My name is Helene Marie Thian. I do not wish to remain invisible, and so I write.
I am now, in 2008, visible, a survivor, but still, and may always be, in psychic shock due to the levee breaks in 2005 which destroyed such a great chunk of my soul that I drift through life, rather like Tennessee Williams' character Karen Stone in "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone". After losing nearly everything tangible, evidence that I ever lived, I did not receive even a $5,000.00 personal property grant from the U.S. government. I was not insured and so received no money from any insurance company. I was not a homeowner, or a renter. I resided with my mother. And somehow that sort of presence in the world is, from the point of view of this nation's government and citizenry, persona non grata. How uncivilized. How uncompassionate. How hypocritical. How sad.
My U.S. citizenship and my contributions to this country by way of my ability to build bridges between Japan and the U.S.--read on--evidently are insufficient to qualify me for any recompense for the loss of my entire life history. This would not happen in Europe, where I have studied and resided, nor in Japan where I resided for many years. So I consider myself, post-Katrina, a New Orleanian and a citizen of the world-at-large.
A house is not a home. Psychologically, one's personal effects--photos, awards, diplomas, books, art objects, gifts from friends, heirlooms from family--define the person. You can rebuild a house, or get another one. You cannot rebuild an archive of personal history.
I spent years in Japan as a lawyer, journalist and author. My book "Setting Up & Operating a Business in Japan" was a bestseller. In 1994, I arranged a major art exhibition for a renowned Japanese artist at New Orleans' Contemporary Arts Center and have represented New Orleans artists in Japan by arranging their exhibitions. In 2003, I lectured at LSU on post-modern Japan. Prior to Katrina, I sent all of my over 16 years of personal history in Japan to New Orleans--including artwork which I'd made and for which I had won a prize in a Tokyo competition--along with beautiful kimonos, an incredible library of Japan books collected over many years, photos, artworks of artist friends, and my personal pennings for the Japanese media. I never saw most of it again as it was destroyed by the black stenchwater (my own word) which flooded the little house in Lakeview to which I moved my mother just two weeks before the levees broke. Previously, our family home was in Lake Terrace for some 40 years, and that home, in a horrible twist of fate, was undamaged after Katrina.
I had an airplane ticket to Tokyo for the day of Katrina. I was going to return to live and work there. My mother and I drove the day before to Baton Rouge after an uncle pleaded with us to come. In shock watching the news from Baton Rouge--the trip had taken us 6 hours, but usually is only an hour or so--I realized I couldn't return to New Orleans. My cousin put me on the plane a week later, buying me some clothes and taking me to the Baton Rouge airport as Moisant was obviously out of commission.

The people at my company in Japan enfolded me, and helped me to survive, as did my dear friends in Tokyo. One day, I pulled a folder out of the closet at the office and it said in Japanese, "Red Cross". I didn't know why that folder was there, but knew that these Japanese people were my Red Cross. I was, if you can call it that, the guest of honor at a benefit for Katrina in Tokyo headlined by my blues musician friend from Mississippi, Steve Gardner, a long term resident of Japan. (Amazingly, as I am writing this, Steve phones from Mississippi. He came to do some shows here, one of which I arranged at the Ogden Museum a week ago, and returns to Tokyo tomorrow.) He bought me a futon while I lived in Denver post-Katrina. I still have it, and the few things I could salvage which were sent by my best friend from Acadiana, all sitting in a storage unit in Denver to this day. I wish to extricate the contents from the locker this year, as I wish to extricate myself from the locker of post-Katrina living.
I spent months moving my mother to the little home on Milne Blvd., and every time I pass that street, feel disbelief and above all, numbness. I slept on the floor in our family home of 40 years, not wanting to transfer myself physically, finally to Milne Blvd., sensing somehow that a godawful event was soon to take place.
I spent two days with my best friend from law school, and her crew from a shipyard which she owns, digging and trying to salvage what we could
of my life six weeks after the levees broke. I had returned from Japan to do the deed. The silverware given me by my parents looked like something from 20,000 leagues under the sea. (It was subsequently cleaned in New Iberia while I resided in Loreauville at my friend's family home, and then restored at Tiffany's in Denver to such perfection that I wonder if they didn't give me a new set of silverware.)
