After experiencing a disaster, communities have to rebuild everything like homes, relationships, and businesses. That’s why our project focuses on Hurricane Katrina and the teamwork the community had to have in order to rebuild their homes. We focused on resiliency, rebuilding friendships, homes, and the community. We used poems and essays, outside resources, the novel “Salvage the Bones” written by Jesmyn Ward and Voyant to give us more input about our topic. We thought this was a great topic, that goes with Hurricane Katrina because people came together to rebuild their city and what they’ve lost. After Hurricane Katrina the impact caused the people that were affected to restore what they’ve lost. The tragedy manifested different levels of resiliency that people used in order to rebuild their relationships, homes, and communities.
The book Salvage the Bones is about Esch, a 15-year-old who lives in Mississippi, Esch goes through a lot of hardships in her young life. Through sexual abuse, death of a parent, and neglect from the other parent. Esch is pregnant by the end of the book by an young man named Manny. Her brothers eventually surround her and come to terms with her pregnancy. When the storm calms the following day, Esch’s father tells her that he’ll support her and her child. Big Henry, a friend of the family, tells Esch that he’ll help with her child and take on the role of its father. Skeetah waits for China to return; even when he pulled to leave, he demands that he’ll stay and wait and Esch understands this because now she is now a mother. This book really put together the fallout of Hurricane Katrina, building back with relationships and resilience. From a 15-year-old girl getting pregnant, to a father rejecting her and the loss of a beloved family member. At the end of this book, you can see how everyone comes to and surrounds one another with love.
Before Hurricane Katrina hit Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, Esch’s life was in complete shambles. Esch, along with her siblings, practically took care of themselves after their mother died. With no mother figure in their lives, nor a good father to properly guide them, they did things primarily on their own. In a way, this resulted in Esch getting pregnant and having to hide it from everyone, including her family, and not receiving support from the unborn child’s father. Esch was all alone, or so she thought. After the hurricane passes, we see how the family comes together to rebuild their relationships. Esch’s father apologies to her for pushing her off the tree, and shows that he supports the pregnancy by wanting to “make sure everything’s okay.” What really makes Esch feel loved though, is when Big Henry corrects her for saying that the baby doesn’t have a daddy, and he says “This baby got plenty daddies.” In this moment Esch knows that the baby will be loved, and the reader is left knowing that this family will rebuild with time.
According to the book, “Salvage the Bones,” written by Jesmyn Ward the damage to Bois Sauvage was bad, but some people, including Esch’s family, didn’t want to evacuate.there were buildings that collapsed to the ground, and roads were flooded over with water. It doesn’t say in the book whether or not they were going to rebuild, but if the book had continued I figured they would have. Esch and her family would have fixed up their home while their dad guided them. They also would’ve helped Big Henry and his mom with fixing their home. They would have come together with their surrounding neighbors to help one another fix their homes and community.
So one aspect that had to be rebuilt were the communities themselves. In “Salvage the Bones,” there is a bit of this shown in chapter 12 after the hurricane hits. Big Henry goes with the family and says that they will all get through this and even help raise the child that she is expecting. This same sense of community can be seen all throughout the poems and articles that we analyzed. A regime shift is when one normal way of living is shifted to a new normal way of living. Before Hurricane Katrina, there was a regime set for how people lived and survived. After the hurricane hit they had to set a new regime for how they lived wherever they had to leave. If they chose to move back, which many people did, there was another regime shift to readjust to how to live back where they were originally from, possibly with some differences.
The article New Orleans Tells the Story of Resilience After Disaster, it talks about influencing resilience into aspects of city planning to be prepared for other natural disasters. Resilience in this article is the capacity of cities and the economic systems within them. Resilience is as much about planning and preparing as it is about responding and reacting. There is no city that understands this better than New Orleans, in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans the levee had failed but hit only that, there was poor leadership and racial divisions.
In this article, Finding Solidarity in Disaster by The Atlantic, it talks about how families and friends come together to rebuild what they have lost. The article proves to remind us that there is hope after a disaster, like Hurricane Katrina. Although one can see a sense of community, there is also an issue with the police force and the U.S. government not handling the situation properly. Two paramedics in New Orleans explained how they were staying away from criminal activities, along with “hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.” How were the people of New Orleans supposed to trust those sworn to protect them? In order to gain the people’s trust back and rebuild that relationship, the government must step in and do a better job to help. Working to encourage connection and unity would be a step in the right direction so people aren’t afraid of their police officers.
