“Katrina isn’t over”

In a personal essay for this Sunday's New York Times, Pulitzer prize-winning poet and Gulf Coast native Natasha Trethewey describes how Katrina has become emblematic of loss for many residents who remain in the hurricane’s wake. Trethewey, who explores similar themes in her latest book, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, contemplates how the way we understand the past is often shaped by the present:

Landmarks are the monuments of our pasts, the things that reassure us that our history has some kind of permanence. To see them gone is, in some ways, to see ourselves and our pasts condemned to forgetting. The biologist E.O. Wilson wrote: “Homo sapiens is the only species to suffer psychological exile.” I understand this to mean that one can be physically in the homeland and yet — for various reasons — still feel exiled from it. For the people I have spoken with on the coast, this idea seems to be rooted in the sense that Katrina destroyed so many of the recognizable markers that tied them to the past and to their former selves.