Lower 9th Ward (October 2008)
Originally Delivered as the W.E.B. DuBois Lecture @ George Mason University in February of 2009
Haunting the (Political) Waters:
A Meditation on Movement, Citizenship and Political Will in the Post-Katrina Era
by Mark Anthony
"Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more”
—Bessie Smith, “Backwater Blues
Can “niggas” be cosmopolitan? The answer was emphatically no, four years ago, as we all witnessed the drama(s) of misery and suffering unfold in New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast region. To be cosmopolitan suggests access to certain economic resources and the leisure time to travel the world unfettered by the demands faced by everyday folk. But those black bodies that that made themselves visible in the days after Hurricane Katrina’s landing were not “everyday folk”—they were “niggas” and “niggas” is perhaps apropos for a nation that struggled to name the landlocked and waterlogged black bodies that encroached upon the casual comforts and carefree expectations of our tiny little worlds. We called them “looters,” “refugees,” “unfortunate,” “sinners,” “animals,” “hapless” and “helpless”—anything but citizens. Such terms, ironically did little to provide media commentators pundits any more insight into the complexities of the moment or the literal landscape in which the moment evolved. As Darwin Bond Graham writes in his essay, “The New Orleans that Race Built,” despite efforts to shorthand New Orleans, the city “remains an assemblage of terrains imbued with so much meaning, nesting so much struggle and power, history and community.” (Graham)
And it is in this context that I’d like to offer yet another linguistic reference: “Katrina-Politans,” a term that obviously references notions of cosmopolitanism, but more so draws from Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s decidedly classed concept of Afro-Politians—those Africans who live in the world. (Tuakli-Wosornu) What is to be said about the humanity, desires and survivalisms of those black bodies that bore witness to Katrina’s fiercest moments, even as they are deemed expendable, and dare continue to think themselves citizens of the world? What I am suggesting here is a form of cosmopolitanism, that speaks to the relationship between those black bodies so many observed four years ago—bodies that were rendered visible, yet invisible at the same time—and the State. This is a type of cosmopolitanism marked, in part, by a symbolic homelessness from notions of mainstream American morality, political relevancy and cultural gravitas; a cosmopolitanism that finds resonance in the “Katrina Generation”—those black bodies that were deemed as little more than “refugees” by mainstream corporate media. In this regard the evoking of the term, “refugee” duly reinforced the inhumanity and foreignness of this population. In the early moments of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the evoking of “refugees” also cast illegitimacy on those so called “refugees” who might view themselves as national subjects—citizens—deserving of relief in a moment of national crisis. The term “refugee” also cast aspirations on the desires of the “Katrina Generation” to seek citizenship in whatever locale they chose—or likely were forced—to relocate.
When Walter Mosley makes the point, as he did in The Nation, that “not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age,” he captures the tragic irony of Katrina’s aftermath: many Americans and dare I say the State, have never deemed those black bodies as legitimate citizens. (Mosley) And why would they? The everyday realities of New Orleans citizens prior to Hurricane Katrina stood in stark contrast to America’s view of itself, particualry before the recent finacial crisis. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, nearly 20% of the city’s 450,000 residents live below the so-called poverty line. Within the black community in the city, about 30% of that popular was below the poverty threshold, though the national average for Black Americans was abouy 25%. (Durant) The national poverty levels for all Americans was 12.7% in the year before Hurricane Katrina. (Leonhardt) In otherwords, the black poor in New Orleans–based on a statistical map that captures little of the challegnes faced by those just above the poverty line—represented nearly three times the rate experienced by the average poor American.
For those in which there was a regular, if not fully livable wage, tourism was the city’s primary industry, much of it related to the activities of The French Quarter and seasonal events like Mardi Gras, the Sugar Bowl, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the occasional Super Bowl. The livelihoods of many of the city’s working class and working poor communities were inextricably tied to their roles as service workers in the tourism industry. In other words, for much of the year, some sections of New Orleans were little more than underdeveloped outpost—not of some so-called “third world” nation, but right in the United States. As Lynell Thomas writes, the city’s tourist industry “invites white visitors to participate in a glorified Southern past. Black residents, if they appear at all in this narrative, appear as secondary characters who are either servile or exotic—always inferior to whites and never possessing agency over their own lives.” (Thomas) Thus perceptions of of the black poor on display at the the New Orleans Convention Center or in the Louisana Superdome were framed by a national imagination that had historically viewed them as service workers or at best, entertainers. In many ways, the coverage of Hurricane Katrina survivors functioned as little more than a national travelogue.
