I was in New York at the end of April in the days preceding the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death, there to take part in a conference on Memory Studies at The New School for Social Research. An American colleague of mine, Alexandra Delano, along with Ben Nienass, presented a paper on the invisible victims of 9/11: the illegal Mexican workers who were in the towers at the time. During the conference, Alexandra movingly declared that these illegal workers had not had rights, alive or dead. Their names are not listed on the sides of the two big pools, which constitute the memorial for the victims of the terrorist attack of 9/11.

I really loved the idea of giving a voice to the invisible, so I decided that it was time to pay a visit to the 9/11 National Memorial. I set out for a long walk across Manhattan to reach downtown. I hoped that the walk would prepare me for what I was about to confront. Once I got to the vicinity of the commemorative site, I found countless signs that explained to me where to book my tour. Everything was organized in a very efficient way, and after waiting for less than an hour, I was able to enter.

I found myself standing in line together with many visitors, thoroughly watched by many kind and smiling policemen, and when I say many, I mean that they were so numerous that it came to mind that there must be a clear and present danger to watch out for. They asked me to let them scan my purse into a metal detector in order to make sure I did not carry a weapon. Finally, after walking along a closely watched path, I stepped into a garden.

There were two enormous water pools, as if they were two gigantic swimming pools with high walls from which two immense water falls flowed down with tremendous force and energy. I noticed that there was absolutely nothing one could tamper with, so I kept on asking myself why all those policemen had been standing there. It looked as if the intent of deploying so many involved a symbolic value rather than a functional one. It seemed that all those policemen were about to tell all the victims whom the memorial had been dedicated to: “We had not been able to protect you when you were alive, but we’ll make up for it now that you are dead.” In other words, the heavy deployment of police looked as if it wanted to speak to me of the sorrow of a nation and its dismay over the impossibility to protect its “sons and daughters” a sorrow to deal with through the activation of a kind of a- fortiori “militarization of suffering.”

Although it is true that the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death was upcoming, I had gone there neither to investigate nor to bother anyone, but to just pray. I was there as an Italian and European citizen to commemorate the victims of terrorist violence. The idea that a place of prayer had to be protected by the police was incomprehensible at the time.

The memorial is astonishingly beautiful. I believe I have never seen such a spiritual memorial: so much water flowing onto the center of the pool toward a trapdoor that seems to be connecting directly with Hades, the kingdom of the dead. The names of the victims are written onto the pools’ sides, at least those who have been legitimately recognized as such by the U.S. Government. There is no doubt: Michael Arad and Peter Walker, the two architects who designed the memorial out of 5200 different projects from 63 countries, created a work of great impact, both esthetically and spiritually. The force of nature caps it all and makes the whole creation more vigorous: the wind whips up splashes of water onto the tourists, who then walk away. It’s those tourists that, taking pictures with their cameras in compulsive ways, try to exorcize the pain they’re feeling. Yes, because paying a visit to the 9/11 Memorial nags you with a pain that spreads all over your body and makes you burst into tears as rivers flow down from your eyes. I had been skeptical about places having their memory and energy, but not any longer. I have to admit that after this visit I have changed my mind. The memorial isn’t just a simple commemorative monument: it is the exact place where thousands of people died, where their bodies were scattered and crushed. That place is imbued with that pain, and looks as if a huge gap between two worlds opened up allowing those souls to keep on talking to us.

While I was looking for some spare space on the sides of the pools, some space that Michael Arad had left out for other potential names of potential victims, I happened to notice a young woman with long black hair. She didn’t take any picture, hiding behind the role of the “tourist.” Without  choice, she visibly let pain spread across her body. From a distance, I looked at her for a long time. When she left, I walked toward the place where she had been, and I found a tiny red rose beside a victim’s name. I rejoice in thinking that she left it there.

That delicate gesture clearly suggests how the semiotic device enacted by the commemorative space works. Those big pools can collect all our pain, and those waterfalls that seem to last forever have the power to cleanse all the violence and all the blood shed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

When I finally mustered my strength to walk away, I was very sure: that ever-flowing water would be able to wash away all that horror throughout the centuries and give peace again to Americans and their loved ones who died in the terrorist attack. All that water would help us, too, to remind us of that sorrow in Europe and to come to terms with the violence that caused it.

9/11 is a very difficult date in the recent past: it’s a date in which the horror of violence has been concentrated, in 1973 in Chile a U.S. backed coup and in 2001. I like to imagine that the big waterfalls honor the memory of all the dead. Such a difficult and painful past: we use words to commemorate, a way to elaborate and respect, so our sorrow is included in the future’s memory.

Are there words and actions that may recount this “cultural trauma” and heal its wounds at the same time? I hope my brief lines, along with my photo of the red flower at the extraordinary memorial may help as a little step.

This post was originally published in Italian on the blog LINKIESTA.

