Not so dreadful here and an·ni·ver·sa·ry: a five-year fragmentation
Date
2019
Authors
Borgard, Mikey, author
Doenges, Judy, advisor
Fletcher, Harrison, advisor
Levy, E. J., committee member
Alexander, Ruth, committee member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
Not so Dreadful Here is a novel of interstices, a meditation on the failure of language in the aftermath of mass tragedy events. On April 15th, 2013, at 2:49 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring nearly three hundred more. Within a five-day span, the perpetrators of this attack committed a carjacking and a kidnapping, murdered a police officer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, started a firefight with members of the Watertown Police Department on a residential street, and brought the city to its knees for twenty hours while the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Massachusetts National Guard, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the Boston Police Special Operations Unit, and dozens of additional teams searched door-to-door for the surviving perpetrator. This story has been told and retold in the press, in ghostwritten memoirs, and on the screens of Hollywood. What has been neglected are the shreds of fear that resound long after the echoes of the bombs fade, the cracks in the mind unrepairable by doctors and nurses, the parasitic nature of survivor's guilt, the desperate need to define and explicate this event. Audiences have been spoon-fed the inspirational version of events, the sugar-coated #BostonStrong narrative. That is not the whole truth. The pages of this novel are tattooed with fragments of the bombings: flashbacks of shattered glass and scraps of fabric, personal belongings sealed in evidence bags, headlines and transcripts, posts from social media sites, messages scrawled in chalk at the temporary memorial on Boylston Street. The narrative threadsthose of Theia Bronwyn, twenty-one-year-old sociology student captivated by Greek mythology, and Johnathan Mensch, twenty-seven-year-old Marine mourning the loss of his brother in Afghanistanbegin to intertwine in the suffocating moments after the detonations and finally tether in the last pages of the text with the realization that both suffering and survival are knotted. This is a book about self-preservation, mass confusion, the hierarchy of victimhood, the insidiousness of the media, the consequences of public violence, and the reverberations of fear in a post-September 11th culture fixated on race and religion, but it is also a novel of hope, of determination, and of forgiveness. It is an attempt to fill the hollows with stillness, with remembrance. It is failed meaning-making from unspeakable tragedy. It is a reminder to meet every human with grace. an·ni·ver·sa·ry: a five-year fragmentation holds the bleeding-over of Not so Dreadful Here, the nonfiction unable to be contained in the fictional realm. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, a temporary memorial bloomed at the edge of the crime scene, providing comfort to the people of Boston. In June of 2013, the items left at this shrine were removed, tagged, and transported to the City of Boston's archives, where they now sit in bankers' boxes nestled on metal shelves, forgotten. A permanent memorial has yet to be erected. an·ni·ver·sa·ry serves as a textual memorial, a hodgepodge of speeches, letters, etymological tracings, records of items from the original shrine, and medical logs, all interwoven with a personal account of the five years after the bombings. Told from a survivor's perspective, the central narrative focuses on mental health, the erasure of identity, the never-ending search for answers, and a desperate attempt to make peace with an unspeakable reality. an·ni·ver·sa·ry is memorialization, remembrance, and resilience. It is, ultimately, a map to forgiveness.
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