New Orleans rising from a watery ghost town

It can take a long time for a city to fully recover from a major disaster, a lot longer perhaps than the recovery time needed by individual inhabitants. Sixty years passed before Dresden Cathedral was rebuilt. It, along with the rest of the city, was devastated in a single Allied bombing raid during World War II.

Even when the reversal of a city’s fortunes occurs in peacetime, is brief in duration and the damage is economic in origin, the negative effects can last for generations. My home town of Melbourne was, for a short time, one of the fastest growing cities in the world before it succumbed to a sudden and deep depression in the 1890s, and it is yet to fully recover.

In late August and early September 2005, New Orleans appeared almost lost. Though the city was spared the direct impact of Hurricane Katrina, the breaches in the man-made levee system allowed a massive storm surge to flood and contaminate New Orleans and surrounding areas.

New Orleans became a watery ghost town. The flood covered 80 per cent of the city and caused well over 1,000 deaths from drowning and dehydration.

Four years on and the famous French Quarter and Garden District appear to have regained their period charm, although some of the poorer residential areas that were worst affected by the flood are still largely places of desolation. It is estimated by one housing construction company executive I met during a recent visit that such a rebuilding effort, which is propelled by private philanthropy, will take more than 20 years to complete.

Not all of a city’s scars are allowed to fade. The bomb-ravaged Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church cathedral in Berlin exists as a permanent war memorial. Traces of the damage sustained in London as a result of the Blitz have been deliberately preserved.

In New Orleans during the flood emergency, house-to-house search teams spray-painted a distinctive X with the quadrants containing a code to indicate the date of the search, affiliation of the search team, and how many corpses, if any, had been discovered. I saw one restored house in the Garden District that showed no sign of having been flood-affected except for this grim graffito, which had apparently been preserved on the front door as a memorial.

The outward signs in New Orleans post-Katrina, at least to a casual visitor, are more positive than negative. At the fourth anniversary of the flood, statistics indicate that the total population of New Orleans, which a year after the flood had fallen by 40 per cent, has almost been restored.

New Orleans is a city of world significance very much on a human scale. There is a kind of provincial pride there that has resisted, to an appreciable extent, the uniformity and blandness of the wider corporate America. Huge chains such as Wal-Mart, Starbucks and Borders are represented - the Borders store, to the amusement of some locals, is located in a former funeral parlour - but that way of doing business seems foreign in a town where everyone seems to know, or know of, everyone else.

Even for an outsider, it is hard not to take New Orleans personally. The streetcar drivers may be famously rude yet it is considered normal to greet strangers in the street.

As in Dublin, another city with a provincial feel whose inhabitants have made a disproportionate contribution to world culture, New Orleans doesn’t seem especially materialistic. Neither town is overly fastidious, which for me is part of the charm though a lack of efficient public services can, understandably, drive the residents to distraction.

The electricity poles all appeared to lean to some degree, as if there is no point in straightening them ahead of the impact of the next strong winds. One of the innumerable potholes in New Orleans was so big that someone put a refrigerator in it to alert motorists.

If you judge a city’s importance by industrial might, financial clout or population size then it may seem as though in New Orleans a disproportionate amount of energy is directed towards talking, writing, making music, costumes and dancing. Every conversation in New Orleans seems to either begin or end with the discussion of food.

It struck me how passionate and knowledgeable people in New Orleans are about their own culture and how much street theatre takes place, a similarity with the Irish capital. In New Orleans, as in Dublin, people who move away from the city may be spoken of not as having left, or moved, or migrated, but as having gone into exile. My impression was that New Orleans knows itself to be a special case, despite or because of the real or imagined indifference to its fate on the part of the rest of the United States.

It is difficult to comprehend the disappearance of any city, much less one as famous and distinctive as New Orleans. One of the paradoxes of New Orleans, portions of which are situated well below sea level, is that the existence of a place with such deep historical and cultural roots should have been at peril from the moment the original French settlement was established in 1718. There is an annual hurricane season during which, more often than not, the worst fears of damage and harm have not been realised. This run of good luck prior to Katrina may help explain, though not excuse, any complacency on the part of the responsible authority that led to the inadequate provision of flood protection.

Los Angeles, another famous American city under constant threat of destruction due to its position along an earthquake fault line, is remarkable for its lack of urban character. At first impression LA really is, as the song says, a great big freeway. Everyone there seems to have come from somewhere else, and to be moving fast one way and back again. LA is like every other anonymous modern city, only more so.

By contrast, the character of New Orleans is timeless, unique and fully formed. The complex culture, which combines French, Spanish, African, English, Irish, Jewish, German and the more recent American influences, has produced the music, cuisine and wildly colourful Mardi Gras pageantry.

New Orleans is regarded as the birthplace of jazz, which is the only distinctively American contribution to world culture. Not for nothing does New Orleans have the only international airport in the United States - and perhaps the world - named after a jazz musician, namely Louis Armstrong.

