This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, a series of poems written by Juliana Spahr, is about 9/11 and the differences and similarities in how it has had effects on people around the world. The poems are split noticeably based on when they were written. The first section is entitled “poem written after september 11/2001,” and the second section, “poems written from november 30/2002 to march 27/2003.” This divide separates Spahr’s initial experiences of the terrorist attacks that occurred on 9/11/01 from her thoughts on the events later on, as well as her reflection on the United States’ invasion of Iraq.

Spahr’s first poem explores the connection between all people. Our bodies are made up of the same organs and operate in the same ways. We all, as human beings, breathe the same air in and out. We all share the same space. She wrote the first poem in Brooklyn, New York, a place where people were physically effected by the effects of 9/11. The toxic chemicals that were released into the air upon the impacts of the planes into the Twin Towers physically effected all of New York’s residents: even with all their differences and diversity in values, views and lifestyles, all people living in New York City were effected by the air that they all breathed in and out of their lungs.

When I lived in New York in 2013, I worked in a cafe with a back door to the kitchen that slammed loudly whenever someone walked through it. One night when I was working the late shift, a disgruntled neighbor to the cafe came in and informed me that she needed to speak to the owner of the establishment, as the slamming door was putting her on edge every time an employee went down to the kitchen. She told me that she had lived through 9/11 and that she suffered from PTSD. After promising her that I would speak to the owner on her behalf and that we would make an effort to close the door quietly, she went back home. After her departure, a fellow employee commented that we had all lived through 9/11 and that if the sound of a slamming door bothered her, she shouldn’t be living in noisy Manhattan. She was appalled that the woman had “pulled the 9/11 card.”

Immediately following 9/11 occurred, a sense of community within New York as well as the United States formed. I remember learning in a friend’s Sunday school class about how people banded together and that a lot of kindness came from 9/11 as a result of people’s ability to relate to each others’ experience, as well as a need for support. New Yorkers were there for each other in their losses. The U.S. as a whole banded together in their fear and and grief in order to become stronger. However, the U.S. as a country isolated itself. Instead of opening up and relating with other countries, the U.S. separated itself from other countries, upped its security and planned counter-attacks.

America’s reaction to 9/11 exemplifies the dichotomy of “we” and “others” that is discussed in Judith Butler’s book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, and has been so throughly explored in many of my classmates blogs. New York, and the U.S. as a whole opened up their “we” to include all New Yorkers and all Americans, but in doing so, also made their “others” more distinct and to include more people. As time has progressed, the people of New York have relapsed into their old ways of the self-centered isolation. On a day to day basis, I would argue that our “we” usually only includes those that we have positive interactions with. The woman who came in to the cafe where I worked to complain about the noise wasn’t taking into account the fact that 9/11 was something that had effected all New Yorkers, all Americans, and all those that breathe, as Spahr argues. She had re-isolated herself, and her “others” had grown to include those of us working in the cafe. Additionally, my rather insensitive co-worker, instead of being understanding and accepting the woman into her “we”, excluded her. The two were unable to connect with each other over the traumatic events that they had both experienced, and much like the U.S., shut down and isolated themselves. Though we are all connected as humans, we often choose not to expand our “we” and connect with strangers unless we are forced to by extreme conditions, such as 9/11.

References:

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Berkley: University of California Press, 2005. Print.

Our discussion about Poems from Guantanamo in the past couple weeks made me think about Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in a way I never had before. I didn’t really know that much about Guantanamo Bay, other than that they torture people there and that I think that is wrong. I never considered that the people there might be innocent, that they might have families or that they might only be children. I distanced myself from the unpleasant thoughts that I associated with Guantanamo Bay, and never took the time to think of the prisoners there as people. I didn’t think of them as inhuman, I just didn’t really think of them as people with lives outside of their link with the word ‘terrorist.’

In Poems from Guantanamo, each poet has a biography prefacing their poems, illuminating their circumstances. These biographies create an obvious bias favoring the prisoners, painting them in a favorable light. Though this can be seen as an exaggeration, trying to convince the reader that the detainees are all innocent, I would like to argue that the extent to which all of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay are portrayed as evil is most likely also an exaggeration. There were at one time fourteen year old boys at Guantanamo Bay: it seems unreasonable to me to pin crimes of terrorism on children. Though not all of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were found to be guilty, some of them have been, and this book of poems helps us to realize that even if the authors of the poems are evil, they are still humans.

In Abdullah Thani Farris Al Anazi’s biography, he is quoted: “In the world of international courts, the person is innocent until proven guilty. Why, here, is the person guilty until proven innocent?” I don’t fully understand how these men can be held in prison without being convicted of any crime and the policies that keep this from being wildly illegal. Though I understand that when it comes to matters of national security, the US is very careful, which may be necessary, it is not necessary to remove even basic human rights from people who have not even been proven guilty. As Judith Butler explores in her book Frames of War: when is life grievable?, we are all vulnerable to each other. The detainees at Guantanamo Bay are held in the utmost state of vulnerability. They have no means of defending their vulnerability. It can be argued that the crimes some of these men committed were inhumanly heinous. This can be said to justify the fact that the men at Guantanamo Bay are made so vulnerable that they are hardly even human. However, the fact that I didn’t even think of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay as human before I read these poems shows that these men are criminalized and dehumanized to an extreme. The media doesn’t even allow people to see these people as humans. These men are not even given the opportunity to defend their vulnerability or innocence or to be seen as human, and this, in my opinion, is not right.

Works Cited:

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: when is life grievable? New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Falkoff, Marc. Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007. Print.