Standing upright in the face of ruin: New Orleans in Laurent Gaudé

Four voices in a stormy night

Laurent Gaudé Hurricane, Actes Sud, 2010. [quoted as OUR]

As Hurricane Katrina hurtles toward New Orleans, the wealthy flee the city, leaving behind the poor, the elderly, and the forgotten. When the storm then breaches the levees and the city is submerged, all the characters are plunged into a state of emergency where the usual rules are suspended: prisoners escape from jail, people fight for survival, and thousands are stranded in the Superdome.

The storm uproots lampposts and smashes them onto parked cars, tears off branches and sends them hurtling down the avenues, shatters windows, and sends flowerpots, laundry, and garbage cans swirling through the air. Gusts of rain pound so hard against the windshield that Keanu can't see anything; rivulets of water race across the asphalt like raging mountain streams, a tree trunk blocks the road, a shopping cart rolls alone down the street in the wind. Josephine watches through the crack in the cardboard window as the world bends and breaks. And stays put. – When the levees at Lake Pontchartrain break, streets turn into canals: dirty, chemically contaminated water rises into prison cells, seeps through the walls of the Superdome, fills basements, and floods entire neighborhoods up to waist height. Alligators crawl from the bayous onto the dry asphalt, take over cemeteries and main streets, and tear apart escaped zoo animals—flamingos, monkeys, a deer—in their bloody mouths. Corpses float in the alleys, the stench of decay rises from sewers, oil platforms have broken free from their moorings, factory buildings collapse, plumes of black smoke rise above the city center—and through it all, Keanu silently carries a small boy on his shoulders, a boy who says for the first time that he is thirsty.

When a natural disaster is transformed into literature, the fundamental question arises whether the narrative should explain, lament, or glorify the event—and Gaudé chooses none of these paths, instead transforming the catastrophe into a stage of truth where each character answers the questions posed by the world "with their whole life." A central thesis of this essay is that OUR stages the hurricane as an instance of revelation: The water, which washes away the social order, the houses, and the masks, simultaneously exposes the naked core of the characters and paradoxically transforms the catastrophe into a place of birth, liberation, and rediscovered dignity. From this arise the guiding questions of this study: With which genre-poetic means—polyphony, tragic structure, lyrical-epic tone—does Gaudé transform the historical catastrophe into a mythical space? How do the polyphonic narrative perspective and the shift between first-person and third-person narration relate to the question of voice and silence? How do space (Lower Ninth Ward versus Beaux Quartiers, city versus platform), time (the intrusion and the retrospective), and a dense network of semantic fields—animal, water, shame, fire, uprightness—organize meaning? And finally: To what extent does the novel, which combines the social indictment of the neglect of the poor and Black people with an almost sacred language, contain its own poetics of speaking against silence, one that is intertextually rooted in Aimé Césaire and Sándor Márai?

Laurent Gaudé's novel OUR recounts the destruction of New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina not as a report, but as a multifaceted drama of souls. The very first sentence sets the tone: Josephine Linc. Steelson, a nearly 100-year-old Black woman, opens her window in the morning, smells the air, and realizes that something sinister is approaching—long before television and the "culs blancs" begin to talk about it. She refuses to leave her neighborhood in the Lower Ninth Ward; her daily bus rides to the wealthier parts of the city have become an act of hard-won dignity, a triumph over years of downcast eyes. As the city is evacuated, she decides to stay.

Meanwhile, Keanu Burns returns. He has spent months working on an oil platform off the coast of Texas, fled traumatized—the memory of machine noise, mutilation, and a man's screams haunts him—and now, against the tide of refugees, travels back to the threatened city to see the only woman he has ever loved: Rose. Rose, trapped in a joyless life and consumed by shame, fears his gaze almost more than the storm. They both move toward each other as the water rises.

A third narrative thread belongs to a priest, the "révérend," who ministers to the prisoners of Orléans Parish Prison and whose faith crumbles under the weight of the catastrophe. In the desperate situation where the prisoners are threatened with being left behind in their cells, the line between shepherd and criminal blurs: one scene culminates in a gunshot, in guilt and escape – "Je suis un criminel" (I am a criminal). Around these figures, other voices emerge, including a lost boy named Byron, whose desperately called name echoes like a refrain through the flooded streets.