The role of New Orleans’s black citizens in the tourism economy of the city prior to Hurricane Katrina, helps better frame the emotional distance and lack of empathy that seemed palpable in much of the early media coverage of storm. Political scientist Melissa Harris-Lacewell observes that the regular coverage of Hurricane Katrina was only matched by the real time coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks in allowing a shared national experience of trauma. As Harris-Lacewell writes, “Rather than a single, terrible moment replayed for the media, the horror of New Orleans increased daily, produced new images of agony and death, and generated increasingly awful narratives of suffering.” Yet as Harris-Lacewell argues, there was a discernable distance between how white and black citizens viewed the effects of the tragedy and the extent that white citizens were willing to empathize with their black counterparts (Harris-Lacewell) I’d like to argue that this disconnect, while fueled by the realities racially biased structures, including the national media, was also the product of the inability for many audiences, including African-Americans, to fully invest in the idea that the black poor in New Orleans were truly citizens. This dynamic became critically clear, as Katrina survivors were dispersed throughout the country, desiring sanctuary to often disparate locales.
What the Black Katrina poor represented was a segment of the national population that had been largely isolated—politically, and otherwise. Stephanie Houston Grey suggest that the that very infrastructure in cities like New Orleans was “designed to isolate both ethnic and economic from one another by creating a protective membrane around the privileged to shield them from those less desirable. Thus the federal response was not simply an aberration of administrative policy, but a logical extension of existing urban rationality.” Issues of containment became palapable in national media coverage as black hurricane Katrina survivors became the embodiment,according to Houston Grey, of a “moral panic…leading to media hyperbole that feeds fear and hysteria, provoking a police response that is out of proportion to the actual threat that may or may not be posed.” (Houston Grey) Thus the human misery that crusted and festered over in the Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center was not viewed in the popular realm as a failure on the part of the State (at least at the time), but the failure of the infrastructure to keep such black bodies contained.
In her book Black Cosmopolitanism, literary scholar Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo suggests that efforts to deny black bodies access to the resources of the State—via active political isolation—are historically related to fears among whites that blacks might view themselves as cosmopolitan subjects. Writing about the Haitian Revolution, Nwankwo argues that “the denial of access for people of African descent to cosmopolitan subjectivity coexisted with a denial of access for that same population to both national subjectivity and human subjectivity…effectively determining the possible parameters of identity for people of African descent.” (Nwankwo) Thus the naming and misnaming of black Katrina survivors was as much an effort to deny them relief—as relevant in a natural disaster as it has been historically in relation to pursuing of legal recourse for racial and gender discrimination—as it was an attempt to dictate from above how those particular black bodies and all the black bodies who were forced to account for the images those black bodies projected, would be interpreted as political subjects.
Nwankwo’s notion that the collapsing of cosmopolitan possibilities is related to efforts to limit the breadth and diversity of black identity is particularly compelling in an era where black identities are intensely wedded to racial truisms, that while often legitimized by some of the most visible (and highly compensated) “celebrities”—Michael Vick, R. Kelly, Whitney Houston, O.J. Simpson and William “Flava Flav” Drayton to name a few and indeed the images that were transmitted from New Orleans—often distort the realities of contemporary black identity. For example, like most major urban areas, New Orleans contained sizable immigrant communities made up of African nationals and Afro-Caribbeans, which were reflective of the historic ethnic diversity of the city. Most media outlets glossed over the complexity of black identity in those days and weeks after Katrina’s landing, in part because such complexities challenge corporate media’s desires to manage evolving news stories. More broadly though, the mainstream press and the mainstream public at large, has rarely been willing to grant black bodies such complexity, choosing instead to embrace “exceptional” blacks, often at the expense of the black masses. For example, President Barack Obama’s success in the Presidential election, might be viewed within the context of his own status as an “exceptional” black.
