New Orleans Is All Of Us
Posted by John Rensenbrink on 11/19/09This article by Kimberly N. Ruffin appears in the current issue of Green Horizon Magazine (Fall/Winter 2009/10). Ms.Ruffin, an African American scholar teaching literature at Roosevelt College in Chicago, invites and urges the reader to respond to her challenging thoughts about the essnce of citizenship in the wake of the catastrophe in New Orleans. John Rensenbrink, Editor, Green Horizon Magazine.
New Orleans is all of US:
Citizenship in an Age Ecological and Economic Crisis
“It’s hard to be a citizen. You gonna have to fight to get that. And time you get it you be surprised how heavy it is.”
“Solly” in Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson
By the time you read this, another anniversary of the 2005 New Orleans Levee Disaster will have passed. Although reporting about “Hurricane Katrina” (as it is commonly called) has faded from mainstream media, this on-going incident in America’s recent history deserves remembering. Our memories should propel us to discussion and action.
The Levee Disaster seared in my mind the idea of “dual citizenship”: ecological and national. The disaster emblemized these two concepts as fractured and at odds with one another. Many of the human victims and survivors of the disaster felt their national citizenship violated and squandered by criminally negligent rescue and return efforts. Regardless of national citizenship, people around the world watched as their fellow ecological citizens were left to die and criminalized as they fought to live. Additionally, an ecologically vulnerable but crucial part of America’s environmental and economic vitality, New Orleans was sorely neglected (particularly its levee system) by the federal government. As a result, what we knew of a world-beloved city was obliterated. New Orleanian residents were left with their ecological and national citizenship decimated.
Numerous post-Levee Disaster films confirm Solly’s sentiments in the epigraph: citizenship is something people have to fight for and something that is “heavy” to carry, something that is constantly being (re)made and maintained. Filmmakers’ record of what happened in New Orleans provide us with a way to remember, and perhaps move beyond, the chasm between ecological and national citizenship so symbolized by the 2005 Levee Disaster. Also, they highlight New Orleans as a city of rituals. Rituals that bonded people to place and one another. Indeed, ritual may be one of the most powerful tools we have in closing the gap between ecological and national citizenship.
New Orleans: New Citizenship
Documentary films such as Dawn Logsdon’s and Lolis Eric Elie’s Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans focus on race (in particular “blackness”) and national citizenship, allowing for a specific understanding of the city and a larger appreciation of America’s ecological history and present. Their film, and others like it, depicts African-Americans as fighting constantly to obtain fully recognized national citizenship, beginning in the antebellum era and climaxing with the 2005 Levee Disaster. Implicit to these films is the ecological story of a human group trying to root itself in a place on Earth, despite huge barriers from human systems. Ultimately, the films show the worst that can happen from asynchronous ecological and national thinking. They call for imaginative and collective work that may help the world change the terms of citizenship.
Musician Glen David Andrews underscores the trauma of denied citizenship felt by New Orlenians after the disasters, “Right now, [we’re] going to need a lot psychiatric help. And I’m gonna be one of the first people to get in line. ‘Cause I still can’t come to grasp with [the fact that] the church I was baptized in: gone. The cemetery where all my family is: gone. I sincerely hope nobody asks me to say the ‘Pledge of Alligiance’ or play… ‘God Bless America’ or any of them dumb ass songs again because I’m never going to play it because I don’t feel like an American citizen. I know I’m not an American citizen in the eyes of the power that be” (Faubourg Tremé). Andrews’s comments capture the anguish felt by New Orleanians; his participation in the city’s continuing music and parade traditions demonstrate the power human culture has to connect people to geographies even without the benefits of fully honored national citizenship. Although he will change his repertoire of songs to exclude those tied to national citizenship, he still participates in public rituals that signal his ecological belonging.
