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“Memoire/Anti-Memoire:
New York City Women Writers Recall September 11, 2001”
Laura Hinton
Introduction
“All has shifted from the experience to the
industry of contemplating it.” Lines like poetry come into my head
half out of some forgotten dream. It is early in the morning, this
day, late in June. Last night, I went to a book party celebrating
the Etruscan Press anthology, September 11: American Writers Respond.
One of the tens of contributors, I listened to editor William Heyen’s
moving speech. I signed the printed page for well-wishers eating cheese
and paté, posed with writers for a photograph. Leaving before the
last hangers-on went for beer, I entered the evening blackness; a
cloud rumbled and ruptured above me in the sky. The sky I couldn’t
see, in mid-town Manhattan, quickly drenched my clothes. I stood for
half an hour under a leaky construction awning on Fifth Avenue, as
if I could save my summer sandals. The storm did not pass. Braving
the torrent in a sprint for Grand Central Station, I was wet and miserable
in my irony.
I recall again September 11, 2001, the day that
began, legendarily, that terrible blue, a day as dry and seamless
as a New York City day can be. As I write, we near the approach of
the anniversary of September 11th. In the inexplicability of landscapes,
it is our industry that makes survivors writers and writers survive.
We have indeed shifted from the experience — because that’s what survivors,
and writers, do.
This section of How2 tells a story unfolding
in the year since September 11th. Here, New York City women
writers speak about “the horror,” to borrow from Joseph Conrad, that
ripped through our skyline, and settled like an unwanted guest. Writing
from a romanticization but also a critique of the colonial “guest,”
Conrad both fetishized and called into question a “horror” within
this colonizing “self.” The contributors to this section embrace a
similar modernist irony. They do so by adopting, and also jettisoning,
this version of “self,” and the memoire as a form.
The words I wrote down that morning in June expressed
my growing sense of guilt and frustration about our “self”-expressions
since September 11th. These words were not a criticism.
They were the beginnings of an acceptance that, in fact, “poetry is
not a luxury,” as Audre Lorde once wrote, that our writings are as
important and serious as the nine-month task of “rescue workers” in
lower Manhattan. Our blessed state of discourse is laborious and difficult;
and it produces not a clarity but a confusion — one ironically that
enunciates its own healing process. When we think about the memoire,
in particular — from a post-modern theoretical perspective — we think
about it as falsely clarifying, with colonial objectives, a form that
would render easy the cultural monological “self.” Indeed, the memoire
traditionally has attempted to memorialise — to use a fashionable
term — our sentimental faith in language’s zip-lock lucidity. For
experimental writers, the memoire rightly could be seen as the effort
to falsely construct one’s “self” as protected container, as if one
could separate “self” from history and social event. In the case of
September 11th, this raises grave issues. As Ann Lauterbach
poignantly states in “What Is a Day?,” printed here: “To narrate
oneself into a catastrophe with vast and unknowable global consequences
seems trivial, or vain . . .”
The title phrase of this section, “Memoire/Anti-Memoire,”
reflects these questions about using the memoire form as a response
to September 11th. The phrase contains its dualism, as
an insistence that we do narrate our memories, our individual experiences,
of September 11th, even if we do so ironically, and, perhaps, differently.
This phrase is borrowed from a recent issue of Chain, whose
contributors reconsider the possibilities of the memoire from an experimental-writer’s
positioning. Its collection of writings suggests that the language
of memoire need not attempt to reseal memories as if in a leak-proof
box. So, too, the women’s memoirs that follow use and reuse the memoire
form to explore tragedy, both personal and social, not through a sentimental
re-visioning of events but a re-invention of what and how we articulate
them. Our memoirs collectively suggest that writing does not simply
“re-collect” past events and refurbish them with a bright new literary
engine. Rather, writing exists itself as its own event — as writing.
In her study The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry examined
the writings of political torture victims and argued for the necessity
of expressing physical pain for political purposes. She also wrote
of the impossibility of expressing pain through the medium of language.
That necessity, and that inexpressability, I would argue, applies
to those trauma victims who observe, so close at hand, human pain
and tragedy on a mass scale. As co-victims of mass terror, New Yorkers
last September experienced a pain that takes on its own physicality
and tragic psychic dimension.
The memoirs that express this experience of pain
begin with Suheir Hammad’s “First Words Since.” This powerful memoire-poem,
written by the young Palestianian-American poet living in New York,
details the suffering of having no words to describe what she has
seen by the end of the first week following September 11th,
what she has felt and feared. In the duality of a gratitude for life
and a fear of political reprisals, Hammad begs that the attackers
might not look “like my brothers.” It also praises the world of New
York City’s streets: the Korean “kimchi and bibim bob” that kept her
out late the night before September 11th, away from downtown
the next morning; a stranger, a woman, who asked her if she wanted
“a hug”; the friends and acquaintances who asked, without compunction,
if she “knew the hijackers” because she is Arab.
