Can Love Overcome Hate?

There is a fallacy out there that a graphic novel can't be serious. People assume they are frivolous and unintellectual. I call BS on those assumptions! And Jay Cantor and James Romberger's Aaron and Ahmed will destroy any assumptions you may have had, too. 

Aaron wasn't a privileged man, but he took advantage of the military to send him to medical school. When the woman he loved was killed in a hijacked plane on 9/11 when it crashed into the second tower, he made a decision fueled by anger and revenge: he chose to become a doctor at Guantanamo Bay. He supervised the torture and made sure the prisoners held without due process weren't tortured to death. While he thought it would be easy to watch these men tortured, he realized even the loss of his love didn't change the man he truly was. 

He proposed an alternate means to get information out of the most closed-off and stubborn inmate: Ahmed. Aaron's idea was to feed Ahmed estrogen and treat him kindly in an effort to gain his trust and open him up. Aaron thought he could change Ahmed, but in reality, something different happened. Ahmed changed Aaron. The humanity, or lack thereof, in what was happening in the prison was affecting Aaron in ways that he couldn't contain any longer. Together they would travel a journey that explored the nature of hate and manipulation that leads to one human choosing to do the most inhuman thing they could- choosing to end the lives of innocent people. 

This graphic novel was absolutely not what I expected going into it. It was so much more. In fact, now that I have finished it, I am having trouble even remembering my preconceived notions because it was so transformative. There is so much to the ideas of humanity and torture and safety and fear, that unless we expose ourselves to those raw nerves, they will never be soothed. It reminded me of the experience I had in a class recently where my students and I were discussing Civil Rights. They were obviously uncomfortable about the frank and earnest discussion at first, but they persisted and the idea of discussion Civil Rights and humanity became easier with each statement. When we avoid talking about the things that make us uncomfortable, we give them power. By talking about them and thinking about them, we can change ourselves and the world for the better. If those people who started and have continued to fight for Civil Rights in this country succumbed to the discomfort of difficult questions and situations, would we still have separate drinking fountains and bathrooms? Confronting the difficult is how we make progress, and Aaron and Ahmed wanted us to think about torture, fear, understanding our similarities and acknowledging our differences so we can find a way to stop the atrocities that are committed by both sides of this deadly and clandestine war on terror. 

I would give this to any older students because the material is very deep, dark, and thought-provoking. It requires a certain maturity and self-awareness in order to make the impression it was written for upon its reader. A more immature reader would fail to connect to the difficult questions being asked. I look forward to sharing this story with appropriate students and am intrigued by the kind of discussions it will no doubt spurn. Now we must continue these tough questions in order to make our present better than our past. 

Who Survives?

I remember having a conversation with a family friend a year or so after 9/11. We were talking about humanity and the good and the seriously ugly that comes out of humanity. And after we talked about some pretty ugly things, one being all the people who died on 9/11, I made a comment that quieted us both. I said (not verbatim), "Well, there wasn't a single call of vengeance or hate or anger that came from those buildings or those planes. They were all of love." I remember him pondering that for a moment and saying, "I guess humans aren't so bad after all." We lived through 9/11. We remember where we were that day. What we were doing. Who we were with. But our children and students don't. I am teaching middle school students who were born after that horrible day. They hear about the horror, but none remember it. So how do we teach them about a day we will never forget? David Levithan has the right idea with Love is the Higher Law. He talks about the people who survived that day. And you didn't have to be in the towers to be a survivor. 


Claire was sitting in homeroom when it happened. When she saw people bustling around and whispering to her teacher, she was scared something had happened to her mother. What she didn't expect was a tragedy that would take so many people's mothers and fathers. Jasper was sleeping. With his parents in Korea, he was using the time to indulge in late nights and later mornings and had disconnected the phone. For a family halfway around the world with their son in the middle of a terrorist attack, nothing can be scarier than him not picking up the phone. Peter is in Tower Records, picking out the next great album and day dreaming about his date that night with a cute boy named... Jasper. When he walks outside, he removes his headphones because any song he heard as he watched the second plane hit the towers would have been forever tainted by the horror he was witnessing. 


When the towers went down in NYC, many people died. But while many people survived, a small piece of them went down with the towers. Everything stopped in the city that never sleeps and certainly never stops. And three young adults all living very different lives found their lives intertwining and never losing sight of what their city lost: the facade of safety and imperviousness. Claire, Jasper, and Peter all survived in very different ways, but they carry the towers and what happened that day with them each and every day. 


The importance of this book is that it is not a dictation of facts of what happened that day. It is a personal, human story of three teenagers living through the scariest day of their lives. I think this is a story that teens today could not only relate to, but also get a better image of what happened that day. But the story doesn't stop with that day. It continues for days and years after, showing the true influence 9/11 made on those kids. What was particularly important for me was how different their reactions are. When we look at the way people deal with tragedy, we have to acknowledge the widely differing reactions and this book chronicled three of those. In particular, Jasper was unable to get it out of his mind while Peter just wanted to move on with his life. 


While this book wouldn't tell the whole story of what happened that day, it would be a great companion to any lesson on the subject for teens. It is very realistic and upfront about the lives of these three teens, a skill Levithan is a master at. He doesn't hide behind stereotypes and fluff, but rather delivers a story that will leave you different by the last page. This is a short story, a little over 150 pages, so it is good for an older reader who struggles to focus on longer books or as a part of a larger unit about this time period. Levithan does it again. He brings the humanity out of the shadows and into the light.