Missing New Orleans: The Cultural Costs of Katrina

By late Saturday afternoon, August 29, 2005, it was clear that the great natural monster called Katrina, engendered by global warming and 90 degree water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, was aimed at my beloved city of New Orleans. I live in Iowa, my nearest (distant) relatives are safe in their homes in northwestern Louisiana, and I haven’t been to the Big Easy since 1996, but just the same I have been consumed with grief.

Katrina’s impact to the historical foundations of North America is almost incomprehensible. As one of the New World’s oldest cities, New Orleans holds remnants of our Spanish and French past, our decadent dance with slavery, the seamy evidence of government-sponsored prostitution and piracy. I love New Orleans for its unwillingness to hide the truth of our collective past, the extremes of huge homes in the garden district and tiny apartment blocks downtown. The interior courtyards hidden behind iron and brick facades. The first floor flats in the Vieux Carre with ancient wooden floors and huge windows that look out on narrow brick streets. The above-ground St. Louis cemetery where the bones of the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau lie. The eighteenth century Lafitte’s Blacksmith shop bravely decorated with mold and mildew. The crusty sugary powder of a warm beignet chased down with chicoried coffee in an open air café on the banks of the Mississippi river. Too much alcohol consumed listening to the Preservation Hall jazz band. Raw oysters spattered with McIlhenny’s Tabasco sauce. Loud and vulgar, pervaded by voodoo for the tourist and voodoo for the believer, New Orleans represents all that America is and was built on. Smelly, dangerous, ethnically diverse, New Orleans makes Los Angeles seem too clean, New York too angular, Chicago too cold.

Today, the survivors are still being pulled from their rooftops. Today, the needs of those survivors outweigh the considerations of guilt and expiation for dilapidated levees and the heedless greed for petroleum, and even far outweigh the cultural losses. But, tomorrow and for a long time after, we will grasp at our memories of what New Orleans was and will never be again: a repository of the deep scars of the American colonization.

Give generously to the Red Cross.