In late October of 2007, over two years since Katrina, the Orleans Times-Picayune was featuring front-page articles on the wild-fires that had recently destroyed over thousand homes in California. Under their headline No Comparison, local news reports documented, bit by bit, the facts of the two disasters that managed to get erased as FEMA staged fake news conference and California evacuees ate gourmet food and received massages in the San Diego sports arena. The stories described this strange flashback as evidence of the way that the disaster of Katrina is not entirely forgotten, but gets disturbingly recast again and again, as if New Orleans' biblical flood lurks just below the surface of American (Katrina Angle AI). The idea that the flooding of Orleans lurks in the spectacle-hungry American consciousness once again offers us the image of Orleans as forgotten and as place where it is fun to forget things. As an image recurring in the annals of cultural memory and in nation expert in the workings of amnesia, (1) the has become poster site for erasing the past and therefore ensuring that everything is possible, legacy inscribed in its tourist emblem--New Orleans, The City that Care Forgot. America is lured to this place of forgetting, where we can come down and have some fun, as United States President disingenuously suggested to the nation after his quick flight over this disaster zone in history. But there are some places, uncanny sites in history, where traumatic enactments of the past break through the surface of the present and linger. They linger because, unlike the durable statues of selected icons or well-preserved documents in museums, they remain spectral. They elude the crystallizing effects of memory and they keep recurring, like an old song that won't go away. This song is what Sidney Bechet, clarinetist at Preservation Hall who performed the music of Orleans across the world, called the song, as he put it, a thing the music had to know for sure ... gotta hear it starting way behind you (qtd. in Floyd 8-9). He meant the forgotten story of his people, his grandfather who was slave, who likely sang the song in Congo Square in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. But beyond even all that, it's song that keeps breaking through the seams of tidy history built on selective erasures and national amnesia. We can keep tracing this song farther and farther back because it always precedes history. It is thoroughly oral; it escapes encampment in narratives of nation and empire and in the written records of literature confined to literacy. Its rhythms and odd melodies beat at the heart of poetry and keep poetry at odds with history and philosophy, because it is song about problem that won't go away, about pain-wracked body that keeps reemerging throughout history, or in sweltering attics after flood. The long song is preserved in performance venues throughout the city, from old bars in Bywater, or in parts of Central City where few tourists would dare to walk these days, to the more hip clubs on Frenchman Street in the Marigny. And it gets featured at Preservation Hall where can hear its sounds for just few dollars donation and short step into the city's dark alleys, and where, just across the courtyard from the former slave quarters, can purchase records and CDs of the past. A few blocks away lies Congo Square--the place where the Houma Indians once gathered for their festivals, where Choctaw women sold vegetables and herbs in the markets, where Africans from Senegambia and the Congo gathered for those markets and for song and dance on Sundays, where poor Italians who once flooded the city took up asylum nearby before they settled throughout the old sections of town with their St. Joseph altars. (2) Congo Square, now surrounded by tall locked iron fence, hulks over the landscape like prison, as if incarcerating song that will only be allowed to circulate on very special occasions. …
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Nov 1, 2008
André Richelieu 
Open Access