The novel brings these movements together on the stormy night. Amidst looting, gunfire, and rising water, Keanu and Rose find each other; a child is born or rescued in the chaos, a man dies. In the end, Josephine sits in a rescue helicopter, which carries her against her will from the destroyed city, and sings—upright, angry, free. OUR is thus less an account of a natural disaster than a meditation on what remains of humanity in the moment of its end.

The catastrophe as a tragedy of voices

Disaster novel as a polyphonic tragedy with a choral core

Although OUR bears the subtitle "Novel," its structure betrays the playwright Gaudé, who began his career with plays. The novel is a tapestry of voices: characters appear as speakers in rapid succession, their monologues juxtaposed until they intersect in a storm. This polyphony does not follow the omniscient overview of the classic disaster novel, but rather the logic of ancient drama, in which individual voices lament their fate and a chorus comments on the events. Josephine simultaneously assumes the role of protagonist and that of the chorus: her language, which unfolds in long, rhythmically recurring periods, interprets, accuses, and elevates the events.

The extent to which the opening of the novel carries the gesture of a dramatic entrance is shown by the very first sentence, which is both a self-introduction and an incantation, and with which the central voice enters the stage:

The opening with the self-identification "Moi, Josephine Linc. Steelson" functions like the parodos of ancient tragedy, the first appearance of the main voice, introducing itself to the audience and immediately proclaiming the impending disaster. The appositional self-identification ("négresse depuis presque cent ans") establishes the character not as a psychological individual, but as a type and a speaking role; she speaks from a threshold—the open window—that connects the city's interior with the storm's exterior. By sensing and naming the calamity before official authorities do, she assumes the prophetic function that, in drama, belongs to the chorus or the oracle: she interprets the events before they occur and simultaneously elevates them through the mythologizing image of the "sacrée garce."

That this voice not only narrates but also laments and accuses in a choral manner is evidenced by the bus ritual with which Josephine structures her days. The following section unfolds, in a single, rhythmically staggered period, why she boards the "bus of the rich" every morning:

The passage is musically composed throughout: the anaphoric recurrence of "Je le fais" sets the pace, the long phrases, stretched by dashes and parenthetical phrases, mimic the breath of a spoken lament, and the self-correction "unis, ou plutôt face à face" stages thought as a speech act before an audience. In terms of content, the speech transcends the individual into the exemplary: the private bus ride becomes a tribunal on the history of racial segregation, in which Josephine speaks on behalf of a collective ("nous"). It is precisely here that protagonist and chorus merge—she is both the actor and the voice that places and comments on the action within the horizon of a collective history.

This choral center is contrasted by the other speakers as independent voices, each lamenting their own fate. Keanu, the man from the oil platform, is given a monologue which—although grammatically in the third person—entirely takes the form of a dramatic lament about the haunting trauma:

The short, prayer-like wishes – “Just a little bit. That some faces blur.” ¹ – break up the epic narrative stance and allow a pleading voice to be heard, addressing a merciless authority. The change of the personal pronoun within the same sentence – from "il" to the more general "vous" ² – draws the reader into the lament and transforms individual suffering into a general statement about memory. This creates the complex interplay of voices within the thesis: alongside Josephine's choral "I" stands a second, suffering subject whose monologue fulfills the same function as the lament of a minor character in a drama.

The central scene of violence, in which the clergyman shoots a man in the water and is struck by the gaze of the child Byron, demonstrates how these voices ultimately collide in the storm. Here, Gaudé rapidly interweaves the perspectives:

Within just a few lines, the passage switches back and forth between the fleeing clergyman's inner monologue ("Je suis un criminel") and the detached, external view of Rose ("Elle le soulève et le serre") – a cinematic-dramatic cross-cut that unites two previously separate strands within the same visual space. The wordless "Honte à toi," which the child cries out in silence, is pure theatrical staging: a look as an accusation that speaks louder than any word. Here, the voices truly intersect "in the storm," as the thesis claims, and the polyphony condenses into a tragic knot.

