• 1 Lafcadio Hearn immortalized its disappearance through a revenant in his 1889 novella. Cf. L. Hearn, (...)
• 2 Lauren Zanolli, “Louisiana’s Vanishing Island: The Climate ‘Refugees’ Resettling for $52m”, The Gua (...)

2Downriver from the other side of the city, exotically named barrier islands off the Mississippi Delta have simply been swallowed up by the sea. Isle Dernière disappeared in an 1854 storm,1 Manila Village during Hurricane Betsy (1965). Today, Isle de Jean Charles, home to Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw indigenous people, has already lost most of its landmass to climate change.²

• 3 Shannon Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans, Chicago, University Chicag (...)
• 4 The expression “helicopter researchers” came up post-Katrina to refer to researchers who, locals so (...)

3New Orleanians orient themselves by water – the river and Lake Ponchartrain, canals and city bayous – as they turn their mental map of the city clockwise from its coordinates. “Uptown” is upriver, not north; “West Bank” lies south, on the other side of the Mississippi, across from “Below Canal”, the broad avenue that separates the central business district from the historical center. (The canal referred to was planned but never actually built, although others were.) In Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, the pretentious Pont-l’Évêque lawyer laughs at the domestic Félicité’s bewilderment when he shows her a map, her disorientation a validation, for him, of her unenlightened class. Yet people everywhere read maps within their own narratives. In New Orleans, a shared conventional geographical orientation cements a place identity with the watery city rather than along the Cartesian grid of colonial urbanists who built the city.3 When, during those months after Katrina the city overflowed with helicopter researchers,⁴ New Orleanians sometimes told me, as if reassured before the inundation of researchers, “but you’re one of us”. It’s not that they knew my Louisiana roots. Rather it’s because I orient myself the way they do. “I don’t have to explain to you what the North Shore is,” someone might tell me; it’s not a bank of the Mississippi River.

• 5 The moniker for the Mississippi River shared by Blacks and poor whites.
• 6 John Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, New (...)

4Useful habits become hand-me-downs when living in a watery place. Viola Green told me how she escaped drowning by hauling her aging, diabetic body up the ladder in her living room and, as the water rose to her shoulders, hollered for her life. That ladder had always been there, leaning on the wall next to the front door, because that’s where her now-deceased brother had always told her to keep one, waiting for the day when the water would rise. And rise it would. My Uncle Emile – he passed away long before Katrina, too – used to say Old Man River⁵ could never be stopped from its natural course by the US Army Corps of Engineers. I smiled at that memory a couple of years after Katrina when a New Orleans French Consulate fonctionnaire insisted to me that had France sent its engineers, cleaning up Katrina’s mess would not have taken so long. There were always lots of hypotheses, from those of nineteenth-century French polytéchniciens⁶ to my uncle’s, about when and why New Orleans would finally, inevitably flood. Other than when he was deployed to France in World War II, my Uncle Emile never left his river-bound parish and the watercourses where his father labored in the early 1900s, floating logs from backwaters to lake to the Mississippi. Both of my kinsmen could read the great river and its tributaries, the lakes and the bayous, and the level of the land far better than I have ever been able to read any book.

• 7 As part of a larger study examining the interrelation between endogenous violence embedded in the e (...)

5I arrived in New Orleans five months after Katrina’s storm surges breached faulty levees and floodwalls, spilling tens of billions of gallons of water, drowning 80% of the city infrastructure. The antiquated municipal water pump system took two weeks to drain it all. Katrina also destroyed the health and mental health infrastructure, leading to the largest ever exodus of medical personnel in US history. By early 2006, I began collecting anecdotes to understand how people previously diagnosed with severe, ongoing psychiatric disorders navigated the storm and the post-disaster quotidian.⁷ I began to see firsthand how the annexing of the trauma paradigm onto the assemblage of organized disaster response worldwide invisibilizes people with disabilities by focusing instead on how the “abnormal” event of a disaster affects the mental health of “ordinary” people. Throughout that year, observing evacuee trailer camps and Red Cross meetings and volunteering at major health events where NGOs provided everything from typhoid shots to open-air dental surgery to over 7,000 displaced New Orleanians, I never heard mention of what happened to the thousands in psychiatric care before Katrina. Nor could local medical personnel answer my question.

• 8 Although there was virtually no state evacuation policy for psychiatric patients, Tabby was brought (...)

14Like Leo, nineteen-year-old Tabby’s words eddy around Katrina’s moments. In a later interview, her description of experiencing the disaster, too, does not differ from her account of life before and after. She is passed along from the police to hospitals to prisons to clinics to group homes and back again.⁸ Money never arrives, before Katrina or after. Since birth, she has had a mole in her head which causes her hair to fall out. They treat the mole with “leukemia treatment”. It’s all the same old “moling”, old “foothing” (food and clothing): cancer, Katrina, life. Her life appears to be one circuitous movement, within which the disaster made no waves. Time is flattened, space reduced.

