Liza's Journal

the rabbit hole runs deep

2006-06-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

well i haven't written in quite a while. for a while i felt like i couldn't write about my experience in new orleans without just experiencing it for a while. i took a lot of photos, but even being a photographer there made me feel like i was just a spectator, that i was really living and experiencing the intensity of that city, although it was affecting me tremendously. so i got more involved with stuff going on there, tried to do what i could but it was really overwhelming. with everything i tried to organize around, we just kept getting defeated. the land-grabbing, the racism, the police brutality, the homelessness, the blatant classism. things that are happening everywhere, but new orleans is different these days because everything that's wrong in the world is happening in new orleans, just with extreme intensity.

i left town on April 30th. i plan to go back, but i just don't know when. since then i've been hearing a lot. public housing residents still can't come back home. they even tried direct action and broke into the housing developments to start cleaning them out. the national guard was called back, so i guess new orleans has returned to it's complete police state status. last week, every public school teacher in new orleans was fired. you gotta be a rich kid to go to school.

there's more. there's a lot more. maybe someday i'll write a whole book about my perspective on things there. or i'll just write it here, piece by piece. right now new orleans is hot and humid and violent and a lot of people i know have started going crazy because they've been dealing with it for so long, now they're letting it out.

new orleans is the most fascinating place i've ever been. its rich history, culture, and streets full of weirdos all make it beautiful. it's my kinda place. at least for the time being. maybe i'm just really jaded by activism these days, but my heart's broken knowing that the city is being completely taken over by the rich white elite who don't care about the people that make new orleans what it is. the city council declared that damaged houses have to be gutted by August 31st 2006. when asked how that's going to happen, they said to just rely on non-profits. the non-profits don't have the capacity to do that. they also laid out a plan in which, depending on what neighborhood you live in, you have to raise your house by a certain number of feet. but who has the money to do that? rich french quarter elitists are complaining about all the people in the street who apparently are "ruining the french quarter." but with no housing, where else are they supposed to go? i'm sick of people who won't give anything up to help those who are completely fucked over. i'm sick of people who think their wealth is more important than others' basic needs. i'm sick of tourists who come down for mardi gras and feel good about themselves for spendng money in the french quarter and say that's helping to 'rebuild' new orleans, but they never even step outside the french quarter. i'm sick of rich college students who came back in january and never left their bourgeois uptown bubble to see what's really going on, acting like everything is ok. i'm sick of activists who go down and are insensitive to trauma, who act like martyrs in a community that was never their own.

that being said, i'll continute to do what i can, knowing that maybe it's better for me to build my own community rather than intervene in one that's not mine, keeping in mind that maybe it's better to do things from a distance sometimes. i may have dropped out of college, but i've learned more in the last 6 months than i have at any other point in my life.
my heart goes out to all the new orleanians living in the diaspora, to all the people living in the streets who still can't find housing, to the people who are suddenly homeless because FEMA decided to cut off the funding that was housing them in hotels, to all the people locked up in Orleans Parish Prison, to all the people who are trying really hard to continue their lives in a city that's more dead than alive.

disclaimer

2006-03-26T20:56:00.000-08:00

and i know that my last few posts have been just photos, but i promise i'll write more soon. the writing has become overwhelming.

st. roch cemetery

2006-03-26T20:39:00.000-08:00

this is one of my favorite place to go in new orleans. cemeteries in new orleanas are really beautiful. because the water level is so high, all the graves are aboveground. on my birthday, this is where i came at midnight to watch the lunar eclipse.

slidell

2006-03-26T20:32:00.000-08:00

so back in february, i spontaneously decided to go to Slidell, Louisiana for a couple days with two of my friends. Slidell is a fairly rural town about an hour away from New Orleans, which also got very badly hit by the storm. United Peace Relief has a center there, and a lot of volunteers use the space to sleep, eat, and get work crews together. it's a beautiful place, so i thought i'd put some photos here:

zulu parade, fat tuesday

2006-03-26T20:30:00.000-08:00

mardi gras

2006-03-26T20:27:00.000-08:00

articles to read

2006-02-16T10:40:00.000-08:00

here's an article that i think is really important to read if you want to understand new orleans from a racial, feminist perspective (written by my friend shana who grew up in the Iberville Housing Development):

http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2006/01/6740.php

and here's an article written by a fellow volunteer named Greg:
http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/6996.php

