Books by Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers
(2003 /
Singular Like a Bird: The Art of Nancy Morejon
(1999)
The
Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells (1995) /
Erotique Noire/Black Erotica
(1992) /
Homespun
Images
( 1989) /
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Rising and
Recovering from the Water Logged Ashes
A Review of The
Katrina Papers by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
By
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
February 16, 2009
In
the December 21, 2005 entry of
The Katrina Papers,
entitled “Notes on Book Reviewing,” Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
writes:
|
Book
reviewing long ago lost its purpose of
shaping tastes and educating readers. .
. . The reviewer uses the occasion of
talking about the book to spew the
fetid, festering content of his or her
psychology; class identity is worn like
armor, and the lance of random desire
pierces the reader” (58-59) |
With trepidation,
then, I approach the daunting task of reviewing a
difficult, complex, and multilayered work of brilliance,
honesty, and heroism. I shall not pretend to shape
tastes, assuming that anyone who reads this piece has
tastes of his or her own, and it certainly is not my
intention to educate readers, because I retired from
higher education several years ago. No, my purpose is
quite mundane: to stimulate interest in a fascinating
and illuminating book.
First, the event. Called one of this country’s deadliest
and most destructive hurricanes, Katrina, which made
landfall on August 29, 2005, wreaked havoc on the Gulf
Coast, causing over 2,000 deaths and the dispersal of
one million people into the largest diaspora in U. S.
history. Who can forget the images of poor folk,
children, and the elderly—mostly African
Americans—trapped in the New Orleans Convention Center
or stranded on the Danziger Bridge? As Ward notes in his
prologue, the dispersed recorded passionate stories of
survival to bear witness to the tragedy and to theorize
about the personal, political, and economic consequences
of the disaster.
These ur-stories, as he calls them,
include cinematic narratives, such as
When the Levees
Broke, which he discusses in
TKP, and Trouble the
Water, as well as written texts—Mourning Katrina:
A Poetic Response to Tragedy and
After the Storm:
Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane
Katrina, for example.
A
significant addition to this body of literature is
Ward’s story.
The Katrina Papers
is a profound meditation on the emotional, intellectual,
and psychological effects of a natural
disaster—exacerbated by human failure, if not
criminality—on the body and mind of a “displaced
scholar” who struggles heroically to transcend the
trauma and, in the process, to transform his life.
Katrina, for Ward, is a life-altering event. The text
covers a year, from September 2, 2005, four days after
he fled New Orleans and found refuge in the First
Baptist Church shelter, to August 29, 2006, the first
anniversary of the day that the levees broke in the
Crescent City.
During that year, he spent two weeks in a
Vicksburg, Mississippi shelter, another three and a half
months in a Vicksburg apartment, six months in the
Hilton New Orleans Riverside Hotel (called the Dillard
Hilton because college classes were held there), and,
finally, on Saturday, July 8, 2006, he returned to his
home at 1928 Gentilly Boulevard, which he dubbed Camp
1928, because of its primitive conditions. There, he
slept on an air mattress under a naked ceiling, while
weeds choked the lawn; later, he described the ruined
floors, mold-infested walls, and the smell of dying in
the house.
As
the sub-title,
A Journal of Trauma and Recovery,
indicates, Ward’s self-narrative is structured like a
journal, a genre with a long literary history, including
works as diverse—and as literary—as tenth-century
Japanese pillowbooks, Emerson and Thoreau’s
nineteenth-century diaries of self-reliance, and the
twentieth-century psychological journals of Carl Jung
and Ira Progoff. Because it is an open genre that allows
complete freedom of expression without formal rules with
regard to content, structure, or style, Ward includes
such disparate forms of writing as e-mails, poems,
lists, letters, lectures, epiphanies, conversations,
book reviews, conference notes, and even dialogues with
himself.
Each entry is a discrete unit, but what
provides unity and coherence to the various segments is
the rhythm of the narrative: memories of his mother,
father, and Vietnam; frequent allusions to the same
people and places; and repetition of certain rituals
such as his morning cup of coffee, Sunday morning Mass,
and the weekly tête a tête with
Kalamu ya Salaam.
