*Please feel free to read the blog post alongside the music for best effects.This May, I didn’t come to the South because I was curious about the miles and miles of swamp and the thick stench of the waves.
No. I returned to this rotten place buried in my personal history because I needed to test if the adolescent version of me was still alive somewhere in my body. The one who willingly traverses through the turbulent storms of thought. The one who admires the fallen palms. The one who clings on with youthful convictions. I was never fond of this dormant self, but she whines to the gust of wind by the waves, waiting to be summoned at the right time and place. I am familiar with tip-toes around the hundreds of lakes in one region, wildlife knocking on your backyard's door to disrupt civility with harmless invitation. But I have never lived next to the bayous. Under the gloomy, overcast sky, I know the haze is not supposed to be the norm. Nostalgia blooms as I enter the southern towns after three years of separation. Somewhere, beneath layers of adult resignation, she is as sharp as the ambitions I hold today. The Southern cities need not greet me as a traveler because I am indeed a ghost coming home. Perhaps the reincarnation of the desperate housewife or the duplicated spirit of the woman who drowns with the weariness of her fate.
The State of Louisiana sounds like my name. The European roots overlapping in their linguistic variations, suggesting me, the embodiment of the name, could be just as unkind and cruel as the land obtained from an epic purchase. Hence, reflecting on this experience, I am also looking inward. If I was not born into the household I came from, I would not receive this given name full of expectations and foreigness. I would not resonate with the poor Louisiana overcoming glamor and a troubled portfolio of stories.
At the young girl's core is an utterly discontented ideologist frozen in time. I am fearful that she knows about things I’ve tried to forget. Keep in mind that this consciousness would not exist without Brontë and Woolf, my well-revered “founding mothers” of intellectual discoveries—literary giants who revealed to me the required courage of being a woman. Tired of browsing through hundreds of pages daily, I developed an apprehension against the didactic lessons embedded in feminist literature.
But this time, the journey is guided by the sensuous book by Kate Chopin—my introduction to rebellion and the possibility of defiance. In a weird sense, her awakening is mine, too. Revisiting the great classics on ordinary summer days in Grand Isles for more spiritual and metaphysical wake-up calls to liberate the thoughts from the caged minds. The thickly textured sand begins to infiltrate the spine of the thin book. Grains of sand wedge into the plastic covers. The skeleton of my precious book becomes softer than usual. Moisture slowly deteriorates the physical binding as my fingers flick through the bound pages. To this day, my lungs are still not accustomed to the humidity that dampens my hair into a wet, soggy rag that vaporizes the last bit of my sanity. The water drops in the air decorate my face with a layer of fuzziness; I became constantly draped in a coat, insulating my skin from the outside world.
The pelicans line up in militant formations as they cruise in the humid air. The great migration shouldn’t be a rare sight to the children of the wild, but, too bad, we are products of the ruthless concrete jungles. Lying awake beneath the birds with great precision, I despise us for our chaos. We utter with wonder as we dip our toes into the shallow beaches blocked by fences made out of seaweed. I was patiently waiting for the rattlesnake to make an sudden appearance in the wetland. They happen to be more shy than the human explorers.
There is something uncanny about arriving in a location that has recently been redefined on the map; to some, we are standing by the “Gulf of America. It's a territorial rebranding that I can’t get myself to agree with. At least in my taxonomy, it is still undeniably the Gulf connecting to Central America. This open coastal region invites prosperity, exchanges, and soft mantles with the margins of the Atlantic. I can't even begin to talk about Confederate America, and the scars it leaves behind. Only it feels like today we are re-creating the supremacist separatist system in a sinful way; we are accepting a new empirical instinct, the renewed conscience of the selfish emperor. The scroll around the town becomes too painful when I am hyper-aware of the importance of statehood. This body of water is no longer apolitical and neutral.
The Symbol on My Arm
Everytime I miss the taste and sensuory attacks originating from the sea, I look down to find my waves tattoo gracefully, permanently implaneted on my arm. She is the testament to my determination: when I reach the end, I will not integrate with the soil but engulfed by the waves.
Scientifically speaking, the particles that run through the Mississippi River and the ocean are pretty similar. Sharing the same chemical composition, how disparate can they be? However, putting the technicality aside, one is the birthplace of civilizations, while the other is the agent of destruction. The River introduced the historical trading networks that dictated modern-day economical glory. At the same time, the Atlantic is the goddess commanding death at the palm of her irritable expressions, roaring with storms and occasionally the deathly hurricanes that reveal the dark side of motherhood. We all become witnesses to the unspeakable rage she endures as she relentlessly unleashes chaos on every roof, deck, and watchtower. The Atlantic is never the weeping mother we presume: she terrifies me as the killing machine that erases with joy. This is a deeper love from the creator to the mankind. We hide at the sound of thunder pulsing, but we fail to recognize this is the type of love we struggle to identify admist the trials and tribulations of our evolution.
When the waves of exasperation subsided, I heard Edna’s cries from afar. Am I the only one who is noticing the sorrow? The waves that drowned her still echo along these shores. As each hurricane peels back another layer of history, I am left to sift through the wreckage of the boats and the death of a woman who needed to escape from her cult of domesticity. The desperation that caged her for a lifetime. I want to find Edna and tell her she was not wrong and offensive for exploring what her heart desires. I want to gently rub her back as she unload her soul and reborn into a freed pelican.
