9/11: Healing Through Storytelling
It is hard to believe that we are already 15 years out from the harrowing events of 9/11. What's astonishing to me is not only the fact that every single person I have ever spoken to about it can remember in vivid detail where they were and what they were doing , but also that the weeks immediately following the attacks when we were all Americans united, indivisible by race or gender or ethnicity or orientation, has not been seen nor experienced since. People remember where they were, what they were doing, but they cannot remember how to unite as one country as before. Back then, it happened organically, like daisies pushing up through dead soil and angling themselves towards the sunlight despite wretched circumstance.
Right now, I am in the middle of teaching a unit to my high-school students called "9/11: Effects on Genre Fiction and Healing through Storytelling". I showed them videos of the attacks to give them a frame of reference. Many were horrified, most of them still in the womb when the events transpired. I asked them if art, be it music, artwork, or fiction, could possibly remain relevant and charged with the same emotion of pre-9/11 when the images and the stories of that day had torn a jagged and permanent hole into the fabric that separates the real from the imaginary. If the truth of that day is one of horror and suspense and drama and tragedy, then why read in these fictional genres? How do you continue to derive joy from these genres when they have just shaken you and your family and your country to their very foundations? Did the events of 9/11 render the art of storytelling in a genre market impotent? Irrelevant? I don't believe so, and neither did my students. We just finished reading a short story by a wonderful speculative fiction writer named Paul Bowes. The story is titled "There's A Hole in the City". It talks about ghosts escaping the site of Ground Zero right after the attacks and how they serve as reminders that all lives are precious, no matter how or when they passed on. I found the selection in a fantastic anthology edited by Douglas Lain and I highly recommend it: "In the Shadows of the Towers: Speculative Fiction in a Post-9/11 World". On 9/11, there were no special effects bleeding across our tv screens, but there was a the real, choking stench of jet fuel and great clouds of stifling smoke chasing and, in some instances, erasing Americans all over the city when the towers collapsed. Where does the artist go from here?
The writer writes, the painter paints, and the songwriter composes, and just as we had once organically united as one people for two weeks following the attacks, the art we produce will organically reflect the pain of a people. It will also offer an escape hatch when the pain becomes too much to bear. It is our job as artists to make that escape hatch readily available and always accessible for those who have lost and those who need solace. That's why fiction still matters, no matter its incarnation or genre, because as horrible as some fiction stories may prove, one need only close the book and return to themselves. The nightmare, the mystery, the thriller, can be shelved and opened back up at the whim of the reader. Books return the power and the control to the people. 9/11 tried to rob all Americans of this peace of mind and this power over their own emotions and futures, but the novel, the song, the work of art in all its forms, returns that power to the hands of the resilient.
God Bless America! "Let's Roll!"
