Names of the Dead An Elegy for the Victims of September 11

by Schoemperlen, Diane

• ISBN13: 9780670033256
• ISBN10: 0670033251
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-08-19
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

We’ve seen the pictures and heard their names. But the staggering number of September 11, 2001 terror attack victims overwhelms the individual stories of the men and women who left home that morning never to return. And with this deeply moving tribute, Diane Schoemperlen both bestows individuality to each and connects us all. As she says in her preface, There is an immediate recognition in the power of naming.”A tapestry of every name and a narrative of events crafted with a novelist’s keen observational eye, the story of this day of loss becomes a celebration of life. Accompanying the names of the victims is an imaginative framework of fragments based on facts—relationships, hobbies, hopes for the future, the textures and basic endeavors of human life. Written in spellbinding prose, Names of the Deadis at once a work of literary art and a haunting elegy that captures the magnitude of an unforgettable event.

Author Biography

Diane Schoemperlen is an award-winning author of numerous novels, including Our Lady of the Lost and Found, and the author of five short story collections.

Excerpts

Preface This book is a work of both extensive research and the imagination. It is at once a distillation and an elaboration of the facts.I began with the names. At that time, it was only two months since the tragedy and the lists of victims were incomplete and incorrect. I worked solely from the Internet, using the lists posted by the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN. All the lists were different. All the lists changed every day: names added, names deleted, spellings changed and then changed back again. Nobody knew yet how many people had died. For four months I worked only on the names. Listing the names of the dead on memorials to tragedies involving large-scale loss has become an established practice all over the world. The names of the dead appear on monuments commemorating lives lost in both World Wars and in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, in Israel?s memorial to the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, and on Maya Lin?s Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. In all such lists there is an immediate recognition of the power of naming, this deceptively simple way in which we bestow identity and individuality upon others and ourselves. Reading a long list of the names of the dead becomes almost overwhelming as it goes on and on, so simply and brutally conveying the magnitude of all that was lost. Faced with such large losses of life, we find that the numbersof the dead tend to remain as abstractions in the mind but the names...the names are real. They take your breath away with their power. They can only be read with your heart in your mouth. Finally, arranged in paragraphs, the names of the September 11 victims totaled more than eighty pages in manuscript. While working on the names, I was also reading profiles and obituaries of the victims, personal accounts by survivors, as well as many factual and photographic books about the tragedy. I began to figure out what I wanted to put into all those blank spaces between the paragraphs of names. I immersed myself in elegaic poetry in an attempt to discover the right tone, the delicate balance between lyricism and cold hard fact, between joy and despair. I read the work of many individual poets, and I studied an anthology called Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and published by W. W. Norton and Company. It contains more than two hundred poems by writers from Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Yeats to Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Tennyson to Sharon Olds, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, Philip Larkin, and Sylvia Plath. I read Rilke?s Duino Elegiesseveral times. From each of the poems I read, I learned something more about how to write about death, how to speak beautifully about the unspeakable. I carried Elie Wiesel?s memoir of the Holocaust, Night, in my purse for weeks. Of utmost importance for inspiration, reassurance, structure, and style in this book was a collection of essays by Susan Griffin called A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, published by Doubleday in 1992. The last essay in the book, ?Notes Toward a Sketch for a Work in Progress,? is about the paintings and writings of Charlotte Salomon, which were published in a book called Life? Or Theatre?: A Play with Music. The nearly eight hundred paintings in this book tell the story of Salomon?s short life. She was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin in 1917. In 1943, pregnant, she was sent to her death at Auschwitz. Griffin uses a fragmentary collagelike structure to write about Salomon, including her thoughts on writing about Salomon, on her own life, and on the Gulf War, which begins while she is writing the essay. Many passages in this hundred-page essay described exactly what I was trying to do in Names of the D