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What Isn't There: Inside a Season of Change
What Isn't There is Jocelyn Lieu's own interpretation of what 9/11 meant to her and to New York City. It presents her kaleidoscope of memories of the unforeseen consequences of September 11, when an unprecedented act of violence collided with her day to day life as a mother and a writer. This retelling of the experience of a woman who lived near Ground Zero restores the event back in the realm of lived experience where it belongs.
208 pages, Paperback
First published April 2, 2007
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October 15, 2007
In “What Isn't There,” Jocelyn Lieu writes: “Stories change the listener.” In the creation of her journal, there's the inevitable distancing effect, the making poetry out of horror, but there's also an intimacy, an immediacy that pulls the reader in. Early on in the book, she writes “Tiny blurs that are people fall past the gleaming façade. The North Tower waterfalls in on itself. The world is covered with ashes.” In descriptions of her haunted dreams, the images both reflect and amplify the unreality of the days after 9/11; haunting images that come unbidden, much like those in waking hours, where, for a person close to the towers when they fell, unknown triggers are everywhere.
She personalizes, without miniaturizing, the terror and sadness. She also carefully examines the dread, the fear stoked by politicians and the media. And there is anger at their awful assumption: As Jocelyn writes “that death can come in a second isn't a lesson I need to learn twice.”
She writes achingly of the exhaustion, the unfulfilled desire to return to normalcy, when her rational mind keeps telling her that there is no longer any such thing. In this journal, which attempts to document unsparingly the raw material of difficult days, she keeps finding that her memory of her own experience is imperfect; as when her mother tells her words she herself said on the day of the attacks, words she has no recollection of speaking. Remembering itself becomes a pressing need, even at the risk of making the overwhelming emotions, which Jocelyn at one point describes as “practically holy” of those early days into something more prosaic, less alive. She watches the Gaudet brothers documentary, recalling and remarking upon the by-then indelible pattern of images: “Bright Towers, roar, plane, boom. Holy Shit,” and observing in wonder and some sadness at the fact that only six months after, the images have simply become part of her, having lost some of their awful urgency.
With stunning, simply rendered observations, like the slow realization of what was being breathed in as downtown residents took in the acrid air after the collapse of the buildings, or the poetic, unforced examination of seemingly simple ideas like “what is distance,” Jocelyn Lieu has created a vital document of a horrible time, filled with anger and sorrow, gentle poetry and welcome grace.
She personalizes, without miniaturizing, the terror and sadness. She also carefully examines the dread, the fear stoked by politicians and the media. And there is anger at their awful assumption: As Jocelyn writes “that death can come in a second isn't a lesson I need to learn twice.”
She writes achingly of the exhaustion, the unfulfilled desire to return to normalcy, when her rational mind keeps telling her that there is no longer any such thing. In this journal, which attempts to document unsparingly the raw material of difficult days, she keeps finding that her memory of her own experience is imperfect; as when her mother tells her words she herself said on the day of the attacks, words she has no recollection of speaking. Remembering itself becomes a pressing need, even at the risk of making the overwhelming emotions, which Jocelyn at one point describes as “practically holy” of those early days into something more prosaic, less alive. She watches the Gaudet brothers documentary, recalling and remarking upon the by-then indelible pattern of images: “Bright Towers, roar, plane, boom. Holy Shit,” and observing in wonder and some sadness at the fact that only six months after, the images have simply become part of her, having lost some of their awful urgency.
With stunning, simply rendered observations, like the slow realization of what was being breathed in as downtown residents took in the acrid air after the collapse of the buildings, or the poetic, unforced examination of seemingly simple ideas like “what is distance,” Jocelyn Lieu has created a vital document of a horrible time, filled with anger and sorrow, gentle poetry and welcome grace.
Displaying 1 of 1 review