ABlog

“It looks like the hull of a slave ship,” Rev. Jesse Jackson remarked, commenting on images of destitute, immiserated African-American flood victims abandoned in New Orleans.

Last week, as the magnitude of the socially constructed horror that piggybacked on that city’s trial by storm and flood began to sink in, I listened to a Black colleague vent about the blasé response of a white co-worker who’d shrugged off the unfolding disaster with a dismissive remark about the region’s problems. “It’s poor Black people, and they’re not doing anything for them,” my normally reserved colleague raged. Walking home, I ran into an elderly neighbor, a soft-spoken African-American woman who was spilling over with the anguish she’d been watching on TV. “All these poor minority people. Some of them haven’t had a drink of water in four days. They’re stuck there in the hospitals and no one is coming to get them. Isn’t that just terrible.” I reflected on my own slowness to catch on: hearing that New Orleans was evacuating as the storm approached, why hadn’t I ever thought about what was or wasn’t being done for people who had no cars or money? Why did I know so little of New Orleans’s demographics? Of course I realized there was a strong African-American presence, but now I was hearing (I don’t own a television, so my sense of public events comes through print media and radio) that the desperate people featured in the video coverage—the weeping parents with wailing children, the corpses in wheelchairs—were almost all Black. Why hadn’t I seen it coming? I’d only thought, vaguely, that if there’s one thing this idiot superpower knows how to do efficiently, it’s respond to any “natural” disaster, any problem that can be viewed as standing outside of history (never mind that, between global warming and short-sighted flood control policies, the fact that this particular storm caused such devastation probably had plenty to do with human meddling).

Who could have believed that the apostles of know-how, the richest show on earth, the boys with their groovy flying machines, the engineering nation, the people with all the stuff would have such a hard time figuring out that levees were collapsing, and then fail so spectacularly to respond with the most basic relief measures?

Well, now we know how the world ends—not with a bang at the apex of an elegant narrative arc (the Great Men stand eyeball to eyeball, a choice is made, a button is pushed), but with a whimper (complex systems fail in complex ways; malice, malfeasance, turpitude, and ineptitude collide with things that genuinely can’t be helped). I’m reminded of a fascinating book by Charles Perrow called Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, which looks at the multi-faceted genealogy of disasters like the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island. I believe its analysis of how technology goes wrong offers an extremely useful metaphor for looking at a range of contemporary social disasters. “People know what they do,” Michel Foucault pointed out, “they even know why they do what they do--but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”

But I don’t want to dwell on all that now—on how things go wrong. I want to think about how it shapes the imagination to know that one comes from a certain kind of history of things going wrong: the history that prompts someone safe and dry in a wealthy northern city to say automatically, “that’s me, that’s us” when viewing the video footage from the New Orleans Superdome; that causes such a mind to flash on images of bodies chained in slave ships.

In important yet limited ways, I in my white skin do feel a sense of “we” with people of African descent. I feel this on account of friendship, political history, physical community (city, neighborhood, household)--because of love and daily partnership. Winston and I have been together for 18 years now and, different though we are, the time and the love have made us “one flesh” in every important sense except the conventional one of legal marriage. Whatever is happening to the “we” of the African diaspora is happening not simply to my friends, my students, my Brooklyn neighborhood, my fellow Americans--it is happening to Winston and his family, who came here from Africa by way of the Eastern Caribbean. It is happening to my family. It is happening to me.

At the same time, I remain apart—and not just because of my “white skin privilege,” though that is significant. I remain white, as well, in the history of my imagination. My gut-level sense of where the worst threats lurk comes out of a background that says things are supposed to be basically okay, and they will be, unless we really fuck it up somehow (like by having a nuclear war, or triggering catastrophic climate change). That’s not to imply my forebears had a free ride. Both of my parents were deeply marked by the hardships their Midwestern “working families” underwent in the Depression. I grew up with a sort of religion of self-exertion and self-improvement, a notion that one can never afford to relax one’s vigilance, on either a moral or material level. But that’s a far cry from any collective memory of historical trauma that threatens the survival of one’s group. I come from people who expected to be around indefinitely; individuals might fall through the cracks—after all, that comes with the territory of our wonderful competitive economic system—but the fear this thought induced was nothing like the terror of knowing that the rulers of the world want you dead, or reduced to the status of object.

