Poetry of 9/11: Trauma, Grief, and Imagination

Introduction: Treating Trauma—Beatrice Beebe

The Project for Mothers, Infants, and Young Children of September 11, 2001 was created by a group of eight core therapists. We worked originally with approximately 40 families who suffered the loss of husbands and fathers on September 11, 2001. Our efforts focused on the families of women who were pregnant and widowed, and the women who were widowed with an infant born in the year prior to September 11.

The Project was organized as a pro bono primary prevention

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project and continues to provide free services to these families. The eight core therapists are Beatrice Beebe, Phyllis Cohen, Anni Bergman, Sally Moskowitz, K. Mark Sossin, Rita Reiswig, Suzi Tortora, and Donna Demetri Friedman. They specialize in adult trauma, child therapy, mother-infant therapy, family treatment, and in nonverbal communication. In response to the demands of the crisis, we expanded our psychoanalytic training, finding new ways of responding to these families.

We sought these families out. We organized support groups for the mothers, their infants, and young children, in the mothers’ own towns. We also brought the families to Dr. Beebe’s mother-child filming laboratory at Columbia University, New York State Psychiatric Institute. In this context, the children engaged in play with their mothers, and with the therapists. They played out imagined stories which represented their understandings about what happened to their fathers. These “pretend stories” inspired Edward McCrorie to write his “Ballads.”

From Grief to Imagination to Recovery—Ted McCrorie

My poems were inspired by play therapy sessions with the children and mothers who lost fathers in New York City on September 11, 200l. I found the children’s spirit, emotion, and imagination in their play rooms totally commanding: Often a scare and a surprise for adults in the room, they provided a basis for my own poetic efforts. I’m deeply grateful to them, their parents, and the psychotherapists who wrote up the project.

The ballad form, beginning centuries ago in English and involving quatrains with some rhyme, serves the purpose of brief narration. The tradition often focuses on social and personal danger, sudden loss, mourning and aesthetically appealing, and if limited, recovery.

Playing Small Parts
His father’s son, Russell’s a grown
black leopard leaping down
from the heights he’s ruled all day
onto a far-off town

floor among broken tanks and trucks.

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His mother’s boy, he’s warned,
‘That’s brave but risky. The leopard’s bones
could break and scatter, be unmourned.’
Russ feels mastery at four. His mom
stares at the leopard, her heart
longing to find and bury her man,
even the smallest part.

Retaliation
Next year, August. All the children
put on furious joy
clearing the table, flooring throngs,
not wanting to alloy
a millisecond’s violence. Karl
goes for the men disguised
as dolls, pushing women aside
and, having mobilized
a tank or two, rushes the treads
across blanched faces. Birds
loaded with bombs look pale
when Eileen, now four, makes herds
of brachonid wasps to parasitize
birds and their eggs. Shells
litter the floor. Mothers are told
the children’s decibels
are therapeutic. Meanwhile New York
shudders to remember
what feels like make-believe, a doom
pretend soon in September.

Repeat
People go upstairs in the house.
Although a crow flies up
to warn them, buzzards level the place.
‘Their deaths are so abrupt,’
Rose is told by her mom. The girl
repeats her leveling tale.
Her mother supports police to guard
the house but they all fail,

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they’re leveled too. The girl repeats
as though each flight of the crow
were more than pretend. The mother stares,
just beginning to know
her husband’s death has kept her out of stories.
She’ll need to be lost
and found in her daughter’s mind. Or face
repeat whatever the cost.

Getting Through Another Year
Daphne and Gale have lost their dad
somehow at four and three,
pre-schoolers not yet told the news
and not to watch TV.
They’ve heard their baby sister whine,
their mother up till two
trying to nurse. Dad hurt himself
falling, she says. What grew
inside her now absorbed them too
at home and then at play.
They love the lady therapist
who helps them feed then lay
their baby down. A bassinet’s
appeared, a bottle, soap
and bath water. Daphne knows
their lady’s pregnant, for hope
grows in her belly, pillow-like.
And soon as their mother arrives
Gale says, ‘Leave.’ Delivery hour
adds to their toil, their lives.
* * * *
It’s hide and seek next time.
Gale finds doors and goes behind
into an elevator and,
cool as the cables’ mind,
she is ascending swiftly toward
a hopscotch square in the sky.
She’s caught, she sits there. Can she dream,
pretend or hear them sigh

