9/11 and Transnational Memory: Seamus Heaney's 'Anything Can Happen'

Abstract

In this essay I examine the role of poetry in the production of a transnational memory of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. Although 9/11 was a transnational event, the commemorative culture has largely been shaped within a nationalist frame, which remembers the traumatic event in terms of national identity. The attack on the World Trade Centre in Manhattan had a global reach, however, and the collective memory of the event cannot be contained within national borders. As Michael Rothberg observes: ‘In its preconditions, in its mass media unfolding, and in its deadly repercussions, September 11 was a global event. It demands a literature that takes risks, speaks in multiple tongues, and dares to move beyond nearsightedness’ (‘Seeing Terror, Feeling Art’ ch. 6). Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s contribution to the literature of 9/11, ‘Anything Can Happen’, foregrounds the intersecting transnational and transhistorical dimensions of 9/11 memory. Drawing on concepts and approaches from transnational memory studies, I aim to identity the poem’s contribution to a transnational memory culture of 9/11. This analysis supports my broader argument that poetry opens up new perspectives on an event that has most often been commemorated within a national frame.

As one of the earliest literary commemorative forms, poetry is a transcultural form particularly well suited to transnational circulation. Generations of poets have borrowed and adapted poetic forms, structures, figures and preoccupations from earlier cultures and traditions. For instance, in ‘Anything Can Happen’, first published as ‘Horace and the Thunder’ in The Irish Times on 17 November 2001, Heaney translates and adapts a Horatian ode. This literary translation by an internationally recognised poet has been further translated and adapted. It has been republished in a range of periodicals, translated into 23 languages for an Amnesty International publication, and adapted as a piece of choral music by Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz. The translation of a Latin ode and the later appropriations of the text, the Amnesty translations in 2004 and the musical adaptation, disrupt the national memory frame that has circumscribed 9/11. Moreover, in each of the above instances, multiple social scales have shaped the remediation and reframing of ‘Anything Can Happen’, making its remediation an apposite example of how poetry oscillates between shifting scales of memory. Through analysis of such examples, I aim to show that literary translations can be an important mnemonic device for remediating memory.

A number of recent approaches to memory studies have examined the complex relationship between national and transnational frames of memory. Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney’s idea of ‘scales of memory’ presents memory as ‘a dynamic operating at multiple, interlocking scales and involving conduits, intersections, circuits and articulations’ (6). This approach recognises the significance of national frames of memory, but also that different types of memory production can both ‘reinforce and transcend them’ (4). ‘Anything Can Happen’ illustrates the ‘interlocking scales’ of memory by travelling across national, temporal and linguistic boundaries. Moreover, the reception of the poem has occurred on multiple scales: the immediate repercussions of this poem were evident in its local and national reception, while the long term reverberations have had global implications. De Cesari and Rigney observe that the past can be understood ‘within shifting social frames operating at different scales and across different territories’ (6). Informed by this analysis of interlocking scales of memory, I argue that ‘Anything Can Happen’ provides new possibilities for interpreting the memory of 9/11. To that end, I consider the adaptation and circulation of the text in a transnational literary sphere. But first, it is worth considering the political and rhetorical context that shaped the national memory of 9/11. Show more