Faubourg Tremé also documents the way people used print culture to actively shape the terms of citizenship. Specifically, it focuses on Paul Treveigne, founder of the “first Black daily newspaper in the United States”: L’Union later named The Tribune, which historian Laura Rouzan declares as the “beginning of the Civil Rights Movement in the South because it was vocal; it was articulated, and it was written.” Historian Eric Foner celebrates the writers’ ideological work calling them “proponents of an idea that we may take for granted… which is equality before the law for all Americans regardless of race. This is the origins of the concept of civil rights we understand today” (Faubourg Tremé). Framed by two eras of “reconstruction” (post-Civil War and post-Levee Disaster) and the story of two journalists, Faubourg Tremé spends the bulk of its time positioning New Orleans, especially the neighborhood of its title, as an overlooked harbinger of civil rights “that changed the course of American history.” By the film’s end, viewers feel as if New Orleans has this potential again. Speaking of post-Levee Disaster New Orleans, Elie remarks that “this is not the first time my community has been devastated and then abandoned by its government. In the past, we survived and came out stronger. What I’m wondering now is how can our past help us survive this time?” The resistance to dehumanization by enslaved and free people of color populations in New Orleans’s past suggests that using words to popularize the idea of civil rights and shape the idea of citizenship may answer Elie’s question in our age of ecological and economic crisis.
Criminalized Citizens
The DVD cover of Desert Bayou explains “the most devastating thing about Katrina is what it revealed about America.” Its stories about Black evacuees and their post-disaster time in Utah reveal that America has racial traditions that go a long way in impacting the environmental experience of Americans. The oxymoronic title stems from the identification of people and environment: just as the film documents how 600 Black 2005 Levee Disaster survivors cope with radical environmental and cultural change after being flown to Utah, the film also tells how a racially “White” city and state attempt to appear racially accepting after ecological catastrophe. Despite apparent good will on the part of many Whites in Utah, the sins against displaced African-American New Orleanians continue. The narrator summarizes the injustices that happened to the Black evacuees saying, “Put on a plane and shipped to the almost entirely White state of Utah without their knowledge, upon arrival frisked, housed in a secure military base far from civilization and under curfew, subjected to criminal background checks after which erroneous findings were broadcast on the radio resulting in community panic… were this the experience of most Americans outrage would soon follow; however, for an African-American from New Orleans it would simply appear to echo their everyday experience”(Desert Bayou). The Black evacuees’ experience demonstrates that perceptions about race, nation, and ecology impact whatever geography in which a racialized person finds him/herself.
This is true, in part, because of mass media’s spin on post-Levee Disaster events. Rocky Anderson, Former Salt Lake City Mayor (2000-2008) remarks, “You saw an unbelievable, and I think a racist coverage by the media, leading this nation to think that all these African-American people are raising utter hell [after the flooding], and none of it was true; not one bit of that was true. And yet that’s still the impression in most people’s minds in this country and that’s because it was repeated over and over and over again in our nation’s media” (Desert Bayou). The documentary films cited here definitely provide a counter-narrative to these images; in particular, they document the ways in which endangered ecological citizens, often unfairly criminalized as looters and potential threats, came to their own aid after the Levee Disaster, showing the power of the marginalized to meet their own needs. Desert Bayou also documents the decision by several former evacuees to take root in a new geography despite the misperceptions about them created by negative images. Three of the four African-American adults profiled decide to trade the sub-tropical, below sea-level urban terrain of New Orleans for the semi-arid, mountain-surrounded urbanity of Salt Lake City, Utah, perched over 4,000 feet above sea-level. They represent the ecological refugees to come as climate change worsens. Untold numbers of people will have to relocate as their current environments become uninhabitable. What systems and rituals do we have in place that will ease their transitions and help the communities that absorb them cope?
