Prosimetrum for the 9th Ward

New Orleans. Callaloo’s 2008 conference and retreat. The 9^th Ward tour. What is government for? How should artists respond to a failure by government to govern? Not like in Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus where toil, both as art and craft, continues unperturbed as disaster ensues. I’m on a bus filled with academics and other writers, surely a motley crew if ever there was one, prone to speculation, imaginative forays into presumed republics of blame, and downright vindictive (so I’m told) when it comes to the machinations of authority. In this case, the despotic authority of central and local government towards the poor (and by historical conflation) black inhabitants of this area. The 9^th Ward of the much fabled New Orleans (Long live Satchmo, King Oliver, the Dodds brothers, the Kid Ory Band) now a mass of rubble and concrete foundations devoid of house frames, scattered limbs and naked stumps of trees, vines creeping up partial walls and over bowdlerized ground, and grass sprouting in the cracks and crannies of concrete, a city’s neglected grid, abandoned to fend for itself against a fecund nature of wildness. But this is a city. This is not the political jungle of internecine warfare captured by CNN and brought to our mortgaged lives from faraway failed states. This is where American families struggled to feed and clothe young and old alike and fought to keep jobs and meet the demands of power and light and food bills. They did not prosper—so few in America really prosper—but they picked here, this place, this New Orleans, to make a life. So, where are they now?

These miles with black skin stretched over them black skin over rubble, over concrete bases where houses should sit. This rubble of black flesh flung for miles, truckloads of flesh if black flesh were cargo once again, at a premium once again but this time to be thrown away as too poor, too raw for this city. But the drunks in the street of the French Quarter dance shackled in beads. They do not see the skin they march on or hear Flesh yield underfoot, partying till the Mississippi Dawns red, red as black flesh filled with blood.

The light in this 9^th Ward is merciless, now that the buildings have been swept aside by the floods. There is nothing to hold back this bleaching light, nothing to interrupt the glare. In this interrogating light no stone is left unturned. Particularly, the stone of abject neglect of a people by its government and by those elected locally to take care of the city’s infrastructure. This light points one pylon of a finger at negligent authority for throwing these citizens away. For sending them to twenty other states and forgetting them. For leaving the wreckage of their lives here in the 9^th just as the floods left it but after two years and three years now a glaring museum of neglect of criminal proportions.

This is the light of the poor of our so-called First World: a light in which no quarter must be shown to the poor. No mercy for the weak: the throwaway people. This light wishes to forget them and promote the weeds of renewal before developers claim the land for profit. Where are the gods of equilibrium? Creative though they may be; theoretical though they purport to be. Where are the forces in nature which help the good hearted until they can help themselves? These forces are natural, to an extent, but they are social as well and surely, moral and spiritual. It may be that such a force is contained in the safety of this steel canister on wheels, this bus with so many fine minds outraged and brought to tears by what we see in street after street: the systematic destruction of lives and then the demonstrable disdain for their suffering by continued negligence of their plight of being uprooted. Where are the gods who promise retribution for such bold, bald, bodacious misuse of resources and authority?

Something pushes up...