“That Was Then, This is Now” or A Wound Still Simmers contemplates the author’s memory-work in the years after the attacks of 9/11. As a New Yorker who teaches at NYU and rides the subway regularly, the author encounters armed guards at her local subway station one day slightly eight years after the attacks. How do they evoke the dangers and memories of 9/11? In what ways has time allowed her to forget or “move on” from the day? In what ways does its impact still linger beneath the surface? The author turns to literature-to the short story “World Memory” by Italo Calvino and to Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved-to reflect upon how we archive, narrate, and share our traumatic pasts. She underscores a dynamic between, on the one hand, the processes selection, editing, and forgetting that occur in the retelling of the past and, on the other hand, the inability to know, tell and contain traumatic experience. Literature, she observes, calls attention to both the difficulty of the narration of trauma and the necessity of sharing and transmitting traumatic stories to others. Literature can articulate the memory-work or oscillation between remembering and forgetting that transpires in the delay between “now” and “then.”
