The Wake and the Work of Culture: Memorialization Practices in Post-Katrina Black Feminist Poetics

Hurricane Katrina has come to represent a nexus of natural, infrastructural, and ethical failures that forced a moment and perhaps an era of public reckoning with the ongoing processes of black disenfranchisement from US state protections and rights. Poetry about Katrina both promises and is asked bear witness to this spectacular, violent show of force and to manage public and political appetites for recognition and remembrance through its ability to merge the material and the abstract in linguistic form. This cultural imperative stands as both opportunity and limit for black artists and poets, as they are expected to weigh in exclusively on the fates of black life, historical and present, and are frequently only given accolades and earn readership when they accede to this demand to represent the spectacle of Blackness in pain. In this article, we consider the Katrina-focused work of two prominent African American women poets, Claudia Rankine and Natasha Trethewey, arguing that they engage in innovative practices of poetic memorialization, performing black feminist "wake work" in their insistence on the long-standing, porous boundaries between black life and death, black expressive creation and precarity, and black material history and the present. Their work in Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) and in Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010) refashions the perverse poetic "opportunity" of Katrina as a moment to reframe black life and black cultural production both through and beyond the immediate temporality of disaster.