Nigerian Elections 2015

Morality and Integrity in Party Politics in Nigeria

By Dr. S. Okechukwu Mezu

The Presidential, national Assembly, gubernatorial and state assembly elections of 2015 have come and gone. They were not perfect but with few unfortunate exceptions here and there, including the very regrettable violence leading to loss of lives and other anti-democratic activities, they were the closest Nigeria had come to a free and fair election. The nation is definitely maturing in its electoral journey since 1999.

For instance, as early as December 2006, Nigerians knew and the world confirmed it that the government and INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission) would not be ready for the election. As pointed out by Pierre-Richard Prosper, a former US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crime Issues, who led a ten-man delegation from the International Republican Institute (IRI), Washington D. C that spent one week in Nigeria to assess the country’s readiness for a free and fair election in April, 2007. He observed that with only two weeks remaining before registration deadline, less than half of the machines and only 3.5 million of the potential 60 million eligible voters had been registered.  Furthermore, INEC’s noble and ambitious goal of implementing a cutting edge system to deter the past fraud in the registration efforts was turning problematical. Dr. Maurice Iwu, INEC Chairman claimed to have awarded about 1000 contracts for the election supplies including the introduction of the Direct Data Capture Machine(DDC), that was “to prevent all loopholes that existed in the past for fraudulent politicians to rig elections.”  The DDC machines were neither available for registration purposes nor for the actual election.

Warnings came from at home and abroad, including from the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Mohammad Sa'ad Abubakar III, who on March 15, 2007 in Kaduna described the INEC as “unserious and ill-prepared for the April 2007 general elections,” and warned about the dangers of a failed transition program and characterized the INEC’s efforts as being tantamount to “manifest un-seriousness.” The Nigerian Elections of 2007 turned out to be a chronicle of shame and deceit: shame to the country and deceit of the population. One CIA agent in a moment of unguarded indiscretion or blunt honesty quipped that: “No country of this [Nigeria’s]size and financial structure has much to say about its operation. The big money-men of the world who decide whether to invest or not; and the big governments of the world who decide whether or not to give aid, run just as much of Nigeria (or maybe more) than the Nigerians.”

Today we live in a global village complicated by events in other parts of the world.  The Nine-Eleven tragedy in America had hardened the attitude of the former colonial masters and the United States.  Life has become a serious matter of survival.  Irrespective of the government in power in America and the Western world, the economy must be fueled. The millions of vehicles in the Western world must be fueled; the houses need heat; electricity is taken for granted.  Every second in life needs oil to function. There are no sentiments about this. It is a matter of survival. The Mid-Eastern oil has become problematic with the posture of Iran, the debacle in Iraq, the intractable problems between Israel and Palestine, the fragility and nervous vulnerability of Saudi Arabia. The western world does not care what sort of government is in power in Nigeria as long as the flow of Nigeria’s sweet crude oil continues whether through the black or white market.  The illegitimate devil you think you know that came to power through undemocratic means is better that a legitimate democratically elected government whose tomorrow is unpredictable to the West and possibly inimical to its interests.

Democracy and government of the people by the people for the people has never been donated as a gift to the people. No it was not so in France in the eighteenth century; neither was that the case in Britain with the Monarchy. Even colonial America had to fight the British government not the people for their independence and democracy. Any Nigerian who believes that the Western world and foreign countries will fight to install democracy in Nigeria for Nigerians is living in a volcanic fool’s paradise. The rigging of Nigerian elections in 1963 was child’s play compared to the rigging in 1983 and each one was followed by a military take-over.  The rigging in 1999 was out of the playing field when placed side by side with that of 1983.  Because Nigerians accepted the election sham of 1999, the players of the political parties perfected the rigging and killing and maiming in 2003.

Many of the present civilian governments of Nigeria on the Local, State and National levels have failed the people woefully. The hope that Nigeria’s civilian leaders would accomplish for the nation what military rulers hungry for adulation at home and meteoric respect abroad failed to achieve has been dashed. Nigeria continues to be buffeted by the very same pressures and centrifugal forces that led to the demise of the regimes of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, General Aguiyi Ironsi, General Gowon, General Murtala Muhamed, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, Generals Buhari and Idiagbon, General Babangida and General Sanni Abacha. Any Government that comes to power without the will and concurrence of the people is doomed to failure.The eventual security and salvation of the individual Nigerian and the individual component ethnic groups in Nigeria lie not in the disintegration of the country and/or ethnic control of the sector’s natural resources, but in the eventual further amalgamation of the component elements of black Africa under a government of the people for the people  where the resources of the whole are used for the benefit of the many and not expropriated by the few for abuse by privileged aliens and non indigenes. This is a task Nigerians and Africans alone can and must do.

The Presidential Elections of 2011

The 2011 Elections was a repeat of the electoral farce of 2007. Two examples will suffice. I contested as a deputy gubernatorial candidate for CPC in Imo State, Nigeria in 2011.

(a)   During the Presidential elections, 734 votes for the CPC Presidential candidate in one Ikeduru polling station metamorphosed to 34 by the time it reached the Local government collation center and further became 4 votes for candidate Buhari at the Imo State Central Collation center.

(b)   Following the 2011 presidential elections, I was in the office of the then State Commissioner of Police’s to secure the release of one of our polling agents, a young married with four children from Ohaji who tried to stop the presiding officer, the police and PDP polling agents from openly thumb-printing ballot papers for PDP. They were being given out in batches of twenty ballot papers. He risked his live after severally warning them. He snatched from the presiding officer a batch of twenty ballot papers destined for further thumb-printing as evidence and ran out of the polling booth. They called for police reinforcement and he was arrested for ballot snatching, mercilessly beaten, stripped naked and locked up in Owerri police detention station. This incident was widely reported on the internet immediately to the extent that INEC in Abuja sought clarification from Imo State about what happened. After I explained the situation to the State Commissioner of Police, he could not control his laughter and almost fell off his chair. He ordered the immediate release of the young man and the interrogation of all those involved. He wanted to handle the matter himself. While in the office a phone call came from Abuja, complaining that the Presidential votes ascribed to PDP from Imo State exceeded the number of registered voters. They required the State Commissioner of Police to fly to Abuja immediately with the corrected results that showed total votes that are less than the number of registered voters.

The main reason for some improvement in the running of 2015 general elections was the insistence on the use of the Permanent Voters Card (PVC). The use of PVC led to a decrease in the number of eligible voters. The number of eligible voters dropped from 67,422,005 voters to the only 56,431,255 who collected, or were able to collect, their PVC that would enable them to vote. In the 2015 presidential election approximately there were 31,746,490 accredited voters from these eligible voters’ group. The total number of votes cast was 29,432,083. The rejection of 844,519 votes brought the number of valid votes to 28,587,564. Out of this number, APC General Buhari scored 15,424,921 votes to President Jonathan’s 12,853,162 votes. The other twelve candidates shared the remaining votes. In the case of the 2011 presidential election, by January/February 2011, INEC had registered over 73.5 million voters and had registered also 63 political parties. In the actual election these were the scores of the leading political parties and their candidates.

