Muddy Worlds: Re-Viewing Environmental Narratives

Abstract

In ‘Do You Know What It Means?’, the opening episode of Treme (2010–2014), we watch Albert ‘Big Chief’ Lambreaux walk across the mud-filled floor of his house in New Orleans after the flooding caused by the failure of the levee system in the days following hurricane Katrina. Much later in the HBO series, he is diagnosed with cancer, which proves fatal. By listening to the doctor’s diagnosis, we might conclude something in the mud was toxic. With the prevalence of toxic waste sites in the region (Tuana 2008, 198), it is likely that some of the water that flooded the city carried with it dangerous chemicals. As visualized in the fictional and non-fictional texts that shape Treme, Katrina insists on the connectedness of natural and cultural environments. Lambreaux’s death, furthermore, discloses the operation of non-human agencies — rooted in muddy worlds — that can exceed human perception.