One definition of trauma is that it is an injury so great that no words can capture or describe it. Faced with the insufficiency of language, the victim performs or experiences that horror over and over again in the form of dreams or flashbacks or acting out. Hurricane Katrina was and continues to be an unparalleled trauma upon the body of American society. Many people have described it as the greatest natural disaster in our history, but there was little that was “natural” or inevitable about it. The wound that Katrina left resulted from a complicated intersection of social forces: from the failure to heed many years’ worth of warnings about the disreputable condition of the levees to the failure to initiate mandatory evacuation proceedings well before the storm hit, from the corruption that rendered regional government so perpetually ineffectual to the corporate muggery that has left this richly endowed arable delta impoverished and poisoned, from the cruel and inhuman conditions in “Angola” Penitentiary to the school system that was and remains little more than a prison industrial complex itself.
Except as a matter of degree (or as a matter of pure size), all this is familiar. Indeed, it is so entirely familiar that it practically seems predestined. Public and low-income housing razed to make way for corporate interests. Elderly left unattended on their deathbeds. Homeless children with more weapons than hope…. A diaspora of broken families hunting for kin: Have you seen my mother? Have you seen my brother? This is a picture of my fiancée…. The chilling ghostliness of such reiteration is not about what has already happened; ghosts are most frightening when they drift from memory to the visible present and become the lens for our future. The horrors of Katrina form an ongoing narrative of national distress, of aimless migration, of homelessness, of exile. If the Puritan jeremiads envisioned our nation as a Promised Land, a New Canaan, a latter-day Jerusalem, our twenty-first century jeremiad is rewriting itself as paradise lost: as a tale of broken covenants, of much crying in the wilderness, of New Orleanians being swallowed up by a sea of red ink, without trace, without mourning, without cultural memory.
Close on the heels of the hurricane came revelations of national patterns of predatory lending and our massive home foreclosure crisis. A bitter, confused, if thoroughly American narrative began to swirl: doom is nigh, what a sucker you’ve been, and now no one’s going to save you…. You didn’t pack for eternal exile? Well it’s your own dumb fault.
Homelessness rather than nudity is the great shame of the post-Edenic state. Against this backdrop, the peculiar locution of homeland security becomes a threatened terrain to be hunkered down inside but not lived within. The “homeland” is a Swiss cheese of unguarded portals, disposable trailer parks, promiscuous doorways, and floodgates that don’t work—yet simultaneously and curiously devoid of real houses or real homes. In contrast, the simplicity of home becomes a site for nostalgia, the old country before famine, flood, or pogrom, an imaginary geography of tremendous contradiction, of ambivalence and flight, of (up)rootedness and romance, of magic and superstition.
This theme of the terrible sublimity of loss dominates our literary and political figurations and, unless addressed, or until healed, no doubt will continue to. It is the plot line of the Timothy LaHaye’s Left Behind series as well as the tension in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Longfellow’s Evangeline . It runs through the babble on Fox News, in television dramas like 24, in Samuel Huntington’s book Clash of Civilizations, and in journalist Robert Kaplan’s doomsday political futurism. It shapes our domestic police practices and informs our global war on terror. There’s a certain Schadenfreude to it, the frisson of a well-rehearsed nightmare, the creed, the screed, the Greek chorus, the litany of woe, the passion play whose dark moral law haunts us ceaselessly.
When I think about the human disaster that has unfolded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, there are two moments that stand out in my mind. The first is George W. Bush’s press conference in Mississippi on September 2, 2005, during which he bounced uneasily from foot to foot like he couldn’t wait to get out of there, looking sullen and furrowed, observing with tense jocularity that Trent Lott’s house had been lost, too, and that “we” were going to rebuild him “a fantastic house” and that he, our president, was looking forward to rocking on the porch when that day came to pass. The second moment was the now famous interview with Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff on National Public Radio. Media junkie that I am, I had the TV and the radio on at the same time. As pictures of the horrific conditions at the convention center, including the image of the body of that poor old woman who had passed away in her wheelchair, were being broadcast to the world, Chertoff was insisting that he had no knowledge of any extreme conditions or deaths at the center. “Our reporter has seen [it],” insisted the host. “I can’t argue with you about what your reporter tells you,” said Chertoff with snappish impatience. I confess that I found myself filtering this horror through a very personal lens. It overlapped with the task of clearing out and selling the house I grew up in, in Massachusetts, the house my mother was born in, my grand mother’s house, a house that had belonged to my family for a hundred years. My distress at having to give it up is confused with the scenes of Katrina’s devastation that most of us—if not Chertoff—were witnessing. Against that appalling backdrop, I found myself clinging to a sense of place, even though I was not truly or traumatically displaced. Mine was an African American family that owned a home in times when so few did.
