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A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast
University of Georgia Press
September 2010
On Sale: September 1, 2010
144 pages
ISBN: 0820333816
EAN: 9780820333816
Hardcover
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Fiction Poetry
Beyond Katrina is poet Natasha Trethewey’s very personal
profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people
there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina. Trethewey spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her
mother’s extended family, including her younger brother,
still lives. As she worked to understand the devastation
that followed the hurricane, Trethewey found inspiration in
Robert Penn Warren’s book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in
the South, in which he spoke with southerners about race in
the wake of the Brown decision, capturing an event of wide
impact from multiple points of view. Weaving her own
memories with the experiences of family, friends, and
neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and
the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. She
chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated
the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose
citizens—particularly African Americans—were on the margins
of American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly,
Trethewey illustrates the destruction of the hurricane
through the story of her brother’s efforts to recover what
he lost and his subsequent incarceration. Renowned for writing about the idea of home, Trethewey’s
attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport
started as a series of lectures at the University of
Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the
Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey has
expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates
personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving
meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home.
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