The textual rhythm parallels and undergirds “the rising and
falling rhythms of [the author’s] life”: writing,
teaching classes, attending conferences, and performing
civic duties.
This rhythm is frequently disrupted by uncontrollable
events and existential despair, which leads to silence,
panic, feelings of isolation, and even thoughts of
suicide. The trauma of the hurricane, flight from New
Orleans, and retreat to a shelter culminate in four days
of complete silence, the significance of which he does
not elaborate on until his first lengthy entry on
September 13:
|
Writing. Help! I have not been writing
the way I want to write. I have been
thinking about writing, the fragility of
writing, how personal it is (12). |
The implied “you” in the command “Help!” invites
the reader into the author’s private, intimate world,
and it is Ward’s openness and vulnerability that is one
of the hallmarks of his journal. The reader, especially
one who shares his love of writing and research, can
feel his despair on returning home for the first time,
in early October, to discover that his papers,
manuscripts, and rare books—the possessions that define
him as a scholar—have been destroyed. The resulting
“depression and periods of near-insanity” recur
throughout the journal and eventually prompt him to seek
psychiatric help after a brief hospitalization.
The
depression also creates a profound sense of dislocation
and alienation from others, and even from the
person—stable and disciplined—that he once was, an
alienation that he expresses very movingly through
dialogues with himself and with his body. Ward often
writes in the second person, in what he calls “the other
voice, the italicized me, [who] provides copious
backtalk in my mind (116).” Here, the other voice speaks
to him:
|
After Mass,
you did not walk back to the hotel. You
floated in rainlight. You floated as the thunder
roared over New Orleans” (166). |
This poetic passage is
followed, several pages later, by an hilarious call and
response between the writer and his body:
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Your body reminds you that even in a shelter it had the
pleasure of a hot shower. You remind your body that it
had endured cold showers during the summer after its freshman year in
college and in Vietnam. Your body gives you back talk: “Yes, but I was young,
young, you hear?” You’d think your body would appreciate the fact that it
slept on an air mattress rather than in a sleeping bag. (170)
|
These passages—one poetic and the other
humorous—indicate that Ward experiences both trauma and
recovery through language, through the act of writing.
His journal, like that of painter Frida Kahlo, is an
artistic workbook in which he employs various forms of
creative writing, including poems and prose narratives.
Unlike the daily diary of a novice, his journal is a
literary work, carefully organized and structured,
edited and revised by the author, and reviewed by
other published writers. The reader can almost look over
the author’s shoulder as he constructs his text. On page
52, for example, Ward lists entry ideas for
TKP,
including such provocative titles as “Having an argument
with St. Paul” and “Cornel West and the Laundry Room.”
Throughout the journal, he writes about the benefits of
writing, sending entries to friends for their comments,
and drafting more entries for
The Katrina Papers
. . . as the reader views the work in progress.
Some days, he
writes, I have no words to describe feeling. When
words fail him and prose seems inadequate to express his
emotions, he writes poetry to convey feelings of grief,
outrage, or nostalgia. The poems scattered throughout
the text range from short verses, such as a haiku and a
satiric couplet, “we drink syrup, we chew salt / if
sorrow sings, it ain’t our fault (198),” to longer, free
verse poems, like "When It Rains: Morton Salt Poem for
Quo Vadis Gex Breaux," about the aftermath of
Katrina, and "POEM 63," about a homeless woman on
the corner of Canal and Claiborne. I particularly like
his witty riff on Aretha Franklin’s “Chain of Fools,”
entitled "Poem 227, or Change, change, change / change
of tools."