So I still think hard about this as I look at the continuing devastation of the Ninth Ward, an area that, before the storm, had more African American property owners than anyplace else in Louisiana. As I drove back and forth from the house I grew up in, carrying out pictures of my college graduation and my Latin notes from seventh grade, I heard a woman on the radio describe how jarring it was to see the media describe her neighborhood as one driven by poverty and desperation. She was about to get her MBA; her brother already had his MBA; their extended family owned nine homes there; they all had insurance and owned cars in which they had fled for their lives. But it was the Ninth Ward; it was indeed being dubbed “poverty-stricken,” “corrupt,” “drug-ridden,” and politicians like Dennis Hastert were talking about bulldozing the entire area. The Ninth Ward and Gentilly and other black neighborhoods haven’t been entirely bulldozed in the years since. But, despite all the talk about rights of return, the only thing that’s happened since—at least in the way of publicly funded reconstitution—has been the planting of a few strips of grass in front of still empty buildings. Millions of dollars have gone into setting up charter schools in the suburbs, and tens of millions have been spent on metal detectors for the few public schools remaining within in the city limits. The budget for books, meanwhile, has been infinitesimal.
And so I still think about what might have happened had I not been engaged in the relatively leisurely process of packing up my memories but had rather been forced to run for my life. In particular, the documentation of people being “sorted” in the shelters should give us pause. The elderly were taken from their families, the sick from their caretakers, newborns from their mothers, and, because men were apparently segregated from women, husbands from wives, mothers from sons. I heard one unidentified local authority on the radio saying that when people were evacuated to other states they were not told where they were going, so as to make them less unruly. And there were accounts of white foreign nationals airlifted out “secretly” by National Guardsmen and warned not to go into the shelters because it was too dangerous for them. To some extent, this sorting and separation is what already happens in homeless shelters in many places around the country. Hurricane Katrina merely made that reality, at least momentarily, impossible to repress.
The rationalization of such practices proceeds unchecked, however. A few days into the seething mess at the Convention Center, a sociologist named Betty Hearn Morrow opined on NPR that it was less traumatic for people in distress to be grouped by their own kind. “That’s just human nature,” said Morrow. Putting people into groups reinforces a sense of familiarity and security, so they should be relocated “according to their backgrounds.” She gave an example of sorting people from Guatemala and Nicaragua and explained how that would help keep the peace—though she did not explain how separating Americans from Americans would do the same. My ears pricked up at this take on civil society; I wondered what “kind” I might appear to be in an evacuation. My son has been over six feet tall since he was thirteen. If we were fleeing without any identification, would anyone believe he’s a child? Would we be put on separate buses to unknown compass points? Would I be herded offto the camp for middle-aged law professors? And, if that’s too scary to contemplate, would it really becalm me with a sense of “familiarity” to be penned up and marched offwith a group of other black women of my “background?”
According to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the City of New York, where I live now, has been divided into grids in case of catastrophe. People would be ordered from their homes, or taken by force if necessary, and marshaled along preset routes to reception centers where they would be identified by Social Security number and then relocated. I want to be a good citizen, part of the orderliness of a well-managed response to disaster. But with the images of New Orleans in mind, why on earth would any of us stream willingly toward chaos? If it is true that families may be broken up as a means of crowd control, then perhaps just a little public discussion is in order. And if it is true that white foreign nationals are a higher priority than black solid citizens, to what then do we pledge allegiance?
At homeland insecurity, new categories of suspect profiles bubble forth. Race, ethnicity, religion, a fortiori—but the list churns on with up-to-the-minute brands of scoundrel like an endless ticker tape: unusually clean-shaven men, men with long beards, people wearing heavy clothing or shoes with thick soles or big hats, women carrying large handbags, unknown delivery men bearing oversized packages, kids with backpacks or violin cases, sweaty people, cool-as-a-sly-cucumber people, people with cameras, people praying aloud, people who blink too much or not enough, men with thick waists, women pretending to be pregnant, people who spend too much time in public libraries, men reeking of rosewater—on and on it goes. Apparently, we are also to be on the lookout for the great masses of the unshaved, unwashed, and unperfumed, to wit, “vagrants who seem out of place”—an almost calculatedly redundant designation—for fear they might be terrorists posing as “homeless people, shoe-shiners, street vendors or street sweepers.”
In our once celestial cities, whose denizens are now deemed dangerous, one hears calls for house-to-house searches, shoot-to-kill policies and protection from “too many” civil rights. Debates rage about “political correctness” rather than whether this isn’t beginning to look like martial law or an effective immunization of police from discriminatory behavior, scattershot decision making as well as deadly mistake. I ponder this global game of Gotcha. It is a traumatically insistent re-presentation of a violent past as well as a prefiguration of devastations to come. With this endless looping, our civic domesticity becomes ever more embittered, tainted by the obsession with enemies amongst us whose voices speak like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, whose shapes we profess to “know” instinctively and in defiance of fancy rituals of politeness, legal niceties, book learning, or empirical knowledge.
