September 11
8:45 AM. September 11th, 2001
was the day I’d been waiting for
to pass my history test
to become a US citizen.
That morning
I was at the Jacob Javits Federal Building
a massive ship of a building that takes
up a few blocks
in downtown manhattan
At that time
I lived in the west village
and I could have walked
but I took the subway
the express or the local
the red line
to Varick street
I think
Before that day -
to get to that appointment
had been such a long journey
so many notaries
I had even been background
checked by the FBI
All that was left was this
last step
There were over
100 questions about government
and history
and of those you might get asked
5 or 3
The exact number was a mystery
So
by 8 AM
I am there
and 8:45 AM comes and goes
and I am still waiting
and then a guard approaches
and I rise
but it’s for all for us
to go down
Evacuating, the guard says
No panic
just procedure
Something had happened
gotta go
Everyone disappointed
but following the rules
I don’t remember an elevator
I feel we walked
in an orderly fashion
in a low grumble
All of us there had been waiting
decades for these interviews
We went down and we looked up
Both planes had already struck
Was there one
stuck in place? sticking out
or am I making up the memory?
I cannot remember except
even then
the reality was not real
We went down, and we looked up
We looked around
We murmured to each other
A few people covered in dust
ran by
We made room for them
Then the police came and the subways stopped
and we turned our back on the scene
and walked uptown
Those weeks in New York
the empty streets to the empty hospital
bereft of the hordes of injured they had expected
the black hole where the towers used to be
and the smell of smoke
everywhere
But we looked at each other like
we’d never looked at each before
we stood on the west side highway
watching and clapping
at the fire engines
and trucks
carrying dust and
volunteers
And there was fear
suddenly
to be brown
Especially if you were brown and bearded and a man
I remember asking after some Indian friends
who lived in Brooklyn
they were journalists
they could fend for themselves
but still
you wondered
you worried
Some girl called me because
she wanted to make a film
to tell the difference
between sikhs and arabs
because two sikh brothers had been shot at gas stations
and I told a friend about it
and he said
in that way he had
‘so basically it’s a film to say
“shoot them, not us
or shoot us, not them?”
Who was thinking clearly then?
You just sensed it was best
to keep your head down
People were afraid
angry
even as we looked at each other
and connected
more than ever before
All those different rivers were running
that time
At a rally in Union Square,
one evening, there were groups of people out
college students with drums
and others singing
tie dye people
singing tie dye songs
is how I would describe them.
There was one group
made up of older
folks singing a
chaotic loop of songs
that began one way
and ended another
The songs
trailed away
then suddenly
started again.
I was even smiling to watch
them
when
I heard two young men in front of me
they were angry
very angry
fucking chaos
they said
one said
‘who’s the DJ here?"
And the other guys said,
‘well, who cares
as long as he's not Pakistani right.’
They laughed
It was very strange.
I knew that word from the UK
Paki
It's used to shame. It's used to hurt.
But it had not come to the US.
That’s what I felt
I hadn’t heard it as the only Indian in my high school
in Jersey
There wasn’t enough of a sense of South Asians
in the culture
Not yet.
We didn’t have the same history in the US
as we did in Britain
(hello, colonization, my old friend)
That moment
the boys saying
Pakistani
I felt something odd
because
I’m used to being thought of
as clever
or exotic
or something
But to be dismissed
whoosh
just like that
It made me think of that phrase you hear:
Why don't they go back to where they belong?
And I wanted to say,
Who says you belong only
to the place you were born?
Who says?
I don’t have a deep thought
for that day
or this day
except to share a memory
of being there
I remember calling my mother from a payphone
she had been worried
Everyone knew I was down there
that I had my interview
My mother had
been commiserating with her neighbor
who was also worried
because her husband
worked in the towers
He had called his wife after the first plane
but not after the second
and it stayed that way.
Honestly
after all these years
I still don’t have words
except to say
yes
I was there
I lived that
time
I remember when.
And I thought the US would stop
all citizenship tests
but they rescheduled them all for a month
later
so on October 11
I passed the test
And that scene in Union Square
I just stepped back
out of the story
and
three years later
I had had
enough of cities
enough of clever-ness
enough of the world I knew
and I went and took
a plane to tierra del fuego
to ushuaia
the end of the world
is the motto of that place
the beginning of everything
may we remember
may we journey
may we connect
yours in solidarity
Shebana
PS: hey - you know that creativity is the sea guided meditation I created about 2 weeks ago? I’d love for you to experience it. Send me an email finishing the sentence - “creativity is….” and I’ll send it to you - I always wanted that offering to be free and lost sight of that feeling. and today, I want to honor the original impulse I felt. (thanks, cara jones, for your workshop that illuminated this thought)
PPS: thanks also to Get It Done for their tiny book course scholarship which I am using to write a tiny book, the good manners of colonized subjects, of which this memory is a part.
