Traumascapes

The power and fate of places transformed by tragedy

Maria Tumarkin

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780522851779
• eBook ISBN: 9780522864663

'Traumascapes are a distinctive category of places transformed physically and psychically by suffering, part of a scar tissue that stretches across the world.'Maria Tumarkin grew up in the old Soviet Union, and emigrated to Australia as a teenager. In 2004, she embarked on an international odyssey to investigate and write about major sites of violence and suffering. Traumascapes is a powerful meditation on the places she visited: Bali, Berlin, Manhattan, Moscow, Port Arthur, Sarajevo, and the field in Pennsylvania where the fourth plane involved in the attacks of September 11 2001 crashed. In a time when terror and tragedy flourish these locations exhibit a compelling power, drawing pilgrims and tourists from around the world who want to understand the meaning of the traumatic events that unfolded there. In traumascapes, life goes on but the past is still unfinished business.

PART I
GOING TO
GROUND

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SEVEN DECADES AFTER THE DESTRUCTION of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour created a giant pit in the middle of Moscow with its own force field, another self-centred and technocratic empire suffered a hole in the heart of its most important city. On September 11, 2001, a massive sixteen-acre pit punctured right through New York’s Lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center Towers had stood side by side since 1973. New York’s latest traumascape was a site every bit as extraordinary as its counterpart in Stalinist Moscow. Not simply a monstrous and spectacular eyesore, it was a place of immense power, a vortex sucking everything into itself. An endless stream of people, first from New York and then from across the world, came to see what celebrated American scientist Stephen Jay Gould called ‘the largest human structure ever destroyed in a catastrophic moment’—the Pit, the Pile, Ground Zero. As a traumascape, the World Trade Center site attracted twice as many visitors as it did before the attacks, when the Twin Towers were among the city’s main attractions.

From Day One, every aspect of New York’s Ground Zero was meticulously documented by the media. The reporting of September 11 was overwhelming in its volume and pitch. All across the world, but in the US in particular, essays and articles were written not as disposable chunks of instantly used-up and forgotten text but as prophesying, castigating masterpieces, breathless and baroque. As to the images of Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan, they were everywhere. Their sheer quantity assured the site of a trans-cultural immortality rarely afforded even to the world’s most eminent landmarks. While decades of repression and silence separate us from the story of Moscow’s cathedral, the World Trade Center site has been transformed into a traumascape right in front of our eyes. As its contemporaries, we are privy to the depth and reach of its power. We are able to feel in our bones its enduring allure, to observe the reactions and meanings it continues to elicit at their most unmediated and raw. The story of the sixteen-acre wound in the heart of one of the world’s foremost cities opens doors towards understanding the cultural, historical and spiritual work that traumascapes have been performing in the modern world.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, as four planes were hijacked by Al-Qaeda operatives, United States President George Bush slipped off the radar. Taken away to an undisclosed location, he showed up in Washington around 7 p.m., more than eleven hours after the attack. The President’s disappearance, prompted by what was perceived as the direct threat to his life, has been a subject of much debate, in the US in particular. A few journalists who did not think much of Mr Bush’s actions on the day were sacked shortly after their comments inspired not simply a controversy but a wave of revulsion from the public. Out went Daily Courier columnist Dan Guthrie from Grant’s Pass in Oregon, having accused Bush of hiding in a hole in Nebraska instead of returning toWashington immediately after the attacks. Out, with a huge bang, went Texas City Sun columnist Tom Gutting, who thought that Bush behaved like a first lady at best, zigzagging through the nation’s air-space in a state of panic and paranoia.

It was not until three days after the attacks that Bush’s presidency seemed to have re-asserted itself. On 14 September 2001, Bush came to the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan to see for himself the enormity of the destruction. Those who want to imagine the scale of what had happened in New York, wrote American Professor of Religion Mark Riley, should simply remember that the remnants of the two full-size passenger jets which slammed into the Twin Towers were so insignificant as to be lost amid the ruins. There was so much rubble, in fact, that more than 250 tonnes of it, stolen from the site, made its way to scrap yards within weeks of the disaster. Once at Ground Zero, Bush grabbed a bullhorn, climbed on top of the wreckage and addressed the firefighters and rescue workers, who were working at the site around the clock in hope of finding survivors. As the US President began to speak, someone in the crowd yelled that it was hard to hear the words. Bush’s response electrified the crowd. ‘I hear you,’ he yelled back, ‘the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.’ Ignited by the force of Bush’s reaction, the workers broke into spontaneous chants of ‘USA! USA!’

