Performing trauma: Commemorating 9/11 in downtown Manhattan (2018) (original) (raw)

Abstract

There are two memorials at the site of the World Trade Center: the above ground Memorial Park and the below ground Memorial Museum. They embody very different conceptions of how an event such as 9/11 should be remembered. The Memorial Park was an attempt to integrate the recognition of loss into the ongoing life of the city. It fails to do this, largely because it succumbs to the temptation to let the site itself— " Ground Zero " —do the work of memory. The two pools (" voids ") are located on the footprints of the two towers. They dominate the site, inheriting the clumsy monumentality of the destroyed buildings. The underground Memorial Museum combines relics, remnants, images, and newsreels, to involve its visitors in the emotional immediacy of the events of 9/11. It presents 9/11 as a traumatic memory, one to be re-experienced but not understood, placing it outside history in a kind of perpetual present. It reinforces what Marita Sturken identified as a national sense of innocence, and it militates against the development of an historical understanding of the causes and consequences of 9/11. In the final section of this article, I reflect on ways in Ground Zero might have been designed to create a site where residents, citizens, and visitors might have come together to mourn, reflect on, and seek to understand the events of 9/11. The voids There are two memorials for 9/11 at the site of the World Trade Center (" Ground Zero "). The first, the Memorial proper, is a park of around 8 acres, consisting of paved space, rows of trees (swamp oaks) and grass, and concrete benches. Within this space are two large square pits (" pools " and " voids "), each of which has water cascading down its walls, disappearing into a smaller square hole in the center. Surrounding each pool is a low wall, with the names of those who were killed on 9/11 and of those who died in the car bombing of 1993 displayed along a slanted top surface. A strangely off-kilter two-story building close to the two pools provides the entrance to the underground Memorial Museum, the second memorial (of which more shortly).

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

References (42)

  1. For excellent accounts of the struggles between the various groups ("stakeholders") as to how the site might be developed, see Sturken (2007: Chapters 4 and 5), and Greenspan (2013). Sturken (2015) brings her account up the present. James Young gives an insider's account of the selection process in Young (2016: Introduction and Chapter 1).
  2. Laqueur (1994) provides a seminal account of this development emphasizing the role of World War I. See now Laqueur (2015), especially Part III, for a much larger story. For reflections on the role of names in commemoration, see Margalit (2002: 18-26) and Poole (2009: 137-139).
  3. There is a special room in the Museum for family members. There is also a room providing photos, bios, and online information about each of those who died. It is not quite the same thing as a memorial wall.
  4. On a recent visit (January 2017), the attendants seemed less in evidence, and the visitors were behaving in a more relaxed manner, leaning on the walls for smiling photos with the pools in the background.
  5. See, for example, Sturken (1997) and Wolfson (2017). Maya Lin (2006) has provided her own account. Lin was on the selection committee and was an enthusiastic proponent of Arad's proposal (see Greenspan, 2013: 122-124; Young, 2016: 62-64).
  6. See Kastoryano (2015): Deuxième Partie.
  7. As it happens, it seems likely that Arad drew inspiration from one of the artists I have mentioned. His two pools bear a striking resemblance to one of the pits in Heizer's "North, East, South, West" at Dia, Beacon. Glimpses of this powerful work are available at: http://www.diaart.org/collection/collection/ heizer-michael-north-east-south-west-19672002-2003-174-1-4
  8. I first heard this suggestion from Henry Rousso at a symposium at the Museum to mark its opening in May 2014. See also Gopnik (2014) and Kennicott (2014). Sodaro (2017) is an interesting attempt to References
  9. Alexander JC, Eyerman R, Giesen B, et al. (2004) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press.
  10. Caruth C (ed.) (1995) Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  11. Caruth C (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  12. Caruth C (2014) Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  13. Chomsky N (2011) 9/11: Was There an Alternative? NY: Open Media Books.
  14. Edkins J (2003) Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
  15. Filler M (2011) A masterpiece at Ground Zero. New York Review of Books, 27 October. Available at: http:// www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/10/27/masterpiece-ground-zero/
  16. Filler M (2017) New York's vast flop. New York Review of Books, 9 March. Available at: http://www. nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/world-trade-center-new-yorks-vast-flop/
  17. Goldie P (2012) The Mess inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  18. Gopnik A (2014) Stones and bones: Visiting the 9/11 memorial and museum. The New Yorker, 7 July, pp. 38-44.
  19. Greenspan E (2013) Battle for Ground Zero: Inside the Political Struggles to Rebuild the World Trade Center. New York: St. Martin's Press.
  20. Kastoryano R (2015) Que faire des corps des jihadistes? Territoire et identité. Paris: Fayard.
  21. Kennicott P (2014) The 9/11 Memorial Museum doesn't just display artifacts, it ritualizes grief on a loop. The Washington Post, 17 June. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertain- ment/museums/the-911-memorial-museum-doesnt-just-display-artifacts-it-ritualizes-grief-on-a- loop/2014/06/05/66bd88e8-ea8b-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html?utm_term=.741eb82ecd28
  22. Landsberg A (2004) Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
  23. Laqueur TW (1994) Memory and naming in the great war. In: Gillis JR (ed.) Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 150-167.
  24. Laqueur TW (2015) The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
  25. Leys R (2000) Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press.
  26. Lin M (2006) Boundaries. New York: Simon & Schuster.
  27. MacCannell D (1976/2013) The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books; republished Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press.
  28. Margalit A (2002) The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press.
  29. Poole R (2009) Two ghosts and an angel: Memory and forgetting in Hamlet, Beloved, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Constellations 16(1): 125-149.
  30. Robertson G (2001) There is a legal way out of this …. The Guardian, 14 September, 22.
  31. Santner EL (1992) History beyond the pleasure principle: some thoughts on the representation of trauma. In: Friedlander S (ed.) Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution." Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, pp. 143-154.
  32. Sodaro A (2017) Prosthetic trauma and politics in the National September 11 Memorial Museum. Memory Studies. Epub ahead of print 4 August. DOI: 10.1177/1750698017720257.
  33. Sturken M (1997) Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press.
  34. Sturken M (2007) Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  35. Sturken M (2015) The 9/11 memorial museum and the remaking of ground zero. American Quarterly 67(2): 471-490.
  36. Sutton J (2010) Observer perspective and acentered memory: some puzzles about point of view in personal memory. Philosophical Studies 148: 27-37.
  37. Urry J and Larsen J (1990/2011) The Tourist Gaze. London: SAGE.
  38. Van Der Kolk BA and Van Der Hart O (1995) The intrusive past: the flexibility of memory and the engraving of trauma. In: Caruth C (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 158-182.
  39. Wilcox PC Jr (2001) The terror. New York Review of Books, 18 October. Available at: http://www.nybooks. com/articles/2001/10/18/the-terror/
  40. Wolfson E (2017) The "black gash of shame": revisiting the Vietnam veterans memorial controversy. Arts21, 11 January. Available at: http://magazine.art21.org/2017/03/15/the-black-gash-of-shame-revisiting-the- vietnam-veterans-memorial-controversy/#.WjWn4FQ-dE4 (accessed 19 February 2017).
  41. Wood J (2008) How Fiction Works. NY: Picador.
  42. Young JE (2016) The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces between. Amherst, MA; Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.