TWO years ago, on one of my many journeys home to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I saw on the side of the road the campaign placard of a local politician. “Katrina isn’t over,” the sign read. I could see then, as I can now, five years after the hurricane, that it is true.  The part of the city of Gulfport I was entering that day, a section called North Gulfport, remains one of the most blighted areas on the coast. Highway 49 cuts through it, and on either side of the highway there are “for sale” signs, condemned structures awaiting demolition, empty lots strewn with trash and overgrown with weeds, and a few neat houses hunkered against the neighborhood’s demise. This stretch along the highway, roughly five miles up from the beach, is where I am from, where my ancestors settled three generations back and where my cousin Tammy lives still, with my brother Joe nearby.  My grandmother’s house is there, too, and though Joe cannot afford to repair it and make it habitable, he keeps the grass mowed so city officials won’t notice that the vacant place is falling in on itself, so that they won’t put a condemned sticker on the front door marking it as blight, ready for demolition. There is a blue hydrangea beside the front steps, and Joe sometimes cuts it back to keep it blooming. This is just one way that he is attempting to hold on to some part of the past, something that anchors us to a time before Hurricane Katrina.  Our mother grew up in that house. Back then, it sat beside a pasture, and her Uncle Son and Aunt Lizzy lived in a house on the other side. But by the time I was growing up, the grass had already been erased by the four-lane highway.  When I was about 10, there was another change in the landscape. The street in front of my grandmother’s house was turned into a dead end where before it had intersected and crossed the highway. At the same time, several of the pecan and persimmon trees that bordered the edge of her backyard were cut down and replaced by huge poles supporting a giant billboard advertising the marine wildlife park a few miles down the road. It loomed over my grandmother’s yard, its foundation sunk in her driveway — a patch of grass and crushed oyster shells — giving me the first sense I had that the places we inhabit and the memories we have of them are inscribed by landmarks that aren’t necessarily beautiful. From a great distance, whenever I approached the city limits, I could see the sign. I described it every time I gave people directions to my grandmother’s house.  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.  The sense of the loss of the past is powerful for Aesha, Joe’s longtime girlfriend, who lost her apartment as a result of Katrina. Five years ago, when I first talked to her about it, she saw it as the defining moment in her life, a moment that she could only imagine being in — not beyond. Now, she marks time as before or after, but at the same time feels trapped by the storm’s effects. Long after the storm, we’re still living with it. In this sense, Hurricane Katrina hasn’t ended.  She sees the storm now as prelude to the many losses she has faced in its aftermath — the death of her sister to pancreatic cancer, the loss of Joe, for a while, to prison. She tells me that she has changed her mind about the storm, about what the memory of it means. “It was preparation,” she says, “for everything that was to come.” For her, Hurricane Katrina is simply the beginning of a larger pattern of loss.  Natasha Trethewey, who received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, is the author of âBeyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coastâ and a professor of English at Emory University.
The memory of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is changing, undergoing a kind of revision even as the region is still rebuilding, still healing.