In his memoir We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World, Malian scholar film scholar Manthia Diawara tells the story of spending a recent sabbatical in Paris. Concerned about the historic treatment of Africans in the city, Diawara wore his Black American Intellectual status on his sleeve, but when stopped by a pair of law enforcement officers who rifled through his bag only to find his Malian passport, he was symbolically undressed. The passport was evidence in the minds of the officers that Diawara was just another African—another nigga—and thus not deserving of the common courtesies extended to citizens or visitors for that matter. Diawara’s exchange with the police was prefaced by a conversation with the cab driver, also an African, whose cab he was in when Diawara were stopped by the police. “Where are you originally from?” the driver queried Diawara in response to Diawara’s earlier claim that he was from the United States.” (Diawara)Seemingly an innocent question, in many ways it was meant to demean Diawara’s site of origin and to undermine any privilege associated with his cosmopolitan identity. If a major Black American Intellectual can undressed in such a fashion, what can be said of those whose cosmopolitanism isn’t clothed in class and ethnic privilege.
Indeed, I can’t imagine that there isn’t a day when the Katrina Generation, as it is dispersed throughout the country and denied access to its “homeland,” is not faced with the like-minded query: “Where are you really from?” For all of the good will offered to Katrina transplants and in light of Barbara Bush’s ridiculous claim that they had bettered their fortunes, the reality is that many municipalities viewed Katrina survivors as a further burden on already overtaxed resources. But the Katrina-Politians are citizens of the world, by the vestige of their humanity, and they have every right to make claims on that citizenship, wherever they choose or are forced to lay their heads. Clyde Woods makes a finer point here, “In the blink of an eye, African Americans, and identity fraught with ambiguity, were transformed into black people, a highly politicized identity.” (Woods)
Haunting the Waters, Troubling National Memory
There’s a certain haunting presence about Trouble the Water, the award winning and Academy Award nominated documentary about Hurricane Katrina. It’s a presence that is immediately felt by anybody who has had the chance to journey across the city of New Orleans in the past few years. While tourists travel about downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter blandly commenting on the limited hours of some of the city’s more authentic haunts, and the Lower 9th Ward continues to serve as the most lasting monument of the destruction, portions of the city remain a decidedly barren reminder of the vibrant living cultures that once existed in the city. Of course where there is no people, there is no culture and the slow pace of recovery in the city suggest that something more sinister might be in play. Nevertheless, if Hurricane Katrina offered the rationale for what might be the only most contemporary example of ethnic cleansing in the United States, then the power of Trouble the Water comes from its brazen ability to summon the voices and spirits of those—who by force or choice—have not returned. As such Trouble the Water is a striking intervention, for a city that lacks the bodies—and the political wills that such bodies possess.
Trouble the Water tells the story of Kim Roberts, a 24-year-old New Orleans resident and aspiring rapper and her husband Scott, as Roberts documents their experiences before and after the hurricane on a hand-held video camera. Produced in collaboration with Tai Leeson and Carl Deal, the very fact that the film exists speaks to the economic realities of so many Katrina Survivors. As Rivers told the Brooklyn Rail, “We’d run out of money. We had about a hundred dollars left, and we was like, “We ought to try to see what we could do with this tape; we might find somebody we could give this tape to; well not give it, but either sell it, or license…you know, see what it’s worth.” (Cole) Robert’s comments capture the DIY ethic that has informed hip-hop geneartion expression, but also taps into more traditional African-American sensibilities that can be best captured in the notion of “make a way out of no way.” (Neal) If we think about survival as distinctly improvisational mode of navigating in the world, Trouble the Water finds it grounding by harnessing the rhythms of black improvisation via Robert’s audio and visual narration.
