“That Was Then,This Is Now” or A Wound Still Simmers

Wound

“Then,” I felt 9/11 as a set of physical and tangible encounters: the air I inhaled (the smell during few days following the attacks was noxious; it’s unsettling to imagine what was contained in each breath), the missing person posters I faced taped around the neighborhood, and of course the images shown repeatedly on television. A palpable grief hung around me. I cried when reading The New York Times’ daily profiles of the victims. On drives to my in-laws in New Jersey, I would burst into tears after pulling out of the Lincoln Tunnel and gazing on the place where the Towers once stood. How could I try to speak to that gaping emptiness? I needed to do something. It turned out that other academics, writers, photographers, and mental health practitioners felt a similar need for expression. So we created—even if our words and images were broken, fragmented, and reactive. I put together an assemblage of reflections, essays, images, and poems, the book Trauma at Home: After 9/11, with surprising ease and efficiency (Greenberg, 2003). Caruth’s insight that the “passing out of the isolation” (11) caused by a traumatic event “can only take place through the listening of another” rang true for our need to exchange our responses.

Back then, the psychoanalyst Dori Laub hesitated before agreeing to write something for Trauma at Home. I had a publisher’s deadline of not much more than 6 months after the attacks. It was too early to start writing, Dr. Laub said to me. We were not yet able to bring narrative to the events. Nevertheless, I urged him to contribute something; I desperately wanted his voice in the collection. Wisely, his essay articulated how we could not yet begin to narrate 9/11. He addressed the issue of the inability to—and yet the crucial need for survivors to—narrate experiences of trauma.

We needed to pause, to reflect and grieve before rushing to fill the void, close the wound, assemble the fragments. We needed to mourn rather than act out. We needed to explore how we could and could not witness the events of the day, which as a televised nation we kept watching over and over again, perhaps in an effort to witness or understand that which continued to exceed the limits of our understanding.

Despite Laub’s awareness of how 9/11 was an event without a narrative, multiple nationalistic and ideological narratives arose quickly to “fill in” the vacuum—some, perhaps, reactions or symptoms to trauma; others, calculated uses of the nation’s vulnerability to advance political and personal goals. The Bush administration manipulated 9/11 in multiple ways, including as a reason to go to war in Iraq. The picture became even more fragmented and tense as more violence and acts of aggression ensued. We learned of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. PTSD became a common diagnosis not only for people around 9/11 but also for soldiers in combat. 9/11 became part of a nexus of ongoing traumatic events. “Now” we cannot think about 9/11 without also thinking about how it was exploited and how it led to other acts of violence.

The ways in which 9/11 led to such narrative constructions leads me to think of “World Memory,” an essay by Italo Calvino (1995) that I use at the start of one of my classes at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study titled “Truth or Fiction? Memory and Storytelling.” ¹ “The lie is the real information we have to pass on,” declares the story’s narrator shortly before pulling the trigger to kill Müller, his utterly silent addressee. Calvino’s narrator is passing along to Müller the job of Director of the “world memory” the “ultimate archivist”—the person responsible for cataloguing “everything that is known about every person, animal and thing, by way of a general inventory not only of the present but of the past too, of everything that has ever been since time began, in short, a general and simultaneous history of everything or rather a catalogue of everything moment by moment” (p. 135). How “world memory” is written—what will remain of history and all information about life on Earth—depends on the Director’s acts of inclusion. “The duty of the Director is to make sure that nothing is left out,” the narrator explains (p. 138). However, as the story moves forward, the narrator reveals the fact that the position also brings with it the “privilege: the right to put one’s personal imprint on the world memory” (p. 139). In short, the Director’s task involves selection and interpretation, “that slight subjective slant, that touch of the opinionated, the rash, which it needs in order to be true” (p. 139). Archiving and the writing of history depend on correcting “reality where it doesn’t agree with that memory,” a memory the narrator wishes to keep from contamination. “Then” or “world memory” will exist only through the archive created in the Director’s/narrator’s/writer’s “now.”

If 9/11 was so quickly adapted to suit political and ideological agendas, how do we attend to it without misappropriation, respecting the dead, the wounded, the memories and the ongoing suffering? The act of writing or remembering it “now,” after an 8-year delay, further complicates the difficulty of narration as we now must balance between memory and truth. How are we to begin to archive 9/11—to turn memories into forms of historical narrative—without correcting “reality where it doesn’t agree with the memory” and conforming to a scripted agenda?