The Cost of Complacency
Massive in length and scope, Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four
Acts contains an explicit discussion of fault. New Orleans City Council Member Cynthia Hedge-Morell says directly, “I tell people all the time: Katrina didn’t do in [the city], the [US Army] Corps of Engineers did. If they had built those levees, really to [withstand] Category 3 [hurricane strength], all of the residents of New Orleans would still be here” (When the Levees Broke). Robert Bea, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California—Berkeley, calls the 2005 Levee Disaster “the most tragic failure of a civil engineering system in the history of the United States.” Yet, the stinging indictment of the government for levee failures and delayed rescue efforts comes along with voices of caution that in no way releases American citizens of responsibility. Terence Blanchard, trumpeter and New Orleanian, chides with “precautionary rhetoric” (Patrick 151) saying, “Everybody needs to understand that this is an American tragedy. It’s not a tragedy for Louisiana or New Orleans, this is an American thing. Because, if it can happen to us, in New Orleans, it can happen anywhere in this country.” His comments highlight the emblematic function of New Orleans and its potential to change “the course of American history” (Elie) by energizing citizens to be proactive. Another New Orleanian trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis, highlights the dangers of a citizenry that does not hold its representatives accountable. He comments, “What is the government doing [after the Levee Disaster]? They trying to figure out how to hand out contracts, how to lower minimum wage so that the sub-contractors can make all the money; steal money from me and you. Man, we’re paying taxes! You understand what I’m saying? But they’ve been doing it. And we [are] stupid. We sit by and we let them do it. And we re-elect ‘em and that’s what they do” (When the Levees Broke). Blanchard and Marsalis speak out of frustration born of governmental misdeeds, and at the same time, they pinpoint that our republican government does not act alone; it relies on the implicit or explicit permission of its citizens. Although the film documents residents determined to use the electoral process to express their demand for change, it leaves the audience wondering, what happens if we let our interest in protecting our planetary life support systems inform our national citizenship at other moments? What are other ways one can be active as someone trying to align ecological and national citizenship? What are the ways our ecological belonging can impact our lives as participants in municipalities and nation-states? How can we respect the ecological citizenship of those who do not enjoy privileged national citizenship?
Rights & Entitlements vs. Duties & Obligations
Mark J. Smith and Piya Pangsapa have it right when they say, “For over two centuries, citizenship has been fixated upon rights and entitlements, glossing over duties and obligations” (9). Being active during the electoral process is not enough. The Levee Disaster signaled an alarm: if we remain complacent about citizenship, we cannot expect to be secure. We have duties and obligations to ourselves, our neighbors, and the world to make ecological citizenship tangible. Civic rituals that express, question, and envision ecological and national belonging are necessary. We need rituals that help us (re)connect to place and, more broadly, to our place in our current local and global ecology. These rituals may look nothing like the ones New Orleans is (in)famous for, but we need them nevertheless.
In the interest of fostering civic dialogue, I turn to you, readers of Green Horizon Magazine: Do you think a having a sense of dual citizenship, both ecological and national, is helpful? If so, can rituals, events, and dialogues in our communities move us forward in better appreciating the interlocking nature of these citizenships? What are these rituals? I don’t think it’s frivolous to talk of such rituals at a time when we are undergoing “global economic decline.” Do you think I’m misguided? I’m eager to participate in the ritual of discussion and debate. As an envoy of your civic duty, I invite you to comment at: http://www.green-horizon.org
Works Cited
Desert Bayou. Dir. Alex LeMay. Cinema Libre Studio , 2007.
Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans. Dir. Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie. Serendipity Films, 2008.
Patrick, Amy M. “Apocalyptic or Precautionary? Revisioning Texts in Environmental Literature.” Coming into Contact Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice. Ed. Annie Merrill Ingram, et al. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2007.
Smith, Mark J. and Piya Pangsapa. Environment and Citizenship: Integrating Justice: Responsibility and Civic Engagement. London & New York: Zed Books, 2008.
When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Dir. Lee, Spike. HBO Film, 2006.
Wilson, August. Gem of the Ocean. Theatre Communications Group: New York, 2007.
BIO: Kimberly N. Ruffin is an Assistant Professor of English at Roosevelt University. Her book, Black on Earth: African-Americans and Ecological Insights will be published by University of Georgia Press in Fall 2010. She strives to be a better ecological and national citizen by volunteering as a TreeKeeper and University of Illinois Extension Master Gardener.