mardi gras evictions

2006-01-21T19:45:00.000-08:00

on january 7th, about 100 hurricane survivors were evicted from a hotel that FEMA was paying for them to stay in. they had very little warning, and they received a note from hotel manager Emily Wright that they have to leave because the city is "now entering in the city's season of special events." in other words, since Mardi Gras is coming up, hurricane survivors are being forced into homelessness again to make way for tourists who want to come here and get really drunk in the French Quarter while the rest of the city is still devastated. while talking to our legal team, Ms. Wright said that it's "only a matter of opinion" that survivors who have nowhere to go should have priority over tourists, and she also took full responsibility and said she would maintain her right to put them out on the street. that day, we mobilized people to go to the hotel, and we picketed all morning and afternoon, shouting chants like "housing for survivors, not for tourists," "the people have a right to return", and "FEMA FEMA you can't hide, there are rooms right inside," among others. at noon, the residents' locks were changed, and some of them weren't even able to go inside and get their personal belongings. we picketed with the residents until the end of the day, when the lawyers were able to file an injunction against the hotel, and then got a temporary restraining order against the hotel so that the residents could stay. as of now, the residents are allowed to stay until February 7th, and after that date, all residents who still can't find housing have to be able to stay there longer. the courts also ordered that once the residents are eventually kicked out, FEMA is required to either find them immediate housing or provide them with money for rent.

more can be found at http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2006/01/6744.php

hey throw me somethin mr. rich man

2006-01-21T19:32:00.001-08:00

2006-01-06T10:11:00.000-08:00

one of the big issues going on right now is the land-grabbing of the lower 9th ward by both the city and private contractors. the lower 9th is where the levee breached, devastating the poor black communities of New Orleans. the city recently decided to start bulldozing homes in this area without making any effort to contact the residents, violating the process of eminent domain, in which property owners are supposed to have a say in the decision-making process. shortly after christmas, the city tried to start the bulldozing, but the residents of the 9th Ward filed a lawsuit and wone a temporary restraining order to prevent the bulldozing until Jan 6th, when a hearing will be held.

yesterday morning a press conference was held at City Hall in preparation for the hearing. lawyers, community organizers, and residents of the lower 9th spoke about the complete neglect of the 9th ward, the injustices of the decision-making process of eminent domain and land-grabbing, and the hurricane survivors' basic right to return. Ishmael Muhammad, an attorney who's been working with the People's Hurricane Relief Fund, spoke about residents' rights to have a say in what happens to their homes, saying to the city council, "you have no right to bulldoze their houses when you are already bulldozing their voices." A resident of the lower ninth reiterated the fact that not only is this an issue of the city neglecting people living in poverty, but that it is an obvious issue of race. explaining how unfair it is that major streets in new orleans that divide neighborhoods have become color lines, she ended her speech by shouting "Canal St. is NOT the mason dixon line!" someone else addressed the issue of how a lot of people who are not members of the community have been saying that the lower 9th ward was so full of crime that it should not be rebuilt for the same community that lived there before the hurricane. this has been a contentious issue as more and more people want to move back, and many outsiders are ignorant and insensitive about the real issues that are involved in the right to return. she made a good point by saying "we don't WANT the crime, we don't WANT the poverty, we don't WANT to have to fight for a better education system, but we want our COMMUNITY back!"

as the last speaker was about to go on, Ishmael Muhammad received a phone call from a lower ninth resident who said that she was standing outside her home, watching all of her personal belongings get bulldozed. i'm guessing there were between 60 and 80 people at the press conference, and we all drove over to her house right away to stop the bulldozing. when we got there, the bulldozers seemed to be mixing the resident's belongings and pieces of her house with other debris, and were about to take it away to the dumpsters. several lawyers were present, as well as many law students, community organizers, activists, volunteers, other residents, and many press teams. we all surrounded the construction workers as the lawyers told them that what they were doing was illegal, that there was an injunction against the city's bulldozing plans, and that there would be a hearing the next day about it. for a while they refused, but eventually we got them to turn off the bulldozers. the cops arrived, as well as homeland security and the army corps of engineers. the army corps of engineers, which is responsible for building the levee in the lower 9th improperly, told us to leave, but we insisted that what was going on was completely illegal. the press kept asking them questions, but they kept saying "no comment" and then drove off. one thing that people in favor of the bulldozing don't seem to understand or care about is that there is a difference between debris and property that is someone's identifiable belongings. while pretty much everything in that area is at least damaged by toxic flood water, a lot of it is still identifiable property belonging to people who want to come back but aren't yet able to. also, it's interesting that almost all of the houses in new orleans that are red-tagged (houses marked to be bulldozed) are in the lower ninth, and some of these houses are still standing, while many houses which are totally demolished are not tagged. there is a house in relatively good condition which Common Ground volunteers have gutted out, with the permission of the owner, and are now occupying. this house is almost all cleaned out, is now being used as a distribution center, and soon the owner will be able to live there. unfortunately, this house is red-tagged and could be demolished any day now. anyway, after the bulldozers left, several teams of volunteers, legal workers, and photographers scouted the area to see if there was any other bulldozing going on. later in the day, we got word that all bulldozing and construction in the lower ninth was called off for the rest of the day. this morning there was a hearing for the court case against the city's bulldozing plans. more on that later when i have the details...