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trapped in elevators, those
in towers who went mad?
Can she suppose an elevator
ought to have saved her dad?
* * * *
The girls obsess with buildings. Red
and beige blocks are piled,
topple, rise again and stand
frailly. Daphne’s beguiled,
sends a little girl up. There’s
the elevator; here,
the top. Will she stay? Too high
or weak, she falls like a tear.
Daphne rebuilds. Gale bumps
and down it crashes, all
on the street. Daphne weeps, asking,
‘Why? Why did it fall?’
* * * *
A filled black truck keeps backing up
at Gale’s command. Its noise
is matched by dumped debris and body
parts that look like toys.
The girls find other figures lacking
parts, an ear or foot,
a head. The lady therapist tries
helping Daphne to put
a nose on one.
It slips, then stays.
They celebrate, a year
has passed, the lady’s birthday must
be met with song and cheer
although it’s not her birthday. They bake her
a strawberry cake of rich
red brick, then eat the cake. A half-
raised tower stands in its ditch.

Giraffe Dad
Her father’s lost before she’s born.
How can she make him real
four years later? Can a toy

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giraffe be more than a meal
for lions about? It’s black on gold
speed she would love to feel
high on his nape.
The veldt’s no hell,
the wind’s a glockenspiel
song in their ears and down they run
to the river in spate, a spring-
filled brown invitation. They pause, anxious,
before they cry out and fling
themselves into water. Over their heads
she is unborn again,
he is her father close to the near-term child
addressing her, ‘Jen.’

Commentary: From Poetry to Psychohistory—Billie Pivnick

The cries of a child, the sense of a therapist, and the sensibilities of a poet together created psychohistory after mass catastrophic trauma. In publishing a book about this 10-year project to help survivors heal, the eight psychotherapists kept the memory of September 11^th alive both as history (becoming part of a growing archive of materials and testimony) and by becoming history (registering a change in their identities). But to facilitate the work of mourning, this group of remembrances had to be transformed in a way that revivified the event with emotion, so that those who were not present could become witnesses to the suffering of the victims of this mass murder.

This sort of remembering is important not just to individuals but also to our collective recovery from mass disaster. After a mass catastrophe such as 9/11, society’s ability to remember is also under assault. With symbolic structures attacked intrapsychically as well as externally, “the writing of the disaster” is always problematic (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 1980). Not only is the process of communicating, testifying to, or predicting something disastrous destroyed, but written historical records and our ability to use language are wrecked. “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch anyone in particular, ‘I’ am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened; it is in this way that the disaster threatens in me that which is exterior to me—an other than I who

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passively become other.”

The first step in repairing our ability to think and communicate after trauma involves creating dialogic thought. As with children, whose “play in the presence of another” fuses dissociated emotions and creates tolerance for interpersonal separation, it is dialogue that heals shattered communities and individual psyches. With semantic categories unavailable and sensorimotor fragments of memory the only available modes of experience of the past, it is the implicit playfulness—even in adults—that must be reconstituted therapeutically so that metaphors can be created and symbols used communicatively.

Scrambled syntax must also be reassembled. An intersubjective, interactive therapeutic approach implicitly builds pragmatic discursive skills like maintaining joint attention, keeping the other in mind through anticipation in turn-taking, and maintaining a referent over time. Together content and structure emerge as intrapsychic scaffolding and interpersonal relating (Billie Pivnick, Trauma in Translation: The Effect of Object Loss on Discourse, Reflective Functioning, and Symptomatic Behavior during Psychotherapy in Literature and Clinical Practice, paper presented at the Trauma: Intersections Among Narrative, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis Conference at George Washington University, March 5, 2010).

Therapeutic interactions can be seen as rituals for rendering lived events that are still too present into keepsakes more like a photo. Sigmund Freud’s grandson, described in his paper, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (SE, 18, 1920: pp. 1-64), may help us see this less abstractly. His charming “fort-da” play in his mother’s brief absence illustrates a number of levels of symbolization simultaneously. Like smoke coming out of a chimney, his play alerts us to the presence of absence. It is thus indexical, signaling his distress through its repetitiveness and the emotion evoked in a viewer. At the same time, it bears an iconic relation to the event in its resemblance to the mother’s to and fro movement. It is symbolic in that it joins opposites, there and here. It is intersubjective in that his playing was in the presence of Freud himself, who mentalized the sounds “oo” and “ah” as “fort” and “da,” making it memorable even a century later.

