Through the Water
by Joshua Ellison · 11/16/09
Hurricane Katrina, and the massive engineering and civic failures that followed, is part of a long history of disaster in this fragile environment. It’s not the first time New Orleans has approached the brink of destruction, and it’s not the first time some have wondered if New Orleans is even a viable enterprise. Still, it comes back, though much is lost each time. As environmental historian Ari Kelman, who contributes to this issue, writes: “it’s a resilient place, practiced in the art of recovery and forgetting.”
After Katrina, many citizens of New Orleans have been flung out across the country. Some are waiting to return, and others are starting lives anew elsewhere. But everyone from New Orleans has been experiencing a kind of exile, too. They’ve watched their homes and their city transformed into utterly unfamiliar places.
This isn’t the kind of Diaspora story that unfolds over generations; that part will come, though it’s too soon to know what it will look like. But, even now, there’s a deep intensity to the way people talk and think about New Orleans today—the one they know and the one they remember—something I’ve never heard anywhere else.
Maybe I had underestimated, in a place as transitory and ephemeral as America, just how deeply a sense of home could define a person’s experience. New Orleans, though, seems to permeate all the stuff of life. People often have a hard time describing why living in New Orleans is so important to them. They’ll tell you about their large family, their neighborhood, a favorite restaurant or bar, a band they love, a parade they look forward to each year. Or something even smaller—but to them, synonymous with belonging—like a particular inflection of the local accent, the way strangers greet each other. New Orleans lives by its own calendars and rhythms—the city can be a whole program for living, with habits and disposition that make it utterly unlike any other place in the nation.
To be cut off from this, physically or psychically, is to be detached from an essential part of yourself. All over America now, and in New Orleans too, there are people trying to repair an enormous breach: their ruptured connection to a place that matters to them so terribly, maybe more than many of them had understood before. This is the stuff that the news reports can’t capture.
On an early visit to the city, one local activist said something to me that echoed a common sentiment: three years after Katrina, she told me, there is still much pain and much work to be done; but we’re ready now to start reclaiming the rest of our history. Because, in New Orleans, the memories that people hold are inseparable from how they experience every new moment; and these will be, for good or ill, a tenacious presence as they plan for what comes next.
That notion became the starting point for this issue of Habitus. We have tried to engage the city both in its precarious present and in the buoyant complexity of its past. These texts and images address a broad horizon in time, from the earliest days of settlement to the next century and beyond. Past, present, and future happen all at once—just as they do in New Orleans—and so do tribute and lament, optimism and trepidation.
This has always been a great Diaspora city: a place that contains multitudes and has been defined by the murky edges where people meet to create something new. Now that saga has a new direction. Katrina still looms large, but this issue is not just about the storm. It’s about the precious and ecstatically loved city that is still in turmoil. And it’s about the way that traces of previous times and distant places sit close to the surface here, always present as time unfolds. Th e way the city, as it changes, turns over on itself—into itself—over and over again.
The task of rebuilding New Orleans isn’t just about one city—it’s about many different visions, all contending for their stake in the collective self-understanding. But how do you conjure a floating city, when its meanings are in constant flux, looking different at each moment through each set of eyes?
