Throughout this interview, Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the humanity of her fictional and nonfictional subjects – subjects whose humanity has been eviscerated by what has been characterized as the postwar, neoliberal shift in American politics and economics. The socioeconomic and political neglect of African Americans was, of course, demonstrable in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, revealing the structural racism that had often resided in the US's political unconscious. Ward's emphasis on the ideas of survival and renewal – a “savage” resilience of humanity in its most precarious state – offers a corrective to the proclivities of some critical theory deployed in the framing of Hurricane Katrina's victims and the longer history of suffering they represented. For examples, theories of biopolitics used to conceptualize the ways in which African American life has been removed from the protections of citizenship and state sovereignty do run the risk of universalization. A transhistorical version of that life, consistent from slavery to the present day, might emerge from such theory, indistinct from examples of “bare” lives rendered by states of emergency beyond the US and across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Giorgio Agamben might describe such life. In other words, theory risks a process of re-othering and a suspension of historical agency. Anna Hartnell finds in Ward's work the resonance of the jeremiad, and so narratives that are structured by the possibility of the redemption of historical experience – future-oriented narratives. These are narratives that represent the negotiation of historical conditions, not utter submission to them, and following Hartnell's reference they are aptly framed by Henry Giroux's reconceptualization of biopolitical life and the limits of American democracy.
Giroux finds many theories of biopolitics teleological, insufficiently nuanced, and unable to account for the “complexities, specificities and diverse social formations” of the biopolitical order revealed by Hurricane Katrina. In Giroux's terms, the conceptualization of bare life is nuanced through the history of capitalism and those of which capitalism disposes. This is a history of the differential distribution of invisibility and visibility, life and death, security and violence, privilege and want, and the disposability and indispensability of human life across the US population, and particularly that of New Orleans, as conjoined inequalities of race and class are generated over time, producing chronic and emergent effects that have a long and uneven history.Footnote 1 The differentiation of African American experience in this theory is consonant with spaces and places of Ward's version of the South that offer some room for negotiation. For example, as Hartnell points out, the car in Men We Reaped figures a suspension of the slow and fast violence of capitalism's racialized onslaught.
In writing about death and life, oppression and survival, the cumulative burdens of the past and the possibilities of the future, Ward is testifying to agency. Testimony takes its most obvious form in the memoir that is Men We Reaped, but arguably Salvage the Bones is a form of testimony. Visiting, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the nearby town of St. Catherine's, Mississippi, Esch, the novel's narrator, declares, amidst the ruins, her intention to remember the destruction – which she lived through – and to narrativize it: “I palm a piece of glass, marbled blue and white, blunt at the edges, grab another piece that is red and a pink brick stone. I slip all three into my pockets … This was a liquor bottle, I will say. And this, this was a window. This, a building.”Footnote 2 That the novel's chapters count down to the hurricane's landfall, and this concluding testimonial declaration that follows the consequent destruction, suggests that the novel has been, proleptically, from the start testimonial.
What the novel gives testimony to is a concept of agency that is truly innovative. Although Ward plays down the role of animals in her work, Hartnell gestures towards their significance in pointing to the ways in which the parallels between humans and creaturely characters figure the collapse of American exceptionalism. For example, as Donald Pease points out, the idea of American exceptionalism is always ghosted by its historical contradictions. The Bush administration's failure to protect its citizens before, during and after Katrina; its criminalization of the stranded; and its paramilitary occupation of New Orleans to protect property more than lives was a process of unhoming resonant of Baghdad after the American invasion. As Pease puts it, “Hurricane Katrina had dissevered the U. S. people's bond with Bush's Homeland Security State by revealing how the administration had reneged on the core promise that was crucial to the continuation of the compact – to secure the U. S. domestic population through the forcible depopulation of Homelands elsewhere.” In a post-9/11 US, the administration had ironically transformed the homeland into a site of trauma, reflected in sites of trauma overseas.Footnote 3 Indeed, what stands out in Esch's description of the post-Katrina wreckage of St. Catherine's is the absence of state assistance and the presence of refugees where there were once citizens:
And everywhere there are people, looking half drowned; an old white man and an old black man camping out under a tarp spread under a lone sapling; a family of Vietnamese with sheets shaped into a tent over the iron towing bar used for mobile homes, plywood set under the draping to make a floor; teenage girls and women foraging in the parking lot and hollow shell of a gas station, hunting the wreckage for something to eat, something to save. People stand in clusters at what used to be intersections, the street signs vanished, all they own in a plastic bag at their feet, waiting for someone to pick them up. No one is coming.Footnote 4
The traumatic disruption of moral exceptionalism and historical innocence has, as Hartnell reminds us (elsewhere), a longer, American history. Hurricane Katrina dispelled facile national narratives of democratic progress, from the originary trauma of slavery, through abolition and the civil rights movement and legislation, to the present day. While not collapsing history, Hartnell argues that cultural memories of slavery have served strategically to counter redemptive versions of American history, narratives made possible only through the repression (of dissociation) of continued racial oppression, and indeed the originary trauma of slavery.Footnote 5 As Esch puts it, hurricanes have always revealed a history of slavery: “there's always a hurricane coming or leaving here. Each pushes its way through the flat Gulf to the twenty-six-mile manmade Mississippi beach, where they knock against the old mansions with their slave galleys turned guest houses before running over the bayou.”Footnote 6 In short, the ideals of American civilization collapse into something wild and barbarous, figured by Ward's dramatization of the interaction of the bestial and the human. However, Ward's use of the bestial is more far-reaching than that.
