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The topic of violence is one that is complex and hard to understand but yet is always pertinent. In his novel Cities of the Dead: Circum Atlantic Performance, Joseph Roach defines violence as “the performance of waste.” By this Roach implies that violence is just the action of creating waste with purpose to it. Roach further expands upon his definition by providing three corollaries: “first, that violence is never senseless but always meaningful, because violence in human culture always serves, one way or the other, to make a point; second, that all violence is excessive, because to be fully demonstrative, to make its point, it must spend things—material objects, blood, environments—in acts of Bataillian “unproductive expenditure” (or Veblenian “conspicuous consumption”); and third, that all violence is performative, for the simple reason that it must have an audience—even if that audience is only the victim, even if that audience is only God.” Although Roach’s work is from 1996, his definition of violence is still relevant today and especially so to the topics covered in class as each of Roach’s three corollaries can be applied to the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina.

In the context of Katrina, the failure of the United States government can ultimately be considered as an act of violence upon the people of New Orleans. During the events of Katrina, the levees of the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, a predominantly poor and black district, broke causing massive flooding and catastrophic damage. The United States government viewed the people of the Ninth Ward as expendable and because of this, they did very little to protect this group from the destructive power of a hurricane. As outlined in the Spike Lee documentary When the Levees Broke, the United States Corp of Engineers conducted an investigation post Katrina and found that the levees that they had constructed were not sufficient to handle the kind of destructive force of a hurricane as powerful as Katrina. In the novel Unfathomable City, A New Orleans Atlas, authors Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker relay in a powerful quote how if the levees were constructed properly, much of the destruction of New Orleans could have been avoided altogether: “Imagine that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had built adequate levees: Katrina would have just been a powerful hurricane that missed New Orleans…” In addition, the United States government completely blundered the response in the aftermath of Katrina, taking far too long to respond to the crisis. New Orleans had to fend for itself in the aftermath of the storm with little support as reflected in another quote from Solnit and Snedeker: “Imagine that even though the levees failed and people were left behind, everyone in a position of power had responded with urgent empathy so that no one was left to die on a roof or in an attic…” In this case, the people of New Orleans, more specifically the people of the Ninth Ward, are considered as waste by the United States government and thus, violence was acted upon them.

In Roach’s first corollary, he mentions how violence is never senseless but rather always has a point. In the case of Katrina, the point of the violence acted upon the people of New Orleans by the United States government was as punishment for the actions of the people or rather their “sins.” It is no secret that the United States government held many prejudices against the people of New Orleans, believing the city to be prideful, dirty, and unclean. Thus, the government only initiated an evacuation of the city at the last possible moment, providing little to no resources in the aid of the evacuation. Spike Lee highlights in his film how the government relayed that they were not going to help anyone who stayed during the hurricane, doing little to help in the process of evacuating the city. Solnit and Snedeker also highlight this idea in the quote “Imagine that the evacuation order had not been a demand that people without cars and money do the impossible but an expression of social commitment that no one would be left behind. The U.S. government did the bare minimum to say that the people of New Orleans were warned and punished greatly those who had no choice but to stay in the city. If the people of New Orleans were going to be disobedient, the government would not help them in their time of need. An obvious analogy can be made to the biblical story of Noah in which God used a storm to flood the Earth and purge the wicked so that the Earth can be reborn. In this case, the government played the role of God, using the storm to purge the city of its sin and wickedness so that it too could be reborn. Many believed that this worked and was a benefit to those who had survived the ordeal. As highlighted in the collection of poems Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith, one such example was past first lady Barbara Bush who in a tasteless quote stated: “What I’m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone here is overwhelmed by the hospitality… And so many people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this-this [chuckles slightly] is working very well for them.”

In Roach’s second corollary, he mentions how violence must be used excessively if a point is to be made and Hurricane Katrina is no exception to this rule. The sheer destruction of New Orleans is captured expertly in Spike Lee’s documentary which gives the audience a visual indication of what the hurricane did as well as how the hurricane affected those who were caught in the storm on an interpersonal level. Hundreds died during the storm and those who survived lost their families, homes, or both. One poignant example from the documentary is a case in which a man who worked his entire life to pay off his home, broke down crying after seeing what the storm had done to the home he spent decades paying for. The excessiveness of the violence is also demonstrated expertly through Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith. There are many poems that demonstrate the excessiveness of the violence. A notable example is the poem Buried in which a father must bury his own son who passed away during Katrina because the government stopped giving funds to help bury the victims of Katrina. This poem does an amazing job at not only demonstrating violence caused by the storm, but also how the government abandoned New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, causing even more violence as a result.

In Roach’s third corollary, he mentions how violence is performative in nature and because of this, there must be an audience for the violence to be performed for. In this case, the audience is the entire world, who saw the complete destruction of New Orleans by Katrina. The U.S. government used New Orleans as an example of what happens to cities which sin or disobey orders given to them. The residents of New Orleans, especially those from predominantly poor and black districts were treated as criminals or sinners. Anyone who tried to get food from grocery stores were labeled as looters, further contributing to the idea that New Orleans is an unjust city that needs punishment. The people of New Orleans were treated as savages by the public and were not given the help they desperately needed. As outlined in Spike Lee’s documentary, those who tried to leave the city were met with people with guns who attempted to keep people in New Orleans. Rumors ran rampant about the residents of New Orleans with one of the biggest perpetrators being New Orleans Police Chief Eddie Compass. In the collection of poems Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith in the poem Dream Lover highlights the actions of the police chief with the quote “We had babies in there. Little babies getting raped” in reference to how the police chief stated that residents were trying to rape babies in the dome arena during the aftermath of the storm. This claim was completely nonfactual and only further served to justify the destruction of New Orleans. Violence was used by the government so that the world would see the absolute worst in the people of New Orleans in order to justify the violence that was committed upon the city of New Orleans.       

It is important to understand Roach’s definition of violence as it allows us to better understand why violence occurs in the first place, allowing us as a society to avoid such acts of violence in the future. The violence acted upon the city of New Orleans was not an act of God but rather an act of man that could have been avoided altogether. Yet, the people of New Orleans were considered to be waste by the government and thus violence was perpetrated onto the city through the inaction and lack of support from the government. If we are to avoid such acts of violence in the future, we must first define violence and then understand the means in which violence is committed.

Violence. A force that is intended to damage or destroy someone or something. Synonyms of violence include, but are not limited to, roughness, brutality, ferocity, severity, and so on. Maybe not all of these terms resonate the same way when we picture violence, as each person holds their own perception of what violence truly is. I believe that violence is a feeling. I believe that violence is not the action itself, but the aftermath and the looming effects it has on us. Author and historian Joseph Roach provides the quote, “…violence is the performance of waste” (Roach, 1996) in his book titled Cities of the Dead. Roach’s work relates back to many of our course concepts, developed from both the readings and in-class screenings, in a multitude of ways that I am intending to delve into momentarily. 

Roach has three interesting concepts of the term violence that I will tackle individually. His first concept states that “violence is never senseless but meaningful, because violence in human culture always serves, one way or the other, to make a point…” (Roach,1996). Without delay, this reminded me of a concept from our in-class screening of When The Levees Broke, a documentary directed by Spike Lee, about the aftermath of New Orleans, Louisiana, after Hurricane Katrina. In the documentary, we saw many first-hand experiences of the surviving victims from the vicious hurricane. New Orleans was flooded from the hurricane because of the breaking of the levees that were supposed to keep the city safe from flooding in the instance of a natural disaster. These levees were, said by Louisiana state’s politicians in the film, very poorly constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers. To worsen the matter, the multitude of victims that were interviewed in the documentary stated that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was absolutely useless when the people of New Orleans were in dire need of support. People were dying, starving, injured, and desperate with nowhere to go after their homes and belongings were destroyed. Families were torn apart, the streets were trashed, and nobody came to help for months. This left the people without food, clean water, electricity, money, or shelter for what felt to them like an eternity. When FEMA search teams finally came to search houses and account for dead bodies, they lied about checking houses and cleared those houses as having “no deaths”. Dead bodies were, in fact, later found inside by family members of the home that was supposedly already cleared. Now as we relate back to what Joseph Roach said about violence proving a point, the point proven here is clear as day to me. The United States Government savagely proved to these innocent people that they were not important enough to be helped in any sort of a timely manner. This violence performed by the government, which was fully aware of the disparity of the surviving residents of New Orleans, reveals the true flaws within our country. 

