Collective Memory: 9/11

The first interview I listened to was with CM and AS, recorded in October 2001 and then December 2002. This was the first interview from the collection that I was able to listen to rather than read. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could or would read the transcripts, since I knew that the audio recordings were available. I was really privileging the ability of the audio to communicate both the interpersonal dynamics between the interviewer and interviewee, and also the intimacy of the narrator’s story, better than the transcript. Although I understand the unique insight that can come only from reading and seeing the arrangement of words on a page—after all, my academic background is in the study of literature—at this point I think that it’s essential to listen to the interview whenever it’s the subject of research, in addition to reading the transcript (at least, whenever the audio is available). I almost feel like the researcher should specify whether they listened to, or read the transcript of, any interview they cite; that’s another part of the context of the interview as far as I’m concerned (the context of its creation as well as the context of its use).

The major theme of the interview sessions with CM was the impact of September 11 on her work. She was a social worker at the Freedom Community center in the Bronx where she works with people who need assistance finding work, school or apartments. She had grown up seeing her mother depend on her father for almost everything; she had never learned English, did not know how to get around the city, etc. Carmen used her example to mold herself into the opposite: someone who was independent and could navigate all the city systems, and furthermore, could help other people become independent in this way too. The fact that many of the agencies with which she regularly corresponded were housed in downtown Manhattan, and were therefore physically displaced or otherwise totally disrupted as a result of the destruction downtown, presented a major problem for the work that she did. She could no longer refer people to the agencies they needed in order to find homes, or to get public assistance or job training, and she therefore felt impotent, and blocked from helping the people in her community.

This manifested itself in anger with the city as a bureaucratic entity. She said she felt like “NYC had gone to sleep” before the attacks occurred—meaning, the country should have known that something like this would happen and it should have been prepared. After the attacks, she was upset that it was taking so long for the city agencies to get back up and running. In her opinion, agencies were using September 11 as an excuse. In other words, agencies chose to be lazy about reorganization and reopening because they could; they understood that the September 11 attacks could be used to excuse anything and they took advantage of that opportunity.

Perhaps this is the way that CM articulated her frustration over her loss of control in her life. Because her whole life had been built around taking control and helping others take control, her inability to fulfill these goals generated anger, which she directed not at the perpetrators of the attack (she referred vaguely to “the enemy”) but at her own city and its organizations. In this sense, the traumatic event for her seems not so much to be the events of September 11, but rather the daily aftermath in which she’s unable to live her life as she chooses and to find personal fulfillment in the way that she formerly had.

The second interview (which I was only able to read because the transcript couldn’t be found) was with ZE interviewed by GA. ZE also located the real problems of September 11 as manifesting outside herself; she explained that she hadn’t felt much of the impact herself until one of her close friends, who is Indian, was accosted on the street while she was wearing a traditional sari because she was mistaken for a Muslim woman. ZE is an independent museum curator who specializes in Indian art, and her friends include a number of Indian aristocrats; the friend that she spoke of in her story was an American citizen who was a consultant for CK. This episode was shocking to ZE because she suddenly felt that she realized how many people she would have to protect or advocate for. Her friends, who were successful cultural and professional figures, were equally as vulnerable as people who she saw on the streets and the subways whose histories were unknown to her. She didn’t feel bodily threatened herself—that was not a comprehendible effect of September 11. Rather, it was a direct attack on an individual, her friend, who caused her to understand September 11 as the impetus for discriminatory hate crimes by Americans on other Americans.

She compared the experience to when she was a student at Berkeley in 1968 and the police began to physically attack the student protesters and to administer tear gas. I thought this comparison was interesting since it describes a domestic attack of the Berkeley police on the Berkeley students. To her, however, the events are similar because in both cases she fought for the rights of her friends (to stay out of the Vietnam War) and for the rights of the innocent Vietnamese who were being killed by American soldiers. She does not seem to understand September 11 as an event that made her a victim because of her history--as one who fights for cultural understanding.

I can understand her desire to avoid the feeling of being victimized. Part of how I understood September 11 was to see it as an attack on the American government, and specifically the policies of George Bush and his administration. Because I didn’t agree with those policies, I could avoid feeling attacked—even though I lived in New York City at the time and witnessed the effects of the attacks firsthand. That was, simply, my logic at the time. Furthermore, such a violent event, to me, seemed to be lacking in compassion, and I too felt that it was an appropriate time to have compassion in the places where others directed their feelings of revenge and anger. I hadn’t thought of it so much as a coping strategy, but reading the interview with ZE made me want to ask her how she was able to maintain that she wasn’t a direct victim. In other words, this logic that she and I might have shared started to seem faulty to me.

On the other hand, I think this response is somewhat rooted in the dominant narrative that began to be proffered by the media in that it was a response against it. For me, it’s natural to want to offer an alternative to the official statement about how the group responds or what the group thinks. My thought is very much rooted in individualism, rather than the communal, and this is perhaps because I grew up in a community where my and my family’s beliefs (and the food we ate, our names, the cars we drove, et al) were drastically different from our neighbors’. It’s partly an inherent understanding for me that I’m not represented in communal stories. I think this is why when I hear about any kind of group—even one that I may be a part of, such as “New Yorkers”—I automatically dismiss its potential to include, or apply to, me in any way. Part of the September 11 Narrative and Memory project was to get a diversity of stories of individuals that could potentially create a collection of individual memories which, collectively, could serve as a statement against (or alongside) the official collective memory as preserved by the media or the government. It was a useful assignment for me to see how individual memory and collective memory can feed off each other, or be formed in response to one another. And most importantly, it was a reminder to me that my own feelings of existing outside the dominant group are likely to each person’s perception, to a certain extent, and not just mine.