May 2009

Jordan Soyka

features

The Right to Write About It: Hurricane Katrina in Poetry

In 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina, numerous books of poetry dealing with the hurricane were published. Of these, three books -- Raymond McDaniel’s Saltwater Empire, Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, and Katie Ford’s Colosseum -- offer a continuum in regard to the poet’s relation to New Orleans and the hurricane. McDaniel is a Florida native with friends and family in New Orleans; he lives in Ann Arbor and teaches at the University of Michigan. Ford was born in Oregon and schooled at Harvard. However, she was the poetry editor of the New Orleans Review when Katrina hit; after the storm, she evacuated, eventually settling in Philadelphia. Smith, a Chicago native, is a former journalist, four-time winner of the National Poetry Slam competition, and was nominated for the 2008 National Book Award for Blood Dazzler. She currently lives in New York.

The one thing the public expects of authors is the ability to imagine something -- personas, stories, conflicts -- outside themselves; “contain[ing] multitudes,” as Whitman wrote, is a basic job requirement. If authors only wrote about what they knew, they’d be accused of having no imagination. However, in the case of catastrophe, the situation is reversed. Some authors responding to Katrina were criticized as "outsiders" incapable of understanding something outside their own realm of experience.

On the flip side, in arguing that authors are inherently capable of writing from a victim’s position, we run the risk of disregarding the uniqueness of that position, potentially disregarding the victims themselves.

How, then, do we navigate between these two seemingly legitimate viewpoints?

“[New Orleans’ citizenry] could, would and should speak for themselves,” McDaniel told me, via email. Indeed, all three authors have expressed their inability to provide a fully representative account of the hurricane: “My own loss or grief is not, in any way, comparable …to what many citizens in New Orleans went through,” Ford said in an interview with San Francisco’s online city guide, SF Station. Similarly, Smith told New Orleans’ Times Picayune that she was “really uncomfortable… try[ing] on… the shoes” of Katrina victims.

However, we must question whether a truly "authoritative" account of Katrina is possible, be it from a victim or not. Moreover, we should be suspicious of our own impulse to funnel the victims’ diverse experiences of the storm into a single, "authentic" portrayal. Smith’s quote is telling -- there are a lot of shoes to try on; how do writers decide which ones to wear?

Although not present for the storm, Smith found herself able to approach the mindset of New Orleans’ citizens through other routes: “I think that if you're African-American, you were placed there in another way… There is always the chance, no matter what you're going though, you will be abandoned to deal with it on your own.” McDaniel used a similar approach, though through an economic rather than racial perspective: “I grew up poor and I felt acutely the effect of the distortion field the [media] coverage [of the storm] created -- the combination of bourgeois shock, revulsion, pity and contempt.”

This brings us to the next question raised by Smith’s quote -- once an author has chosen which shoes to wear, how can we, as readers, decide if they fit? The parallel arguments of Smith and McDaniel, from different perspectives, demonstrate the slippery slope created when trying to talk about authenticity in relation to a tragedy as large as Katrina. It becomes an all-or-nothing affair. To argue that it is impossible for an outsider to comprehend the position of Katrina’s victims (who span a wide range of socioeconomic classes, races, religions, etc.) is to define a diverse group of people by their victimhood alone, an act of simplification that disregards the victims as people, ultimately repeating the traumas inflicted upon them in the first place. On the other hand, if we allow certain traits, like one’s blackness or one’s poverty, to act as empathetic footholds, we have to ask where to draw the line.

It’s a difficult, if not impossible, question. “[T]hree-quarters of my poems wouldn't be written if I had to be there and actually go through it,” Smith tells the Times. Indeed, any limit placed on empathetic ability is a limit on the human imagination. Furthermore, if we were to posit an empathetic inability on the part of an outsider writer, then that inability would apply to an outsider reader as well. Thus, even if a book on Katrina were written by one of its victims, the author would still have to find a way to relate their experience to someone we’ve posited as being incapable of understanding it. Victims don’t have a special language; we are all limited to the same dictionary. And any unique experience is never fully relatable. Nietzsche taught us that. However, if we believe that writing has any importance at all, we must attempt to bridge the gap between people and their experiences, however rickety that bridge may be.

