Drawing
Louisiana
Marthe
Reed
Sitting with the IPad, tracing the outlines
of the Louisiana coastline I am flooded with frustration and desire: I want this coastline. That is, I want to
place the coastline into the text of the poem, into the public discourse, I
want to put it in sight. Because it is largely invisible and vanishing.
I pick up the stylus and trace the tiny
islets of the birdfoot delta, the endless cuts through the marsh made by
fishing fleets, shrimpers, oil and gas drilling operations, pleasure boaters
and anglers: the fragmented coast is fractal in its complexity. This is what it
looked like in 2000.
You can see where we are from where we’ve
come: this is the birdfoot delta in 1937.
My tracing task would have been quite a bit
easier if I had started well before I was born. Though the destruction had
already begun with the building up of levees that prevented flooding, prevented
the silting up of the coast, prevented the land from remaking itself in the
face of tides, currents, hurricanes, human traffic, and the natural compression
of the soil.
From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost 1,900
square miles of land, or the state of Delaware. Of course, we think, Delaware
is tiny in the scope of the continent. And it is. So is the island of Manhattan,
which is equal in scope the amount of land lost every year from Louisiana’s
coast. So, what if Delaware just disappeared, or Manhattan?
The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection
Authority has sought to sue
the oil and gas companies that have been the agents of so much of the land
loss, having cut 10,000 miles of canals and pipelines through Louisiana’s
coastal lands. Though of course Bobby Jindal is fighting tooth and nail to
protect the interests of the oil and gas companies, patrons of his political
ambitions.
Is it possible to bring urgency to the back
page news item, the flickering story on the nightly news?
It is hot here in Syracuse, mid-summer, and
I’ve just moved from Louisiana where this project has its origin. Fans blowing,
windows open, I move the stylus ceaselessly over the touchscreen, shifting view
as I complete a section. It takes most of the week to complete the tracing, then
go back to enlarge the view and smooth out what I’ve done, before finally
uploading it to the computer. —Then
what?
Documentary poetics affords me a way into a
poetic project from which I have a complicated distance. Though I lived in
Louisiana for eleven years and came to love this landscape in all its
mutability, I am no native. Indeed, my politics, my atheism, my ethics with
respect to community and the ecosystems I am indebted to are marginal ones in
Louisiana. I sometimes feel the people of this state are loving the land to
death. And they do love it. Hunting
and fishing are central activities of the culture, even as fishing is also
central to the economy of the state. Louisianans can’t wait to get out on the
water, out to the coast, or the deer lease, or the fishing camp.
Fox news gets a lot of play in Louisiana to
no good effect. People are fearful: jobs jobs jobs is the mantra, and I get
that. People need livelihoods. But the preservation of the status quo in the
local economy—mainly extractive, as well as chemical refining and production,
commercial fishing, and tourism—is dependent upon industries that are forces of
terrible injury to the coastline and the human environment, to say nothing of
all the other-than-humans we are intricately bound up with. And this is true
across the planet, notably in that great middle section of the United States,
producing soy beans, corn, cattle, pigs, and chickens, factory farms spewing
out “product,” tainted product at that, for our consumption along with a toxic
stew of waste, which then makes its way into the Mississippi.
The Mississippi River has built its
sprawling delta again and again, shifting from site to site as the silt it once
freely spilled over the coast built up the land around it and forced the river
elsewhere. If we abandoned the levees along its banks, the river would flow
through the Atchafalaya Basin and begin again further west from where its present
outlet south of New Orleans lies. The Mississippi River drains the entire
middle part of the United States, lying between the Rocky Mountains and the
Appalachians. Everything we put down the sink, the toilet, every drug we
ingest, all the pesticides and fertilizers we put into the garden or onto
crops, the antibiotics that go into the feed of the animals we raise for
slaughter, their manure, it all ends in the Gulf.
Anger doesn’t help, especially an
outsider’s anger. Who am I to judge? I, too, drive a car, heat my house in
winter, cool my house in summer. Affluent, I buy into an organic CSA, drive a
hybrid, recycle, pat myself on the back, knowing, even so, I as fully complicit
in the causes and consequences as any other consumer.
Louisiana is beautiful—its coast a
startling, fertile realm of bottomland forests ceding ground to prairie, to
marsh, to la prairie tremblant,
flotant marsh in which the tall rushes and grass make the wet appear solid at
first glance—and it is vanishing. Its children poorly educated, it poor barely
noticed let alone supported toward productive, healthy lives. The coast erodes,
and chemical companies pour their refuse accidentally and illicitly into the
water supply. Texas Brine has created a sinkhole on Bayou Corne so large it has
swallowed a community and is still growing. The folks whose homes fall within
the “safety zone” of the innumerable chemical plants hope for the best, expect
nothing good. The community of Reveilleville had to be relocated and its
buildings demolished after a vinyl chloride accident in the 1980’s. In the
1990’s the Mossville community, suffering unprecedented disease, the groundwater even now still threatened
by liquid toxic leachate, and the area imperiled by contaminated fish,
vegetables, and fruit, fought for and finally received
relocation away from the PVC plants surrounding it. In 2003 yet another toxic
plume of vinyl chloride forced the relocation of a community near Plaquemine, a
crisis discovered when miscarriages there become epidemic.[1] —The narrative quickly becomes numbing.
Documentary poetics allows me, an outsider,
to write my way into this beautiful, vanishing world without anger, without
falling prey to the temptation to preach. Documentary poetics allows grief into
the poem without bathos or sentimentality or feigned authority. Sometimes, a
picture is worth a thousand words.[2]
[1] http://www.chej.org/pvcfactsheets/Environmental_Justice_and_the_PVC_Chemical_Industry.html
[2] This piece first appeared in The
Volta “Trash” Issue, Fall 2013.