I never saw most of my personal history again. I shall always see before my eyes: decapitated Japanese dolls, lovingly valued since childhood; kimonos bleeding dye on the muck-and-stench floors of the house, twisted like multicolored corpses; shreds of Japanese woodblock prints stuck here and there in the muck, tiny faces and body parts etched on paper decorating the muddy floors; the little Italian blown glass lamp, pink and curly, which belonged to my Sicilian grandmother, sitting there forlorn. The house was a 1950s Japanese-style home, and now it was covered in mud, stench and destroyed Japanalia. I saw my mother's Steinway piano upside down, flies circling it as if it were fruit. My mother's and my beautiful clothes were now as if petrified wood, grey and stiff hanging in the closets, and all of the silk scarves I'd gifted her from Japan over the years floated away somewhere, along with her treasured accordion which she'd played since the 1950s.
My friend and her crew and I threw the remains of the days and nights of my life out of a window. It lay in a heap and one day got hauled away like so much detritus. A woman from FEMA came around while we were in the house and asked if we wanted sandwiches. I screamed, "I just want my life back!"
There was a big shovel in the house. My friend gave it to me and told me to swing it everywhere and let the anger out. I did. It didn't help. I cleaned and Cloroxed and Cometed my remaining few things--mostly glass and ceramic as all else got devoured by the waters--at my friend's home in Acadiana, then boxed it all up. Without her, and others along the way, I wouldn't be alive now, nor would any memory of mine. Kindness of friends, and strangers, indeed.
I miss my personal history every day, especially my childhood photos and personal artwork: the little plays about Henry VIII I penned as a grammar school student; the poetry journals; the collaged artist's books; the copies of my bestselling book; the stack of one year's worth of architectural magazines which included my monthly columns, including a series on New Orleans artist friends; the video collection which I'd created over the years of my favorite films; the Murano glass bowl given me by my grandmother which cracked, when I touched it,into fragments due to water occlusions; the little statue of playing whippets full of rust blisters, also my grandmother's gift; the boxes filed with postcards from friends worldwide; the vintage clothes collection assembled over decades; my childhood jewelery, including gold charm bracelet, baby rings and baby shoes pin; pearls that had been given me by my Japanese "family", which cracked and became dust in my hands; and so much more in that tiny room where everything was stored. It was shipped from Japan, picked up at Customs, delivered to our home of 40 years and then moved, in a date with destiny, to Milne Blvd. to be destroyed. The same goes for all of my boxes of mementos and books sent from Berlin, where I lived for several months after two years spent as a training candidate in Jungian Psychology at the C. G. Jung Institut in Zurich. As the opera title states, "Forza del Destino", date with destiny.
All that defined me, that identified me, that was and is me in a tangible sense vanished or was destroyed in one ugly, foul-smelling act of watery treachery. But I don't blame Katrina. I blame the patriarchy: the Army Corps of Engineers and its Big Daddy, the U.S. government, who don't, frankly, give a damn about the dignity of the lives of others, despite all of the rhetoric to the contrary.
We who have endured the unendurable are just like the victims of WWII in Europe who lost everything in the blitzkriegs and bombings. How could one's own nation have contrived to visit this upon us by contributing big time to global warming, neglect to build and maintain adequate levees for New Orleans, a world class city, and then, to add ignorant insult to unspeakable injury, not provide salve in the form of monetary compensation to ALL of us without question?
I had refined the essence of my life to the contents of a single tiny room in Lakeview, and it held my treaures, my life story. It is one thing to lose the four walls. But it is another to lose not only the walls, but what lies within and beneath, the foundation of the walls. This is what I, and others, have lost.
Such loss isn't confined exclusively to the 9th Ward, by the way. We are the forgotten people of this hurricane: people at the Lakefront who are expected to get on with it and bear the unbearable without complaint because we're perceived to be more well to-do. But pain and suffering of individuals cannot be compared. That is not only insensitive, but an impossible thing to accomplish anyway. Everyone suffers in his or her own private Louisiana.
It's all supposed to be "back to normal" now. It isn't. It won't ever be. No amount of therapy or talking about it will make it so. But it would help the healing to be visible. For this will not only help us, the survivors, but also, those who think it has nothing to do with them. For it all turns on a dime. It can happen to you, too. As Whitney, an African-American man encountered in Denver, where I stayed with a friend who saved my life in so many senses post-Katrina, said to me, "We just got it sooner than they did. But they gonna get it,too." What goes around comes around. Those who don't care to help us here in New Orleans, or remember what has happened, would do well to remember at least that.
