Images Impossible To Forget
 Global Community
Prepares To Confront Variety Of Powerful, Personal Memories
September 2, 2002
By GREG MORAGO, Courant
Staff Writer
Joan Sullivan heard the news on BBC radio
while riding in a car through the choking slums of Lagos, Nigeria.
"I completely dismissed the broadcast, and found myself staring out
the window at the hawkers dodging traffic, breathing in those awful
fumes, their arms crammed with radios, sunglasses, Kleenex, clocks,
irons and flip-flops."
Darcy Roehling had been out to dinner with a girlfriend, wanting to
get back to her apartment in Beijing, China, in time to catch "Ally
McBeal."
"But when I switched on the channel, I saw the images. ... I didn't
understand what it was all about and thought that the TV channel got
it wrong. I thought it was a movie."
Remember that day? Remember where you were and what you were doing
when you heard the news? Remember what the rest of the day or week
was like?
Remember the images? The sounds?
They played out instantly on television, radio and the Internet
throughout the world, simultaneously linking every continent;
linking Sullivan and Roehling with millions of others in a shared,
global experience. Perhaps for a generation too young to recall
historic events such as Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, the Kennedy
assassination, or even the Challenger disaster, Sept. 11 stands as
the first significant shared experience. Call it the Internet Age's
first great global memory.
And that global memory looms mightily over the first anniversary of
the terrorist attacks on the United States.
As Sept. 11 approaches, Americans are confronted with the physical
and emotional acts of remembering. The urge to remember is coming
from all fronts. Friends and family will gather to remember;
politicians and clergy will urge remembrance; the media will
practically force-feed memories of that ridiculously awful,
opulently unforgettable day.
"For most people, the memorializing will help them master the loss
and be able to go on with their lives," said Dr. Mark I. Levy, a
forensic psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor at the
University of California at San Francisco. "Memorializing is a
community ritual. The people who experienced [9/11] are part of a
global community. We want to go back and revisit in an effort to
master the trauma of the loss. That's why human beings memorialize."
For most people, the commemoration of the anniversary of the
terrorist attacks will be a significant step toward getting on with
their lives, Levy said.
"What happens in an overwhelming catastrophe is that our bubble of
invincibility is ruptured," he said. "But in time, the memory fades
for most people. It doesn't disappear, but it fades."
Forget?
How could we? And yet in the very process of remembering, we already
are forgetting. We probably even started forgetting before the smoke
cleared - rearranging sequences, minimizing unnecessary elements,
overemphasizing certain visuals. In the parlance of visual artists,
we have Photoshopped the events of Sept. 11, creating our own highly
edited and extremely personal visual snapshots of that day.
Regardless of how we remember the day, we have simplified the mental
recollection, stripped it down, said Kathy Pezdek, professor of
psychology at Claremont Graduate University in California.
"We all try to make sense out of it. We remember it in a way that
makes sense to us," Pezdek said. "For many people, Sept. 11 was so
disturbing and too overwhelming. They want to package it up and put
it away. It's too big to comprehend, so it's easier to let go.
People do that to try to simplify events. They don't necessarily
want to hold on to the intense horror of the event. Healthy people
do that - they let go."
Letting go of memories, whether being able to or, in fact, refusing
to, is an individual thing. In the case of 9/11, it has to do with
your connection to the places and the people affected.
In Donegal, Ireland, John Twohig's responses to that day were
dictated largely by how they were defined and presented by news
anchors, he said. His memories of the events, however shocking, are
tempered.
"In terms of memory of the event and memory of the day, the kind of
fantastical nature of it - planes crashing into two massive
buildings, global in scale, in New York City - and because I knew
someone who was a native of the city, I have specific memories.
Memories of shock and concern, difficult communications and
emotional phone calls," Twohig said. "In broader terms, though, 9/11
doesn't really shine as some kind of resonant date, as an event that
matters deeply, affected all of our lives fundamentally, or
radically changed things. At least no more so than many other
events."
In Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, Africa, where Joan Sullivan lives, 9/11
barely registers. "In Africa, the daily struggle to live, to feed
one's children, to avoid AIDS definitely takes precedence over a
distant problem in a foreign country. Nine/eleven quickly fell off
the African radar," she said.
It stands to reason that, despite being a global memory, everyone
recalls 9/11 differently.
"The event was one thing, but the response was not one thing," said
Dr. Robin F. Goodman, associate professor of psychiatry at New York
University School of Medicine. "Everyone got to see the plane hit,
buildings on fire, buildings crash, chaos. Just because everyone saw
the exact same thing on TV or standing on the street does not mean
they processed it and remembered it and experienced it the same
way."
The mental postcard we carry of that day is important for the
personal stamp we've affixed to it. In Darcy Roehling's case, it
made her a stronger, more patriotic American living abroad.
"I wanted to fly home immediately to help in some way. Life just
carried on here [in China] as if nothing happened, and I felt
guilty. I wanted to be surrounded by other Americans, not by Chinese
who could care less. I will forever remember Sept. 11. It was a day
that changed my life," said Roehling, who co-owns an Asian crafts
company. "I suppose in a way I had become more global than American
after all of these years, but 9/11 changed that for me. I am proud
to be American."
Goodman said our memories are as unique as we are individual.
"For every situation, we bring what we are to it. We bring to it
what we are, who we are," she said. "Memory is significant because
it makes us who we are. You can't erase that from the hard drive.
Our brains are still human. They're not hardware."
Being human, we tend to forget. Or remember what we want. Or, as
experts suggest, construct a memory and remember that construction.
When asked if there are other memories of international importance
that he'd compare to the events of 9/11, Salil Tripathi, a writer
who works for a human rights organization in London, mentioned the
explosion of the Challenger space shuttle. And, because he is
Indian-born, the images out of Bhopal in 1984 , when a gas leak at
Union Carbide Corp. killed thousands of people, and the
assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 come to mind.
"I also have visual memories of the lone student standing in front
of a tank at Tiananmen Square, but I am not sure if that's because
of the posters I've seen subsequently, or if I actually saw that
image."
In a recent study, Pezdek polled 700 people in New York, California
and Hawaii - three very different regions - about their memories
seven weeks after 9/11. Pezdek was looking at two types of memory:
"event memory" and "autobiographical memory." Event memory focuses
on details of the specific event - which tower was hit first, which
collapsed first, the timing of events. Autobiographical memory
recalls personal data - where you were, who you were with, what you
did.
"Interestingly, the New York sample remembered details of the event
best. That is not surprising. They were there. But in terms of
autobiographical memory, which is how well you remember the
experiences upon hearing the event, the New Yorkers remembered in
far less detail their autobiographical experience," Pezdek said.
"The New Yorkers perceived the terrorist attacks as more dramatic,
but they had less detail of autobiographical memory. They remember
the event, but have much less memory about where they were, who told
them, what they said."
Her findings oppose conventional wisdom that the more traumatic the
event, the stronger the memory. In fact, she suggests, these
traumatic memories - or "flashbulb" memories - are not more accurate
simply because they are traumatic.
In short, we have reconstructed and simplified the events of 9/11 in
ways that make sense for us.
"This simplifying of memory is actually advantageous," she said.
"The simplifying of memory is a very adaptive memory technique. You
couldn't live your daily life if it weren't. You'd be immobilized by
your depression."
So it's OK to remember what we choose. And to forget what we want.
"For most people, it was the most horrible thing that has happened
in their lifetime. And yet, a year later, they're not talking about
it that much. Ground zero is cleaned up. It's kind of all done and
put away," Pezdek said.
So what good is a global memory if we're going to be selective about
it; perhaps even forget it?
"In terms of our global memory, we're not forgetting this event, but
constructing a memory of it that you can put aside and return to in
your life," Pezdek said. "It's a fine line between remembering and
being immobilized by that memory."
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