To mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Slate asked novelists, artists, journalists, and other thoughtful people a question: What work of art or literature has helped you make sense of the attacks and the world after them?

Harold Bloom, author, American Religious Poems: An Anthology, and cantankerous critic, said: “I’ve seen absolutely nothing adequate to the event. It may be another sign that our culture has grown numb.” But here is what my friends had to say:

Hanif Kureishi, author, Gabriel’s Gift

The best source of information about 9/11 is the film My Son the Fanatic, which I wrote and which was directed by Udayan Prasad. There’s insight there, into the individual and into the community.

Pankaj Mishra, author, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond
So much of our intellectual energy since 9/11 has been spent on understanding the so-called Muslim world. However, no literary genre has seemed more capable of illuminating its complex emotional reality than fiction. I found Nadeem Aslam’s novel Maps for Lost Lovers to be particularly insightful. Describing with exceptional fidelity the inner lives of a devout Muslim woman, her secular husband, and their rebellious children in a British town, Aslam lays bare the often painful ways in which people negotiate their way out of the security of tradition, and then struggle to realize the promise of personal fulfillment held out by modernity.

Mia Fineman, Slate art critic
During the eerily quiet days following the World Trade Center attack, nearly every street-level surface in New York City was plastered with photographic images. Homemade fliers, onto which families and friends scanned color snapshots of missing loved ones, suddenly appeared on lamp posts, storefront windows, kiosks, bus shelters, subway platforms, firehouse doors. Most of the photographs captured the missing people during their happiest hours—at weddings, graduations, birthday dinners; lounging on sunny beaches; cuddling babies—and the pictures were often accompanied by loving descriptions of identifying details: clothing, scars, birthmarks, tattoos.

As the days went by, the images multiplied. But after about a week or so, there was a subtle, unspoken change. The fliers that had at first seemed to be active expressions of hope began to look more like declarations of sorrow. The candle-bearing crowds that gathered to gaze at walls densely plastered with images of smiling faces now recognized them for what they had become: public memorials that put a human face on a generalized sense of loss. New York’s temporary, collective installation of “missing” fliers, produced over the course of a few weeks by hundreds of sad and hopeful people, is, to my mind, the most meaningful and authentic work of art on the subject of 9/11.

George Saunders, author, In Persuasion Nation
I can’t say that anything has helped me make sense of the attacks. I suspect they were just what they felt like they were—namely, a reminder that chaos and hatred sometimes rear their heads and, temporarily, are ascendant. But one work of art that has helped me in a more general way is John Adams’ symphonic work “On the Transmigration of Souls”; it has “helped” me in the sense that I’ve been able to use it, periodically and sacramentally, to move myself to tears remembering that day just as it was. Every time I listen to it, it re-attunes me to the real sadness of that day, the sense of ordinary lives suddenly and horribly interrupted. That, I’d say, is the real purpose of art: to sweep away the mold that conceptual and habitual thought allows to grow over even the most raw experience. And Adams does it—it’s a great and courageous piece of music.

Production still from the film My Son the Fanatic from here.

slate-september-11-art-literature