I wonder how my preoccupation with the end of the world might be different than it is were I stamped with that particular strain of historical memory—the one that Audre Lorde drew on to write “A Litany for Survival,” with its mysteriously hopeful refrain, “We were never meant to survive.” How does it affect one’s mode of response to the broad-spectrum jeopardy in which the human species now finds itself to think, “Well, this feels familiar--our survival has always been an issue”?

I wonder about the ways in which my own sense of “we” is bound up with a history of rule, of empire, of U.S. manifest destiny—even as I rail against the emperors. I wonder about how all of us, now that we are threatened by the “normal accident” of a catastrophic disruption to our biological and technological life support systems, might draw on the imaginative legacies of African diasporic survival to help us grapple with what awaits.

I’m thinking now of how images of apocalypse—images, truly, of “the end of the world”—recur in many of the 20th century works by African-Americans that have touched me most deeply. I think of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and the images of apocalyptic rage and potential conflagration in his “Notes of a Native Son.” I think of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, with its venture into the most desperate human territory—the place not merely of “fear to bring children into the world,” as Bob Dylan said, but of resolve to get them out of it through infanticide rather than leave them to its torments. I think of Alice Walker’s great short essay, originally delivered as a speech at an anti-nuclear rally, “Only Justice Can Stop a Curse.” I think of John Edgar Wideman’s “Fever,” set during the terrible 18th century yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, in which the plague of racism fuses with a “natural” disaster in a way eerily analogous to what we are now seeing in New Orleans. I think also of Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire, which is partly concerned with the firebombing of the group MOVE by the Philadelphia police department, another lethal “normal accident” of a sort inevitable in a racist and classist society. I think of his story “Damballah,” which evokes in a few pages the annihilating order of the slave system, at the same time creating an emotionally convincing image of the kinds of imaginative acts that permitted collective survival in the face of hideous attrition. I think of Sekou Sundiata’s character Space, who appears in the theater piece entitled "The Circle Unbroken Is a Hard Bop" and on the album “The Blue Oneness of Dreams”—Space with his crazy, jittery, paranoid rap, his equipoise between the seer’s wisdom and the nut-job conspiracy theorist’s ravings. I think of the climactic Florida hurricane in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which, like the great Mississippi flood of 1927 or the current situation in Louisiana, exposes racial fault lines as the surviving African-Americans are forced to work collecting and burying the dead. I think of Audre Lorde’s chilling poem “Za Ki Tan Ke Parlay Lot,” the title a patois phrase meaning “you who hear, tell the others”: “This is not some other cities’ trial/your locks are no protection/hate chips at your front doors like flint/flames creep beneath them….you are drowning in my children’s blood/without metaphor.”

We –the Big We, the species-wide first person plural--are in desperate trouble. Some of us are brand new to that concept, or haven’t figured it out yet, or are destined to die stupid. Others have been dealing with it for a long time. Jesse Jackson’s insertion of an equal sign between one moment of the present trouble and a ghastly historical legacy is both dubious in its hyperbole and compelling in its resonance. History doesn’t repeat itself. But future grows out of past. The ubiquitous images of apocalypse and survival in African-American literature have much to tell us about the shape of the coming days, which, despite the tidy projections of Hollywood and the subway evangelists, will unfold chaotically and unevenly on the ground, in the murk and fog and muddy churning of countless small-scale battles, marked by pratfalls and diabolical manipulations, rank self-interest, epic greed, unlooked-for generosity, solidarity, and grace under pressure.