[Nettime-bold] Robin Morgan: Ghosts and Echoes (fwd)

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

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Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 19:13:04 -0400
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Subject: Robin Morgan: Ghosts and Echoes
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Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 09:31:41 -0400
From: Martha Cameron <fmlink@igc.org>
Subject: Robin Morgan: Ghosts and Echoes

Apparently some people couldn't open this as an attachment, so I'm
resending as open file--I apologize if it's a duplicate.

------------------------------

Week 1: Ghosts and Echoes

From: Robin Morgan

Dear Friends,

Your response to the email I sent on Day 2 of this calamity has been
overwhelming. In addition to friends and colleagues, absolute strangers- in
Serbia, Korea, Fiji, Zambia, all across North America--have replied, as
have women's networks in places ranging from Senegal and Japan to Chile,
Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, even Iran. You've offered moving emotional support
and asked for continued updates. I can't send regular reports/alerts as I
did during the elections last November or the cabinet confirmation battles
last year. But here's another try. Share this letter as you wish.

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 imagined it:
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 York University
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.lee@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 Rwandas 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 Zuhira 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





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