Recovering Bodies

Abstract

The events of 9/11 remind us again, if we needed to be reminded, of the significance of bodies and the need for bodies to be identified so that mourning can continue. Through this tragedy, we learn to think about embodied identities in different ways and thus with the ways that losses can cut deep and continue to shape us at different levels of experience. Those who lost relatives and friends on the four doomed planes at least knew beyond reasonable doubt what had happened, but those who saw their loved ones and friends off to work were still clinging to hope, and for so many, they were never really to come to know what had happened that day. They would possibly ‘never know for sure’ and they had to learn to live with this reality ‘as best they could’. They have learnt that life cannot be controlled and that your life and possible future can be transformed in a moment. We need to think beyond the terms of language and cultural discourses to engage with the different everyday moral decisions and predicaments that people were faced with after 9/11.