The fact that Josephine's speech eventually transitions entirely into choral singing is confirmed by the final recurrence of her refrain formula, which runs through the entire book like a chorus:

The formula "Moi, Josephine Linc. Steelson," which recurs seventeen times throughout the novel in ever-varying appositions, functions like the recurring intervention of the chorus leader, who takes the floor again after each episode shift and interprets the events. The triple anaphora "C'est ma façon à moi de…" intensifies from a tender gesture (caressing faces) through the impossible healing of the city (drying the streets, straightening the trees) to cosmic self-aggrandizement that rivals the storm ("souffler plus fort que le vent"). The song explicitly places the voice of lament above the force of nature—thus naming the function that Josephine fulfills throughout the novel: She is the choral voice that not only endures the events but also transforms them into language, interpreting, lamenting, and transcending them.

The tragic structure is revealed in its inevitability. Like the oracle at the beginning of a tragedy, Josephine's sense of impending doom stands at the beginning of the book: she knows, "it smells like a bitch." ³...before any authority issues a warning. This sets the course, and the narrative, as in tragedy, shifts from the what to the how – the characters' inner truth in the face of the end. Here, the catastrophe is not accidental, but, in the tragic sense, the fulfillment of what was always already inherent.

Epic hyperbole and mythical breath

The lyrical-epic tone for which Gaudé is known elevates the events beyond the documentary. The storm is not described meteorologically, but mythically: it is a "cursed bitch." ⁴A creature with will and malice. The language employs repetition, anaphora, and incantations, so that the prose at times transitions into a recitative. This stylistic height, which imbues the banal (a bus ride, a motel room door) with the pathos of ancient lament, is the central genre-poetic device: it transforms Katrina into an archetypal downfall, comparable to the mythical subjects Gaudé explores elsewhere (the death of King Tsongor, the death of Alexander). New Orleans becomes the exemplary city on the water, the hurricane a deluge, and the personal takes on epic proportions.

Conversion of parallel approach movements

The novel's narrative threads don't run parallel, but rather describe directed movements, all converging on the eye of the storm. It's striking that almost all the characters move against the logical direction: while the city is being evacuated and the stream of trucks is flowing out of New Orleans, the main characters are driving and walking into it. Keanu retraces his steps from the Texas platform back into the threatened city to reach Rose; Josephine refuses to leave, even though, as she knows, "there's room for me." ⁵. This opposition is the structural principle of the book: the plot is a choreography of staying and returning against the logic of flight, and it gives each character the dignity of a conscious choice rather than mere suffering.

The narrative threads – Josephine, the couple Keanu and Rose, the priest and the prison, the lost boy Byron – are initially separate, intertwining only on the stormy night. There, the lines cross at a nexus of looting, gunfire, and water: the fleeing man's shot, Rose carrying the wounded Keanu, the search for the child, and the man's death all fall within the same narrow timeframe. This convergence is typical of tragedy: parallel fates merge into a single event at the moment of greatest threat, in which each character makes a decision. Afterward, the structure opens again, dispersing the survivors – Josephine into the helicopter, Rose to her newborn son – and releasing them into a future that the text already anticipates in the future tense.

Spaces, bodies, and the interplay of voice and silence

Prayer, appeal and lament

Before considering the narrative perspective, the nature of the discourse itself deserves attention, because OUR is a novel of failed and substituted communication. Genuine dialogue is rare and mostly fails: Keanu doesn't answer the knocking cleaning lady; "he lets the silence answer." ⁶He communicates only through hand gestures. Three monologic forms of speech take the place of communication. First, prayer, which in the clergyman's case shifts from liturgical supplication to desperate accusation and finally to silence – God is ultimately addressed with the abandoned rifle "and Your name, Lord." ⁷ Left behind in the water. Secondly, the phone call, the cry of the name into the void: Rose's and Josephine's incessant "Byron?…" and "Petit négrillon?…", which no one answers and which, precisely in its futility, becomes the purest form of love and despair. Thirdly, the song, which for Josephine surpasses all other forms and takes the place of impossible communication: where the rescuers would have to "shout" amidst the helicopter noise. ⁸ and the actual thing is "too long" anyway ⁹ "Would be," she sings. Communication in this novel doesn't succeed as an exchange, but only as the assertion of a voice that doesn't wait for a reply.

