Retelling 9/11: How Picture Books Re-Envision National Crises

In 2006, Hollywood marked the fifth-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with the first theatrically-released films based on those events, Universal Studios’ United 93 and Paramount’s World Trade Center. Critics initially questioned how the films would retell the events of September 11, 2001, particularly in a format of pseudo-fictionalization, and also how they would show events that had been so keenly imprinted on the American consciousness. Yet when the movies came out, they were met with general critical approval, perhaps because the central narrative thrust of each was on what one critic called “an inspiring vision of can-do American spirit amid adversity” (Lowry). What was not shown in either movie was the moment of violent physical impact in each event. United 93 did not show the plane crash in Pennsylvania; in World Trade Center the planes hitting the towers were not shown directly, but rather visually anticipated when a plane’s shadow momentarily blocks the sun from a New York City street.

The issue of how to aesthetically reconceptualize the September 11 attacks becomes all the more complex when the audience is children and the format that of picture books.¹ Not only the young age of readers but the visuality of the form presents particular problems, after all, the visual images of the planes hitting the Twin Towers and their later collapse have reached iconographic status in the American imagination. Indeed, perhaps because of the ubiquity of those images, children’s picture books published to date that deal with the September 11 attacks have all focused on the New York site. 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. Yet, only indirectly describing those attacks and assuming supplementary extra-textual knowledge is problematic if the books are to serve as more than transitory time-pieces. This is especially the case for children who have no personal memory of the event and for those born after 2001. Picture books that only obliquely refer to the attacks that nonetheless frame or underpin their story may have functioned as a palliative for cultural shock, but may require an adult reader/interpreter to complete their intratextually undefined interpolations. Such texts could thus serve to prompt potentially substantive conversations between children and adults about those events. Yet one danger of avoiding an intratextual description of the 9/11 attacks is of softening its depiction to the point of absence. Whether framing the events through stories of recovery, heroism, individual accomplishment, or community resolve, these books also reveal a range not only of responses but of ideological paradigms about 9/11. An exploration of picture books about the September 11 attacks may thus provide examples of how specific visual/verbal semiotics are used to translate violence to young children as well as opportunities to explore paradigms of childhood, national identity, internationalism, and notions of cultural and political hegemony.

The promise of cultural hegemony underlies Andrea Patel’s On That Day: A Book of Hope for Children (2001), one of the first picture books published about 9/11. Receiving mixed reviews—described as “effective . . .” by one critic (Lukehart) and “vacuous” by another (Kidd 140)—On That Day has nonetheless become a well-read book in what one could call “the 9/11 canon” of children’s literature, probably more so because it enjoyed strong popular promotion as the primary reviewed book on Reading Rainbow’s 9/11 episode.² What is noted most by both the book’s supporters and detractors is the simplicity of its text and message. Here, Patel presents a peaceful world that is one day shattered by a...