The Post-Post-9/11 World

One of my favorite spots in Bergen. In the field across
from Fantoft, there's a fountain with markers reaching
out from it showing the direction and distance from
different cities across the world.

Congratulations. We’re officially in the post-post-9/11 world.

At a Halloween party this week, my mind jumped out of my head and did a quick lap around the room before returning, completely blown. I had just seen a couple dressed up as the World Trade Center. They each wore cardboard boxes with windows drawn on, and had half a plane coming out of their fronts.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate a good bit of irreverence as much as the next person. I chuckled over the shoe-attack on Bush, and can cock my head to stare at Piss Christ with plenty of aesthetic curiosity. From the time I could write, parodies and lampoons poured out of my pen. But this touched the raw. And surprised me by doing so.

In recent years, I think of September 11^th less as a tragedy, and more as a paradigm shift. When it happened, it was horrible. I remember my seventh grade brain performing the following contortion: oh good, now America will understand the unbelievable fear and sorrow that Israel has been living with for years. Since then, I’ve been exposed to so much discussion of 9/11’s use as an excuse for oil-greedy grabs in Iraq and government surveillance and fuel of Islamaphobia, that it seems more a political event than an anniversary of death. Yet the Norwegian couple who thought it would be a good idea to dress up as this murder of thousands shocked me back into feeling.

I understand that ten years is a long time to some people (it’s true that my sense of historic time is so distorted that every summer I fast for the destruction of the temple 2000 years ago). But it is not so long that people are not still mourning their friends and family. I wanted nothing more than to walk up to the couple and sock them one with, “I didn’t dress up like Uttøya. You keep your hands off 9/11.” Which would have been at least as tasteless and horrid as their costumes. So instead I walked home, and opened the door to a pair of adorable trick-or-treaters with an enormous bucket of candy and change. I added a couple of quarters to their loot and shooed them back out into the scary world.

In my masters literature class the other day, the prof inadvertently raised a fascinating question. He was talking about American literature departments’ inability to cope with “The Man Who Lived Underground” properly, and include it as often as they did sentimental favorites with much less political punch. I mused a bit out loud on the humor of accusing lit departments of failing to be properly liberal and leftist, and then realized I’d hit a poser. In America, the liberals gather in the literature departments. But it’s not so here. Where do the liberal Norwegians hang out? Then I realized it was an incredibly dumb question—they aren’t enough of a minority to need their own cozy haven. In fact, whereas in the States identity and race and class are constantly clashed over in classes and pretty much every student of the Humanities walks around with a little conscience on their shoulder telling them to rethink their words and labels 24/7, the Norwegian literature department seems curiously absent of class anger or gender anxiety or inquiries of sexual definition. Though I’m certain these students have all read about identity and can speak intelligently on it when required, it seems less immediate. Perhaps its simply their European reticence and manners against American bluster. Or perhaps it really is less relevant here. Americans are so worried about defining themselves, and Europeans may be more comfortable remaining in the pack. Plus, they all look kinda the same to an American ;-)
Jonas, what do you think?

Rosh Hashanah: Oslo Edition

Two of my high school students tried to come in the window of the classroom this morning. As they hung like pendulums with their bellies on the windowsill, heads in the classroom and legs still kicking ridiculously outside, I meant to tell them to go around and use the door properly, but I missed. Okay, actually I was laughing so hard I couldn’t summon up the words. Luckily Anita was there to direct them to the door. Isn’t it wonderful to teach high schoolers and be a part of their maturing process?

We read a short story about society and the individual. Man are these some smart kids; they each had articulate opinions about responsibility and ethics. I brought up bystander effect and it electrified them. They all had examples of their own or thought about what they would do in like situations. Most charged were A’s words about an individual’s responsibility to society. I felt, behind the usual desire to say something intelligent in class, an urgency to communicate that her friends’ deaths at Utøya had given her more responsibility, given every single person more responsibility, to their fellow human beings.