In the case of Calvino’s (1995) “World Memory,” the reality that needs to be “corrected” is the fact that Müller, the intended replacement Director of “world memory”, has been having an affair with the narrator’s wife, Angela (or so the narrator claims). The narrator has killed the real Angela for diverging from being the ideal (faithful) Angela he has written into “world memory.” Müller would be the only witness both to his crimes and to the fact that Angela was not the perfect wife he has inscribed for eternity. The story closes with the narrator about to shoot Müller and thus erase his crimes from the record. (Of course, the crimes are recorded in Calvino’s writing of them.) It is when the narrator’s own life—his need to erase his wife’s adultery—intersects with the history he inscribes that he begins to slant the truth. The narrator explains, “The lie is the real information we have to pass on.” As soon as one’s life intersects with the archive, the subject becomes slippery.

How do I, then, begin to narrate or write about “then,” to begin to archive my memories of 9/11, without passing on a lie, a slanted narrative?

Scab

As I assess changes in my own move from “then” to “now,” I can identify moments or periods of change. The act of putting together Trauma at Home marked one transition. Once published, 9/11 became an object of study, an event to be contained within the covers of the book. I could shift from my feelings and anxieties to thoughts about the written pieces and their reception. Publication was a form of closure.

Time also worked to separate “then” from “now.” For the first couple of years, I did not schedule anything on the anniversary. It was a day of mourning. I remember judging my neighbors who bought a townhouse next to our apartment complex and threw a huge party on the night of September 11, 2003. How could they so egregiously ignore the sobriety of the day? But several years later, I found myself scheduling appointments as if the anniversary were a blank day in my calendar on which to fill with activities. A scab started to grow over the wound and I allowed it to thicken.

Teaching about 9/11 at Gallatin changed as well. In the first few years following the attacks, any class of mine that involved trauma theory or literature’s relationship to trauma couldn’t help but lead to discussions of 9/11. Almost every student wished to share a recollection. The emotional, charged, and varied discussions revealed the students’ need to speak collectively and reflectively about 9/11. But over the years, the students got younger and the urgency around the seminar table faded. “Now”, the period in which I write this essay, most of my first-year students were born in 1991. They were only 10 years old when the attacks occurred and most were not in New York. As new students fill the classes each semester, I feel as if I am watching 9/11 recede to a piece of the past. Perhaps on some level, I welcome this. How long can I keep the wound open? If 9/11 slides into history then perhaps the grief, the threat, the anxiety can be put in the past as well. Like Calvino’s narrator, I have altered the story for my own ends. The ideal version keeps 9/11 in the past, back “then,” when it was dangerous, as opposed to “now,” when I feel safe.

Of course, the wound never went away.

Embers

Despite our thickened skins as New Yorkers who walk past armored guards as if they were Christmas decorations on store windows, we are now palpably vulnerable. For me, 9/11 emerges all of the time. When I assess whether planes overhead seem too low in the sky, when my shoulders tighten at the sight of extra security guards stand in front of the JCC my children use, when I fear enjoying a perfect sunny day because the sky is too clear and too blue and threatens trouble, or in the heaviness that hovers as I walk through the subway at Chambers Street, aspects of its aftermath are still stored within me. I tell my husband that we should keep an inflatable canoe under the bed to get out of Manhattan, just in case. Eight years covers a lot, and yet a strange smell in the air or some other scratch to the scab can set me back into panic mode.

Despite publishing Trauma at Home and the illusion of thinking that securing covers onto the book granted a kind of end to the event, it slips out. Maurice Blanchot (1989) described the writer having two hands that work with different purposes. One hand writes the work and the other hand is able to stop writing, is “capable of intervening at the right moment to seize the pencil and put it aside” (p. 25). Although the publication of Trauma at Home marked a transition that the “mastering” hand might claim as a stopping point, Blanchot observes that the being of the “work” continues for both reader and writer. He marks a distinction between the book and the work: “The writer writes a book but the book is not yet the work” (Blanchot, 1989, p. 22) The work emerges when the book is read by another. It comes into being in the intimacy between reader and words on the page. And if the work is ongoing between the book and its readers, the work also doesn’t end for the writer. Rather, the writer’s “I” is abandoned to the work, lost in its infinite demands. The writer keeps returning to the work long after the book’s publication. ² According to Blanchot, “writing is the interminable, the incessant” (p. 26). So while my editorial hand may have closed my 9/11 book, it exceeds the pages and spills out interminably into the present.

