Varieties of experience in navigating disaster: Notes for a fluvial way of knowing

International audienceThe qualitative, undifferentiated time of disaster affords propitious moments, requiring quick action by those in its midst. During Katrina, the rapidly transforming watery world of New Orleans created new resistances and lines of flow. In the absence of government-organized disaster assistance during Katrina, some New Orleanians already long afflicted with chronic mental illnesses were left to navigate the flooded city on their own, as this essay captures from oral histories gathered and observations made over four years. For some long disabled by severe mental illness, surviving the disaster resembled their life pattern of circuitous movement, the survivors appearing caught up in a circular pattern of water, floating along with no external force to push against or momentum to be retrieved. Their particular mode evokes pre-steam engine era sailors stuck in the Doldrums, the Equatorial belt where atmospheric conditions deprive the sea of wind-force and momentum. Yet others deviated from the usual everyday scripts in which they were ensconced, be they those of patient-clinician routines or of stigmatizing encounters in public places. Rather than stagnating, these survivors moved along, improvising at every turn, divinely realized or sheer happenstance. They interacted with the disaster’s undercurrents, crafting temporary solutions through chance encounters and found resources. Such wayfarers place-mark a world wide open, even for those whose lives are usually confined to a circuit of institutions and marginal spaces that stymie agency and narrow relational possibilities. Mark Bradford’s Katrina-inspired art resonates with such varieties of experience, from exclusion to the possibility of community and rebirth, however momentary