The Hundred-Year Flood
2022; Indiana University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2979/gbs.2022.a900853
ISSN1932-8656
Autores Tópico(s)Disaster Management and Resilience
ResumoThe Hundred-Year Flood Jennie Lightweis-Goff (bio) "… Uncertain and afraidas the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade …" —W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939" The fifty-year flood. The hundred-year flood. Flood zone X. Never flooded. Katrina damaged. Fixer upper. Handyman's dream. Investor's special. Real estate listings are necessarily ephemeral—anyone who has searched for an apartment in August in a college town can tell you how quickly they disappear—and yet never tied to the present. Other temporalities are drilled into place by language that indexes the history their owners can stomach ("This home was damaged by a storm in May 2017, so there are no utilities on the lot") and their hypothetical futures ("put in a little sweat equity and you'll have a nice home") while their present is a deliberately blank slate. Stripped of the previous owner's eccentric taste in porcelain pig statuary and ceiling-stencils, they possess the neutral, hidden history of "good bones," but their tattoos have been carefully painted-over. Previous owners and present sellers appear, sometimes, as specters, in the brick ranch in the 8th Ward with an Astroturf application on the kitchen floor, or the shotgun in the 6th Ward with a hip high wrap-around mirror, previously occupied by a person who took comfort in the familiar sight of their own genitals moving from room-to-room: that is, through the houses we imagine we own as we occupy the bodies for which we're trying, in 7 decades or more, to obtain clear title. For years before Katrina, I was one of the curious New Orleans creatures who reside somewhere between tourist and transplant. Local is another category, and one about which I give not a single damn. (Nativity is, like 'authenticity,' the undercarriage of pernicious arguments—from the preservation of monuments to the segregation of Mardi Gras krewes to the gormlessness of trash politicians from Ray to Mitch, the "natives" who auctioned off the city in the wake of Katrina). Some people visited for Spring Break and never left: my buddy Chris—UCLA'86, unfinished—suspects that I mean him in the preceding sentence. But some people who want New Orleans never quite settle in: they defer and transfer. Years ago, I tried to decide between graduate school in Louisiana and Upstate New York; I perversely decided that choosing the option farther from home would eventually place me in New Orleans for the long haul. [End Page 111] Thanks to that signed contract, I spent much of the Katrina decade off-world. A few hasty decisions protected me from the force of the blow. Instead, I passed my fingers along the satellite pictures and "pain indexes" and incomprehensible anniversary stories from an icy loft in Rochester. By the time George W. Bush returned for a photo op in 2015, I'd set up house in Tremé. Seeing the motorcade pass, I thought of Fran Lebowitz's joke about time. Presenting the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, she noted that Bush had just appointed an Iraq Study Group. Would you prefer, she asked, to study before the test, or three years after? Then, to massive booing: "Where do you think the Iraq Study Group meets? I think it meets at Windows on the World." On Katrina's decadal anniversary, Bush praised New Orleans charter schools as a "beacon of hope," one that, I assume, blinks like a lighthouse from the levee on the 17th Street Canal, that twinkles faintly from the bass bridge of Fats Domino's white piano, that gleams behind the plywood boards in the windows of a dive bar in Holy Cross or the Lower Nine. A year and a half after my arrival in Rochester, the deluge arrived to carry away Tulane's graduate program in English. A few weeks earlier, my father had paused when I showed him the venue contract for the small commitment ceremony my partner and I had planned within New Orleans's porous borders. "I'll buy you event insurance as a wedding present," he told me. "And we'll never think about it again." We obsessed about it for the next 18...
Referência(s)