Hyerborean

I've just returned to Schaumburg, Illinois, my childhood home. My parents have very generously offered to let me stay with them for a little bit until I can find my druthers. For right now I've been constantly in a strange state of mental flux, neither quite ready to accept what is going on down south or properly understanding it.

In Houston we were constantly watching the reports of Katrina on CNN. The hurricane sent sheets of rain down. Reporters seemed to be offering us the usual disaster pornography. At one point I watched a correspondent run into a parking garage, then out into a doorway in the rain, then duck next to a garbage can on Canal Street and throw a piece of metal debris down the street, commenting that yes in deed the rain was very heavy and the wind was very fast.

So as I'm siting here, in my old bedroom, the NPR station is playing brass band music. At the time, well in nola, I'd never liked it. It was sort of on par with Mardi Gras music and "When the Saints Go Marching In." Now I can't get over how lonely and sad it makes me feel. I mean, you're not supposed to feel melancholy listening to Ernie K. Doe or the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, but I can't help wondering if all of my very familiar surroundings, my home up until nine days ago, has become some artifact.

My boss at the library called my cell and left a message. We hadn't technically lost our jobs, but we couldn't work at our branch.

Everyone was talking to me about the looters and I didn't want to talk about it. I mean who gives a fuck! I would be going crazy if I'd been left to die in a city with no aid in sight, I'd be looting too. It's amazing how the mainstream media has the power to disassociate the effects and causes.

In the papers we see photographs of people dying in the street, of the tragedy, but very little was being said about why and how we reached that state. It seems like what I heard being reported was something to the effect of "Look at this tragedy! Look at the sadness, how shocking, how sudden!" Not "Where is the government? Why is this happening to people days after the hurricane? How does this qualify as an immediate response to devastating emergency?"

Michael Moore tracks Bush to San Diego the day after the hurricane. I'm reminded of that scene in Fahrenheit 911 with the president joking in front of a well dressed dinner full of supporters. How different we were. We, being New Orleans. The media coverage exposes so many of the ugliest parts of the American mind-- assumptions about the regional South, and anxieties about race and class parcelled along with that. I defy anyone to tell me that the word "looters" hasn't just become a stand-in term for black youth in American media coverage. Look at the representation in photographs. They're depicting us like we're savages. I mean isn't it the same old colonial mind trick, that we're not civilized that we're lawless, that we're other. And that somehow allows them to justify our mistreatment and neglect.

I am so angry! The only difference between me and the people who didn't evacuate was a car, friends out of town, and a credit card. I wonder about all the people who came into the library, or the bike punks I know. Where are they, did they make it out? Fuck this shit!