One of the many pleasures of substitute teaching is I can
keep learning in an academic setting without having to do the heavy
lifting—lesson prep, grading, dealing with parents. Part of this pleasure involves what I call
“found books”—books I find on the bookshelves in classrooms or perusing school
libraries. For today’s entry, I am going
to take a side trip from words (Be-Worded) to discuss a recently “found book” (Be-Booked). In a local high school library, I found a book
by Natasha Trethewey, the current U.S. Poet Laureate, who spent part of her
life on the Mississippi Gulf coast in Gulfport and part in Atlanta. Currently, she is at Emory.
Her book, Beyond
Katrina: Meditations on the Mississippi
Gulf Coast caught my attention.
Since I cannot borrow books from school libraries, I searched the Upper
Hudson Library System, only to find none of the member libraries owns the
book. I ended up getting it through
interlibrary loan from the Utica College library. Ultimately, I asked our local public library to
purchase a copy for its collection.
Beyond Katrina is
a combination of prose non-fiction and poetry.
Trethewey meditates not only on the after-effects of Katrina, both
natural and human-made, but also on race relations on the Mississippi Gulf
coast going back for decades. It is a
thoughtful, moving thin volume that I highly recommend. (Unlike the one thin mint in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, this one thin
volume will not make your head explode.)
Trethewey makes the point that in the aftermath of Katrina,
New Orleans has received the lion’s share of attention. There is a dearth of literature about the
Mississippi Gulf coast after Katrina.
However, the true appeal of this book is how Trethewey interlaces
Katrina recovery with larger social and economic issues and with human’s
attempts (futile) to control or manipulate nature. (I never realized that the beaches of the
Mississippi Gulf coast were constructed by humans in the 1950’s in order to
attract tourism. I always thought they
were made by nature.)
When I was a child, we spent some time in the area of
Gulfport and Biloxi visiting relatives.
I can remember the devastation which Camille wreaked. I have not been along the Gulf coast since
the late 1970’s, when we used to drive through to Florida, usually Pensacola. Much has changed, evidently, since
Mississippi legalized gambling and the floating casinos popped up along the
coast.
In the wake of devastating hurricanes in the northeast--Irene and Sandy--I am curious to see the literature which these disasters generate.
My mark of a good book is one I would add to my personal collection. Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina very well may make its way to my already overcrowded
bookshelves.
NOTE: As I edited this blog to post, an idea for a literature elective occurred to me--Literature of Natural Disasters. I googled the idea to find that a book aimed at grades 3 - 6 exists, as does a course, but no such course exists in googleland for secondary or higher education.