Candidates	Parties	Votes	%
Goodluck Jonathan	People's Democratic Party (PDP)	22,495,187	58.89
Muhammadu Buhari	Congress for Progressive Change (CPC)	12,214,853	31.98
Nuhu Ribadu	Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN)	2,079,151	5.41
Ibrahim Shekarau	All Nigeria People's Party (ANPP)	917,012	2.40

Source: INECnigeria.org

In the actual so-called election, President Goodluck Jonathan of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) thus scored 22,495,187 votes to General Buhari’s 12,214,853. The valid votes cast were quoted by INEC as 39,469,484 with 1,259,506 as invalid votes. The turn-out was put at 53%.  When compared with the 2015 election figures of 67,422,005 registered voters and the figure of 56,431,255 who collected their PVC and the actual number (29,432,083) of people who voted, one can deduce that the rigging in 2011 surpassed the worst fears of many. Like the 2007 election, it could be said quoting, the 2007 Movement of the Nigeria House of Representatives that: “[By] any standard, this election cannot be called free, or fair, much less credible. It was a predetermined systematically orchestrated exercise that was out to return the ruling party at all cost. The barbarism, violation, etc, were as outrageous as they were unprecedented.” Foreign election observers and observers from Nigeria have confirmed that that was probably the worst election ever not only in Nigeria but in the history of electoral democracy. The electoral crimes ranged from the stuffing of ballot boxes, to the hijacking of ballot papers.  Several polling stations were not opened.  The ones that opened had no ballot boxes. During the gubernatorial and state assembly elections, many people lost their lives; there was thuggery and burning and intimidation using state security services which was unleashed to stymie opposition. 

In that Presidential election, it was then adduced that more than seventy percent of the sixty million ballot papers (printed in South Africa at the very last minute by INEC for the Presidential election) were deliberately abandoned in the cargo wing of the airport in Johannesburg, South Africa. This means that about eighteen million ballot papers only were delivered in Nigeria for the sixty million prospective registered voters.  Since these arrived in Nigeria on the very night before the election, how were those delivered to the nooks and corners of Nigeria’s 923,768 square kilometers stretching from the Gulf of Guinea and Atlantic Ocean (Bights of Benin and Biafra) to areas bordering with Cameroon in the East and Chad in the North-East, Niger in the North, and Benin Republic to the West? How were these ballot papers and election materials delivered over night to the low coastal zone, the hills and plateaus of the Center, to the mountainous zones of the East, some between 1,200 and 2,042 meters high and this including the riverine areas of the Delta region and the impassable gullies of the hinterland.

General Buhari – a constant in Nigerian presidential elections

General Muhammadu Buhari has been the one constant in Nigerian presidential elections since 2003. He has also brought morality and integrity into Nigeria’s political landscape. He contested the presidential election in 2003 on the platform of All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) and was defeated by President Obasanjo with over eleven million votes margin.  Again he was nominated as the presidential candidate of the All Nigeria People’s Party for the 2007 election to contest against Umaru Yar’Adua, the candidate of the PDP. The April 2007 elections awarded the PDP presidential candidate 70% of the votes and 18% to General Buhari. These results were flatly unacceptable and not based on voting or on reality. The results were rejected by General Buhari. On invitation by the Yar’Adua government, following the election, the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) agreed to join the government, but Buhari denounced this betrayal and accommodation and in March 2010. Buhari left the ANPP and helped form a new party, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), to pursue his ideal of progressive change in Nigeria “as a solution to the debilitating, ethical and ideological conflicts in my former party the ANPP”. This represents morality and integrity in party politics in Nigeria. General Buhari became the candidate of the quickly formed CPC. Even though he had no funds of his own, he rejected as gubernatorial candidates in his party some who wanted to fund CPC with what he believed was ill-gotten wealth. Despite contesting against two other Muslim and Northern Nigeria Presidential candidates in the April 16, 2011 general election, - Mallam Nuhu Ribadu of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau of ANPP amongst twenty other contestants – General Buhari, the CPC Presidential candidate in the 16 April 2011 general election, was the main opponent of President Goodluck Jonathan of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

With barely one year to the presidential elections, Buhari had a hard time organizing ground support and had barely time for zonal rallies before the elections.  For instance, barely one week after I joined CPC in Imo State as the Deputy Gubernatorial candidate, the party (CPC) scheduled the Southeast zonal rally in Owerri. The PDP Governor Ikedi Ohakim of Imo State, denied CPC the use of the Owerri Stadium for the rally, denied the party the use of any other location in Owerri; refused even a courtesy call on him by the former President and Commander in Chief, General Buhari. The State Chairman of Imo State Council of Traditional Rulers refused a courtesy call by General Buhari. I had to overnight organize the Southeast zonal CPC rally in front of Our Lady’s School, Emekuku, my home town. To fill up the program, I arranged a courtesy call on the Catholic Archbishop of Owerri, Dr. Anthony Obinna (incidentally a native of Emekuku) who gave me one sole condition that no pictures of the visit would be allowed to be taken. I also finally a courtesy call on the traditional ruler of Emekuku, Eze Peter Obi. People traveled from all corners of South Eastern states to the rally that saw over a hundred thousand participants. Yet when the presidential election came votes were counted in my Emekuku polling station, my own vote apparently disappeared as Buhari scored zero votes at the polling station and some CPC party agents who tried to follow the ballot box to the Owerri North Local Government collating center at Uratta, came back with broken skulls.

Where then in 2011 did the 22,495,187 votes for President Jonathan come from when he only scored 12,853,162 in 2015? General Buhari’s winning score of 15,424,921 votes in 2015 was a mere marginal increase over his losing score of 12,214,853 votes in 2011. The introduction of PVC in 2015 more than any other measure curtailed the inordinate harvesting of spurious votes but it did not eliminate it because the real or engineered malfunction of card readers and the substitution of voting with incident forms became the new vehicle for vote rigging and inflation of votes. In the actual so-called election 2011, President Goodluck Jonathan of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) thus scored 22,495,187 votes to CPC General Buhari’s 12,214,853. The valid votes cast were quoted by INEC as 39,469,484 with 1,259,506as invalid votes. The turn-out was put at 53%. When compared with the 2015 election figures of 67,422,005 registered voters and the figure of 56,431,255 as those who collected their PVC and the actual number (29,432,083) of people who voted, one can deduce that the rigging in 2011 and consequent vote inflation surpassed the worst fears of many. It is interesting to note that the combined votes of General Buhari (CPC), Nuhu Ribadu (ACN) and Ibrahim Shekarau (ANPP) totaled 15,211,016 in 2011, a few votes shy of the 15,424,921 votes secured by General Buhari in 2015 to win the Presidential election.

