How does a terrorist attack transform the everyday lives of ordinary people – victims, survivors, families, first responders, journalists, and communities? Is it possible for victims and their families to ever be happy again? Can there be closure? Is forgiveness possible? How does the experience of trauma differ according to a person’s proximity to the actual attack? What kind of transformation is possible under these circumstances, if at all?
These are some of the questions I set out to explore as an anthropologist for my doctoral research. I investigated the personal impacts of terror through conversations with five Australians with lived experience of terrorism. I refer to them by their first names: Andrew, Nick, Kev, Gill and Karl.
Their stories are important, but not because they are all heroes. The “hero” narrative of terrorism survival can be damaging sometimes because it holds up one way of surviving as the best way. We need to recognise and do justice to the varied ways in which people respond to the experience of terrorism and weave this experience into the fabric of their everyday lives: at times resisting, at times accepting what happened. Some, but not all, will look beyond their personal circumstances to seek transformation at the public and societal level.
Andrew, a firefighter from Perth, was a long way from the 11 September 2001 terror attacks when they happened on the World Trade Centre in New York. As part of the global audience to this world-changing act of terrorism, he watched the images on television in the firehouse in Perth while at work. As he watched the Twin Towers crumble, Andrew knew there were firefighters and civilians lost in the ash and rubble. He had to do something, he had to help.
Nick was a Perth-based television news journalist at the time of the 2002 Bali Bombing. Given Perth’s proximity to Bali, Nick was put on an early morning flight within hours of the bombing to report on the story. On departure, he was told there had been a small incident involving around 20 people. Upon arrival, Nick was confronted with the devastation and death of 202 people.
One of those victims was Kev’s son, Corey. It was Corey’s first trip away from home without his parents. Corey and his footy teammates had decided they would head to Bali for their end-of-season wind-up. Corey died in the Sari nightclub, just a few hours after arriving in Bali. Kev was devastated. He had lost his son and best mate. Kev spent the next three years drinking himself almost to death.
After a restless night and running late for work, Gill was on a London Tube train travelling from King’s Cross into the city on 7 July 2005 when a terrorist detonated a bomb that killed himself and 26 passengers. Gill regained consciousness to the screaming of other passengers and the realisation that something terrible had happened. Gill could not feel her legs. Looking down she saw muscle, bone, blood and shredded skin. Gill met Karl after the attack and while she was going through a divorce. As Gill’s husband and primary carer, Karl was an important part of my conversations with Gill about the impacts of terrorism on her everyday life.
Andrew, Nick, Kev, Gill and Karl each have a relationship with trauma that is in a constant state of flux. There is an oscillation between the identity of a “victim” and that of “survivor”. Like treading a tightrope, the trauma in people’s everyday lives must be balanced delicately, lest life becomes unbalanced. Andrew, Nick, Kev, Gill and Karl tread this tightrope of trauma every day as they navigate a sense of self that fluctuates between who they were, what they have been through, and who they can become.
Their stories are tales of self-transformation. Storytelling creates a space in which they can reimagine their experience of terror. Stories help to negotiate a complex relationship with trauma and reclaim a fragile sense of agency. Survivor stories reveal responses to terror that are necessarily social and ethical: “Should I tell my story? Why? To whom? In what way?”. The process of storytelling allows a re-interpretation of events and an opportunity to assert a renewed sense of self, often in terms of a traumatic yet transformed social identity.
For Andrew, Nick, Kev, Gill and Karl, their experience of terror awakened or reawakened, a sense of social responsibility. Each has found their own way to tell their unique story to reach out to others and change others’ lives. This was not done in the same way, nor to the same timeline. Gill and Andrew began to tell their stories publicly shortly after their experiences. Kev waited for some years. Nick has only just begun to tell his story. Their stories are an ethical response to terrorism, but they are not all about closure and forgiveness. Forgiveness is not necessary to recovery or required to reclaim a sense of agency after terror.
These are stories of suffering, enduring hardship, and the human ability to keep moving forward. Traumatic identity is not determined totally by the past but is purposeful and creative. For Andrew, Nick, Kev, Gill and Karl, the storytelling process has been, in different ways, of therapeutic value. The experience of terror has created environment or situation that has produced a transformed sense of ethical responsibility: being victim to terrorism has allowed these participants to survive beyond the experience by taking responsibility to act for themselves and for others in a way they had not done before.
Yet there always remains a tension between owning or being in control of one’s own story and realising that control could slip through your grasp at any moment. The way in which a person’s story appears in media, or is used by politicians, can be disempowering and even re-traumatising if it is serving someone else’s interests rather than the Storyteller’s purpose. The Storyteller’s wellbeing depends on the ethical choices they have each made as they choose to live with the trauma of terror. The pain and trauma can be understood as part of the ethical struggle to live a good and hopeful life after terror.
As destructive as terrorism is, the experience of terrorism can also be generative. Despite the physical, psychological and social constraints the experience of terrorism can place on survivors’ everyday lives, the experience of terrorism does not determine all that they are or who they can become. The stories shared during my research celebrate humanity. Certainly, there are moments that draw people with an experience of terror back into the trauma of the attack, and such moments can feel like they will last a lifetime. The struggle for humanity, the struggle for hope, is keenly felt against the context of the experience of violence and terror.
Andrew, Nick, Kev, Gill and Karl lead lives that are messy, complicated, and wonderful. Their stories do not only belong in ‘Memorial Day’ articles: they resonate across time, across different acts of terror, and they connect people through a shared sense of humanity.