This interrelationship of homelessness, suspicion, and citizenship found its most interesting expression in the all-too-brief debate about whether the half-million people displaced by Hurricane Katrina ought to be categorized as “evacuees” or “refugees.” This nomenclature was more than semantic—as some experienced disaster aid workers knew only too well, it might have made a difference. Under international law, a refugee is someone who has fled their country of origin because of violence or persecution based on race, caste, ethnicity, political belief, or religion. When refugee status is granted, allowing admission to the United States, it automatically confers entitlement to resettlement aid, such as sponsorship, housing, medical treatment, employment opportunities, psychological counseling, and food stamps. According to most experts, the victims of Hurricane Katrina would probably have been better off classified as refugees, even though their removal was entirely domestic. “After half a century of experience, the public-private partnership that resettles refugees nationwide is like a well-oiled machine compared with the new apparatus being invented on the fly for Katrina survivors. And the refugee agencies want to help.”1
By contrast, “evacuees,” whether by war, famine, flood, earthquake or tsunami, are considered merely “internally displaced” and thus are not subject to the same automatic benefits. They must rely on a patchwork of mostly charitable or religious or Red Cross–initiated responses—in other words, whatever hodgepodge can be thrown together at the moment of the disaster in question. In the wake of Katrina, this meant that any potential right to resettlement or return was left to lopsided market forces and disastrous political decisions allowing nothing less than prospecting in the old flood-ravaged neighborhoods by developers and other monied interests. Perhaps most hurtful of all, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been reorganized as a subdivision of the Department of Homeland Security shortly before the hurricane. Not only was Michael Brown, the head of FEMA, woefully inexperienced in disaster management, the entire Department of Homeland Security seemed prepared exclusively for war rather than recuperation. Thus a great deal of time and precious resources were wasted—mistaking flight for riot; need for greed; and the scramble to high ground for all-out invasion.
I spent a few days in New Orleans recently. Four years after the hurricane, it is still a city in mourning, more riven than ever. An estimated 30 to 40 percent of the population has not returned, most because they have not been able to. Landlords have refused to accept out-of-state housing vouchers from renters trying to return. Rents have soared because of the decreased housing stock. Yet the New Orleans City Council recently OK’d the demolition of virtually all the surviving stock of public housing—large brick-and-mortar buildings, all minimally damaged, all eminently reparable. (The tenants were never even permitted to go back in and retrieve their belongings.)
Today, the Lower Ninth Ward is an eerily lush plain of overgrown sadness. Of the fourteen thousand residents before the storm, only about eight hundred remain. One of the more intriguing embellishments upon this expansive devastation, however, is the flutter of hundreds of little signs affixed to the remaining lampposts: “Easy terms! Refinance with us!” “Want to rebuild? No money down!” Local newspapers are full of disturbingly gushy articles about realtors who slaver over the historic row houses still standing in largely black and poor areas. They see the next Soho! The new Chelsea! To hasten the process of what one half calls gentrification and the other half feels as dispossession, the city has passed an “antiblight” ordinance. Little signs have been planted in front of houses where only the walls remain. “Do you know where this owner is?” These signs pass as public notice: found owners are slapped with antiblight fines. Failure to pay results in forfeiture of the land.
A year after Katrina, flooding caused levees to burst again, this time on the upper Mississippi, making mud of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Rush Limbaugh snickered that the residents there weren’t “whining” about their condition like those noisy New Orleanians. Well, it’s quiet in New Orleans now, a terrible brew of frustration beyond words and utter exhaustion. If it is just as quiet in the largely white floodplains of the upper Mississippi, we should not take that for a good thing in an economy as troubled as ours. The collapsed levees in Iowa and Missouri are signs of the same deeply broken infrastructure, even if the corruption that allowed it is not as visible, as cruel, or as racially inflected as in New Orleans.
American mobility depends upon the equity accumulated in its homes and the stability lent by reasonable rental stocks. The failure to make affordable housing a right has, in the long run of the last half century, hurt all Americans, leaving us with ravaged “inner cities” and strip-malled “havens” of suburban blight. There are, as I see it, two models competing for our future unfolding on the street. Model Number One: while walking in the Eighth and Ninth Wards, I saw scores of volunteers from all over North America, a rainbow coalition skewed heavily to young people and college students, working for organizations like Habitat for Humanity. They were sweating in the broiling sun, hard at work, hammers in hand. Model Number Two: I overheard a conversation between two middle-aged men apparently touring the area “for deals.” The first was wearing an Obama T-shirt. The second said amiably, “So, you’re for Obama.” No, replied the first man; he was “a liberal” but hadn’t decided yet. Turns out he was just wearing the shirt to ingratiate himself with the natives—although ingratiate was not the word he used.
Alas, poor us. The course we pursue may be politically disastrous, academically wrong, strategically flawed, statistically disproved—a cacophony of finger-pointing and calls to 911—but our narratives instruct us to be stubborn guardians of the faith. At our collective peril do we remain enchanted by homiletic hokum about sifting wheat from chaff.
Notes
1. N. Bernstein, “Feeling Empathy, Refugee Groups Reaching Out to Victims of Hurricane,” New York Times, September 18, 2005, 37, 42.