Dear Grandma: some thoughts on nation, and memory

My grandparents, uncle, younger sister, and me. I always remember the end of 2001 as the canceled trip to the Philippines, which was where my other uncle was getting married. After 9/11, most of the family canceled their travel plans—which means I have still yet to go [back, for the first time] to the place that gave me my grandparents and my mom.

In this excerpt of a letter to my Grandma, I am reflecting on the ways that nation gets constructed, and patriotism gets made. This project is inherently one about memory, and so this scene in the immediate wake of 9/11, is about the images that adhered to my nine-year-old brain—and the ways that image becomes memory and memory becomes ideology and ideology might/can/does breed fear. I imagine this excerpt as part of a longer letter that thinks about internalized racism and family and belonging.

…

Dear Grandma,

I did not really know what nation was—what nine-year-old does? But I know that I put my hand over my chest every morning to honor a swath of fabric that hung in the corner of the classroom. In a way that felt just as reverent, just as faithful, as genuflecting before the altar on Sunday at St. Elizabeth’s. I know that when the airplanes hit those two tall buildings in New York, when I was nine-years-old, that my dad was so overcome by shock of it that he just stood in front of the TV in my parents’ bedroom, clutching his post-shower towel around his waist. I don’t remember him speaking. I do remember that it was quintessentially sunny—rays streaking into the bedroom, falling on my dad. It must have been around 6 or 7 am in California. I remember that everything felt normal until it didn’t. That something about our morning rhythm began to go awry. Where was my mom, anyways? And Megan? Everything felt normal until I saw my dad—often on the move in the morning—locked in front of the television. It is strange to think that, when those airplanes hit those two tall buildings that day, my dad was only a few years older than I am now. I don’t remember where my mom was—though I can easily imagine the heights that her voice, her terror, her shock would reach when he told her what had happened. Or when they heard it on the radio in their bathroom, as they were preparing for work, first. Or when he compelled her to join him there, in front of the television. I think that I probably went and sat on the couch next to the window, the same couch I was sitting on that one time Megan began choking on a carrot. And that maybe then the sun rays fell on me, too. I remember that having established a different orientation to the television, now behind my dad instead of in front of him, I saw buildings that I probably could not discern as buildings being swallowed by the red and orange of flames. I remember that I could not understand how a plane crashing into a building resulted in a fire—that my nine-year-old brain had a very limited conception of things that started a fire. That the list included paper and logs that you find in the woods, but not an airplane.

The image that I remember from the television, as I sat on the couch behind my dad. Or, the image that I think that I remember from the television, but that might just be the image that I remember from the last two decades of national mourning and memorialization of this day.

I don’t remember how we got ready for school that morning. How my parents managed to gather themselves enough to facilitate that. To make sure we were dressed. And fed. And had a lunch packed. I do remember that everything about the rest of the day felt solemn. That I had to learn how to mirror mourning. Shock. Terror. But not just any mourning—not familial mourning like at Lola’s funeral the year before—this was national mourning. And I didn’t understand it. I imagine that the adults tried to find child-sized-words to offer us. To explain this thing that they could not have possibly fully understood. I assume that, maybe arriving late to school—this shock blanketing my small suburb of the world and snuffing out that morning sun—we probably recited that pledge with more vigor, under our teacher’s direction. That the ritual of it probably felt so much more vital to her on that day. Maybe she offered up her own child-sized words, to us, trying to explain why today, especially, this recitation was important. That our attention, our allegiance, was critical. Or maybe she just cried, listening to our soft voices offering up those lines, as if they were a prayer.