ChickenBones: A Journal

for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes

   

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A Canal Street of tourists & low wages / cultural colonies of Zulus & Mardi Gras

  Indians, they too were in abundance like / banana trees in narrow alleys & dreamers

 

 

There's No Way Out This Sadness?

                                By Rudolph Lewis

Rivers, lakes, and oceans, we’ve had

aplenty & bayou blues & camelbacks

 

A Canal Street of tourists & low wages

cultural colonies of Zulus & Mardi Gras

 

Indians, they too were in abundance like

banana trees in narrow alleys & dreamers

 

But flood waters washed away Treme

& Piety, the play on Desire & Gentilly

 

Now speculators in Benz & Lincoln ride

now by abandoned houses on empty streets

 

N’awlins, there’s no way out this takeover

 

there’s no way out this loss, this sadness

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posted 23 September 2005

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The Katrina Papers a Journal of Trauma and Recovery

By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

The Katrina Papers is not your average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of writing, including intellectual autobiography, personal narrative, political/cultural analysis, spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry. Though it is the record of one man's experience of Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a part of his life and work as a scholar, political activist, and professor.  The Katrina Papers provides space not only for the traumatic events but also for ruminations on authors such as Richard Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The result is a complex though thoroughly accessible book. The struggle with formthe search for a medium proper to the complex social, personal, and political ramifications of an event unprecedented in this scholar's life and in American social historylies at the very heart of The Katrina Papers. It depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view which takes the local as its nexus for understanding the global.  It resists the temptation to simplify or clarify when simplification and clarification are not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very direct, but he always refuses to simplify the complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the process and the historical moment that he is witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is both pedagogical and inspiring.Hank Lazer

The Katrina Papers, by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. $18.95

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update 20 April 2010

 

 

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Related files:  What Does It Mean to Survive N'awlins  Can You Quilt a Life, Now Dead?  Address on the Battle for New Orleans I Gave My Heart to That Woman