked at the still present fear culture and Islamophobia that manifested after the 911 attacks.

Fellow classmate Devon Coady talks about fear after 9/11 in a general context but discusses how the attacks and more predominately the fear after those attacks affected her life. Devon’s mom is a flight attendant. For Devon, having a mom who flew around the world was “cool” and a source of “pride” for her, however, after the attacks of 911 in which planes were used to strike down iconic building across the United States, her moms career suddenly became a source of worry for the family. Her “brothers clearly worry” and father is “adamant about her mom calling him once she lands.” It seems as though for Devon the attacks added on a new dimension of fear to her mothers career, but a fear that does not belong in our society or her family, a fear that has no place in determining her life actions. For Devon she sees fear as something that “limits our actions and segregate us from the world.”

Moving deeper into fear, Naima Mansuri starts us off with a truly brilliant definition of Islamophobia as she states that Islamophobia is not just the outward of hatred of Muslim people but can also serve as an internalized fear of everyday Muslims. She goes on to say that its spectrum ranges from every “Demand of Donald Trump… to every look that a brown person receives no matter where he is.” Naima then discusses a very personal account about how Islamophobia has affected her. Naima describes an episode where her cousin faced blatant Islamophobia in Canada. In his workplace he was forced to stop his work after a fellow employee told superiors that he thought he had seen a bomb in her cousins pocket. He was asked to leave by this man and “Go back to [his] county,” despite being born in Canada. Which surprised me even more was what he said after, “Canada has and always will be a white country first and foremost, no matter how many Syrian refugees Justin fucking Trudeau lets in.” While acknowledging much social progression in recent year, Naima calls for more social progressive thinking and understanding to minorities. With this she rejects the fear mongering that has developed in contemporary times.

Robert Bernheim also discusses Islamophobia that has developed since September 11th. Robert goes into incredible depth regarding the trends of attitudes towards Muslim people since the attacks on 911 and ultimately inquires if “The spread of Islamophobia is also aided by the constant reoccurrence of terrorist attacks from Muslims in the “global north.” I am extremely interested in his questioning of recent attacks and growing Islamophobia because I think there is a discussion there. He offers some valid evidence of the only the most recent attacks in the Western world. Robert mentions the Bataclan and widespread attack on Paris and the mass sexual assault committed by mainly Arab asylum seekers. Besides this, Robert also touches on the fact the minority does not represent the whole. He shows that like every socially constructed group have radical dissidents that do act out to support their own rhetoric. Like the KKK in Christianity and Buddhist extremists in Myanmar, every group has factions that by no means represent the values of the whole. Ultimately, Robert concludes on a very similar note to Devon and Naima, saying that the “dehumanization of the worlds second largest religion is unjustified as only a small portion of the religion belongs to radical groups such as Al-Qaeda or ISIS,” and “that news organizations the world over [are] only showing the bad side of the religion people have a very negative view towards.”

These fellow peers of ours all agree to some extent that fear can be debilitating and contradictory to the values in which our society is built on. From what I have seen throughout the academic year, as a class I believe that our whole entire CAP stream can agree that fear of the other and fear of the enemy ultimately hurts us more than them and fear offers no benefit to the fabric of an ever increasing global society. I do want to however, question these bloggers and our whole class whether fear has a role in our future? Is and can there be a balance between fear and trust? And what is stopping us from living in a world where we fear isn’t inflated around certain topics. More and more I do not think it is enough to blame Donald Trump and the media for fear.

All the best GC2,

Michael Twamley