PRODUCING SPACE, REPRESENTING GRIEF: SEPTEMBER 11 MEMORIAL IN AMY WALDMAN’S THE SUBMISSION

Published a decade after September 11, 2001, Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission recounts the events about the project to build a memorial for September 11. Two years after the attack, a jury is commissioned to decide the winner of the blind memorial competition. After winnowing five thousand entries, the jury chooses two finalists: the designs named “the Garden” and “the Void.” Following the long discussions about how the tragedy should be remembered in that memorial space, the design named “the Garden” wins. When the submission file is opened, the winner’s identity as a Muslim-American is revealed which leads to a debate among the jury members. The news regarding the identity of the winner is leaked to a journalist and the chaos in the jury becomes nationwide. The debate on the symbolic associations and the practice of the memorial space goes along with ruminations on mourning, art, Islam, equality and democracy. Using Henri Lefebvre’s socio-spatial dialectics as a theoretical framework, this study examines the representation and practice of “the Garden” in The Submission as a space to memorialize and mourn