>From a woman poet--Ghosts and EchoesFrom another list - It is long. It is
>perfect. It speaks the unspoken. It whispers the unspeakable. I offer a
>prayer of thanks for Robin Morgan.
>From a woman poet-- Robin Morgan (recipient of the National Endowment for the
>Arts Prize), founder of the Sisterhood is Powerful Institute (an international
>womanist think-tank), author of 14 books (including, a little over a decade
>ago, *The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism*), the 1990 Feminist
>Majority Foundation Woman of the Year, and the former editor-in-chief of Ms.
>Magazine.
³Week 1 : Ghosts and Echoes²
"In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is
cooperation with good."
--Mahatma Gandhi
Dear Friends,
I'll focus on New York--my firsthand experience--but this doesn't mean any less
anguish for the victims of the Washington or Pennsylvania calamities. Today was
Day 8. Incredibly, a week has passed. Abnormal normalcy has settled in. Our
usually contentious mayor (previously bad news for New Yorkers of color and for
artists) has risen to this moment with efficiency, compassion, real
leadership. The city is alive and dynamic. Below 14th Street, traffic is
flowing again, mail is being delivered, newspapers are back. But very early
this morning I walked east, then south almost to the tip of Manhattan Island.
The 16-acre site itself is closed off, of course, as is a perimeter surrounding
it controlled by the National Guard, used as a command post and staging area
for rescue workers. Still, one is able to approach nearer to the area than was
possible last weekend, since the law-court district and parts of the financial
district are now open and (shakily) working. The closer one gets the more one
sees--and smells-what no TV report, and very few print reports, have
communicated. I find myself giving way to tears again and again, even as I
write this.
If the first sights of last Tuesday seemed bizarrely like a George Lucas
special-effects movie, now the directorial eye has changed: it's the grim lens
of Agnes Varda, juxtaposed with images so surreal they could have been framed
by Bunuel or Kurosawa.
This was a bright, cloudless, early autumnal day. But as one draws near the
site, the area looms out of a dense haze: one enters an atmosphere of dust,
concrete powder, and plumes of smoke from fires still raging deep beneath the
rubble (an estimated 2 million cubic yards of debris). Along lower 2nd Avenue,
10 refrigerator tractor-trailer trucks are parked, waiting; if you stand there
a while, an NYC Medical Examiner van arrives -with a sagging body bag. Thick
white ash, shards of broken glass, pebbles, and chunks of concrete cover
street after street of parked cars for blocks outside the perimeter. Handprints
on car windows and doors- handprints sliding downward--have been left like
frantic graffiti. Sometimes there are messages finger-written in the ash: "U R
Alive." You can look into closed shops, many with cracked or broken windows,
and peer into another dimension: a wall-clock stopped at 9:10, restaurant
tables meticulously set but now covered with two inches of ash, grocery shelves
stacked with cans and produce bins piled high with apples and melons--all now
powdered chalk-white. A moonscape of plenty. People walk unsteadily along these
streets, wearing nosemasks against the still particle-full air, the stench of
burning wire and plastic, erupted sewage; the smell of death, of decomposing
flesh.
Probably your TV coverage shows the chain-link fences aflutter with yellow
ribbons, the makeshift shrines of candles, flowers, scribbled notes of mourning
or of praise for the rescue workers that have sprung up everywhere--especially
in front of firehouses, police stations, hospitals.
What TV doesn't show you is that near Ground Zero the streets for blocks around
are still, a week later, adrift in bits of paper--singed, torn, sodden pages:
stock reports, trading print-outs, shreds of appointment calendars, half of a
"To-Do" list. What TV doesn't show you are scores of tiny charred corpses now
swept into the gutters. Sparrows. Finches. They fly higher than pigeons, so
they would have exploded outward, caught midair in a rush of flame, wings on
fire as they fell. Who could have imaginedit: the birds were burning.
>>From a distance, you can see the lattices of one of the Towers, its skeletal
>>bones the sole remains, eerily beautiful in asymmetry, as if a new work of
>>abstract art had been erected in a public space. Elsewhere, you see the
>>transformation of institutions: The New School and New YorkUniversity are
>>missing persons' centers. A movie house is now a rest shelter, a Burger King
>>a first-aid center, a Brooks Brothers' clothing store a body parts morgue, a
>>record shop a haven for lost animals. Libraries are counseling centers.
