By Angel Lemke
Geoff Nunberg, a linguist for NPR, noted on Fresh Air the other day that the decade since September 11, 2001 has produced virtually no shift in our everyday lexicon. There are no September 11 words.
There are, however, some September 11 phrases. In his first editor’s column for the journal Narrative after the attacks, Jim Phelan pointed out the one that was, for reasons other than his, the most salient one for me in my own reflections on the day. On September 11, 2001, “the world changed.”
Says Phelan in his analysis of the implicit narrative in the phrase:
“[T]o claim that these events changed the entire world is to imply that their significance extends beyond these literal, horrific consequences to some larger, even more pervasive effect.
“That effect, I would suggest, is one about our narrative understanding of the world: “On September 11,2001,what happened at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in the sky over Pennsylvania changed the existing narrative by which we make sense of the world.” Before September 11, 2001, we had somewhere in our consciousnesses an implicit and relatively stable understanding about the past, present, and future of the world. On the morning of September 11, that understanding was destroyed. Since then we have been trying to replace it with another relatively stable understanding.”
I’ve written elsewhere of the profound feeling of alienation I had from (most of) those around me precisely because I did not feel that the world had changed, because I was grief-stricken to learn that others had not been living with the intense feeling of vulnerability that pervaded my daily life as a young, queer person, as a child who grew up surrounded by generational poverty, raised by people who were struggling with severe mental illness and untreated PTSD. “You mean the rest of you didn’t know shit could blow up at any moment?” For me, feeling safe in the world began with an understanding that shit will blow up at any moment, and the hope that we all shared that understanding, that we could, as Dean Spade says, “Be gentle with ourselves and each other,” while being “fierce as we fight oppression.”
September 11—at first—made me realize that “we” did not share that understanding. Nope, Jim Phelan, my understanding of the world was not “destroyed”; yours was.
Still, there were moments of hope for me, just after the attacks, like at the end of Phelan’s “world has changed” column, when he reflects on what it would mean to find that new stable understanding he seeks:
“[A]fter September 11,2001,’we’ have been facing a major shift in our previous understandings of past, present, and future, a shift whose outcome is currently far more contested than settled. But emphasizing the diversity of narrators and narratives explaining the world does call attention to the larger challenge of finding a new viable narrative: this narrative must acknowledge rather than erase the multiple explanations of our past, present, and future, and it must find a way to enable the inevitable competition among those explanations to be productive rather than destructive. Only then will the events of September 11 have produced the kind of change the world needs.”
But Nunberg’s piece did not discuss “the world changed.” Instead, he focused on a different phrase to come out of the days following September 11, 2001; the ubiquitous and instantly mocked formulation, “If we don’t [blank], the terrorists win,” wherein the blank constituted some banal, usually consumerist activity. He says that, despite our universal understanding of the phrase’s ridiculousness:
“Yet people kept using the phrase. It helped them or their customers square their consciences, as it became clear that in the period that followed this new Pearl Harbor, only a few people would be called on to do the serious sacrificing. For the rest of us, the actual hardship would chiefly extend to having to leave for the airport an hour earlier.”
Having grown up around so many forms of trauma, I know this formulation all too well: Of course we all know something bad happened, but for chrissake don’t talk about it. Perhaps that’s why the phrase “the world changed,” escaped Nunberg’s discussion. We’re still trying to pretend it didn’t.
That’s the legacy of the first decade. I avoided the memorializing this weekend as much as humanly possible; I did not want to mourn my distance from the “implicit and relatively stable understanding about the past, present, and future of the world” again. Perhaps by the end of the second, we’ll have moved closer to “acknowledg[ing] rather than eras[ing] the multiple explanations of our past, present, and future.” Putting words to the experience of trauma doesn’t happen overnight, but I think we can all agree that “Only then will the events of September 11 have produced the kind of change the world needs.”
Angel Lemke is a frequent contributor to POTB.
Planet of the Blind 