Morality and Integrity in Politics

The formation of All Progressives Congress (APC) was due to the collective effort and personal sacrifices made by the leaders and members of the Legacy Parties. That was the epitome of morality and integrity in politics. President Jonathan, in defeat also became magnanimous by conceding even before INEC announced the actual results of the 2015 presidential elections. Supporters of the President took the cue and saved the country Nigeria from violence and kata-kata and possible disintegration. The country had had enough of it already. Congratulations galore flowed from all over the country, all deserved and merited - from friends and foes, some out of sportsmanship, others out of greed, avarice and pandering. Overnight, the worst enemies of the opposition party and their antecedents the past fifteen years now defect in droves to the winning All Progressives Congress (APC). Politics should be made of sterner stuff, of greater morality and integrity. Congratulations to the winner are understandable and commendable but defection from PDP to APC within hours of APC victory is self-serving, reprehensible and offensive. General Buhari has maintained his moral and political integrity all these years and refused even to serve in Yar’Adua’s government when invited to do so and had leave the ANPP on the basis of principle when ANPP, his party elected to join the PDP government. What respect then would a man like Buhari have for those apostles of Any Government In Power (AGIP) who defect to the winning party on the morning of victory?. Politics should be made of sterner stuff and greater integrity and morality. The five PDP governors that left the governing party PDP and joined the nascent opposition party APC not only showed political courage but moral integrity in the face of the venomous and slanderous onslaught from the impolitic elements that surrounded and led a President Jonathan who was rather lukewarm to a second or third term. We salute the courage of PDP members of the National Assembly who defected from PDP when they had nothing to gain but everything to lose.

A Buhari government should and could appoint men of integrity (and some there are) from the PDP because of their integrity, expertise and devotion to the nation. A Monday morning defection from PDP to APC should be enough reason for a PDP candidate to be disqualified from consideration for any meaningful post in an APC government. The Good Lord once said: “I have chosen you, you have not chosen me.” For the growth of democracy in Nigeria, PDP must not be allowed or helped to crumble leading to a one party system. Only 2,357,854 presidential election votes separate APC from PDP whose members should show political courage and moral integrity like General Buhari, rebuild the party, dress themselves in a newer fashion and robes and look for less difficult electorate to paraphrase Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer.

Dr. S. Okechukwu Mezu

The Challenges of Ndi Igbo

Igbo Nation 

 History, Challenges of Rebirth and Development (Volume One )
By S Okechukwu Mezu and T Uzodinma Nwala

Igbo Nation: History, Challenges of Rebirth and Development is a chronicle of the Igbo past, the challenges Ndi Igbo have faced across the centuries, how Igbos have survived discrimination, pogrom, genocide and how now they stand on the threshold of a new renaissance that will make their numbers and business, intellectual and scientific acumen manifest the world over. They probably constitute the single largest ethnic group in the world and geographically, Ndi Igbo regard Igboland as the center of the earth. Present state of Igbo studies and research tend to lend credence to the postulation that Ndi Igbo were part of the original inhabitants of the earth before their migration to other parts of the world as we know it today.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00QVWCL26/ref=nosim/?tag=chickenajourn-20

Response by Adeyinka Makinde

I would like to browse/read through this at some point in the future. My fear is that much of the content of this work will contain assertions and thesis of debatable historicity.

What one looks for as we struggle to discover and re-define the black African soul is a substantive level of introspection in the tradition of hermetic thinking. How deep does this work attempt to penetrate the psyche of the Igbo-African? Or is it just another exercise in expressions of a crudely contrived nationalism. A lot of cultures consider themselves to be at the centre of the universe. 

The Yoruba of western Nigeria have the Oduduwa myth of the man descended from heaven to an earthly watery waste on a chain while holding a cockerel, earth and a palm nut. The Japanese on the other had have the godess Amaterasu-omikami and the creation of Yamato culture.

I have never before heard of this thesis of Igboland being at the centre of the world.The purported similarities between Igbo and Japanese words needs to be handled with extreme caution. There are other Nigerian/African languages which have words which are same or similar to Japanese. In fact, there has been enough research to ascribe to Far East Asian languages a near African languages theory.

There will be those who will smirk at certain Igbos attempting to position themselves with Japanese and wonder whether this effort has supplanted the previous efforts to ascribe Igbos with Hebrew-Judaic origins.

Why is less effort being put into discovering the links with fellow black Africans particularly with those in West Africa who form the ‘Kwa’ language group? Igbo is like Ashanti, Yoruba, Bini etc a member of this language group. The Igbos are a black African people and attempts geared towards ‘proving’ links with Jews and Japanese people may be suggestive of having an inferiority complex.

Recent Igbo history has been mired by persecution, pogrom, marginalisation: all palpable evidence of rejection by their neighbours. But such rejection also applies to the wider world particularly to the United States and Western European nations who for the most part did not support their bid for secession in the 1960s.

All this talk of a renaissance is misguided. We can admire the remnants of discovered artefacts from the civilisation of Igbo-Ukwu. But the existence of a presumed empire of Biafra is thoroughly discredited. The Igbos were a disparate group of village-dwelling farmers, artisans, hunters etc who arguably did not develop into a feudal system of social organisation.

Igbo communities, particularly the Aro were involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Where does this fit into the scheme of effecting a renaissance? I have heard of Igbos constituting much of the slave populations in the Americas with much pride being expended on Igbo descendants been part of ‘Igbo landing’ in the Carolinas and slave revolts.

They acknowledge that Igbo were the most plentiful of African groups in Haiti scene of the first independent, black-run country in the Western Hemisphere. But Haiti remains the most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere.

A different course needs to be taken among African intellectuals in terms of how history is constructed. The aura of superficiality pervades a lot of works and I fear this is the case here - no matter how detailed it is.