Roach’s second concept of violence that he offered in Cities of the Dead is that “all violence is excessive, because to be fully demonstrative, to make its points, it must spend things–material objects, blood, environments–in acts of Bataillian ‘unproductive expenditure’…” (Roach, 1996). I interpreted this quote as the idea that with violence, comes sacrifice. Sacrifice of things that are important and/or valuable to us. I believe that if something wasn’t valuable, then losing it would not be looked upon as being a sacrifice. The way I see it, in order to sacrifice, we have to possess something worth sacrificing. In one of our course novels, Unfathomable City, one of the two authors speaks about her personal experience of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She says; “What’s normal here? Looking everyone you pass on the sidewalk in the eye and nodding, at the very least! Rolling thunder on summer afternoons, masked men on horses in parades, living your whole life here. (Before Katrina, we had the highest rate of nativity–the percentage of residents living in the same town where they were born–in the United States.) Guests visit and tell us that the city is different from other American cities…These people say we’re friendly, yet we’ll talk behind your back; they say we celebrate life, yet we’re killing our own; they think it’s easy to get by, but most everyone I know is working hard to make ends meet, and since Katrina, the cost of groceries and insurance has skyrocketed. The opposite of everything you can say about this place is true, too” (Snedeker, 2013). This moving excerpt from the book identifies the sacrifice (that Roach previously mentioned) as the heart and soul of the city. People’s spirits were crushed. Any sense of hope was lost. The city of New Orleans was permanently changed in a way that could never be fully undone. 

Joseph Roach’s claim that violence spends things also connects to the aforementioned When The Levees Broke documentary. We saw evidence of countless homes that were torn apart, carried away with the flood, or nonexistent whatsoever. The hurricane “spent” these citizens’ homes, their sacred belongings, and devastatingly, many of their loved ones. This is what they had to sacrifice in order to start over– their city mostly wiped clean of the possessions they owned before the hurricane hit and the levees broke. And although they never consented to sacrificing these things, it was sacrificed for them, against their will. The remains, or lack thereof, are the streets of New Orleans left trashed and unrecognizable for months on end, the loss of so many lives, washed away memories, and no hope left in our government. 

Roach’s third and last conspiracy of violence is “that all violence is performative, for the simple reason that it must have an audience—even if that audience is only the victim, even if that audience is only God” (Roach, 1996). This statement specifically stood out to me because I believe that, in a cruel way, the United States Government– being FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and all of the political leaders who were bystanders in this devastating tragedy– were the audience, as Roach would say, watching uselessly as the violence unfolded over the city of New Orleans. The Katrina victims were suffering as the government watched them cry for help and did nothing to aid them. They viewed everything that was washed away in the flood as waste, not memories or keepsakes or peoples lives turned upside down. Through this course I now realize the significance that this storm truly held. That the ruins of Hurricane Katrina were not “waste”. They held the stories and the heart of New Orleans, and all of its beloved people. 

Two overwhelmingly important key concepts that Professor McCoy taught in class are the words memory and forgetting, inspired by Joseph Roach’s quote from Chapter 2, Echoes in the Bone, of Cities of the Dead– “Echoes in the bone refer not only to a history of forgetting but to a strategy of empowering the living through the performance of memory” (Roach 34). Memory and forgetting are so important because it teaches us, as human beings, a very important lesson. I interpret memory as meaning to honor, to talk about, and to always remember. Memory is so crucial so that we don’t end up forgetting. Without memory, we are bound to repeat the same mistakes time and time again. Forgetting is what happens when we don’t remember, we don’t honor, and we don’t actively work towards change. Forgetting is so important in the way that we must not do it. That is how “Violence is the performance of waste” resonates with me.

In Roach’s “Echos in the Bone”, from his book Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, he writes heavily on the subject matter of forgetting and remembering the deceased, as well as portions of our lives. Roach’s writing suggests that these two work hand in hand with the ideas of performance and memory within our society.  Upon reading the chapter, Roach brings forth many interesting claims about how these ideas play into one another.  Yet none are as striking as when Roach makes the claim that “violence is the performance of waste”.  Looking further into Roach’s exploration of violence as a performance of waste, he includes three corollaries to provide a more rigid definition and understanding of how violence, performance, and waste are defined within his own words. 

 Specifically, I will be drawing attention to the third corollary in which Roach suggests, “that all violence is performative, for the simple reason that it must have an audience – even if that audience is only the victim, even if that audience is only God”. What makes this corollary so complex is the lack of the inclusion of one’s self.  While it can be inferred that those that do not believe in a divine being can interpret the latter solely as self reflection or that a person may be a victim of their own violence, Roach’s lack of reference to the performer indicates that one can not perform violence as an act solely for themselves.  Roach’s emphasis on performance forces the reader to question why he would not include this in his corollary.  His writing is, as he would say, a performance, similar to how he, “argue[s] that performed effigies —those fabricated from human bodies and the associations they evoke—provide communities with a method of perpetuating themselves through specially nominated mediums or surrogates: among them, actors, dancers, priests, street maskers,states-men, celebrities, freaks, children, and especially, by virtue of an intense but unsurprising paradox, corpses”. His goal was to evoke the absence of one’s self in this corollary. But his reasoning/rationale for doing so is a bit more difficult to grasp. To have forgotten such a crucial part of the violence cycle after discussing at great lengths the importance of remembering and forgetting seems unlikely. Initially, the thought dawned upon me that Roach disregarded this claim in hopes of avoiding the idea of his work unintentionally leading people to blame themselves for the violence enacted on them. However, this would also suggest that his quote would lead people to believe all forms of violence are bad.  Roach instead says that violence, except in the case of self defense, which he believes to be rare, is a form of cultural expression.  Ultimately, through Roach’s understanding of violence a person’s impact on themselves, others, the environment, and everything in between would result in one being an an audience to the performance of waste at one’s own hands.

Having established the typical interpretations of Roach’s ideas, we can now use them to analyze Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke”.  Lee’s documentary focuses on the violence that befell New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina and how it impacted the citizens as well as the entire country. One of the most primal examples of violence comes at the heart of any storm. The film shows the loss that flooded the city, whether it be the rubble of buildings as well as bodies washed away with the storm.  These images follow the idea of the storm performing waste in a very literal sense. The city was transformed from a celebration of Creole history, as well as a celebration of the melting pot mentality of America, into nothingness. 

The documentary shows different perspectives of multiple New Orleans natives to share their reactions to how President Bush, their state legislature, and FEMA handled the care for the city after Katrina. These people were the audience to the political performance that came from major corporations, as well as their representatives as they pleaded for their homes back, but no help was offered. Months passed and the government quickly began to show their true nature and their own side of violence, with a lack of action.  The United States Military was preoccupied with Bush’s war with Iraq and therefore was unavailable to come and help with the rebuilding of New Orleans. There appeared to be no rush to try and get some form of assemblage of people into the city to help move forward.  Instead the city continued to live in the dirge.  This violence, the second major act that fell onto the New Orleanians in 2005, begins to delve more into the symbolic root of waste. What more was there to waste after the storm? How could there be any more loss? The spirit and time of New Orleanians was washed away due to the lack of action.  Lack of care.  They were victims of a government that would not prioritize them, until they remembered that the New Orleans area is beneficial to the United States’ economy.  It wasn’t until the oil on the Louisiana coast began to go missing from the economic system that the government really began to try and rebuild New Orleans.  

While these acts shower over the disaster that occurred throughout the year, the question remains as to what part the people of New Orleans played in the violence enacted on them.  While not everyone was capable of leaving, due to a lack of transportation, resources, or secondary location, there was an evacuation put in place for the people of New Orleans to leave the area before the hurricane hit.  While it was not the case for everyone, the film shows multiple people standing firm in their belief that they “were born in New Orleans and would die in New Orleans” .  This thought process led to many natives staying, not believing the storm would be as dangerous as it was.  Many of the older New Orleanians referenced surviving Hurricane Betsey, not forgetting the violence that hurricane brought with it, but rather remembering the strength of their community as they rebuilt from the destruction that occurred.  The stance on staying was initially founded in the performance of memory of the struggles that hurricane brought to the entire city and the exaggeration of the storm’s power. This was an unintentional act of violence on themselves that would lead them to stay and fight through the violence performed by the storm and continue to live with the news surrounding the lack of action from the government.  Spike Lee’s interviews throughout the documentary clearly show the fusion between performer and audience as these people were witnessing their own actions first hand, waiting for others to act, to help, and yet being forced to continue pushing beyond what they could do solely for survival.  

