The visible pain of Khizr and Ghazala Khan as they feuded with Donald Trump this week over the memory of their dead son brought up a world of all-too-familiar emotions. After my husband, Luis Eduardo Torres, died at the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, I stood on many smaller platforms as his widow, invoked his name and story to make a public point, and felt excruciating pain each time I did so.
The political fallout in the aftermath of September 11 horrified me: the post 9/11 world brought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – where Humayan Khan was was killed in 2004 – compromised our personal freedoms for security through the US Patriot Act, stepped up with harsh immigration policies while failing to pass much-needed positive reforms like the Dream Act, tortured prisoners, created Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp and more.
Like many 9/11 victim family members, I spoke up in response to terrible things being done in my loved one’s name. I felt especially impassioned about immigration crackdowns spurred by the attacks. My husband came from Colombia as an uneducated illegal immigrant. By the time he died, he was a senior currency broker, a job his bilingualism helped him get. It was his second day at work at Cantor Fitzgerald, and I was seven and a half months pregnant.
But no matter the audience – no matter how long since he’d died, nor how important the issue – speaking about my husband in public was hard. As I passionately recreated his life for others, I always felt tricked in those moments into thinking he was still alive and all was well.
But in the silent pauses between words, I’d remember all over again that he was dead, and that was why people were so interested in hearing me talk about him. My voice would then quake as I continued, which only made it quake more. To say my husband’s familiar name, “Eddie,” aloud and in public was especially hard because I went about my daily life referring to him only as “my husband” or if possible, not referring to him at all.
To receive strong applause at the end of my speeches, as I often did, and to be complimented on my bravery, as I often was, made me feel sick instead of proud. And although I’ve never spoken to a hostile crowd, as I move through a world that casually bounces “9/11” again and again through its discourses at all levels, I am forever cut by it.
The Khans performed a giant feat, as their dead son’s picture loomed large at the DNC, where Khizr Kahn gave the speech that caused Trump to trivialize his pain and sacrifice. “You have sacrificed nothing,” Khan said, adding that, if it was up to Trump, his family would never have been allowed in the US at all.
They held out their broken hearts as they spoke of Humayan’s heroic, patriotic life, a stark contrast to the myth that all Muslims are terrorists and that they don’t belong here. Did they know, even before they spoke, that Donald Trump would excrete upon them and their incontrovertible offering?
He is attacking my late husband’s American Dream, too. From the start of Trump’s presidential campaign, he has slandered Mexicans, which I take to be a shorthand for all Spanish-speaking people from south of our border. Immigration is once again a central issue in this election. But I sat silently, afraid to speak up in this especially hostile political environment and to take on the inevitable emotional costs of speaking my heart.
But with the Khans’ example, here I am, ready to share my husband’s story anew, to discredit false myths of what immigrants are and what they mean to this country. In turn, I hope I can help others step up too, and speak through their heartbreak. Our nation’s future may depend on it.