If this work fails to carry out a detailed deconstruction of the psyche of the Igbo-African mind and critically explores the underlying impulses behind his creativity, enterprise and self-destructive tendencies then it is an utterly worthless endeavour.

https://www.facebook.com/adeyinka.makinde?fref=ufi

Mockingbirds at Jerusalem Available at Amazon

Mockingbirds at Jerusalem: A Poetic Memoir (2014)
By Rudolph Lewis

http://www.amazon.com/Mockingbirds-at-Jerusalem-Poetic-Memoir/dp/087831041X/ref=nosim/?tag=chickenajourn-20

"My Father Still Comes to Me" is the first poem in 
the newly published Mockingbirds at Jerusalem: A Poetic Memoir (2014)

My Father Still Comes to Me

When he died, I was not in the room, that bed where I slept 
as a boy cold nights by a wood heater. Tinka built that room,
that house from ground, three cinderblocks high, eight rooms
for his family. That country was of mules, outhouse, well dug
with pick & shovel. Mama pulled buckets mud & clay heavy,
for water to drink, wash away fields & harvest. As he passed
to dreamland he took all that world. This house he left behind.
A sun goes down. I’ve come back to Tinka’s home to conjure
that world, a backbreaker crosscut saw & ax splitting fire logs

& walking to school dirty miles &yellow bus faces screaming.
We waited by a highway, far too few words spoken. Trailways
Bus took me away to the city. I was sixteen. I began to be man
beyond the bounds of fields, barnyards, pigs & chickens. Books
& picket signs, college & blackness borne brave new worlds.
In flight I circle above. I’m not too unlike the father who raised me
silent & gloomy as he was in my years he wanted me to be him.
Mama his wife Ella & Ann his daughter nursed him through his
long illness after doctors cut his enlarged testicles—a disease no

one could pronounce. I visited home. He was in bed hiccupping,
prostrate, weak but for his earthmoving prayer to unseen powers.
Did he hear Him, that Negro God of so long ago who I learned to
fear in his voice, a heart he yearned silent? In dreams he comes to
me I forget he went away before I could know him. We strangers
learning in that house he kept building from the ground. Dreams
mirror that rough space. I was never homeless. Walls spin round.
He pulled me into his arms. We dancing whirling like dervishes.
Afraid of falling, I woke from my childhood when he went away.


 from Mockingbirds at Jerusalem: A Poetic Memoir (2014)

                                                               

*   *   *   *   *

"Ode to Walls" is the last poem in the newly published
Mockingbirds at Jerusalem: A Poetic Memoir (2014)

Ode to Walls

1. You rose from the stony earth with bloodstained groans
to bestow birth and growth to civilization.
You were created first to support roofs
and ceilings against the sun and storm—
mud huts and the wooden longhouse
to divide space for privacy
a barrier to moving earth, stone and water.
You’ve outgrown your modest grace for mural beauty 
& amp; art. You’re upright now for prisons and trophies.
O, Ancient One, monstrous stone Serpent 
that will not fall. You snake your way speaking
volumes from the Great Wall of China to Israel’s 
West Bank barrier to northern Mexican boundaries 
to secure residences here in America. Your strength
mortared dead men’s bones to ideology.

2. You metamorphosed Deceiver, descendent of Satan,
tossed from Heaven, so long ago. You Separator of
togetherness! we breathe your essence deeply daily
as the skull’s wolf bane, in the heart's pump. Our soul’s
categories embrace nothingness not flowing, not permeable
to warmth and care, no connecting doors to enter rooms
of ethical ruminations. As mechanical as industrial
centuries we return to a hotel hallway change our masks,
our business suits before entering another orange toga 
fantasy of ourselves. Our precarious lives demand
we call such deceit—poise, freedom from terror.

from Mockingbirds at Jerusalem: A Poetic Memoir 

*   *   *   *   *

Mockingbirds at Jerusalem: A Poetic Memoir

By Rudolph Lewis

This is an achievement, a long black surreal song about 1) return and exile, 2) family history and confrontation with legacies basically devoid of romanticizing, 3) nature uncooked, 4) dreamwork much akin to what Australian Aborigines brought out of some African time warp to the island continent, 5) an echo of Bob Kaufman’s imagination that pays tribute to his undersung goodness, and 6) a poet’s psychology.  

The subtitle for the collection is crucial, because it reminds us that while the individual poems can stand alone, they present a richer and deeper texture in combination with one another.  Just as my friend Sterling D. Plumpp found his voice in probing and reprobing of a blues ethos, you have discovered your own in Nature, time, and human nature that identify your origins.—Dr. Jerry Ward

Your imagery is rich and your emotion feels authentic.  Your poems read like a canvas—painterly. For some (southerners like me), the book should and probably will create a strong sense of nostalgia.   For younger persons, it may help to educate. I pray that God will find you the right publisher because your manuscript deserves to circulate in hard copy (as well as in digital format.)   It should be on a new books library shelf in places you have never heard of so others may know and learn.—Jeannette Drake

Resurrecting We after the Flood

Resurrecting We after the Flood

A poetry review by Rudolph Lewis

“Second Line Home: New Orleans Poems”

By Mona Lisa Saloy

Truman State University Press, 2014

http://www.amazon.com/Second-Line-Home-Orleans-Odyssey/dp/1612481000/ref=nosim/?tag=chickenajourn-20  

June 2005, almost a decade ago, was the time I last visited New Orleans. It was still almost the Big Easy I knew in the mid-1980s. Several months later the nation observed via television the flooding of the Crescent City—85 percent after levees collapsed. The Lower 9^th Ward was devastated and much of the 7^th Ward. That is, entire communities and family homes were destroyed and were never to be reoccupied. New Orleans lost 140,845 residents, most of which were black and poor. Maybe the best of New Orleans retreated to cities in Texas, and other sanctuaries east, north, and west—made refugees by government officials.

That is, the abandoned poor were not given a choice—they went where they were sent. Other cities provided these impoverished rejects opportunities New Orleans wouldn’t. Only a quarter of the city’s 4,200 public housing units demolished . . . have been rebuilt” The black population fell from 67.3 percent to 60.2 percent.  Over a 1,000 were killed by the flooding (David Mildenberg, “Census Finds Hurricane Katrina Left New Orleans Richer, Whiter, Emptier”). “City blocks . . . smile / Toothless, missing homes now demolished, / Families lost to Gonzales, Vacherie, Houston / Black-lanta and all points out of here” (Mona Lisa Saloy, “Sundays in New Orleans”).

Construction and real estate agencies encouraged Latin “fresh blood” from Mexico and Central America to come work for them, while natives of New Orleans were not allowed to return by a collusion of city, state, and federal agencies—done legally by condemning homes, dynamiting federal housing projects undamaged and inhabitable, and specious housing codes which prevented poor residents and homeowners from returning and rebuilding their family homes. “Obstacles to public funding of affordable housing came from within New Orleans and in neighboring parishes. Many in New Orleans do not want the poor who lived in public housing to return” (Bill Quigley, “Eighteen Months After Katrina”). In the 1980s (and before) the cost of housing in New Orleans was rather inexpensive compared to other big cities. The poor lived rather comfortably in the arms of cultural and familial traditions and look forward to an even brighter future. Many homes, especially in the 7th and 9th wards had been passed down from generation to generation.