It was at that point that Bush, visibly charged by being at the site of the collapsed Twin Towers, appeared to take charge. To many who had doubted Mr Bush, he seemed to become president that day, wrote journalist Elisabeth Bumiller in the New York Times. No televised addresses to the nation could have made it so very clear to the Americans and the world who was now leading this massive country under attack. Bush’s resurgence did not go unnoticed. Some political commentators have gone so far as to argue that the President’s first visit to New York’s Ground Zero defined not only his role in the aftermath of September 11 but his presidency as a whole. Shaken and disembodied on TV screens before his visit, Bush was now all flesh, emanating presence and claiming the absolute authority, both human and divine, to lead America’s retaliation effort. As the image of Bush atop a destroyed fire truck was televised across the world, the President appeared to speak from the very ‘epicentre’ not only of the terrorist attacks but of the future, of the new world that was taking shape with each and every one of his heavy, enraged words.

What happened on 14 September was a cliché: the President inspects a site of his nation’s latest tragedy, takes his rightful place at the frontline. Yet the President’s visit went beyond the clichés as well. What we saw in New York amid the still-smouldering wreckage was a moment of empowerment or enchantment, like in a fairytale, where a simpleton main character becomes touched by powers he never knew existed. The powers of a place destroyed, laden with the dead, a place that was, at that moment, briefly, unforgettably, the most brutalised on earth.

‘You should be here, Maria.’ After days of short beeps on the phone line, I was finally able to get through to my Australianborn New Yorker friend. ‘This is what you’ve been writing about. It’s all here, but you can only understand it when you actually go to the site.’ My friend went to Ground Zero as soon as she could. Like her, a great many New Yorkers had been making their way to the World Trade Center site ever since the day of the attacks. ‘I have never known the city gripped by anything stronger,’ wrote New York journalist Verlyn Klinkenborg, ‘than the desire to get close to those ruins, to attest to their existence’. If the authorities had not fenced off the area, wrote Klinkenborg, the people of New York would have been right there in the midst of it, clambering on top of the wreckage.

I have gone through hundreds of interviews, articles and blogs in an attempt to understand why so many people ended up at the World Trade Center site in the days and weeks following September 11. The words most people used were not very illuminating. Time and time again I read of New Yorkers seeking healing and closure, paying respects, honouring the dead. Yet to me, all these words seemed like the ready-made idioms of a culture that preferred to stay in the dark about what was at stake now that its foundations were coming undone. After all, you can pay respects at memorial services, find solace in temples or in the arms of a beloved. You can make sense of the tragedy in libraries—there you can find thousands of books about how we got to this point, books on history, politics, religion and economics. Why go through barricades, police checks, layers of ash, asbestos, the unbearable stench, your own heart accelerating hundredfold, the almost inevitable shock and equally inevitable nightmares, to see it all for yourself? Not one person, but tens of thousands. One continuous, unceasing stream. If the survival instinct is to flee a site of danger, why was the exodus from Lower Manhattan literally reversed so soon after the tragedy?

Newspapers told the story of a woman dressed in a suit, who spent the entire day of September 11 as close to the site as the police would let her. All day she sat virtually motionless with her eyes fixed on the smouldering wreckage. ‘I know it’s useless,’ she told reporters, ‘but I just don’t feel like I can go home. I just need to be here to see this.’ A number of firefighters, who worked at the site looking for survivors, also refused to leave. Despite being exhausted by their 24-hour shifts, despite the frustrated Deputy Chief ordering them to get some rest, they simply would not go home. I have read of survivors who, having miraculously escaped, returned to the site to serve sandwiches hours later. A woman who lost her husband in the attacks lied to get herself a slot at the volunteer table. She said she needed to be a part of the action, she could not keep going without being in some way useful. In the immediate aftermath of the explosions, to some survivors, grieving relatives and rescue personnel, being at Ground Zero was a way of keeping themselves together. To them it was a basic necessity—something akin to a survival instinct. The alternatives, after all, were more than real—despair, paralysis, fear and an inconsolable feeling of loneliness amid the madness engulfing New York and the rest of the country.

