Neither dead nor alive, New Orleans is ing: it is enduring, it is drying, it is crying out and using its jazz language to enunciate itself. Joseph Roach elaborates on the relations of the living and the dead in his book, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, relations of superimposed cultures each sharing one urban area and extending through many eras. The idea of cultures superimposed on top of one another as opposed to existing on the same plane of reality seems appropriate. Picture a slice of earth as it might appear in an elementary lesson on archaeology where the layers of dirt, clay, schist, ash, mantle, and magma, stacked one atop the other, mark the different ages that have passed since the cooling of the planet, except in the case of N.O. the different layers are the various generations that have existed since the founding of the city in the early eighteenth-century. The French settlers, the Spaniards, the early Americans that moved down from the North, the African slaves that were traded like cattle, the slaves that eventually bought their own freedom, the black people born free but poor, the so-called mulattos, the "octoroons"; all the languages used by these people to communicate to one another, all the spiritual practices of the different faiths, all the dance forms and musical modes, all of these people and their ways of being still exist today in the Big Easy, their existences performed by surrogated ritual and the ancestor actors. Roach emphasizes the peculiar bond between the living and the dead, two states of being that do more than establish the poles of a commonly perceived binary. For Roach, the dead remain present in the ornate cemeteries with their above-ground tombs and in other sites that he calls vortices of behavior where, for example, performative acts of funerary rites mingle with markets and sites of musical explosions. Absence is a part of everything that is; a process of forgetting is built into every becoming. 
But the New Orleans that Roach was writing on was different from the city I visited this last week. The dead and living still commune and collude with one another in their daily doings, but a new brand of absence has appeared. After Katrina, the superimposed cultures acquired a scar of sorts, a gash that ripped through the present days’ inhabitants and the dead alike, that stretched back through the temporal and spatial landscape known collectively as New Orleans. While perhaps always a ghost town in the respect that the presences of the living collaborate contiguously with the absences of those who had once lived, the city today feels haunted not just by the inhabitants who perished in the floods but by those who have simply not returned after the winds had scattered and the waters receded. The population is down to something like 25% of its original count. The place is dead in a whole new way.
Everything is in a basic state of disrepair. There is a very strong sense that the earth is trying to reclaim the city. In the garden district, the roots of the trees perturb the levels of the sidewalk created uneven terrain and massive cracks in the roads. The leaves hang low to the ground giving the feeling that the all the houses and little shops are progressively sinking, led to the down below by large, leafy hands. In the lower ninth ward, where the devastation of the floodwaters and hurricane-force winds was greatest, the foliage has started to cover the decimated houses and overturned cars. The upcoming summer rains combined with the sloth of the cleanup effort means that the green will claim more property for itself and overgrowth is inevitable. It is there in the ninth ward that the feeling of living ruins is the keenest. The scene didn’t look much different than 
National Geographic pictures of Incan cities uncovered in the thick of South American Rainforests. If there wasn’t such a large portion of human error, greed, ignorance, bigotry and stupidity responsible for the death and destruction brought to the residents of the lower ninth, one might suspect that nature was simply healing itself in much the same way that forests spark fires to the clear the dead brush and fertilize the land with new ash to make way for new growth. Here again is the performance of the living and the dead, for even in the garden district where exists the decrepit houses and crooked streets, the fecundity of the grounds wreaks of life. In the ninth ward, the absence emphasized by the vacant fields in which once stood houses packed tight like urban residential sardines only reinforces that which it marks, which is the life of a city, a segment of the population that once rooted itself in those fields. In a certain way, the hurricane that caused so much attention and claimed so many headlines when it struck last year was only another episode of the interplay between the living and the dead in the city of New Orleans. 
Katrina’s acts of power punctuate the city’s historic landscape, but in the present moment the spectacle of the storm falls to whispering and a quiet muttering of questions that beg for certain actions to commence. Where is the cleanup effort? Who’s in charge? Does anybody care about rebuilding this city? To those questions I add my personal quandaries, such as “what will rebuilding accomplish,” “what would it mean if the city simply disappeared back into the earth,” and “isn’t this just going to happen again some time in the not-too-distant-future?” I have to wonder if those vacant lots will once again host the families that lived their before the storm or if those lots will be paved and readied for richer occupants. To rebuild the city, we will have to imagine what the new city will look like and how it will run, but if we gathered nine sketches of the new city from nine different types of people I can almost guarantee we would see nine distinctly different cities. What I mean to say is that the new New Orleans might turn out to be the one conceived by the people with money, power and influence. It is easy to silence absent voices, and many voices have yet to return. 
It would be great if the jazz music on Frenchman Street could rebuild the city, if the blaring clarinets and washboard rhythms could hammer some nails and erect some houses. It would be grand if the voices of the dead could speak out above the drunks on Bourbon Street. The voices are always speaking out, after all. We have to tune our ears to the pitch of the dead, which runs on a low frequency and is made up of giant silences. New Orleans is a beautiful place, and it also a damned place. It is alive with tradition and ritual, and it is dying more each day as the future snazzes things up. It is a monument to American diversity, and it is a site of ruins delineating a small urban area around the mighty Mississipp’.
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