Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast

Liturgy

Liturgy This page intentionally left blank liturgy 55 the morning after the storm, hundreds of live oaks still stood among the rubble along the coast. They held in their branches a car, a boat, pages torn from books, furniture. Some people who managed to climb out of windows had clung to the oaks for survival as the waters rose. These ancient trees, some as many as five hundred years old, remain as monuments not only to the storm but to something beyond Katrina as well—sentries, standing guard, they witness the history of the coast. Stripped of leaves, haggard, twisted, and leaning, the trees suggest a narrative of survival and resilience. In the years after the storm, as the leaves have begun to return, the trees seem a monument to the very idea of recovery. Such natural monuments remind us of the presence of the past, our connection to it. Their ongoing presence suggests continuity, a vision into a future still anchored by a would-be neutral object of the past. Man-made monuments tell a different story. Never neutral, they tend to represent the narratives and memories of those citizens with the political power and money to construct them. Everywhere such monuments inscribe a particular narrative on the landscape while—often—at the same time subjugating or erasing others, telling only part of the story. In Auburn, Alabama, a plaque in the center of town, meant to describe how the city was founded, reads simply “After the Indians left . . .” As I write this, determined citizens in Gulfport are working to erect, on Ship Island, some kind of monument to the Louisiana Native Guards—the first officially sanctioned regiment of African American Union soldiers in the Civil War—who were stationed there and to whom no monument exists alongside the monument for Confederate soldiers. According to historian Eric Foner, “Of the hundreds of Civil 56 liturgy War monuments North and South, only a handful depict the 200,000 African Americans who fought for the Union.” That’s only one example of our nation’s collective forgetting. With such erasures commonplace on the landscape, it is no wonder that citizens of the Gulf Coast are concerned with historical memory. And no wonder the struggle for the national memory of New Orleans—and the government’s response in the days after the levees broke—is a contentious one. Political contests over the public memory of historical events undergird the dedication of particular sites, the objects constructed , funds allocated, and the story that is to be told. These contests, rooted in power and money, undergird the direction of rebuilding efforts as well—how the past will be remembered, what narrative will be inscribed by the rebuilding. Many of the people I spoke with on the coast were concerned not only about how the storm and aftermath would be remembered but whether it would be remembered at all. A woman waiting in line at a store worried that people were forgetting the victims on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, what they had endured and endure still. “There’s a difference between a natural disaster and the man-made disaster of New Orleans,” she said. “Don’t forget about us.” Though she acknowledged that more attention has been given to New Orleans because of the travesty of the aftermath, her own need to inscribe a narrative into our national memory prevailed. “We have suffered too,” she said. The first monument erected on the coast to remember Katrina and the victims of the storm stands on the town green in Biloxi. Part of the memorial is a clear Plexiglas box filled liturgy 57 with found and donated objects—shoes, dolls, a flag, pieces of clothing, a cross, a clock. They suggest the ordinary lives of the people and the kinds of things that can be recovered or regained. Taken another way, they symbolize things lost: childhood , innocence, faith—national or religious—and time. A wall of granite in the shape of a wave replicates the height of the storm surge. Even more telling is the dedication: not for whom but by whom the monument was commissioned. A gift donated to the city of Biloxi by abc’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the memorial not only remembers the storm and the people but also inscribes on the landscape a narrative of the commercialization of...