[September 25th marks William Faulkner’s 125th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Faulkner and other Southern storytellers, leading up to a special weekend tribute to a great new Faulkner website!]
On three exemplary
stages of artistic depictions of the controversial
21st century tragedy.
1)
Documenting: Released less than a year after
Katrina hit, Spike Lee’s gripping documentary When the Levees
Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) is required viewing for anyone
seeking to understand the hurricance and its many complex contexts and effects;
but it’s only one of many
impressive documentary films on those topics released in the years after
the storm. Among them I would especially highlight Trouble the Water
(2008), an immersive account of the storm filmed by a local family and
featuring some of the most stunning and devastating on the ground footage of a
hurricance ever captured. Taken together, Levees
and Trouble offer crucial
complementary lenses through which to document Katrina, and on a broader level
exemplify what documentary storytelling can do in representing such histories
and communicating them to audiences.
2)
Rebuilding: There are likewise important
documentaries about the multi-layered, ongoing efforts to rebuild New Orleans
in the post-storm era. But I believe that the best artistic representation of
that process is Treme, David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s
four-season HBO show about music, food, race, culture, relationships, and the
residents of that New Orleans neighborhood (and of the city overall) in the
storm’s aftermath. Simon is a
master television storyteller, and one of our culture’s most
impressive depictors of urban communities and stories, but I would also
argue that a TV show was the perfect artistic vehicle to chronicle the
rebuilding process. Being able to follow the show’s numerous characters across
multiple episodes and seasons provided a gradual, nuanced, contradictory, and
always compelling perspective on whether and how the city could find its way
again after the destructions and traumas of the storm.
3)
Remembering: Both those documentaries and a show
like Treme continue to have vital
roles to play as New Orleans and the nation continue to document and rebuild,
but nearly a dozen years after the storm, the complexities and meanings of
remembering have also taken on a more prominent place in our collective
narratives of Katrina. I don’t know of any artistic texts about Katrina that
represent those complexities and meanings more successfully and powerfully than
does Jesmyn Ward’s
National Book Award-winning novel Salvage
the Bones (2011). Ward’s immersive, lyrical novel of a Mississippi
family before, during, and after the storm is in many ways singular, but I
would nonetheless argue that it also exemplifies what novels can do as
representations of dark and potentially divisive histories. By focusing so
fully and deeply on her central characters and family, Ward’s novel illustrates
how fiction can produce empathy with the individual experiences and
perspectives that are at the heart of any historical event—and thus can reshape
our collective memories of those histories through such intimate, individual
voices and stories.
Last
storytelling studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Southern storytellers you’d share?
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