Ice rinks are morgues. A bank is now a supply depot: in the first four days,
it distributed 11,000 respirators and 25,000 pairs of protective gloves and
suits. Nearby, a mobile medical unit housed in a Macdonald's has administered
70,000 tetanus shots. The brain tries to process the numbers: "only" 50,000
tons of debris had been cleared by yesterday, out of 1.2 million tons. The
medical examiner's office has readied up to 20,000 DNA tests for unidentifiable
cadaver parts. At all times, night and day, a minimum of 1000 people live and
work on the site.
Such numbers daze the mind. It's the details--fragile, individual-that melt
numbness into grief. An anklet with "Joyleen" engraved on it--found on an
ankle. Just that: an ankle. A pair of hands--one brown, one white-clasped
together. Just that. No wrists. A burly welder who drove from Ohio to help,
saying softly, "We're working in a cemetery. I'm standing in--not on, in-a
graveyard." Each lamppost, storefront, scaffolding, mailbox, is plastered with
homemade photocopied posters, a racial/ethnic rainbow of faces and names: death
the great leveler, not only of the financial CEOs- their images usually formal,
white, male, older, with suit-and-tie--but the mailroom workers, receptionists,
waiters. You pass enough of the MISSING posters and the faces, names,
descriptions become familiar. The Albanian window-cleaner guy with the bushy
eyebrows. The teenage Mexican dishwasher who had an American flag tattoo. The
janitor's assistant who'd emigrated from Ethiopia.
The Italian-American grandfather who was a doughnut-cart tender. The
23-year-old Chinese American junior pastry chef at the Windows on the World
restaurant who'd gone in early that day so she could prep a business breakfast
for 500. The firefighter who'd posed jauntily wearing his green shamrock
necktie. The dapper African-American midlevel manager with a small gold ring in
his ear who handled "minority affairs" for one of the companies. The
middle-aged secretary laughing up at the camera from her wheelchair. The
maintenance worker with a Polish name, holding his newborn baby. Most of the
faces are smiling; most of the shots are family photos; many are recent wedding
pictures. . . .
I have little national patriotism, but I do have a passion for New York, partly
for our gritty, secular energy of endurance, and because the world does come
here: 80 countries had offices in the Twin Towers; 62 countries lost citizens
in the catastrophe; an estimated 300 of our British cousins died, either in the
planes or the buildings. My personal comfort is found not in ceremonies or
prayer services but in watching the plain, truly heroic (a word usually
misused) work of ordinary New Yorkers we take for granted every day, who have
risen to this moment unpretentiously, too busy even to notice they're
expressing the splendor of the human spirit: firefighters, medical aides,
nurses, ER doctors, police officers, sanitation workers, construction-workers,
ambulance drivers, structural engineers, crane operators, rescue worker,
"tunnel rats". . . .
Meanwhile, across the US, the rhetoric of retaliation is in full-throated roar.
Flag sales are up. Gun sales are up. Some radio stations have banned playing
John Lennon's song, "Imagine." Despite appeals from all officials (even Bush),
mosques are being attacked, firebombed; Arab Americans are hiding their
children indoors; two murders in Arizona have already been categorized as hate
crimes--one victim a Lebanese-American man and one a Sikh man who died merely
for wearing a turban. (Need I say that there were not nationwide attacks
against white Christian males after Timothy McVeigh was apprehended for the
Oklahoma City bombing?)
Last Thursday, right-wing televangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (our
home-grown American Taliban leaders) appeared on Robertson's TV show "The 700
Club," where Falwell blamed "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the
feminists and the gays and lesbians ... the American Civil Liberties Union,
People for the American Way" and groups "who have tried to secularize America"
for what occurred in New York. Robertson replied, "I totally concur." After
even the Bush White House called the remarks "inappropriate," Falwell
apologized (though he did not take back his sentiments); Robertson hasn't even
apologized. (The program is carried by the Fox Family Channel, recently
purchased by the Walt Disney Company--in case you'd like to register a protest.)
The sirens have lessened. But the drums have started. Funeral drums. War
drums. A State of Emergency, with a call-up of 50,000 reservists to active
duty. The Justice Department is seeking increased authority for wider
surveillance, broader detention powers, wiretapping of persons (not, as
previously, just phone numbers), and stringent press restrictions on military
reporting.
And the petitions have begun. For justice but not vengeance. For a reasoned
response but against escalating retaliatory violence. For vigilance about civil
liberties. For the rights of innocent Muslim Americans. For bombing Afghanistan
with food and medical parcels, NOT firepower. There will be the expectable
peace marches, vigils, rallies. . . . One member of the House of
Representatives--Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, an African American
woman--lodged the sole vote in both houses of Congress against giving Bush
broadened powers for a war response, saying she didn't believe a massive
military campaign would stop terrorism. (She could use letters of support:
email her, if you wish, at barbara....@mail.house.gov<<.)
