Where were you when JFK was shot? Martin Luther King? Bobby
Kennedy? Where were you when Neil Armstrong took “one small step for man?” When
Nixon resigned? When the Soviet Union imploded For two generations, these
essential “Where were you?” questions were eclipsed by, “Where were you at 9 AM
on September 11, 2001?” For Amy Waldman, author of The Submission (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) , she was building
up the journalistic skills of a major reporter and the writing chops of the
author that she becomes within these pages. As a bureau chief of the South Asia
office for the New York Times, she found herself embedded in the conflicting
cultures that led the story of the
memorial design competition that led up to the tenth year anniversary. Waldman
is enough of a New Yorker that she could capture the view through the eyes of
demagogues, widows, and Muslims. The demagogues live behind pen and microphone.
The widows have the conscience suit covered deep, and the Muslims? Both the
winning designer and an unlikely spokeswoman arise from the American Muslim
community, with the twist that this Muslim is also a 9/11 widow.
Claire Burwell holds the lone seat on the memorial selection
jury reserved for families of the victims. An Ivy-educated woman of independent
means, her husband was very wealthy from his work at Cantor Fitzgerald. The
jury added her because she was presumed to serve as a barrier between the
artistic taste of the jury and the raw emotion of the other survivors. At
the other end of the spectrum is Sean
Gallagher, a handyman living in the basement of his mother’s house in Brooklyn.
Sean’s brother Patrick was a firefighter pulverized under the collapsing South
Tower. Sean had build a small career being Patrick’s voice from beyond the
grave. Mohammed (Mo) Khan, a prominent architect and a secular Muslim, won the
anonymous competition with a garden that emerged geometrically from the
irrigation canals up to the metal trees made from 9/11 rubble. When a grasping,
aggressive journalist from a notorious tabloid discloses the religion of the
competition winner, the city falls under another attack, this time from within.
Would the memorial garden ever be built at all? Gallagher plays his status as the brother of
a fallen hero into a speaking career with minor celebrity status, all in the
name of preventing a Musilm architect from building an “Islamic garden: as a
“martyr’s paradise.” Claire struggles to balance her own integrity with the
raging voices of the other families. Mo fights everyone’s attempts to vilify
the design by attacking the designer, or more specifically, the religious
heritage of the designer. At a crucial moment, Asma, an undocumented
Bangladeshi Muslim widow of the attacks, risks all she has to speak her truth
at an angry gathering of the families of victims.
Ten years and two wars later, Waldman’s novel, The Submission,
tells the story of a nation struggling to affirm the principles that extremists
love to hate. The Submission speaks
to the morals of a people whose pluralism, tolerance, and understanding were
pushed to the brink of collapse by attackers whose main objective was to make
the country whose ideology they hate destroy itself from within.
