"The Memorial Garden as Political Space in Amy Waldman’s The Submission"

The aim of this contribution is to examine the garden as a political space of memory in Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission. Focusing on the controversial memorial proposed for the victims of 9/11, the essay explores how the garden functions not merely as a site of commemoration but as a contested terrain where narratives of national identity, grief, belonging, and exclusion are negotiated. Drawing on theories of cultural memory, spatial politics, and memorialization, the analysis shows how Waldman mobilizes the garden as a symbolic and material space that exposes tensions between private mourning and public remembrance and between aesthetic universalism and political particularism. The novel foregrounds the ways in which memory is shaped by power, revealing how the design and interpretation of memorial spaces become arenas for ideological struggle, especially in the post-9/11 American context marked by Islamophobia and securitization. By reading the garden as a liminal and unstable space—simultaneously open and regulated, inclusive in aspiration yet exclusionary in practice—this contribution argues that The Submission critically interrogates the possibility of shared memory in a fractured polity. Ultimately, the essay positions the garden as a key narrative device through which Waldman questions who is entitled to remember, how memory is spatially organized, and whose histories are rendered visible or erased.