Politics & Power Quote by J. M. Coetzee

Coetzee is needling the imperial instinct that follows catastrophe: the urge to make grief into a trademark. By asking us not to "grant the Americans possession of that date", he frames memory as territory, something claimed, policed, and defended. The line lands because it refuses the default moral hierarchy that treats certain nations tragedies as world-historic while others register as background noise. In a single move, he shifts September 11 from sacred noun to ordinary number, dragging it back onto the calendar where competing meanings already live.

The comparison set is doing sly, abrasive work. May 1 (labor movements), July 14 (revolution), December 25 (Christian hegemony) are not neutral holidays; they are anniversaries loaded with ideology, exported through culture and power. Coetzee implies that 9/11 is being installed into that same system: a date elevated into a global reference point, demanding recognition as proof of moral membership. To some people, it is a wound; to others, it is a demand.

The subtext isn’t callousness about the deaths. It’s skepticism about how states and media convert trauma into a permanent instrument: to justify wars, to narrow empathy, to reorganize the world around a single narrative of innocence violated. Coetzee, a novelist steeped in the politics of attention, is arguing that significance is not inherent in dates; it’s assigned, enforced, and circulated. His provocation is a reminder that the calendar, like history, is a battleground of whose suffering counts.