Reimagining Traitors: Pearl Abraham'sAmerican Talibanand the Case of John Walker Lindh

Maria-Irina Popescu

doi:10.1017/s0021875818000014

Abstract

Pearl Abraham's 2010 novelAmerican Talibanuses the “true” story of John Walker Lindh, a white US citizen captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, to reflect on the intense mediation of public trauma in the early days of the “War on Terror.” This article discusses the significance ofAmerican Talibanas a post-“9/11” work of literary fiction which, by imagining individual agency and interrogating the relationship between a racialized “Americanness,” treason and sovereignty, invites its readers to be critical of historical, political and media narratives in the so-called “post-truth era.”

Highlights

This article discusses the significance of American Taliban as a post-“ / ” work of literary fiction which, by imagining individual agency and interrogating the relationship between a racialized “Americanness,” treason and sovereignty, invites its readers to be critical of historical, political and media narratives in the so-called “post-truth era.”
The Daily Show segment identifies the American public’s confusion when they were confronted with the paradox of an “all-American Other” soon after the beginning of the “War on Terror”: a white, young, Californian man from a wealthy, liberal family who was captured fighting for the Taliban – which, in the polarizing discourse of the Bush administration, was synonymous with fighting for Osama bin Laden himself
Pearl Abraham uses details of Lindh’s biography to create a narrative inspired by the idea of a white-as-universal American identity, or what she calls, in an essay detailing the creative process behind writing the American Taliban novel, “the American religion,” which starts not with “unknowable jihad, but with Emerson and American Transcendentalism, [and] with Whitman’s celebrated

Summary

Reimagining Traitors

Stewart and Rocca play with the common misconceptions surrounding the “un-American Other,” who, in the post-“ / ” imagination, takes the shape of the “Islamic extremist” or “terrorist”; a necessarily repugnant figure, the “terrorist” appears as socially inept, a loner with reduced intellect and inferior education, originating from a broken family and an impoverished economic background. The media narrative of an all-white America facilitated by the Lindh case constitutes an attempt to revive the Cold War image of a country in which, in Pease’s words, “gender, class, race, and ethnic differences were massively downgraded as threatening to national unity,” an ideal of national identity built “out of exceptionalist norms [which] had deployed the coordinated myths of the Frontier and the Melting Pot in which the state’s assimilationist paradigm overrode questions of diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism.” It is out of this mythological framework that Lindh’s “anti-American” character emerges: his family’s liberal approach to parenting, which afforded their son access to a multicultural, multiracial America (at least in virtual environments, if the proximity of Lindh’s all-white suburbia did not allow for it), coupled with Frank Lindh’s “failed” masculinity (Lindh’s parents’ divorce on grounds of Frank’s homosexuality is a recurrent trope in media narratives about Lindh’s childhood), is used, in Time articles and in mainstream media in general, as overarching causes for Lindh’s “anti-American behavior.”. Lindh’s case complicates these fantasies, because he needs to be “racialized” in media discourses to appear threatening, and because he was captured in the so-called “Middle East,” an Othered geographic and symbolic space onto which the state of exception displaced the trauma of “ / .”

JOHN WALKER LINDH VERSUS JOHN JUDE PARISH

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY