Love letter to New Orleans bookpacking

Now that we have come to the end of bookpacking, it's safe to say I have finally found the words to explain it. 

It's a program where I got to learn about different cultures and explore different types of cuisines and learned about the history of the American education system that failed to teach me in high school.  And the people I came to this experience with soon became my friends. 

I was initially so scared to come on this trip, scared of the uncharted territory, but now that I have exprienced it was amzaing to say the least. The time I have spent in Grand Isle and New Orleans have been a time of reflection and personal growth. 

The books I have read on this trip and the places we have visited were like mirrors, all these characters staring back at me. I found myself relating to book characters like Louis de Pointe du Luc, characters I never thought I would relate to. I had to face my blackness in America; no matter where I'm from, people will always perceive me as just another Black person, and even though I never truly cared for how other people perceive me, I should be more intentional about the way I move through life. Being talked about or discriminated against because of my faith or how I see the world through my faith has been one of the surprises of the trip. I have never experienced anything like that before, but also I have never been this bold and forthcoming about my faith before as well. New Orleans is normally associated with the supernatural, all the voodoo, and the vampire stuff; because of that, I felt the need to stand firm in my faith so that I would still be unwavering in the face of anything that came my way.

In a city full of music, food, and culture, as we went through and visited places on our list and in between all that, I found myself just sitting with my thoughts. This was so difficult for me to do as someone who comes from an architecture background. Leisure is not normal for me. That’s what I said in the beginning of this trip but not anymore. I found myself slowing down my pace while I was walking and taking in everything as I walked through the city, talking and joking around with friends and staying at the cafe or restaurant an extra 30 minutes or an hour or so. In a world full of go-go-go where we are always looking for the next thing, we sometimes forget to appreciate the small things along the way, and all the work we do is actually so we can live. I feel fully immersed in the French influence in New Orleans, where leisure is a good thing and I don't have to be so stressed at all times.

Every day was something new in this city. One day we are seeing celebrations like the second line parade and Backstreet Museum, and the next we are visiting the Hurricane Katrina museum, and then the next we are seeing one of the most beautiful and mesmerizing performances EVER at Preservation Hall. Even through the pain and the natural disaster this city has been through, it always found a way to hold on to joy in everything. 

I want to be as resilient and vibrant as New Orleans. 

“What is it about this city that makes people want to write?” — Andrew Chater

People usually go to Los Angeles or New York to find themselves or to reinvent themselves. I say, come to New Orleans. A city TRULY like no other. Professor Andrew and I were talking about how weird it feels to not have one place to call home. For me, I always felt in the middle, too Ethiopian for my American friends and too American for Ethiopian friends; even going back and forth between LA and ATL never really felt like one place was my home, like my ride-or-die home. It was always about the people at the different places, never about the place. I never truly felt like I belonged, always in between, and felt a bit strange, too. But not in New Orleans. In New Orleans I didn't need to belong because the city is a collection of many different people and cultures and languages; I suddenly felt less strange. Even Louis from Interview with the Vampire says that there are so many interesting characters in the city that a vampire won’t stand out, I agree. 

This program brought so many different people all together. All the people that came on this program with me, our paths couldn’t be any different from one another's. We probably wouldn’t have crossed paths if it wasn’t for this program. Which I'm very grateful for. As much as I learned from this program, I also learned a lot from them. 

I aspire to be:

As curious and full of energy as Sadie 

As welcoming and caring as Isabel 

As kind and patient as Trey 

As happy and considerate as Vanessa 

As sharp witted and man of taste like Andonis  

As smart and courageous like Laura

As funny and whimsical like Celeste 

As creative and compassionate like Jaenalyn

And finally, as knowledgeable and thoughtful as Professor Andrew

New Orleans will forever have my heart!

Goodbye for now.

Details are not dead

People say details are dead in architecture; I say they just haven’t been to New Orleans.

New Orleans doesn’t behave like most American cities, where the architecture presents itself as clean progress or uniform planning. Instead, it’s a constant negotiation between time periods and materials and different cultures that never fully agreed to merge but simply coexist. The architecture in this city is curious; it's not just one thing. It doesn’t feel accidental; it feels layered. 

The old and the new are always pushing and pulling one another.

As an architecture student, I can’t help but move through a street without inspecting every building I come across. I notice the tacked-on balconies/galleries and the fully flat sides that make my head turn in confusion. I notice the abundance of stairs and the lack of inclusive entrances and walkways—not afterthought ramps that are bolted on later but a meticulous, accessible design that accommodates everyone without having to use different walkways or entrances. I notice the wrought iron balconies that must have taken hours and hours to perfect and the various types of columns. I notice the shortage of adequate water drainage. All this, and the city carries it all unapologetically.

