Memorializing Absence (Remembering This Date)...
            It has been said quite often since September 11 that Americans are standing at a juncture of history, that, on that date, the world changed forever into a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’ Such proclamations of radical breaks in historical consciousness have happened before, of course. Writing in 1924 about the experience of modernity, Virginia Woolf stated, “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” Many years later, Theodor Adorno wrote, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” implying that cultural production would never be the same in the wake of the Holocaust. There are many good arguments to reject the current version of the shock of history insofar as it is a particularly American-centric and provincial one, one that awards traumatic events in the U.S. more historical weight than those in the rest of the world. Yet, the feeling persists, that this date will be forever be understood as one that marks the end of one era and the beginning of another, indeed that September 11, 2001 will be remembered as the beginning of the new world of the 21st century.                      
            In many ways, this before/after can be attributed to the aspects of this event that were so unanticipated, so unimaginable: the image of one plane, and then another, colliding into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and the shock of the buildings’ collapse, so quickly and so controlled. As millions of witnesses watched, from Manhattan, Brooklyn, New Jersey, and throughout the nation and the world on their television sets, the shock of the spectacular image of the plane’s impact was replaced by an equally unbelievable image - the absence of the twin towers in the skyline, the erasure of the two massive buildings anchoring lower Manhattan. How instantly had those two towers changed meaning, for never hadthey signified more than in their absence. Standing untouched, the World Trade Center had been invested with many meanings in its duration of almost thirty years - the folly of oversized public building projects, the banal glass towers of modernity’s fading years, the symbol of New York tourism, and, later, the arrogance of American capital. Yet, once fallen, their absence spoke more profoundly than their presence ever could. To look at the skyline now is to experience the shock of absence; all images of the towers have now taken on a poignancy that was, before September 11, unimaginable.
            In the face of absence, especially an absence so violently and tragically wrought at the cost of so many lives, people feel a need to create a presence of some kind, and it may be for this reason that questions of memorialization have so quickly followed this event. It seemed as if people were already talking of memorials the day after, when the numbers and names of the missing were unknown and the search for survivors still the focus of national attention. What, we might ask, is behind this rush to memorialize and to speak of memorials? Could we imagine people talking of memorialization after the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, or the bombing of Hiroshima? Or, for that matter, that the people of Rwanda talked of memorialization after the massacres that killed hundreds of thousands there? Throughout history, collective and public memorialization has most commonly taken place with the distance of time. After wars have been declared over, towns, cities, and nations have built memorials to name the dead and those sacrificed. Historical figures, such as Lincoln, Jefferson, and Roosevelt, became the focus of memorials many decades after they died. Many of the most important memorials in the United States took many decades to build, each the product of bureaucratic wrangling and conflicting agendas. In recent years, it is true, this process has accelerated. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was built seven years after the end of U.S. participation in the war, and even then it was considered to be long overdue. The Oklahoma City National Memorial was opened five years after the April 1995 bombing that killed 168 people, and it was in many ways a memorial sped into existence by the presence of a powerful group of family members and survivors who participated in the memorialization process. Now, the question of memorialization of September 11 has focused on what is called “ground zero” in New York City, completely overshadowing the sites of destruction at the Pentagon and in Western Pennsylvania, making it clear that this site is the symbolic center of this tragic event.