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Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992)
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The Katrina
Papers
Reckoning with
Displacement
By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
December 6, 2005: Reckoning with
Displacement
People are possessed by hope, sensing at once
its promise and its futility. One hopes to resolves economic
difficulties by winning several million dollars. The probability
that one can warp from poverty to wealth overnight is farfetched
, a transparent fantasy. One might hope that tribesmen, dusted
by Islam, would honor the Words of Allah and not murder , in the
name of honor, women they believe have been violated . It is
unlikely such virtue can unsettle the male-defined tribal mind.
One does not discard root and branch an idea that has been
growing since the invention of antiquity. In the fervent mind of
the tribesmen, the hymen must be either intact or totipotent.
When such brave Muslim women as Serap Cileli
(We’re Your Daughters, Not Your Honor) and Necla Kelek
(The Foreign Bride) expose mortal sins, we may hope the
lesson is not lost on Euroamerian wife-abusers. Hope on. The
words of those who dissent, who transgress the pseudo-sacred,
receive scant attention. Their words are hangnails to be clipped
and discarded. Nevertheless, in our brave new world of
electronic possibilities, hope refuses to die. It is brash and
determined and survival-oriented. It lives.
One might hope that ordinary civilians would
not become the collateral damage of warfare, knowing even in the
moment of hoping that the God of War is blind and thirsty,
incapable of discriminating the blood of the innocent from the
wine of the guilty. Hope is absurd.
Strangely, it is within the hopeless confines
of the absurd that one hopes to find meaning in exile, in the
diaspora occasioned by Hurricane Katrina.
From the vantage of a writer, the lack of a
good library, or the pain of not having one’s dearly loved
books at hand, is a bittersweet blessing. The writer in exile
recalls that other writers have sometimes volunteered to exile
themselves in artist and writer colonies. This places exile in
arguable perspective. The disadvantages of forced exile, you can
freely lie to yourself, are sweeter and yield higher dividends.
Matthew Arnold thought sweetness and light were primal
ingredients of the civilized mind. He was dead wrong. The truly
civilized mind is a product of recurring darkness. It can not
flourish where the dirt is not as saturated with bitter toxins
like the soil of post-Katrina New Orleans. Examine the fabulous
textures of writers exiled from the Crescent City for evidence.
Or explore the weavings of writers who have returned to the Big
Easy to create in the moldy stench, in an "exile" from
the normal.
The writer in exile becomes a rabbit. She or
he navigates the briar patch of memory. The rabbit does not
forget convoluted paths, the tracks of reading and witnessing
that have become matters of instinct. The rabbit remembers the
lettuce of the King James Bible and munches on the carrots of
expanding canons. Emersonian self-reliance increases tenfold and
enables the rabbit to explore geographies of imagination. There
critical foxes do not run you down and snap your neck. There you
are immune to the intimidation of the book, to its power to
batter you with exactness. You hop blissfully over alien
terrain. The rabbit remembers what is most worth remembering.
Exile forces the writer to live outside the box,
to be remote from textual or referential certitude. The writer
has hope that odd combinations in a new context do work.
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End of the Year Letter
Vicksburg, Mississippi
December 11, 2005
Dear Friends,
This year has been one of serious decisions.
Natural disasters have made us aware of things we might wish had
remained hidden and dormant. We had to choose what is so
important about our being in this world that we shall elect to
have it govern the remainder of our lives. The fact of
breathing, at least for me, is now an existential phenomenon. It
is necessary to segregate what is actual from what is merely
real. As the year ends in holiday moods of sound, benign
insanity, and color, I think 2005 has much improved our visions
of the world.
Hope stands nude in its brilliant absurdity.
Charity is water that evaporates rapidly. Faith is a mosquito
that sings celestial hymns in the ear. Love has not changed its
character; it exercises its enormous powers with impunity.
Stupidity has exhibited itself to be the denial that slavery,
genocide, colonialism and imperialism; self-hatred and
ethnic-hate; fascism and sexism; class struggles, diseases, and
racism; capitalist tyranny and pseudo-socialism in the guise of
globalization, and plain old evil retard human efforts to be
civilized and dignified. The idea of virtue can not be conceived
without a disturbing reference to permanent conflicts among
human beings. Like the figures on a famous urn, the princes of
peace are involved in an eternal battle with the gods of war.
The much overrated inventions named goodness, truth, and beauty
are toys for children. It is not a bad thing if some of us opt
to become children again. 2005 made the whole planet very adult.
Do not be surprised to find that 2005 altered
some facets of my personality, that 2005 has handed me a surplus
of issues to carry into 2006. I refuse to burden you with a
catalog of post-Katrina complaints. It is sufficient that you
know I did experience some moments of joy during 2005. The
unexpected and reaffirming kindness of friends and strangers
prevented my walking through the mirror of death into the
unknowable. I will return to New Orleans in January to resume my
work at Dillard University and my research projects. I will
continue to share excerpts from THE KATRINA PAPERS, a journal of
my visions and epiphanies, with you. Meanwhile, I wish that you
and your families will have abundant happiness and peace during
the holiday season and thereafter. And finally I want to say
thanks for being there when I needed you most.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
4311 Commons Circle
Vicksburg, MS 39180
(601) 883-9926
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posted 13 December 2005 / updated 9
April 2008 |