more Algiers photos

2005-12-12T10:44:00.000-08:00

these photos were NOT taken by me; i copied them from the Common Ground website. www.commongroundrelief.org.

in the distribution center at Malik's house

around new orleans

2005-12-10T07:49:00.000-08:00

boarded up casino

ghost town

2005-12-05T11:55:00.000-08:00

the other night i was sitting on our porch on Franklin Street and this guy came up and introduced himself and said that he just came back to town and moved back into his house across the street. it feels good to actually have a neighbor now. you don't realize how good it is to have a neighbor until you don't have any. even if you don't really talk to them, just their presence is comforting. new orleans is really lonely right now, especially in the 9th ward, where hardly anyone has moved back. a lot of times i sit on the porch and try to picture what the neighborhood was like before the hurricane. i mean, it wasn't until the other day that i realized that this must have been a really busy street. the building that Common Ground is using as a media center/office space used to be a daycare center. next door is a chinese restaurant, a couple other businesses, and we're just a block and a half from St. Claude, one of the main streets in new orleans. things have changed so much that there's really no way to imagine what it was like before, and it's depressing how few people are here. i mean sure, there are people in the French Quarter, but it's relatively empty, and rather than the way people used to party there, it's now more like people just go there to drink their sorrows away. in the rest of the city, hardly anyone has moved back. a lot of people come back, determined to fix up there house so they can continue to live there, but are so overwhelmed that they end up leaving again. i was talking to a woman in the 7th ward who said her house was cleaned up and she was ready to move back in, but she still won't stay because the city won't turn on the electricity. yesterday i spent the whole day gutting a house, and the woman who owned the house was telling me that it's really depressing to be back, but she's been trying to get her neighbors to move back, because how else will they rebuild if there's no community? she just keeps herself busy, cleaning out her and her friends' houses, trying not to think about things, and when another volunteer and i spent the day with her yesterday, she kept telling us that we must have been God's children sent down from heaven, because no one would help her out until we came along. a guy in the 9th ward who i see working on his house a lot said he wants to fix up the place, but won't move back because he doesn't have any neighbors. and obviously if there aren't any people, there's not much going on here. the streets are huge trash piles, many business are closed, the schools haven't reopened yet. in fact, the other day there were teachers in a school, preparing to reopen, when cops showed up, announced that the school was officially closing down, and the teachers had 3 hours to take out anything they needed.

class war in new orleans

2005-11-30T20:58:00.000-08:00

so i want to talk a little about the anti-eviction work i've been doing here. i'd say the biggest problem in post-Katrina New Orleans is the housing crisis. people are calling it a housing state of emergency, and it's nothing less than that. not only are millions of homes uninhabitable because of the flood damage and lack of electricity and water, but landlords are evicting their tenants illegally so that they can raise their rents. i know there are corrupt landlords all over the place, but in new orleans it's utterly amazing what they seem to get away with. people are coming home from where they evacuated to and finding eviction notices, some of them even handwritten, and not knowing when the notices were put there. some people come home from work to see that their landlords have thrown all their belongings onto the street. had there not been a hurricane here, this still would have been appalling, but the fact that landlords are taking advantage of the destruction and using the hurricane as an opportunity to get richer is just disgusting. before i got here, i had heard about huge corporations getting contracts with the city, and how there were all kinds of plans to totally gentrify the city as their way of "rebuilding." especially as i become more and more aware of what poor people in this city have historically been through, i see class war and housing rights as a huge priority when it comes to relief work.

