This weekend marks the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one of the most devastating natural disasters in modern American history.
Oxford, like many of the other communities affected by Katrina and its aftermath, is taking a moment to look back and reflect on the storm that affected so many lives. One Oxford resident and University faculty member will honor Hurricane Katrina’s legacy by promoting a book she helped publish.
Cynthia Joyce, assistant professor of journalism, will be signing tonight at 5 p.m. at Square Books. The book, “Please Forward: How Blogging Connected New Orleans After Katrina,” is an anthology of media and blog posts from New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina that she edited and curated.
Joyce turned to the Internet to connect with the New Orleans community and their struggles to recover, exploring various accounts of the disaster.
Upon realizing that Allen Boudreaux’s firsthand account “GET. OUT.” on his blog “Unapologetic” had disappeared, she said she was inspired to put together “Please Forward” as a way of commemorating and immortalizing the remaining stories from this time.
Hurricane Katrina provided a plethora of media sources for Joyce to use. Some blog posts made her laugh, such as NOLAFugees, which used satirical humor to make its points. There were also posts that made her cry and posts that caused blind rage. Emails from former FEMA director Mike Brown are an example of the latter.
“Reading through old emails from former FEMA director Mike Brown, especially, reminded me what an outrage it is that no one ever went to jail for criminal negligence,” she said. “I only used a couple of those emails in ‘Please Forward,’ ones that spoke specifically to his lameness on a personal level. The choice to use those entries may strike some as arbitrary or petty, but given that he’s still got a public platform (he now hosts a talk radio show in Denver), I found it pretty satisfying to remind people of just a few of the many reasons he should forever be publicly shamed.”
On the opposite side of the spectrum, there are additions that bring up nostalgia, grief and hopefulness.
“Every time I read an entry, I think, ‘That’s my favorite,’” she said. “I will say that I did have one post in mind — an impromptu eulogy written for Willie Tee Turbinton by the musician Steve Allen and posted in the comments section of his Times-Picayune obituary — that I always knew I wanted to include, and that wound up closing the book. It gets at how, for the first few years after the storm, every loss felt like one more domino knocked over by Katrina, even if it wasn’t directly related. But it’s as sweet and hopeful as it is sad, and I cry every time I read it.”
Though the blog posts within the book come from writers other than Joyce herself, she said the task of tracking down the stories was arduous. Some pieces were originally published by lesser-known blogs with little traffic; sites that aren’t nearly as immortal as the stories they tell.
“Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, says the average lifespan of a webpage is about 100 days before it changes or disappears,” Joyce said. “In other words, we are increasingly incapable of reconstructing our recent past. At least a quarter of the leads I received for this project were dead-ends.”
Speaking about her own memories of Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing devastation, Joyce explained she originally evacuated New Orleans for the safety of Oxford before returning to stay with friends on New Orleans’ West Bank.
“What I remember from those early few days is still pretty vivid,” Joyce said. “There was the extreme ‘high-low’ experience of being welcomed and treated with such compassion and kindness by total strangers, all the while being heartbroken beyond belief, and uncertain about absolutely everything.”
“Please Forward” is imbued with the desire to remember and commemorate an era of devastation and perseverance for the people of New Orleans, as well as the Internet phenomenon of “citizen journalism” that powered so many people through.
With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina fast approaching, this book memorializes the experiences and respects the trials the people of New Orleans overcame.
“Most people who lived through Katrina don’t need reminders — and don’t want them, either — but they wouldn’t want to forget, either,” Joyce said. “Sometimes I miss the intensity of that time, the clarity that sometimes comes with crisis.”
