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Our eleventh brave post by
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For Manchester: When the unspeakable happens ...
Speak! On 9/11
On 9/11/01, while in my flimsy white cotton nightgown watching NBC news with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, the plane hit the tower, live, real, dead-on—and I was struck dumb. I taught creative writing at George Washington University in D.C., so close to the Pentagon, a field in Pennsylvania, and, yes, New York City.
I wondered: "How do I ask my students to write?"
I answered the question with a question: Isn't the gift of language, the foundation of our humanity? So here I am sixteen years later again trying to put words around the unexplainable, acknowledging my inability to understand.
Paul Celan, the poet, came home one day to find that Nazis had taken his parents during an overnight raid in Czernowitz in 1942. At the time he was 22 and was away for the night. The door, when he returned, was sealed and never again did he see his parents, speak to them. Celan was left, I have to believe, trying to explain the unexplainable.
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