For tens of thousands that future in New Orleans was drowned. Housing costs soared. According to Jose Torres Tama “Hard Living in the Big Easy” (June 2006), “In the Marigny neighborhood where I live, downriver and east of the Viuex Carre, a double shotgun Creole cottage that was worth $120 grand in 2001 was selling at the hefty speculated value of $240 to $280 thousand dollars.” All of what was the Big Easy was lost by leaders careless and corrupt in September 2005.  Later, eighteen months after that tragic drama—the flooding of New Orleans—Jerry W. Ward, Jr. published a literary view of the cosmic depth and breadth of the grief and loss and the evil that brought on the flooding in his  The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery (2007). One of Ward’s journal pieces was written as early as 6 December 2005, titled “Reckoning with Displacement”:

“The disadvantages of forced exile, you can freely lie to yourself, are sweeter and yield higher dividends. Matthew Arnold thought sweetness and light were primal ingredients of the civilized mind. He was dead wrong. The truly civilized mind is a product of recurring darkness. It can not flourish where the dirt is not as saturated with bitter toxins like the soil of post-Katrina New Orleans. Examine the fabulous textures of writers exiled from the Crescent City for evidence. Or explore the weavings of writers who have returned to the Big Easy to create in the moldy stench, in an "exile" from the normal.”

In contrast to Ward’s journal of poems, essays, letters and other materials, Mona Lisa Saloy’s refreshing, Second Line Home (2014) is a poetic memoir of her post-Katrina experiences—from her evacuation with friends and neighborhoods to her return, through efforts to rebuild and reoccupy her 7^th Ward home handed down to her by her Black Creole father. Saloy emphasizes the resilience of Black Creole culture, which she views at the core of New Orleans cultural life. With its central faith, New Orleans, with a little help from her friends, can be as the fabled phoenix bird and live again as it once did before its demise. That is, a fount of cultural creativity.

As a teller of tales in the tradition of New Orleans’ excellent oral storytellers, Professor Saloy uses printed verse to mime the voices and intricacies of life lived fully in the Big Easy before the post-Katrina flooding. Personally blessed with talents and intellectual skills, she too was forced out the city. Nevertheless, Dr. Saloy managed to return to her home city and reestablish her position of professorship at Dillard University. She returned in 2007 after almost two years in Seattle. Still teaching and speaking for New Orleans unique culture, she’s still trying to rebuild her home in 7^th Ward New Orleans, nine years later. To do so, the new housing codes required her to demolish her flood-damaged family home: as she reports, “$100,000 cost to elevate it and termite eaten wood / Nixed keeping our family place” (“From Lament to Hope”).  Professor Saloy is exceptional. Only a select few have had her resources, talents, and persistence necessary to jump through all the political and legal hoops needed to acquire government assistance and loans. Of course, we cannot underestimate her profound love for the community in which she was born and raised, as well as thankfulness for her familial inheritance and her conscious desire to sustain and extol the virtues of that neighborhood life passed down over the generations.

A story of despair, grief, love, and hope, Second Line Home contains 54 poems, divided into six sections and slightly over a hundred pages in length, including “Notes” and a “Glossary.” Dr. Saloy, a very skilled poet, as well as a local folklorist, captures Black Creole speech, music, and other cultural aspects of New Orleans neighborhood life. For instance, the title references the cultural tradition of a marching band playing after the loved one is buried: neighborhood folks—family and friends—follow the employed band chanting and dancing. This procession is called the “second line.” The book title used as a metaphor, this book of poems thus is a kind of celebration. But, as we all know, a celebration is not without thoughts and memories of the past, sometimes a very tragic past and present. The book opens with the section “See You in the Gumbo” (a folk statement of cultural unity) containing three poems that sketch out and describe what New Orleans is and the westward traffic-jammed evacuation.

The first poem of the same title characterizes the uniqueness of what is New Orleans—a place of food, music, dance, celebration, religion (“venerating saints like Anne, Joseph & saving sinners”). All of which caused, before the tragic flooding, a derision of fears of a windy and watery death. The first poem provides background (a prologue) of how the poor folk of New Orleans dealt with hurricanes before Katrina:

Storm warnings rise like cream in café au lait

Folks don’t make no never mind about

Hurricane season starts, we

Joke about Hurricane Betsy whose waters flowed

Down streets like a parade with

Floating bodies of dogs, cats, people, shrimp, swollen stinky, we

Party, shake off the coat of fear with a DJ spinning Joe Jones’

                           “You talk too much, you worry me to death . . .”

           Dance like nobody’s there; dance like nobody’s there,

Gas up the car, pack emergency lights, shout

See you in the gumbo! See you in the gumbo!

The next poem “Sankofa NOLA” provides a sketch of the historical background of the multiethnic character of New Orleans, not only its European ethnic groups (English, Irish, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese) but also from Cuba, Haiti, and Central America, “to carve lives into New Orleans, Caribbean North, into neighborhoods / like Gentilly / Sugar Hill, Treme, Pallet Land . . .” as well as “Natives Choctaw, Houma, Natchez, and Alabama.” The poem ends with a statement of the unique healing aspects of New Orleans Creole culture. There was

Love always, committed to caring

One family, one block, one church, many Cubans, Haitians, Puerto Rican Creole

Cultures together celebrating each one’s crafts

Teaching each one’s generations grounded in this

Crescent City landscape of camellia, bougainvillea, hydrangea, iris in

‘Sippi & Pontchartrain clay, with swamp, ‘squitoes & sunshine.

Certainly, the clay, the swamp, mosquitoes, and sunshine remain. It’s not so certain that the post-2005 recomposition of New Orleans has the same creative qualities as it was before Katrina. In a manner, the rest of the book—filled with hope and belief in miracles, and political recognition of the significance of New Orleans—asserts that that Big Easy  can be reborn. But that hope might indeed be baseless in that politicians and investors (without grace) have ignored the negative impact of excluding its poor natives and discouraging old neighborhoods from resettlement. According to the 2010 census, the poverty rates have returned to the pre-2005 levels (28 percent in 1999 to 29 percent in 2012). Political decisions that caused the emptying of New Orleans of its poor has not effected the long-term economic opportunities necessary to sustain hope and prevent high crime rates such as those that are generated by violent drug trafficking, and other criminal pursuits taken by the poor for mere survival. Empting the Big Easy of its poor thus only had a temporary impact, that is, a poverty rate that dropped to 21 percent in 2007.

The third poem “Evacuation Blues: This is how we did it” dramatizes the poet’s exodus or path of escape from pre-Katrina New Orleans, and stops along the way.

We were bumper to bumper for hours, the

Sun high over our heads, we waving at cousins in caravan, other

Church folks in contraflow lanes, all traffic fanned akimbo from the

Crescent City praying for safe passage, affirming that

“Nothing can happen that God can’t handle.” Then we sing along with

94.5 FM, the Praise Station blasts Fred Hammond:

              “We shall mount up on wings

               Like an eagle and soar . . .

               They that wait on the Lord, wait on the Lord . . .”

Rows of traffic, cars, trucks, in lanes like ants to anywhere safe,

Stopping in lines unable to move 45 minutes at a time, then

Longer, Jasmine happy looking out of the picture window, then

Nightfall outside of Baton Rouge eight hours later, Miz Ruth & I

       Dancing in our seat, I

Call Cindy La . . .