there are several organizations in new orleans that are working for housing rights. some of these groups existed before the hurricane, and some of them grew out of the rebuilding efforts. Common Ground started a legal clinic, which focuses on anti-eviction work, and it has become part of the NO HEAT (new orleans housing emergency action team) coalition, along with the People's Hurricane Relief Fund and Hands off Iberville, among others. we've gotten tons of calls from tenants who were evicted illegally for no reason other than their greedy landlords wanting to raise the rents, and completely disregarding the fact that their tenants, who have already had a lot to deal with since the hurricane hit, are now homeless and have lost everything they had. people are being evicted for not paying rent for the month of september, even though many of their homes have a lot of water damage, black mold, and no heat, water, or electricity. one tenant i met with yesterday not only got evicted, but is also dealing with an ugly custody battle. her landlord evicted her on the premise that the apartment is too damaged, yet after she moved out, the apartment was fixed up right away, and now there are new tenants living there at double the price. people are left to rely on FEMA and HANO (housing authority of new orleans), but when they go to these agencies to find other housing, they are only asked where outside of the state of louisiana they want to live, and HANO contacts a housing agency in that area to find out if there is any available housing. we've had some victories so far. last week, the louisiana government issued a court order saying that for tenants who are still evacuated, the landlords have to give a 45 day warning of eviction rather than 3 days. also, the landlords can't just tack a notice on the door, since the tenants aren't home to find them. instead, the landlords have to contact FEMA to obtain the tenants' current location, and have to send the eviction notice there. we were able to stop a few evictions while they were in progress. also, today the tenants of the Iberville Projects were expected to be evacuated, but a huge rally was planned in which people went to the projects to demand that the tenants be able to stay, and they managed to drive the cops off of the property. hopefully we will be able to prevent more evictions, but the landlords are finding loopholes in leases that they can take advantage of. last night there was a big town meeting of about 100 tenants and the NO HEAT coalition. a lot of people got up and told their stories, and it seems like a lot of them are willing to band together as a community and stop this from happening.

between piety and desire

2005-11-30T20:16:00.001-08:00

so the other day i decided to bike to the lower ninth ward, close to where the levee broke. in the last couple of weeks, i had seen parts of the city that were almost this bad. but never before had i seen so much neglect, so much destruction, in such a vast area. i biked for about 2 hours, and only saw 2 human beings, one who was a construction worker and one a resident who came to clean up some of his stuff but then gave up. i saw cars that the wind had blown up to second stories of houses, homes split by fallen trees, a house that the wind had pushed forward on top of a car, a whole side of a house in the neighbor's lawn, a garage halfway on top of a fence. i heard whole houses creaking slowly, pieces of sheetrock swaying back and forth in a still breeze, rats rustling around in people's belongings that were blown into trash piles in the street.

it's interesting to learn how the damage to the lower 9th, as well as the complete neglect of the government has affected the city. the lower 9th had been known as the "murder capital of the murder capital." residents from other parts of the city are relieved that it is now uninhabitable, because the crime rate has pretty much vanished. new orleans has seen a total of 2 homicides since Katrina. however, the amount of crime there is no excuse for the government to completely give up on rebuilding the area. in fact, shortly after the hurricane, the head of homeland security for new orleans said, "there's nothing out there that can be saved at all." as horrifying as the destruction is, what does this mean for the people who live there? there are evacuees dispersed all over the country who want to return home, but the city is telling them that they can't come back. some insist that they have a right to return to their own homes, some who have been back to look at their homes and retrieve their belongings end up not wanting to stay because there's no neighborhood to go back to. the neighborhood is gone. in a ghetto where many once had a vibrant sense of community (it also happens to be the community in which fats domino grew up), it was reported on the front page of the paper just last week that the body count continues in the lower ninth. and it breaks my heart to know that this happened when it didn't have to. a whole year ago, there were warnings that they levee by the 17th street canal wasn't built properly, but because it was a levee that would only protect the poor black communities, no one did anything about it. the racism before the hurricane was so blatant, and it continues as the affluent neighborhoods that don't have much damage get rebuilt, when the lower ninth sits in neglected destruction, with an empty eeriness that i had never felt before.

