In this post-9/11 era, at a time when the U.S. government appears to be veering away from open trials toward more heavy-handed alternatives (incommunicado detention, military tribunals) to deal with the threat of terrorist violence, Susan Hirsch's In the Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief and a Victim's Quest for Justice should prove to be a highly provocative read for a wide-ranging audience. The book begins in 1998, when Jamal, waiting outside the Dar es Salaam American embassy for his author-anthropologist wife, becomes one of the 224 fatal casualties of simultaneous Al Qaeda attacks in Kenya and Tanzania. For the first two chapters, we feel the full onrush of shock as his young widow is taken by her husband's family through the steps of Swahili burial and mourning. However, thanks to the author's flowing prose and a relentless questioning of surrounding events—from President Bill Clinton's bombing of Afghanistan to Osama bin Laden's recruitment of fervent Muslim adepts, the reader soon embarks on another sort of analysis, trying to understand, together with Hirsch, if—in such cases—a trial by U.S. criminal courts is the best way to assuage a victim's pain, combat terrorism, and guarantee justice.
During a good part of the book, it is a bereft woman's need for healing that looms largest. Thus, from the Sufi dhikri ceremony to the four-month seclusion period decreed by Islamic custom and into an eclectic set of therapies that includes grief counseling, support groups for young widows, Jewish and Islamic chants, and sleeping pills, the reader becomes familiar with the post-traumatic stress experienced by victims of sudden violence. We see above all how the healing process—whether of an individual, a group, or a nation—requires recognition of the victims' suffering. The long-awaited criminal trial that took place in the first six months of 2001 thus rivets our attention on victims' rights and, in particular, the role of the law in victims' recovery.
The author's multi-layered identity that, through her marriage, bridged differences in class, continents, and religion becomes a critical pivot as she brings an anthropological gaze to the trial. Her sympathies and originally unqualified identification with the bombing victims and their families undergo a subtle shift as she recoils from calls for vengeance and follows through on her husband's Islamic philosophy of “patience at the moment of greatest calamity.” In fact, the book may be summed up as Hirsch's effort to prove her love and respect for Jamal as well as her faith in justice by showing “patience”—an obstinate will to reason out the why's and wherefore's of the bombing through critical inquiry. Although reluctant to testify, she becomes an assiduous observer of the trial, sitting with (at one point, even wearing the badge of) other victims, and avoiding direct contact with the defendants, their attorneys, and families. She is grateful for the commemorations that have been held by the U.S. State Department to honor victims of the embassy bombings and gives signs of having bonded with various actors on this side of the scenario—whether ambassadors, prosecutors, judge, or FBI agents. Indeed, the author's attempt to transmit something of the earnestness of these personages—an insider's view of wounded power—is perhaps one of the book's most original contributions. Yet even as she is showing sincere respect for these allies, there is always a fine edge on her observations—when the “personable” FBI agents who have sympathetically heard out her story, expressing several of their own views, suddenly clam up on certain key issues (how, for example, the defendants fell into U.S. hands), or when in court they inexplicably stonewall the defense's attempt to establish simple facts of the terrain.
It is, however, in the ethnography of the court scenes that the author demonstrates her full competence as an academic analyst of narratives. Here, in deft comparison with her previous experience in Swahili courts, we are reminded how “guilt or innocence can turn on the subtleties of language” (p. 125). In this multilingual scenario, we see the importance of court interpreters and other mediators in presenting the facts. Hours of the defendants' interrogation are summarized by FBI agents in all-too-straightforward terms. Indeed, the complexity of notions such as brotherhood and jihad—which, in the English retelling, seem to confirm the defendants' violent intentions—only becomes evident after skillful cross-examining by counselors. In contrast to the antiquated technology of handwritten notes used to record and translate defendants' words, the prosecution builds its case using high-level computerized technology, subtly conveying a message of reliability. Again and again, the author transmits her ambivalence. Although anxious to have those responsible for her husband's death identified and punished, she feels that justice requires a scrupulously fair trial—and here, the weight of the U.S. government, holding a trial in its language, on its soil, using its own rules of law, appears to seriously undermine such aspirations.
Hirsch's critical reflection focuses on timely issues for the American court system. A first concern involves the 1991 Supreme Court decision to allow inclusion of victim impact evidence in capital cases (pp. 180–1). Although, as a victim, she recognizes the need to tell her story, she doubts that the trial—where such testimony may dehumanize defendants, swaying jurors toward feelings of vengeance—is the most adequate place. The process of reparation, she suggests, may better be served through noncapital trials, or truth and reconciliation commissions, rather than a judgment in which the threat of a death sentence hangs over the head of the defendants. Indeed, Hirsch's book, drawing on sources as varied as Islamic philosophy and American criminal justice, stands as a plea against any form of capital punishment. A second misgiving concerns the U.S.-centered nature of the trial. Thus, she points outs the irony of a trial aimed primarily at prosecuting the violation of U.S. interests, property, and nationals, given that the vast majority of those killed in the embassy bombings were Africans. Would an international tribunal not have made more sense? Finally, she asks if U.S. criminal justice, geared to a great extent toward individual psychology (we end up knowing as much about the defendants' childhood and marital experiences as about their economic opportunities or political beliefs), can hope to adequately probe the social and political circumstances that lead young men in different parts of the world to join movements such as Al Qaeda. During the trial, judge and prosecutors gave little or no heed to political arguments etched out by the defense that would present the bombings as part of an ongoing war involving—among others—the disastrous U.S. sanctions against Iraq. Citing fear of reprisal as well as reluctance to assist convicted terrorists, no academics stepped forward to air such a thesis in court. And despite providing some background material on the havoc wrought in many parts of the Middle East by tourism and the economic decline of the 1990s, Hirsch herself does not ultimately pretend to fill in these gaps. On the contrary, the book's conclusion brings a frustrated warning that, because of tightened security, research on such matters has become more and more difficult. And exactly because the political, religious, and cultural roots and repercussions of the embassy bombings were not ultimately explored—either at the trial or in other arenas—the reader will join Hirsch in hoping for future conditions in which more systematic and open research will build the way in our common “quest for justice.”