After class, she stayed to talk with me a bit. She’s very close with R, the girl in the class who survived Utøya, and R hung around on the edges of our conversation. I know she’s been having trouble returning to normal life. Finally, as A and I wound down our conversation, R wrote something in huge letters across the chalk board. What does it mean?, I asked her. It’s the political slogan for her party, she told me. Tell me more, I told her. Before that, she’d been like a child who desperately wanted to get my attention, but didn’t know how, and since I don’t speak Norwegian, I hadn’t been able to crack in. But now, as she and A told me about the party and their positions in it, I felt her open. I think, I hope, it helps… I know that regular teenage angst is greatly allayed by adult attention, and if the horrors that she went through can be relieved by any similar means, I’m going to ply her with all I can.

In Amlit I burst out laughing, because while explaining Mark Twain, Ingrid said, joking, “I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s better’n any other frog.” You haven’t heard a fake Southern accent until it’s mangled through the soft, hesitant, slightly British tones of a Norwegian. I thought I was going to fall out of my seat. Last class, everyone shrieked because while reading Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” one intrepid member of that species zoomed its way into the classroom. Literature is never dull.

On the plane to Oslo this morning, I thought about how comfortable I feel here. Living in another country is just a matter of smoothing the edges of that culture over your own skin, softening out the places where it puckers or rubs or juts sharply into your shoulder. But not every culture has a shape that I could fit myself inside of so easily.

In the Americans-in-Norway Facebook group, there was a discussion comparing America to Norway. People debated health care stubbornly (on the one hand, everybody has it and you needn’t be rich to use it, but on the other, it’s paid for by tremendously high taxes) for most of the thread. But I found some of the other points interesting, and am rephrasing the ones that I agree with and adding my own:

Norway:                                                                                              America:
Better chocolate                                                                           More of a produce selection
Roaming Law (you can pitch tent anywhere for three days)               Empty hiking trails
No separation of Church and State, but no God either                        Picturesque Bible Belt
Charming, history-filled cities                                                             Free bathrooms
Less public drunkenness                                                                     MUCH cheaper alcohol
Politeness                                                                                            Volunteering spirit

Trivia of the day: if an ICA and a Rema are next to each other, it spells America backwards.

I’ve started using a Norwegian detergent, and my clothes smell sweet and Norwegian.

I’m in Oslo for Rosh Hashanah. One of the things I’ve been wondering is how such a small Jewish community supports itself. Today, I found out—war reparations. Pretty much all of Norwegian Jewry was shipped off to camps during the war (in Norway, WWII is still called “the war” because there have been none since then. Hear that with longing, Israelis. Hear that with shame, Americans), and the Jewish community here uses the interest from the reparations to keep itself going. Wonderful as it looks from the outside, it’s so terribly sad that instead of the vibrancy of an old Jewish community that struggles to keep itself going, there’s this bits and pieces of a community kept going on plentiful blood money. Wish it was the other way around.

Rosh Hashanah in Oslo has been interesting, and largely lovely. I’m staying by the shlichot, who are the two people in this country having the experience most parallel to mine this year (yes, my shlichut is for America, mah meshanah?). It’s nice to compare notes with them. The davening was beautiful, albeit occasionally more pompous than I’m used to. A chazzan came in from Israel, and community members harmonized with him. At one point, his daughter, sitting next to me in the balcony, and several of the women, picked up the higher parts and everyone below turned to listen to the female half of the choir.

The first night, I ate dinner at the annual Israeli dinner and sat with a fun gay Argentinian couple who made aliyah recently and are traveling through Scandinavia for a month. Lunch was at the old age home next to the shul. The residents spoke only Norwegian, with tiny chunks of scattered Yiddish and English, so the room stayed pretty quiet. I walked around trying out my Norwegian, but sat next to a man who spoke English. Into the silent room he shouted that his parents had been murdered in the war, that he had fled to Sweden, returned to Oslo after, worked in the chevra kadisha for fifty years, but he didn’t believe in God. Then we sang “bashanah haba’ah” together, and I helped him clap on beat.

That night, I walked down to the Akker Brygge alone. As I passed Karl Johann, two drunken Norwegians started tailing me. There were a lot of people around, so I wasn’t scared, but kept a courteous and dismissive expression so that they wouldn’t take offense or start anything. Then one of the men put his hand on my coat. He didn’t grab me, just tapped my shoulder for a moment. All I did was look at him. He slunk away. Funny how an unwanted touch instantly galvanizes me into a person that's incredibly scary and ready to lash out in defense. Unfunny how so many of my female friends are held captive in their houses after dark by fear of such an experience.
 
