“What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?”
–Czeslaw Milosz, “Dedication”
This Sunday morning, at the end
of their final 3am shift, the National Guard left New Orleans, after more than
three and a half years there. This moment is significant. Controversy has surrounded the
Guard because of the fact that the Guard arrived in the city on September 2,
five days after the hurricane made landfall in Louisiana, and because of its
treatment of the people of New Orleans, especially in the Superdome and the
Convention Center. Now, crime in
New Orleans has skyrocketed, police force numbers still low. Many worry about
the safety of the citizens of New Orleans without the National Guard. And at the same time the city is
haunted by images of the National Guard mistreating its citizens.
When Hurricane Katrina hit the
city of New Orleans, my parents were there. We are not leaving. This is our
home, my mother said to me on the phone. I
wanted my parents to go to the Superdome, the shelter of “last resort.” They
refused. And, for several days, my sister, brother and I didn’t know if they
were dead or alive. We called
FEMA, the Red Cross, the Louisiana State Police, the local hospital, begging
for help. We typed their names in Coast Guard search engines. All we could do
was watch the news – the roads in and out of New Orleans shut down, the
floodwalls cracking open, the city filling like a bowl. The television showed
familiar landmarks—the Rite Aid next to where my parents were living being
looted, its front door smashed with a fork-lift, the families in the Superdome,
waiting in line for food and water.
My parents were safe, though they
remained in New Orleans after the storm, living with no electricity or clean
water, until they could leave. But
their home was largely intact.
Many other people on the Gulf Cost were not so lucky and lost
everything—relatives, houses, streets, neighborhoods, communities, entire
towns.
The people of New Orleans are
still suffering terribly. The
National Guard is leaving a few days after Mardi Gras, which was last Tuesday.
Mardi Gras offers one of this country’s favorite images of New Orleans: revelry
and celebration. We would like to hold on to the image of New Orleans as a
great tourist destination, The Big Easy, the City that Care Forgot.
Meanwhile I fear New Orleans is
being forgotten. This morning, I’m thinking about the National Guard, New
Orleans and poetry—a seemingly unlikely trio. In particular. I’m thinking about
what poetry can do in a time of disaster and in its aftermath. I want to
believe that poetry, as Milosz says, can help to save us and that it can teach
us about saving one another.
If I didn’t believe this, I wouldn’t write and read poems.
The facts of the disaster are
crucial. On the morning of August
29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall 70 miles southeast of New
Orleans. Mayor Ray Nagin had
issued the first ever mandatory evacuation of the city. Look at map, I said to the students.
New Orleans is bordered by the lake at the north and the river at the
south. Most of the city is six
feet below sea level; parts of the city are ten feet below. After Katrina, the levees and the
floodwalls breached in twenty places. With a death toll in Louisiana of more
than 1,000 and other bodies still unaccounted for and unrecovered—three and a
half years later–the scope of the devastation is nearly unfathomable.
Yet, I think it is critical to
fathom it. The statistics above
are chilling, but poetry can help us to see the disaster more fully. I don’t
know if poetry can spur us into action, but a whole way of life is disappearing
as people have fled and are fleeing the Gulf Coast. As one survivor from St
Bernard Parish — which was
completely destroyed by a storm surge in fifteen minutes – when she described
her difficult decision to stay in the city, told me: “If we leave, we take this
city with us.”
I worry
that New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are being forgotten. I worry that we have lost our empathy for the people of the Gulf Coast. I worry that Hurricane Katrina is receding in our collective memory.