The novel's most striking formal decision is the shifting narrative perspective between characters—and within a single scene between "I" and "he." Josephine speaks consistently in the first person, in a defiant, self-identifying formula: "I, Josephine Linc. Steelson, négresse for almost a hundred years." ¹⁰This formula is a speech act of self-empowerment. It is significant that she gave herself her middle name: from "Fidelity," an empty attribution of virtue, she made "Lincoln"—"It doesn't need to be said, it needs to be done." ¹¹ —the appropriation of the liberator into one's own name. Whoever says "I" in OUR asserts themselves against a history of silencing.

In contrast, Keanu and Rose often appear in the third person, as observed bodies named from the outside. The scene in which Rose fears Keanu's return is particularly poignant: she becomes entirely the object of an anticipated gaze, "she would behold the disappointment of the one standing before her." ¹², and wishes "that the whole world forgets her and nothing remains of her" ¹³The third person here signifies shame, self-annihilation; Josephine's first person signifies dignity. The novel does not distribute its pronouns arbitrarily, but rather as an ethical grid: to have a voice is to exist.

Social violence and the storm

The space in OUR is socially charged from the very beginning. Josephine's ritual divides the city into two worlds: the Lower Ninth Ward, "this neighborhood where we've been crammed together for so many years in houses built from four planks." ¹⁴, and the wealthy neighborhoods with their “two-story houses with balconies and gardens” ¹⁵She deliberately gets off the poor bus to board the "bus of the rich" and, demonstratively and with a smile, sits at the front – a spatial gesture that reverses the historical humiliation of the Rosa Parks story.

This horizontal space of social separation contrasts with a vertical, extraterritorial space: the oil platform off the coast of Texas to which Keanu has fled. It is the site of alienated labor, where, unlike in the myths of the early oil producers, the oil no longer visibly gushes forth, but rather flows beneath "a constant noise of machinery." ¹⁶ and the memory of a mutilated worker disappears. The platform "grows within him," haunting him as a trauma. It is the industrial antithesis of the city, the site of guilt and male self-testing. The hurricane now brutally levels the horizontal spaces: The water makes no distinction between the Lower Ninth and the Beaux Quartiers—and thus simultaneously reveals who is left behind. The novel's indictment is spatially inscribed: Rescue comes from where one could flee; those who remain are those who never had a place "at the front."

The catastrophe unleashes a whole bestiary of dangers, some imagined as animal, some as human, some as divine. From the flooded bayous and the destroyed zoo, alligators crawl onto the asphalt – they tear the escaped zoo animals (flamingos, monkeys, a deer) to pieces in the cemetery, catch up with Tockpick as he flees, and rip the Reverend to pieces while he is still alive; they become the literal image of nature unleashed, reclaiming the city. Meanwhile, the prisoners of Parish Prison are freed: armed, murderous, coalescing into a mob that kills two police officers, loots, and ultimately disintegrates – Tockpick as their leader, seeking to rule a dead city. But the most sinister figure is the Reverend himself, who, in his delusion, believes he must carry out God's wrath and transforms from a merciful pastor into a hunter, roaming the streets with a rifle and shooting Keanu. Added to this are the human predators on the periphery—the three men on the barque, whose potential violence is narrowly averted—as well as the anonymous, almost abstract threat of poisoned water, toxic air, burning gas stations, and the pesticide sprayed from helicopters, with which the state treats its own citizens like vermin. The real monster, however, is not any one of these figures, but the resolution itself: the storm lays bare what was previously contained by walls, law, and order—animals, instincts, madness, and the cold indifference of a system that ultimately saves the poor and the Black.

