Standing in the Shadow of No Towers frames a personal account of September 11 and its aftershocks, beginning with a Tribeca nightlife scene disrupted by fear and ending with the long tail of immigration checks and community organizing. By late summer, the downtown club Vinyl was tense, with warnings about undercover stings hanging over a dance floor once known for talcum-dusted steps. The club’s proximity to the World Trade Center only truly registered on that Tuesday, when volunteers stacked bags of clothes on the sidewalk for survivors expected to be rescued at any moment. By midnight, it became clear there would be no rescues.
That morning, the narrator left a subway at Broadway–Lafayette, where a familiar fruitseller, Amin Miah, shouted in Bangla that two planes had struck. Looking south at the smoke, the narrator headed to work at HBO’s downtown satellite, calling a colleague on the West Coast who might not yet have heard. At the office, a senior executive insisted on keeping the 10 a.m. staff meeting on schedule. Then the South Tower fell, visible through the window. Phone lines jammed, the narrator tried to reach a partner, artist Reiko Yamamoto, who did not have a cellphone in 2001, and instead bicycled toward Tribeca. Office blocks were already evacuating. Hours later, when Yamamoto made it home safely, the first request was simple: please get a phone.
In the days that followed, South Asian activists from Youth Solidarity Summer and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance gathered at a vigil organized by the South Asian Journalists Association for a Sikh man attacked in a hate crime after the attacks. A small American flag on a bicycle drew a quiet rebuke from filmmaker Dina Hossain, who had just finished a Leonard Bernstein documentary and begun a project on Islam. Her warning was stark: the circle of national grief might not include those perceived as Muslim.
Memories of earlier backlashes resurfaced. A cousin recalled being assaulted in California in 1979 as an “Eye-ranian” during the hostage crisis, while poet Saba Waheed, who had joined volunteers at Vinyl on 9/11, wrote about the dread that followed the first Gulf War, ending with the line, “oh no, not again.” The narrator initially doubted that the national response would target “Eye-raq,” but worry grew as stories spread.
Standing in the Shadow of No Towers
Within days, word circulated that several Bangladeshi waiters had been working at Windows on the World in the North Tower. Their deaths, among many working-class victims, prompted reporters to seek names, photos, and biographies. In that moment, the narrator recognized how “Bangladeshi” in public discourse had been mapped onto “Muslim,” and how memorializing Muslim victims became essential as assaults on taxi drivers and shop owners mounted. Community advocates leaned into a model-minority narrative in response. When Mahmood Mamdani later published Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, the analysis felt uncomfortably familiar. The narrator saw how often politeness had been wielded as a shield against Islamophobia. A younger generation, represented by Mamdani’s son, Zohran, chose a different path by entering politics to change the system instead of appealing to it.
Fear of another strike pushed a move from Hell’s Kitchen. A landlord welcomed the vacancy and a rent hike, and a neighboring strip-club bouncer with a scarred eye offered a knowing wave as boxes were loaded. Driving to a Brooklyn storage unit, the narrator thought about leaders who find faith in crisis and about the shared claim of mercy in the Abrahamic traditions.
Before the attacks, HBO had sponsored the narrator’s green card application, which arrived in April 2001 in a plain envelope. An immigration lawyer fielded a question that felt newly urgent: was it now safe to attend protests over cases like Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo? A college roommate, Saif, was not as fortunate. His green card deadline fell at year’s end, and after September the process stalled in extended security checks. With a common Muslim Bangladeshi surname, he was repeatedly flagged. His H-1B ran out, sending him back to Bangladesh for work. Many skilled immigrants made similar decisions, a form of reverse brain drain. Working-class migrants rarely had that option. They stayed despite crackdowns, including mass arrests along Coney Island Avenue, or sought refuge in Canada.
Visible Collective, “Disappeared in America: Fear of Flying” (2005), video, sits within a wider landscape of narrative and political art that interrogates race, memory, and state power, alongside projects such as the forthcoming George Washington Carver pigments and a lost dye legacy feature. The piece’s focus on surveillance and disappearance also echoes concerns raised by civil liberties groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which tracked detentions and profiling in the post-9/11 era.