Gigue
When I think of the waters of South Louisiana I am reminded of the attributes of the people who live there. I think of the turbulent Mississippi, which has wreaked havoc on the population with floods that wiped out entire cities and shifted or eliminated boundary lines, and I think of the flooding of emotions and desires I see in people who call this state their home, a state rated sixth in the nation for violent crimes and a state whose murder rate is twice the national average. Just as the Mississippi doesn't like being pinned by levees and must be given outlets for its annual swellings, so too do those who live here dislike being told what to do and seem to need to jump their banks regularly, to find outlets for their excesses. Unfortunately, though the Mississippi appears to be in check now, due to new techniques and engineering feats that have built seemingly impregnable levees, one cannot say the same for the people.
The love of drink in New Orleans-there are hundreds of drinking establishments in the city, and it is rated fourth in the nation in terms of alcohol related fatalities-has much to do, of course, with the culture the early European settlers brought with them, a culture in which good wine was sometimes as important as good food, but one can't help but note the stark parallel between the flooding of the waters and the drunkenness of a people. We flood ourselves just as our waters flood us. We water ourselves as excessively as the rain waters the earth here (five feet annually).
It's said that the very idea of the cocktail was invented in New Orleans, but even if it wasn't we've invented enough of them to claim bragging rights: Sazeracs, Ramos Gin Fizzes, Brandy Milk Punches, Dripped Absinthe, Café Brűlot, Mimosas, to name only a few. Drinking and driving is de rigeur here; frozen daiquiri drive-through stands are everywhere, the alcoholic versions of the equally ubiquitous, but less intoxicating, snow ball stands. Even our foods are often made with liquor: we put champagne on our oysters, rum in our omelets, we cook our steaks in brandy. And most of our desserts contain a healthy amount of alcohol: bread pudding with whiskey sauce, bourbon pecan pie, rum pralines.
One of our most famous and potent drinks, which has been the undoing of many a tourist, is the Hurricane, a rum-based tropical fruit drink served up in a glass made to look like a hurricane lamp. The spirit of the actual hurricane, which some of us honor by evacuation to higher, safer ground, and others of us honor by hosting "hurricane parties," finds its metaphorical equivalent in its sweet but deadly namesake drink. If we cannot actually become a hurricane, we can at least symbolically ingest it, take it inside our bodies and hearts as some take the wine that represents Christ's blood. Thus do we assimilate its power, its chaos, and its potential for both transformation and destruction.
With respect to the excessive drinking and other forms of debauchery prevalent here, Lyle Saxton would write, only partly tongue-in-cheek, of New Orleans that "there seems to be an insidious chemical in the air which tends to destroy Puritanism." Indeed, some New Orleanians have suggested that it is the humidity or the heat itself that leads them to such a love of drink; others have claimed it is rather the foul flavor of the Mississippi water. Certainly when the water you drink makes you sick (which it often did in the early years of the city), wine or liquor may seem a pleasant alternative. These days, however, the complaint is that the water, though "pure," still tastes bad because of all the chemicals we've put in it to get it that way. So we continue to feel ourselves absolved in choosing to drink anything other than water.
The importance of bodies of water to our very sense of orientation can be seen in the fact that designations of place here are always related to them: you don't go north or south, east or west (as you must in the Midwest, for example), but rather upriver or down river, across the river or to the lakeside or the riverside. Even then it's not easy to know where you are; streets follow the river and curve around so that a street can run parallel to and perpendicular to itself. As a child I found it hard to figure out where the real edges of cities, parishes, or subdivisions were because they were all located between a shifty river and a shallow, expansive lake; land that wasn't marsh or swamp was cut up into pieces by canals and bayous. Because most of the borders I understood as borders were liquid, the concept of precision with respect to location often escaped me. Indeed, my relatives also often seemed without boundaries. Excessive drinking allowed them to "get out of their skins" so to speak. For a people who are already always ready to spill their guts, alcohol let it all flow out so that the walls between self and other were often utterly erased.
|
 |
Louisiana was the landscape where I first learned to speak and to see, the landscape I first walked through, making my way into the world. What I want to understand is how this place gave breath to my voice and desire, and how it might have shaped (or altered) the character of a people, my people, those born and raised in New Orleans; how this place insinuated itself into us in ways that feel, sometimes, like infection.
I've come to understand Louisiana waters as the ink that gives my words body. It is the ink I was given at birth. When we write with this birth-ink, we are writing with waters that not only quench our thirst and feed our crops, but saturate our land and destroy our homes and bodies. Our words, our lines and our sentences carry the weight of that water's penchant for both baptism and destruction.
- Sheryl St. Germain
|
|
