Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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Katrina also made her way into movies and documentaries, especially with Spike Lee, as well as into fiction. And I am thinking specifically of Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Salvage the Bones, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011, and Mat Johnson’s Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story (2010), which is a graphic novel about the Katrina disaster. Jesmyn Ward depicts a family’s wait for the arrival of the Hurricane as well as the destruction that they witness afterwards. The natural events serve as the backdrop against which a poverty-stricken family, whose primary pastime is dogfighting and whose 15-year old narrator is pregnant, lives out its miserable existence, an existence made even more miserable by the arrival of the hurricane. Katrina has thus entered into the linguistic heritage of the South in all forms of writing, from memoir to poetry to essay to graphic novel to traditional fiction.

One of the most fascinating accounts of the hurricane’s aftermath, however, is Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, published in 2010. What is striking about this memoir is that it is only barely about Trethewey. It is, rather, a meditation on nature, kinfolks, space, and place. The place specifically is Gulfport, Mississippi, and the failed efforts at restoration in a space that Trethewey and her only brother Joe know as their ancestral home. The book is also about that brother, who, unable to find work or any legal means of making a living after the destruction that Katrina caused, ends up selling drugs and earns a prison sentence as a result. Beyond Katrina, therefore, is not about birth and growing up; it is about people living with and trying to survive destruction—not only natural destruction but the destructive effects of drugs on Joe’s life. The character, so to speak, in the text is the storm itself—together with its lingering effects. Racism is not the primary villain; nature is—with human stupidity being second in villainy. The construction of the narrative is intriguing in its distancing of the narrator herself from the major focus of the text, which means that this is a memoir that has no precedent for what it labels itself or for what it hopes to achieve. Self-erasure for Trethewey becomes the device through which she privileges destruction and attempts to recover from destruction. It matches the erasure that she notes in terms of destruction of the landscape as well as the erasure that ensues as time passes and memories of the disaster falter or disappear altogether. Hurricane Katrina constructs a narrative, and there are narratives about Katrina and the landscape on which she inscribes her signature. Trethewey’s meditations finally enter a realm of imaginative creation that uses writing to comment on the writing that nature did on the geography as well as upon human lives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.