The pride and heart that lives in New Orleans is not, and will never be a bad thing.  New Orleans is what it is solely because of the people that live there.  The determination and pride in the land to stay through devastation, while violent, is certainly not bad, but rather a cultural expression.  This expression of love and happiness and memory made Hurricane Katrina just that much more devastating.  But New Orleans lived on and the violence of the storm, of the divine, of the government, of other Americans, and of themselves will never be what New Orleans is known for. It is a culmination of so much more. 

Looking at the city from an outsider’s perspective, it is best known for its celebration of Mardi Gras, where the city is crowded with tourists to celebrate the holiday, celebrate the history, and partake in the festivities.  Mardi Gras is well known by multiple symbols, but none as prominent as Mardi Gras beads.  They are worn by many throughout the day and are even thrown from the floats throughout the parade.  However, in a Nola article from 2018 written by Beau Evans the impact thetis celebration had on the city afterwards was brought to light.  According to Evans “46 Tons of Mardi Gras Beads Found in Clogged Catch Basins”, there were “crews working under a $7 million emergency contract have flushed out 15,000 clogged catch basins – nearly one-fourth of the city’s full roster of about 68,000”.  Through the celebration, a fundamental symbol being disregarded in the streets yearly clogs their drains.  The parade is not an act of violence at first glance, but looking at the effect it has on both the community and the environment, the performance of waste becomes more clear over time.  The article focuses primarily on the environmental and economic impact that the draining of Mardi Gras beads has had, however, it chooses not to focus on the impact the draining issues had, and continue to have, on the residents of New Orleans.  This act of violence first and foremost affects them. Not bringing them into the discussion of the impact of these beads is very apparent.  They are not only not given the opportunity to take accountability for the issues with the parade, but also become a part of the solution.  Without their account, similar to Roach, the idea of acts of violence affecting oneself is missing.  

Overall, Roach’s connection between violence, performance, and waste raises more questions than it answers.  However, this connection allows for us to look back and reconsider the definition of violence and how it may impact individuals as well as corporations.  If violence is a cultural expression, then it should and does continuously change with time and the performance of waste that follows will continue to develop along with it.  Therefore, looking at Roach’s quote through the lens of a single person’s impact on themselves will continue to create the further development of this timeless philosophy.

Before enrolling in ENGL 111 this semester, I viewed violence as simply the intention of using physical force against or harming another person. Halfway through the semester, the concept of violence has reassured me that actions can be violent if the results are harmful to their victim, whether it be a person causing violence or different elements, particularly catastrophic events. This assurance comes from various readings and in-class screenings. I will try to comprehend Joseph Roach’s definition of violence and apply it to other course topics in order to dissect what he says in Cities of the Dead. Roach achieves this through effigies and his examination of violence as a form of entertainment.

Roach says, “to that definition I offer three corollaries: first, that violence is never senseless but always meaningful, because violence in human culture always serves, one way or the other, to make a point; second, that all violence is excessive, because to be fully demonstrative, to make its point, it must spend things—material objects, blood, environments—in acts of Bataillian “unproductive expenditure” (or Veblenian “conspicuous consumption”); and third, that all violence is performative, for the simple reason that it must have an audience—even if that audience is only the victim, even if that audience is only God”. (Roach 41).It’s a lot to decipher what Roach is trying to say. Roach suggests that violence is only thought of when someone experiences it, so, if the victim of an act of violence does not see the actions of the perpetrator as  violent, the act cannot be considered violent. Thus, “violence is the performance of waste (Roach 41).  In class, we talked about the different types and feelings of violence; how people often get angry and violent, how people can feel stressed or pressured about something, when that happens they can be violent “. I relate this concept to the purpose behind “When the Levees Broke”, arguing that the work is “violence” against the US government.

The idea of waste, which was also covered in class, was very significant. Waste can refer to a variety of things, including bodily excretions, actual trash, or other tangible material. Nevertheless, “waste” can also refer to something that can be spent, such as time or money; it can also refer to something that is rejected or abandoned. We discussed a few instances such as the stepmother of McCoy’s college friend who wanted to simply throw money in the trash because she didn’t know what to do with it after her big casino win. We also discussed how both time and money may be spent, but the difference between the two is that you can always make more money; wasted time, on the other hand, frequently makes us feel unproductive. Finally, we discussed the consequences of using humans as a waste. Based on McCoy’s class notes, “A person may think another person is disposable of (minority) and perform violence towards them because you think this.” (McCoy). 

In the Spike Lee-directed film When the Levees Broke, the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the people of New Orleans are discussed, along with the U.S. government’s response to the storm—or lack thereof. Almost 50 levees failed during Hurricane Katrina; levees are flood banks that, in this case, run parallel to the Mississippi River. Almost the whole city of New Orleans was destroyed by flooding as a result of the levees rupturing. The film is a devastating and moving experience, and the way it was filmed allowed the audience to truly feel what those victims were going through. The film’s chronicling of the immense amount of suffering and agony is heartbreaking, and those people were constructed by the government as waste. Nonetheless, I had a strong connection to this movie because in 2006, a catastrophic snow storm caused me to lose my home in a house fire. Some audience members might realize how truly bad it is only when it impacts them or how people don’t realize other people are violent until it affects them, even if it’s due to the weather. With people losing their homes to weather, I consider this an act of violence even when it isn’t planned. The difference between what happened to my family and those affected by Katrina is that while my community rallied to put us up in hotels for months, provided food, clothing, cars, therapy, and really anything else we needed, those who lost their homes to Katrina were an entire city that was unable to assist one another and required aid from the government and the president at the time, George Bush. The unacceptable delay in response was arrogant. This implies that both individuals and cities may be constructed as “waste”. New Orleans residents were treated with the worst degradation and dehumanization while being left homeless and helpless. FEMA also stopped contributing to the cost of supplies like food, housing, and clothing. People’s faith in the government was damaged. Before the hurricane hit,  in the novel Unfathomable City, “Like many urban infrastructure systems  in the United States, the city waterways  have not been well  maintained. People haven’t been willing to pay up – and  we haven’t  adapted these systems to the problems we’ve had.  Together,   S & S&WB operations account for an estimated  40 percent of the city’s carbon footprint”. (Sonlit 156). Not only did the city delay its response to the hurricane, it also delayed its response when the levees required maintenance. The government is also depicted in the film’s credits and interview subjects; Spike Lee only included those who had experienced the hurricane’s direct effects; he left out policymakers. Every character in the film has been impacted. Either directly through personal experience or indirectly via being shocked by injustice on an individual level.

Life was miserable after the hurricane. Some people passed away in their city, and others returned to nothing and worse than they had ever imagined. An interviewee in the documentary says “The aftermath to me is worse than the actual levees breaking”, referring to having to start their lives over from scratch. This again is where losing all of your family’s dwellings sinks in with the connection to the residents of New Orleans. My family is by no means wealthy, especially considering that 17 years ago we had no house insurance, a sizable amount of cash in the bank, or any form of backup plan. The division of New Orleans’ poverty from the book Unfathomable City was the topic of group discussions in class. We talked about how the poor suffered terribly without any supplies, even if they were able to flee the city. “New Orleans is a city of firm racial divides and enthusiastic racial mixing, a city that contains  both a poverty that can be measured by statistics and  extraordinary wealth of festivity and memory that cannot be quantified” (Solnit 4). The terms “forgetting” and “memory” were two of the course concepts that we discussed. While visitors to New Orleans stroll the streets, gather to party, and celebrate Mardi Gras over the weekend, they forget what happened. Yet, Katrina is something that the residents of New Orleans will never forget and from which they are still suffering; McCoy relates this to Roach in that “violence performance of the return of the forgotten memory” in her lecture notes (McCoy). It is important to remember and not pass over the events of Hurricane Katrina because they could happen again in some areas of the United States and because the city of New Orleans will never be the same. Because everyone is fundamentally impacted by violence by its waste and all of the analyses that implies, the idea that “violence is the performance of waste” is important. 

In January 2018, Beau Evans released an article entitled “46 tons of Mardi Gras beads found in clogged catch basins,” detailing the efforts and struggles of city officials and communities of New Orleans in cleaning up the waste in the city’s pivotal if ineffectual storm drainage system. The act of mass littering, much like the creation and maintenance of unsustainable architecture, is a form of environmental violence. Environmental violence encompasses everything from ecologically-damaging policies and practices, to humanity’s effects on climate change, and even to the human impacts felt as a result of environmental degradation. Interestingly, environmental violence is defined as a one-way street: it concerns the human impact on the environment, the world, and even on themselves or other humans. Despite the churning destructive wrath that hurricanes and other natural disasters bring upon the world and its biomes, it is we, humans, who are the perpetrators of environmental violence. 

