Every year on September 11, New Yorkers pay tribute to the victims of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center — and to the wounds of the weeks and years after. That period was defined by grief, rebuilding efforts, and, almost immediately, a vicious campaign of Islamophobia and surveillance whose effects reshaped the world as they knew it. Iraqi-born artist Wafaa Bilal recalls, “I sensed at once that the comfort and security Americans had long taken for granted were gone.”
Bilal is one of several artists from Muslim, South Asian, and Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) communities whose lives were indelibly altered by the United States’s weaponization of the 9/11 attacks to pass the PATRIOT Act and justify the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Twenty-five years into “never forget,” Hyperallergic asked artists, curators, and culture workers to share personal and artistic reflections on how that day shaped their lives. These are their stories.
A note: Some contain references to violence and trauma, so please read with care. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, associate editor
Wafaa Bilal, artist
“When the second plane hit, I knew this was no accident, and I sensed at once that the comfort and security Americans had long taken for granted were gone. The images were not new to me. I had lived through the Iran–Iraq War, Desert Storm, and years in a conflict zone, and what I saw on the screen brought back memories I knew too well. My first instinct was to call hospitals and ask where I could donate blood. My deepest empathy was with the victims and their families, but as soon as it became clear who was behind the attacks, I knew a backlash against Muslim and Arab communities would follow. And it did. Walking through downtown Chicago, I was called ‘Bin Laden.’ Middle Easterners were afraid, and Muslim women feared going out with hijab.
I hoped the United States would respond by taking the moral high ground rather than letting fear determine its course. That did not happen. Our political leaders used 9/11 to justify multiple wars, including the invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attacks. In 2004, during the Iraq War, I lost my brother Haji. The architects of those wars fell into the very trap the attackers had set: allowing violence to breed more violence, fear to breed more fear, and division to deepen at precisely the moment another path might have been possible.”
Shahzia Sikander, artist
“In the aftermath of 9/11, Muslim and South Asian bodies were made newly legible through surveillance, suspicion, and fantasies of rescue. The figure of the “Muslim woman” became, with devastating efficiency, an alibi for war. I answered with ‘Pleasure Pillars.’ Its central head, an amalgamation of feminist thinkers and poets, crowned with ram’s horns, is built out of pleasure, sensuality, and confidence: against the paternalistic construction of Muslim women as anything fragile, anything waiting to be rescued. That head floats above torsos of Venus and Devata, and dancers drawn from Mughal and Rajput miniatures. I insist on not just the longevity of these visual traditions but of the women who carry them. I later added a fighter jet, not simply an image of war, but the collision of temporalities it produces: South Asian and Persianate visual culture, diasporic movement, gendered mythologies, and the inescapable present of imperial violence. As Gayatri Gopinath has written, ‘Its bodies stay fractured, composite, illegible, its histories spiraling and overlapping rather than moving in a straight line.’ What endures, 25 years on, is what she calls “the promiscuous intimacies of our shared pasts and presents.'”
