ESSAYS, ARTICLES & LECTURES
When the Towers Fell
Remembrance
Los Angeles Review of Books, September 11, 2021.
Those old enough to remember where they were on September 11, 2001, usually have a personal story to tell about that day. Here’s mine:
I was headed to South Africa to give a keynote address at an international design conference. I was on an early United Airlines flight from Chicago, connecting in Atlanta with a South African Airways flight to Johannesburg.
The flight landed in Atlanta at 9:00 a.m. I could feel the chaos in the airport, but until I saw the monitors showing footage of the first plane hitting the North Tower 15 minutes before, I did not know why. Terrified and uncertain about what to do next, I jumped on the tram to the South African Airways terminal. By the time I arrived, the South Tower was down. I called home. If the South African flight went ahead as planned, my partner, Jack, and I agreed I should be on it; whoever was responsible for this attack should not determine our future lives. At that time, neither cell phones nor information technology was as yet ubiquitous, so I lent my phone credit card to a South African woman who also needed to call her partner. We huddled around the gate with other passengers, uncertain until told to board — but once on, we were almost immediately instructed to deplane. A hush came over the entire area as a loudspeaker announcement declared that all US airports were now shuttered. I could not return to Chicago nor go on to South Africa.
We loaded onto buses that took us to a motel close to the airport. I was to share a room with the woman to whom I had lent my phone card. I learned she was the great-great-granddaughter of Paul Kruger, the controversial former president of the South African Republic and builder of the Afrikaner nation. She was someone I probably would never have met in South Africa. But in this moment of extreme uncertainty, we began a friendship that we valued for many years.
Security sequestered our bags and only allowed us to keep our hand luggage. To lessen my anxiety, I swam in the small pool behind the motel. My swimsuit was in my checked suitcase, so I swam in my underwear every day, which I then dried with the motel hairdryer. On the third day, a bus from South African Airlines came and took us to the enormous Atlanta mall to buy whatever we might need.
During these several days, my roommate and I watched nonstop television reportage about the attacks in our room and in the motel bar. We saw people jumping out of windows from the second World Trade Center tower before that footage was taken off the air — bodies hurling through space, fleeing fires behind them, unthinkable choices being made. We were in shock and in limbo.
On the fourth day, our luggage was returned, and we awaited our departure. After several false starts, we were finally the first plane out of Atlanta. Lots of media people were there to film us departing. Chillingly, for the first leg of our journey, flying parallel to our plane on either side were two fighter jets.
When we landed in Johannesburg 16 hours later, the only flight from the United States to arrive since the airport shutdown, the media again were waiting. Because I was one of few Americans on the flight, a reporter thrust a microphone in front of me and asked, “What should the US do now? Should you retaliate?” “Retaliate against whom?” I responded. No one yet knew who organized the attacks.
Johannesburg was already filled with makeshift memorials to those who had died, and media coverage continued nonstop. I arrived at the conference in time for my opening address to have become the closing remarks. I received a standing ovation, not for the brilliance of my ideas, but rather for having arrived there at all.
After my talk, I accidentally dropped my open purse onto the cement floor, and bits of my everyday life went rolling in all directions. I burst into tears. Nothing would ever be the same, I thought. The sense of invulnerability I had previously felt when traveling back and forth to Africa for years now was gone. Would I ever have the confidence to journey so far from home again? Would I ever even get home?
Three thousand people lost their lives in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11; hundreds more died attempting to save them. Multitudes were affected — friends, families, co-workers traumatized even to this day. Many New Yorkers chose to leave the city and not return. Extreme security measures came to dominate passengers’ airport experiences, transforming travel forever into a hostile event. The US government retaliated blindly with war, brutality, racism, and more war. A collective, global wound never to be healed now would pass from one generation to the next.
How to convey the magnitude of what occurred? How to mourn? How to move on?
Twenty years later, there are two powerful yet inverse memorial images in New York City that frame the individual and collective emotional responses to this cataclysmic event. Michael Arad’s remarkable public site of mourning, Reflecting Absence, a location with enormous twin gravity-bound chasms of black bronze, etched with the names and approximate locations of those who died, each mass holding the space of a lost tower, as volumes of water cascade, forever echoing into a bottomless abyss. Tribute in Light is staged annually by the Municipal Art Society of New York. It marks the anniversary of the attacks with two vertical beams of light stretched magnificently into the night sky in proximity to the site where the towers once stood.
Together these memorials encapsulate the best of what art and design can do to approximate an experience of incomprehensible pain, fragility, and human resilience. Reflecting Absence recreates the void — an enormity of never-ending personal and collective grief — while Tribute in Light illuminates a gargantuan emptiness, out of which the new can emerge.