THE YELLOW HOUSE is about so much more than the destruction of your family home—Katrina is just one in a long line of many official neglects that beset your family and NewOrleanians. What are these neglects?
Inadequate housing and healthcare, unequal access to education and employment, environmental racism and catastrophe—all of which are not unique to New Orleans. But New Orleans is one of the most mythologized, tourism-driven cities in the United States. I wanted to explore how the fantastical story of a place can sometimes suffocate the life-and-death concerns of actual citizens living at its very heart. For a long time, when I went home and wanted to visit childhood friends, I’d have to go to the prison or cemetery to see them. I’m an exception among my childhood friends, which feels deeply wrong and unjust. Most of my siblings received a substandard education, as did I before college. It was, and still is for some of my siblings, hard to find good-paying work, not to mention the kinds of opportunities that they deserve. Our house was built on sinking ground—an apt metaphor. On the day my mother moved in, part of the family’s work was shoring the ground up. Many storms -- of all sorts -- arrived long before Katrina.