1 A Comparative Analysis of: Blood Dazzler and A.D.

New Orleans: After the Deluge The two books that I chose to compare to one another have a common subject: Hurricane Katrina. However, they are very different in how they depict the city of New Orleans and its people. Both of the authors had good intentions in their writings, but one was more successful. A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge provides a more accurate account of Hurricane Katrina by evaluating pre and post Katrina New Orleans in an authentic and culturally relevant manner while Blood Dazzler does not due to a superficial analysis of the affects of Hurricane Katrina. A.D. New Orleans: After the Deluge is an authentic description of the city of New Orleans, unlike Blood Dazzler. My criteria for a work to be authentic in post Katrina literature is for the author to visit New Orleans and to talk to New Orleanians. Additionally, I believe that to have completely authentic work, the author should ask New Orleanians about their own personal experiences that they had with the storm. An example of a nonauthentic work would be an author one in which based their novel off of what they would see and hear in the media. Also, if the author only shows one extreme of our class system being effected by the storm, then that is only showing some of the thousands of stories, which is not authentic or effective. A.D does a phenomenal job being authentic to New Orleanians. Josh Neufeld visited to New Orleans and talked to the people. I have a great amount of respect for an author who is willing to submerge himself in a different culture. He interviewed five main people and got their individual stories about their experiences with Hurricane Katrina. I praise Josh Neufeld for starting the book by showing the reader the affects of storm and t life before Katrina. I also applaud Neufeld for choosing the people he chose to interview. The

2 characters in the book all have diversity and substance to them, because they are real people and he tells their real stories. A.D. shows the most accurate depiction of what New Orleanians went through and why they came back after the storm. In Patricia Smiths Blood Dazzler, the book seems to be on the opposite of A.D., the book does not depict New Orleans or its people accurately. Smith starts Blood Dazzler with a poem that she thinks describes New Orleans. This poem describes a tourists view of the city, not a New Orleanians view. If she had immersed herself into New Orleans culture, then she would have realized that New Orleans is a beautiful place filled with beautiful people of all different social positions. All of her poems in the book sound as if she had watched television then wrote about what she saw, which is unfortunate because most of the news that was reported was not accurate. Patricia Smith had the tools to write a book filled with beautiful poetry about our city, but she failed in doing so by providing a superficial account due to heavily relying on the media. If New Orleanians had the chance to read these two works I believe A.D. would be praised by the city and Blood Dazzler would not. I found myself very upset with Patricia Smith throughout the entire book, especially when I got to the evacuation poems. In her poem titled Inconvenient, she basically takes the tone to represent the wealthy class in the city. She says in the poem that the storm is an inconvenience for the wealthy class and that evacuating was just like a vacation. I have lived in Mandeville, Louisiana my whole life, which is an extremely wealthy area. So, I have had a privileged life. My family has evacuated for every Hurricane, just like most people. It is not a vacation; it is filled with worry and fear. After Katrina, my family could not go back to Mandeville for a month. When we did return, pine trees had destroyed our entire house, and since there were huge

3 holes in our roof, it had being raining in our house for a month. We returned to our house and all of our furniture was covered in mold. It is extremely insulting to the upper and middle class to write a poem like this because our homes were destroyed too just like the lower class. A.D. shows a variety of places and faces that Blood Dazzler seems to forget that exist in the city. I enjoyed the comic aspect of A.D. because the reader could see the faces and places of the city. It makes the stories more personal and the reader can relate to the characters experiences. After reading A.D., I feel like I personally know Denise, Leo, Michelle, Abbas, Kwame, the Doctor, and Darnell because Josh Neufeld actually interviewed them personally. Neufeld also kept up with them after the storm, as well. The real people and real stories are a major strength to the book and this strength is what separates it from a misinformed book like Blood Dazzler. In both of the books, they put blame on certain parties involved in the storm. In A.D., I found that there was not a certain person or thing they blamed the aftermath of the storm on. Denises story showed some blame on the government and the police. When her and her family were standing outside the Convention Center, Denise makes a comment that she does not understand how this situation is happening and ask if the authorities know about all the people and asks if they care. The blame that the book places is legitimate. The government abandoned their own people and left them in the 100-degree weather to die. Our country abandoned New Orleans and did nothing to save those people. This interpretation of how it was at the Convention Center, to me, is extremely accurate. In Blood Dazzler, I feel like the blame was put on FEMA, and the President. There are a couple of poems dedicated to Michael Brown the head of FEMA at the time. The blame

4 Patricia Smith puts on Michael Brown is legitimate, these are some of the more appropriate poems because FEMA did not do their job. The poem the President Flies Over, is also putting the blame on the right people because while people were suffering on top of their roofs, President Bush was traveling giving speeches. The government failed its own city. This is one of the strengths of authenticity that has come out in Patricia Smiths writing. The tone in A.D., I believe, is one of its weaknesses. I did not find that it had a strong defined tone, but the tone that I did find at the end was hopeful. At the end of the book, Josh Neufeld shows all of his characters returning and rebuilding. He is definitely trying to end the book on a positive note, which he does. It shows the world that New Orleans is rebuilding and we are coming back. Yes, it is taking time, but eventually we will thrive again. That is the tone I received from the book. The Tone in Blood Dazzler is more defined then A.D., but it has a more negative tone. The first poem titled, And Then She Own You, is extraordinarily negative, which sets up the tone for the rest of the book. The first poem proclaims that New Orleans is a place of nastiness and it is lifestyle that a person gets addicted to. The last poem is very discomforting as well, it is titled Voodoo VIII: Spiritual Cleansing & Blessing, from the title you would think that it would be a fairly hopeful ending. I found the ending filled with hopelessness. She paints a picture of a spiteful and unforgiving God. I do not feel like New Orlenains feel that God spited them. Smith took the wrong perspective in writing this book. Authenticity is extremely important in post Katrina literature because if the author does not get approval from the community that it is writing about, then the book is fraudulent. I do not believe that acceptance by experts is as important as acceptance by the community. The experts that gave praise to Blood Dazzler are not from the city and admire

5 her book because it is aimed at people who are not from here. The people who do not know the real New Orleans, praised this book and the people who only heard the libel on the news, therefore, it has no substance to me. A.D., on the other hand, told real stories from real Katrina survivors, which makes it more authentic and it also has diversity to it. All things considered, these two books were written with good intentions. I firmly believe Patricia Smith wrote Blood Dazzler to inform people about Katrina and put a good spotlight on New Orleans, she just ended up being extremely misinformed. A.D. wanted to get multiple people with multiple backgrounds the chance to inform the world of their stories. I believe that it did an inferior job at showing what the people of New Orleans and went through. The two books give New Orleans the limelight it deserves and I respect both writers for their work and their intentions.