I passed the Nobel Peace Center. Outside of it stood a walk-through exhibit. As I approached, I realized that the pictures of dusty empty streets had captions describing dehumanization in Gaza, and the West Bank. The captions sidled and slipped around the truth, telling half-facts and showing photos zoomed in close without showing the larger picture. Every tourist to Oslo walks past this area, and sees this propaganda. An ugly feeling settled in my stomach as I squinted through the lies. 

The Akker Brygge was quiet. I followed the string of fountains down to the wharf, and out onto an empty dock. On either side of me, boats sagged against the wall. A ladder led down into the lapping black water, and I pondered slipping in for a moment, as I always do when on a dock. In the distance, eating up my Rosh Hashanah ambitions and introspection, a green light mocked me by blinking cliché across the water. So I returned to Bergstein.

For lunch the second day, one of the families invited the greater part of the Jewish community to a huge meal. I met a couple who work at the US embassy and had already heard of me (you know, the other Jewish American in Norway) from the Fulbright staff, a family from Christiansand who converted two years ago and were ostracized by their former friends, and people who asked me again and again what on earth I was doing in Norway, and why I wasn't Israeli since I was speaking Hebrew. After lunch we all sang classic songs together, a small enclave of Israel in the middle of Oslo.



At lunch on shabbat I sat next to the security guard for the Oslo shul. She's the woman who interrogated me the first time I entered the shul. Getting inside the Jewish community center for an hour was harder than getting into Norway for the year. She's getting a degree in international relations, and had strong opinions about immigrants taking over European countries' identity. I suppose, if my job was to sit day in, day out, behind bullet-proof glass and inspect visitors for potential threat, I might also have a cynical approach.


The shlichot and I watched Savta Chaya Maitah after shabbat. It's an iconic early Israeli comedy whose hero reminds me strongly of Napoleon Dynamite. Tomorrow I take the train back to Bergen, armed with a block of kosher cheese bigger than my face. A good way to start the year. 

Norwenglish

Norwegian flags at the harbor near Bergenhus

My high schoolers finished writing the poems they’d started on the theme of carpe diem, and read them to the class, while standing on the teacher’s desk (they’d just watched Dead Poets Society, how could I not?). Only one kid hit his head on the light. Only one kid dropped the f-bomb in his poem. Overall, a successful educational endeavor. Especially for A, who hadn’t been in class when we started the poems because she’d been helping with the current elections. She’s the girl who lost two close friends in Utøya, and when I explained to her what the students were doing, she started to write her own poem. And wrote, and wrote… I couldn’t stop her. She crafted stanza after stanza about the difficulty of escape, and the importance of looking forward. The furiousness of her writing was interrupted only by periodic questions about whether something made sense, or wanting to show me what she had so far. I let her keep pumping out the poetry; why not use writing as therapy? I think the intensity of being part of this girl’s healing may be the highlight of my teaching here in Norway.

Graffiti at the bybanen station at Fantoft

All of the students were given laptops by the school, which they’re meant to use in class as well as at home. I find this ridiculous. Anita may not notice the facebook tabs hidden on the screen when she walks around, but I’m too young not to be clued into their clever evasive tactics. These kids are in high school: many of them are not yet old enough to embrace learning on their own. They still need external discipline. Also, facebook is my generation’s addictive drug. Allowing them to use it in school just exacerbates the problem. This is probably the gist of the campaign I’m about to begin to get the rector’s permission to block access to facebook on the school network. Any suggestions on additional points I should make?

A group of my adult students discussed 9/11 conspiracy theories on Thursday. They talked about the metal girders not being hot enough to burn, or bend that much, and how strange it was that the buildings went straight down, and that planes can’t knock down buildings… listening to them clogged my mind. What were they suggesting? That Bush killed all those people because he wanted to invade Iraq? That martians really orchestrated the whole thing? As much confusion as there may be about events and reactions afterward, so many people were killed on that day—how can you react in any way but sorrow? To be fair, I’ve been surprised by the sympathy of most Norwegians’ to the 9/11 anniversary. Many of them remember exactly where they were when they heard, and how visceral their reactions were. I hadn’t realized it resounded across the world to that extent.

We did a unit on baseball in my adult class. At one point, the students turned to me for clarity about the rules of the game. I had no clue. Bad American!