There’s a telling scene early in the film, when Roberts travels the streets of New Orleans alone shortly before the storm and sings to herself “On My Own” in reference to the Patti LaBelle recording. Seemingly a random utterance, the reference would have a particular resonance to African-American audiences familiar with Labelle, who possesses iconographical stature in many black communities. Mirroring the sampling practices of contemporary hip-hop, the film is littered with such references, offering audiences the possibility of gaining greater literacy in Black New Orleans culture and African-American culture more broadly. In another example the Roberts’s family dog is named “Kizzy” in reference to a popular character from the groundbreaking miniseries Roots. Within black vernacular expression, the term has been utilized as a metaphor for overburdened black women. In fact, Robert’s deployment of African-American vernacular culture as part of the metaphorical shelter that she and her comrades construct in response to Hurricane Katrina helps establish Roberts as the most credible intellectual agent in the film, despite her claim early in the film that she was the “only stupid nigga who stayed.” Robert’s use of black vernacular culture is akin to what Woods more formally describes as the “blues tradition of investigation and interpretation.” According to Woods, “the blues began as a unique intellectual movement that emerged among desperate African-American communities in the midst of the ashes of the Civil War, Emancipation, and the overthrow of Reconstruction.” More specifically in the context of Roberts’s narration, Trouble the Water, “draws on African-American musical practices, folklore, and spirituality to reorganize and give a new voice to working class communities facing severe fragmentation.” (Woods)
Roberts’s narration of Trouble the Water is also notable because it illuminates the gendered realities of Katrina survivors. That Roberts is an aspiring hip-hop artist, using rap music—a decidedly male centered cultural space—as a vehicle to express the specificity of her life as a black women, speaks to the extent that Trouble the Water succeeds in disturbing “official” readings of black urban life. Though Roberts does not openly discuss some of the specific challenges faced by women survivors of Katrina, her visibility in the film’s narrative allows for productive speculation about what exactly those challenges were. In a city in which more than half of the adult female population were single mothers, black women were particularly vulnerable to the economic and physical displacement experienced by many Katrina survivors. In addition issues of child care and parenting, for a population typically overburdened by such, were made tragically more difficult. Kathleen Bergin, suggest though, that it was the submergence of sexualized violence disproportionately experienced by black women that particularly highlights the gendered dynamics of the storm. Ironically the circulation of false rumors about bands of black male rapists—directly related to the production of Katrina survivors as “moral panic”—undermined what were legitimate cases of sexual violence and rape against black women. According to Bergin, “To deny the violently sexualized reality of Katrina on account of previous false reporting only compounds the horror of the storm for both black men and black women.” Ultimately Bergin holds the State at fault for its failure to anticipate a well known phenomenon: “The reality of gender specific violence, particularly sexual assault, is so predictable during times of catastrophic upheaval that major human rights instruments that address the needs of refugees and displaced persons…presume a heightened risk to women.” (Bergin)
When queried as to why she decided to carry a hand-held video during the storm, Roberts told the Brooklyn Rail, “I decided to film because I realized we weren’t going to be able to leave—that was the fact. And just in case it happened like how people said it was going to happen, I wanted to film it, just in case we died. I didn’t want to go out like that. With all I had been through my whole life, I always felt to some degree that my life was meaningful and that I was put here for a reason. If I died, people gonna know how I died. So to some degree, I was feeling like my legacy should live on and people would know what had happened to us. “ Though Roberts and her husband survive the hurricane, Trouble the Water still serves as tribute to those who were lost in the storm and I’d like to suggest the film serves as a kind of “second line” performance—the parade of dancing, shuffling bodies that occurs, often after a funeral. According to musician Michael White, “at the time of their origin, these parades offered the black community an euphoric transformation into a temporary world characterized by free open participation and self expression through sound, movement and symbolic visual statements.” White adds that “impositions and limitations of ‘second class’ social status could be replaced by a democratic existence in which one could be or become things not generally open to blacks in the normal world: competitive, victorious, defiant, equal, unique, hostile, humorous, aloof, beautiful, brilliant, wild, sensual, and even majestic.” (White) As such Trouble the Water serves as a critical intervention into a national memory that would rather ignore the cultural gifts that New Orleans gave the young country, the dead bodies that were sacrificed in the midst of catastrophic circumstances, as well as the possibility of rebirth that the Katrina-Politians embody.