Algiers photos

2005-11-28T12:02:00.000-08:00

Malik and Sharon on Thanksgiving in the 9th Ward

Tina and me on Thanksgiving

Algiers, Part I

2005-11-28T11:03:00.000-08:00

i guess i should do this chronologically, or at least i'll try to. i spent the first five days in Algiers most of the time, while occasionally going into downtown New Orleans. Algiers is part of the Westbank, right across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. The Common Ground Collective is based out of Malik Rahim's house in Algiers. His house was basically turned into a distribution center, stocked with cleaning supplies, food, water, and other necessities that people can just come by and pick up. The collective also set up a computer lab there, and volunteers sleep in tents in the backyard.

When I arrived in Algiers, I dropped my stuff off at Malik's house, checked out the medical clinic, which is at a mosque in Algiers, and then I met a woman named Tina who decided to take me on a tour of the area. She showed me parts of Algiers, Gretna, Jefferson Parish, and downtown New Orleans. It was quite a sight for my first hour in town. Tina showed me her house in Gretna, which she can't live in right now because the roof is damaged. We drove across the bridge that she and many other people tried to cross during the hurricane, but were turned away and shot at by cops. She showed me houses where her friends used to live, and told me stories of how some of them climbed onto their roofs and floated on them for several days. She kept pointing out how different things are now, how usually when you look out from the bridge, the town below is pretty lit up but now is completely dark because hardly anyone is there, how empty the highway was on a friday night, how there's nowhere to really go anymore, because everything's either destroyed or boarded up. Tina had lived in that neighborhood in Gretna with her whole extended family ever since she was a little girl, and now no one's there, and her family is dispersed all over the country. Listening to Tina tell me her story and her relationship with the neighborhood made me better understand why a lot of residents, besides the fact that a lot of them couldn't leave, also didn't want to leave. A lot of people have lived in this community for the entire lives. It's all they know, it's what they're familiar with, and they mentally and emotionally just couldn't leave.

Throughout the tour, i saw some homes that were completely flat on the ground, lopsided, or had their roofs caved in. In downtoan New Orleans, I saw parking lots full of destroyed cars, the Superdome, which apparently is now covered in mold, the Greyhound station which was turned into a makeshift jail just after the hurricane, and the Saks Fifth Avenue which someone supposedly burned down. It was really strange when we drove through the French Quarter. The French Quarter is in pretty good shape, with maybe some buildings having a little bit of water damage. When we got back to Malik's house that night, I found out that a volunteer had been arrested the night before for doing a copwatch (there were three people doing the copwatch, and the one black person was the only one arrested). The cops picked him up, threatened to kill him and throw his body in the river, and then kept him in jail overnight. By the time I heard about it, he was out of jail, and Malik held a press conference about it which I watched TV before going to bed.

where do i start...

2005-11-28T10:56:00.000-08:00

this is my blog in which i'll attempt to document what i've observed and experienced in post-Katrina New Orleans. i've done a lot of writing so far, but rarely have time to get to a computer here. i'll try to get it all on here soon, and there will also be photos coming soon.

so here we go...i've been meaning to start this journal for a while now. i've been in New Orleans for two weeks so far, and so much has happened in that time that I feel like my mind is scattered all over the place, and I don't really know how to start explain what it's like down here. i've been seeing a lot, learning a lot, and who knows, maybe i'll be able to make sense of it once i leave. one thing i know is that it's hard to convey in words what's really going on down here. the next time someone asks me to describe the scene in new orleans right now, i'll just tell them to come down here and see it for themselves. i never saw what new orleans was like before Katrina, but it feels surreal right now. sure, this town is in bad shape, but the residents are amazing, strong people. it's sometimes hard to realize that what goes on down here is part of people's everyday lives. i mean, try to imagine walking through a neighborhood with lopsided houses, whole kitchens scattered across the front yard, and roofs or parts of houses blown to the middle of the street. imagine seeing a dead dog's leg in the backyard of a house you're working on, and wondering where the rest of its body is. or late at night, you're hanging out at the levee in Algiers, watching the barges slowly go down the Mississippi, and your friend next to you is saying that had this been a few weeks earlier, those barges would be piled with dead bodies. imagine a party scene on Bourbon Street, where people seem to forget about the rest of the city, except that every intersection is patrolled by either the National Guard or the New York State Police (yeah, New York, not New Orleans). or on Thanksgiving Day, an old man sits next to you in Washington Square Park and tells you about being in jail during the hurricane, and being stranded with water full of sewage up to his neck for 3 days in the bottom floor of the OPP. try to imagine seeing a woman come home from work, watch her landlord throw all her stuff out the window, and when you ask her if she needs help finding a lawyer, she says "it's no use, from ashes come glory.."