Response to Randall Reading

Kasia Thomas

I am very interested in memory, even outside the context of our classroom. Memory is strange and almost surreal concept to me — we just hold onto these events in our mind, allowing them fade from forgetting or live on through recollection. Memory is also very fickle. Our memories age and escape us, decaying in the back of our minds, like an unattended book. I enjoyed this reading because it examined our memory. It looks at not only our personal thoughts, but also our collective memory — the memories we share as a culture and as members of the contemporary world. 

What better an example on tapping into the power of personal and collective memories than the 9/11 Tragedy? It was an event that lives on with everyone who was there — from small school children like myself, who witnessed the event on the rolling televisions of my elementary school, to the inhabitants of the lower Manhattan who were physically and psychologically affected by the event. The reach of the event is broad and overarching.

While reading this, I enjoyed thinking about the censorship that came about out of sensitivity to the tragedy, like “re-doing” the Spiderman poster or pulling Hollywood projects from production. What interested me the most, however, was the connection I made between this article and the documentary “The Woman Who Wasn’t There”.

I saw this film a long time ago, but the documentary focuses on the claims of a woman known to be Tania Head (who is later revealed to be named Alicia Esteve Head). Head claimed to be a survivor of the 9/11 attacks and eventually became president of the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network; however, in 2007, it was found that her whole story was a hoax — she had manipulated the memories of many survivors to include herself in their recollections, when in reality she was attending college in Barcelona during the times of the attacks. She was featured in many articles and interviews and became a tour guide at Ground Zero, reaching a sort of celebrity status among New Yorkers, until she was outted by the New York Times.

What interests me most about this documentary and about the reading is that often times we feel that in instances of importance, such as tragedy, that our memory and recollection of those events is infallible. In general, we have experienced a traumatic experience and, as a result, we may never forget that, and, yet, so easily we are tricked by ourselves, other people, or the media into thinking otherwise.