Ford attempt to bridge that gap through history. In Colosseum, she explores other catastrophes, from biblical times to the present. In “The Shape of Us,” for instance, she begins by telling us that “…Pompeii was discovered / beneath calcifications of ash / because certain hollow looked human.” She then writes of the inverse shadows in Nagasaki, left by bodies that “had absorbed all they could.” The poem ends with an “American city” where bells “inside the walls wore on, not ringing / for us but for their own death.” The poem’s historical perspective renders Katrina familiar, if not empathetically resonant. Ironically, the historical parallels don’t relegate Katrina to the history books. Instead, the pattern suggested breathes life into history, making the past an integral element of the present.

Interestingly, the early stages of Colosseum were not about Katrina; in fact, the book began in 2001. “I was… looking at ancient ruins and civilizations.” Ford told the Times; “New Orleans became the modern example.” Indeed, New Orleans came to dominate the first two of the book’s three sections: “Storm” and “Vessel.” Similarly, McDaniel told me that, prior to Katrina, much of Saltwater Empire had, “already [been]written, and much of [it] (disturbingly) already considered the city and the region and its history through the metaphor of flood and violence.” The crux of this suggests another way of viewing the catastrophe in New Orleans -- "You're responding to a human situation,” Smith tells the Times. “It becomes a universal thing."

In other words, a tragedy like Katrina, opened up from multiple perspectives, becomes a way to meditate upon the human condition. This certainly prevents Katrina’s victims from being reduced to their victimhood. However, it creates a new problem -- is the act, however well intentioned, of turning a specific tragedy into a metaphor, an essentially exploitative one? Even if we grant that a writer can write from any perspective, we (and the writer) should question why the writer would choose to write about a tragedy they did not experience.

“[W]hat drove me to care about the fate of the place was personal,” McDaniel said, “but what compelled me to write about it was civic.” McDaniel claims that what drove him to write Saltwater Empire was the portrayal of New Orleans’ citizens by the media: "One moment seemed to rely upon a sense of a great national tragedy while the next drew just as heavily on the hysteria of the white viewers' fears of uncontrolled black people in large numbers. So I wanted to write about it as a citizen, as a person who saw all those people as neighbors, as familiar faces. Human persons, not merely Victims or Others."

McDaniel wanted to avoid “ventriloquizing” New Orleans’ citizenry. His book therefore includes a series of six poems, all entitled “Convention Centers of the New World” that are composed entirely from excerpts of interviews with New Orleanians, compiled by the organization “Alive in Truth: the New Orleans Disaster Oral History & Memory Project.” In the final installment of “Convention Centers,” McDaniel quotes one of the citizens as saying, “Like I say, you just don’t know because you wasn’t there. / Nobody knows what we went through but God himself and us.” In this line, McDaniel tacitly agrees with what we’ve been suggesting thus far -- McDaniel, as an individual, can offer us perspective, even if he can’t offer us witness in the same way as the man he quotes. Because he is aware of the fine distinction, he manages to give us both. “The poet doesn’t invent,” Jean Cocteau once said. “He listens.”

But what if there’s no one to hear? Smith told the Times that the “first breath” of Blood Dazzler came when she heard about the 34 residents of St. Rita’s Nursing Home that were abandoned to die during Katrina. "I wanted to write a poem that gave those people their voices back," she said. The poem that came out of it, “34,” is broken up into 34 sections, one for each resident who died. This imaginative attempt to speak for the dead is the most moving in the 18th section, which is nothing but white space. Thus, even in the attempt of trying to give a voice to the speechless, Smith recognizes the impossibility of such a task. Like McDaniel, Smith recognizes the fact that outsiders can never offer witness to tragedy.