The fish market

As I was walking around explaining points in the baseball story, one of my students lured me into an argument about the superiority of rationality. Having just finished Coetzee’s Lives of the Animals, I was reluctant to grant too much credibility to my student’s insistence that everything comes down to rationality. The idea that of course rationality determines that rationality is paramount, it’s acting in its own interests, tickled my postmodern-sensitive brain that cannot help but politicize everything, and gave me just enough pause to argue with this guy.

I’m beginning to rephrase simple statements into Norwegian. My vocabulary and comfort with the syntax is growing in leaps and bounds, but I still can’t speak it. It’s the pronunciation. Anita started laughing when I asked, “hvordan går du?” –how do you walk? Instead of “hvordan går det?” –how’s it going? And I can’t even hear the difference between the numbers 7 and 20; both sound like “shoe” to my American ear. 27 sounds like “shoeshoe.” My Slovenian neighbor in the class tried to explain that one is more of a “ch” sound, but I simply cannot hear it, and wonder if I’m doomed to forever make mathematical mistakes.

Chilling at Fantoft: there are lots of nationalities in that room!

Learning Norwegian names for other language mostly involves adding “esk” onto the end: Engelsk, Dansk, Hebresk. The colonization of language involved in renaming countries in one’s own tongue still bothers me in Norwegian as much as it did in Hebrew or English: why don’t we call each country what they call themselves? United States of America, Norge, and Eretz Yisrael. Then we’d also become accustomed to some of the sounds in foreign languages, and hearing Mandarin for the first time wouldn’t be such a shock. Just a thought.

I bought lefse for the first time, and man, is it disgusting. The blandest thing I’ve ever tasted. It’s a Norwegian flatbread made from potatoes, and meant to be eaten with something tasty rolled up inside of it. Of course, I bought a package on the run and munched it while walking, which doesn’t do it full justice, so I’m going to try it again with butter and cinnamon handy. On the scale of Norwegian foods, it falls waaaay below fresh salmon and brunøst. Hmm. I think that may be it for Norwegian cuisine. Because no way am I trying lutefisk: not even the Norwegians like it.  

In Memory

Ten years later, so much has changed. The Washington Post has Cartoons about 9/11 through the years that capture the the essence of post 9/111 America much better than I could: I can't remember a world without fear of terror and all the accompanying accoutrements.

THE END OF THE WORLD

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb---
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing --- nothing at all.

-Archibald MacLeish

Intersections

The Blue Stone in the middle of Bergen where people leave flowers.
Every day, the city clears them away and people bring new ones. 

The young woman who sat beside me let a quick, focused frown cross her face. It might have been thoughtful, or angry, but from our conversation of the past few minutes I figured it was the only sign she’d show that she was not about to let another emotion take over.

Flowers stuck in a fence near a
building that was attacked in Oslo

She is one of my high school students in my English class, and she had just come from a memorial for two of her closest friends, who were killed in the Oslo attacks on July 22^nd. She was worried about starting high school, and about the upcoming elections in which she felt she had to play an even larger part campaigning now that several of her friends weren’t there to help, and, of course, worried about coping with the emotional trauma she’s been through. She presented a weird blend of kid and adult. I was impressed by her maturity and determination to power through, and stymied by my inability to tell her that everything would be okay. All I could offer was help getting through this.

At roughly the same time that we sat in the hallway outside of the English classroom, another country was dealing with terror. Israel is one hour ahead of Norway, time zone-wise, and Thursday, as I comforted a Norwegian suffering from fallout of the Oslo terror attacks at 11am, Israelis on a bus near Eilat at 12 pm were being shot at in the beginning of what became an eight-hour terror attack.

Egged bus 392 after the attack

In Norway I’ve seen people cope with the destruction of security, stability, identity as a peaceful country. Israelis shouldn’t have to deal with that; it’s not a country where people assume safety. But the anger and fear and loss and trauma and desperate helplessness that hit when terrorists strike all bob up nonetheless. I know that, in some ways, the terrorists in each of these cases want to represent themselves as on opposite sides. But at the end of the day, what’s left are the survivors, and the victims’ families, and a picture of a smiling student on a screen where there should have been a kid ready to start their first year of high school. The innocent should not have to suffer.

We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

                                                                        -Chekhov