When considering the City of New Orleans, evidence of environmental violence lies not just in the beads clogging the catch basins, but also in the spiked lead levels in the soil. It can be found in the levies that buckled and tipped from the force of Hurricane Katrina, the public service announcements that promised the levees would hold, and the private meetings in which engineers admitted they wouldn’t. Award-winning Director Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke chronicled the events of Hurricane Katrina. Lee collected testimonials, interviews, and footage of the devastation, aftermath, and strength of the survivors, compiling them into a narrative (or series of narratives) to tell a story both affective and effective. In the documentary, we see a damning indictment of the US Army Corps of Engineers, who confess that the levees could not withstand even a Category 3 hurricane. The Corps likewise lied to residents by telling them to rest assured that the levees would be rebuilt to pre-Katrina condition, a condition that while supposedly strong, tipped over and broke unleashing immeasurable damage and catastrophe (Lee). New Orleans, the land, remembered what the Army Corps of Engineers repeatedly fails to, that New Orleans is a land of water. 

Surrounded by water on all sides, built atop wetlands and swamps, New Orleans is marvelously solid though thoroughly unsustainable. According to Rebecca Snedeker, one of the writers and activists behind Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, the numerous pumps, pipelines, and canals lauded by some as feats of life-supporting infrastructure have proved to be life-draining in practice, sinking the city deeper down, thus rendering the city more prone to flooding, oxidizing the soil, and requiring complex maintenance (that often goes awry); Snedecker likens New Orleans to a “cement lily pad” borrowing the name from Monique Verdin, a Houma photographer (Snedeker 156). A sustainable future for New Orleans, with open canal streets, mindful reforestation of the swamplands, and an end to excessive groundwater pumping would conversely keep the city afloat (Snedeker 158). Such a future would acknowledge the City’s nature and attempts to work within it, as opposed to against it. We must not forget that only by remembering the land and what sustains it can we hope to forge a sustainable future. 

In “Echoes in the Bone”, the second chapter of the book Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, Joseph Roach discusses how memory, when performed, can empower the living; Roach also argues that “violence is the performance of waste” (Roach 41). To get to the heart of what Roach means by this and why these observations and definitions matter, we must start by breaking down the internal components of these claims. 

Violence is a poison, introducing toxins, producing waste byproducts, and expending limited resources in what Roach calls, borrowing from Bataille, “catastrophic expenditure” (Roach 41). Violence and superfluous expenditure (i.e. wasteful spending) are interlocked. To return to the tons of Mardi Gras beads clogging the catch basins, the violence is starkly evident. The beads, at one point carried by the tourists who flocked to the historic city for an unforgettable time, are themselves discarded and forgotten. Discarded but not disappeared, these beads piled up in critical areas, threatening lives and livelihoods not to mention the city’s coffers and infrastructure. The beads themselves, symbols of celebration and disposability, are cheap and plastic, often distributed at no or low costs. They are easily, without hesitation, tossed aside when their brittle nature betrays them, or the sun comes up, or the hangover hits. The tourists leave New Orleans but the beads remain. Ultimately, it is the City of New Orleans and its peoples that are forced to reckon with the memory, the tonnage of beads, and the millions of dollars their removal will cost. So powerful are the desires of tourists for consumable, forgettable, and disposable culture, and so effective the violent performance, that nowhere in Evans’ article does he mention a burden on tourists to consider the waste they leave behind. Instead, the burden falls on New Orleans residents who must “step up” to clear their own neighborhoods of catch basin debris (Evans). Many local residents spearhead litter collection operations, often as part of charitable and/or sustainability missions, however the tourists have left by then. As part of Roach’s own breakdown of his quote, that “violence is the performance of waste” Roach describes violence as a performance due to the existence of an audience to witness or even receive the violence (Roach 41). Violence requires a victim (or victims), and its existence draws attention to itself. Whether it’s the Army Corps of Engineers maintaining and defending their ineffectual levees or tourists disregarding their bead debris, or any other act of violence for that matter, there is always an audience to witness the violence and the waste resulting. If memory can be performed to “empower the living” as Roach states, the case of the discarded colorful beads proves that the opposite is also true. The performance of forgetting and ignorance serves to disempower and even enact violence upon the living. 

To return to Roach’s statement about the performance of memory potentially being empowering, it’s important to keep in mind that memory is not set in stone. Memory is intangible, yet realer than real. Both fixed and fluid. When we invoke memory in ways that move, challenge, encourage, or propel us we often make use of effigies. An effigy can be anything or anyone, it is a surrogate (i.e. the replacement of something/someone) that stands in for the original.  They may be physical representations of disliked politicians, or could be immaterial like the insistence that something is in accordance with what a respected departed community member would have wanted. The dead make powerful surrogates and effigies, but they are not the only group or individuals who can be conscripted into serving some purpose according to Roach (Roach 36). We are also not the sole possessors of memory, for within nature itself memories are embedded. 

Memory is quite empowering, environmentally-speaking. Climate change, long debated among politicians but accepted as scientific fact, profoundly affects our realities in many ways that are getting increasingly difficult to ignore or forget. Even blockbuster thriller films from nearly 20 years ago such as The Day After Tomorrow (2004) reckon with the West’s willingness to forget or ignore climate catastrophes and the role that governments, institutions, and individuals play in creating and mismanaging them. The same goes for the ecologically-damaging extraction of oil and other resources, not to mention the tangible long-known and injurious effects of disposing industrial waste improperly. Green sustainable policy and movements are still being stonewalled in the halls of power; despite a majority consensus among US adults that climate change is real and will affect US citizens in the next 10 years, 59% already believing the effects are currently being felt, (Yale Climate Opinions Map 2021), remarkably little is achieved when it comes to curtailing the root causes of human-driven climate change. Of course, I’d be remiss to not mention the strength that today’s climate movements find in the memory, veneration, and critique of the contributions of past activists. Denial of climate change is not only unpopular nationally, but inevitably serves violent ends, obfuscating blame from the culpable actors and institutions, preventing both introspection and retrospection, in addition to reliably ensuring that natural catastrophes will not be properly prepared for.  

While the discarded beads may represent forgetting on the part of individuals, or even tourist culture as a whole, Rebecca Solnit, the other writer behind Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, points out that the lies and forgetting done by those with power is “another thing altogether” (Solnit 147). These lies, obfuscations of fact and justice, result in lasting legacies. Environmentally-speaking, Solnit discusses how the scientists who were studying connections between lead (the heavy metal) and human health lied regarding the health risks of lead contaminants (Solnit 150). Because using lead in gasoline and paint was deemed useful and profitable, the health risks were hidden from the public and disregarded. In the saturated city of New Orleans the lead easily infiltrated the water supply in certain areas, making testing a regular requirement for children, who are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of lead poisoning (Solnit 150). The scientists and those raking in profits weren’t affected personally by the lead runoff, so they forgot or ignored the problem, so long as it wasn’t their problem. When those people and institutions with power and influence forget something, don’t report on it, or misrepresent reality (i.e. the levees will be strong and at pre-Katrina strength) the lasting legacies are grievous and violent. 

The act of violence ultimately ends up with some sort of waste. That waste can be in the form of money, energy, people, and even time. The quote “…violence is the performance of waste” (Roach, 1996, 41), can be articulated in so many different ways and from multiple different perspectives. This quote derived from Joseph Roach’s, Cities of the Dead Circum Atlantic Performance “Echoes in the Bone”. Although this book is meant for other drama and performance scholars, and not college students, the chapter “Echoes in the Bone” connects to many of our classes’ course concepts, media, and readings. Some of these concepts include memory, forgetting, performance, expenditure, and many more. 

Roach looks at “…violence is the performance of waste” in three different ways. He begins to discuss that violence is never senseless but always meaningful because violence in human culture always serves one way or another, to make a point (Roach, 1996, 41). This alludes to the idea that behind every act of violence, there is a purpose. He then proceeds to explain that all violence is excessive, because to be fully demonstrative, to make its point, it must spend things—material objects, blood, environments—in acts of Bataillian “unproductive expenditure” (Roach, 1996, 41). More often than not, violence in some way exceeds the idea of expenditure. Expenditure refers to the act of spending. You typically aren’t able to perform violence without experiencing some type of expenditure whether that be physical money or even blood. Moving along with his third point, he discusses that all violence is performative, for the simple reason that it must have an audience—even if that audience is only the victim, even if that audience is only God (Roach, 1996, 41). Violence of any kind has an audience. That audience witnesses the act of violence and the waste that is produced.