In most big cities I have been to, they are always trying to show their uniform continuation of buildings that all look modern and show seams but not New Orleans. New Orleans is proud to show its seams: the patches where the time has caught up with the building, the places where materials were swapped out, and moments where buildings from different eras come together without ever fully resolving one another. 

Bookpacking helped me see the city from different perspectives. I got to see the city through the lenses of the books I have read so far.

In Interview with the Vampire, New Orleans is almost too beautiful to be real, so glamorous and gothic, draped in wrought iron and dim lights. In Confederacy of Dunces, the architecture is neither romantic nor mystical but simply real/human. It cracks, it leaks, and eventually collapses. In The Moviegoer, the elegance has started to loosen up. The city feels fixed and more uncertain, drifting, which reflects how the main character in the book, Binx Bolling, was feeling during the entirety of the book. In Coming Through Slaughter, the architecture becomes something more unstable. Buddy Bolden’s New Orleans is less about structure and more about vibration, the wooden houses and narrow rooms that seem to bend under the weight of music and memory. In The Awakening the buildings become a form of confinement. Edna Pontellier, or Kate Chopin’s house parts, the room, and the galleries that are carefully maintained domestic spaces are very elegant and suffocating in equal manner. The contradiction between the openness of nature and the enclosure of social expectation mimics Edna’s struggle between desire and limitation, wanting to expand but yet be so restricted. In The Yellow House, architecture is described as a breathing entity that reflects complex matters like systemic inequality and familial bonds. And, in the yellow house, we see architecture isn't about beautiful structures but a weapon that has been used to keep people of color at a disadvantage. All these books I have read show that the buildings are never really just the background but more so an active participant in the lives that are unfolding inside or around these buildings.

My personal favorite is the shotgun house. They originated from West Africa and were further developed in Haiti. They are my favorite because they are one of the smartest designs I have ever come across so far. One of the design features is that the interior and exterior doorways line up perfectly from front to back, which, combined with the high ceiling, allows cross ventilation to happen, which is so important in places that are humid like New Orleans.

New Orleans is filled with shotgun houses that are just explosions of color, not afraid to show out like the people who live in them. In most American cities, a bright pink or cobalt blue house is a statement of defiance against a sea of beige. Here, it simply belongs. The explosion of color isn't just ornamentation for its own sake, but it's an extension of the same spirit that produced the wrought iron, the courtyards, and the layered history visible in every block. It is a city that refuses to be muted.

New Orleans architecture is not a result of a single grand vision executed cleanly. It is a result of centuries of improvisation under pressure shaped by hurricanes and floods, by the collision of the French, the Spanish, and the African influences, and by poverty and wealth existing side by side. It is architecture that was never finished because the conditions that produced it never stopped changing. And yet it endures, not despite that instability but because of it. The buildings are resilient like the people who occupy them. 

Details are not dead. They just require a city patient enough and stubborn enough to hold onto them.

Weep for the living

I have always avoided watching movies like 12 Years of Slave, not because I didn't care or wasn't interested, but because I don’t find joy in watching painful history. Now that I have watched it, I can say it is an important film to see in order to have some understanding of the psychological and physical torture enslaved people endured.

The film follows Solomon Northup, a free man from New York who is kidnapped by people he trusted, colleagues and professionals and sold into slavery and shipped from Washington D.C. to New Orleans. What is most striking is not just the physical brutality but also the deliberate psychological conditioning he is subjected to from the very beginning.

After being drugged and captured in Washington, Solomon tried to tell the slave trader that he was a free man. The trader responded with “Produce your papers then” in a condescending tone, knowing well enough he couldn't in a situation he was in. The trader then declares Solomon a runaway slave from Georgia. When Solomon pushes back, insisting on this identity, the trader first beats him with a wooden paddle, then with a whip. Which shows the resistance isn’t promoted and an identity is something that can be stripped away by force.

On our Ghost Tour, we visited the home of Madame Delphine LaLaurie, who tortured the enslaved people under her house, as did her husband. It’s reported they had a torture chamber where the husband practiced experiential surgeries on the enslaved people. During this tour one of my peers said I couldn't possibly understand how someone can do this to another human being. Well, all of this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Slavery was made possible by years and years of propaganda, the deliberate assertion that people with darker skin were less intelligent, felt less pain and needed to be “liberated”. This kind of thinking is what they used to justify any cruelty committed against Black people.

Once Solomon arrives in New Orleans, we see enslaved people being bought and sold like livestock at an auction. In the scene, we see a young boy is made to perform knee-high jumps so buyers can assess his fitness. Buyers check the enslaved people's teeth the way one inspects an animal. This is a clever illustration of dehumanization.