Later in the 2^nd section, “Requiem for the Crescent City” the poet speaks more in detail about the multiethnic cooperative character of and relationships in New Orleans in the poem “2 Friends”: Cindy Lou Levee, a middle class Jew from Uptown New Orleans contrasts to Saloy born to a Seventh Ward, downtown working class Catholic Creole father. Despite the differences, they’re for each other in crisis. This example (this kind) of friendship is one way Professor Saloy believes New Orleans can be better than it has been under the government response to the urban crises. The poem “August Landing & Katrina Hits” again sets the tone of persons working together for the common good, as she and her neighbor take refuge at the house of Cindy & her husband Terry in Baton Rouge. The poet as well renders a very vivid feel of the impact of the hurricane they endured through the night:

Winds wail through wee hours, bigger branches beat windows,

     Rooftops, and bomb doors like a war zone rattling shrapnel, then

     lights fail; the television blackens. . . .

No one sleeps. Storm surges sound sprays, breaks windows nearby,

Windows pained by pressure.

We pray in Creole, English, and Hebrew. Papa nou. Our father

       Hallelujah

Too scared to talk anymore, silence sends sleep.

Probably the most powerful of these requiem poems is titled “On not being able to write a post-Katrina poem about New Orleans.” Though shorter than and less militant than the notorious “Somebody Blew Up America” by Amiri Baraka, Professor Saloy knows the cause of the flood disaster: the incompetence and corruption of government officials. One possibly may also even speak with conviction of a conspiracy to “bring in new blood” and expel the old, a curative bleeding like pre-20^th century medicine. She writes:

It wasn’t Katrina you see

It was the levees

One levee crumbled under Pontchartrain water surges

One levee broke by barge, the one not supposed to park near Ninth

         Ward streets

One levee overflowed under Pontchartrain water pressure

We paid for a 17-foot levee but

We got 10-foot levees, so

Who got all that money—the hundred of thousands

Earmarked for the people’s protection . . .

With the tragic sufferings and horrors of the black poor vivid for all to see, the public masquerade of innocence and government lack of responsibility are challenged. Outraged Saloy compares post-Katrina events to the brutality and cruelty that occurred during the eras of the Atlantic slave trade, slavery, and Jim Crow brought with callous self-interest into the Republic by slaveholding White Fathers, like Tom Jefferson, who had no respect for the human worth of black life:

Our poor who without cars cling to interstate ramps like buoys

Our young mothers starving stealing diapers and bottles of baby food

Our families spread as ashes to the wind after cremation

Our brothers our sisters our aunts our uncles our mothers our fathers lost

Stranded like slaves in the Middle Passages

Pressed like sardines, in the Superdome, like in slave ships.

Though there’s no mystery about those responsible for the flooding of New Orleans 2005, the poet ends the poem with a barrage of probing questions how the post-Katrina tragedy could be allowed to happen. After reviewing the bitter images of neglect for the least of us, the Invisible made visible by a media hungry for sensationalized black life they are questions whose answers are filled with mockery, scorn, and sarcasm:

Where is Benjamin Franklin when we need him?

Did we not work hard, pay our taxes, vote our leaders into office?

What happened to life, liberty, and the pursuit of the good?

Oh say. Can you see us America?

Is our bright burning disappointment visible six months later?

Is all we get the baked-on sludge of putrid water, your empty promises?

Where are you America?

Saloy also recalls the barriers—material, legal, and spiritual—preventing residents returning home to New Orleans. The poem “September 2005, New Orleans” begins with the lines: “They said only businesses could come into the city, / First, then residents by zip code. New Orleans is all / Our business, so I went by rent-a-car . . . / Traffic slowed stacked, like toys, past Causeway / At the 610 Interstate split. Armed GIs in fatigues say: / ‘State your business’.” But even worst to the spirit

Once in the neighborhood, the smell of death

Laced streets, covered in debris along the sidewalks,

Enough room to pass, with some live wires popping,

No sign of anything alive, no birds chirping, no

‘squitoes buzzing, no cats crossing, no dogs running,

No people here, downtown, no cars either, just empty

Silence, so loud, like the dead ghost towns of the Old West.

Still there was a star of hope at Bullet’s Bar on A.P. Tureaud, which provided ice, food and drinks for those drudging and digging their homes out from the debris and muck. With such poems in this section, Saloy begins to reassure her audience that there is a path forward, as in “New Orleans in January”: “Angel trumpets and night jasmine fragrance dusk / When the moon rises in eastern skies smiling.”

Though the loss remains prominent and grief subsides, it “scratches your skin / Till it bleeds all the bottled-/ Up hurt.” In response, Saloy evokes a  martial tone in several poems, including one of her two grief poems, “Black faces” are  “Still at war with American justice / Just us / Still thirst for peace / And a home.” In her “New Orleans Broken Not Dead,” a free sonnet, she invokes Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die.” Her poem ends with the couplet: “Like men and women, bold, we make our pact, / Pressed to our knees, held down but kicking back!” One would be blind not to acknowledge the role Race plays in our political decisions. Saloy points out the “Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis / Crushed into crumbs / Their neighborhoods smashed, / Artifacts of humanity looted / Like the lives of young and old. / The sea is painted with their blood” (“Iraq by the Numbers”).

Back home in the States, “racism, prejudice, / Walking while Black, / Glass ceilings, / Brick walls, Emmett Till, / 41 bullets shot at Diallo in NYC / . . . Deflated dreams of equality, and / The fact that African Americans still / Scrape for crumbs of the American pie” (“My Race”).  Though still living with hope of equity, justice, and progress, Saloy knows that “New Orleans still lies broken”: gas bills are four times higher, and “rentals four times too” (“Meanwhile, Back in America”). What may be worst for community is the generational differences: the carelessness, lack of respect of wayward youth, those hopeless and dispossessed of chances for the American Dream: “I wouldn’t be so shocked to find my 100-year-old cypress doors & windows destroyed, / My cement and bricks—formed by Creole craftsmen—broken like rotten teeth,” as they slither away (“For the New Young Bloods on my Porch”). Repression of the black poor not only has an egregious impact on white fears but also on those of the black middle-classes. All have been disappointed by black elected officials and their lack of effectiveness in providing an economy and a social atmosphere that works for the poor. Too often they have worked for self-interest. That is, the poor have gotten “black faces in white places”: “Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was sentenced . . .  to 10 years in prison for bribery, money laundering and other corruption that spanned his two terms as mayor—including the chaotic years after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005” (Kevin McGill, “10 year sentence for ex-New Orleans Mayor Nagin”).

