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The Mourning After: Languages of Loss and Grief in Post-Katrina New Orleans
Marline Otte
| The following essay is as much a testimony to, as a testimony of, the post–Hurricane Katrina era in New Orleans. First formulated about four months after my return to New Orleans in January 2006, this essay was written in transitional times, when many returnees felt compelled to share their thoughts and coping strategies after months of isolation and displacement. For the more fortunate ones, the Katrina drama unfolded in three distinct acts: a hasty evacuation, a shocking return to the ruined city, and an arduous path toward the restoration of former lives. A returnee myself, I was most interested in how others managed their passage through those distinct periods, as a smooth transition from one to the next could not be taken for granted. I thus began to investigate the coping mechanisms we had developed individually in post-Katrina New Orleans. What was the relationship between individual and collective memory in this disaster, and what prevented many from experiencing and processing their trauma collectively? |
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As a historian of Germany, I have always been intensely interested in tracing how individual and collective memory and trauma manifest themselves in commemorative rituals and practices of mourning. On my return to New Orleans, I could not help but observe—with at times morbid fascination—how returning residents processed the disruption of cherished daily habits and rituals as well as the more obvious losses of homes, financial security, and the comforts of familiar communities. In fact, I gained a whole new appreciation for the postwar reconstruction of Europe (the subject of my current book project), as I myself now live in a city crippled by a palpable breakdown of order, a marked collapse of the boundaries of privacy and property—even of civil society. The spectrum of loss and human drama is vast in today's New Orleans, ranging from the material to the intangible. Facing the ruins of ravaged communities and of hollowed-out houses, we may not forget that the list of the missing and the presumed deceased remained long, well after Katrina made landfall. During my walks through barely recognizable streets and alleys of devastated neighborhoods littered with the vestiges of collapsed structures and caked with toxic mud, the all-pervading stench of decay served as a bodily reminder of the many lives lost. |
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Coping with this disaster was indeed a full-body experience, and memory and cultural recall of it had to be performed to be meaningful. A combination of the visual and of the tactile seemed ever more essential in the construction of a narrative memory of abandonment, dislocation, and bereavement.1 I embarked—with considerable help from a dedicated group of Tulane University students—on an oral history project that was designed to explore how New Orleanians coped with the formidable trials of evacuation, months of homelessness and continuous migration, and, for the more fortunate, a difficult return to a spectacularly altered cityscape. In about 350 interviews, we explored the immense adjustment of the minds and hearts of a population of returnees. The response to requests for interviews was overwhelming, and fascinating tales emerged from the conversations. |
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