"Just a Closer Walk With Thee"
New Orleans funeral dirge
Through this world of toil and snares,
If I falter, Lord, who cares?
Who with me my burden shares?
None but Thee, dear Lord, none but Thee.
The love affairs we share with cities are secret things. Mine begin with their connection to the waters that nourish them.
The crooked canals of Venice and the narrow walkways chasing after them, closed in like a picture frame. Camps' Bay Beach in Capetown, when the immense magenta dusk opens its mouth to swallow the cobalt colored stones of Table Mountain. The emerald waters of the Bosporus dissecting Istanbul at dawn, as the lights of the Blue Mosque fade with the morning call to prayer. The fog and wind sweeping over the Bay in San Francisco at noon on an impossibly sunny day in the middle of winter. Or even New York, where I work and live, where nature has been exiled and replaced with jagged skyscrapers rising from the ground like gigantic tombstones--this desert of concrete and iron is also a series of islands dependent on her rivers and harbor.
And then there is New Orleans. My home. New Orleans is nothing without water. New Orleans is water--a city in a swamp where sea is not distinct from land, where more than any other city water defines a way of life. Everywhere you turn there is water. In New Orleans we breathe water. We drink the air.
In late August 2005, the waters that give New Orleans life finally betrayed her. They burst through the levees and swallowed the city whole. They left hundreds of bodies floating in houses transformed into underwater tombs. They left thousands stranded on rooftops, tens of thousands stranded at the Superdome or the Convention Center, and hundreds of thousands stranded in strange places all across the country. They exposed to the world the pathological effects of poverty and racism in the United States, and the deep ineptitude of the most powerful government in the history of the world.
Perhaps it would have been better had New Orleans never reemerged from the waters. After all, Atlantis is forever romanticized as the lost civilization or, if you believe the moderns, a utopian society. Or Pompeii, scorched between a fold in time and buried for seventeen centuries before being rediscovered by accident. New Orleans should be so lucky. On the contrary, once drained in the weeks after Katrina, she had to endure without the one thing which gave to her a distinct nobility – her people.
How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary! She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.
- The Book of Lamentations
More than three years later, the world has moved on from Hurricane Katrina, from New Orleans, from the grotesque images that mesmerized and befuddled billions of people around the world for five gripping days in late summer 2005. More than three years later, the images which Rebecca Zilenziger and other photographers have captured seem like ancient history. For each of the last three spring breaks, I have brought students from Pace University, where I teach political science, back to New Orleans to do volunteer work. This last time – March 2008 – a student of mine told her parents she was going to New Orleans to volunteer and they asked her what for. She replied: Hurricane Katrina. Their response: you mean that is still happening?
Yes. I suppose it is still happening.
Which is probably why Zilenziger’s images are so important to hold close. Some pieces of this mortal earth are worth fighting for – especially at the moment of their loss. Since Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians have returned to repair the breach in the levees and in their lives. Almost as many volunteers have made a pilgrimage to assist. Some looked at Katrina and rejoiced that New Orleans would now be rid of its poverty and ugliness. My response is that I didn't know what real poverty and ugliness were until I left home as a young man and saw the vapid suburbs and strip malls of America.
These images matter because they remind us that, through the pain of Katrina, death, destruction, and the folly of arrogant men cannot conquer an uncontrollable appetite for life in the people of New Orleans. Neither can an exile which was Katrina’s meaning. These lessons we should not soon forget.
Lost civilizations and utopian societies are made for mythology. Pompeii is a gorgeous cemetery and a tragic museum. New Orleans is for the living.
I'm walking to New Orleans.
Just a closer walk with thee, New Orleans.
When I arrive we're gonna push the waters back--
To the Lake,
To the River.
With a shovel in one hand and a horn in the other.
Christopher Malone, Ph.D
New York City
December 1st, 2008