How to write about New Orleans

By Lenelle Moïse – in April 23, 2008

I haven’t written because I don’t know
how to write about New Orleans.
Riding through an empty French Quarter
with a white man in a white pick-up truck,
I try to imagine the perfect, narrow streets
full of the millions of Mardi Gras bodies he describes.
Heartbroken, he mumbles that he is ready to leave
this beautiful, ravished place.
Like a lover about to walk out on you, he says,
“I imagine it’s a lot like Detroit here now,a ghost town.”
But it looks to melike even the ghosts have left, have found
happier people to haunt.I have been to Detroit. I know
what happens when white folks
abandon a cracked city. It breaks.I offer a silent prayer:
May the truck driver stay.May his money stay
here and help rebuild.I don’t know what to say about middle-aged Black
people sleeping in tents and frying eggs in hot plates
under the Interstate in downtown New Orleans.
The yoga instructor who points them out to medoes so too casually,
as if she is pointing out
her favorite restaurant, a famous mural or an expensive skyscraper.
“They used to camp out in front of City Hall
but they put up a barbed-wire fence around City Hall
so now they’re here,” she shrugs. She tells me she can't imagine
that they are native New Orleanians.She insists that they are foreign
hobos and out-of-state workers
who migrated here after the storm.She won’t let herself believe that a government
would treat it’s own people like pests but I know better.I ask around.
I find out that many of the Interstate campers are,in fact, the displaced, ignored
and forgotten people
whose houses were destroyed in the flood. People whose public housing
buildings were torn down so landowners could build condos.
I tell another somber poet what I've seen.
She says,“There is something so permanent about a tent.”
How do I describe walking into a transformed Superdome?
With purple lights shining on stadium seats and a hot pink vagina
spread loud and luscious across the wide, main stage.
Sound never stops travelingso everywhere I go I hear
Katrina's blood-curdling screams.
Especially in the bathrooms where, during the storm,
women and girls and boys and men were rapedand terrorized and raped again.
Every step I take in the dome,I remember:
There was anarchy here.
It was a kind of Armageddon.
It was epic.
It was hell.
It was a waking nightmare.
It was a president in deep sleep while people died here.
People held in their urine for days.
People let their bowels loose, choiceless.
People starved.
People waited.
People prayed. People gave up on God here.
People felt that God had given up on the
mand, brave, prayed some more.
I sit with the 1200 homecoming womenof the Gulf South (dubbed Katrina/Rita Warriors) --nanas, mothers, daughters,
church elder-women, aunts, cousins, friendsand women nobody knew.
When activist and lawyer Colette “Coco” Pichon Battle announces
that they will be offered health screenings,
massages, makeovers and childcare
FOR FREE they laugh from their feet.
They sigh with relief.
One of them pushes the air with her palms
and shouts “Hallelujah!”
Another whispers to a friend,
“Nothing like this has ever
happened to me before.”What a gift it is to be heldlike a woman, I think.
Not held uplike a refugee.There are no words for the electric feeling
of squeezing the hands of Suheir Hammad
and Rha Goddess and hi-fiving Alix Olson, my sisters in poetry.
We see each other and are reminded
that all the line breaks we use are a fancy attempt
at saying something as simple as LOVE.
I hug Jane Fonda for an entire minute.
I hug a weeping woman whose name I can't remember
for even longer. It isn't about names or occupations or
orientations or cities of origin or education levels or annual incomes.
It's about open ears, open mouths and open minds.
It's about pumping blood, pumping hearts and peace-loving, pumping fists.
Have I ever said, sung, shouted, screamed
VAGINA this many times in my life?
At the afterparty, I tell Eve Ensler I am in love with her.
I dance with activists from all around the world.
The female DJ plays Prince, “Lady Marmalade,” Queen Latifah,
“Pretty Young Thing,” Aretha, Destiny's Child and “I'm Every Woman.”
I remember Emma Goldman who said, “If I can't dance,
I don't want to be a part of your revolution.” We dance.
I learn that I feel best when I am dancing, connecting,
asking, listening, embracing, holding, grieving, reciting, spreading,
singing loud in a room or tent or arena full of loud, singing voices.
I like knowing that even though I can't hear myself, my voice
contributes to the big, booming, celebratory sound.
I learn that New Orleans is walkableand dangerous, alive and kicking, traumatized
and resilient. Like Haiti.I learn that women all over the world
of different ages, colors, creeds and credentials
want the same things:
to eradicate poverty and fundamentalism,
misogyny and sex trafficking,
U.S. occupations and genital mutilation,
illiteracy and war.
We want to create art
and grassroots coalitions, alternative masculinities
and safe housesand a global movement to end violence against women.
V-Day is my new religion. Amen.