"Was Katrina a Monster, Daddy?" A Review of Beyond Katrina by Natasha Tretheway
reviewed by James Dickson
whatthingnews : I was reading my five-year-old son a story about dragons, when he threw me an unexpected question: “Dad? Was Katrina some kind of monster? Robbie’s big brother was talking about her at school. He said Katrina smashed his grandparents’ house a long time ago.”
For most of us living close to the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Katrina, which struck on August 29, 2005, was a monster of nearly mythical proportions, and for my son who was born five years later, the carnage Katrina inflicted seems beyond reality, the work of cartoon meanies with raspy voices and serrated teeth. Yet she was entirely real, and the destruction she wrought created millions of individual stories that make up the larger story of our nation’s weird relationship with Katrina. In her reissued and updated memoir, Beyond Katrina, poet Natasha Trethewey, a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, tells lots of stories about the coast, beginning in 2007, two years after the hurricane. Unlike much of the Katrina literature, which centers around New Orleans, this book is set farther east, near the midpoint of the Mississippi coast, where things supposedly turned out better. As the title suggests, Tretheway uses Katrina as the jumping-off point for a broader essay on the way it has changed the region.
In the initial section, she shows us the psychic scars of the disaster. We learn that coastal residents refer to things as BK or AK: Before Katrina or After Katrina. The worst hurricane BK was 1969’s Camille, a storm that washed some boats ashore and destroyed buildings, but with far less rage than Katrina. We are told of Trethewey’s aging grandmother, struggling with dementia, whose memory has conflated the two storms. Always the poet, Trethewey uses this as metaphor:
She has layered on the old story of Camille the new story of Katrina. Between the two, there is the suggestion of both a narrative and a metanarrative—the way she both remembers and forgets, the erasures, and how intricately intertwined memory and forgetting always are.
When Mississippians talk about the storm, we invariably contrast our successful resurrection to Louisiana’s extended zombie state. The easy narrative is this: things (like levees and local government) worked here; in Louisiana, they failed miserably. Here, volunteer efforts led the way; there, a corrupt and ineffective set of decision-makers allowed poor people to die. But Trethewey refuses to let that oversimplification go unchallenged. She uses it as a template for the way that simple stories about Katrina are often untrue or only half true. She points out that the first businesses to re-open on the Mississippi coast were the “boats,” as they are known—floating casinos, created by the 1992 legislation legalizing gambling in Mississippi, which restricts casinos to navigable water. With their deep pockets, the casinos could fund their own rebuilding; and with their huge contributions to the state’s tax coffers, their ability to get rebuilding permits was unsurprisingly easy, according to Trethewey.
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For most of us living close to the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Katrina, which struck on August 29, 2005, was a monster of nearly mythical proportions, and for my son who was born five years later, the carnage Katrina inflicted seems beyond reality, the work of cartoon meanies with raspy voices and serrated teeth. Yet she was entirely real, and the destruction she wrought created millions of individual stories that make up the larger story of our nation’s weird relationship with Katrina. In her reissued and updated memoir, Beyond Katrina, poet Natasha Trethewey, a native of Gulfport, Mississippi, tells lots of stories about the coast, beginning in 2007, two years after the hurricane. Unlike much of the Katrina literature, which centers around New Orleans, this book is set farther east, near the midpoint of the Mississippi coast, where things supposedly turned out better. As the title suggests, Tretheway uses Katrina as the jumping-off point for a broader essay on the way it has changed the region.In the initial section, she shows us the psychic scars of the disaster. We learn that coastal residents refer to things as BK or AK: Before Katrina or After Katrina. The worst hurricane BK was 1969’s Camille, a storm that washed some boats ashore and destroyed buildings, but with far less rage than Katrina. We are told of Trethewey’s aging grandmother, struggling with dementia, whose memory has conflated the two storms. Always the poet, Trethewey uses this as metaphor:
She has layered on the old story of Camille the new story of Katrina. Between the two, there is the suggestion of both a narrative and a metanarrative—the way she both remembers and forgets, the erasures, and how intricately intertwined memory and forgetting always are.
When Mississippians talk about the storm, we invariably contrast our successful resurrection to Louisiana’s extended zombie state. The easy narrative is this: things (like levees and local government) worked here; in Louisiana, they failed miserably. Here, volunteer efforts led the way; there, a corrupt and ineffective set of decision-makers allowed poor people to die. But Trethewey refuses to let that oversimplification go unchallenged. She uses it as a template for the way that simple stories about Katrina are often untrue or only half true. She points out that the first businesses to re-open on the Mississippi coast were the “boats,” as they are known—floating casinos, created by the 1992 legislation legalizing gambling in Mississippi, which restricts casinos to navigable water. With their deep pockets, the casinos could fund their own rebuilding; and with their huge contributions to the state’s tax coffers, their ability to get rebuilding permits was unsurprisingly easy, according to Trethewey.
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