A Meditation on Movement, Citizenship and Political Will in the Post-Katrina Era
by Mark Anthony
"Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/Backwater blues have caused me to pack up my things and go/'Cause my house fell down and I can't live there no more”
—Bessie Smith, “Backwater Blues
Can “niggas” be cosmopolitan? The answer was emphatically no, four years ago, as we all witnessed the drama(s) of misery and suffering unfold in New Orleans and the rest of the gulf coast region. To be cosmopolitan suggests access to certain economic resources and the leisure time to travel the world unfettered by the demands faced by everyday folk. But those black bodies that that made themselves visible in the days after Hurricane Katrina’s landing were not “everyday folk”—they were “niggas” and “niggas” is perhaps apropos for a nation that struggled to name the landlocked and waterlogged black bodies that encroached upon the casual comforts and carefree expectations of our tiny little worlds. We called them “looters,” “refugees,” “unfortunate,” “sinners,” “animals,” “hapless” and “helpless”—anything but citizens. Such terms, ironically did little to provide media commentators pundits any more insight into the complexities of the moment or the literal landscape in which the moment evolved. As Darwin Bond Graham writes in his essay, “The New Orleans that Race Built,” despite efforts to shorthand New Orleans, the city “remains an assemblage of terrains imbued with so much meaning, nesting so much struggle and power, history and community.” (Graham)
And it is in this context that I’d like to offer yet another linguistic reference: “Katrina-Politans,” a term that obviously references notions of cosmopolitanism, but more so draws from Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu’s decidedly classed concept of Afro-Politians—those Africans who live in the world. (Tuakli-Wosornu) What is to be said about the humanity, desires and survivalisms of those black bodies that bore witness to Katrina’s fiercest moments, even as they are deemed expendable, and dare continue to think themselves citizens of the world? What I am suggesting here is a form of cosmopolitanism, that speaks to the relationship between those black bodies so many observed four years ago—bodies that were rendered visible, yet invisible at the same time—and the State. This is a type of cosmopolitanism marked, in part, by a symbolic homelessness from notions of mainstream American morality, political relevancy and cultural gravitas; a cosmopolitanism that finds resonance in the “Katrina Generation”—those black bodies that were deemed as little more than “refugees” by mainstream corporate media. In this regard the evoking of the term, “refugee” duly reinforced the inhumanity and foreignness of this population. In the early moments of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the evoking of “refugees” also cast illegitimacy on those so called “refugees” who might view themselves as national subjects—citizens—deserving of relief in a moment of national crisis. The term “refugee” also cast aspirations on the desires of the “Katrina Generation” to seek citizenship in whatever locale they chose—or likely were forced—to relocate.
When Walter Mosley makes the point, as he did in The Nation, that “not only did our government fail to answer the call of its most vulnerable citizens during that fateful period; it still fails each and every day to rebuild, redeem and rescue those who are ignored because of their poverty, their race, their passage into old age,” he captures the tragic irony of Katrina’s aftermath: many Americans and dare I say the State, have never deemed those black bodies as legitimate citizens. (Mosley) And why would they? The everyday realities of New Orleans citizens prior to Hurricane Katrina stood in stark contrast to America’s view of itself, particualry before the recent finacial crisis. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, nearly 20% of the city’s 450,000 residents live below the so-called poverty line. Within the black community in the city, about 30% of that popular was below the poverty threshold, though the national average for Black Americans was abouy 25%. (Durant) The national poverty levels for all Americans was 12.7% in the year before Hurricane Katrina. (Leonhardt) In otherwords, the black poor in New Orleans–based on a statistical map that captures little of the challegnes faced by those just above the poverty line—represented nearly three times the rate experienced by the average poor American.
For those in which there was a regular, if not fully livable wage, tourism was the city’s primary industry, much of it related to the activities of The French Quarter and seasonal events like Mardi Gras, the Sugar Bowl, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and the occasional Super Bowl. The livelihoods of many of the city’s working class and working poor communities were inextricably tied to their roles as service workers in the tourism industry. In other words, for much of the year, some sections of New Orleans were little more than underdeveloped outpost—not of some so-called “third world” nation, but right in the United States. As Lynell Thomas writes, the city’s tourist industry “invites white visitors to participate in a glorified Southern past. Black residents, if they appear at all in this narrative, appear as secondary characters who are either servile or exotic—always inferior to whites and never possessing agency over their own lives.” (Thomas) Thus perceptions of of the black poor on display at the the New Orleans Convention Center or in the Louisana Superdome were framed by a national imagination that had historically viewed them as service workers or at best, entertainers. In many ways, the coverage of Hurricane Katrina survivors functioned as little more than a national travelogue.
