Author: Salman Rushdie
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: August 3, 2002
One day last November I spent a
long sad afternoon prowling around the perimeter of the smoking ruins of
the World Trade Center, trying to take in the horror of what I was seeing,
exchanging numb civilities with equally shell-shocked strangers. I saw
my own bewilderments reflected in the eyes of those who had gathered at
the site - not, I believe, as voyeurs, but out of a graver, more honourable
compulsion to bear witness.
In the rather different aspect of
those who came here every day, the emergency workers and those who worked
in stores and offices nearby, I saw something else, almost an avoidance,
a turning away of the head from the unbearable in order to make it possible
to go on. I walked for hours, looking in people's eyes for the answers
none of us had. Nobody was offended by my staring. It was a time when eye
contact seemed necessary, even comforting.
My own eyes kept being dragged upwards
to look at the empty sky. Many people have written and spoken about the
force of the towers' absence from the landscape. The eye seeks them out
where once it found them, and can't believe what it doesn't see. The absence
has become a presence.
At Ground Zero that November day,
the hollow air seemed to gather and shape itself into those huge lost forms
and soar upwards towards the memory of billowing fire. "That was where
it happened," I kept reminding myself, "not down here, but up there." I
tried to identify cubes of empty space 'up there' that might correspond
to the exact locations of the twin crimes, wanting, a little crazily, to
repossess those spaces by the pure force of seeing. An aeroplane passed
overhead and made me wince.
Now that the city's conversation
has moved on from the simple articulation of grief towards ideas of reconstruction,
this longing for the sky is what I remember most powerfully. I remember,
too, Senator Charles Schumer speaking poignantly on TV in the aftermath
of the attacks, wanting his city back. And I remember the decisions made
in post-war Britain and Poland regarding the damage done by bombs to the
Houses of Parliament in London and to the entire heart of the city of Warsaw.
The people of Warsaw and London, too, wanted their cities back, and rebuilt
the Palace of Westminster and the centre of Warsaw exactly as they had
been before.
If a recent poll is to be believed,
a majority of New Yorkers is of the same mind. Build the Twin Towers back,
they say, just as they were before or, at least, standing just as tall
and grand. Make our city whole. We can't make the past unhappen, but we
can remove the scar it left behind.
At once, here come the counter-arguments.
The 'memorialist' lobby, with the relatives of the dead in its vanguard,
wants the site to be thought of as sacred ground. The 'anti-capitalist'
lobby, which allies itself with the memorialists, objects to the excessive
influence over the six newly unveiled schemes of the requirements of the
port authority for the provision of as much office and hotel space as previously
existed, and of leaseholder Larry Silverstein for buildings equivalent
to those he has lost. The 'architectural' lobby argues that you can't go
back again, that there is an opportunity here to build the great buildings
of the future, not merely to echo the past. And the 'danger' lobby believes
that to put up tall buildings would only invite somebody to knock them
down again and would also be useless, because nobody will ever wish to
work 'up there' again.
In the days following the unveiling
of the six plans, all these lobbies - and others, too; let's not forget
State Governor George Pataki's determination not to let anything at all
be built on the "towers' footprints" - have been making their feelings
known. The result of all this democracy may be the building of a new Lower
Manhattan which everyone can support, or, more probably, it may be a timorous,
confused series of compromises, a multi-humped camel of a scheme - the
camel being, as the saying goes, a horse designed by a committee.
As it happens, my own idea for the
reconstruction, or possibly one exactly like it coincidentally dreamed
up by someone else, has been incorporated into more than one of the six
schemes. At the end of that day of skywatching I thought: something grand
must be built here (and, yes, if I had to choose, I'd probably side with
those who wanted the new buildings to look like the fallen towers, at least
on the outside). Those who destroyed it were making a symbolic statement
and we must answer them in symbolic terms.
So, what if we did build a new 110-storey
tower here, or even two towers; but what if the top 30 or 40 storeys of
one or both the towers were then left empty, filled only with light, like
a giant atrium or pair of atriums, and what if that were the memorial -
a memorial in the very sky-space where the assaults had occurred, and which
repossessed and dignified that space for ever? What if the walls of that
single or twinned memorial were engraved with the names of the lost, like
a negative-space version of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC?
Might that not offer a solution that all the lobbies could accept?
By chance I learned that a friend,
the British artist, Brian Clarke, was advising Larry Silverstein and his
team of architects on what might be done at the site. I told Clarke my
idea; he liked it and said he'd pass it on.
Since then I've heard nothing, but
I now see that, in the words of one press report, "Almost all designs feature
a memorial tower first suggested by architects for World Trade Center lease-holder
Larry Silverstein, which would be at least as tall as the toppled 110-storey
buildings and have more than 40 storeys of empty, transparent space on
top." I am simultaneously amazed, gratified and perplexed. I've tried to
find out if indeed this is a version of my original idea, but so far have
received no reply. But it doesn't finally matter whose idea it is. I still
think it is a good one, and commend it to all parties.
What matters more is that a choice
is swiftly made about the nature of what is intended; do we want to create
a necropolis or a phoenix? I venture to suggest that those hard-working
men and women who were hard at work when death flew in through the window
would be best served by the re-creation of a spectacular working environment,
by the regeneration of the city they loved.
That would be a finer memorial,
surely, than any statue or garden or light-filled atrium in the sky: the
sight of Lower Manhattan restored to its old vibrancy, the spectacle of
New York looking, as it has always looked, towards the future and not the
past.
(The Guardian)