Nor Any Drop To Drink: A Case Study Of Denise In AD

1518 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Personal narrative of a hurricane victim

Water, Water, Everywhere; Nor any Drop to Drink: A Case Study of Denise in AD

In Josh Neufeld’s Trauma novel, A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge the personal aspects of Hurricane Katrina are emphasized and explored. The book follows representative Katrina survivors, highlighting their experiences and coping with the aftermath of the storm. None of characters in the book are presented as having the “right” answers, but Denise, had a full experience of the chaos, horror, and destruction that Katrina inflicted on New Orleans. She had full exposure of the traumatic event, and the novel gives the reader a unique insight into her experiences.
Denise is a counselor with a graduate degree who works with many battered women. She is sensitive to vulnerable individuals who have experienced racism, sexism, mental health issues, and are economically disadvantaged. Denise also has had personal experiences of trauma including poverty and racism, similar to her clients. The novel suggests through the settings and the narrative that her trauma and that of others is a personal affair. Each person processes trauma in different ways. It is difficult to assign a general meaning of trauma without considering ones backgrounds, resources, and experience.
Aside from narrative and detail, Neufeld uses color and type styles throughout the book to indicate the changing atmosphere and moods. Hartman, an expert in trauma theory describes the use of color and light in the trauma novel as “The paradigm of coming-to-knowledge, expressed often as a movement from darkness to light” (Hartman 263). At first in A.D. the colors are uniform, but they begin to degrade and mix as the storm displaces and detaches the New Orleanians amongst it. He begins the story i...

... middle of paper ...

... Bags of trash are visible in the lower corner.
A.D., covering only a few days in 2005 and brief reports from Denise and others in 2008, concentrates mostly on the traumatic event, Katrina, rather than the coping or not coping with physical and psychic disorders. It lingers as an unexplained unexpected horror that left deep scars on both Denise and New Orleans. Denise, who has the fullest experience of it, comes closest to suggesting a remedy for, a happy ending, to trauma: she works, not broods, helps others and herself in practical ways like with the battered women Katrina survivors work, and she, at the very end of A.D. feels for the many people whose journey into trauma has been a one-way misery. The graphic novel may have a general message of the will to survive, of hope, but the main impact clearly is of the power and even mysterious effects of the event.

Show More
Related

  • Analysis of Dave Egger's Zeitoun

    874 Words  | 2 Pages

    Niman, Michael I. "KATRINA's AMERICA: Failure, Racism, And Profiteering." Humanist 65.6 (2005): 11. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.

    Read More

  • Racial Microaggressions and Injustice: A Review of Rankine's Citizen

    1116 Words  | 3 Pages

    Rankine also shares the horrible tragedy of hurricane Katrina experienced by the black community, where they struggled for their survival before and post the hurricane catastrophes. She reports that the lives of black people in the disaster were of no cost for white administration and they delayed the help. She expresses this by writing, “I don’t know what the water wanted. It wanted to show you no one would come” (Rankine 94)(11).

    Read More

  • Analysis Of One Dead In Attic By Chris Rose

    1109 Words  | 3 Pages

    A storm such as Katrina undoubtedly ruined homes and lives with its destructive path. Chris Rose touches upon these instances of brokenness to elicit sympathy from his audience. Throughout the novel, mental illness rears its ugly head. Tales such as “Despair” reveal heart-wrenching stories emerging from a cycle of loss. This particular article is concerned with the pull of New Orleans, its whisper in your ear when you’ve departed that drags you home. Not home as a house, because everything physical associated with home has been swept away by the storm and is now gone. Rather, it is concerned with home as a feeling, that concept that there is none other than New Orleans. Even when there is nothing reminiscent of what you once knew, a true New Orleanian will seek a fresh start atop the foundation of rubbish. This is a foreign concept for those not native to New Orleans, and a New Orleanian girl married to a man from Atlanta found her relationship split as a result of flooding waters. She was adamant about staying, and he returned to where he was from. When he came back to New Orleans for her to try and make it work, they shared grim feelings and alcohol, the result of which was the emergence of a pact reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. This couple decided they would kill themselves because they could see no light amongst the garbage and rot, and failure was draining them of any sense of optimism. She realized the fault in this agreement,