The role of New Orleans’s black citizens in the tourism economy of the city prior to Hurricane Katrina, helps better frame the emotional distance and lack of empathy that seemed palpable in much of the early media coverage of storm. Political scientist Melissa Harris-Lacewell observes that the regular coverage of Hurricane Katrina was only matched by the real time coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks in allowing a shared national experience of trauma. As Harris-Lacewell writes, “Rather than a single, terrible moment replayed for the media, the horror of New Orleans increased daily, produced new images of agony and death, and generated increasingly awful narratives of suffering.” Yet as Harris-Lacewell argues, there was a discernable distance between how white and black citizens viewed the effects of the tragedy and the extent that white citizens were willing to empathize with their black counterparts (Harris-Lacewell) I’d like to argue that this disconnect, while fueled by the realities racially biased structures, including the national media, was also the product of the inability for many audiences, including African-Americans, to fully invest in the idea that the black poor in New Orleans were truly citizens. This dynamic became critically clear, as Katrina survivors were dispersed throughout the country, desiring sanctuary to often disparate locales.
What the Black Katrina poor represented was a segment of the national population that had been largely isolated—politically, and otherwise. Stephanie Houston Grey suggest that the that very infrastructure in cities like New Orleans was “designed to isolate both ethnic and economic from one another by creating a protective membrane around the privileged to shield them from those less desirable. Thus the federal response was not simply an aberration of administrative policy, but a logical extension of existing urban rationality.” Issues of containment became palapable in national media coverage as black hurricane Katrina survivors became the embodiment,according to Houston Grey, of a “moral panic…leading to media hyperbole that feeds fear and hysteria, provoking a police response that is out of proportion to the actual threat that may or may not be posed.” (Houston Grey) Thus the human misery that crusted and festered over in the Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center was not viewed in the popular realm as a failure on the part of the State (at least at the time), but the failure of the infrastructure to keep such black bodies contained.
In her book Black Cosmopolitanism, literary scholar Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo suggests that efforts to deny black bodies access to the resources of the State—via active political isolation—are historically related to fears among whites that blacks might view themselves as cosmopolitan subjects. Writing about the Haitian Revolution, Nwankwo argues that “the denial of access for people of African descent to cosmopolitan subjectivity coexisted with a denial of access for that same population to both national subjectivity and human subjectivity…effectively determining the possible parameters of identity for people of African descent.” (Nwankwo) Thus the naming and misnaming of black Katrina survivors was as much an effort to deny them relief—as relevant in a natural disaster as it has been historically in relation to pursuing of legal recourse for racial and gender discrimination—as it was an attempt to dictate from above how those particular black bodies and all the black bodies who were forced to account for the images those black bodies projected, would be interpreted as political subjects.
Nwankwo’s notion that the collapsing of cosmopolitan possibilities is related to efforts to limit the breadth and diversity of black identity is particularly compelling in an era where black identities are intensely wedded to racial truisms, that while often legitimized by some of the most visible (and highly compensated) “celebrities”—Michael Vick, R. Kelly, Whitney Houston, O.J. Simpson and William “Flava Flav” Drayton to name a few and indeed the images that were transmitted from New Orleans—often distort the realities of contemporary black identity. For example, like most major urban areas, New Orleans contained sizable immigrant communities made up of African nationals and Afro-Caribbeans, which were reflective of the historic ethnic diversity of the city. Most media outlets glossed over the complexity of black identity in those days and weeks after Katrina’s landing, in part because such complexities challenge corporate media’s desires to manage evolving news stories. More broadly though, the mainstream press and the mainstream public at large, has rarely been willing to grant black bodies such complexity, choosing instead to embrace “exceptional” blacks, often at the expense of the black masses. For example, President Barack Obama’s success in the Presidential election, might be viewed within the context of his own status as an “exceptional” black.
