Students and faculty alike gathered Wednesday at the International Center’s presentation to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Ghent University’s Kristiaan Versluys spoke about the trauma of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. He spoke of the different mediums in which people tried to convey the shock of the Sept. 11 attacks as well as the aftermath of the war and what it has cost the United States.
“There is no way even something as indescribable as what transpired on that sunny Tuesday morning can stay out of the reach of syllable or metaphor,” Versluys said.
He read quotes from some of the phone calls placed by victims as well as quotes from people who witnessed the attacks first hand to show the helplessness they felt during the attacks. Versluys went on to explain how the missing persons posters and an online shrine on The New York Times website helped to individualize the mass destruction of the attacks. Versluys said things like this told the victims’ stories in nontraditional ways.
“There is the feeling on the part of the victim they have the duty to testify and there is the desire on the part of the listener to learn more about drama in order to reintroduce it into a network of signification,” he said.
The use of pictures and the online shrine helped to bring emotion to the presentation, those in the audience said.
“I enjoyed hearing him talk about so many different forms of representation of the event, from the pictures in the news paper to the missing peoples posters and all that, it sort of made me appreciate the different ways that they can be viewed, and it’s such a diverse and such a complicated phenomenon,” English professor Samuel Cohen said.
Versluys spoke about how some journalists and media outlets made a spectacle of the attacks on television and through sensationalized documentaries. He said he feels that only eight novels actually communicate the trauma of the attacks and there has yet to be a single novel that fully captured the severity beyond the sensationalism.
In closing, Versluys talked about the aftermath of the attacks and how many lives were lost in the wars following the disaster. He said the U.S. has spent $4 trillion fighting the two wars while Al Qaeda has only spent a small fraction of that amount to attack the U.S.
Sophomore Lanard Green said he felt more assured by Versluys’ closing remarks about the aftermath of Sept. 11.
“It is a big deal, I don’t mean to discredit (Sept. 11), but I think people kind of overreacted, and that opinion is even stronger now after the presentation,” Green said.
Versluys said that after he found out about the attacks on the World Trade Center, he felt sad not only for the people who lost their lives but also for the bloodshed that would follow. He said the wars that have followed Sept. 11, 2001, have taken more lives than were lost on that day.
The International Center is hosting another presentation Thursday about Canadian-American relations following the 2001 attacks.