Section 3 “La Vie Crĉole & Étoufĉe Talk” contains eleven poems: 2 about Creole foods, e.g., breads and beans; and the rest about family and neighbors. There are several about Saloy’s Creole dad; and several about her mom. Both parents have passed—her mom when she was sixteen. One of those poems is fairly dense. It reports personal difficulties of her Creole father and his other two wives, the third and last DD. “Some say she drank herself to death, some say / DD had bourbon with a Coke back for breakfast most days. Still, / I know better. Grief. / Grief got hold of her like the left side of bad luck and / Never let go, Finally, / She has peace.” Hope and grief are locked hand in hand. DD’s “last daughter” was killed on her way to her senior prom. Like Saloy, she “wanted college.” (“Creole Daddy Ways”). When her Creole daddy’s second wife, “Deep, dark chocolate, tall like me, 5’8”, heavy boned, a / Black beauty” [when her mom] died, Saloy reveals, “my world” was “crushed like smashed pecans.” That’s a lot of hurt.

Imaginative thinking like poetry writing, indeed, is a special way of discovering the spiritual beauty in hurt and loss, e.g., courage and endurance. Such is evident in Saloy’s other poems about her deceased mother and father. Both are connected to that hundred-year-old Creole house that was lost and that lovely neighborhood “soaked in the stench of death” (“December 2005 at Stephanie’s House”). But a house is not a home, which is a place in which people live—talk, laugh, cry, and all the other acts that fill life with humor and tragedy. Saloy is the first poet I know to write two Alzheimer’s poems, or even one such poem. And she does it well and compassionately: it matches observations of my grandmother’s behavior during her last post-90 years. The poet in “The Day Alzheimer’s Showed,” recalls her father’s early stages when he confuses TV reality (“The Young and Restless”) with everyday street reality. In “Alzheimer’s, Day Two,” she paints a lovely portrait of her father (in his 80s) in mental decline: “Bebé, get the door. / Can’t you hear that damned doorbell ringing?’ / This Creole crazy man / is my daddy, the / First man I loved, At whose feet I read the funnies, the dictionary, / At whose side we read all the jokes in The Reader’s Digest, / At whose table we searched the / American Peoples Encyclopedia / . . . His eyes are gunmetal grey today, and / Stare with questions bouncing eye to eye. / ‘I don’t know who that is, Shut the door’.”

In two other poems, Saloy’s mother meditations are prompted by a “Sepia photo circa 1943.” The poem “She was not a queen, but . . .” focuses on her mother’s “smooth skin, / Burnt chocolate brown” which was in great contrast to that of her Creole dad, who appears white in a rescued black-and white photo. The poem ends reflectively with the line, “I wipe the mold carefully, / Caress her eyes with mine / Thankful her photo survives.” In a world that praises “whiteness,” Saloy suggests that her Creole dad Louie boosted her mother’s self-confidence regarding her dark complexion. The poet plays on that image—“he was in love, gave her the first taste of chocolate, the / Color of her cheeks” were a “frame” for the whiteness of her smile. The poet again returns to her mother’s eyes, “she liked to wink at me, and I / Melted each time, warmed over with / Her narrow brown eyes, the color of raw almonds.” In her “Missing Mother” poem, there’s sadness and reconciliation. Only “two weeks past 16,” Saloy recalls, “she left me / Shriveled up like a blue prune, and / Left this life without saying goodbye.” Maternally abandoned, the poet now realizes she herself is “older than her last day.” The poet’s personal endurance and victories have brought some understanding to her mother’s view of the world and her own mother’s hurt, which resonates as taking her mother’s advice given during the poet’s childhood: “Today, from now on, I’m sitting and standing erect / Thankful for the dream of days and / Mother’s wisdom packed in my pocket.”

The fourth section “Hurricanes & Hallelujahs” presents a newly developed attitude by post-Katrina New Orleanians with respect to hurricanes and the hurricane season. The tragic consequences of the flooding of New Orleans and the barriers set up against the return of its natives brought an end to an era that might be referred to as “Laissez le bontemps rouler” (“Let the good times roll”), when the folks “dance like nobody’s there” (“See You in the Gumbo”). The lost of over 100,000 residents, the break up of families and neighborhoods, the federal neglect, the economic disregard, and an unkind racial petulance grown wild among the white middle-classes during the post-80s era flaming monotonously in the 21^st century set chains on black optimism. The readily apparent negation of its black poor, in short, brought on a reticence and a watchful attentiveness toward the warning months of the hurricane season, in which the people and the city were on the “hit-list target.” In the interim (2006 to 2012), the Crescent City was threatened near and far by Gustav, Isaac, Irene, and then Sandy. The poet concludes, “We give thanks for such / Reminders, what’s important / Being here” (“Hurricane Days”).  The people have been forced to learn truth-telling lessons about callous cruelty. In the poem “Hurricane Lessons: Isaac September & Sandy October,” Saloy reminds her readers of the nation’s forgetful sense of history and appreciation:

Post-Katrina flooding was an unnatural disaster to a

Beautiful city below sea level, a city whose typography

Scoops are the neighborhoods making culture almost four

Centuries old and still warming the world with wonder.

But from all reports, governments near and far from New Orleans have not learned to be generous to “beautiful” people who became victims of natural and “unnatural” disasters. On the whole rather what we have noted is a most stringent lack of generosity to people who embraced the Big Easy, and suffered a mean-spirited denial of humanity.    

I am uncertain what to make of the fifth section, “Presidential Poems,” other than they were written in the post-Katrina period, sometime between 2006 and 2012. I am almost certain these five poems are peripheral to the consequences of the “unnatural” flooding of the Big Easy. They indeed may provide a lighter, balancing tone to the main narrative of this poetic memoir. Of these five praise poems, three poems are about Mr. Obama’s success in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. One poem is about Mr. Lincoln’s two visits to learn “horror firsthand” (“Lincoln in New Orleans, 1831”). Of course, Louisiana was not the only slave state or even the worst of the slave states. Mr. Lincoln may have made the visit like millions of others subsequently for the unique pleasures the Crescent City offers compared to other American cities. “We, a Poem” written for George H.W. Bush and William J. Clinton honors their work abroad as presidents. 

Specifically, what work Saloy had in mind is rather fuzzy, as she speaks wondrously of American ideals. From my remembrances, I found both presidents a disappointment, especially the presidency of Bill Clinton, who ushered in “block grants” to states, rather than money set-asides that would go directly to decaying urban centers; the man who also reformed welfare, making life more difficult for poor black women and placing a target on the backs of black men. His “three strikes and you’re out“ expanded the prison industrial complex, overwhelmingly blackening jail cells nationally. In 2006 Ishmael Reed published this occasional poem, although other poets had declined the offer to compose for the Liberty Medal presentation.

It’s not that these are not good well-executed poems, expressing confidence and belief in American ideals. My problem is that I do not share the politics of these poems. Their sense of American history and their praise of American ideals, upon which Professor Saloy in other poems heaps scorn and disappointment contrasts are in contrast to my own critically complex views. My perspective is that America still makes and will continue to make war on the black poor, as well as its artists and writers. In short, my own optimism about American justice and the fulfilling of its ideals is much more measured, especially with regard to its black citizenry. In his Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Derrick Bell expresses more cogently my own political perspective:

"I want to set forth this proposition, which will be easier to reject than refute: Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary 'peaks of progress,' short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance" (p.12, 1992).

