warning Hi, we've moved to USCANNENBERGMEDIA.COM. Visit us there!

Neon Tommy - Annenberg digital news

9/11: Here Is What I Can Tell You

Tasbeeh Herwees |
September 11, 2011 | 3:51 a.m. PDT

Senior Staff Reporter

I can’t say I remember where I was on 9/11. I can’t remember what I was doing, or who I was with. I can’t remember the time or the place. But it’s hard to forget what happened after. 

If you’re Arab or Muslim, or both, it’s likely you have a hard time forgetting too. 

I was 9 years old and like most of my memories from that year, the memories of that day, and the days following it, are vague and disjointed, like damaged film reel. There are a few scenes that I remember from those days with stunning clarity - Osama bin Laden’s portrait being flashed on my TV, the somber face of my principal as she tried to explain what happened, and the man at the grocery store who told my mother, days later, to go back to her country. 

I also remember putting on the hijab, my headscarf, and deciding to keep it on for the rest of my life. 

At 9 years old, I did not know what the World Trade Center was or why someone would want to destroy it. I didn't know how many people had died or why anyone would want them dead. I was confused by the images of bearded men on my television - men who looked, somewhat, like my father. I could not understand why some people now looked at my mother with so much contempt in their faces. 

But I understood pain. Pain was seeing your mother cry for the first time in public. 

I didn’t just understand it, I felt it. 

At 9 years old, you want to be a lot of things, but most of all you want to be your mother’s hero.

I wear the hijab today for many reasons, but I wore it on that day for one. I wore it for my mother’s pain. I wore it because I didn’t want her to feel sad or alone.

I didn’t know the word “solidarity," either, but I understood it very well. 

I understood “sacrifice” too, and at the break of what was to be a long, hard battle against hatred, bigotry and an information war that was systematically vilifying my people, I saw this as no big one. Not for my mother. 

When you’re Muslim or Arab, people expect profound musings on what happened on that day. They want to hear about how it affected your life and how you are the way you are today. But I don’t know how to do that. 

I can’t speak for the Muslim community. I can’t speak for the Arab one either. But I can speak for myself when I say I still don’t know what happened on 9/11. I don’t know what lives are lost - just numbers. I don’t know how to mourn those numbers but I do know how to honor them - with love, with dignity and with a respect for my brother in humanity.

What happened on that day was horrific, but I don’t know what I can say to make it better. I don’t know what the perpetrators of this heinous tragedy were thinking, or who they were - just their names and faces. 

I do know, however, that they can’t speak for me. Or my mother. 

And I’ve learned some new things about pain. Pain is seeing your brothers and sisters struggle through their lives for something they don’t remember.

It comes when you see your faith torn apart by people who know nothing of it and perverted by those who’d like to see you dead because of it.

It comes as you comfort your friend after she's just been woken up in the middle of the night by the FBI, forced out of her bed to watch them ransack her home for an indictment they'd never find.

Pain is seeing war for the first time - live and in color: one building in this foreign land, filled with these foreign peoples who looked liked your family and friends, demolished by the bombs of a country thousands of miles away. It's knowing your faith, your religion, was the reason that happened. 

Pain is seeing your mother cry for the first time. 

But pain goes away. Wounds heal. It’s the scars that stay, shadowy reminders of a past impossible to forget, of a suffering that’s inscribed in the history of our lives forever. 

I don’t know what to tell you about 9/11. I don’t know what to say or how to conduct myself. There’s a certain a protocol to these kinds of things; there’s a respect that must be paid, there are taboos that must be avoided. 

I want to tell you about a lot of things. I want to tell you how scared I was for a long time. I want to tell you that, at times, I was wrongfully apologetic for a crime I did not commit. I want to tell you about the silent moments that followed after being told to "go back to your own country", the nervous laughter that came after. I want to tell you about forcing myself to hold my head up when all I really wanted to do was go and find solace in the arms of my mother.

There are things I want to say but I don’t know how to write them. There are things I want to give you but my words can do them no justice.

But here is what I can tell you. 

As a Muslim Arab-American, this tragedy doesn't define my life, but it has left a really big scar on it. 

I can't give you much; I can only give you who I am - a student of journalism who wielded pen and paper for the first time to defend her people and faith; a student of love who donned a super-hero's cape for the first time to save her mother from solitude.

Here is my life, and here are my experiences: here is a person who's life was molded by a tragedy she could never understand, a tragedy she could never touch or witness.

Here is my pen, the only weapon I brandish. 

Here are my words, the shallow reverberations of my heartbeats.

And here is my pain, birthed in struggle but carried in love. 

 

Follow Report Tasbeeh Herwees on Twitter



 

Buzz

Craig Gillespie directed this true story about "the most daring rescue mission in the history of the U.S. Coast Guard.”

Watch USC Annenberg Media's live State of the Union recap and analysis here.