Still, it was not just survivors and family members who were drawn to theWorld Trade Center site. On Friday, three days after the planes hit the Twin Towers, the Reverend Joseph Griesedieck, an Episcopal priest from Manhattan, came home after a hard day’s work. He put down his suitcase, looked at his wife and children eating pizza, as was the family’s coveted Friday tradition, and instead of the proverbial ‘Honey, I’m home’, the Reverend picked up his suitcase again, turned around and said, ‘Honey, I have to go.’ It was, he said, nothing less than compulsion that he felt that Friday evening. Ever since the attacks, he was administering to crowds of parishioners who were flocking in increasing numbers to his nice, clean, gorgeous church in Manhattan and then on Friday he could not do it any more—could not preach, could not stay clean any more. He was, after all, talking to people about good and evil, faith and faithlessness, but there it was in Manhattan—the crux of the matter—so on Friday he hailed a cab and went to Ground Zero.

When Reverend Griesedieck’s spiritual colleague, New York’s Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, went to the site in Lower Manhattan as well, not sure what he was doing but feeling the need to be there, he was struck—not at first, but as he stayed at the site—by the feeling that in front of him, emerging out of devastation, was something akin to an ideal community. It may sound perverse, said the Rabbi, but it was at Ground Zero that I witnessed all the nurturing and care-taking and strength and responsibility that I always wished to see in the community where I live. Like Rabbi Hirschfield, reporter Susan Taylor Martin was taken by a new kind of reality emerging at the site. Having spent the second half of September 2001 documenting the recovery effort, Martin wrote of what she saw and felt in the enchanted language of magic realists, as if she was starting a sequel to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Within hours of the towers’ collapse, a whirlpool of people and motives descended upon the site—police officers, firefighters, bureaucrats, building contractors, survivors, doctors, chaplains and thieves. Martin calls these people ‘the inhabitants of Ground Zero’—as if a new world has just been forged and these people are the first to live in it.

Survivors, relatives, spiritual and political leaders of all kinds, even thieves—their presence at the site seemed understandable, but what about others, New Yorkers and visitors who did not have a direct connection to the place? What drew them in? What were they looking for in Lower Manhattan? On 12 September 2001, following a restless day spent in vain attempts to contribute to the recovery effort in any way imaginable (we’ll give blood, dig, cook, pitch tents, anything you want us to do), a young New Yorker and his girlfriend put in an award-winning performance to sneak in to the already fenced-off area around the World Trade Center. They were not authorised volunteers and had no business being at the site. It’s true that as far as stories from a disaster zone go, theirs is neither extraordinary nor heroic. Two young New Yorkers fake their IDs, shake at the thought of being found out, lie, push their luck, do whatever it takes to get to the site—all in order to (and this is where the possible anti-climax might creep in but it doesn’t) hand out cold bottles of Gatorade to the exhausted firefighters, strike a few conversations and take in the magnitude of the destruction at eye level. That’s it really.

Yet something remarkable happens when, at the end of the long day spent at the site, the young man goes home and writes it all down. Before falling asleep, he shoots off a few e-mails to some friends. And almost instantaneously, his account is forwarded across the world. His rushed, overwhelmed, self-effacing account becomes cherished and passed on. People write back. They say ‘thank you’. It’s as if the man and his girlfriend were doing something for them—some kind of vital chore. Faced with doubts about sneaking in to the site for the second time, the young man decides he should go again, at least one more time. ‘It is, I suppose, a form of “helping”, helping those who can’t get (or sneak) in and get down and dirty, it is helping to all the rest of us, who can only wonder, mourn and grasp for reality. I will keep trying.’

Trying to do what? To stay there, down and dirty? To keep grasping for reality? To not fall back to the chair in front of the television?

I have read hundreds of recollections of September 11 and its immediate aftermath, in which people described the sensation of being glued to TV screens, often for days, unable or scared to walk away. Yet for many, the act of watching Al-Qaeda attacks unfold in real time on television proved to be an enormous burden. For some, it was close to unbearable. ‘I am not going to watch what’s happening on CNN,’ my Australian-born friend told me, ‘I need to go there.’ At first, I thought hers was an act of defiance, a dangerous if accurate gut reaction. On reflection, I think she was protecting herself by going to Ground Zero, saving her sanity. The role of a passive onlooker, away from the immediate danger, may have been relatively comforting for a great many Americans, but for others it compounded their powerlessness and isolation. The world that people were part of only a few days ago no longer existed. As to the new world taking shape in front of their eyes, they were not part of it either. At best, they were in the audience. Going to Ground Zero was a way of countering 9/11 being transformed into a TV spectacle, a hyper-real and addictive show. It was a way of bringing meaning to an incomprehensible and endlessly replayed sequence of events that was doggedly rewriting history.

