Vertical travel, the sense of place, and the environmentalism of the poor: climate change in Frank Smith’s Katrina: Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiane

ABSTRACT

Frank Smith is a contemporary French author who is known for his poetic writing style, social activism, and attention to detail. This chapter examines Smith’s unconventional approach to the representation of the environmental uncanny he witnesses during his journeys to Louisiana where rising tides and climate change threaten a small island community in the bayous, that of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Native Americans, America’s first climate refugees. The author depicts the non-human and human agency of a complex environmental crisis through figurative and literal forms of verticality. His approach to vertical travel, dwelling, and the fractal diversity of the everyday resonates with Ursula Heise’s descriptions of situated knowledge, sensory perception, and physical immersion as foundations for a sense of place that will be explored here through various types of fragments evident in his work.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• environmentalism
• indigenous
• Isle de Jean Charles
• sense of place
• translanguaging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Smith collaborated with the plastic artist Dominique de Beir one year prior to publishing his 2015 text.

2 All translations of this text are my own.

3 “Islands may appear to be contained spaces par excellence, bounded by water on all sides; yet at the same time islanders dwell thanks to many different kinds of coming and going, pausing and waiting, producing a choreography of uneven spatialities and temporalities” (Sheller 2020, 17).

4 French sociologist Razmig Keucheyan goes as far as to call Katrina a metaphor of environmental racism due to its devastating effects on marginalised segments of the population, including the elderly and the African American community (2018, 29–30).

5 “While there is a long history of immediate disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions that have devastated various places in the Caribbean, there is also a long history of ‘slow violence’ or ‘slow disaster’ that includes colonialism and genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery and plantation systems, exploitative terms of indenture and other abuses of labor, ecological destruction, and resource extraction” (Sheller 2020, 8).