But they can offer something. What these poets offer, essentially, is a creative space. Smith’s persona poems contribute to the goal of chronicling Katrina as it occurred, but they go far beyond that. While many of her pieces are from the point of view of the victims, she takes on, in a number of poems, the persona of the hurricane itself; for instance, in “5 P.M., Tuesday, August 23, 2005,” she writes: “I console myself with small furies, / those dips in my dawning system. I pull in / a bored breath. The brine shivers.” Although this poem fulfills Smith’s interest in factually tracking the progression of the storm from a tropical depression to a category five hurricane, the personification of Katrina undercuts the poem’s ties to reality. Instead, she and McDaniel are compiling the factual details of the storm within a creative realm. They are opening a dialogue between insiders and outsiders in the only realm that such a dialogue can occur: the imagination.

Because she was there for the storm, Ford’s poems are able to run the gamut from witness poems to imaginative contextualization. Unlike the later poems in the Colosseum, and unlike her first book, Deposition, the witness poems Ford offers are unusually straightforward, with a clarity that is unarming. In the book’s shortest poem, “Earth,” she writes:

If you respect the dead
and recall where they died
by this time tomorrow
there will be nowhere to walk.
In “Tell Us,” Ford, like Smith, tracks the approach of the storm, though directly instead of personifying the hurricane:
first the storm
will take all lanterns all flags
it will begin at 600 hours
end at 1300…

She even offers a blunt political poem; in “He Said,” Ford recalls an encounter with apologist for his “…buddy… in the guard”: “what killings I said of citizens I said / don’t worry he said not innocent ones.”

In Colosseum’s later poems, however, Ford steps back from her own experience of the storm, and renders Katrina in a simultaneously historical and creative perspective. In “Snakes,” the only poem in the book to mention New Orleans by name, she writes, “How wise for the living plagues / to leave only their effects for archaeologists / to find…” She goes on to imagine archeologists, in the future, discovering a ruined New Orleans; she muses that the archaeologists would find, “Not what buried them” but “the ax that cracked the attic”: “ what saved them / a moment longer / will abide.”

The image of the ax acts as an ars poetica for Ford, Smith, and McDaniel. When Smith went on a book tour for Blood Dazzler, she found that many of the poems made audiences uncomfortable: "I realized that there were a lot of people who wanted it to be over and filed away, who would look at CNN and see somebody nailing up a bit of bright wood or throwing beads and say, 'New Orleans is all right.'" The goal of these three poets is to shatter the rigid confines that reduce Katrina to history, to headlines, in order to breathe life even into death.

As McDaniel said, those who experience tragedy firsthand “could, would and should speak for themselves.” It is the responsibility of authors to know, for themselves, why they feel the need to respond to a large-scale tragedy, and what they can add to what’s already been said. And it’s ultimately our responsibility, as careful readers, to decide if the author succeeds. We must remember, as Edward Said taught, that works of art don’t float in a bubble -- they exist in the world, and have social and political resonances. Writers and readers must remember to look at the big picture. And in the big picture, it seems that the question of authenticity is just an over-simplification. Instead, we must look at the complex web of authorial intention, political ramifications, and, ultimately, the quality of the work, and judge each book on an individual basis.

I read these three books as Hurricane Gustav descended upon Baton Rouge. I read them by candlelight as I sat, for eight days, without electricity. After the storm, Entergy spokesman, Dave Caplan, said that New Orleans and Baton Rouge were “essentially islands,” cut off from the rest of the country. He was talking about the cities being cut off from power and information in the wake of the storm, but it seems like a fitting metaphor for the social and psychological chasm that was torn open after Katrina. Writing is a bridge, and it’s never more essential than in the wake of tragedy. If, in encountering a piece of art, we are led across that bridge, and find ourselves on the other side of the gulf, the art succeeds.