"Once There Were Two Towers": Describing Tragedy to Children after 9/11

The attacks of September 11th have frequently been characterized as unimaginable, capable of inflicting confusion and emotional trauma beyond the scope of other historical events. On September 12th, 2001, N.R. Kleinfeld of the New York Times asserted plainly that the people of New York had “witnessed the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the unthinkable.”1 Moreover, 9/11 has frequently been represented as a point of historical rupture, an event of extraordinary singularity. If society as a whole found the attacks traumatizing and unparalleled, then it follows that children would have had an especially hard time assimilating these events. In the aftermath of the attacks, how did we explain 9/11 to young children? Did we alter, sanitize or otherwise fabricate aspects of the story? Did the picture books that were published attempt to memorialize, instruct, or do something entirely different? Finally, what do these depictions of 9/11 reveal about American society, its cultural values, and its latent attitudes towards children?

Yet when historical trauma and literary representation meet, children’s literature is forced to overcome a number of unique challenges. Oftentimes, children’s books simplify or revise factual events with the goal of presenting an uncomplicated, agreeable, or morally instructive version of history to impressionable children. Picture books about 9/11 face a fundamental problem of representation, whether to teach history or provide comfort. The picture books that have been published represent the product of negotiating this complex literary and historical terrain. Ultimately, children’s literature has taken an important role in mitigating, explaining and redefining the trauma of 9/11.

Mordicai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers and Maira Kalman’s Fireboat are two popular picture books that attempt to represent 9/11 for an audience of children. In 2004, Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers was awarded the Caldecott Medal. The American Library Association gives this award each year to the “most distinguished American Picture Book for Children.”3 Likewise, Kalman’s Fireboat was awarded the Boston Globe Horn Book Award and was singled out in Publishers Weekly by a number of booksellers as a powerful and valuable piece of children’s literature. Both offer diverting narratives that hide many of the more complex or traumatic aspects of the terrorist attacks. Gerstein and Kalman place the events of September 11th in a larger historical context and include minimal discussion of the actual attacks themselves. Both Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers and Kalman’s Fireboat combat a sense of historical rupture by deliberately generating a comforting and non-didactic narrative of continuity. By employing techniques such as narrative bookending and historical contextualization and avoiding most explicit commentary and direct representation, Gerstein and Kalman mitigate the trauma of the attacks, present a hopeful and positive outlook to their audience and recognize the role of parents and teachers in conveying the story of 9/11 and facilitating discussion.

Both The Man and Fireboat are specifically crafted to negotiate the numerous challenges of describing 9/11 in children’s literature. In an article entitled “Retelling 9/11: How Picture Books Re-Envision National Crises,” Professor Paula T. Connelly outlines the unique problems associated with writing a picture book about the attacks:

In revisioning visual images of 9/11 one risks opposing charges of inauthenticity (if the images vary from what many saw, either firsthand or through televised reports) or of frightening children (if the images are too realistic). The scale of destruction and loss of life make the event a difficult one to encapsulate in a picture book. Moreover, fully explicating the event becomes nearly impossible: the motivation for the attacks was politically complex and the event lacks closure that could neatly fit into a narrative structure for young children.4

According to Connelly, the problem of writing children’s literature about 9/11 is three-fold; the scale of the event is too large, the reasons behind them are too complex and the narratives that can be told are restricted by the tension between providing authenticity and comfort. The complex moral and factual terrain that these narratives must navigate may explain why there have a very limited number of picture books on 9/11 and why many of these books have been met with a substantial amount of apprehension. “It gives me an odd feeling in the bottom of my stomach,” one bookseller wrote, “the idea of equating [September 11th] with retail.”5 The creation of picture books that address the attacks of September 11th, 2001 is a process fraught with historical and literary tension and these numerous problems are reflected in the works of Gerstein and Kalman.

The clash between alleviating trauma and explicating historical events is especially apparent in books written for the purpose of bibliotherapy.6 Some children’s authors chose to exclude 9/11 almost entirely from their narratives and focused only on offering sympathy and emotional support. For example, Bernard Waber’s Courage is specifically designed to help children deal with the trauma of 9/11 but only briefly and indirectly references the event. Courage offers reassurance and encouragement in the form of specific examples of courage, ones that a child can relate to such as riding a bike for the first time or jumping off the high dive. The second to last illustration depicts firefighters and police officers and reads simply “Courage is being a firefighter or a police officer.” The final panel represents the most direct reference to 9/11 in the entire book; the illustration shows children waving to a plane as it takes off and the caption reads “Courage is sometimes having to say goodbye.”7 Some might not even consider the book to be related to 9/11 but a note on the publisher’s website reveals its purpose:

Since 9/11, most children (and adults, as well) associate courage with the awesome dedication of emergency workers, but Waber hails everyday courage, the kind that every child is capable of exhibiting… Deceptively eloquent in its simplicity, [the book] teach[s] kids to value their own accomplishments — an effective strategy in dealing with the feelings of helplessness that often follow trauma.8

Waber’s Courage serves as an example of how discussion of specific events is subordinated when the goal is to present a narrative of comfort. In its nearly absent representation of 9/11, Courage can serve as a basic of comparison against which to analyze Gerstein and Kalman’s more explicit representations of 9/11. The diverting narrative presented in Courage reveals the top priority of these children’s 9/11 books: to offer comfort and encouragement in a time of trauma.

Though The Man Who Walked Between the Towers and Fireboat directly confront 9/11, they still do so in a way that minimalizes the event and removes it from the center of each narrative. Gerstein selects Phillipe Petit’s famous tightrope walk as the nucleus of his story, effectively de-emphasizing the events of 9/11 in the narrative of the Twin Towers. On the morning of August 7, 1974, Petit, a French street performer, spent nearly an hour delicately walking between the nearly-finished towers on a steel cable. The book itself, though not explicitly about 9/11, offers a certain sense of both historical context and memorialization by focusing on the story of Petit. Only in the final pages does Gerstein indirectly reference the attacks. "Now the towers are gone,” reads the final page, “But in memory, as if imprinted on the sky, the towers are still there.”9 Gerstein offers no description of what happened to the towers, why they are “gone.” Instead, he leaves this up to the adult reader to explain to the child if they chose to do so. It is a deliberately incomplete explanation that is meant to facilitate discussion between the reader and the audience.10 Gerstein’s refusal to provide commentary on September 11th brings the narrative of Petit to the forefront and allows the Twin Towers to become associated with the joyful memory of his tight-rope walk.

Though Kalman goes much further in her depiction of 9/11 in Fireboat, the terrorist attacks are still subordinated to a larger narrative. Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of John J. Harvey is the story of a New York fireboat, built in 1931, that was restored and reequipped just in time to help put out fires around Ground Zero. Although the narrative of Fireboat is more directly focused on the events of 9/11, Kalman nevertheless places emphasizes outside the central 9/11 narrative, celebrating the actions of the heroic “Harvey.” The first mention of 9/11 occurs about two-thirds of the way through the story; Kalman devotes most of the book to discussing the rich history of New York City, including the Empire State Building, the New York Yankees and the launching of the John J. Harvey fireboat. By focusing the story on the fireboat, Kalman engages the narrative of 9/11 but excludes any sense of danger. The Harvey is never in any peril and is removed from the dispiriting Ground Zero rescue efforts. In “Retelling 9/11,” Connelly discusses the effects of this distance between the narrative of Fireboat and the events of 9/11:

That their main characters are not directly injured by the attacks allows child readers a measure of separation from the depicted violence and since the stories are ultimately about the possibilities of positive input and restoration, the authors are able to balance that optimistic ending with direct visual and verbal descriptions of the attacks.11