"Dhalgren in New Orleans"

Bidisha Banerjee,
Reason

September 13, 2005 —

As Americans struggled to grasp what was unfolding in New Orleans, the
word "unimaginable" recurred frequently — even though the catastrophe had
been imagined, and envisioned, many times. Thirty years ago, science
fiction writer Samuel Delany wrote, in high detail, about the unfolding
of racially-charged violence, rape, and looting in "Bellona," a major
American city struck by an unspecified catastrophe and ignored by the
National Guard.

Delany's Dhalgren focuses on a group of people who choose to remain in
Bellona despite — and partly, because of — its dystopian qualities
(including lack of water and sanitation). This surreal work of science
fiction seemed especially apt last week, as fires raged and stories of
racism, rape, looting, and murder proliferated, and then-FEMA head Mike
Brown continued to blame the victims who had not evacuated the city. New
Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco
publicly disagreed over whether residents would be forcibly evicted from
their homes during the cleanup, while thousands of the city's
approximately 10,000 remaining residents remained adamant in their
resolve to stay. Dhalgren suggests what the holdouts might find if they
succeed.Dhalgren's micro-detailed images of the streets of Bellona portray a
city that is both hellish labyrinth and temporary autonomous zone.
Bellona's residents (mostly poor and black) live on looted cans of food;
there's no economy to speak of, gossip is the most highly valued
commodity, and a gang of thugs (eventually headed by the main character,
Kid, an amnesiac Native American poet) runs a haphazard protection
racket. Delany writes,

"The city is a map of violences anticipated. The
armed dwellers in the Emboriki [a department store], the blacks
surrounding them, the hiss from a turned tap that has finally stopped
trickling, the time it takes a group who go out to come back with bags
of canned goods, packaged noodles, beans, rice, spaghetti—each is an
emblem of inalienable, coming shock. But the clashes that do occur are
all petty, disappointing, minor, inconclusive, above all stupid, as
though the city prevents any real anxiety's ever resolving. And the
result? All humanity here astounds; all charity here is graced."

Last
week, New Orleans was more than hellish ("Worse than Iraq! Worse than
Afghanistan!" those who have recently visited both declared). But in the
months before the rebuilding starts, it's worth asking whether it can
also be a space where new ways of making and speaking and existing can
come into being.

While some residents of Bellona refuse to adjust, insisting that nothing
has changed and the old way of life will come back intact, others take
advantage of their unique position to break taboos. Since money is
meaningless, Kid mugs somebody just to see how it feels, and his primary
lover Lanya prostitutes herself for the same reason. But they don't get
much out of criminal gestures. Delany is better at depicting the
openness that Bellona bestows upon promising new ways of interacting.
Some of the most beautiful parts of Dhalgren concern Kid's attempts to
write poetry in a language that's appropriate to the strangeness of the
city, and Lanya's intricate experiments with tape-loops and harmonica.

Even though all sorts of horrors hang in the city, Kid and Lanya
occasionally stumble onto remarkable new ways of inhabiting their world.
Sometimes, they even manage to draw other residents into these projects,
thereby enlarging their perceptions of what sorts of actions are
possible. Most people that Kid writes about recognize themselves in his
poems and feel elevated. Lanya, who refuses to identify as an "artist,"
successfully starts a school; later, in one of the book's best scenes,
she ropes Denny, a teenage thug, into performing in her experimental
composition. And Lanya and Kid spend all night in an abandoned art
museum, looking at paintings for hours. When they leave, Kid hangs his
favorites upside down, hoping that this will get others to pay them more
attention.

In a journal, Kid reflects on how difficult it is for Bellona's only
newspaper to reflect the city's warped reality. He concludes that his
poems, which wouldn't make much sense anywhere else, do so in Bellona.
He writes,

"Today I cut down the block where I'd heard the scorpions
[the thugs] had their nest. 'What kind of street do they live on?' in
the grammar of another city, that sentence would hold the implication:
What kind of street are they more or less constrained by society to live
on, given their semi-outlaw status, their egregious manner and outfit,
and the economics of their asocial position? In Bellona, however, the
same words imply a complex freedom, a choice from hovel to
mansion — complex because every hovel and every mansion sustains through
that choice some remnant of our ineffable catastrophe."

Like Kid, who leaves the city after losing Lanya and other friends in
the fire and confusion resulting from a race riot, those who choose to
stay in New Orleans will, in all likelihood, come to harm. But, I hope,
not before glimpsing more than the city's nightmares. About two dozen
people in New Orleans refused to accept the cancellation of the Southern
Decadence gay pride parade scheduled for last weekend. They donned wigs
and beads, and celebrated in the streets. A restaurant started giving
away $20,000 worth of free food, and two bars in the (mostly dry) French
Quarter remained open through the hurricane. In the absence of any
controlling legal authority, residents even formed ad hoc defense
committees. You wouldn't know it from the blathering of countless
columnists, but while Katrina was busy disproving some non-existent
policy of "small government," private citizens from Wal-Mart to New
Orleans hoteliers proved their ability to keep functioning in an unreal
city. It's a start — not only for the city's will to rebuild itself, but
also for the inhabitants who hope to stick it out until then. There are
many stories about the bodies still afloat in New Orleans, but this one,
with its detail about a corpse with one shoe on and one shoe off (an
image that haunts Delany's work) stands apart: here.