From the Filmmaker, Still Waiting: Life After Katrina

Still Waiting: Life After Katrina leads many viewers to comment on the strength and centrality of women in the 155-member family that we followed. I want to point out, however, that this woman-centered film rises not from a decision to showcase women’s voices or experiences, but from the truths that came to light through steady, ethnographic work.

Over a period of 18 months, we became students of the family’s nightmares and their struggles to find a way back to life as they had known it. As we interviewed all varieties of people at different stages of grief and recovery, many key stories, personalities, and themes emerged naturally. The force of women became an undeniable theme. Through storytelling, cooking, and ritual gatherings, key women reproduced a sense of belonging and continuity amidst the upheaval, displacement, and confusion of life away from home. Women galvanized others in the network to get organized, stay connected, practice their faith, and face with courage the overwhelming odds that threatened every member of the group. And, beyond the details of their own stories, the women in Still Waiting capture a larger social truth about African American families and the multiple ways that women manage and sustain their kin networks, however profound the challenges.

In the last days of August of 2005, like millions of other Americans, I watched with horror the raging storm that pushed right through ill-built levees in New Orleans and threatened to drown the city. Reports from the bayou communities outside the city showed how these areas were imperiled by even more than the levee breaches. In places like St. Bernard Parish where most of the Still Waiting family had their homes, the natural buffer of extensive wetlands had largely disappeared as a result of oil pipeline construction and manmade ship channels. Without the thousands of acres of wetlands that had once kept powerful storm surges at bay, whole parishes like this one had become vulnerable.

New Orleans has always been a complex, soulful city. My shock and sadness at the unspeakable and unnecessary damage of Katrina moved me to look for a way to relocate my research here. The prospect of doing anthropology in New Orleans, the only French Caribbean city in the United States, felt like a natural extension of my long-term fieldwork on the French island of Martinique. By chance, I had nearly completed an ethnographic film with Emmy-winning filmmaker Ginny Martin about my research with Afro-Creole women entrepreneurs in Martinique.¹ When Katrina struck, like many scholars all over the country, I felt a sense of urgency to research what was happening. At Colorado State University, I formed a research partnership with an extraordinary young disaster sociologist, Lori Peek, and together we secured funding from the National Science Foundation to pursue our separate Katrina research plans. Peek would focus on interviewing evacuees to Denver as would my graduate student, Megan Underhill; I would collaborate on a new film project with Martin to document the lived experience of disaster in hopes of one day communicating these realities to a broad American public.

From our first encounter with the family portrayed in Still Waiting,² the women of the group made a strong impression. The senior women became models for others, practicing every conceivable strategy to reproduce the sense of family and comfort they had enjoyed back home. In Connie’s kitchen, they prepared “down-home” comfort food, and even sent men on periodic all-day runs to Louisiana just to bring back the Creole ingredients that were unavailable in Dallas. They told stories, drew out anxious children, and schemed ways to get back home. We filmed everyone who agreed to be interviewed, and most of these were women. In the end, the people that others regarded as the glue of the family—Katie, Connie, and Janie—became the glue for our film.

Connie’s centrality to the network and to our story was evident from the beginning: she was the one who had welcomed all her bayou relatives to her home in Texas.³ The 155 people who...