As we mark twenty years since the terrible events of September 11, 2001, this past week has been a time of remembrance and reflection for many of us. While reading a powerful piece in the Washington Post in which people share how that day changed their world views, I reflected on how in the weeks, months and years following 9/11, we librarians witnessed a shift in the reading interests of our patrons at the Library that seemed to me a ray of hope during a dark time.
Like everyone, my memories of the day itself are indelible. I recall how the word spread via (then newfangled) email around our Central library’s temporary facility – the current library was still just a big hole in the ground. How people gathered around hastily set up televisions at many of our branches, to watch in stunned silence as the day unfolded. And how over phones and in person, the questions flooded in: What was happening? Were we safe in Seattle? What could people do to help, and where should they send support? Why do they hate us?
After the initial shock wore off, requests started to pour in for novels, memoirs and histories centering the experiences and faith of Muslims around the world. Book lists were assembled and annotated, and displays jumped up overnight. True, there was also immediate interest in Joshua’s Hammer, a supposedly uncanny 2000 thriller in which Osama Bin Laden attacks Los Angeles after the U.S. accidentally kills his daughter — a “this time it’s personal” hook that hardly sheds light on the nature of terrorism — but most of our readers’ interests lay in a less simplistic direction.
Fiction readers snapped up copies of Hanan Shaykh’s Only in London, Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason, Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, Leila Aboulela’s The Translator, Assia Jabar’s So Vast the Prison, Makiya Kanan’s The Rock: A Tale of Seventh Century Jerusalem, and the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, among others. Karen Armstrong’s Islam: A Short History was also in high demand. Within months, publishers began to respond to this interest with a wave of fiction and non-fiction by Islamic authors from around the world, reaching its peak with Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini’s runaway 2003 bestseller The Kite Runner. Of course many powerful and thought-provoking books have since been published about 9/11 itself, but at that moment what impressed me most was how so many of our patrons actively sought out books that would further their understanding of and empathy with “the other.”
Since that time, I’ve seen wave after wave of this literary de-othering, as readers flock to our libraries to read about not just the facts surrounding complex societal issues, but underlying realities and lived experiences of the marginalized and misunderstood. Of course I know this didn’t really start with 9/11, going back at least as far as when the works of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe—the James Patterson of her day—fueled the fires of Abolitionism. But I was so grateful during a dark time that so easily leaned towards fear, paranoia and intolerance, to be able to serve and commune with readers as they pulled in the opposite direction, towards clarity and light.
~ Posted by David W.
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