In his memoir We Won’t Budge: An African Exile in the World, Malian scholar film scholar Manthia Diawara tells the story of spending a recent sabbatical in Paris. Concerned about the historic treatment of Africans in the city, Diawara wore his Black American Intellectual status on his sleeve, but when stopped by a pair of law enforcement officers who rifled through his bag only to find his Malian passport, he was symbolically undressed. The passport was evidence in the minds of the officers that Diawara was just another African—another nigga—and thus not deserving of the common courtesies extended to citizens or visitors for that matter. Diawara’s exchange with the police was prefaced by a conversation with the cab driver, also an African, whose cab he was in when Diawara were stopped by the police. “Where are you originally from?” the driver queried Diawara in response to Diawara’s earlier claim that he was from the United States.” (Diawara)Seemingly an innocent question, in many ways it was meant to demean Diawara’s site of origin and to undermine any privilege associated with his cosmopolitan identity. If a major Black American Intellectual can undressed in such a fashion, what can be said of those whose cosmopolitanism isn’t clothed in class and ethnic privilege.
Indeed, I can’t imagine that there isn’t a day when the Katrina Generation, as it is dispersed throughout the country and denied access to its “homeland,” is not faced with the like-minded query: “Where are you really from?” For all of the good will offered to Katrina transplants and in light of Barbara Bush’s ridiculous claim that they had bettered their fortunes, the reality is that many municipalities viewed Katrina survivors as a further burden on already overtaxed resources. But the Katrina-Politians are citizens of the world, by the vestige of their humanity, and they have every right to make claims on that citizenship, wherever they choose or are forced to lay their heads. Clyde Woods makes a finer point here, “In the blink of an eye, African Americans, and identity fraught with ambiguity, were transformed into black people, a highly politicized identity.” (Woods)
Haunting the Waters, Troubling National Memory
There’s a certain haunting presence about Trouble the Water, the award winning and Academy Award nominated documentary about Hurricane Katrina. It’s a presence that is immediately felt by anybody who has had the chance to journey across the city of New Orleans in the past few years. While tourists travel about downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter blandly commenting on the limited hours of some of the city’s more authentic haunts, and the Lower 9th Ward continues to serve as the most lasting monument of the destruction, portions of the city remain a decidedly barren reminder of the vibrant living cultures that once existed in the city. Of course where there is no people, there is no culture and the slow pace of recovery in the city suggest that something more sinister might be in play. Nevertheless, if Hurricane Katrina offered the rationale for what might be the only most contemporary example of ethnic cleansing in the United States, then the power of Trouble the Water comes from its brazen ability to summon the voices and spirits of those—who by force or choice—have not returned. As such Trouble the Water is a striking intervention, for a city that lacks the bodies—and the political wills that such bodies possess.
Trouble the Water tells the story of Kim Roberts, a 24-year-old New Orleans resident and aspiring rapper and her husband Scott, as Roberts documents their experiences before and after the hurricane on a hand-held video camera. Produced in collaboration with Tai Leeson and Carl Deal, the very fact that the film exists speaks to the economic realities of so many Katrina Survivors. As Rivers told the Brooklyn Rail, “We’d run out of money. We had about a hundred dollars left, and we was like, “We ought to try to see what we could do with this tape; we might find somebody we could give this tape to; well not give it, but either sell it, or license…you know, see what it’s worth.” (Cole) Robert’s comments capture the DIY ethic that has informed hip-hop geneartion expression, but also taps into more traditional African-American sensibilities that can be best captured in the notion of “make a way out of no way.” (Neal) If we think about survival as distinctly improvisational mode of navigating in the world, Trouble the Water finds it grounding by harnessing the rhythms of black improvisation via Robert’s audio and visual narration.
