Photo by Lauren Dore (Rock This Life Photography)
My name is Lana Maht Wiggins and I am a poet/writer/mother/teacher and born-n-bred Cajun girl. I am the author of Notes from Refuge (Plain View Press 2008) which is my first full-length book of poetry. The poems in NFR chronicle my existence as a refugee from NOLA and also my existence upon returning to a battered and bruised city 4 months later. New Orleans was my mother’s city and I grew up listening to her stories about NOLA and could not wait to move there in the summer of 2005 for a teaching position at UNO. That summer of 2005 was full of adventure, drama, intrigue, and poetry . . . it was the best time of my life and I fell immediately and irrevocably in love with New Orleans. There was never a dull moment in the French Quarter and although I was lonely for my home people in Lafayette, I met some of the most interesting and quirky characters a writer can only dream of . . . there was Sasha, my beautiful Russian, a gypsy artist who could break my heart and mend it simultanously just by watching him create. Gina, who knew every single scar on your soul and revealed them to no one but you at the riverwalk on a full moon. Sam, the clown who loved me and followed me home just to make sure I made it safely and never asked for anything but respect. Crystal, the lady-man who knew exact history of our block all the way back to the Kennedy Era. The Incomparable Lord Chaz, the premier tour guide of Vampire Street Theatre–one evening with Lord Chaz and his pal, devil-cherub and oh-soooo sexy, Micah, and your life will be changed forever. Lord Chaz is the finest mystery NOLA has to offer . . . but as life and luck spins around the great wheel of fortune and the winds blow in as they did on August 29, 2005, all that beautiful magic of NOLA came crashing in upon us and a new, unrecognizable existence set in.
I spent 4 months as a refugee. Barred, blocked, deleted and denied from my home and all of my belongings. But I was lucky– I had family and friends who came to my rescue. Cajun people are like that . . . we turn out in droves to help family and friends in crises. I also had a good job waiting for me, so when NOLA’s gates opened up, I was one of the first to come back home and spent the next two years trying to adjust to holocaustic madness. It was a nightmare. The city was damaged beyond recognition, almost beyond function. Sure, the French Quarter made out okay, but there’s so much more to the city than the Quarter. Imagine driving inner city–and NOLA has a BIG inner city area–on buckled streets and no working signal lights, 4 way stops at every corner and very angry, very confused drivers flipping off everybody else with both fingers. Imagine doing this for 2 hrs . . . stop, go, stop, go, all the while staring in disbelief at the roofline watermarks and collapsed homes, dreams, futures, fortunes . . . pyramids of debris, garbage, garbage, garbge and no one to pick it up, and all this just to get to one of the few grocery stores in operation only to find they’ve run out of everything on your list, so you either settle for what’s there or drive–stop, go, stop, go, endure the flip-offs, and stare again in horror at the unequivocal and unending blend of horrors until you get to the next store and find half of what you wanted . . .
Well, this scenario got a little better after about six months or so, but as more and more people came back to NOLA, so did the violence. Imagine locking yourself in the bedroom every night with a knife under your mattress, trying to sleep with your neck cocked in that awkward position that allows you to listen for the possibility of breaking glass, footsteps in your house because 3 people on your block were hit that month. Imagine waking nearly every night at 4:00 am to hear gunshots popping like a string of black cat firecrackers throughout your ward, sirens, sirens, sirens coming from all directions at once, drowning out the poem you’re trying to write in your head, and you don’t dare look out the window or move an inch or exhale until it all fades into sunrise . . .
To be honest, I spent hours and hours on end, holed up in my house on Grand Route St. John, leaving for work, necessary shopping, and the occasional stroll through the Quarter with visiting friends. Most of my time was spent writing poetry and waiting . . . waiting for someone to come in and fix the city, set it right, make the bullets stop flying, make the mold disappear, make the people happy again. I stayed until the thought of another summer in the city with temperatures spiking into the 100′s and tempers rising along with it made me physically ill and I knew I had to leave. I had to come home . . . I love NOLA and the people there, but I could no longer exist in the broken world of post-Katrina New Orleans . . . so I came home. After 2 months back in Lafayette, I got my dream job teaching at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, and I don’t think I’ll ever leave here again.
It was indeed a very difficult experience, but I was able to finish my book and I’m really happy with the results. Shortly after the book was accepted for publication by Plain View Press in Austin, TX, I was contacted by a French author who’d read one of my poems online. Monsieur S. invited me to be the guest poet at the annual International Writer’s Conference held in Paris in 2008, and my dear friend also arranged for me to launch the book at a very hip English/French bookstore in the Latin District, The Abbey Bookstore, the afternoon before the conference. This was the experience of a lifetime! I got to launch my little book in Paris! Monsieur S. also hosted a lovely party for me after the reading at the Abbey in his home in Les Lilas with prominent writers from France, Italy, England, and Canada. The conference was amazing with international writers such as Alexandra Dekimpe, Melanie Fazi, Céline Guillaume, Fabienne Leloup, Dominique Lesbros, Malaïka, Martine Mangeon, Marie Ange Prétot, Emmanuelle Maia, Barbara Sadoul, Miguel Angel Arellano, Pierre Brulhet, Lucas Balbo, Jean Marie Beurk, Olivier Bidchiren,Robert de Laroche, Arnaud de l’Estoile, Patrick Eudéline, Antoine Faivre, Sylvain Ferrieu, Franck Ferric, Jacques Goimard, Frank Guilbert, Massimo Izzi, William Hugues, Robert de Laroche, Gérard Lopez, Jean Marigny, Hana Myo Shin, François Poublanc, Alain Pozzuoli, Marc Louis Questin, Michel Rozenberg, Jacques Sirgent, Nicolas Stanzick and a concert by Heavenly Creatures featuring harpist Morgane Chavaneau.
I truly felt as if I landed in a dream . . . I went from the war zone of post-K NOLA to Paris in a blink of an eye and I’m still reeling from it all . . .
