Incompatible identities: Memory and experience at the National September 9/11 Memorial and Museum

• The paper examines the National 9/11 Memorial as secular and sacred place.
• A subjective voice provides access to the emotional qualities of the memorial.
• The multiplicity of ‘incompatible identities’ provides a variety of experiences for visitors to this site.

The National September 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City is simultaneously a secular location and sacred place, a space for collective mourning and for individual grief. The incised identities of the diasporic 9/11 dead are displaced from loved ones and from traditional resting places for the dead. While the ephemeral presence of the deceased on the memorial site may be tangible to some, the dead will soon return to this site in the physical form of bone fragments and unidentifiable remains. What will this place then become – public place or death space, ossuary or park, or simultaneously a heterotopic realm of incompatible identities and multiple experiences? The writer's voice echoes these heterotopic tensions; the presence of the subjective voice struggles with the vividness of a ‘prosthetic’ attachment to the events of 9/11 and the scholarly voice struggles to attain a critical distance from the event. From these seemingly incompatible perspectives, a middle ground is negotiated by embedding an autoethnographical perspective, allowing for reflection upon the implications of the return of the dead to the heart of the living city upon practices of death and grief, of memory and experience, of mourning and of everyday life.