Yesterday, I was with Steve Assael, my friend of nearly 60 years, retracing, as much as possible, his steps of ten years ago. He worked for Blue Cross Blue Shield on the 25th floor of North Tower of the WTC. The vivid specificity of his memories was moving, from the opening tragedy, the paraplegic colleague who couldn’t escape because the elevators weren’t working and his co worker who decided to stay with him, to the loneliness of direct experience, riding on the subway in Queens along with the daily commuters ten years ago and walking downtown yesterday. We spoke, walked, looked around, remembered 9/11/01 as a day of personal experience and national trauma. I wondered and worried about how the people we saw yesterday remember.  I recalled that the U.S. has been implicated consequentially in the suffering of so many others since that day. Steve and I don’t agree on such matters, but political discussion wasn’t on the agenda.

We met in Penn Station at 7:45. The time, more or less, he had arrived on his morning commute from Massapequa, Long Island, ten years ago. We took the express train downtown to Chambers Street, as he did then. Instead of a crowd of office workers, we joined the anniversary memorial ceremony, part of the general public observers (only the relatives of those who died were included in the ceremony). Steve later told me that he had hoped that by chance he would bump into one of the hundreds of people whom he knew when he worked there. But, ironically, we met my friend and colleague Jan Gross, author of Neighbors, one of the most important and troubling books of recent decades.

We passed through a security checkpoint at 8:30. We were a couple of blocks from the memorial, with a clear view of the rising tower. We observed the ceremony on a huge television screen and listened to the reading of the names for a while, and heard the dignitaries’ readings. Our project was to wander, look around, and talk. So we moved on after my friend Mike Asher’s name was read off. My book, The Politics of Small Things, is dedicated to Mike and was an imagined extended conversation with him. Mike worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104^th floor of the North Tower.

Steve spoke to me more openly about what he had seen, heard and smelled that day than he has in the past ten years, about feeling the impact of the jet in his office, about the hesitancy to walk down, the crowded stairwell, stopping on the 14^th floor. When people lower in the stairwell were warning about the danger of fire and smoke, he and a group of others went into an office suite there.

The phones were working. The room was illuminated (perhaps by sunlight). The assembled people weren’t sure what they should do. They then moved quickly on at the urging of a fireman, who Steve pointed out probably saved his life. The fireman was panting, running up the stairs, warning people, encouraging them to go down. Steve’s gift to the fireman was a glass of water. Steve had intended to use the water to dampen a cloth as he went through anticipated heavy smoke, but he figured the fireman needed it more than he did, and that puddles on the ground would probably work, if water was needed. At first, Steve assumed that the fireman was among the dead, but reading more about the events of the day weeks later, he holds onto the hope that the hero of his story was among the firemen who did turn back and survive.

Steve got out. The stairs were no longer crowded. He had to time his run across the plaza outside the building, avoiding falling objects and people, and the resulting obstacles on the ground. He and a colleague hesitated at the entrance of the Millennium Hotel. They wondered if they could help, watched for a while, saw the towers swaying. A cop shouted to them to get out of there. And they headed uptown. Around Chinatown, they felt the collapse. Steve’s colleague walked to Grand Central Station. Steve walked over the Queensborough Bridge, took a subway to Jamaica and caught his Long Island Railway train home.

Walking uptown and riding out of the city, Steve moved from the scene of the crime into a world that strikingly resembled normal everyday life. He, they, we, were all bewildered and dismayed, not sure what would happen next. We knew something big happened, but unsure about how we would proceed. He experienced the trauma directly. For us, it took time to sink in. And now remembering is a challenge.

As Steve and I walked back to Penn Station, I got to thinking about how we are remembering. I appreciated Gary Alan Fine’s post last week on the need to forget, the normality of it. Forgetting is an important part of remembering. In order to remember some things, we have to forget others. Certainly, we have to forget as thoroughly as we can the purported lessons of The Kids Book of Freedom: The 9/11 Coloring Book. It is clearly destructive, but also is the fear that led to the abuse of fundamental liberties in and by the United States in the past ten years. We need to remember cautiously, avoiding too easy lessons and comfortable myths.

Odd that Steve and I bumped into Jan Gross, as we started our walk uptown away from the memorial, along the promenade by the Hudson River. Jan upset memory in Poland, in his books Neighbors, Fear, and Golden Harvest. Jan has been challenging Poland, and, more broadly, Europe to face up to the degree to which the genocide of Jews in Europe was an active Polish, and European affair, not only a German or Nazi one. They need to forget the self-righteous stories of opposition,  and realize the complexities, the degree to which heroism was accompanied by collaboration and active complicity. Not the Nazis, but their Catholic neighbors killed the Jews of Jedwabne, Gross documented. His are tough books, difficult for many to accept. They have changed my view of the world. Remembering accurately is a challenge. It requires forgetting, abandoning satisfying myths.

Walking with Steve yesterday, I realized that this is our challenge as well.