Mourning over the loss of innocence, Edna’s womanhood repeatedly pulls me back to the sticky marrow of my childhood fears. I never want to succumb to her pain. I never want to lead a plain life that is carefully constructed by a loving suffocation. The excuse to kill me slowly, masked by the disguise of affection and care This isn't it, this could never be me. At the end of the day, I am lucky enough to have been born in the 21st century, carrying forward my ancestors' good wishes. On top of that, fortunately, I have the power to write and run outside of my confinement by writing determined words that elevate me above sensuous weight. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that women used to vanish under the heaviness of their social roles. We keep mistaking existential contemplations for romantic longing. Why can't we accept that the tragic ending is not a projection of loneliness? Why can't we comprehend that drowning in the sandy waves is returning our body to the generous, giving planet that granted us this life in the first place?
Aftermath of hurricanes on Grand Isles
Witnessing the destructions first-hand
Professor Chater casually brought up the fact that people here grow resilient to the frequent hurricanes. With this knowledge, they don't attempt to build stronger houses with more durable materials. Rebuilding over and over would suffice. The offhand comment helps me mourn the losses of those I have never met and could not name. Despite the hurt, I can confidently proclaim that it is the divine feminine in its most terrifying form, creating a cycle of prophetic language and retrospective reckoning. Looking back at the yellowing scrolls of history, every hurricane can be traced back to the ruins of these local establishments. And how much has humanity’s documentation been able to capture? This is a generational passage. I don't even need to talk to the locals to imagine their hurt. I don't dare to ask them about their rituals for picking apart and sensationalizing things they used to love deeply, places they used to reside from within.
Far too few of us learn our lessons about the inexplicable dangers of the mother planet that birthed us and, concurrently, is capable of taking away our livelihoods. Too torn down to be habitable but just astute enough to be recognized as the aftermath of recurring natural disasters that seek to swallow half of Earth’s landmass. The erosion of dirt and soil is not nearly as detrimental as the decimation of a culture that once meant searching for utopia. Despite wanting to know about the Creole people, despite wanting to learn more about the decomposition, we all silently agreed not to disturb the grief embedded in the soil. Hundreds of years later, the Mississippi flattens out the wrinkles of despair. My question is, do you ever wonder if the Gulf feels guilty for its (un)intentional murders? I can still taste the deceased flesh and blood in the valient raindrops.
When I was a teenager, stuck in the great sunshine state, every rainy season was accompanied by hurricane warnings, days off from school, and emergency evacuations. I didn’t use to understand the extent of damage people suffer from these calamities. In late September or early October, I can’t remember exactly when my schoolmates and I would break the curfew issued by the city and meet up to dance to music during the early waves of downpouring before the real hurricane came around to distort the Spanish architecture. We danced on the edge of disaster, a dumb vocation. My unshakeable joy from "dancing at the center of the hurricane" is the prelude to the great losses. I was rude to assume the unexpected holidays can be exhilarating and not a threat by any means. Occasionally, I heard the news of my friends’ friends losing their houses, caused by falling trees and hitting the electric wire, which turned into burning wood and bricks, then eventually nothing at all. But it all felt like a story happening to someone else at the time. Amidst the peaks and valleys of college, I am occasionally irritated by the encounter, fantasizing the peaceful afterlife if the flooding has looted me as opposed to those underserving of the blessing of the human demise. They make plans to survive, I create my agenda to exit, to perish, to decay with the spiteful rain.
My favorite architectural feature
The secret courtyards hidden among the buildings
The disappearance of the fishing community in Jefferson Parish showed us the unpredictability of the force of nature. One moment, you are harvesting oysters and trading sugar cane with the French-speaking neighbors; the next, their absences strike as a deliberate attack. When we gaze towards the abandoned porches, the docks also gaze us back. The scene is empty as if the entire village has collectively decided to withdraw and never return: they are now nothing more than distant memories in old maps that attempt to capture their presence along the sovereign water. In the drowned township, there used to be many other young women like myself, starring ajar into the lonesome coast across the body of water, hopefully confused, astonished by the lives they may possibly lead in the future.
I have yet to understand the connection between the cursed motherhood and my beloved planet that births my wild self-possessions. Why do you provide us the nutrients and liquids, then easily abduct the subsistence away from us? The sea takes in anything the world is not willing to protect, which makes me fear one day I too would be swept and collected by the waves.
Over the past few days, I have been haunted even thick into the night. The imagery of the Spanish moss attached to the ginormous oak trees keeps invading my dreams. I picture myself submerging just below the surface of the stream, floating with bursting air bubbles suspended in murky water, tangled in green laces. The epiphytic flowering plant is entangled with the gnarly tree branches swinging side by side in the tropical wind. This vision became an evident contrast with my nightmares of apocalyptic plots wiping out humanity with one touch. As much as I tell you I resent the South. As much as I proclaim I could not stand it. As much as you get the sense I need to escape. I find myself engulfed by her embrace upon my exile. The young girl is alive and well now, no longer kept in the eloquent, high towers of etiquette and madness. This is just the beginning of the revival, and I know without a doubt the blueness of my past, our collective past, is still coming for me.
