There’s an amazing moment in Spike Lee’s film about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Break. Labor organizer Fred Johnston recalls a conversation with a friend in which they agree that Katrina was caused by spirits angry about the loss of African lives during the Middle Passage. The simbi (water spirits) are getting their revenge all right: they’re going to drown capitalism.
Johnston was referring to the “many thousands gone” who died or self-killed during the hellish journey from Africa to slavery. There were infamous moments like the voyage of the Zong, during which the captain threw 138 enslaved people overboard to lighten his load during a storm. And then claimed insurance on them. Turner rendered the scene in his classic painting usually known as The Slave Ship, just after the abolition of slavery.
You can see the presence of the formerly enslaved suspended in the water in the foreground, caught between life and death, between freedom and slavery. The painting suspends realism (because a person weighted with iron thrown into the sea will sink immediately) in order to give proper weight to the moment. At the far right you can see a curious water monster approaching, Turner’s intuitive understanding of the simbi.
For African diaspora cultures have visualized the world as a cosmogram in which the living are separated from the spirits by the ocean. The ocean is a barrier we cross twice, once at birth and again at death, in a cycle that continues. Thus a child’s birth would be celebrated on the eighth day of life, once the spirit had made the decision to remain in the world of the living. For the enslaved, self-killing was a rational choice because it entailed the return of the spirit and its subsequent rebirth in Africa.
On the island of Martinique, the sculptor Laurent Valère has created a powerful monument to three hundred Africans drowned with their slave ship in a storm after they had led a successful revolt.
Laurent Valère, Monument at Anse Cafard, Martinique
The hunched figures are arranged in a triangle evoking the Atlantic triangle created by slavery, looking across the sea in the direction of Africa. They are white, the color of death and of mourning. They have not been sleeping. They have been biding their time.
Now the economic system that sent the slave ships is set to drown in its turn. It is no coincidence that the spirits sent Isaac seven years to the day after Katrina.
Flooding in New Orleans
The point with these Anthropocene hurricanes is not the wind but the water. Like Katrina, Isaac is bringing huge amounts of water with it. As global warming develops, the warm air holds more water vapor. As the ice-caps melt, there is more water in the ocean. As the oceans warm, there is more energy for a storm system to draw on. Put these three together and you have the new once-a-year “storm of the century.”
By 3pm, there had already been nearly ten inches of rain in New Orleans. The storm surge was twelve and a half feet in Plaquemines Parish and some people have had to be rescued off the rooftops. In New York, half-an-inch of rain leads untreated sewage to be flushed directly into the rivers and oceans. We learned last year that a storm surge of five feet would flood much of Manhattan. When–not if–that happens, it’s not going to matter who is in charge of Zuccotti Park–it will belong to the water spirits.
Despite the levee overtoppings, the floods and the massive loss of power, New Orleans is surviving Isaac. But only because $14.5 billion was spent defending it in the last seven years, on top of a century of levee building. What will it take to defend the entire Eastern seaboard? It doesn’t matter, no one will spend it.
Capitalism has been blithely indifferent to climate change. Why? Look at this diagram. On top, the world mapped by quantity of emissions. On the bottom, the world mapped by likely consequences of climate change.
The Lancet, 2009
So it’s easy to see the calculation: the US, Europe and Japan get off lightly, Africa and Asia pay the price, who cares? Only this was made on the basis of the now evidently conservative IPCC reports. This summer has shown a far more accelerated melting of the Arctic ice than anyone has previously predicted. The total disappearance of Arctic ice in summer is now expected by 2030, far sooner than ever imagined. No one really knows what the consequences will be but they will not be good. It’s going to mean flooding becomes the new normal, rain for months on end for some, and drought for others. Just like we’ve been seeing this summer, in fact, with 63% of the U.S. in drought, while other places have flooded.
And what are our lords and masters doing? Debating how to divide the drilling rights in the Arctic. George Monbiot reports:
The companies which caused this disaster are scrambling to profit from it. On Sunday, Shell requested an extension to its exploratory drilling period in the Chukchi Sea, off the north-west coast of Alaska. This would push its operations hard against the moment when the ice re-forms and any spills they cause are locked in. The Russian oil company Gazprom is using the great melt to try to drill in the Pechora Sea, north-east of Murmansk.
The revenge of the spirits is devastating but in a certain way beautiful. Just as the enslaved were driven to choose drowning over slavery, the death of life over social death, so now capitalism is choosing to drown itself rather than die.
Unless we choose to do something about it. S17. S stands for survival. Sorry about that.