Thus I cannot sing sentimental praise songs of American progress and racial reforms as beautifully as Professor Saloy.

Many on the left (black and white) are inclined to think of our black president as a war criminal with respect to his use of drones in the assassination of two American citizens. Then there is his dismantling of the government of Libya and his targeted assassination of Gaddafi. And much more such acts in Afghanistan. Though his elections, noteworthy historical events, ones in which I cast votes for him, Mr. Obama did not generate within me the emotional response that Professor Saloy experienced. I did not in either instance cheer or cry. Professor Saloy, however, confesses, “I cried for joy . . . for the first time in my life” (“The Night America Elected the First Black President”). As a journalist I have not only been a critic of his foreign policies but also critic of his domestic policies. Too often in his public rhetoric has spouted the patronizing attitude of white liberals and conservatives who blame the victims for their own oppression. In short, he has failed to address the problems and issues that most affect poor black men in their powerlessness. By the larger society, they have too often been viewed as criminal, less than human, available to be verbally abused, beaten and gunned down in the streets.

Unlike Saloy, I do not see the elections of Mr. Obama or other black politicians as a means to bring “America back to democracy” (“God Bless President Obama & the United States of America”). Curiously Ms. Saloy believes that Mr. Obama gave America “historic free health care” (“Four More Years for President Obama”). But we know there is nothing free in this country, which justifies profit at any cost. While billionaires stash their profits abroad to avoid paying taxes for the general welfare, pharmaceutical and insurance companies (the general medical industry), banks, energy and food industries gouge the poor and the middle-classes. Though personal achievements, the successful elections of Barack Obama and other black politicians do not and did not and can not balance the books for the horrors visited on the Big Easy. Barack’s elections were a corporate sick joke, a con job, a popular liberal self-delusion at the expense of the black poor. One might say his presidency has been more significant and had a greater impact for Latinos than for poor blacks who suffer universally about a 30 percent poverty rate in our most populous metropolitan centers. Recently, not concern about re-election, Mr. Obama has been more vocal about troubling injustice regarding violence of white police and private citizens and about the drug policies instituted by Bill Clinton during the 1990s.

The last section of Second Line Home contains eleven poems, mostly in praise of New Orleans, and what it has to offer the nation and the world by its example. One exception to this worthy praise is the poem “100 Thousand Poets for Change,” with the chant-like exhortation, “Change yourself / Change your block / Change your community / Change your city / Change the World,” first recited at New Orleans Café Istanbul 29 September 2012. And the other is “From Lament to Hope,” which returns to the narrative tone of the first four sections, which speaks again of her childhood home: “Now, a demolished 105-year-old / Treasure bought for $2,000 on the / GI Bill post-WWII by my / Creole Sergeant Daddy . . .  .” Unable to hold onto a family heirloom, Saloy had to replace it with “concrete and steel.” The section concludes with “New Orleans Matters,” a note of bravado:

We ain’t dying y’all; like roaches

We can’t be buried.

We rise after funerals!

Ever heard of a Second Line?

We live, celebrate lives in beats, songs, and dances.

But there are darker notes that are being song by the lovers of New Orleans, especially by artists and writers. Listen to how Jose Torres Tama, complained in 2006 what had happened as a result of real estate speculators and government officials:

“New Orleans of old as a creative cauldron of bohemian tolerances, street life, and ritualistic culture, which was known to rise up from the ground, is a sad postcard of itself.  I truly love this city, but in my twenty-two years of life here, I have never been at such a crossroads, singing the familiar rock-n-roll Clash anthem of ‘should I stay or should I go now?’  Even the local newspaper, The Times-Picayune, which has failed miserably in covering the rental crisis, has used this lyric as front-page headline to denote the mood of thousands caught in the same personal debate.

“The tragedy is that I may not have an economical choice to stay and forge a living when basic shelter is oppressively expensive.  New Orleans has been my poetic muse for half my life, but for numerous artists and working class residents, it is hard living in the ‘Big Easy’ with post-Katrina rents as high as the lingering water lines.”

Here is what I wrote in review of Professor Saloy’s first book, Red Beans and Ricely Yours (October 2005).

“The life rendered in these poems will never reconstitute itself after the 2005 Katrina flood. Thus Saloy’s poetic documentation makes the book exceedingly more precious, especially for those persons displaced who lived in such communities as the 7^th Ward.”

I’m willing to admit that I may have under-estimated the resilient spirit of that which is New Orleans. With natives like Professor Saloy, just maybe, New Orleans can be revived and made into something just as wondrous as the Big Easy that was murdered September 2005 in cold blood. Just maybe the genius of its people can gather together all the pieces scattered like ashes nine years ago and create that which may amaze again and keep the fires of creativity stoked. Long Live the Big Easy!  See y’all in the Gumbo!

Related Readings

Bill Quigley, “Eighteen Months After Katrina” (February 27. 2007). First published in “Truthout.” http://www.nathanielturner.com/eighteenmonthsafterkatrinabillquigley.htm

David Mildenberg “Census Finds Hurricane Katrina Left New Orleans Richer, Whiter, Emptier” (4 February 2011)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-04/census-finds-post-katrina-new-orleans-richer-whiter-emptier.html

Jerry Ward, “Reckoning with Displacement”

http://www.nathanielturner.com/katrinapapersjerryward.htm

Jose Torres Tama, “Hard Living in the Big Easy” (19 June 2006)
http://www.nathanielturner.com/hardlivinginthebigeasy.htm
 

Kevin McGill, “10 year sentence for ex-New Orleans Mayor Nagin” (9 July 2014)
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/10-year-sentence-ex-new-orleans-mayor-nagin

Rudolph Lewis, “Obama and the Hunger for a Black President” (3 September 2007)

http://www.nathanielturner.com/obamaandthehungerforablackpresident.htm

Vicki Mack and Elaine Ortiz, “Who Lives in New Orleans and the Metro Now?”

(26 September 2013)

http://www.datacenterresearch.org/data-resources/who-lives-in-new-orleans-now/

Author, folklorist, essayist, and poet, Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy is professor of English at Dillard University. She previously published Red Beans & Ricely Yours, which won the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Prize in 2006. Saloy’s literary voice represents the African-American and the New Orleans Creole cultural experience.

Saloy’s work appears in many anthologies, journals. An active Educator and Scholar, Dr. Mona Lisa Saloy is a noted speaker and storyteller, who consults to the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH), the Louisiana Division of the Arts (LDOA), and is an active member of the Louisiana Folklore Society. Also, Saloy composed a praise song & performed for two presidents. http://aalbc.com/authors/mona-lisa-saloy.html