I had harsh words for Ani DiFranco’s 9/11 poem “self evident” in my statement supporting the Unite Against Terror petition. There I cited her description of 9/11 as “the day that america/fell to its knees/after strutting around for a century/without saying thank you/or please.” On my Adlermusic.com website [scroll down] I wrote the following:
[T]he trope is familiar: 9/11 was punishment for American wrongdoing. The hijackers were victims. Actually, a mere mention of the hijackers would have been welcome. DiFranco doesn’t refer to them at all, even indirectly, anywhere in the poem. Their human agency has been erased. Some karmic invisible hand committed the atrocity.
My criticism still stands, but I’m thankful to have read Gene Santoro’s short chapter on DiFranco in his recent book Highway 61 Revisited (Oxford U. Press). Santoro writes:
In an interview, she described performing “Self Evident” at Carnegie Hall several months after the World Trade Center fell…. “About three seconds in, panic just hit me, like how dare I? Who knows who these people in this audience are, what happened to them that day, or whom they lost?”
DiFranco is a great musician, songwriter and purveyor of alternative culture. I’m awed by the personal bravery she’s displayed in support of the Burmese democracy movement. And as profoundly as I disagree with most of the sentiments in her poem, the quote above gave me a deeper appreciation of her humility and self-questioning temperament. I also admire Santoro for this passage:
You can… revel in [DiFranco’s] Bush-bashing and still have trouble imagining how turning off CNN could transform Al Qaeda into reciprocal pacifists…. Arabs, Muslims, radical Islamists, whoever, the spectrum of millions actually involved in American policy don’t much appear in DiFranco’s political sallies…. [I]t can frequently feel as if she’s replacing one America-centered mode of seeing the world with another.
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