I do not stop all activities on each September 11th, but at times during the day, I am startled by its assertion of its uniqueness, of its very marking of how it is and is not September 11th. The anniversary of the event points to all that we cannot address in the growing temporal gap, the space between “then” and “now.” I cry listening to the annual recitation of the names of the dead not only for their loss but also for the passage of time, for the fact that we move on. I mourn that the living forget the dead.

If my students can now talk casually about living in a “post-9/11 era” and discuss it objectively without a need to share experience, then can I join them in their lack of memory? In a class called “the Self and the Call of the Other,” we contemplate the problems of separating any group of “us” from ‘them” or conceiving of a Self independent from an Other and how such divisions close knowledge and impose myths or false stories rather than open intersubjective relationships. I allow them to refer to 9/11 as a turning point: “now” versus “then.” Although we unsettle other divisions or binary oppositions that lead to problematic power structures or simplified modes of understanding, knowledge, or identity, I allow the historical divide to stand. It turns out that much as I mourn the passing of time, I need a sense of chronology and temporal progression.

Picking at the Scab/Beating Back the Past

Like watching a movie, I must keep a certain suspension of disbelief as I live in New York. Toni Morrison (1987) writes in Beloved that Sethe begins her days rubbing and kneading dough: “Nothing better than that to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past” (p. 86). I walk by the West 72nd Street subway station that I use regularly and do not ask why armed guards stand in attendance. While there is no comparison to be made between my own memory work and that demanded of Sethe, an escaped slave who mourns too many dead and carries too many wounds to list here, I am drawn to her phrase of “beating back the past.” It turns out that as I move from “then” to “now,” I must acknowledge my will to forget, to ignore, to not know.

On one level, Calvino warns us, through his murderous narrator, of the dangers of writing the past—how assembling an archive demands lying, forgetting, and omission. But in his act of writing the story, Calvino undercuts his narrator’s damage: he reveals the process of archiving. “Of course there are moments in our work—you will have experienced them too, Müller—when one is tempted to imagine that the only things that matter are those which elude our archives, that only what passes without leaving any trace truly exists, while everything held in our records is dead detritus, the left-overs, the waste” (Calvino, 1995, p. 138). In exposing the process, he actually articulates the relationship between experience and archive—the subjectivity of history making. He writes, “The lie is the real information we have to pass on,” but Calvino’s fiction, an untrue story, reveals a truth about how we come to know the past.

Calvino (1995) and Morrison (1987) offer examples of how literature can help us to reflect on how we construct memory, narrative, and history. Like Laub’s sensitivity to the inability to narrate 9/11 so soon after its occurrence, literature illustrates the complexity of creating stories about the past, especially about traumatic events. Literature is able to both point to all that eludes trauma and, in exposing that silence or gap, articulate it. The last pages of the novel Beloved include a phrase that intermittently repeats, “It was not a story to pass on.” The line then shifts into “This is not a story to pass on.” Finally, the novel closes with a word “Beloved,” a final word that is the name of the ghost come to life, a mother’s inscription on her dead child’s tombstone, and the very title of Morrison’s own book. Beloved’s story both cannot be and will be archived. Morrison gives voice to the trauma that cannot be passed on or named and yet is passed on nevertheless by appearing in the words on her pages. Literature helps us understand the dynamics of trauma, the force of “beating back the past” and the memory work that pushes against forgetting.

For me, 9/11 exploded boundaries between trauma theory and life, between literature and reality, between “world memory” and my subjective slant. If the truth of the past becomes slippery as soon as we insert ourselves into the archive, then 9/11 placed me within the theories I studied, unhinging separations created by the covers of a book and altering any illusion of my safe temporal distance from large-scale trauma. As someone who teaches literature and uses trauma studies in class—and who rides an occasionally guarded subway to those classes—I still heed Laub’s warning about attempts to narrate 9/11. My experience around the subway scene suggests I struggle between remembering and forgetting. What I do—or do not do—when I face perceived danger “now” still engages with 9/11. Of course, my responses to 9/11 also engaged with other traumas and losses I experienced well before that day. The work of writing, as Blanchot puts it, preceded 9/11 and continues in its aftermath.

As we think about the boundaries and slippages between “then” and “now,” we might consider our own acts of memory work: how we inscribe our own “slants” on the past and how we forget. Rather than react like Calvino’s narrator and shoot the people or information that get in our way, we can attend to the silences, the discrepancies, the contradictions, and the omissions that arise.

Coda

I am appreciative to have this opportunity to contemplate my own memory work in relation to 9/11. I didn’t realize that I needed it. But as soon as this journal’s editors offered this opportunity, I welcomed a place to be heard—and to listen to the echoes of 9/11 within.