I salvaged what I could for two days. Then lived in Acadiana, Denver, Virginia, New Mexico and California and am back in Virginia working temporarily. I have driven the length of this country two times since Katrina, frantically searching for "home" and the meaning of my survival, indeed, my life. I have always been alone, aided by friends and strangers--a pastor and his wife even paid for my room in a bed and breakfast in Athens, Tennessee, telling me that they did it not only because I was a Katrina survivor, but because I matter, and am important. They had come to New Orleans to help, and continue to do so. Would that everyone was as giving and loving as Dan and Susan Denlinger of Ohio. Or my German friend Yvonne Cappell, met in Virginia, who gave me her deceased mother's locket with an edelweiss flower in it to remind me that the edelweiss grows high on the mountaintops in Switzerland and Germany and is "the survivor flower". Or my friend Kathy Maser, who gave me blues music which she and I love so much, a little stuffed animal sea otter clasping a beautiful red beaded necklace, and above all, her hug and beaming face. It is not the case. One says "Katrina" nowadays and it might as well be as if one said "a little rain in the afternoon". America has moved on.org.
My Cadillac, a 1996 Fleetwood Brougham, belonged to my best friend's deceased mother. It was sitting in Acadiana. I drove her away and have kept driving. I will go on, now I know that, though for a long time I didn't. But it is no testament, doesn't mean a thing to me to be "strong". For what? The Red Badge of Courage?
I only know that my other best friend, a psychoanalyst, wished me to remain alive so as to assist her in living through this life of so much pain and suffering, to remain alive so we could assist one another, and that rang true.
As if Katrina weren't enough, I lost my beloved fiancee, who had a drug addiction and shoved me out of his life just prior to Katrina in order to save me from suffering with him to the end, which was not so long in coming. He turned up dead a year ago in 2007 in New Orleans, another casualty of Katrina and the harsh world which Big Daddy (read: the patriarchy) has made.
I am here and housing a soul which is part and parcel of a vanished New Orleans, a kinder, gentler world where a Farley's Florist, Fairmont Hotel Christmastime, and regal Mardi Gras traditions (including brioche-like King Cakes rather than mushy cinnamon rolls with icing masquerading as King Cakes)reigned. This fast food nation is killing the goose which laid the golden egg of old New Orleans, she who is Blanche DuBois of "A Streetcar Named Desire", and negligent levee building/maintenance is one of the ways the murder is being perpetrated.
I remember Romantic New Orleans, my definition of New Orleans, and despite the great destruction of our physical world which embodied that romance, I will, as a musician told me in Baltimore as he pointed to his chest (and heart), carry all of that within me. Then Romantic New Orleans has not completely vanished nor been vanquished, but will just have to be carried within us who remember a kinder, gentler time.
So go on, Big Daddy, you the master of the plantation, as Bill Moyers would put it, keep on hoodwinking the masses about Iraq and everything else in the name of non-love. We the Romantic New Orleanians will walk our talk and represent another way of being to those whom we encounter on our travels.
I am a native New Orleanian. And I am a survivor, not of Katrina, but of unconsciousness of the collective, which has led to global warming, the visitation of war upon the planet and all things ugly in the name of greed and desire, fear and hate. Katrina was Mother Nature's retaliation for Big Daddy's ugliness to her, and to us. If only this nation would have early on, before 2005, allied with Mother Nature, and stopped the patriarchy from continuing to be destructive so that she wouldn't have had to rise up in a tidal wave of reprimand that year.
I want everything that symbolized me and which I lost in 2005. I cannot ever have those things. I am beyond valiant, and so is everyone I know who experiences (it is a present, not a past, by the way) this. And I am so oppressed by the unconsciousness of the American public. But, without contradiction, I am thankful for the individuals who have lit my way with lamps of love, lit the path enough to keep me stepping on it even as it felt every second as if I was sinking into the quicksand.
I am still walking, sometimes back home to New Orleans, as Fats Domino sang, and sometimes away from it in order to earn a living as a Japanophile. But I am always walking as a Romantic New Orleanian.
Helene Marie Thian, J.D.
February 28, 2008

Citation Information:

Helene Thian, "Untitled." Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, Object #33877 (February 29 2008, 12:07 am)<http://www.hurricanearchive.org/object/33877>