After Hurricane Katrina, people worked hard to rebuild what they lost. The hurricane caused so much damage, but that didn’t stop people from fixing their homes. Even today, all the rebuilding still isn’t complete. In Lolis Eric Elie’s poem, “Fourteen Years Later, New Orleans is Still Trying to Recover from Hurricane Katrina,” written by Nicole Santos, the damage from the hurricane was so big that some of the impact can not be fixed. Most of the city of New Orleans has been rebuilt, but one part that is taking longer is the Lower Ninth Ward since it was hit the hardest. There were certain parts of New Orleans that weren’t considered in any danger of flooding during hurricanes. Since those parts were told they wouldn’t receive any flooding they did not get Flood Insurance. Since the hurricane, Habitat for Humanity has gotten a lot of volunteers so they were able to build homes faster. Habitat for Humanity has built 450 homes after Hurricane Katrina, which is 25-30 homes a year.
In the poems and essays, you are let into Hurricane Katrina. You feel the pain and love that the author conveys for you—poems touch people differently than a book. In the poem Topographies, the author talks about what happened after Hurricane Katrina. They write about how the people of New Orleans coped 1 year after the hurricane. There is one part of this essay that I thought showed the community’s love for a place ” The pink, blue and yellow notes covered the surface of the building: ” Dear Camellia Grill I can’t bear the thought of you not being here”. Camellia’s Grill was a beloved restaurant that the author writes about in one of the last paragraphs. After the Hurricane, someone left a bucket of sticky notes and a pencil, so that others in their community can show love for Camellia’s Grill. This showed the reacting side of resilience, you don’t always have to stand with each other but coming back to a place of importance and sharing remorse for it can show resilience for a whole community. In another poem Third Heaven, the author writes about relying on his neighbors and god. His relationship with god and his community strengthens his will to write. It’s like the author is telling his audience read me and feel my resilience.
Unlike Salvage the Bones where one can see detailed and in depth examples of relationships being rebuilt, the poems and essays in the data sets convey them a little differently. In the poem titled Third Heaven, one can see that the author is using his relationship with God to find grace and rebuild after the hurricane. They explain how the experience has helped them value everything more, including “the sanctity of human life.” In another poem, The Raft of Medusa, the author uses the painting of The Raft of Medusa created by Théodore Géricault to show a metaphor of the whole tragedy that Hurricane Katrina left behind. The author explains how they were a victim and lost sight of themselves because of what had happened to their home, New Orleans. In order to rebuild themselves “emotionally and practically,” the author found art and poetry, which helped them be mindful of the past and present all thanks to hurricane Katrina. Both are great examples of rebuilding a relationship with life, and one’s self.
In Lolis Eric Elie’s poem,“The Whys,” she talks about how most of the residents went back to New Orleans for different reasons. Some people came back for their families, some came back to help fix the things that were damaged, including so many other reasons. There was one reason that stuck out however, which was how some went back because they thought they had enough insurance to fix the damage of their homes. The reason this stuck out was because without the insurance money these people had no way of fixing their homes, so they had no homes. They went back to New Orleans to fix their city, to build their city back up.
In the article “The Whys” by Lolis Eric Elie, they state many reasons why people came back. Some came to take their homes back, to rebuild their house, even just because they felt like they belonged there. Maybe if it was not the safest to come back they did because it was their culture and did not want to live anywhere else. The community came together to rebuild where they were from because they wouldn’t let even a hurricane drive them away from the place they called home.
One thing all of these poems and essays have in common is that they all either lived through or know the experiences of people that lived through Katrina. They all capture the combined feelings and emotions of people who watched their homes get destroyed. They all have that shared trauma and therefore were able to come together to rebuild the community. In all of these pieces of writing it had some sort of positive impact on the way they think both individually and as a whole community. The words “came” and “people” were very common among all of the writings that we analyzed.
To me that paints a picture of how the sense of people and people coming together was a very important focal point when it came to the writings of all of these.
