The Gulf: A Meditation on the Mississippi Coast after Katrina | Virginia Quarterly Review - Summer 2008

The Gulf: A Meditation on the Mississippi Coast after Katrina - Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Nostalgia Trethewey has intertwined history, present day reporting and an emotional lament over her home.  She is from Gulfport, Mississippi, one of the towns that dot the Gulf Coast.

I had the pleasure of living in Biloxi, at Keesler Air Force Base, back in the early 1980s.  My memories of the Gulf Coast are fond and I wished that I had seen it again before the tragedy.  Well, the first tragedy, though, Ms. Trethewey doesn't call it that, she certainly makes it feel that way.  The tragedy is the reintroduction of the casinos along the coast.

Her Gulf Coast was already changing from her childhood memories when Katrina came.  Now it is unrecoverable.  The Gulf Coast that I knew is no longer.

Thanks to regulations and government spending that isn't necessarily going out based on need, more and bigger casinos are cropping up, with more on the way.  Ms. Trethewey mentions an ordnance that doesn't allow any restaurants that aren't located within a casino.

She does not dare call it racism, but man, the circumstantial evidence is strong.  Set back requirements for rebuilding on lots that aren't large enough to allow it?  Oh, yeah, no problem there.  Funds failing to help those who've lost their homes, because their homes aren't salvageable?  Mmm, hmm.  Because we all know that building a hotel where there was once a squat little ramshackle hovel is really the highest and best use for such prime real estate.

Yes, the casinos bring revenue and help with schools, but where is the analysis on the cost to the community?

Ms. Trethewey spends a good portion of this long essay describing the Gulf Coast's history, using her grandmother and her other family members as supports to tell the story.  She intersperses conversations with various people in the present, all of whom seem to have some connection with the hotel trade, about the storm and its aftermath.

New Orleans gets the lion's share of the news and even the thin follow up stories.  (Most of us are reminded of Katrina when the anniversary rolls around or when we catch the Saints playing football.  We'll notice it again at the Sugar Bowl later this week.)  But the Gulf Coast was ground zero for this storm.  It was ravaged. And the place seems largely forgotten in the psyche of the American people.

Read this essay.  Break it up over a period of time by reading it in its sections, the way it was written.  Let each part sink in.

The area where I grew up has changed.  More people, more development.  They've even straightened out a street that I lived on that had two ninety-degree turns.  But the place is the same.  It only looks different because there are more buildings.  The Gulf Coast had its geography changed.  And while new construction has occurred, there is still devastation plainly visible.

How can we comprehend this?  How do we respond when our homes, our histories, are lost to nature or war?

Ms. Trethewey mentions that children were more clingy and uncertain.  A psychiatrist says that post-traumatic stress disorder will affect many people.

I can only imagine.  I would have to agree.  How can you trust the earth after doing this?  How can you trust the world at large for its response?