The idea of sports connects to the quote “…violence is the performance of waste” because athletes are essentially performing violence against one another which ultimately ends up with waste. They play the game and perform violence for a few different reasons: they love the game, they make a living off of it, they are able to support themselves and family, and/or they play because they have talent. Many people would argue that playing sports is unquestionably “unproductive expenditure”. In this case, waste refers to energy, resources, broken bones, and possibly lifelong physical impairments. This act of violence is performed in front of a fan base. Sports make an unbelievable amount of money off their audience, which is another form of expenditure. Therefore, by athletes performing violence, they are ultimately weakening their body and their audience is losing money alluding to waste. Violence is a waste of time and energy but when you perform violence you are remembering what you forgot.

Roaches third definition of “…violence is the performance of waste”, directly relates to hurricanes, a focus in this class. Hurricanes are defined as a tropical storm with winds that have reached a constant speed of 74 miles per hour or more. Hurricanes are a natural form of violence that produce enormous amounts of waste. The act of hurricanes typically affects numerous amounts of people and places.

 In this class, we read excerpts from Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas shows many ways in which “…violence is the performance of waste” through the actions of Hurricane Katrina. “…Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill” (Solnit, 2013).  We also watched When the Levees Broke. When the Levees Broke is a documentary film that was directed by Spike Lee about the devastation of New Orleans, Louisiana following the failure of the leeves during Hurricane Katrina. Throughout the film, residents of New Orleans discuss how they were impacted by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. They also discuss how New Orleans is rising from the ashes after such a tragedy. Unfathomable City and When the Levees Broke both emphasize on our course concepts of memory and forgetting. Memory, referring to the idea of taking in information, storing it, and later recalling that information. Forgetting is the idea of failing to remember something or someone. “New Orleans has always had hurricanes, but what happened on August 29, 2005, and in the two weeks of chaos, rumor, betrayal, and social splintering afterward cannot be blamed on nature. Imagine that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had built adequate levees: Katrina would have just been a powerful hurricane that missed New Orleans…” (Solnit, 2013, 127). The violence that struck New Orleans was not just from Hurricane Katrina but the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that didn’t take the time to properly mantel the levees. Because of this carelessness, the waste produced in New Orleans was “unfathomable”. The people that survived Katrina were left with dreadful and unforgettable memories. Referring back to “Echoes in the Bone”, the audience of Katrina was not only the people of New Orleans, but the world as a whole. Katrina, as expressed in When the Levees Broke, was talked about on almost every new channel. This devastating event caught the attention of so many people nationwide. Solnit states that the media also upheld power. The newspapers and televisions stations were spreading rumors that those stranded people were ravening hordes, that mass rape and murder were rife in the Superdome and the convention center. The media spread rumors that people were shooting rescue helicopters and that residents were engaged in disaster-time activities referring to looting (Solnit, 2013, 130-131). All of these rumors were due to the violence of Hurricane Katrina and the break of the levees. Not only was the media wasting people’s time who read about and listened to those rumors, but the media was wasting their own time when they could have been actively helping the people of New Orleans in multiple different ways.

Most of the residents that were part of the documentary, expressed the feeling towards the fact that if the levees were made and installed properly, most of the damage done on New Orleans could’ve been avoided. “Some roofs would have blown off in New Orleans, some trees would have fallen, and the city would have picked itself up and gotten back to being 66 percent African American city in decline which many described as poor, but some knew was also uniquely rich in music, in ritual, in memory and tradition, in conviviality and social ties and roots, and in certain kinds of enjoyment” (Solnit, 2013, 130). The residents of New Orleans felt very passionately that the U.S government wasn’t doing much to help in the first few days and weeks. “Imagine that even though the levees failed, and people were left behind, everyone in a position of power had responded with urgent empathy so that one was left to die on the roof of the attic, and the dehydrated elders, the hungry children, the stranded population of New Orleans’s poorest neighborhoods were rescued and protected” (Solnit, 2013, 130). The waste left by Hurricane Katrina was something not many people have seen before. People lost time through days, weeks, and months of not having anywhere to go, not having a job, and were left helpless on the streets. New Orleans residents lost their homes and all the belongings and memories that went with it. They lost energy; they fought and fought, and FEMA did not uphold all they could have within those first few days. And the most unfortunate “waste” of all was the 1,400 people that lost their lives to this devastating hurricane. The people of New Orleans will hold onto their memories of Hurricane Katrina and the awful aftermath forever. They will never be able to forget the days they went without food. The dead bodies they saw all over the streets. And the terrifying unknown of what was going to happen day after day.

The idea of “violence is the performance of waste” matters because everyone is essentially affected by violence through its waste. Money, time, energy, resources, and people are all different forms of waste. A quote that really resonated with me is, “The city was profoundly changed, physically, psychically, economically, and democratically by the storm, and the nation was rocked” (Solnit, 2013, 127). Roach insinuates that violence is excessive and endeavors “unproductive expenditure”. The city of New Orleans will never be the same after Hurricane Katrina hit. The violence and waste that that hurricane produced has forever changed the great city of New Orleans.

In the book Cities of The Dead, Roach states, “a stark definition emerges from Bataille’s meditations on “catastrophic expenditure”: violence is the performance of waste”. Oftentimes when people are violent, they are getting rid of their angry emotions and try to take it out on something or someone else. People may have a build up of wrathfulness, rage, and frustration and feel the need to release it. This then results in an expenditure and waste of negative energy.  Moreover, in class we talked about how an individual being violent may expend their negative energy with a purpose towards someone they don’t like, or even towards people they like or love. This is as a person may think another person is disposable, and therefore perform violence towards them. In regard to violence is the performance of waste Roach asserts, “to that definition I offer three corollaries: first, that violence is never senseless but always meaningful, because violence in human culture always serves, one way or the other, to make a point; second, that all violence is excessive, because to be fully demonstrative, to make its point, it must spend things—material objects, blood, environments—in acts of Bataillian “unproductive expenditure” (or Veblenian “conspicuous consumption”); and third, that all violence is performative, for the simple reason that it must have an audience—even if that audience is only the victim, even if that audience is only God”. In this essay I will demonstrate how Roach’s violence is the performance of waste and the three outcomes he suggests provide insight on the course’s core issues and questions thus far.

Roach states, “Girard’s idea that sacrificial violence operates as a kind of expenditure through which society prolongs its sense of coherence in face of a threat of divisive substitutions owes its understanding of excess to him” (pg 40). In class we highlighted Roach’s emphasis on the terms “sacrificial violence,” “expenditure,” both “productive” and “catastrophic”, and “pressure” on page 40 and 41.  These phrases were then added to our course concepts list. In our class discussion on the course concept expenditure, we discussed many examples of ways things can be expended such as money, time, people, and resources. An example of time being expended and wasted if you sleep your time away. Continuing, during class McCoy told a story in terms of expenditure and violence and performance and waste. In McCoy’s first year in graduate school she was a TA making six thousand dollars a year and went to visit one of her college roommates. Her roommate’s step mother, who was wealthy, had just returned from the casinos in Atlantic city. The stepmother had a pile of cash she won at the casino and stated, “I don’t even know what to do with all of this money, I should just throw it away”! McCoy emphasized to our class the fury that she felt in that moment and that she wanted to leap across the table and throttle her, although she didn’t. This is because her roommate’s step mother did not appreciate what she had, and may have intentionally made a mockery of McCoy. In regards to expenditure and violence of the performance of waste, this story demonstrates the stepmother saying she plans on expending and wasting her money, therefore leading McCoy to violence and wanting to throttle her.

