New Orleans rising from a watery ghost town

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.”