In order to better understand how relationships were being rebuilt, the data sets of the poems and essays provided were synced into Voyant. It seemed appropriate to study the words ‘friends’ and ‘family’ because not only were those words used in the data sets, but they’re both also seen in the novel and the source analyzed. The word ‘help’ was also thrown into the corpus to see who was helping who, along with the word ‘government’ to see what part they had in the aftermath of the hurricane. The findings show that the word ‘help’ was used much more frequently, especially in the poems Bitter Southerner and The Raft of Medusa. One thing that stood out, however, was how all 4 words were used simultaneously in The Raft of Medusa and Poem Found. When more closely analyzing these 2 poems one can recognize that the author has a more personal writing style and they also understand how all 4 words are connected to one another when talking about Hurricane Katrina.
On Voyant I used the keywords insurance, homes, rebuilding, and business. I figured it would be best to use those three words when talking about rebuilding homes and businesses. The keyword ‘insurance’ is a word I chose because people need insurance on their homes and businesses to help them pay to fix it, just like insurance on a car. Some people were told not to get insurance on their house because they were not in an area where it would get damaged, but they were wrong so those people had no money to help fix their homes. The word insurance came up 7 times in, “Ode to Contractors Possessing Various Levels of Expertise,” by Alison Pelegrin. I also thought ‘homes’ was a good keyword to use in Voyant because we’re talking about people’s homes. We’re talking about where these people live and where their families come to visit. The word homes is a very big deal when it comes to the aftermath of a hurricane. The word ‘rebuilding’ was also one of my choices because that’s what every resident has to do to be able to live where they grew up and where they spent so much money. They have to rebuild their homes and businesses, they have to rebuild everything that they lost. From scratch they had to rebuild everything. ‘Business’ was a good word to use because residents also have to rebuild their businesses to earn money to have somewhere for people to shop.
We used the tool Voyant to help us assess all of the poems into trends of words that were used to come to conclusions in order to understand everything better in a more broader sense. There were words such as the ones previously stated and others that paint the picture of Katrina like “water” or “city” that shows that all of these people had a collective idea on both the effect of the hurricane and how they all had to come together to get through the aftermath.
Hurricane Katrina has been the source of many positive things, one big one was the community that came back and how they were able to bond together to achieve a common goal in bringing back the community and on a bigger scale the city of New Orleans itself, since all of these poems refer to New Orleans specifically. Everything here tells us that gaining a sense of community helped the rebuilding of places destroyed in Hurricane Katrina including people who decided to come back.
Hurricane Katrina impacted the lives of many people. Even though it caused many people to endure a horrible period of time, they were able to be strong. These people showed great resilience while rebuilding relationships, buildings and houses, and the community as a whole. We used Voyant along with the book “Salvage the Bones” by Jesmyn Ward as well as the sources and the poems and essays we read and annotated. In short, the people who experienced Hurricane Katrina went through regime shifts while facing the wicked problem of the aftermath of the hurricane itself, but were able to be resilient via the community bonds as well as interpersonal bonds to help rebuild the places that they came from.
Work Cited
Ward, Jesmyn. 2011. Salvage the Bones.
Cooley, Nicole. Topographies.
Cooley, Peter. Third Heaven.
Richard, Brad. The Raft of Medusa.
Remes , Jacob. Finding Solidarity in Disaster. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/hurricane-katrinas-lesson-in-civics/402961/
Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell. Voyant. 2022 https://voyant-tools.org/?query=friend*&query=government*&query=help*&query=family*&corpus=0cadc1efb53b39d8ac7de832fbb139de&view=Trends
Ellie, Lolis Eric. 2015. The Whys.
Santos,Nicolette. 2019. Fourteen Years Later, New Orleans is Still Trying to Recover from Hurricane Katrina. https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/fourteen-years-later-new-orleans-is-still-trying-to-recover-from-hurricane-katrina
Sinclair, Stéfan and Geoffrey Rockwell. Voyant. 2022. https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=0cadc1efb53b39d8ac7de832fbb139de&query=insurance*&query=homes*&query=rebuilding&view=Trends
Ellie, Lolis Eric. 2015. The Whys. https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=0cadc1efb53b39d8ac7de832fbb139de