During class, we discussed that human beings can be constructed as waste. An example of human beings being constructed as waste that we talked about during class is how a lot of cities bring their waste to more rural areas. Another example of human beings being constructed as waste is in regard to the film When the Levees Broke. Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke depicts the havoc that Hurricane Katrina’s breaking of the levees caused in New Orleans, Louisiana. In the film, Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans that were in need of help expressed their frustration that president George Bush originally stayed on holiday and was extremely delayed in helping them. The fact that President Bush did not take responsibility until nearly three weeks into the aftermath of Katrina while so many people were suffering is alarming. In the book Unfathomable City Solnit and Snedeker stated, “Imagine that even though the levees failed and people were left behind, everyone in a position of power had responded with urgent empathy so that no one was left to die on a roof or in an attic, and the dehydrated elders, the hungry children, the stranded population of New Orleans’s poorest neighborhoods were rescued and protected”. This further demonstrates that human beings being constructed as waste as President Bush and those in positions of power did not prioritize helping individuals in New Orleans. Moreover, an individual from the film When the Levees Broke stated, “they are not doing anything for the katrina victims, and the aftermath to me is worse than the actual levees breaking”.  This demonstrates that both human beings and cities can be constructed as waste. Another example in the film, When the Levees Broke, demonstrated how people were treated like animals when Hurricane Katrina hit in New Orleans. A woman in the movie stated how victims could not brush their teeth, change their clothes, or take a bath, and for days people did not eat. In the book Unfathomable City Solnit and Snedeker stated, “the bitterness of Katrina in New Orleans was not only that people in that city (out of 1,836 total casualties throughout the Gulf Coast) died and didn’t have to, but also that many thousands more felt as though they had been treated as outcasts by their society”. In other words, thousands thought they were treated as “waste” by their society. These examples from the film, When the Levees Broke and the reading Unfathomable City indicate that people and cities, like the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina victims, can be and were constructed as “waste”.

 In class, we talked about several kinds of “waste”. It is common for waste to lead to disposal; for instance, if you have a “supernumerary” amount of something, it can go to waste.  Continuing, waste can manifest in a variety of ways, especially that memory and forgetting are factors in.  An example of this is the massive inflatable slide of the Titanic that we were shown in class in the beginning of the semester. In Echoes in the Bone Roach states, “echoes in the bone refer not only to a history of forgetting but to a strategy of empowering the living through the performance of memory” (pg 34). In class, we connected this line from Echoes in the Bone to the tot-tanic and unpacked how the tot-tanic is a approach of empowering the living through memory performance. Despite the fact that children may not be aware of what happened to the Titanic and all of the lives lost, people allow their children to play in this bouncy house in the present, forgetting about the tragedy of the Titanic. Therefore, children use this insanely disrespectful bouncy house as entertainment by performance of fun. The tot-tanic constructed the Titanic and those that died on it as “waste” given the incredible amount of disrespect in making a Titanic bouncy house that children play on for entertainment. 

Throughout this essay, I demonstrate how Roach’s violence is the performance of waste and the three outcomes he suggests provide insight on the course’s core issues and questions thus far. I did this by thinking through class material and connecting to Roach’s violence is the performance of waste. Connecting our class material to Roach’s Cities of The Dead  furthered my analysis and understanding of Roach’s violence is the performance of waste. My analysis matters as it connects Roach’s violence is the performance of waste to important course topics such as “expenditure”. The course concept “expenditure” furthered my thinking on the many ways things can be expended, and how expenditure can also lead to violence. Continuing, my analysis connects Roach’s violence is the performance of waste to how human beings and cities can be constructed as waste. It is extremely important to recognize how horrible it is for human beings, such as New Orleans Hurricane Katrina victims, to feel themselves and their city are treated and looked at as “waste”.  My analysis also lead me to think about several kinds of “waste” and the many ways that “waste” can manifest that memory and forgetting are components in.   

Threshold-

By Marie Naudus, Frances Sharples, Emily Loper, Hannah Myers, Kathleen McCarey, Mia Donaldson, Owen Vincent, and Rachel Cohen

In her fifth novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison uses elements associated with Dante’s Inferno to enhance a grief-suffused narrative following characters who escaped enslavement only to deal with the turmoil of living in a country that is set against the success of Black individuals. The Hell depicted in Dante’s Inferno is made up of nine circles, each dealing with certain sins and their respective punishments that become more severe as Dante the Pilgrim moves down (and then up) through Hell, beginning with virtuous paganism and ending with the worst kinds of betrayal. In the eighth circle—reserved for those who committed fraud—Dante moves to the Malebolge, approximately translated from Italian as “evil pockets,” a series of ten ravines that each serve to punish a certain type of sinner; for the purposes of our analysis, the first, fifth, and sixth ravines will be most relevant. The first ravine is designated for pimps, panderers and seducers, where they walk endlessly in separate lines and are whipped by demons. The fifth ravine is reserved for grafters, who are thrown into a river of boiling pitch, and the sixth ravine is for hypocrites, forced to march forever with lead robes. These specific ravines fit most closely with how the residents of 124 Bluestone Road in Beloved are seen by the reader and interact with other characters. The characters of Beloved, including Sethe and Paul D, must face what could be deemed as Hell on Earth as they suffer through slavery and its ramifications on the rest of their lives. While Sethe reminisces on her time at Sweet Home, a plantation where she and Paul D were enslaved for four years together, she recounts that “there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too” (Morrison 7). This idea of slavery as Hell on Earth is most poignantly depicted in the Paul D imprisonment chapter.

“When all forty-six were standing in a line in a trench, another rifle shot signaled the climb out and up to the ground above, where one thousand feet of the best hand-forged chain in Georgia stretched” (Morrison 126); in this quote, and throughout the chapter describing Paul D’s torturous enslavement in Alfred, Georgia, we the reader are brought to consider one of the novel’s most evocative and raw depictions of slavery. In addition to back-breaking labor, the forty-six men are forced to fellate the white guards every morning, one of the several depictions of sexual assault of enslaved characters throughout the novel. Along with descriptions of the various heinous treatment that these men are subjected to, this chapter explains how Paul D escapes Georgia and moves forward to 124; following the lead of Hi Man, the man at the beginning of the chain, the men are led under and through the mud during a rainstorm to escape. By diving under the water in the trench and moving as one, the forty-six men escaped the plantation, allowing Paul D to make his way to 124 and Sethe after eighteen years of traveling, never settling in one location for too long. 

While the most vivid and shocking descriptions of Paul D’s imprisonment appear in this chapter, they provide context for the reader’s understanding of his traumas and character development throughout Beloved as a whole; his character is introduced before this unsettling scene unravels, thus the chapter provides context for both his most generous and deplorable actions toward Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. Paul D’s presence in 124, too, reveals many of the damages Paul D carries with him; his contempt for Beloved provokes, in the very beginning, Paul D’s violent removal of Beloved from 124, and resurfaces time and time again throughout the novel in his need to assert dominance over women due to the emasculation he underwent in Georgia. His sense of emasculation from his severe defilement is made most clear to the reader in his sexual encounter with Beloved: “She moved closer with a footfall he didn’t hear and he didn’t hear the whisper that the flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his tobacco tin … ‘Red heart. Red heart. Red heart’” (Morrison 137-138). Paul D had tried to lock up his feelings in this “tobacco tin” he created for his heart, and Beloved had opened that tin without his consent, causing him to feel less than human again. Paul D was forced into a multitude of dehumanizing situations during his enslavement in Georgia, many of them sexual in nature; these dehumanizing acts led to the version of Paul D seen in 124 that is often violent and cold, and depicts the world around him as Hell. Throughout the novel, Paul D moves through the seventh, eighth, and ninth circles of his own Hell before finally coming to his own version of paradise. However, this version of paradise is not an idealized, perfect life, since the nature of Paul D’s journey and the constant presence of slavery continue to haunt him even in paradise. These moves through Hell and into paradise mirror Dante’s Inferno, thus creating a deeper understanding of the inhabitants of 124.  

Morrison artfully crafted her novel, Beloved, to mirror elements of Dante’s Inferno. This conversation between the two works can be seen in the plantation, Sweet Home, that Sethe and Paul D inhabit for four years together; given their dire circumstances as living slaves—compared to Dante who, while alive, is on a relatively clear path back to safety—Paul D and Sethe must seek unconventional means of guidance. While Dante has Virgil, a beacon of seemingly endless poetic wisdom, the characters of Beloved feel largely alone and maintain their fraught endurance on their journey through Hell via nature. Trees, for example, “guide” characters toward salvation, but also toward feelings of guilt and despair. This convergence makes itself most clearly in the comparison of Sweet Home to Dante’s seventh circle of Hell, reserved for the violent, suicides, and blasphemers; those who commit suicide specifically are transformed into trees and ripped apart by Harpies. This significance of trees is seen repeatedly throughout Beloved, most vividly in the descriptions of Sethe’s back, which is scarred and torn up by traumatic beatings during her time at Sweet Home. When Sethe, distressed and fleeing Sweet Home, is met by a young white girl, Amy, Amy is shocked by the horrific scars scattered across Sethe’s back. Unfamiliar with the extent of the cruelty that Sethe has faced, Amy is mystified by the scars and says in wonder: “‘It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk — it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white” (Morrison 93). Amy would later prove to be a guide for Sethe, leading her to freedom away from Sweet Home; but even with the assistance of a slew of guides, both Sethe and Paul D’s respective journeys through Hell are marked by prolonged violence.

