Hello! 🙂
Hope you are all having a lovely week!
Thankfully we have reading week to take care of ourselves and to catch up on some readings that we may not have been able to fully read.
For the past week, my ASTU 100A class has been discussing and analyzing poems specifically about the reactions to the 9/11. The poem that particularly resonated with me and that I would like to focus on is Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “Photograph from September 11th.”
“Photograph from September 11th” is a poem that was somewhat uplifting although not cheerful as it was about the photographs during 9/11 such as the “Falling Man.” The “Falling Man” is a controversial photograph taken by Richard Drew, who worked for the Associated Press. There were mixed feelings toward the photograph and initially, I was shocked and upset and then I could not understand how someone could watch someone fall and take pictures of them falling.
With the images of people falling out of the Twin Towers, Szymborska’s poem helps create some sort of peace by helping us look at the photographs in a slightly different way. I think that she is trying to create peace for those who “flew” out of the building as she uses words such as “halted,” “still,” and “flight.” She gives us the idea that the photograph “halt[s] them in life,” trying to keep the idea of hovering them to avoid the reality. By describing their fall as a “flight,” it allows us to think that they’re still free. She also does “not add a last line” which gives a sense of freedom and peace as well as a paying of respect to them by avoiding the truth of what happens to them. There was nothing one could change or make those who lost their loved one really feel better and so the least she could do was not mention the end.
I found the poem to be very touching and lovely how it was written by Szymborska who was not American but Polish. This shows how much the 9/11 effected people all around the world. “Despite our [physical] isolation,” we are not emotionally isolated and are aware of the terrible things going on in the world as “there is no escape from the news” (Spahr 25). The individual is connected to the global as many of us have access to the news and are thinking about the horrible things going on as we turn “sleeping uneasily” (Spahr 24). There is a sense of safety in our beds but there is also a sense of the lack of safety as we think of the violence that is happening elsewhere.
Thanks for reading!
-Ina de Weerdt
Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Print.
tzur shupack
February 29, 2016 — 11:50 pm
Hi Ina, I think this post is great and deals with some crazy ideas about inevitability, trauma, and connections. To witness something as horrifying as someone falling is unimaginable, its impossible to imagine how one would react, but photo-journalists that are in the thick of the fighting have to deal with it all the time. I have a similar question every time I see a photo of something sad like a sick or hungry child, I can’t imagine how anyone could just stand there and take a photo, but its their job. Its their job to photograph and show the world what is occurring, whether its a man falling from the world trade center or a child starving in a war zone. Additionally you touched on how the poems helped people deal with the fact that they couldn’t help their family, and the universality of this. You talked about how a Polish poet felt the same helplessness and sadness during his trauma as an American during theirs. This universality is so obvious to us, and yet we produce narratives which talk about how 9/11 was unique. I think this uniqueness is just made up to excuse the abuse of others, because if we admitted that we weren’t unique we would admit that we would have no unique rights to abuse others. I’ve read a lot of literature which harkens back to the trauma’s of world war one and world war two, and this feeling of helplessness one of the most universal feelings throughout literature about national traumas. This is most exemplified for me in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, which focuses on the capriciousness of massive national and social forces which seem to randomly dictate what happens to hundreds of thousands of people. These are all really interesting ideas which I like to think about, and I think you thought about well, anyways till next time.