This pattern of dehumanization repeats throughout history. We see echoes of it today, in the way the American government demonizes immigrants — reducing them to threats, stripping them of humanity through language and policy, and placing them in places that are basically modern-day concentration camps.

We have a saying in my home country. It goes like this: "ይብላኝ ለከራሚው ሟቹስ ረፍቱ ነው።", which roughly translates to weep for the living; the dead are resting.

On the journey to New Orleans, Solomon also witnessed the death of a fellow captive and was forced to throw his body into the river. Another man remarks that the dead man is in a better place, suggesting that death is mercy compared to the life that awaits them. I saw something similar that reminded me of this scene at the Whitney Plantation. It was an art installation representing the people who threw themselves into the Atlantic Ocean rather than be subjected to a life of slavery.

Death is mercy.

The water mists

While walking through the Whitney Plantation, I also noticed the mist machines set up along the path to keep visitors cool. There’s a painful irony in that. It’s almost unbearable for people to stand in the sun for ten to fifteen minutes while the tour guide speaks. Imagine the enslaved people who had to work the fields for up to twenty hours at a time, in the worst conditions imaginable.

The violence of slavery didn't just live in the labor, people we applaud in American history participated in this act of violence. One of the founding fathers of America, George Washington, had the teeth of enslaved people. The Emancipation Proclamation didn't pass not only because they wanted to free the enslaved people but also to crumble the southern economy, while making forced labor legal as punishment for a crime. We learned something similar in one of the seminars. A man set right here in New Orleans, John McDonogh. A wealthy slave owner who freed some of the enslaved people under his control and donated his money for the educational system. The money was used to further segregate the educational system in New Orleans, and the people he freed, he freed them based on his condition of whether they were “ready” or had the necessary skills to be free. Misguided good deeds that aren’t really good.

In the movie we also see the misinterpretation of the Bible. There is a scene that stood out to me where Epps reads aloud from the Bible to justify the abuse inflicted on enslaved people. One specific verse – Luke 12:47, to be exact. Which they took literally, while it meant something completely different. It talks about the priesthood, church leaders, and spiritually mature Christians. Patristic tradition dictates that the "stripes" or beatings are not physical punishments inflicted by man but the self-inflicted spiritual consequences of sin and the loss of God's grace at the Judgement. The Church Fathers note an important principle of spiritual proportionality, meaning greater spiritual knowledge equals greater accountability. If an enlightened person such as a bishop, priest, or mature believer knowingly sins or misleads others, their spiritual fall is deeper and more severe than someone who sinned out of ignorance. It is dangerous to lean on one's understanding while reading a complex book like the Bible; this kind of misunderstanding gets people gravely hurt.

““And that servant, which knew his lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes.” ”

— Luke 12:47

Even after the enslaved people were free, systems were put in place to ensure that Black people remained as disadvantaged as possible. Whether it’s literacy tests to surpass voting, really cheap wages, or redlining certain parts of a city so Black and brown families won’t be able to get loans or any kind of funding, for that matter.

People talk about generational wealth as though it were equally available to everyone. The majority of generational wealth was built on the backs of enslaved people.

People talk about the American dream, but who exactly gets to have it? Who has access to it?

I often think about one scene from one of my favourite shows, Scandal. A character named Eli Pope, also known as Papa Pope, talks about how people of colour have to be twice as good to have half of what others have. People of color also deal with having to prove themselves over and over again. People of color, specifically women of color, are given far less room to fail. There is always someone out there ready to whisper that you are only here because of affirmative action or just to fill a diversity quota.

“You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.”

— Eli Pope from Scandal

Regardless of this, Black people found ways to hold onto joy. Whether it’s in their hymns, their prayers, their food, or their community. We had the opportunity to visit the Backstreet Cultural Museum, where we saw different expressions of African American culture. Extraordinary handmade costumes, each one telling a story, not a single bead out of place. We also got to experience a second line parade, and it was AMAZING. The people that dressed up in custom-made costumes with their colorful matching accessories were just dancing in the rain and having fun. In the famous words of Beyoncé, it’s just so much damn swag.

The huge barbecue that was going under the highway, the little kids that were dancing along, and even the people that were not walking along the parade were dancing along. It was contagious and really hard to resist dancing along. What we got to see at the parade was Black joy at its finest, and I love it. As important as it is to speak honestly about the pain inflicted in this country, it is equally as important to highlight and celebrate the joy—because the people at the parade are the fulfillment of their ancestors’ wildest dreams.

