9/11 shaping lives of those born after it
SACRAMENTO — Sapeidah Saeedi’s earliest memory is of losing her twin sister, Ghazal. It happened as kindergarten let out and the girls were separated in the rush for the bus. Sapeidah began to panic. Then, as quickly as the fright began, it was over. The sisters found each other in the crowd. Ghazal was not lost. Sapeidah wasn’t alone. They paid the fare and rode the lumbering bus home.
Home was in the city of Herat in Afghanistan. And somewhere beyond their knowing, a tragedy 6,500 miles away began shaping their lives years before their birth.
For the Saeedi’s family, the events and aftershocks of Sept. 11, 2001, would drive them from one homeland in search of another. That journey brought them to California, where they try to imagine what the future holds for them and the place they left.
“Here, you’re not home, but you’re home,” Sapeidah tried to explain. “You’re in the middle of something. U.S. and Afghanistan, you’re in the middle. You don’t know which way to go.”
Along with their younger sister, Haniyah, Sapeidah and Ghazal, who were born in 2005 and are now 16, belong to the post-9/11 generation — an age group that numbers approximately 73 million people in the United States alone. Too young to have experienced the events of a day 20 years ago, they must, nevertheless, find
their way in its shadow.
Like most of their peers, the Saeedi sisters didn’t grow up learning about 9/11 or even of the U.S. invasion of their country. At their private school in Herat, their history classes were concerned with the old, not the contemporary.
“The history we learned about was pointless,” Sapeidah said flatly. “It’s from years ago . ... So you wouldn’t know what was actually happening in the country at the moment. You had to listen to the news. But nobody liked the news, so nobody knew what was going on.”
History as an abstraction isn’t a new concept. The idea of 9/11 receding into history is.
A recent Pew Research Center analysis determined that the events of 9/11 cling powerfully to the minds of Americans old enough to remember where they were when two hijacked planes hurtled into the World Trade Center buildings, but otherwise noted that “an ever-growing number of Americans have no personal memory of that day, either because they were too young or not yet born.”
While the sisters’ formal education about 9/11 wouldn’t occur until they reached the U.S., some American students say the subject isn’t always taught in a nuanced way.
Gabrielle Listana, 13, an eighth-grader at Presidio Middle School in San Francisco, remembers first learning about 9/11 in third grade, when the teacher played a video for the class that didn’t show the actual attacks but left an impression nonetheless.
“It was like, ‘Oh, this could happen to me,’ ” Gabrielle said. “It was just something in the back of my brain . ... Thirdgraders obviously have other things to think about.”
Elaheh Khazi, 15, a junior at Mission San Jose High School in Fremont, also first encountered 9/11 in the third grade, where the focus was on the first responders who rushed into poisonous smoke clouds and falling rubble to rescue the wounded and recover the dead.
“In elementary school, we always honored the firefighters,” Elaheh recalled.
But as she grew older, Elaheh says 9/11 still only registered as an occasional classroom lesson about heroes and villains. Meanwhile, the treatment her older sister received for wearing a hijab and the news her father consumed on various cable news channels complicated the narrative.
“Honestly, sometimes it was a little hurtful because how they portrayed the terrorists — like Muslims,” said Elaheh, who has extended family in Afghanistan. “I knew that wasn’t right.”
The younger generation certainly isn’t untouched by their parents’ trauma, noted Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security Program and an authority on government secrecy and surveillance, especially when it comes to the bargains struck in the grip of fear.
America’s two-decade campaign in Afghanistan, the nation’s longest, means there are now adults who have “no idea what it’s like to not be at war,” Goitein said, while the expansion of domestic spying operations and the creation of an immigration police force means there are communities that have endured 20 years of official state suspicion.
“There was this sense that we were willing to give up whatever we needed to give up for some added security and we weren’t particularly interested in asking questions,” said Goitein, a former Department of Justice civil attorney who was taking a deposition in Indiana on the day of the attacks. “We said, ‘Keep us safe,’ but we didn’t ask ... about the techniques being used or for proof that those techniques were keeping us safer.”
Two decades later, America’s
ledger includes two quagmire wars that cost thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and untold “opportunity costs,” while a new generation came of age in a country at war with terror and its own ideals.
For the Saeedi sisters, the concept of their country at war felt vague and faraway. They didn’t fully realize how the approaching trouble consumed their parents.
Even before 9/11, their father said he tried to immigrate to Turkey to escape Taliban rule. But after the U.S. invasion unseated the fundamentalist government in October 2001, Abdul Rahim Saeedi’s stayed to help build what came next.
He began working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, a federal foreign aid group, as a strategy planning adviser within his city’s local government. He was helping shift local government departments to new computer and software systems, but the rumors proliferated nonetheless: Abdul worked with the Americans. Abdul forsook his Muslim faith. Abdul was rich.