• 9 Jaime Rodrigues, “A New World in the Atlantic: Sailors and Rites of Passage Crossing the Equator fr (...)

15I begin to hear Leo and Tabby as if they were caught in a circular pattern of water, simply floating along, with no external force to push against, to provide momentum. They are like sailors stuck in the Doldrums, the belt around the Equator in which atmospheric conditions deprive the sea of the wind-force to move forward. Before steam engines, ships could be stranded for weeks in the Doldrums.9 Whereas the Doldrums freed sailors from the tediousness of work, even affording festivities, in their doldrums Leo and Tabby communicate dispiritedness and listlessness. To be stuck psychologically in the doldrums is to stagnate, go in circles.

• 10 Independent living sponsored by the family association.

17“You have to talk to Sylvia!” In the next weeks, those words refrain every time I come to the center. “She really has a story!” Staff and clients both pick up the very public elements of Sylvia’s long adventure, elaborating them, “dining out” on her story, as an old local expression goes. Sylvia finally strings together those elements for an interview with a graduate student helping me. How Sylvia and her boyfriend Jack left their apartment¹⁰ to ride out the hurricane in a high-floor apartment belonging to a friend from the center. How the landlady forced them out the next day as water started seeping into the city. How they lugged suitcases filled with canned food and clothing along pitch-dark streets that night, in a city without power. How they slept three nights on the cement outside the Convention Center, surrounded by strangers and even a deceased person, still in a wheelchair and covered with a blanket, until bullets flying overhead scared them off.

• 11 Tim Ingold, “Footprints through the Weather‐World: Walking, Breathing, Knowing”, Journal of the Roy (...)
• 12 Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History, New York, Routledge, 2007, chapter 3.

20Far from being transported along a mental or actual circuit of institutional care, Sylvia and Jack seize the opportunities that present themselves, even momentarily, alongside the dangers of wind and water and violence unleashed during Katrina. Rather than stagnating in the doldrums, they move along, improvising at every turn.11 Disaster, in rupturing of the taken-for-granted of everyday life, creates flux, the undercurrents with which Sylvia and Jack and the statuesque woman and other wayfarers interact, routing their way through a constantly changing world. Thinking further with Tim Ingold, I see these wayfarers as inhabiting with the fluxes of a disastrous world, crafting temporary solutions with what they find at hand, navigating with no final destination.12

• 14 Étienne Hellmer, Ici et là. Une philosophie des lieux, Paris, Verdier, 2019, chapter 2.

22When disasters occur, they open up the possibility of appropriating, however briefly, new spatial and temporal niches (the Convention Center becomes refuge, night the moment of travel, a stranger’s porch a place to sleep).¹⁴ Wayfarers like Sylvia and Jack place-mark a world suddenly opened to those, like them, whose lives are usually confined to a circuit of institutions and marginal spaces beyond, that stymie agency and narrow relationality. To capture their variety of experience, in contrast to those who remain stuck in the circuit, requires bracketing the knowledge cognitive neurosciences and phenomenological psychiatry construct about, respectively, abnormal or anomalous awareness of space.

• 15 Franco Basaglia, “Corpo, sguardo, silenzio”, in Franca Ongaro Basaglia (dir.), L’Utopia della realt (...)
• 16 This discussion on boundaries and personal territory draws on Goffman’s dramaturgical model and stu (...)

23Making their way through the material world, wayfarers place-mark or “make place” (font lieu) that, pluralized, simultaneously comprise the lines of their journey and transform the usual relationality of such space itself. Within public, domestic, and institutional spaces, personal boundaries are often encroached, if not erased in the life-world of patients. Psychiatric practices and institutions violate personal territory by intruding on bodies, surveilling (even subtly) and relegating those bodies to limited, marginal spaces of interaction.15 Even in public space, so-called normals will distance themselves from interaction with those they perceive as “crazy”, or “mentally off”. The rupture of disaster inadvertently broadens the boundaries and hence the possibilities of interaction beyond the usual scripts and roles.16

• 17 Elsewhere, I have described numerous examples of going off script during and after Katrina. On the (...)
• 18 In another example, the social transformation of towns into peri-urban areas in Senegal allowed a d (...)

24Sylvia’s and similar accounts detail how, in Katrina’s rupturing of the everyday, people with psychiatric disabilities often went off script, like a river no longer following its riverbed and spilling beyond its banks. And they might move through public spaces where they might otherwise have felt shunned or stigmatized.17 Forced from damaged domestic spaces into public ones, their carers absent, roles were transformed (the social worker become homeless, rejecting relatives become welcoming, the client become resourceful evacuee, stealing goods become a type of borrowing, and so forth).¹⁸ Going off old scripts and engaging in watery wayfaring after Katrina’s storm are thus mutually necessary, as Ingold, in the citation opening this section, proposes for wayfaring more generally. They are necessary to the creative movement with and against the flows brought about by the disaster and its rupturing of the usual ways of being with others.