Between the Bite and the Cross

One of the reasons I chose this program was a TV show. Specifically a show called The Originals, a spin-off from The Vampire Diaries set right here in New Orleans. I watched it in high school, and it quickly became one of my comfort shows. It was my unofficial standard for what a vampire should look and feel like, which is very dramatic and glamorous, somehow still charming despite all the bloodshed. So you can imagine my surprise when Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire gave me something almost unrecognizable in comparison. These characters in the book weren’t comforting at all, quite the opposite actually. They were deeply unsettling and morally tortured. And yet, standing in the very streets where Rice set her story, I found myself relating and understanding them in a way I didn’t think I would.

New Orleans is a city that holds contradictions beautifully. Vampires, voodoo, and ghosts—overall the supernatural are woven into the fabric of this city as naturally as the live oak trees are draped in Spanish moss. And yet, so is Christianity. Walking through the French Quarter, I encountered both a voodoo shop and a cathedral within the same block, and somehow it doesn't feel like a contradiction; it feels like New Orleans.

The same spirit of contradiction lives inside of Louis. Seeing a supernatural being struggling with human emotions such as guilt, grief, and genuine appreciation for life made me sympathize with him. We see him being mocked by his supposed mentor/companion about the things he was feeling, such as having admiration and more appreciation for life. 

“You are in love with your mortal nature! You chase after the phantoms of your former self. Frenier, his sister…these are images for you of what you were and what you still long to be. And in your romance with mortal life, you’re dead to your vampire nature.”

- Lestat, Interview with the Vampire

St. Louis Cathedral

This quote mirrors something I've been navigating myself, my struggles in my own faith. Trying to balance my spiritual life while being in college, thousands of miles away from home. I'm constantly being surrounded by distractions where it’s easy to get sucked into things that don't benefit my spiritual life. Being young and not having experienced a lot of things, fighting these temptations could be really hard. Lestant tells Louis that he’s dead to his vampire nature. My faith calls me to be dead in my flesh in order for my spiritual life to thrive.

Similar tension, different stakes, I guess.

One of the ways I could be dead to my flesh is by fasting. Can you imagine fasting in a city like New Orleans? A city filled with amazing cuisine, and I only had a week to explore it. Which isn't nearly enough. Fasting in the deep South, where I could barely access any vegan food, feels like its own set of spiritual warfare. But that is the sacrifice, right? The same way Louis refused to drink human blood and only drinks animal blood such as rats and other small animals, I must also refuse to eat for a long period of time, along with not eating any animal products. 

It's uncomfortable, but that's sort of the point.

As much as I would like to believe that there isn’t any connection between religion and the supernatural, Interview With The Vampire tells me something different. The religious parallel that is being drawn in the book makes me question how I haven’t noticed it before. But that's what is so beautiful about bookpacking. It forces me to notice things I wouldn't have prior to this experience. 

In New Orleans, connection expands past religion and supernatural mixtures into the melting pot of cultures and architecture in the city. 

Louis and Lestat’s apartment mentioned in the book

In the book it mentions how glamorous New Orleans is and how much of a melting pot it is. The French, the Spanish, and the American people contributed to the culture and architecture of the city. As I was walking around the city with my peers, we saw the Dantel-like lace wrought iron bars, the Corinthian columns, the gas lamps, and the sailors that came to have a good time… Well, in my case, the Navy SEALs that stopped by to have a great time in the Crescent City. Being able to experience this firsthand has been like a dream; it constantly leaves me in awe of how much being in a place you read about shapes the way of thinking. 

Of course there are other things to notice about the city that I'm actively reading about and constantly observing. As beautiful as these buildings are, they are built with the blood, sweat, and tears of enslaved people. As my professor beautifully put it, the vampirism in Interview With The Vampire in a way represents how labor was sucked from the enslaved people in order to build all this glamor, drawing parallel to a vampire sucking blood from a human in order to live. 

I didn't expect a vampire novel to make me reflect on my faith, on sacrifice, on the history beneath the beauty of a city. New Orleans got under my skin, and so did Lestant.

26 Days in Uncharted Territory

A few weeks before I left campus, I was a nervous wreck. I’m talking about full on questioning every decision I have ever made, nervous to the point I considered backing out from this program completely. What was I thinking? Who do I think I am? The doubts came in fast and loud. A friend jumped in to reassure me, but it barely helped. My parents know I signed up for the program, but I couldn’t find the words to explain it to them, or anyone for that matter. This program is truly a one-of-a-kind experience that no amount of pre-trip conversations could have prepared me for what was coming.

When I landed at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, I was buzzing with anticipation. I was about to spend 26 days with people I had only met once before, in a city and state I had never set foot in. Uncharted territory, in every way possible. 