Those of us who have access to the media have been trying to get a different
voice out. But ours are complex messages with long-term solutions-and this is a
moment when people yearn for simplicity and short-term, facile answers.
Still, I urge all of you to write letters to the editors of newspapers, call in
to talk radio shows, and, for those of you who have media access-as activists,
community leaders, elected or appointed officials, academic experts,
whatever--to do as many interviews and TV programs as you can.
Use the tool of the Internet. Talk about the root causes of terrorism, about
the need to diminish this daily climate of patriarchal violence surrounding us
in its state-sanctioned normalcy; the need to recognize people's despair over
ever being heard short of committing such dramatic, murderous acts; the need to
address a desperation that becomes chronic after generations of suffering; the
need to arouse that most subversive of emotions--empathy-for "the other"; the
need to eliminate hideous economic and political injustices, to reject all
tribal/ethnic hatreds and fears, to repudiate religious fundamentalisms of
every kind. Especially talk about the need to understand that we must expose
the mystique of violence, separate it from how we conceive of excitement,
eroticism, and "manhood"; the need to comprehend that violence differs in
degree but is related in kind, that it thrives along a spectrum, as do its
effects--from the battered child and raped woman who live in fear to an entire
populace living in fear.
Meanwhile, we cry and cry and cry. I don't even know who my tears are for
anymore, because I keep seeing ghosts, I keep hearing echoes.
The world's sympathy moves me deeply. Yet I hear echoes dying into silence: the
world averting its attention from the Rwanda's screams . . .
Ground Zero is a huge mass grave. And I think: Bosnia. Uganda.
More than 5400 people are missing and presumed dead (not even counting the
Washington and Pennsylvania deaths). The TV anchors choke up: civilians, they
say, my god, civilians. And I see ghosts. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Dresden.
Vietnam.
I watch the mask-covered mouths and noses on the street turn into the faces of
Tokyo citizens who wear such masks every day against toxic pollution. I watch
the scared eyes become the fearful eyes of women forced to wear the hajib or
chodor or burka against their will . . . I stare at the missing posters' photos
and think of the Mothers of the Disappeared. And I see the ghosts of other
faces. In photographs on the walls of Holocaust museums. In newspaper clippings
from Haiti. In chronicles from Cambodia .. . .
I worry for people who've lost their homes near the site, though I see how
superbly social-service agencies are trying to meet their immediate and
longer-term needs. But I see ghosts: the perpetually homeless who sleep on city
streets, whose needs are never addressed. . . .
I watch normally unflappable New Yorkers flinch at loud noises, parents panic
when their kids are late from school. And I see my Israeli feminist friends
like Yvonne, who've lived with this dread for decades and still (even
yesterday) stubbornly issue petitions insisting on peace. . .
I watch sophisticates sob openly in the street, people who've lost workplaces,
who don't know where their next paycheck will come from, who fear a
contaminated water or food supply, who are afraid for their sons in the army,
who are unnerved by security checkpoints, who are in mourning, who feel
wounded, humiliated, outraged. And I see my friends like Zuhirai in the refugee
camps of Gaza or West Bank, Palestinian women who have lived in precisely that
emotional condition--for four generations.
Last weekend, many Manhattanites left town to visit concerned families, try to
normalize, get away for a break. As they streamed out of the city, I saw ghosts
of other travelers: hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees streaming toward
their country's borders in what is to them habitual terror, trying to escape a
drought-sucked country so war-devastated there's nothing left to bomb, a
country with 50,000 disabled orphans and two million widows whose sole
livelihood is begging; where the life expectancy of men is 42 and women 40;
where women hunch in secret whispering lessons to girl children forbidden to go
to school, women who risk death by beheading--for teaching a child to read.
The ghosts stretch out their hands. Now you know, they weep, gesturing at the
carefree, insulated, indifferent, golden innocence that was my country's
safety, arrogance, and pride. Why should it take such horror to make you see?
the echoes sigh, Oh please do you finally see?
This is calamity. And opportunity. The United States--what so many of you call
America--could choose now to begin to understand the world. And join it. Or not.
For now my window still displays no flag, my lapel sports no red-white and-blue
ribbon. Instead, I weep for a city and a world. Instead, I cling to a different
loyalty, affirming my un-flag, my un-anthem, my un-prayer- the defiant
un-pledge of a madwoman who also had mere words as her only tools in a time of
ignorance and carnage, Virginia Woolf: "As a woman I have no country. As a
woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."
If this is treason, may I be worthy of it.
In mourning--and absurd, tenacious hope,
Robin Morgan
September 18, 2001
New York City