• 19 Louis Quéré, “Le public comme forme et modalité d’expérience”, in Daniel Cefaï & Dominique Pasquier (...)

25“Way”, derived from the old English weg, refers to road, path, course of travel, space, freedom of movement. “Faring” originally signified adventure, trek, journey. The wayfarers I encounter momentarily join “communities of adventure”, partaking in a collective trial,19 encountering eventualities on the evacuation path that transform their being-in-the-world with others in ways not pre-determined. Momentarily, volunteers and disaster assistance personnel may even view them no differently than they do other evacuees, to the point that some (as in the group session above) actually have to present empty medicine bottles as proof that they do suffer from serious mental illness when they seek treatment along the evacuation route.

• 20 Louis Le Guillant, cited in Lovell, “Tending to the Unseen in Extradordinary Circumstances”, p. 564

26Of course, wayfaring is the utopian version of going off script in exceptional circumstances. In Dominique Cabrera’s 2002 film Folle embellie, the interns of the Charité-sur-Loire asylum in France escape through the gates to join ordinary families fleeing the advance of the invading German troops. Folle embellie: in English, a “fantastic prospect”, a “wonderful spell”. Adventures of freedom may be short-lived; for patients to become refugees, leaving behind scripted dependency, requires the event that spawns the fleeing in the first place. In the wartime events that actually took place at Charité-sur-Loire, on which the film is loosely based, the asylum had released those patients deemed to be curable, to have the best prognoses, into the community. The patients who escaped were ones the staff considered most disabled and confined to the “chronic” wards. Yet in the end, the escapees fared far better than did the released patients, even remaining after the war in the agricultural communities where they had hidden,20 paralleling the confluences of wayfaring and doldrums in Katrina’s evacuees.

• 21 On post-Katrina Desire, see Rachel Breunlin & Helen A. Regis, “Putting the Ninth Ward on the Map: R (...)

31“I brought you here because I wanted to show you how the neighborhood has come back.” N motions proudly to a few houses, some newly constructed by Habitat for Humanity. Mostly, the landscape is that of dozens of weed-filled lots from which collapsed houses have been removed. I see a chicken shack here, a bar further away. N turns towards the back of the clinic, pointing to the row of pastel-coloured houses in the distance, near the Industrial Canal. I don’t mention that I visited those streets recently. A construction worker told me that the houses had been finished right before Katrina, but never had a chance to be occupied. Three years later, battered and faded, they have been abandoned, ruins of a future never attained.21

• 22 Prospect 1 matched up the works of eighty-one artists from thirty-nine countries with devastated si (...)

35But today I’ve come to see Mark Bradford’s gigantic sculpture, created for Prospect 1, the first ever US-based international art biennial, being held in New Orleans. The patchworked biblical ark rises three stories high where a funeral home once stood until Katrina.²²

• 23 Emil Kraeplin & A. Ross Diefendorf, Clinical Psychiatry, New York, Macmillan, 1907, p. 241, 275.
• 24 Angela Woods, The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory, Oxfo (...)

36As I’m still steeped in my récits, the vessel looming before me first conjures a fluvial way of knowing: forced circular patterns, like the Doldrums. The trope behind my image is that of the Ship of Fools, born from the expulsion of the mad from late medieval communities, but even in earlier variations always a ship of exclusion. Built from Katrina’s flotsam and jetsam, Bradford’s patched-together ark, however, sets off another association: “mental shipwrecks”, as Emil Kraepelin wrote of sufferers of dementia praecox, schizophrenia’s conceptual predecessor.²³ Philosopher Angela Woods emphasizes the degree to which such metaphorizing, as battered psyches blown off the course of recovery, projects people with schizophrenia beyond human ordinariness, rather than as flesh-and-blood individuals living on the edge of the varieties of human experience.²⁴

• 25 Katy Siegel & Christopher Bedford (eds), Mark Bradford: Tomorrow is Another Day, New York, Gregory (...)

37That the vessel is an ark, however, inverts the metaphors of exclusion and Kraepelin’s human wreckage, by extending the community of the marginalized. Bradford’s vessel evokes the barge that crashed into Lower Ninth during the hurricane, with a boom some residents interpreted as dynamite, recalling stories of the blowing up of poor downriver neighborhoods during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, commandeered by New Orleans’ elected officials to divert the floodwaters from the wealthy port city. Bradford built his ark from plywood picked off the streets after the hurricane, topping it with shipping containers and plastering faded posters advertising services for Katrina’s displaced and other detritus onto the outer surfaces. His art projects often connect with communities of the marginalized, to which he, too, has belonged; hence his decision to reassemble it in Lower Ninth, with the help of local laborers.²⁵ Mithra, as his ark is mythically named, promises rebirth and regeneration. Through utopian wayfaring, similarly, people whose being-in-the world falls under descriptions of psychiatric diagnoses are joined to a larger community. Whether this process can endure as socially regenerative remains an open question.