But the moment we arrived at Grand Isle, something shifted. The first night, we all gathered in the kitchen, worked together to prepare dinner, and sat around the table getting to know one another. The nervousness began to transform into something else—curiosity and excitement. We were all in it together. 

Challenges

I will be honest, the first challenge I faced was personal. Our professor Andrew's first order of business? Relax, unwind, and read.

I come from an architecture background, where there is always something to be done, a project to refine, an idea waiting to be developed further, and a deadline always lurking somewhere on the horizon. Leisure is not something I do naturally. Sitting on the porch swing with a book and nothing else to do felt almost uncomfortable at first.

The book assigned was The Awakening by Kate Chopin, set right there in Grand Isle and New Orleans. And I have to say, reading a novel in the very place it was written about is an entirely different experience. If I were to read the book back in LA or Atlanta, I would have imagined a completely different kind of beach. Bright white sand, clear blue water, the kind of beach you see on postcards. Grand Isle is none of these things. It has a quicksand-like texture beneath my feet, brown water, heavy rolling waves, relentless mosquitoes, bugs I couldn’t begin to identify, golf cart tracks worn into the ground, endangered birds nesting nearby, and days draped in a moody, grey light. It's hauntingly beautiful in its own way—raw, unpolished, and real. 

Sitting on that porch swing, surrounded by that landscape, while watching the sunset, it felt as if the rest of the world was fading away. The ocean that stretched out before me was the same water that once surrounded Edna Pontellier or her real-life embodiment, Kate Chopin herself. 

On my second day in Grand Isle, I tagged along with Professor Andrew to the local store and a gas station he had mentioned. And for the first time in my life, I felt an eerie, unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt stared at. I felt, for the first time, my Blackness in America in a way I could not ignore.

I moved to the United States seven years ago from Bahirdar, Ethiopia, a city where everyone had similar hair and skin complexions as me. When I first arrived in America, even though I was navigating a new country, I somehow didn’t carry the feeling of being unwanted. I had a kind of blissful ignorance about how I might be perceived in certain spaces. This changed on the road to Grand Isle. We passed a Confederate flag along the cypress-lined, swampy Louisiana highway, and something in me tensed up and didn't fully relax.

I found myself sitting with that feeling for a long time, and I couldn’t help drawing a comparison to Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. Edna was a woman pushing against suffocating social expectations of the 1870s, and despite all the privileges afforded to her as a white woman of means, she still felt caged. She fought for her freedom and tried to find her voice in her artwork. She refused to perform a version of herself that the world expected of her. In a way she was unaware of her privilege the same way I didn’t worry about how I could be perceived. 

I couldn’t look past the privileges Edna had. The ones she sometimes seemed blind to, the opportunities that were not available to people who looked like me in that same era. And yet, despite everything she had, she took her own life at the end of the novel. I find that both heartbreaking and complicated. It didn't have to end that way. We never know what tomorrow has in store. It could’ve held something far better than yesterday, but with death, there are no second chances, no tomorrows. If Edna had paused to see the full range of her privilege, maybe the story could have ended differently, but also sometimes certain types of pain are just unbearable, and she needed to do this one last act of freedom for herself. 

Louisiana Reminded Me of Home

Before we made our way to New Orleans, we stopped at the Cajun Pride Swamp Tour, and something unexpected happened. Louisiana reminded me at home.

The boat gliding through dark, still water, surrounded by cypress trees and alligators, brought back memories of taking small boat trips with my family across Lake Tana to visit convents set in the middle of the lake. There’s something timeless about moving through water, surrounded by nature that goes beyond geography. The warm air, the sound of water, and the pace of it all and entirely carried echoes of Bahirdar in January. I didn’t expect Louisiana to remind me of home, but it did. It was uncanny for a place that made me sit with the uncomfortable feelings to remind me of home. 

Typical boat trip in Bahir dar

Cajun Pride Swamp tour

I still don’t have the perfect words to explain this program to my parents, but I’m closer now than I was before.

Being able to walk the streets was written about; sitting with the discomfort and the beauty and the contradiction of the place in real time feels like I'm inhabiting the stories I'm reading about.

It is letting a book and location work on me simultaneously.

The Awakening hit differently because I read it in Grand Isle, watching the same murky water Edna walked into. My experience of race and belonging hit differently because I felt that in my body and did not read about it in theory. My homesickness surprised me in the Louisiana swamp because sometimes the word loops back on itself in a way I didn’t see coming.

I came into this program doubting myself, but this is what bookpacking does. It doesn’t let me stay comfortable; it meets me where I'm at and asks me to go further.

And I'm just getting started.