WASHINGTON, DC – I knew I didn’t want to see the wannabe-Beaux Arts buildings of Capitol Hill, the erect dick of the Washington Monument, the cliché of gloomy to the reflecting pool. I didn’t even want to hide from the absurd heat – 80 degrees inside November – in the cloister of one of DC’s museums. I wanted something that felt like it would fit the moment. I wanted an anti-monument.
From afar, a trick of light makes the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by Maya Lin, resemble a small body of water, an oasis in a desert of grass. Then vertical lines split that darkness, and it flattens into slabs of grayish stone. And then you realize that that gray is not superficiality, but a heart: chiselled names in black granite, the names of so many dead.
It barely starts there: the stanchions that keep you from the grass tower above it. But keep walking and the names begin – just one line etched on a base (~30 cm) of stone. Then three. Then six. Soon it feels like you’re sliding down the smooth stone of the walkway and the monument opens up all around you, as if your movement is cutting through the fascia of the earth and creating this dark gash, this wound. It won’t be long before it towers over you instead.
“I found my name!” a little boy shouted excitedly to his parents, as if looking at a rack of key rings in a souvenir shop. Certain names also caught my attention. Akira Yamashita, for example. Born in San Francisco; buried in Moroyama, Japan. I wondered what it felt like to be sent by a country that had so recently destroyed your homeland to wreak similar devastation in a nearby country.
More and more I’m beginning to think that the true mark of assimilation in America is forgetting. If the coalition of all those who have been made victims, refugees or others had kept ablaze the knowledge of what this country is capable of – for others, for one’s own – we might have woken up today to a other nation.
Ascend into the world of the living and come around the side, and the memorial closes itself again. You could be right in front of it and miss it, if you were staring at Capitol Hill. But watch your step: at any moment a hole could open around your feet and swallow you whole.
