Forging Public Voices: Memory, Writing, Power

Abstract

In the early evening of March 8, 2001—International Women’s Day— women, men, and children gathered in New York City at the corner of Green Street and Washington Place in front of the Asche Building to listen to the poet and singer Phyllis Capello and the storyteller Gioia Tim-panelli. Small cards with a reproduction of Nancy Azara’s collage “Fire” and inscribed names and ages of victims were passed around the crowd. Ninety years earlier, this had been the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. In this same space in which people listened, held hands, embraced a friend, a child, a horrified crowd had witnessed women workers jumping to their death from the ninth floor in a desperate attempt to escape the fire that burned three floors—eighth, ninth, and tenth—of the building. On March 25, 1911, 146 workers, mostly young women—the average age was 19—died in that fire. Most of the victims were Jewish women immigrants. About one-third were Italian women immigrants.

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fiaught with danger.

—Audre horde, “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action”

Giving your experience a body, putting it down on paper, stakes out your little piece of reality, plants your flag on your territory of human experience.

—Anuradha Sankaran-Lazarre, Writing the Memoir Workshop, New Jersey City University, 1999

What is not remembered is forgotten.

—B. Amore, Lifeline—filo della vita: An Italian American Odyssey 1901–2001