The narrative time is short—a few days between premonition and storm—but the narrative duration is vast. Gaudé works with two layers of time: the relentlessly advancing present of the catastrophe and the retrospective depth of the life stories. Keanu's present is interspersed with analepsis, which repeatedly jump back to the platform; Josephine's present carries within it almost a hundred years of history of black humiliation and rebellion. The prophetic use of the future tense in the final section is striking: Rose and Josephine already experience the future linguistically—"they will explain to her that they cannot take the dead man's body with them." ¹⁷This anticipation lends the end the certainty of fate and, at the same time, the serenity of someone who already knows what is to come. The time of the catastrophe is not linear, but condensed: a moment in which past, present, and future coincide.

Animal, water, shame, and uprightness

The novel is permeated by recurring imagery that carries its meaning. The first is the animalistic: the storm is a "bitch," the city smells, and people are reduced to their creaturely nature. Josephine incessantly calls herself "négresse" and "vieille mule"—a linguistic appropriation of the degrading animal label that, through repetition, transforms into defiance. The second is the water, which tips from promise ("traverser les eaux") to threat, and in which the dead lie "with soft bodies and arms floating in the water." ¹⁸ disappear. The third is the field of shame and downcast eyes, which concentrates social history: "the years of spitting and fear, the years of downcast eyes and humiliation." ¹⁹In contrast, the fourth and most important movement is the image of standing upright: Josephine is “born upright”. ²⁰The entire metaphor of the novel aims at this one contrast – bowed head versus upright posture – which short-circuits the memory of slavery with the catastrophic present.

Speaking, singing, and naming as an act of resistance

OUR defines gender through the body. Keanu embodies a traumatized masculinity: his "broad, muscular upper body, which is not that of a weak man." ²¹, failed due to inner fear; he had gone to the platform to test himself, “with the cheers of those who decide to test their strength” ²²...and returns broken. Masculinity appears as self-examination that turns into guilt – most clearly in the case of the clergyman, whose claim to authority in prison culminates in a gunshot and the confession: "I am a criminal." ²³ flows.

In contrast, the women represent a different order. Rose undergoes a transformation from shame to action: she is the one who carries the injured Keanu in the water – “she lifts him up and pulls him close.” ²⁴ —a reversal of conventional roles, in which the woman introduced as ashamed becomes the savior. Josephine, finally, is the maternal, almost matriarchal figure who proclaims at the end that she will “carry my sisters.” ²⁵ and “the frightened children” ²⁶The catastrophe devalues ​​the male assertion of power and ennobles a female sovereignty that consists not in strength, but in the attitude and the carrying of others.

The novel's self-reflection lies not in explicit writer figures, but in its consistent preoccupation with the voice. Josephine's ending is an autopoetological confession: she "sings"—"so I sing, I, about the dead." ²⁷ —and this song is the model for the novel itself. It laments the dead, refuses pity. ²⁸ And it asserts memory against the official language of the aid workers, who will merely record the event as a "cataclysm." Here, the text formulates its own poetics: singing against silence, against forgetting, against the reductive labeling imposed from the outside. Naming is central indeed—Josephine names herself, Rose and Josephine incessantly call out the lost names "Byron?…" and "petit négrillon?…" into the city. The name against the anonymity of the catastrophe: that is the ethic of this prose.

Gaudé frames the novel with two mottos that define its interpretive framework. Aimé Césaire's verse from lost body – “the wind, alas, I shall yet hear it / Nègre nègre nègre from the depths of the immemorial sky” ²⁹ – places the storm in the tradition of Négritude and makes the wind the vehicle for a colonial, racialized lament; Josephine's obsessive self-designation as a "négresse" is the novelistic fulfillment of this verse. The second motto, from Sándor Márais The embers, poses the existential question to which every character must answer: “Who are you? What have you done? To whom have you remained loyal?” ³⁰ The catastrophe thus becomes the moment of reckoning. Furthermore, the novel plays intermedially with the contrast between the television image of the catastrophe—the language of "télévision" and the "culs blancs" that interpret from the outside—and the inner, sung truth of those affected. OUR consciously positions itself against the media's exploitation of Katrina and establishes the literary voice as a counterforce.

