One of the first sights you were introduced to as you entered the city of New Orleans from the airport was a quaint old graveyard, still in use, stretching back from the wide highway into clumps of trees and pleasant, slightly unkempt lawns.
The graveyard was set up in that unmistakable Spanish style — the resting places of the dead not hidden deep under the ground in ashamed, Anglo-Saxon fashion, but rather sitting on the surface of the Earth, each one (according to the state of wealth of the family of the deceased) a proud shrine, constructed like a miniature palace, with ornate stonework and its own entrance, suggesting that the dead, like the living, still have a roof over their heads, and are free to come and go as they please. The dead are still with us, respected, the human soul still vibrating, if in a different dimension.
The elegance of the old-style graveyard took the grim sting of death away after the mourning was over.
The bus driver, in his other capacity as tour guide, was obliged to give the passengers another piece of information as we floated past this graveyard. ‘New Orleans is built below sea level,” he said, ‘so when there are floods in this city, which happens when the big storms come in, the graveyards are usually under water. A lot of those bodies get washed away. You can’t find them anymore after that. They just go on down the river.”
The Mississippi river is the other major landmark you can’t miss as you enter the city — wide, curving, and deceptively sluggish. It is deep enough, even this far inland, to take ocean-going ships that carry people and cargo towards the hinterland from the Gulf of Mexico and from the direction of tropical South America and the Caribbean.
These two images, the graveyard, with its fragile tombs waiting to disgorge their precious contents, and the river waiting to devour them, kind of summed up New Orleans’ attitude to the to-and-fro of life and death even before you got into the city itself. Life is taken as it comes, and what happens after life is in the hands of the gods.
And there were many gods perpetually hovering over the city, walking the narrow streets of the French Quarter, watching from the sanctuary of the trees in the park at Congo Square, spitting chewing tobacco into the dust at the famous race track that served as a focus for Mardi Gras and the frenzied jazz festivals that made their way to the Big Easy each year.
The gods of New Orleans seem to have found a harmonious way of co-existing. The French and Spanish conquistadors, and the Anglo-Saxon colonists who chased them out, could do nothing to eliminate the presence of the Native American deities, nor of the African gods like Shango who came to inhabit this corner of Louisiana, borne across the waters in the pounding, fearful, angry bosoms of African slaves. The conquering gods of Europe, who came with muskets and caravels, eventually had to let their hair hang down and step into the rhythm.
But last week, something made the gods turn against this beautiful city of wild jazz and high commerce. Hurricane Katrina, long awaited but not quite believed in, like the boy who cried ‘Wolf”, came in from the Gulf and all but wiped out the low-lying areas of the city, taking thousands of its inhabitants into the turbulent waters of the Mississippi in its wake. The bones of the graveyard dead mingled with the blood and cries of the recently living as the river broke its banks and took over the whole city.
‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign/ No more water, the fire next time.” The citizens of New Orleans, and all of the United States, were looking the other way, even as the warnings of a flood to rival the one Noah and his wives and animals rode out so many Biblical aeons ago loomed loud and clear on the radar screen. They were looking for fire in the sky as they continued to party down Bourbon Street. 9/11 and the towering infernos of the World Trade Centre brought to Earth by flames from the sky seemed to be the beginning of the fulfilment of the prophecy.
The gods said ‘Boo, fooled you,” and brought the water down instead — once again, the floods that would all but wipe civilisation from the face of the Earth.
And wipe out ‘civilisation” it certainly did. The fear and horror of the survivors of this unprecedented storm turned in upon themselves, with scenes of rape, murder and looting to rival Mad Max and the post- Armageddon 1960s novel Davey.
But the potential for the collapse of civilisation on a wider scale was starker in the failure of the US authorities to wake up to what had happened. America showed that it could reach across the world with a vengeful, God-like arm when it chose, but was physically and morally unprepared to reach into its own backyard with a caring, God-like hand.
Some say you can’t blame George W Bush for Hurricane Katrina. Shit happens. Others say you can — his continuing refusal to step in line with the rest of the world and sign the Kyoto Protocol, his defence of the evil outpourings of industrial waste into the atmosphere do much to contribute to the slide of the natural order into an unstoppable chaos that not even the gods could have dreamed up.
There is something incomprehensible, diabolical in what happened to the city of New Orleans and the surrounding area a week ago. Maybe everyone, rich and poor alike, is to blame for not seeing the obvious — that if the dead could be washed away by the floods, so, in their turn, could the living.
Fear, greed and sheer inertia were joined in a grip that made the inevitable come to pass. And the US will still be unprepared for its next catastrophe.