Abdul began worrying about kidnappings and ransom demands. He changed his routes to work and texted his wife each afternoon to make sure their daughters arrived home. “It was dangerous for me, for my family,” he said. “I was worried about my daughters.”
In 2014, he quietly applied for a Special Immigrant Visa with the hope of moving his family to America. The sisters didn’t learn their intended destination until almost two years later, when they were brought to Kabul for an interview at the U.S. Embassy.
“On the day we’re supposed to have the interview, he said we’re actually going to (the) USA, not Turkey,” Ghazal said.
The sisters felt ambivalent about leaving. Sapeidah and Ghazal had started sixth grade and were more rooted in their hometown. Plus, they didn’t want to leave their grandfather and aunt, who lived on the second floor of their two-story home. The younger Haniya thought of it as a vacation. She didn’t understand why her big sisters were crying.
“It took me a while to realize I wouldn’t be able to go back,” Haniya, now 13, recalled.
Turlock was not the Magic Kingdom.
The Saeedi’s family arrived in the Central Valley farming
community in October 2016. It was just weeks before Donald Trump was elected president on an anti-immigration platform that translated into several attempts to ban Muslims from entering the country and a 150% drop in refugee admissions, according to an analysis of State Department data.
But the turbulent political moment was not front of mind for the Saeedis. The $900 they received in monthly rental assistance didn’t stretch far enough for the family of five. Abdul said he felt like he was on his own to figure out how to obtain a driver’s license and find a job. A case worker referred him to the local Walmart and suggested he also try getting hired on as a farm laborer, while a job training program put on by a refugee aid organization proved too rudimentary for his needs.
“Believe me, they taught us, ‘This is dollar, this is quarter, this is penny,’ ” Abdul groused.
Back home, Abdul was a well-paid government employee and his wife, Lailama, taught Dari Persian literature in elementary and high schools. Here, they were barely clinging to the bottom rung.
Amid their parents’ economic struggles, the Saeedi girls navigated their own adjustments. Bused 40 minutes to a school outside of town, the twins were put in different classrooms for the first time in their lives, “so we wouldn’t depend on each other,” Sapeidah said. “It was just hard. You have no one to talk to or anything.”
In late 2017, the Saeedis traded the rural farmland of Stanislaus County for a treeand car-lined neighborhood in suburban Sacramento, which they still call home. The area has a large Afghan community, as Sacramento has been one of the top destinations for refugees in recent years. The sisters welcomed the move but still missed home.
This past June, the Saeedis returned to Afghanistan. The journey was long and made longer by pandemic restrictions, canceled flights and lengthy layovers. After two days of travel, the girls touched down in Herat, unable to restrain their tears. They’d been away almost five years, an eternity in adolescence.
They stayed in their childhood home. The first floor was barren. The city bustled with more people who had moved in from the countryside. Roving
produce stands and corner bakeries drew crowds. Cars slogged around four-way roundabouts. Sapeidah counted one traffic light.
The three weeks passed like a dream.
“It felt unreal,” Haniya said. On July 28, the sisters were back in their adopted country. On Aug. 12, the same day they started their junior year, the Taliban took over Herat. The girls’ aunt lost her job “because women can’t go to work anymore,” Sapeidah said. “It was just a month, and the whole country turned upside down.”
“We’ll probably never go back anytime soon,” Ghazal mused, “even if the Taliban get out.”
The sisters haven’t quite figured out how to frame the detours their lives took because of events that preceded them. The roads not traveled haven’t fully revealed themselves. So they concentrate on the present.
Haniya just started her first year of high school, while her sisters have entered their hectic junior year. There are International Baccalaureate exams to cram for, community service requirements to meet, cross-country practices to squeeze in, learner’s permits to get, friends to see in person. And a year of remote learning left everyone feeling behind.
“It was a horrible year,” Sapeidah admitted.
While that was a common refrain for most students, some say their privilege — their ability to attend good schools, their parents’ relative economic stability, their Americanness — freed them to get socially engaged.
In San Francisco, Gabrielle is juggling her last year of middle school with her second year on the city’s Youth Commission, which she saw as an avenue to achieve some of the things she and her peers marched for during last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. In Fremont, Elaheh is balancing junior year with her duties as the new co-president of the Bay Area Student Activists. In a roundabout way, she thinks she may have been drawn to grassroots organizing because of 9/11.
“I think it might have influenced me in a way to become an activist, to speak up for people who are oppressed,” Elaheh said.
Farther out, college looms like a vague certainty. The Saeedi sisters’ parents want them to pursue careers in the medical field. Ghazal wants to find a campus outside of Sacramento, to see a little more of California. Sapeidah sees herself returning to their home country at some point after graduation. Her heart is there, she says. Haniya isn’t quite so sure. Then Ghazal refocuses everyone on the immediate task.
“Honestly,” she said, “everyone is just trying to survive high school.”