New Orleans rising from a watery ghost town

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.”