WEBVTT

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So I wanted to share one
of the New Orleans poems,

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just as a kind of homage
to that city, which is

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being drenched again by Isaac.

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This was a project that
took several years.

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I interviewed evacuees from
the New Orleans and Gulf

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area who evacuated
to Arizona because I

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was working at the time.

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As I was driving
down here yesterday,

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I heard an interview
with someone--

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and I actually forget what he
was being interviewed about.

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I just was so
struck by something

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he said about the power of
the individual's experience,

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the individual's voice.

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And I thought, that
is what I was trying

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to do with this project--

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to give a space.

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Not to give voice,
because I only

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use the words of the
interviewees themselves.

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But to create a space in
which people who are otherwise

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erased in dominant culture
have a space in which

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to express their experience.

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And in this way,
Victoria Greene,

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homeless mother of four,
stepped into that space

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and became a collective
voice for an experience

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of the dislocated.

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"We the people of New Orleans
always talked of the Big One,

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but I had not heard of Katrina.

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Hurricanes come and go.

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But when Lake Pontchartrain
broke, every one of us

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was screaming and hollering.

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If lake was flooding the city,
we knew it'd never be the same.

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These times you remember every
kid you went to first grade

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with by name.

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You wonder where
everybody was, the bum

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on the corner, the
pickpocketers, the little man

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that's always on Bourbon
Street painting the city.

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CNN was showing
people on houses.

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This was not a strange
neighborhood to me.

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This was my neighborhood.

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It's where I went to school.

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Where I shopped for
groceries at Circle Food.

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I got married in that church,
christened my children,

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buried my kin.

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New Orleans is the cornerstone
for spirituality, the stomping

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grounds for psychic ability.

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You don't get on the bus
and go somewhere else.

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It's our culture.

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You'd have to be a citizen
of New Orleans to understand.

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I was here a week
and my mother passed.

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She never had been sick.

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I think any of us would
trade any charity we

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got to go back to
August 15, 2005

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and warn all our family
that terrible storm would

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take everything away from us.

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But we don't get those chances.

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We get what we get.

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