Where were you when...? is a question that some of us love asking, of ourselves, and of those around us. It’s a way of placing ourselves on the arc of history, stroking a sense that we have lived in interesting times, that we have tales to tell.
I haven’t escaped that temptation either, and over the years, as a teacher, I’ve found that there are fewer and fewer “historic” instances that I can share with my students, and when I talk about these moments, I feel a bit like a dinosaur or at the very least, a relic from some time that belongs in the dry depersonalized dust of history books.
For those of my generation and perhaps a bit older, the things we talk about as momentous or perspective-altering (even if not life-changing) include Indira Gandhi’s declaration of national emergency, her assassination and that of her son, the demolition of the Babri Masjid.... and so on. With the advent of satellite television and instant news, we vicariously partook in moments of visual terror, beginning with the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001.
My usual morning cue of podcasts did not let me forget that today is the twentieth anniversary of that attack. Over time, the United States has perfected the art of strategic memorialization (anyone who has been to Pearl Harbor will attest to this), packaging and commodifying it in ways that make the parochial global, that attempts to make the American experience the essential human experience, in some ways reflecting the manner in which US geopolitics and the military-industrial complex that underlies it has touched everyone for better or worse.
But back to the podcasts of my morning which arguably took a nuanced and critical look at the fallout(s) of America’s War on Terror following the 9/11 attacks.
On BBC’s Global News Podcast, Sandwiching stories about teen tennis sensation Emma Raducanu and Lebanon’s new government was a lookback that followed the stories of three individuals whose lives were impacted by the event, including the photojournalist David Handschuh on his way to teach a class at NYU who found himself “at the wrong place at the right time” and took some of the most iconic pictures of the event.
In a series of two pieces that look at the long tail of the event, New York Times’ The Daily on September 9 and 10 tried to unravel the rise of conspiracy theories and counterterrorism excesses within the United States. It’s hard to not see the snaking threads of these phenomena in our own backyard, whether the rise of an Islamophobic nationalism or the brand of jingoism that marks every challenge to the state as anti-national.
Next up was this week’s episode of Radiolab, a re-framed reprise that looked at the politics of the post-9/11 war on terror, justified by what they note is the “single sentence at the heart of it all”, a 60-word sentence that allowed the president to sign into law the “Authorization for the Use of Military Power”. Framed by legal experts and supported in Congress with just one vote against, this sentence has had deep implications for what it means to be at war, what can be done to whom, and why peace will forever remain elusive within its framing. I’ll admit I’m a Radiolab enthusiast, and this one does not disappoint even on listening again, with its nuanced and critical treatment of the multiplicity of issues that are both opened up and hidden by the skillful use of words.
My last memorialization podcast of the morning was The Experiment, a podcast from The Atlantic that tells stories of the “unfinished country” that is the United States. In this episode, reporter Jennifer Senior takes a close look at the personal journeys of grief that began when one family lost a member in the WTC attacks.
There are many more of course, including a call-in on New York Public Radio’s Brian Lehrer Show that features stories of how 9/11 changed childhood, and the New Yorker Radio Hour that features Edwidge Danticat’s essayFlight about how tragedies are memorialized by survivors.
I remember many years ago journalist Aman Sethi, when speaking to students in my department, noted that families who have survived the Partition will continue to have a bit of “madness” in them until those with its living memory have passed on. And this is possibly true even for those whose families have not had the immediate experience of a hugely traumatic event, something that affects the national psyche. I suppose in both weighty and trivial ways, we are shaped by historic moments that are proximal and distant.
…
It was around 7:00 p.m. in the evening when we got news of the attack on the World Trade Centre. Remember, this was a world before social media, and the internet was still in its infancy in India. We were in the middle of a power cut and so the television was off. A friend from another part of the city called me to ask if my brother was safe, as she had just heard about the attack and she knew he lived and worked in the New York area. It took a while for the images to reach us, and we couldn’t reach my brother till a bit later. As it happened, he had been delayed going to work that morning—his commute took him through the WTC station—because he had to take his daughter to her first day of kindergarten. His train was the first one to be stopped after the towers fell. A few minutes earlier, and he would have been at Ground Zero.
All tragedies are footnoted by stories of near-misses, but more importantly, by stories that underscore the ways in which they gain an afterlife in personal histories and in national imaginaries. Memorialization of 9/11 has served to justify the US’s bad behavior elsewhere, its excesses in Guantanamo, its sparking of forever wars. But it’s also served to emphasize the impact on the smaller, more keenly felt stage of individual lives.