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Because children’s ability to symbolize is still developing, they are particularly vulnerable to the effects of trauma; they usually enact what they cannot hold in mind symbolically. They are helped to heal from the disabling effects of traumatic overstimulation with therapeutic play. With an adult analyst or parent mediating, children are helped to mentalize frightening images and emotions and to create coherent stories though play that they can internalize. Often, the images and emotions they carry have been intergenerationally transmitted from parents traumatized while they were still in utero.

Rarely is the conduct of play therapy considered part of the writing of history. But play may bring to life meanings that have been left unformulated by traumatized adults in tragedy’s aftermath. This is especially true to the extent that the children carry vicariously what literary scholar Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (2010) would consider their bereaved parents’ unclaimed experience. Winnicott interpreted this defensive maneuver as the child dramatizing the parent’s displacement (Andre Green, Play and Reflection in Donald Winnicott’s Writings, 2005).

Capturing these meanings in terms comprehensible within a larger community of memory requires the work of a translator. This is the role often accorded to the poet, called by psychoanalyst Jacob Arlow “the community’s daydreamer” in his article, “The Poet as Prophet: A Psychoanalytic Perspective” (The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 55, 1986: pp. 53-68). The role of giving words to the ineffable but emerging feelings of a society facing profound transition was acknowledged by Freud when he stated: “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” Ethicist Avishai Margalit in The Ethics of Memory (2002) concurs: “Good poetry is perhaps the best example of emotions recollected, in the sense of emotions relived” (p. 124).

The manner of recollection is crucial to what is remembered. Natural communities of memory, like families that connect back through generations, keep their own memories alive through tradition, myth, heritage (monuments, for instance), and legacy (attitudes)—often in non-inscribed ways, but also in ways that tend to become as unalterable as religious belief.

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When no generation is still alive to revitalize the original real events, these memories become shared memories—actually memories of memories. These event stories compose what we call history, which reminds humanity as a whole of what transpired so lessons can be learned. While these historical accounts are more scientific and objective, they tend to leave out the vicarious recreation of the experience so crucial to reinstating our moral and ethical values.

In memorializing, a communal intersubjective emotional experience is created for the repair of the social links (narrative and performative aspects of representation, iconic buildings, moral ideals, neighborhoods and families) whose severing in the attack can augment chaos rather than enable a return to the social order. Conducting vicarious memorial recreations of historical events in ways that emphasize the recognition of others’ suffering helps social groups maintain an ethical connection to others and restores moral values that revile radical evil, that can be lost in such attacks on cultural symbols.

Poetry writing and reading is known to make mental anguish more bearable and so plays an important role in this process. As a meaningful repetitive gesture and inscription in the present, a poem helps us keep in mind a collective memory, one that empathically links many disparate recollections of the past.

Salman Akhtar, in “Mental Pain and the Cultural Ointment of Poetry,” (International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81, pp. 229-243) tells us that poems bring opposites together, reconciling contradictions. With metaphor, sensate experience and cognitive conceptions become linked. The anticipations set up by rhyming schemes and alliterative sounds can strengthen our sense of predictability in relationships, augmenting object constancy. The pleasure derived from linguistic beauty and harmony further serves to soothe and connect a group of readers who for some moments become linked as a community of memory. In being addressed as an audience, a sense of unification in times of loss is also communicated to the listeners.

Perhaps it is poetry’s power to help society restore communal bonds and reshape a community’s continuity of identity over

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time that makes Arlow liken poets to prophets, helping us anticipate sometimes dreaded futures and bury undead pasts so as to reclaim enough of our horror to make our day-to-day living not just pleasurable, but dignified. Anthropologists see art works less as objects and more as acts that transform the social world. After all, individuals not only possess a history, but also are a history through participation in the interactions of past, present, and future.

A transitional space such as that created by a poem can be used to make room for a symbolic process in which past and present are kept in tension with the future, avoiding fetishizing or erasing history. Thus symbolized, memories and emotional experience from family communities of memory can enter the collective memory of our culture as a form of psychohistory.

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