Like Dante’s escape from Hell, Paul D must continue his path down through the deepest aspects of Hell in order to reach his salvation, in this case, settling down in 124 with Sethe. After leaving Sweet Home and exiting the seventh circle, Paul D is imprisoned in Alfred, Georgia, which represents the eighth circle of Hell. The Malebolge, or “evil pockets,” are geographically very similar to the trench that Paul D and the forty-five other men were chained in. Dante describes them as “ten descending valleys,” each with their own specific and fitting punishment for the sinners trapped there (XVIII: 9). While the flatterers in the eighth circle are immersed in human excrement and corrupt politicians in boiling pitch, the men chained together in Georgia are forced to work while sinking in mud; while the thieves are chased and bitten by reptiles, the men in Georgia are on the lookout for snakes while continuing to work in conditions of heavy rain and oozing mud. Even the escape from Georgia mirrors the scenes described by Dante in the Malebolgia: “It started like the chain-up but the difference was the power of the chain. One by one, from Hi Man back on down the line, they dove. Down through the mud under the bars, blind, groping” (Morrison 130). In Canto XXII, corrupt politicians are forced to swim and submerge themselves in boiling pitch (line 30); one Navaressian politician, upon being tortured by a group of demons, dives back into the boiling pitch in order to escape their torment (XXII: 123). This mode of escape reflects how Hi Man led the line of chained prisoners under the mud and rain to freedom. While Hi Man served as a temporary guide for Paul D in Georgia, Paul D never has one permanent guide as Dante does in Inferno, thus his path to freedom and 124 is aided by several guides. 

This idea of guides is prevalent in both Beloved and Inferno. Paul D relies on multiple guides in his escape from imprisonment in Georgia to his salvation in the North. In order to escape from the chained Hell that was his imprisonment, Paul D places his trust in Hi Man, as well as the other forty-four men, to lead him away from the torture. Paul D recounts how “the chain that held them would save all or none, and Hi Man was the Delivery … they trusted the rain and the dark, yes, but mostly Hi Man and each other” (Morrison 130). Paul D’s guides soon shift once Hi Man completes his task of escaping the plantation, now shifting to his surroundings as a form of a guide. Paul D is alone in his quest up North, “when he lost them, and found himself without so much as a petal to guide him, he paused, climbed a tree on a hillock and scanned the horizon for a flash of pink or white in the leaf world that surrounded him” (Morrison 133). While Paul D is forced to rely on numerous guides in his escape, these guides are short-lived compared to Virgil’s continual accompaniment of Dante all throughout Inferno and Purgatorio.

Paul D’s stay at 124 ends his journey through the circles of Hell and allows him to make the paradoxical move from the ninth circle of Hell, the deepest and most barbarous, to paradise; but, in Paul D’s case, paradise is haunted. As he steps through the doors of 124, Paul D steps through “a pool of pulsing red light,” into “the spot where the grief had soaked him [and] a kind of weeping clung to the air” (Morrison 11). This compares to Dante’s trek through the last of the malebolge, just before he and Virgil climb the legs of Lucifer down, down, down, and then finally up and out of Hell: “Here, the weeping puts an end to weeping, / and the grief that finds no outlet from the eyes / turns inward to intensify the anguish” (XXXIII: 94-96). While 124 represents Paul D’s most stable and safe conditions from his 18 years of perilous travel, its violent, “spiteful” confines marked by “baby’s venom” (Morrison 3) present new sources of fear, proving that this hellish experience as a former slave does not afford him a sweet release akin to Dante’s paradise. Toni Morrison famously stated in an interview with Bonnie Angelo how “Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.” Morrison artfully establishes her novel in conversation with Dante’s Inferno as a way to not only enhance her own craft but to complement Dante’s own art as well. While it is easy to dissect Beloved in an almost clinical and scientific sense, to fully analyze every detail meticulously, it would be doing a disservice to such a beautiful work to ignore the artful elements of the work. Beloved is important because it tells the true, historical story of Margaret Garner, who committed infanticide to save her children from the cruelty of enslavement. In order to depict such a heavy topic, Morrison takes to well-crafted diction and the creation of her fictionalized telling of true events to offer a raw and honest novel on a topic that is typically shied away from. While Black literature can be cast aside as a teaching in sociology, as previously stated, Beloved demands to be taught and remembered for its intricate writing and complexity of characters and themes. Each detail of her text is accounted for, building on each other and offering additional layers; one of these layers, and indeed a through line in Morrison’s trilogy, is the idea of self-sabotage. This idea can be seen in how Beloved sabotages Paul D and Sethe, creating a Hell on Earth for the two characters and forcing them to endure additional suffering. Paul D sabotages his happiness with Sethe at 124 by having sexual relations with Beloved, causing him to flee the home. Similarly, Sethe ignores her own happiness and Denver’s in order to devote her life to Beloved’s parasitic need for attention. The notion of self-sabotage and its simultaneous unfolding alongside Paul D’s descent into the inner circles of Hell calls to mind many of the questions we have been brought to reckon with in connecting Dante’s Inferno and Morrison’s Beloved, not least of which being the question of whether or not enslaved or formerly enslaved persons can ever escape these depths of Hell, and whether or not the concept of “paradise” can truly exist in the world of Morrison’s Beloved.

By Mar Leeman, Dylan Walawender, Taylor Bramhall, Kya Primm, Joe Morgan, Olive Niccoli, Jenna Brace, and Sheridan Morgan
ENGL431
Dr. Beth McCoy
24 February 2023

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the readers follow the current and previous inhabitants of house 124, as the novel switches between the past and the present. Sethe and her daughter, Denver, live in torment with the ghost of Sethe’s past – her infant daughter, referred to as Beloved, who was killed by her mother to protect her from what she considered a worse fate. The ghostly Beloved is banished by Sethe’s old acquaintance, Paul D, “the last of the Sweet Home men,” but she returns in the flesh (Morrison 7). Prior to living at 124, Sethe and Paul D were enslaved; the plantation from which Sethe and Paul D escaped, Sweet Home, is originally run by Mr.Garner. Following his death, a much crueler man known as schoolteacher takes over, leading to Paul D’s imprisonment, which serves to emphasize Morrison’s examination of the contrapasso in Dante’s Inferno.

One of the most complex circles in Dante’s Inferno is the Eighth Circle – the start of lower Hell and entry into the domain of fraud. This circle is named “Malebolge,” meaning “evil ditches” or “evil trenches,” which features an architectural and urban built environment (contrasting the circle of violence’s natural environment.) The tortured souls trapped in this circle “committed ten different varieties of fraudulent sin” (Inferno 18 – Digital Dante) and Malebolge is subdivided into ten “evil trenches” that house different variations of fraudulent sinners. Significantly, the second holds flatterers, punished by being suffocated in a ditch coated in excrement, and the filth, holding those who made a living out of fraud or trickery, are punished by being “submerged in the boiling pitch with which the bolgia is filled” (AHC). These three bolgias are key components of Morrison’s Beloved – specifically in the imprisonment of Paul D. 

To contextualize the imprisonment chapter, it is important to note how Morrison builds from previous moments where Sethe and Paul D allude to their past traumas. Paul D confesses to Sethe that as her milk was stolen from her, her husband, Halle, had watched. Paul D likewise reveals that he could not speak at the time since he had an iron bit in his mouth, feeling inferior to a rooster. Even as this sharing of vulnerability brings them closer together, Paul D alludes to the “tobacco tin” in his chest, referring to the past he wants to keep hidden (Morrison 83). Morrison uses this image as a throughline in the imprisonment chapter to shape Paul D’s character. 