    Read More

  • Help We Re Drowning Poem Analysis

    965 Words  | 2 Pages

    And when it became clear to us that things were bad, the rest of the world still lacked comprehension.. We don’t see our own vulnerability until we’re standing knee-deep in mud in our basements” (Knufken 510-512). Her frustration about the desensitization of disasters and people’s reaction towards them is portrayed through statements such as this one. A different form of frustration is also noticed when she claims that she “wanted to help, but the rain wouldn’t stop. All I could do, all any of us could do was watch and wait, watch and wait"(Knufken 510-512). Her tone of frustration at this point is due to her reflection upon the inability which she had to help, her powerlessness and the lack of ability which all of the victims of this disaster had. This tone continues throughout most of the essay as she compares disasters such as this flood, to being another face in the crowd of headlines. She furthers this frustration by stating that “today alone, I read in the news that 260,000 people had to evacuate Kyoto due to a typhoon. In Washington’s Navy Yard, someone murdered 13 people with a gun. There’s the new episode of “Breaking Bad” and the threat of war in Syria. every headline screams to be first in line. Everything is a crisis” (Knufken

    Read More

  • The Bias and Suffering after Hurricane Katrina: Trouble The Water, and Zeitoun

    1460 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the late summer of 2005, a terrible tragedy occurred that changed the lives of many in the south-east region of the United States. A Category 3, named storm, named Hurricane Katrina, hit the Gulf Coast on the 29th of August and led to the death of 1,836 and millions of dollars’ worth of damage (Waple 2005). The majority of the damage occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana. Waple writes in her article that winds “gusted over 100 mph in New Orleans, just west of the eye” (Waple 2005). Not only was the majority of the damage due to the direct catastrophes of the storm but also city’s levees could no longer hold thus breaking and releasing great masses of water. Approximately, 80% of the city was submerged at sea level. Despite the vast amount of damage and danger all throughout the city, officials claimed that there was work being done to restore the city of New Orleans as a whole but many parts, and even the people, of the city were overlooked while areas of the city with higher economic value, and more tourist traffic, were prioritized along with those individuals.

    Read More

  • The Open Boat Essay

    1180 Words  | 3 Pages

    On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, the most expensive hurricane in American history, made landfall in Louisiana with winds of one hundred and twenty-seven miles per hour (“Hurricane Katrina Statistics Fast Facts”). The sheer magnitude of the amount of lives and property lost was enormous, and it was triggered simply by warm ocean waters near the Bahamas ("How Hurricane Katrina Formed"). Nature was indifferent to whether the raging winds and rain would die off in the ocean or wipe out cities; it only follows the rules of physics. A multitude of American authors has attempted to give accounts and interpretations of their encounters with the disinterested machine that is nature. Two authors, Stephen Crane and Henry David Thoreau, had rather contrasting and conflicting interpretations of their own interactions with nature. Crane’s work, “The Open Boat,” is story based on his experience as a survivor

    Read More

  • Hurricane Katrina Impact

    1498 Words  | 3 Pages

    According to Hurricane Katrina At Issue Disasters, economic damages from Hurricane Katrina have been estimated at more than $200 billion… More than a million people were displaced by the storm… An estimated 120,000 homes were abandoned and will probably be destroyed in Louisiana alone (At * Issue). For this perspective, “Hurricane Katrina change the Gulf Coast landscape and face of its culture when it hit in 2005” (Rushton). A disaster like Katrina is something the victims are always going to remember, for the ones the lost everything including their love ones. Katrina became a nightmare for all the people that were surround in the contaminated waters in the city of New Orleans. People were waiting to be rescue for days,

    Read More

  • The Round House Analysis

    1215 Words  | 3 Pages

    The publication of The Round House by Louise Erdrich serves as a literary feat and national victory for sexual assault survivors and activists through the author 's realistic depiction and exploration into the brutal effects that domestic violence has on a victim, family, and community. In The Round House, Geraldine 's traumatic assault during the summer of 1988 is not to be treated as an isolated incident, but a common occurrence that has affected millions of Americans and evolved into a national domestic violence crisis. The lasting emotional, mental, and relational effect of sexual assault and trauma are critical matters that are rarely explicated in modern literature, much

