Last night I saw excerpts from Spike Lee’s new documentary If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise, his follow-up five years later, post-Katrina to When The Levees Broke.
Only the first and fourth installments of the documentary were shown; last night’s first installment concentrated on the immediate aftermath of Katrina, as well as the impact that the Saints’ win had on the city.
It’s strange about post-traumatic stress. You think you’re over it, but something will trigger a response, and it all floods back. Almost as soon as Terence Blanchard’s score started—the same music as was in When The Levees Broke—my heart almost stopped. Then the images of Katrina’s devastation started playing against the screen; my eyes filled with tears, and I really almost started to bawl. It was that traumatic. You think all those memories are just that, tucked away in your brain so that you can access them when you feel like you can handle it. Or they’re deconstructed into an abstraction of what happened. Then the images (and music, which had a lot to do with seeing it on a screen) flow, and so do the tears.
There was a short scene from When the Levees Broke that showed Blanchard’s mother going into her destroyed house for the first time after Katrina. It broke my heart the first time (my own mother lost the family home), but I think seeing it again was even worse. I had to literally put my hands in front of my face so I couldn’t see anymore, like a little kid trying to hide from a horror movie.
So the PTSD—at least for me—is real. I’ll live with it until I die. And what my family went through is so minor compared to what many of my friends and colleagues endured, and in many cases, are still enduring.
The immediate horrors of Katrina are over, but the memory will never leave us. Lee’s newest documentary—which I look forward to seeing in total—is a testament to the resiliency of our people. Part One will air on Monday, August 23; Part Two on Tuesday August 24. It’s great that he managed to insert the triumph of the Saints’ victory juxtaposed with the terrible images of Katrina. He addresses the housing problems we’re enduring, Nagin, our health and hospital issues, and a lot more with compassion, insight, and even humor. The last part of the film is concerned with the BP spill—and it’s great. It’s splendid to have a filmmaker with Lee’s credibility who understands our culture, our pain, as well as our strengths and weaknesses, and who is really rooting for us.
It’s often hard to live in New Orleans, with all of our problems, but on the other hand, it’s such a privilege to live here too, because there’s nothing else like it in the world. All we can do is to work together to make it better, and hope and pray that there are filmmakers with the cred of Spike Lee who are gutsy enough to tell it like it is to a national audience, and a network like HBO that helps him produce his work.