Novelist Jamie Callan’s short theatrical monologue,
“Locating the Pain,” was also written in the early days following
September 11th. It expresses a different set of ironies,
the kind that become riveted in the body when painful emotions cannot
be expressed and resurface as physical suffering. Removed from the
catastrophe in New York City while teaching a screen-writing class
at Yale University, Callan tells of a journey to the dentist, in which
the pain she could never locate becomes localized in her mouth, in
which both a detached dentist and patient try to find “the pain.”
This act is perceived as a darkly humorous attempt to control the
discourse of disaster through the discourse of the medicalized body
— and its own symptoms of emotional repression.
Linsey Abrams’ long poem, “The New Century” suggests
that to “locate the pain” is impossible, that the pain fans itself
out and becomes a linguistic cornucopia of personal perception against
the background of historic drama. Abrams’ “complaint” — a form of
the memoire that goes back to the literature of Old English — re-embodies
the fragmented sense that we all felt in the early aftermath of September
11th, that feeling of being both depressed and “on overwhelm.”
As we waited for the next terrorist event, for the next wave of anthrax
to be exposed on our subway line, for the next death, Abrams wrote
this studied piece in manic artifice. Like Callan’s memoire, it ultimately
reveals what became for New York City residents and workers our collective
depression.
My own memoire, “The Hole I Cannot See: Smoke
and Fragments in New York City,” is about that collective depression.
It attempts to embody, too, our fragmented sense of living in the
city last fall. I tried to mirror in the text those gaps I was experiencing
between events and my capacity to observe them, between the information
I received and did not. I wanted to trouble the conventions of my
reportorial memoire by failing to place those conventions in a coherent
whole, to plug the hole that I had not yet seen — left by the World
Trade Center and the 3,000 people that perished, and by our own false
sense of quotidian agency.
Ann Lauterbach’s “What is a Day?” further radicalizes
the memoire as form. While she questions why one should “insert oneself
into the cataclysm after the shipwreck of the singular,” she
nevertheless writes that “One plus three thousand equals three thousand
and one.” She suggests that the “singular,” indeed, is a mathematical
exponent that raises casualties and stands alone in one’s difference
to mass event. Lauterbach’s piece suggests through poetry and prose
— the interpolation of vision, nightmare, and fact — that personal
memoire, that the story of one’s day, need not be told from one perspective
but from one’s own multiplicities of perspectives. “What is a Day?”
shows the uses of the memoire when it is treated as both broken and
lucid, as self-reflexive and externally reportorial — and that out
of horrific tragedy something as daring as Blake’s tiger emerges steely-eyed
and terrifyingly beautiful.
Daniella Gioseffi’s memoire, “Sept. 11th, Meagan’s
Birthday,” takes on the political fallout that has ensued following
September 11th. It narrates events which began as she watched
from her rooftop in Brooklyn the United Airlines jet hit the second
World Trade Center tower, and which end with a journey to New England
and into progressive American history. Telling of her encounter with
a perceptive young girl whose birthday falls, and will always fall,
on September 11th, Gioseffi uses the conventions of memoire subversively,
as political commentary, expressing political ideas and providing
information that challenge their current state repression as replicated
by the media.
Two final pieces wrestle with our on-going struggle
to narrate personal experience after September 11th. Jane Augustine’s
“History” tells the story of a friend’s death in the mountains of
Colorado, where Augustine was vacationing this summer, a story permeated
with fragments of memories of the deaths of September 11th.
The fragmented images of self-in-memory create these two separate
events that remain separate, but also converge in the experimental
poetic sequence. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poem, “Safety,” reflects
upon the banality we experience as we witness and identify with others’
suffering from a near distance — as if witnessing, identifying, would
make them safe. Presented against images of the downtown Manhattan
architectural spaces and emptiness, the problem of witnessing in “Safety”
is that of an outsider’s perspective of the mass tragedy of September
11th. That tragedy is “memorialized by what I saw,” through
a “singularity” that Berssenbrugge, like Lauterbach, questions, but
also reflects back, because that is what separates the “safe” from
the perished, the viewer from the viewed.
The women who have contributed these memoire pieces
have dared to face their “singularity” in the fact of observing, at close
hand, in one’s community, catastrophic event. We are in the process, the
writing process, of moving beyond the shell of singular survival and into
the shared history of a city and a society that has lost not only an icon
but its fear to bear witness. These selective palimpsests, like my drenching
cloud that June night, cover but do not alleviate the harshness of our
personal-real.
Bio: Laura Hinton is an Associate Professor
of English at the City College of New York. She is the author of The
Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa
to Rescue 911 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), and co-editor (with
Cynthia Hogue) of We Who Love to Be Astonished: Experimental Women’s
Writing and Performance Poetics (University of Alabama Press,
2002). She has published articles on film, feminist theory, the novel,
and experimental women’s writing.
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