He also employs fictive
devices—foreshadowing, dramatic descriptions, and
staccato sentences—in discrete stories, including his
sojourn in a shelter, the psychologist from New Jersey,
and the trip to Mama D’s house. The longest and most
moving of these narratives is the account of
his arrest
and imprisonment in the holding cell at Tulane and
Broad. With complete honesty (“I can not lie . . . I
broke a law.”), he bears witness to the dehumanizing
experience, comparing the prison to Arab slave caravans,
European slave ships, and slave cells on the Isle of Goree; and he reflects on the defects of the criminal
justice system—the filth, corruption, and psychotic
officers of the law. Language is a metaphor of the
misery:
|
In jail,
language breaks into little pieces; it
ignores syntax and grammatical standards; it
transgresses for the sake of transgression
(178). |
In
his prison narrative, Ward’s own language—his five-word
sentence, for example: “Body odor, shit, piss,
vomit.”—is hard, tactile, and physical; it conveys the
smell, taste, sight, and feel of that hell hole. His
metaphoric language evokes the effect of his physical
contact with filth. He writes:
| I am
beginning to smell. I no longer smell
Catholic. I smell Sunni or Shiite. I should
wash me (180). |
Language, then, is the medium in which Ward communicates
his trauma and recovery, and he is a master of the art.
He employs various linguistic registers; he writes
phrases in Spanish and prefers Latin Masses, noting,
humorously, that “there was just enough Latin in today’s
Mass to induce a high.” For the most part, he writes
eloquently in the language of the Academy, but, when the
occasion calls for it, he can get down and dirty:
|
Can’t you motherfuckers see that I am still
breathing? Goddamn. |
He creates pithy neologisms–“hurrication
(a hurricane vacation) and traumaticalize”
(129)—and pungent witticisms:
|
Truth is an adult who does not sit in a
playpen with stupidity” (216). |
Ward
revels in wordplay (“Some writers lie for a living and
are quite successful. Other writers lie in wait for a
living, like Godot” [167]) and his repertoire of
metaphors, similes, synecdoche, and other figures of
speech is formidable. This serious work is leavened by
his unique combination of humor and sardonic wit. I
laughed out loud when I read the long paragraph that
begins with this analogy:
|
After our daily thunderstorms
began, the weeds got religion. Newly sanctified by the
drenching, the weeds tried to outdo one another with
praise hymns to the god of growth. (208) |
In
a letter to his friend, Julius E. Thompson, written in
the final pages of
The Katrina Papers, Jerry Ward
reflects on the significance of his work and of writing,
in general. He notes:
|
If I have learned anything from the year-long process of
keeping a journal of trauma and recovery, it is a valuable lesson
about writing and the world. Writing helps us to possess “worlds” that the
inhabited world would deny us. Although these worlds vanish with our minds when we
die, perhaps someone will find something useful in the traces (225).
|
For
me, that “something useful” is the knowledge that a
person can survive a harrowing experience with grace and
dignity, can write about the trauma with insight and
passion, can share his personal feelings with complete
honesty, can reflect on the broader, human implications
of that experience, and can transform his life through
the process of writing.
Miriam DeCosta-Willis, author
and college professor, was born 1 November 1934, in
Florence, Alabama. She received her B.A. at Wellesley
College in 1956; her M.A. Johns Hopkins in 1960; her
Ph.D. Johns Hopkins in 1967 in Romance Languages. In
1967 she joined the faculty of Memphis State University
as the first African American member, and while there
agitated for more black staff members. When King was
assassinated in 1968 she was in the march that erupted
into violence and the police used mace on her.
more
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Notable Black Memphians (Miriam
DeCosta-Willis)—This
biographical and historical study by Miriam DeCosta-Willis (PhD,
Johns Hopkins University and the first African American faculty
member of Memphis State University) traces the evolution of a major
Southern city through the lives of men and women who overcame social
and economic barriers to create artistic works, found institutions,
and obtain leadership positions that enabled them to shape their
community. Documenting the accomplishments of Memphians who were
born between 1795 and 1972, it contains photographs and biographical
sketches of 223 individuals (as well as brief notes on 122 others),
such as musicians Isaac Hayes and Aretha Franklin, activists Ida B.
Wells and Benjamin L. Hooks, politicians Harold Ford Sr. and Jr.,
writers Sutton Griggs and Jerome Eric Dickey, and Bishop Charles
Mason and Archbishop James Lyke—all of whom were born in Memphis or
lived in the city for over a decade. . . . |
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posted 18 February 2009 |
