Return to Table of Contents

Red, white, and blue candles flickered alongside Christian votives, Jewish memorial yahrtzeit, and offertory candles petitioning intercessors from St. Anthony to the Virgin of Guadalupe to the Siete Potencias de Africa. The wax from the candles dripped and flowed together as our differences seemed to melt away. Representing prayers for peaceful repose of the dead, prayers for the welfare of the injured, and prayers for peace, these candles also symbolized solidarity.

PUBLICATIONS | VOICES | BACK  ISSUES | FOLKLORE  IN ARCHIVES | FOLK  ARTISTS  SELF-MGT | ORDER PUBLICATIONS | SEARCH

On September 11, New York City filled with such overwhelming sorrow that personal rituals of grief spilled out of private lives and homes into public spaces. Feelings of loss were inscribed on the city itself. People used every available medium to express themselves; some even scrawled messages in the dust from the explosions that coated vehicles and windows. Public surfaces were plastered with "Missing" posters. Parks, firehouses, subway stations, traffic islands, and even curbsides became sites of continually evolving shrines of flowers, candles, poems, and art. In the great public gathering places of Washington Square Park and Union Square Park, New Yorkers recreated the towers in miniature using tin, papier-mâché, and paint. Red, white, and blue candles flickered alongside Christian votives, Jewish memorial yahrtzeit, and offertory candles petitioning intercessors from St. Anthony to the Virgin of Guadalupe to the Siete Potencias de Africa. The wax from the candles dripped and flowed together as our differences seemed to melt away. Representing prayers for peaceful repose of the dead, prayers for the welfare of the injured, and prayers for peace, these candles also symbolized solidarity. New Yorkers came together in a public ritual that in its transcendence of any single belief system represented all of them. The magnitude of the expression of grief approached the enormity of the loss. Two years ago we began writing a book about creative responses to death and mourning. As folklorists, we were struck by the way people are increasingly expressing their grief by telling stories, crafting commemorative art, and creating personal rituals. Such creative projects counter the destructiveness of death and give mourners a focus that allows them to work through their grief. Expressive responses serve not only to give shape to sorrow, but also to keep the dead present in the lives of the living. Giving a Voice to Sorrow: Personal Responses to Death and Mourning both documents and advocates outward expressions of inner struggles, expressed in storytelling, ritual, and commemorative art. All three forms of expression became public in dramatic ways following the tragedy. Again and again on September 11, the networks broadcast footage of United Airlines flight 175 slicing diagonally into the South Tower and erupting in a fireball. Again and again, we heard the details of flight numbers and moment of impact. Yet this wasn’t just the sensationalism of the media. This was the beginning of telling the story of our loss. In our personal lives, when a loved one dies, his or her last days, hours, and moments are recounted again and again. The recurring broadcasts addressed our need to hear and retell the story of any death—to help make it real. Undertaker and poet Thomas Lynch has noted that such images and details are the first step in assimilating the unfathomable, "the round and witless horror of someone who/ one dry night in perfect humor ceases measurably to be." There are no set rituals for dealing with the deaths of 3,000 people in a terrorist attack. They are being created as we go along. Many New Yorkers have participated in the public ritual of making pilgrimages to sites where "Missing" posters hang. Although Union Square Park was not an officially designated site for public grieving, it was the farthest south most people could go once the city below Fourteenth Street was closed off. Just as after the crash of TWA Flight 800, people brought flowers to the seaside, to get as close as possible to the place where the plane went down and the place where, it seems, the souls of the dead must hover, after September 11, mourners walked to the edge to make their shrines and utter their prayers. In many neighborhoods of the city, memorial murals were already a familiar part of the urban landscape. These vibrant splashes of color in the gray of the city generally include portraits of the deceased, their dates of birth and death, and images that convey something about who they were. They celebrate the lives of those who used to enliven the streets with their presence. The walls, often memorializing those who died young, sometimes violently, keep the dead in the community and are constant reminders of community loss. Drawing on this familiar idiom, on the afternoon of September 11, graffiti artist Chico painted a memorial wall on the corner of Fourteenth and Avenue A dominated by images of the smoking towers and the words, "In memory of families and friends RIP Sept. 11, 2001." In the tradition of memorial walls, this became a site of community gathering. "Missing" posters were affixed to the wall; candles, flowers, and teddy bears accumulated on the sidewalk below. About three weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center, we were distraught to see that the shrines of candles, flowers, and art had been removed from the public parks, cleared out by well-meaning officials who plan to preserve the memorials for posterity. But memorials need to stay on the site where they mark grief. The process of public mourning needs to play itself out, even if our public spaces lose their tidiness. As a society, we are learning how to grieve publicly as well as privately, and the arts of ordinary people have a role to play. Yes, future generations must see the outpouring of humanity that followed the tyrannical assault on our city. Yet at this moment, it is equally important for the memorials to serve their intended function in their intended settings. When we began writing Giving a Voice to Sorrow, we could not have imagined the current devastation. But we do hope that some of the art projects and rituals featured in it will inspire and help individuals and communities who have been affected by the tragedy to cope with their losses by becoming involved in projects that express their grief in personal and creative ways. Our conversations with the bereaved confirmed our initial feelings about the importance of storytelling, ritual, and commemorative art. Tragically, this is also being borne out in the wake of the events of September 11.

HOME | ABOUT NYFS | PROGRAMS & SERVICES | MUSIC | PUBLICATIONS | RESOURCES | CALENDAR | WHAT’S FOLKLORE? | MEMBERSHIP | GALLERY | SHOP | SEARCH | CONTACT US