The qualitative, undifferentiated time of disaster affords propitious moments, requiring quick action by those in its midst. During Katrina, the rapidly transforming watery world of New Orleans created new resistances and lines of flow.
In the absence of government-organized disaster assistance during Katrina, some New Orleanians already long afflicted with chronic mental illnesses were left to navigate the flooded city on their own, as this essay captures from oral histories gathered and observations made over four years. For some long disabled by severe mental illness, surviving the disaster resembled their life pattern of circuitous movement, the survivors appearing caught up in a circular pattern of water, floating along with no external force to push against or momentum to be retrieved.
Their particular mode evokes pre-steam engine era sailors stuck in the Doldrums, the Equatorial belt where atmospheric conditions deprive the sea of wind-force and momentum. Yet others deviated from the usual everyday scripts in which they were ensconced, be they those of patient-clinician routines or of stigmatizing encounters in public places. Rather than stagnating, these survivors moved along, improvising at every turn, divinely realized or sheer happenstance.
Such wayfarers place-mark a world wide open, even for those whose lives are usually confined to a circuit of institutions and marginal spaces that stymie agency and narrow relational possibilities. Today, Isle de Jean Charles, home to Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw indigenous people, has already lost most of its landmass to climate change. The canal referred to was planned but never actually built, although others were. Yet people everywhere read maps within their own narratives. In New Orleans, a shared conventional geographical orientation cements a place identity with the watery city rather than along the Cartesian grid of colonial urbanists who built the city.
Viola Green told me how she escaped drowning by hauling her aging, diabetic body up the ladder in her living room and, as the water rose to her shoulders, hollered for her life. And rise it would. Other than when he was deployed to France in World War II, my Uncle Emile never left his river-bound parish and the watercourses where his father labored in the early s, floating logs from backwaters to lake to the Mississippi. Both of my kinsmen could read the great river and its tributaries, the lakes and the bayous, and the level of the land far better than I have ever been able to read any book.
