When the Levee Breaks. Hurricane Katrina and ‘The Lost City of New Orleans’

When it comes to Southern cities, New Orleans stands alone as a powerful magnet for the imagination. But the ‘Big Easy’, as it is nicknamed for its lively and relaxed atmosphere, is also one of the poorest and most violent cities in the US. In addition to New Orleans’s high crime rate, we must consider how the voodoo and hoodoo tradition contributes to the city’s reputation as an obscure, if not straightforwardly ‘evil’, place. This twofold reality was immortalized in works of literature such as William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes and Tennessee Williams Suddenly Last Summer. New Orleans’s darker side was dramatically heightened when the city was flooded by hurricane Katrina in 2005, with police violence, lootings and murders ravaging a city that fell in total anarchy. Interestingly enough, modern and contemporary modes of depiction find their antecedents in some writers that had already described the city in an unsettling way. George Washington Cable’s portrait of the creole society and Kate Chopin’s accounts of constrained femininity depicted violence in a less explicit but equally pervasive way. A foreboding coincidence: in his Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain took some pages to describe Louisiana’s system of levees, foreshadowing Katrina in expressing doubts about its ability to contain the river’s rage. This research aims at describing New Orleans’s ‘dark sense of place’ as presented in various works of literature, adopting a spatial-oriented outlook that is useful in unraveling the tight connection of place and fiction that is a well-recognized trait of this city.