    Read More

  • Media Coverage on Hurricane Katrina

    1298 Words  | 3 Pages

    Media Coverage on Hurricane Katrina News of the devastating hurricane Katrina and its economic, political, social, and humanitarian consequences dominated global headlines in an unprecedented manner when this natural catastrophe struck the region of New Orleans in mid August 2005 (Katrinacoverage.com). As a tradition, large-scale disasters like Katrina, inevitably, bring out a combination of the best and the worst news media instincts. As such, during the height of Hurricane Katrina’s rage, many journalists for once seized their gag reflex and refused to swallow shallow and misleading excuses and explanations from public officials. Nevertheless, the media’s eagerness to report thinly substantiated rumors may have played a key role in bringing about cultural wreckage that may take the American society years to clean up. To begin with, anybody privy to the events in New Orleans that ensued after Hurricane Katrina struck knows that horrible things that had nothing to do with natural causes happened: there were murders, gunfire directed at a rescue helicopter, assaults and, courtesy of New Orleans’ city police department, a myriad other crimes that most probably went unreported (Katrinacoverage.com).

    Read More

  • Impact Of Hurricane Katrina

    1195 Words  | 3 Pages

    Hurricane Katrina was one of the most devastating natural disasters to happen in the United States. The storm resulted in more then US$100 billion in damage when the cities flood protection broke and 80% of the city was flooded (1). The protection failure was not the only cause for the massive flooding, the hurricanes clockwise rotation pulled water from north of New Orleans into the city. 330,000 homes were destroyed and 400,000 people from New Orleans were displaced, along with 13,00 killed (1). Although the population quickly recovered, the rate of recovery slowed down as the years went on leading us to believe not everyone

    Read More

  • Intergenerational Trauma Essay

    1045 Words  | 3 Pages

    When faced with a life altering situation although Molly’s characteristics and personality aid her in courageously defying them, the effects of facing this traumatic event will lead to long term psychological repercussions. When severe harm is inflicted on a person’s psyche, it is viewed as an emotional trauma (Levers, 2012). The emotional harm inflicted on Molly’s psyche originates from different dimensions; like her upbringing, her trauma is multidimensional too. As a child of the Indigenous community, whose ancestors and elders were killed violently in inter-group conflicts, and whose children were forcefully removed from families, Molly is would experience intergenerational trauma (Atkinson, 2002). Intergenerational trauma is trauma passed down from one generation to another; as a close knitted community group, the grief experienced by family members of losing their loved ones, would have been transferred across generations (Atkinson,

    Read More

  • Woman Thou Art Loosed And Mississippi Damned Analysis

    1708 Words  | 4 Pages

    The concept of displacement from rape in “Woman Thou Art Loosed” and “Mississippi Damned” is represented by mental distortion, trauma, and self-degradation.

    Read More

  • Hurricane Katrina

    1157 Words  | 3 Pages

    Hurricane Katrina had a huge impact on the world and more specifically, New Orleans for there was substantial damage to the citizens property and more importantly their body and minds. The biggest impact Hurricane Katrina has was on the people of New Orleans. Having their homes destroyed or uninhabitable, thousands of New Orleans residents were forced to flee in the Superdome and t...

    Read More

  • Hurricane Katrina: Causes, Effects, and Aftermath

    1428 Words  | 3 Pages

    Fink, Sheri. "Hurricane Katrina: after the flood." The Gaurdian. N.p., 7 Feb. 2014. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.

    Read More

  • Environmental Inequality

    1741 Words  | 4 Pages

    Images of New Orleans residents stranded throughout the city left a permanent impact towards those who followed media coverage, suggesting that the storm’s damage has been viewed at as anything but a natural disaster. “Katrina has come to be interpreted by some as a “metaphor,” for the inequality that pervades urban American, affecting poor, primarily Black segments of the urban populace most directly” (Sharkey 2007: 483). African Americans...

    Read More

More about Nor Any Drop To Drink: A Case Study Of Denise In AD

Open Document