The first time I visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial, I remember feeling a sense that I was not supposed to be there.

The memorial is divided into two major sections. The first is the actual memorial, which includes Reflecting Pool, The Gates of Time, Field of Empty Chairs, and The Survivor Tree. This section is free to everyone and is mostly located outdoors. The second part is the museum, which visitors must pay a fee to get into. The museum provides a chronicle of April 19, 1995, as well as those events’ impacts around the city (the trials of McVeigh and Nichols, the city's rebuilding).

I felt as though I did not belong in the museum. It was not for me. I didn't need to learn about the site's history; I had lived it. I lived minutes away from the Murrah Building and the bombing, minutes away from the memorial and its construction, minutes away from the city growing and expanding into a cultural and commercial hub. I lived through news stories of McVeigh and Nichols, through the obsession that everyone had with their trials across the nation but particularly at home, because these people attacked my home. I lived through protests and counterprotests—should the death penalty be given or should it not? I had friends on both sides, across the lines from each other, demonstrating in the same space where the bombing had happened.

So I didn't need the museum to chronologically lay out the timeline for me as though I needed to learn it. I didn't need to learn it; I knew it. It was the story of my life, my childhood, my growing up minutes away from the bombing. I felt like an outsider in this space, a space that was my home. This museum was for tourists, and I was not a tourist. I was an Oklahoman, and this space was no longer mine.

I didn't return to the memorial until college, at which time I had a very different experience—because I chose not to go through the area telling me the events, but instead to the meditation spaces and The Survivor Tree and the chairs, the spaces designated for the communities and not for chronologically telling what had happened.

In Spectacular Rhetorics, Wendy Hesford provides a theoretical framework that I find useful for understanding the Oklahoma City memorial and its impacts on the city. Her project, as she describes it, is to “demonstrate how spectacular texts and contexts project identifications onto audiences” (9). Although her focus is not on memorials but on human rights, her methods are applicable outside of her study. She argues that “contexts shape human rights discourse” and, conversely, “human rights discourse generates context” (11). Her theory is useful for looking at the Oklahoma City National Memorial to show how the design of the memorial identifies visitors as either “survivors” or “tourists,” then uses these identifications to shape visitor experience. Essentially, Hesford’s theory is that the context shapes the text, and that the text then changes identity, which reshapes a person’s relation to context.

In my application, the context that shapes the memorial is the bombing, without which it would not exist. The memorial acknowledges visitors’ prior relationships to the bombing—as survivors or as tourists—but then changes those identities. For survivors, the memorial acts as a therapeutic text that changes the survivor’s experience by mediating the trauma. For tourists, the memorial functions as a pedagogical tool through which the tourist may learn about the bombing and so become a better active citizen against violence. Therefore, the memorial is shaped by context (the bombing), but then reshapes that context by interacting with the identities of its visitors.