Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 116: Ten Years Later
Summer 2011
A street vendor in Tunisia, an American marine going home and a signals operator on a North Korean fishing trawler. From the battlefields of Afganistan to the streets of Mogadishu and Toronto, these are just a few of the stories in the issue of Granta that conjure the complexity and sorrow of life since 11 September 2001.
From this Issue
Fiction|Granta 116
Fiction|Granta 116
Fiction|Granta 116
A Tale of Two Martyrs
Tahar Ben Jelloun
‘You spend your life swallowing insults.’
Fiction|Granta 116
Fiction|Granta 116
Crossbones
Nuruddin Farah
‘In a world in which coercion is the norm, a human trafficker must have underlings as well.’
Fiction|Granta 116
Fiction|Granta 116
Stones and Artichokes
Nicole Krauss
‘As we get older, the world grows to fit our fear of death.’
Fiction|Granta 116
Fiction|Granta 116
Fiction|Granta 116
The Third Mate
Adam Johnson
‘Please translate that this man is about to get shot.’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
In a Land of Silence
Janine di Giovanni
‘She tells me that he died because he refused to be silent.’
Art & Photography|Granta 116
Art & Photography|Granta 116
Flee
Nadia Shira Cohen
‘I wait for the moment they sense what I am trying to do.’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
The Terminal Check
Pico Iyer
‘The world is all mixed up these days, and America can no longer claim immunity.’
Fiction|Granta 116
Fiction|Granta 116
Laikas I
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
‘Hilary hadn’t wanted to acknowledge A: herself as dog-lady; B: any problems re wolves or whatever.’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
The American Age, Iraq
Anthony Shadid
‘Nothing really escapes the detritus of death in this wreck of a city.’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
Veterans of a Foreign War
Elliott Woods
‘If they’re willing to do this for their country then I should be willing to make the same sacrifices.’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
Jihad Redux
Declan Walsh
‘American patience snapped, and Washington took matters into its own hands.’
Art & Photography|Granta 116
Art & Photography|Granta 116
Letters to Omar
Edmund Clark
‘His mail became part of the control process his interrogators exercised.’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
Essays & Memoir|Granta 116
A Handful of Walnuts
Ahmed Errachidi & Clive Stafford Smith
‘There was no horizon, no life and nothing to see.’
The Online Edition
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Anthony Shadid | Interview
Anthony Shadid & Ted Hodgkinson
‘It’s very difficult to say what kind of Iraq is going to emerge from this trauma. I think we have to wait a generation.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Not Easy to Tell
Patrick Ryan
‘I told him he looked like an assassin in an Elmore Leonard novel, and he smiled.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Novel Terrors
Yuka Igarashi
‘Violence and genius and terror and mysticism reside in equal parts in the so-called heroes and so-called villains. It wells up and pervades us. We swim in it.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
You Want Gunfire With That?
Dan Hind
‘The end of Soviet communism was supposed to have brought with it the end of ideological struggle and even, according to a significant few, history itself.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Undoing the folded lie: Poetry after 9/11
Rachael Allen
‘The real feeling of a day that changed everything forever is boiled down so incessantly, and so often, to cliché.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Nadia Shira Cohen | Interview
Nadia Shira Cohen & Michael Salu
‘What I do hope is to be able to tell people’s stories, people who might otherwise have been forgotten by society, locally and otherwise.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Heartland: Ten Years After 9/11
Frank Bill
‘‘You think 9/11 changed that, how crimes are committed?’ ‘9/11 changed how Americans live. Period.’’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Jongwe, the cockerel of liberation
Kevin Bloom
‘There’s nothing of interest at ground level, no great revelations. Just the rooster keeping watch in the sky; jongwe, the cockerel of the liberation movement.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Amir’s Iraq
Marie-Hélène Carleton & Micah Garen
An Iraqi teacher, author and interpreter shares his perspective on a country recovering from trauma.
Poetry|The Online Edition
I had wondered about the signs of burning
John Kinsella
‘None of it made sense. The house shows / no signs – the old core of the house as it is now – / of fire, of giving up the ghost.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Two Minutes Too Long
Urvashi Butalia
‘What did our government mean by asking us to mourn for these deaths in America?’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Ghost Children of the North
Bina Shah
‘‘I asked him what the four seasons of the year were’, she says, ‘and he replied, ‘sardi, garmi, hangama, hartal’’. (Winter, summer, riots, strikes.)’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Double Vision: The ‘Other’ Twin Towers
Christopher Merrill
‘Two pairs of towers celebrating economic might, two visions of modernity: a double-sided mirror of the international order.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Art of Moving On
David Ulin
‘This felt like the moment New York disappeared for me.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
A Spell For Going Safely Forth By Day
Jynne Martin
‘The hunter pushes a bullet beneath his tongue to fix his aim, / or is it to stave off his thirst?
