We tell a story about violence to make sense of it, and the story returns us to the public realm where grieving is possible. Human beings cannot remain in this silence and survive, and so we have to learn to say what is unsayable. Hannah Arendt calls this the private realm, the dark shadowy place that violence throws us into, shocked and speechless and alone in our loss. The hole swallows up language, memory, and meaning and leaves us in a scarred and stripped landscape. Violence makes a hole-not just the damage it inflicts on the body of a person but the pain it causes in the body of a people. I love that the book is inviting people to go on that journey with me.”īelow, an excerpt from Valarie Kaur’s See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. If you want to understand the 9/11 on people of color, you have to be able to walk in their shoes. That kind of depth you can access with the written word, you can’t get though any other medium. Twenty years later, there’s a chance to go deeper and to invite people not just to know what happened but to know what it felt like. “That did do its work, we crisscrossed the country showing that film, so people were introduced to the experiences of people of color after 9/11 that they were blind to before.

“What I first created after that trip across the country was a film, because I needed people to see our faces and hear our voices and come to understand the struggle of the Sikh community through stories on screen,” she says.

See No Stranger by Valarie Kaur