We Say “Never Forget”

What we mean, I believe, is “never forget what they did to us.” That to forget is to betray—to betray the dead, to betray the living who remember the dead, to betray those in the future who, remembering the dead, will be asked to sacrifice themselves for the promise that we'll never forget them. That to forget is to betray the obligation to remember, to become an alien within our own family and community. But never forgetting also means forever clinging to the inhumanity and guilt of the perpetrators, even as we cling to the humanity and innocence of the victims, and holding them close to each other, like the poles of two magnets trying to fly apart in opposite direction, with all the energy we can muster.

I am remembering the eight years I lived with the 9/11 Memorial, which is meant to never forget the names of those innocents killed on that day, and designing the museum beneath it, where the narrative—the chosen narrative of the event—is enshrined underground. I remember the debates, the wars raged openly in conference rooms and secretly in offices and quiet, fleeting asides, about the nature of the narrative to which we would design. I remember the claustrophobic feeling of its narrowing over time, from a living back-and-forth among different perspectives to an obligatory, flattened recitation of perpetrators, victims, and heroes that would merge the truths of the day with myths forged in the burning, hot anger that followed, molded by the circularity of a mourning process kept perpetually in motion by the “obligation to remember”—as well as the obligation to forget the retaliation that created an equal but opposite narrative in other cultures and other hearts far away from us.

Remembering in this flattened way is an easy path to righteousness and toward the cleansing of our own unclean histories and our own unclean imaginings and deeds. Even though holding so tightly onto what Vamik Volkan calls our “chosen traumas”—cultural memories of pa