There’s a telling scene early in the film, when Roberts travels the streets of New Orleans alone shortly before the storm and sings to herself “On My Own” in reference to the Patti LaBelle recording. Seemingly a random utterance, the reference would have a particular resonance to African-American audiences familiar with Labelle, who possesses iconographical stature in many black communities. Mirroring the sampling practices of contemporary hip-hop, the film is littered with such references, offering audiences the possibility of gaining greater literacy in Black New Orleans culture and African-American culture more broadly. In another example the Roberts’s family dog is named “Kizzy” in reference to a popular character from the groundbreaking miniseries Roots. Within black vernacular expression, the term has been utilized as a metaphor for overburdened black women. In fact, Robert’s deployment of African-American vernacular culture as part of the metaphorical shelter that she and her comrades construct in response to Hurricane Katrina helps establish Roberts as the most credible intellectual agent in the film, despite her claim early in the film that she was the “only stupid nigga who stayed.” Robert’s use of black vernacular culture is akin to what Woods more formally describes as the “blues tradition of investigation and interpretation.” According to Woods, “the blues began as a unique intellectual movement that emerged among desperate African-American communities in the midst of the ashes of the Civil War, Emancipation, and the overthrow of Reconstruction.” More specifically in the context of Roberts’s narration, Trouble the Water, “draws on African-American musical practices, folklore, and spirituality to reorganize and give a new voice to working class communities facing severe fragmentation.” (Woods)
Roberts’s narration of Trouble the Water is also notable because it illuminates the gendered realities of Katrina survivors. That Roberts is an aspiring hip-hop artist, using rap music—a decidedly male centered cultural space—as a vehicle to express the specificity of her life as a black women, speaks to the extent that Trouble the Water succeeds in disturbing “official” readings of black urban life. Though Roberts does not openly discuss some of the specific challenges faced by women survivors of Katrina, her visibility in the film’s narrative allows for productive speculation about what exactly those challenges were. In a city in which more than half of the adult female population were single mothers, black women were particularly vulnerable to the economic and physical displacement experienced by many Katrina survivors. In addition issues of child care and parenting, for a population typically overburdened by such, were made tragically more difficult. Kathleen Bergin, suggest though, that it was the submergence of sexualized violence disproportionately experienced by black women that particularly highlights the gendered dynamics of the storm. Ironically the circulation of false rumors about bands of black male rapists—directly related to the production of Katrina survivors as “moral panic”—undermined what were legitimate cases of sexual violence and rape against black women. According to Bergin, “To deny the violently sexualized reality of Katrina on account of previous false reporting only compounds the horror of the storm for both black men and black women.” Ultimately Bergin holds the State at fault for its failure to anticipate a well known phenomenon: “The reality of gender specific violence, particularly sexual assault, is so predictable during times of catastrophic upheaval that major human rights instruments that address the needs of refugees and displaced persons…presume a heightened risk to women.” (Bergin)
When queried as to why she decided to carry a hand-held video during the storm, Roberts told the Brooklyn Rail, “I decided to film because I realized we weren’t going to be able to leave—that was the fact. And just in case it happened like how people said it was going to happen, I wanted to film it, just in case we died. I didn’t want to go out like that. With all I had been through my whole life, I always felt to some degree that my life was meaningful and that I was put here for a reason. If I died, people gonna know how I died. So to some degree, I was feeling like my legacy should live on and people would know what had happened to us. “ Though Roberts and her husband survive the hurricane, Trouble the Water still serves as tribute to those who were lost in the storm and I’d like to suggest the film serves as a kind of “second line” performance—the parade of dancing, shuffling bodies that occurs, often after a funeral. According to musician Michael White, “at the time of their origin, these parades offered the black community an euphoric transformation into a temporary world characterized by free open participation and self expression through sound, movement and symbolic visual statements.” White adds that “impositions and limitations of ‘second class’ social status could be replaced by a democratic existence in which one could be or become things not generally open to blacks in the normal world: competitive, victorious, defiant, equal, unique, hostile, humorous, aloof, beautiful, brilliant, wild, sensual, and even majestic.” (White) As such Trouble the Water serves as a critical intervention into a national memory that would rather ignore the cultural gifts that New Orleans gave the young country, the dead bodies that were sacrificed in the midst of catastrophic circumstances, as well as the possibility of rebirth that the Katrina-Politians embody.
Works Cited
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Neal, Mark Anthony Neal. ""...A Way Out of No Way": Jazz, Hip-Hop and Black Social Improvisation." Fischlin, Daniel and Heble, Ajay. The Other Side of Nowhere: Jazz, Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue. Wesleyan Press, 2004. 195-223.
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Tuakli-Wosornu, Taiye. "The New Africans Called Afro-Politans." 30th August 2007. The Zeleza Post. 25 January 2009
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Woods, Clyde. "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?: Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues." American Quarterly (December 2005): 1005.
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