In the months following the September 11 attacks, visits to the World Trade Center occupied the entire spectrum between ghoulishness and piety. Conversations with the dead existed alongside macabre fascination. People who had lost family members or friends walked in the footsteps of tourists and opportunistic politicians. Epiphanies coexisted with petty scams. But no matter, because the site pulled them all in. Already within the few months since the tragedy, people from all across America and beyond were flocking to the site—twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. At the same time, the almost daily visits to Ground Zero by lawmakers, world leaders and politicians were part of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s strategy ‘to shock people with the severity of the devastation’—especially the kinds of people who could help New Yorkers and their city. As to media and movie personalities, they were touring the site in such numbers that a scathing article in the British newspaper The Guardian accused celebrities of approaching New York’s disaster zone as if it were a happening nightspot. Eventually, in a move almost too ironic for words, the director of New York’s office of Emergency Management had to ask celebrities to, please, please, stop coming to the site. I want to get the intonation right, because a mountain of words has been used to describe the lure of Ground Zero. Of all the words, ‘compulsion’ is the best, the most accurate, I’ve found to make sense of why so many people ended up at the World Trade Center site. Compulsion—as in, to use a dictionary definition, ‘an irresistible impulse to act, regardless of the rationality of the motivation’.

‘New York wore the disaster like a garment,’ wrote Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. ‘We breathed . . . dust and inhaled particles of the dead that floated in the air.’ For months after September 11, the remnants of the attacks clothed the city. They were everywhere—in the air, the smell, in the temporary memorials and posters for the missing, in the stories that everyone now had about loss, shock and survival by the barest of threads. Ground Zero was the new focal point of the reconfigured city, the place where it ended and where it also began. It is tempting to think of the site—its scale, prominence and remarkable allure—as something that could have happened only in New York. A larger-than-life story for a larger-than-life city. Yet this is simply not the case.

Within two years of United Airlines Flight 93 plunging into a Pennsylvanian field near the small, rural community of Shanksville, more than 200 000 people had visited the site of the crash. As a place, a dot on the map, Shanksville was on the opposite side of the spectrum to New York—barren, lonely, plain and so very inconveniently located. A tiny community of 245, roughly 125 kilometres away from Pittsburgh and with no public transport connecting it to the rest of the country, Shanksville was not even on every map. Yet visitors, the locals say, started showing up already on the day after the crash. They would arrive literally in the middle of nowhere, weary from confusing directions and wrong turns, finding nothing at the site but a spontaneous shrine with miniature flags and baseball caps and wooden angels, left by those who came before.

Why did they come? If in New York people wanted to see with their own eyes what the World Trade Center site was like, in Shanksville there was nothing to see. At a distance a fence marked as off-bounds the actual location of the crash site—a reclaimed strip-mine, which looked flat and abandoned following the painstaking clean-up, distinguished only by an American flag wedged in its soil. As it stood, the site was effectively a crime scene and would remain so for a long time—until, said FBI officials, Osama bin Laden, the crime’s mastermind, was caught or pronounced dead, whichever came first. Only victims’ families, accompanied by the Somerset County CoronerWallace Miller, were allowed to walk through the area of the crash. For others coming to Shanksville, there were no marks of devastation to take in, only the material residue of the grief that the crash had generated—heartfelt, piercing, zealously patriotic. Devoid of the magnitude and the spectacle of New York’s Ground Zero, Shanksville was purely a place where it all happened, a traumascape distilled to its absolute basics. When you went to the crash site, you did not go to experience a giant underworld or a new reality forming itself amid the wreckage and noise. You simply went to be at a place marked by a tragedy. Yet despite such vast differences, the same feeling of compulsion drove many people to Shanksville and to Ground Zero in New York: the same overriding need to make the trip and to see it all with one’s own eyes.

I went to Shanksville in the middle of winter a few years after the attack, pulling along a man who barely knew me...

Table of contents

• TRAUMASCAPES
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I GOING TO GROUND
• PART II FACE TO FACE WITH A TRAUMASCAPE
• PART III THE FATE OF TRAUMASCAPES
• NOTES
• INDEX