PSA: Memorializing Sept. 11

[As promised, here's something I wrote for class:]

I guess I feel the main problem with memorializing Sept. 11 is a narrative one: We're still in the middle of the story, for one thing. And it's shaping up to be the type of story that doesn't lend itself to grand narrative, for another.

If we (and I think we tend to) think of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as isolated, non-contextualized events, it should be easy to create a memorial. We could valorize the firefighters and other rescue workers who helped dig through the rubble of the towers, "remember" the individuals (Americans) who died in the towers and in the planes, and mythologize the individuals (enemies) who attacked "our way of life," "freedom," "democracy," or our most deeply held ideals (also mythologized).

It's interesting to me and instructive, I think, that we refer to the attacks as "September 11th." To me, this habit points to an (almost imperialist, or at least narcissistic) American co-opting of an entire calendar day, which appears every year, as a personal/national traumatic anniversary -- which makes it too wide a name, really, for the discrete occasion of the attacks in 2001 -- and at the same time, a flagrant decontextualizing of the attacks, without reference to any of the events that came before (or after), as though it was a one-day event without antecedent or precedent -- making "September 11th" a too-narrow term for what happened then.

So if we want to memorialize "September 11th," we may be able to do it. We may be able to create a physical space that does what calling it "September 11th" does, which is to cut us off from doubts about the purpose or history of the attacks (and possible critiques of, for instance, our foreign policy), and to formalize our personal/national grief so that we'll "never forget." (September 11 rolls around every year, after all -- it's hard to forget that.)

But I think even a memorial that manages to sing the praises of our heroes and vaguely condemn our vile enemies would call up too much doubt and too many questions in our current national environment. Anyone with any secret questions about what the terrorists were trying to accomplish, anyone with doubts about the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq (which were connected rhetorically to Sept. 11th as though the attacks were a talisman that could justify any subsequent action), even anyone whose loved one died in the attacks, who has an alternate memory that contradicts the official "history" of 9/11, would find themselves dealing with those questions in contrast to the memorial in front of them.

Cutting out the context wouldn't necessarily help, yet, in other words, because we're living in the middle of the context.

But it's not possible to memorialize something we're living through, in part because of its complexity, and in part because it's still happening and can't yet be remembered.

I hope that ultimately, the Vietnam Memorial will be instructive for 9/11 memorial builders -- something mysterious, to which viewers bring their own meaning, and which allows for multiple interpretations and a complexity of thought (in viewers) made possible by the simplicity of form (in memorial content). I think this is why the personal grief shown in the countless items left at the wall by family members of the deceased is able to exist in the memorial space; I've never seen a bunch of flowers left at other war memorials (and I lived in DC for two years).

I hope that family members will be able to share similar moments in front of parapets surrounding 1-acre man-made waterfall basins (over the roar of the water).

Unfortunately, I suspect that the 9/11 memorial will read more like the WWII memorial put in between the reflecting pool and the Washington Monument: ostentatious, easy to decipher, and out of place.