In the HBO documentary Katrina Babies, young teen Meisha Williams recollects her experience surviving the 2005 hurricane that displaced approximately 200,000 New Orleans residents. She describes the screams, the stench and the sight of a dead body on the street that made her contemplate her own mortality at too young an age. She takes a pause during the interview to fight back to tears when the director, Edward Buckles Jr, asks whether she ever spoke about these experiences. The answer is no. “Nobody really asked me,” Williams explains.
That heartbreaking moment, recorded around 2015, was a turning point for Buckles, who at the time was a teacher trained in acting and fiddling with a camera on the side. He realized he was working on something bigger than what he imagined to be a YouTube video series. “I just wanted to hear the stories of my community and my peers and bring some type of change or impact,” says Buckles. “But at that time, I didn’t know what it was. When I went into this documentary, I didn’t know that the children had never spoken about it.”
Buckles is on a Zoom call with the Guardian from a New Orleans hotel room. He currently lives in Jersey City but is back in his home town for a Katrina Babies screening and reception. Buckles himself was a “Katrina baby”, a 13-year-old displaced from New Orleans when the levees broke. He says that he too never spoke about Katrina, nor confronted how it may have weighed on him. He figured his silence was isolated but listening to Williams opened his eyes to the common themes in their experience: the shared trauma and systemic neglect. It wasn’t just them. So Buckles spent the next seven years making a documentary about that trauma and its connection to the problems plaguing New Orleans today, like the noticeable spike in violence. The city reportedly had the highest murder rate in the US for the first half of 2022.
In Katrina Babies, people who were as young as three at the time recollect losing their homes, communities and way of life to the hurricane. Their voices are complemented by harrowing footage of children being airlifted from rooftops in baskets or lost and confused amid the devastation at the Superdome, where the people caught in the eye of the storm were stranded for days.
Buckles also relies on animation inspired by the art of Jacob Lawrence and Deborah Roberts to illustrate scenes where footage doesn’t exist. These are collages of families gathered during the storms and strangers finding refuge on boats without a set destination. These drawings are almost comfortingly cartoonish though they splice in real photographs and shards of traumatic memories.
The dehumanizing experiences in Katrina Babies don’t end with the long wait for rescue – as George Bush’s government dragged its heels to respond to the disaster. The film also covers the subsequent displacement of New Orleans residents and gentrification of the city, which created a whole other set of problems for the youth. You have young people who experienced a lifetime of trauma within a short period, the stressors triggering flight-or-fight responses and developing into behavioural issues. And they are moved into different neighbourhoods with other marginalised youth. The territorial conflict, and subsequent violence, was inevitable.
Buckles takes an intimate and personal approach to this material. He began noticing these issues when he worked as a high school teacher, which is partly what drove him to make the documentary. “Having that responsibility made me pay close attention to what was happening with our youth,” he says. “Most of them are dealing with anxiety, trust issues and PTSD from not just Hurricane Katrina, but all of the other inhumane things that are happening down here in New Orleans, and to Black and brown people in this country.”
Throughout the film, Buckles reflects on the conversations with people from his community while unpacking his own story of displacement and repressed emotion, using language he learns through this process. “I didn’t understand my trauma,” he says. “I think that’s a common thing within our community. We’re trying to navigate so much other stuff just living in America. Who has time to think about how they feel? Who has time to address trauma when you’re dealing with so many other traumas?”
As Katrina Babies gathers momentum, it makes the case that the entire ordeal for the people of New Orleans brought on by Hurricane Katrina – the neglect, poverty and violence — is just a concentrated version of what Black Americans confront always.
The film feels especially potent following the pandemic – which had a greater impact on the Black community – and the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. If unchecked, how are today’s youth going to absorb these traumas?
These tragedies also inspired sustained and introspective conversations about trauma, and how even witnessing violence and harm through social media can have detrimental effects on our mental health. Buckles absorbed that kind of awareness into his film-making process. A school counsellor pointed out to him that the interviews he was conducting with students about their experiences should include a follow-up wellness process. These conversations were a pathway towards healing, but they also have the potential to retraumatise, the counsellor explained.
Buckles adds that watching the film as someone who experienced Hurricane Katrina can be retraumatising. “No matter if the project is healing, no matter if the project is inspiring to them, I am retraumatising them. That’s just the truth.”
Buckles then considers how more artists and film-makers should be cautious about the harm their well-meaning content may cause. That is a whole conversation, especially with the litany of films and television shows (like Two Distant Strangers and Them, for instance) that treat Black trauma like a trope for consumption.
Another trope Buckles warns against is the celebration of resilience. Katrina Babies could have easily slinked into applauding the people of New Orleans for their resilience. Too often documentaries or fiction films about Black suffering search for emotional satisfaction in resilience because there’s no other hopeful payoff when it comes to such cyclical trauma. But the thing about celebrating resilience is that it reinforces a reward system for suffering instead of dismantling the system that makes resilience necessary.
“Resilience is the reason that slaves would get treated harsher and harsher based on how big they were,” says Buckles, reiterating an eye-opening argument someone made to him. “It’s not for you to call me resilient. It is for you to make sure that I don’t have to continue to be resilient under inhumane circumstances.”
Katrina Babies is available 24 August 24 on HBO Max in the US with a UK date to be announced