From the scent of doom to the song of freedom

Comparing the beginning and the end reveals the novel's inner architecture. At the beginning, Josephine stands at the open window, smells the "chienne" (a type of fish), and begins a day "like any other." ³¹ – Stagnation, repetition, the tenacious persistence of a centenarian who wonders why the Lord still makes her drag her "carcass." In the end, the same Josephine sits in the helicopter that carries her away, and her language has transformed from the morning's resignation into a triumphant oath: "I will die free, on my terrace, in the moment I will have chosen... remember me and keep your eyes fixed on me." ³²From the downcast gaze of history, the "regard droit" has emerged. The cycle from sensing impending doom to freely asserting oneself is the book's central argument: the storm solved nothing, but it revealed something. For Rose, this same conclusion is intertwined with a birth—the catastrophe is for her simultaneously "the birth of her son and her rediscovered life." ³³. Downfall and beginning coincide in one image.

OUR is a novel that uses the historical catastrophe of New Orleans as a tragic stage where not the water, but humanity is the true event. Gaudé combines the structure of polyphonic tragedy with an epic-lyrical tone that transforms the documentary into the mythical; he distributes his narrative perspectives according to an ethics of voice, in which the self-determined "I" of dignity stands in contrast to the shamed third person; and he organizes space, time, and metaphor around the single contrast between bowed head and upright posture. The social indictment—that the storm primarily affected the poor and Black people, whom no one could evacuate—is conveyed not through reportage, but through images and voices that resist being appropriated by the language of aid workers and the media. The thesis of this essay is thus confirmed: the hurricane is an instance of revelation that washes away everything external to expose the naked core, and that paradoxically links destruction to birth and freedom. What ultimately remains is not an account of a natural disaster, but Josephine's song—the assertion that a voice that names itself and holds its gaze straight is stronger than the flood. In this sense, OUR is ultimately a poetics manifesto: a book about the power of speaking against silence, naming the dead and commanding the living to stand tall.

1. "Juste un peu. Que certains visages s'effacent.">>>
2. “Ce que vous tentez de fuir”>>>
3. “Ça sent la cienne”>>>
4. “une sacrée garce”>>>
5. “il y aurait de la place pour moi”>>>
6. “il laisse le silence répondre”>>>
7. “et Votre nom, Seigneur”>>>
8. “obligerait à hurler”>>>
9. "trop ​​long">>>
10. "Moi, Josephine Linc. Steelson, négresse depuis presque cent ans">>>
11. “I don’t have a faut pas le dire, I don’t have a faut le faire”>>>
12. “Elle apercevra la moue de déception de celui qui sera face à elle”>>>
13. “Que le monde entier l'oublie et qu'il ne reste rien d'elle”>>>
14. “This quarter has nothing to do with new buildings in the houses constructed with four planches of wood”>>>
15. “maisons with two floors in the center, with balconies and gardens”>>>
16. “a constant noise from the machine”>>>
17. “ils lui expliqueront qu'ils ne peuvent pas prendre le corps du mort”>>>
18. “Le corps mou et les bras floating in the water”>>>
19. “les années de crachats et de peur, les années de regards baissés et de frustration”>>>
20. “née ainsi, debout”>>>
21. A large torso and muscle that is not as strong as a fragile man.”>>>
22. “Avec la jubilation de ceux qui décident d'éprouver leurs forces”>>>
23. “Je suis un criminel”>>>
24. “Elle le soulève et le serre”>>>
25. “je porterai mes sœurs”>>>
26. “les enfants effrayés”>>>
27. “alors je chante, moi, sur les morts”>>>
28. “ne vous apitoyez pas”>>>
29. “Le vent hélas je l'entendrai encore / Nègre nègre nègre depuis le fond du ciel immémorial”>>>
30. "Qui es-tu? Qu'as-tu fait? À qui es-tu resté fidèle?">>>
31. “Semblable with all other people”>>>
32. “Je mourrai, libre, sur ma terrasse, à l'instant que j'aurai choisi... souvenez-vous de moi et gardez le regard droit”>>>
33. “La naissance de son fils et sa vie retrouvée”>>>