Strangers to Ourselves

Perhaps it is the estrangement from our experience with history—and from ourselves, from our associations and social affiliations, from our governments and communities—that mark the subject’s experience with history as a violent one.

Undoubtedly, the most estranging event (if not feeling) I have experienced came at the most unexpected of moments during a visit to my parent’s house almost three years ago. Upon entering my childhood room I noticed a folder on my desk and, in it, a stack of printed pages—e-mails that my father had received from me while I lived in New York. During that time I began to write a series of e-mails to friends and family, explaining the day-to-day events of life in Manhattan, a routine that began the morning I walked to the end of the street to look up and see two buildings in miniature, ablaze and billowing smoke. Accounts of the city turned military-state, with armed soldiers at checkpoints requiring ID to walk from campus to my apartment. Stories of startled midnight awakenings to the thundering fly-over of patrolling airforce jets. Ghastly narratives of human debris raining in Brooklyn and clouds of smoke blowing uptown with wind gusts, two months after the towers collapsed. Hotdog vendors in face masks and selling American flags. Sirens, panic and the day-to-day banal that trigger alarm or startle one awake at night with the sensation of one's own imminent death. Apocalyptic, yes. But as real as experience can be when faced with phantom pangs of having witnessed sudden death, in masses.

As I thumbed through these pages of memories conveniently far away -memories never entirely forgotten but disregarded and unexpectedly awaiting for me then, that afternoon-, it became apparent that my father had saved all of my e-mail messages in this folder. I read and began to remember some of the details from those days in New York, on September 11th—a young woman laughing hysterically in disgust, a businessman vomiting into a trashcan on the street corner, masses of people, some of them bloodied in ties and dresses painted entirely white with ashes, a young mother asking me if the radio announced news of evacuation while her child cried frantically in a stroller, and the stench of burning wreckage that persisted for weeks afterwards. One remembers the stench: when you inhale smoke and wonder what human vapor enters you, what mixture of toxic chemicals and disintegrated human matter enters your nostrils, how could one forget? As I read these stories the horrors and confusion, the death at your door came back to me. I read on until I came to a page that I could not possibly have written, a paragraph describing the first tower crumble and fall to rubble, seen from my perspective at an intersection with the avenue—an experience I most certainly did witness to write about, but could not remember, no matter how much I imagined.

This moment of estrangement, for one’s own seemingly impossible yet very real experience, came to me as the greatest shock, as a flooding impossibility, sinking and hallowing, of disbelief. Disbelief of oneself, of one's own reality, of an experience so sublime and awful that it could only be real. For when I think of the events of September 11th, I remember, as I only can, not one day that comemmorates the traumatic event of two towers falling to the ground with the several thousand inside, but a fading -yet ever vivid- two years in New York, and the day the impossible remembrance of it came to me as the contents of a void. A void I have evidence to be able to say I experienced, but cannot fully recall.

I doubt that my remembrance will fade for that day when I went into my old bedroom, unsuspectingly, to leaf through pages of a manila folder. My days in New York –what has been described inadequately as a ‘national trauma'- have not left me, nor am I certain that to desire this experience to go away, to recede into time, would be sufficient. Rather, I realize one of the most difficult tasks has been to come to terms —perhaps by my own denial, both desired and involuntary- that what happened in New York during those years has marked much of my relationship with my research interests, because it has left its mark on my own past, my every day, and that thing we understand collectively as an experience, as much as I wish I could conceive of it as known. And this is the paradox. Maybe then, by remembrance, it might begin to recede in time.