After being sold to a man named Brandywine, Paul D attempted to kill this new master and failed. He was then incarcerated with forty-five other men, who were forced to live in wooden boxes set down in ditches. Eighty-six days passed, and a torrent of rain halted their work. Eventually, the trenches filled with mud and water, becoming dangerous; but the forty-six men escaped and reached a tribe of sick Cherokee people. Paul D was the last to leave the camp, fleeing north to Delaware. The chapter concludes with a recurrence back to this tobacco tin in Paul D’s chest, the image of his hidden trauma, where “nothing in this world could pry it open” (Morrison 145). In Paul D’s imprisonment chapter, Morrison parallels the imagery of Canto XVIII and reverses the rationale behind the punishments administered in the Malebolge. In Inferno, Dante implies you are justly punished for the sins you committed in life, while in Beloved, Morrison demonstrates that enslaved people are subjected to an undeserved, yet similar torture. Through Paul D’s imprisonment, Morrison exposes the institution of whiteness as they use their power to unjustly punish those they deem as inferior. 

Morrison’s use of imagery, similar to that found in Dante’s Malebolge, is striking when reading the two works comparatively. In Beloved, the three feet of open trench in front of the gates that form the entrance to each cell, the two-foot-wide space that remains for the prisoners, covered with two feet of dirt over the scrap lumber that serves as its ceiling, is eerily reminiscent of a coffin in a grave (Morrison 125). Dante’s description of the sinners in the first bolgia as “crammed into the depths of the first ditch” is a fitting parallel, and it seems that Morrison is making a connection here to the “new suffering souls, new means of torture; and new torturers” that Dante finds there (Inferno, XVIII:22-24). Additionally, the three white guards who walk along the trench abusing the prisoners call to mind the “horned devils with enormous whips / lashing the backs of the shades with cruel delight” (Inferno, XVIII:35-36). As these trenches fill with water after nine days of rain, the decision is made to leave the prisoners locked in their wooden graves where they have no choice but to relieve themselves within the tiny confines of their cell, their feces and urine mixing with the same mud they eventually must submerge themselves in to reach freedom. Dante may as well have been standing above them, rather than the flatterers in the second bolgia, when he says, “from where I stood I saw / souls in the ditch plunged into excrement / that might well have been flushed from our latrines” (Inferno, XVIII:112-114). With this parallel relationship intact, we can see the ways in which morality and punishment operate in Inferno.  

Within Dante’s Inferno, the moral concept of sin and punishment is an integral theme. It is impossible to understand Inferno without understanding that Dante was coming from a society that grappled heavily with the concept of sin and subsequent punishment within the afterlife. Why, then, is Malebolge designed this way, to provoke this particular brand of suffering? Dante’s Inferno relies on his own self-condemnation and punishment for sins he has already committed, trying to walk through Hell with a guide. Morrison turns this idea on its head in Beloved, with no guide available to her characters in this instance. She uses Dante’s examination of punishment as her baseline in Beloved on power and punishment. How can this system be fair when it directly opposes the idea of a contrapasso? Morrison seems to suggest that there is no such thing as Divine Justice, and this idea is just that: a literary device. Dante’s entire journey, led by Virgil so far, is in an attempt to keep him from eternal damnation and lead him into Heaven; in contrast, Paul D is thrown into his own Hell through no sins of his own. But are any of the sinners truly guilty? Or are they simply subject to a punishment for which they have no recourse, no way to explain, or ask forgiveness? Much like the men who run the prison in Beloved, the demons take perverse pleasure in torturing those who have less power, as Dante demonstrates: “With a hundred prongs or more they pricked him, shrieking” (Inferno, XXI: 54). This also calls into question an important idea in Morrison’s works as a whole; who has the power to inflict pain and punishment upon others?

Morrison includes the element of a lead chain in the imprisonment chapter by saying “and the lead chain gave it everything he had” (Morrison 127). A lead chain is what large animal owners use to move and control the animals, and by using a lead chain Morrison is relegating the prisoners to animals. This may have been influenced by Dante’s treatment of the sinners, as he also strips away the identity of the prisoners, noting how they appear as “misbegotten souls, whose faces you could not see before” (Inferno, XVII:76-77). Whereas those in the Malebolge are stuck, never atoning for their sins despite enduring eternal punishment, Morrison twists this concept on its head, bringing her characters out of their Hell and allowing them the sweet taste of freedom. Although freedom is the ideal dream for the prisoners, it comes with a cost. In the present day of Beloved, he is forced to enact the sins that correspond with the punishment he endured. For example, one of the most prominently featured sins committed by Paul D was flattery. In Inferno, the punishment for flattery is being covered in feces, which is eerily reminiscent of Paul D’s escape from prison through the mud. Shortly after his arrival at 124, he begins a sexual relationship with Sethe that is colored by his desire for her from their past at Sweet Home. While the dalliance between the two contains traces of flattery, it is the later fornication between Paul D and Beloved that takes this concept over the edge. “If he trembled like Lot’s wife and felt some womanish need to see the nature of the sin behind him,” is what Paul D thinks once Beloved begins to approach him in a sexual manner (Morrison 137). By comparing him to Lot’s wife, Morrison is implying that Paul D is aware that what he is about to do is a sin, but he physically cannot help himself. It is in his nature to be so tempted by the past that it destroys his future, just as the aforementioned biblical figure did not leave her past in the past and ended up suffering, by turning into a pillar of salt.

 Unlike Dante, who championed a strict code of morals, Paul D begs for “sympathy, perhaps, for cursing the cursed,” suggesting that his sinning is not his fault, but a result of his circumstances (Morrison 137). This argument from Paul D encapsulates the reversal that Morrison is making. While Dante argued that the way one lives their life leads to the punishment they receive, Morrison heralds the belief that when one is punished, they are then shaped by those conditions and must learn to live with the weight of that torture; the moral system of Inferno does not exist in Beloved, and the system of whiteness producing enslavement and incarceration produces undeserving punishment. 

Though not quite the same, the prison system within the United States today is a new eighth circle of Hell for black men and women, with incarceration rates for black Americans exceeding the rate-by-population of white Americans. Brutality runs rampant amongst prison guards, the aggressors. In an article written by Andrea Jacobs in 2004, she describes a harsh institution of brutal treatment at the hands of prison guards: “Corrections officers at the Cheshire Correctional Institution in Connecticut subjected Ronald Nussle to an unprovoked and unjustified beating” (Jacobs 279). She continues on to describe his treatment in detail, which reminds one of the treatment of enslaved people almost 200 years ago. This serves as a cruel reminder that Paul D’s experience with imprisonment in Morrison’s fictional tale held true long ago and that the vestiges of slavery run rampant within American society today, particularly in the unjust justice system. For example, the 13th Amendment is widely known as that which rightfully ended slavery. However, this isn’t exactly true. It prohibits slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” (U.S. Const. amend. 13, § 1.). In other words, prisoners can be lawfully exploited for unpaid labor in the United States. This is even more significant when considering that 38.5 percent of inmates are Black due to the over-policing of marginalized communities (BOP Statistics: Inmate Race). Therefore, those subject to these conditions are overwhelmingly those who already face historic and modern maltreatment.

 Today, Black Americans have freedoms that Paul D, and other enslaved people were denied, but tales of horror seep out of U.S. private and public prisons, bringing us back down to the eighth circle. Dante describes the horrors of Malebolge and its own prison guards consisting of cruel devils, while Morrison draws a similar comparison in describing how the guards would shove and hit prisoners with the butt of their rifles (Inferno XVIII, Morrison 127). Looping back to unfair treatment within American prisons today and the idea of the eighth circle of Hell and the “cruel delight” of Hell’s own guards, it seems as though Morrison’s Hell outlined within Beloved never truly ended.

It is important to note that while Morrison wrote Beloved almost a quarter of a century ago, her concepts and meanings still apply to our own world. Dante’s Inferno, written six centuries before our own, also holds true in today’s society. As Morrison seems to demonstrate in drawing from Dante’s Inferno to craft Paul D’s imprisonment, by reversing the moral dynamic of contrapasso as seen in the Malebolge, there is an emphasis on the undeserved cruelty of incarceration, and enslavement, on the cruelty of white supremacy and dehumanization of Black people, and on the fictive quality of a moral system associated with constructs like punishment to prop up institutions of power.

WORKS CITED

AHC. (n.d.). Inferno. Ahc.leeds.ac.uk. Retrieved February 17, 2023, from https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/discover-dante/doc/inferno/page/5#:~:text=In%20this%20circle%20are%20punished 

Federal Bureau of Prisons. (2023, February 18). BOP Statistics: Inmate Race. https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp.

Inferno 18 – Digital Dante. (n.d.). Digitaldante.columbia.edu. https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-18/ 

Jacobs, A. (2004). Prison power corrupts absolutely: exploring the phenomenon of prison guard brutality and the need to develop a system of accountability. California Western Law Review, 41(1), 277-302.

Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf.

US Constitution, Amendment 13.