New Orleans also has a special place in literary history, being the birthplace, home or both to Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Anne Rice and many other famous writers. Along the main commercial boulevard, Canal Street, there is a “life-size” statue of Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole’s modern classic A Confederacy of Dunces.

If ever a city was brought back from the brink of destruction through the power of storytelling, it is New Orleans. Four years after Hurricane Katrina, the vibrant literary culture flourishes anew. Moreover New Orleans’ writers have provided an impressive demonstration of how writing and storytelling helps people to survive and come to terms with catastrophe and its aftermath.

According to Susan Larson, who has been books editor at the New Orleans daily Times-Picayune for more than 20 years, and is the author of the leading literary guide to the city, the disaster served to galvanise that literary spirit. “We have always been a city where people owned certain stories. Everybody knows about Anne Rice and Interview with the Vampire, everybody knows about Stella and Stanley and the Tennessee Williams play. With the flood after Katrina, for the first time everybody became a storyteller and everybody had a story to tell. They may not have known how to tell it, or told it in the same way, but they all knew it was worth telling.”

Within a year of the flood, Larson says, there was “enough Katriniana to buckle a bookshelf”. More than 600 books on every conceivable aspect of the disaster were listed on Amazon, “including, strangely, a self-published book by an Australian writer who has a panic disorder and rarely leaves his home yet managed to write and self-publish ‘Hurricane Katrina and the Destruction of New Orleans’.”

Larson says that the flow of Katrina books continues even as the city rebuilds. “A day doesn’t pass where this doesn’t come up. I know I’m going to be writing about it for the rest of my life.”

Many of the earliest Katrina-related publications were non-fiction books derived from the original reporting and photo-journalism. Almost immediately community storytelling projects were established to enable schoolchildren and others to give their accounts. The fiction, poetry and drama took longer to emerge. “There’s a sense now that we don’t own this story any more,” Larson says. “It is becoming more diffuse and people are picking up their little bits and pieces of it. The Katrina fiction is just starting because it takes longer to write, longer to publish. Frankly, I think the great Katrina book is still way out there.”

A leading New Orleans writer who shifted from a reporting role in relation to Katrina to literary recreation is John Biguenet. A distinguished author, translator and literature professor at Loyola University, Biguenet wrote a blog during the flood for the New York Times. He says that many people outside Louisiana initially thought the damage to New Orleans had been caused by the hurricane and not the failure of the man-made levees, a misunderstanding that suited the authority responsible for the levees and which had to be corrected.

“In the first days I think every artist in town - writers, photographers, painters, musicians - became primarily journalists”, says Biguenet. “We all felt the task was to get the story out and, as Americans began to be distracted from the continuing story in New Orleans, to keep the story alive. But we eventually fell back into the genres in which we were trained initially to get at the deeper truths of the story that we had been reporting.”

According to Biguenet, getting at the truth was not simply a matter of establishing the facts, but also the means of communicating them. “One of the dilemmas that everyone faced is that this has never happened before in the United States - we’ve never lost a city. We don’t have a form of narration in our culture that allows us to describe what’s happened. Reporters were doing their best to send out pieces of information to Americans and people around the world, but it was very difficult to get an accurate picture because we didn’t have the structure of narration to make sense of the information we were getting.”

In order to capture the deeper truths about the experience, Biguenet wrote plays. “I became interested as a writer in what the experience was like for the people who were left here in New Orleans, in their attics and on their rooftops, as they waited for help that never arrived and so I turned first of all to the theatre”.

Biguenet has written two award-winning plays, performed in New Orleans and elsewhere that form part of the Rising Waters cycle. The plays dramatise the lives of characters, both black and white, in different parts of the city.

Another highly regarded New Orleans author, whose response to Katrina started in non-fiction before moving to a different mode of writing, is Tom Piazza. His book-length essay, Why New Orleans Matters, was written in six weeks out of a sense of outrage at what many locals saw as the indifference and incompetence shown in the response to the plight of the city that came from within the United States. “New Orleans is not just a list of attractions or restaurants or ceremonies, no matter how sublime or subtle”, he wrote. “New Orleans is the interaction among all those things, and countless more.”

Piazza’s latest book is City of Refuge, a realist novel that like Biguenet’s plays powerfully relates the story of representative New Orleans characters - rich and poor, black and white - who are caught up in the disaster.

Four years on, Piazza says the anniversary of Katrina is, in one way, like any personal commemoration of suffering and loss, and in another sense unique. “With Katrina, the event was just so huge. It was like the city came back from the dead. New Orleans’ experience was comparable to someone who has a stroke, their heart stops and they are at the point of death, and then they come back. One effect of it is that one does shake one’s head and go, My God, we’re still here. And the question is then what do you make of that. I think at its best literature helps you begin to have some kind of purchase on the answer to that question.”