Her characters are described and perceive themselves in bestial terms: the distinction between their humanity and the surrounding animal life is blurred; their bodies are experienced as caught in an interminable process of evisceration revealing the animal within. Not only bestial, these characters are also increasingly indistinguishable from the surrounding detritus of poverty and post-hurricane ruination, and from the environment more generally. Here, then, subjectivity is to be found forever breaking its bounds, oscillating between the world of subjects and objects, the human and the nonhuman, environmentally dispersed, or, more accurately put, ecologically constituted. Arguably, in Ward's novel it is in this assemblage of the human and nonhuman that agency is found.
This is not a naturalization of African American identity and subjectivity but rather Ward's (implicit) registration of the ways in which human and natural, social and environmental, histories have become catastrophically imbricated. As in the common refrain of many scholars of Katrina and other so-called natural disasters, noted by John Wills, “there is no such thing as a natural disaster.”Footnote 7 The federal mismanagement of the environment has been part of the renunciation of African American national belonging.
As Wai Chee Dimock, amongst others, has noted, federal underinvestment in flood defenses in the New Orleans area (the war in Iraq was a priority for federal funding), the design failures of defensive engineering (calibrated to withstand lower-category storms), and the failure to protect from erosion coastal wetlands (which impede the onshore progress of hurricanes) rendered the inhabitants of New Orleans (particularly African Americans living in the least-protected areas) and the Gulf Coast vulnerable (disposable). Although this vulnerability was widely commented on in the media prior to Hurricane Katrina, and even modeled by FEMA's hypothetical Hurricane Pam in 2004, the failure to protect New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from the storm attests to the perception, and indeed production, of some lives as disposable, as well as to the cognitive dissonance surrounding that disposability.Footnote 8
Beyond the regional and national histories of disposability there are more global, or even planetary, processes to be historicized, for hurricanes interconnect the global phenomena of anthropogenic climate change and the local regime and instantiation of disposable life. As Dimock summarizes, there is a causal relation between rising sea-surface temperatures and hurricane generation. Hurricanes cannot form if the sea-surface temperature remains below 26·5 degrees Celsius. Katrina transformed into a Category 5 hurricane when it passed over the Gulf of Mexico, whose waters were unusually warm (two degrees Fahrenheit warmer for that time of year). The sea-surface temperatures warmed by one degree Fahrenheit between 1970 and 2004 in the Pacific and the Atlantic, duration and speeds of hurricanes have doubled during this period, and hurricanes in the strongest categories (4 and 5) have doubled in number during the same period in all of the ocean basins. Hurricanes are “indexes to the hydrology of the world as whole,” and this “single, crisscrossing, and already-damaged hydrology makes it clear that climate, geology, and human and nonhuman life are all complexly intertwined, part of the same fluid continuum.”Footnote 9 That bodies in Salvage the Bones are often in states of unbecoming or becoming other, figured as merging with the things and animals of their environment, suggests a form of what Stacey Alaimo would call “transcorporeality”: “the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world … [underlining] the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from the environment”.Footnote 10 Environmental neglect is part of a long and varied history of racial oppression in the South and in the nation more generally, which intersects with a long history of industrial fossil fuel emissions and anthropogenic climate change to which the US has contributed. In effect, the environment has been coopted in the perpetration of systematic and institutionalized racism, to which southern black bodies in particular are subjected. Towards the end of her narrative, having survived the hurricane herself, witnessed its devastation and vowed to give testimony, Esch anthropomorphizes the storm:
I will tie the glass and stone with string, hand the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was a murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.Footnote 11
With the idea of transcorporeality in mind, Esch is indeed the child of the storm, of environments of oppression, both local and planetary. Not just an environmental conduit, wholly porous to the world, Esch, and Ward's other subjects, find their agencies and therefore futures in what Nancy Tuana would describe as their “viscous porosity.” It is the viscosity of their (embodied, cultural and ideological) interactions with the world in which resistance can be found.Footnote 12 Hartnell prefaced this interview by illuminating the blind spots of recent post-9/11 literary criticism in which the frustrated search for a globalized rather than parochialized version of the US sometimes overlooks the nation's traumatic, historical, internal differentiations. Ward's most recent novel moves both centripetally and centrifugally, as it moves through the intersections of embodied local, regional, national and planetary histories.