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
War’s Body
Rikki Ducornet
‘Born of genocide and slavery, our democracy staggers beneath a failure to acknowledge and address its own defining brutal impulse.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
The Trouble with the Horses
Patrick deWitt
‘We did not believe in naming horses but they were given to us as partial payment for the last job with the names intact, so that was that.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Unplanned Road Trip
David Guterson
‘I had a dark, journalistic interest in Ground Zero but also, apprehension.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
To Stand in the Shadow
Samantha Smith
‘I orient myself in time with ‘before’ and ‘after’, using September 11 as a placemarker.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
War and Peace on the Big Sandy River
Dean H. King
‘Far from the canyons of lower Manhattan or the rugged peaks of Afghanistan, 9/11 led to an unexpected breakthrough in an ancient feud.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Other 9/11
Ariel Dorfman
‘Chile, for all its imperfections and failures, found a way of responding to the terror inflicted on us (yes, us, we Chileans), a path of peace rather than war, a path of understanding rather than retribution.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Somalia Then and Now
Mary Harper
‘Madam, you are a potential terrorist. You and every other person in this room.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Of Moustaches and Megalomaniacs
Alia Malek
‘Proper syllabic emphasis was mere collateral damage in the war crescendo of the global coalition that would eventually rumble with Iraq.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Today is a Sunny Day
Porochista Khakpour
‘For the past ten years I have been trying to write about the events that occurred on 9/11.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Politics of Grief
V. V. Ganeshananthan
‘It is a way of humiliating people, to say that their dead are not dead, to say that people are not even allowed to mourn.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Post-Elegy
Wayne Miller
‘After the plane went down, / the cars sat for weeks in long-term parking. / Then, one by one, they began to disappear / from among the cars of the living.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
1911, The Other Revolution
Isabel Hilton
‘Anniversaries, of course, can be a two-edged sword: they invite historical reappraisal.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Vision
Susan Power
‘I am the unlikely interlacing of two families who never thought their histories would braid together.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
The Death of His Excellency, The Ex-Minister
Nawal El Saadawi
‘A minister like myself had to be vigilant, both in body and mind, in order to retrieve correct facts from incorrect information.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
OIF
Phil Klay
‘A few months later I was strapped up, M4 in condition 1, surrounded by 03s, backpack full of cash, twitchiest guy in Iraq.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Memory and Invention
Mavis Gallant
‘When I happened to be working all day, every day, on a story set in the Paris of 1953, I was stunned and bewildered to step outside and discover the shape of the cars, the casual clothing and clean facades of the 1990s.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Requiem
Jill Osier
‘I watch her help, / gathering the leaves to her like love, / hiding herself.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Blazing Light in August
Gabriel Gbadamosi
‘The basic social contract that I won’t break the law by being in a riot and that, in return, my society will keep me safe is being ripped apart in this confrontation with the hard reality of violence: we must break them or they will break us.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
The Burden of Light
Jessica Thummel
‘Jelly sits on the toilet, folded over, staring at his feet still inches from the floor.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Resist: A Letter from Greece
Natalie Bakopoulos
‘This June, I arrived in Athens just in time for a strike that had halted the metro from the airport to the city.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Golden Goat to Communist Ratio
Miroslav Penkov
‘Few people can pinpoint where Bulgaria is on the map. Some people might tell you they can, but you shouldn’t believe them.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
Cupcake
Yana Punkina
‘His voice had long since lost all superfluous timbral embellishments, he was left with only the raw thread of screeching.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Two Poems
Ivan Landzhev
‘My chess teacher / used to tell me: / ‘Play your own game.’’
Fiction|The Online Edition
Returning to the Hague
Georgi Tenev
‘‘Shall I tell you, son,’ I ask him, ‘exactly what I’m guilty of?’’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Gadulka is Burning
Rayko Baychev
‘If they tell you there’s no instrument more thankless than the gadulka, you better believe it.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Labyrinths
A.L. Kennedy
‘I was tempted to let the pages blow overboard and start again...But they have very stern laws about littering at sea.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
A Norwegian Nightmare
Alf Kjetil Walgermo
‘Could we somehow have avoided feeding the killer at our own breast?’
Fiction|The Online Edition
Black Bazaar
Alain Mabanckou
‘Roger The French-Ivorian understood that I didn’t appreciate his tone of voice and ordered two Pelforts to win me back.’