With some hesitation, I have posted to Flickr 30 or so photographs that I took in the flood ravaged parts of New Orleans. I say hesitation because in some ways this is a reprehensibly voyeuristic act, an invasion of the privacy of people who have already suffered too much. But it is also an act of deep sympathy, as well as an expression of my own incomprehension at what I've seen.
Tourists be consoled: historic New Orleans has mostly survived Katrina and the floods. The French Quarter, the Central Business District, the Garden District are as lovely or quirky as ever. But Twentieth Century New Orleans -- the nondescript sub-divisions and shopping malls of ever larger proportion, the American Dream sprawling outward across four generations -- is mostly gone. So are many of the obvious calling cards of the disaster that claimed them. The mud has been cleaned up, the levees repaired (if not exactly strengthened), the debris carted off and burned.
What remains is a ghost town in the most haunting sense imaginable -- one seemingly without end, one that looks, disturbingly, exactly like the rest of America -- if only the rest of America had been drained of everything living within it and left to warp and crack under an unrelenting sun. Even in bold, eccentric New Orleans, suburbia looks, or looked, like something close to nothing. Now these suburbs are almost Vesuvian in their lack of living detail, but they are still recognizable for what they were and weren't. The shape of the Circuit City superstore is there, but the signage, stock and customers are missing. Ditto the fast food joints, the grocery stores, the hulking shopping malls, even a theme park, its rusting roller coasters rising skeletal above the overpasses and underpasses, a network of roads designed to whisk cars along without stopping here.
And of course, out beyond the noise-blocking walls and shrubbery, there are the shapes of uninhabited houses, many of which were until the catastrophe home to people who might proudly have called themselves 'average Americans'. Houses after houses after houses.
Could be developer-abandoned blight in suburban Atlanta, Charlotte or Austin, except that it's not.
What I can't get out of my mind: how invisble all of this is to those of us who aren't there, despite widespread curiosity about New Orleans' fate. How impossible, I suppose, the dimensions of it are to comprehend from a photograph. Then again, these are parts of the city that have always been invisible to visitors, in part because they so closely resembled the places people came to New Orleans to forget.
And how big is big? As vast and unfathomable as the New Orleans devastation is, empirically it's a speck compared to the similarly unimaginable swathes of Asia leveled by typhoon, earthquake or tsunami.
There are, I should add, signs of hope. Not the whimsical hope of greeting cards, but the hope of wild defiance, hard-won hope. Houses coming up almost lawlessly, here and there -- modular or expanded, half-finished or walking on stilts, dotting a landscape of weeds and ravaged sameness with signs of eccentric life, showing us that hope is not, after all, something that can be legislated, that it is unpredictable, radioactive, comes from somewhere intimate and hidden.
Poetry book in a Bywater shop window.
