Hurricane Story By Jennifer Shaw (A Review By Amye Archer)

Chin Music Press, July 2011

118 pages.  $18

I, like most Americans, watched from the comfort of my oversized Lazy-Boy as Hurricane Katrina swept away New Orleans in August of 2005.  Don’t get me wrong, I recognized the tragedy of the event immediately.  I was consumed with news coverage for days on end, especially after Anderson Cooper made landfall shortly after.   But I was dry.  And far away.  Untouched.  Unscathed.  The closest I had ever come to feeling the monumental loss of the people displaced by Katrina’s wrath, was when the Lackawanna River went over her banks a few decades ago and my grandmother was inconvenienced by an inch of water in her basement.  New Orleans and her devastation was a world away.  Then, I picked up a little book called Hurricane Story by Jennifer Shaw.

Hurricane Story is a 46-page graphic narrative, a story told with photographs, a visual novel.  Each page has a picture, accompanied by one written line, and is a haunting progression through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  Shaw’s story of survival and displacement is unique.  She was due with her first child in less than a week when her and her husband were forced to flee their home.  The first two pages tell us all we need to know:

We left in the dark of night.

I was due in less than a week.

This ominous opening juxtaposes the jubilation of birth with the peril of losing a home.  Add to those lines the images of a small truck driving through a surreal landscape, a nude woman with a burgeoning belly, and you are immediately vested in Shaw’s rather miraculous story.    Shaw’s story is beautifully told with weighted insights and tempered observations.  She captures brilliantly the ambiguity of the weeks and months that followed the hurricane’s arrival.

There were rumors of alligators in the streets.

Ten thousand body bags seemed plausible.

No one really knew what was happening, but the presence of militaristic vehicles and rescue helicopters told us all we needed to know.  Shaw brings that uncertainty back into our lives as we relive her journey through this time.

Then, there’s the images.  Shaw, a RISDY grad, is a gifted photographer who uses toys and a soft filter to create an almost surrealist view of the events she is describing.  A small red truck driving away from us, a midwife with cold, wide open eyes, a line of green army men.   There are certain images that belong to the collective consciousness of mankind.  Shaw, manages to not only capture those images, but to skew them into a new reality.  A feat that mimics how Katrina changed New Orleans forever.  We will always see the Crescent City in a different light, through a different lens, post-Katrina.  She is a town of hope, of survival, she is a town of rebirth, and, thanks to Jennifer Shaw’s Hurricane Story, she is a town with a story that is only beginning to be heard.