To Return and Rise Again

To Return and Rise Again

Louisiana’s poet laureate writes of the resolve of New Orleans’s displaced citizens to rebuild their shattered city.

Facebook
Twitter
Email
Flipboard
Pocket

Those of us who were able to leave the city of New Orleans before the hurricane are scattered and waiting to return to begin again. From such places as Shreveport and Baton Rouge, we receive reports of rapes, looting, shooting and fires. Yesterday I stood before the television in my hosts’ home, stunned at hearing that Jefferson Parish residents will be able to return home beginning Monday.

To many people, home is simply the most recent place they’ve worked or lived. These are the people who wonder why we bother living there. New Orleanians have ties that go back many generations. My own family goes back to slavery and freedom there. And there is no way I will not return on the first possible date.

Americans know New Orleans primarily as a tourist destination, a playground of vacationers and wealthy businessmen. The fact is that this is one of the greatest cities this country has known. It is unique in the history of the nation and through such industries as oil and gas, shipping and transportation and the growth and spread of jazz and the music culture that has grown out of it. It has provided the backbone for much of what the rest of the world knows and thinks of as “American.”

Years ago we were dubbed “the City that Care Forgot,” “Big Easy” and “Silver City,” not only because we knew how to enjoy life but because we were and are an open-handed and open-hearted people.

The city that has played host not only to the nation but to the world is now stranded. Those of us who have family and friends to take us in are the fortunate ones. The masses of people who have populated the world’s television screens for the past week are the poor, the broken. If they are in any way refugees, however, the refuge they seek is from the race and class prejudice and neglect that comes with being black and poorer than most Americans can imagine.

New Orleanians are a people of unimaginable strength and resilience. Great fallen cities have been rebuilt since ancient times. And New Orleans will be rebuilt as a great city. When we rebuild it, we will again host the world. Tell that to the world again and again.

We cannot back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.

Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

I urge you to stand with The Nation and donate today.

Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

Ad Policy
x