Picturing Katrina: The queer child and black death-birthing narratives

Black death-birthing narratives and refuge(es)

This article addresses Hushpuppy’s opening spatial irruption through an exploration of the relationship between pain for public consumption, (black) girls’ bodies, and imagined futures tied to what I’m terming “black death-birthing narratives.” These narratives celebrate the creation of new life that is predicated on black death. Both the U.S. economy and global capitalism more generally were built on or birthed through chattel slavery and black death and continue to function through the precaritization of some lives but not others. Black death-birthing narratives are intricately tied to this ongoing history. They emphasize the creation of new life, biological or otherwise (such as the birth of a nation), while simultaneously refusing to recognize the black death and enforced precarization needed to enact said birth. This uninterrogated erasure is facilitated through an othering. While othering has been a tactic for multiple racist U.S. projects (e.g. Japanese-American concentration camps during WWII), said othering is frequently tied to narratives of protection from the Other (again, WWII concentration camps are one of the most clear examples) or narratives that purport U.S. commitment to ending oppression overseas (e.g. Vietnam War), what Mimi Thi Nguyen has termed “the gift of freedom” (Nguyen, 2012). What makes othering different in black death-birthing narratives is the fact that not only is the Other not acknowledged as having been othered, but also that this uninterrogated new life is only made possible through said othering that justifies black death and black peoples proximity to death. I am interested in Beasts black death-birthing narrative, a story that posits Hushpuppy, a 6-year old black girl living in intense poverty, as harbinger of a more sustainable ecological future, in particular because in addition to the othering attached to the genre, through its ties to Hurricane Katrina, it also presses on in-house manifestations of the gift of freedom. This article focuses on Beasts of the Southern Wild to explore black death-birthing narratives around Hurricane Katrina that utilize the image of refuge(e).

What does it mean to be framed as a refugee in one’s country of citizenship? In my interrogation of Beasts, I am interested in the transmutation of historical practices and procedures steeped in antiblackness into refugee policies which are then further transformed when re-mapped onto the majority black and poor citizens affected by Hurricane Katrina. In her work on Cambodian refugees, Aihwa Ong maps how racial polarism and its enactments along with orientalism set the stage for refugee policies and programs that affected Cambodian refugees in the late 20th century (Ong, 2003). Leading her readers through a genealogy of how proximity to blackness served as a measure for worthiness for citizenship as well as refuge (e.g. “good” vs “bad” refugee), Ong marks how technologies originally designed to discipline and oppress black and poor people found traction in refugee policies, programs, and narratives that stressed self-reliance (Ong, 2003). The “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” ideology ignored the largely U.S. government produced material conditions that frequently made the fulfillment of that goal unattainable. While Katrina survivors are not de jure refugees, this article takes up the term to interrogate what it means to seek refuge in one’s country of origin, and explores the transience of violent technologies of power tied to U.S. colonial and imperialist military practices that work to manage and discipline Katrina survivors and refugee communities.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, survivors of the storm who lost their homes or could not in effect return home due to the damage wrought, were articulated as refugees in the news (Pesca, 2005). This labeling, which connotes desperation on part of the fleeing subject as well as the country (Espiritu, 2014), was heavily critiqued by Katrina evacuees and prominent black leaders like Reverend Al Sharpton who remarked that “They [Katrina survivors] are not refugees. They are citizens of the United States” (Pesca, 2005:). In alignment with black feminist studies scholars including Sharpe and Hartman, Ong illustrates the ways in which the notion of “the worthy citizen” is wrapped up in projections of whiteness (Ong, 2003: 71–73), and in doing so, troubles Sharpton et al’s attachment to the term citizen considering treatment of African Americans by the nation-state. As marked by numerous scholars, the United States is built upon and continues to function through antiblackness, evidenced through the rendering of black people as fungible commodities, the proliferation and circulation of racist stereotypes, the overrepresentation of African Americans in incarcerated and homeless populations, and the murder of black people by the police and vigilantes, to name just a few examples. Antiblackness permeates social, economic, and political assemblages that compose the nation-state. In the words of Sharpe, “the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack” (Sharpe, 2016: 104). Notwithstanding the questionable applicability of the term citizen re African Americans, Sharpton et al.’s critique of the application of refugee suggests an acknowledgement that when transposed onto majority black, low-income, displaced Louisiana residents, the term refugee brings its historicity with it and in doing so, transfixes victimhood or the need to be saved by the state onto the citizens’ personhood—a labeling that reinscribes master narratives about African Americans. This article places refugee studies in critical conversation with performance studies to begin to address black death-birthing narratives around Hurricane Katrina through the term mobilizing this special collection: transient performance. I attempt to think through transient performance and its manifestations in Beasts of the Southern Wild both in terms of the movement of technologies of power/violence (including narrative, de facto and de jure policies, nonprofit practices, and forced relocation) across time and space as well as spatial irruptions enacted by people/bodies on the move. Specifically, I turn to Beasts to address the double re-mapping of disciplinary structures and cultural practices historically tied to refugees onto Katrina survivors’ bodies and the resulting material and symbolic violences against black girls produced by/present in black death-birthing narratives.

Related to the work I perform in this piece, in his article “Little Monsters: Race, Sovereignty, and Queer Inhumanism in Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Tavia Nyong’o utilizes queer theory to interrogate the relationship between Beasts’ ecological pedagogy and its representation of racialized precarity. In his work, Nyong’o notes the irony of the wide-acclaim of Beasts as a call for a shared sovereignty between humans and nonhumans since the film and most of its critics fail to address the historical and material implications of depicting black bodies as (a) more in-tune with the earth (read primitive) and (b) as advocates for an alternative form of sovereignty when black subjects have often (and continue to be) deemed nonhuman. In addition, Nyong’o uses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s theory of incompossibility to argue that the existence of Juicy and Delicious’ (the play by Lucy Alibar on which the film is loosely based) Hushpuppy and Beasts’ Hushpuppy bear weight on one another as both represent “real” Hushpuppies, with neither one serving as the original, and thus affect analyses of the film. Like Beasts’ Hushpuppy, Alibar’s Hushpuppy is a kid living in poverty in the South (albeit Georgia, instead of Louisiana) with an abusive, dying daddy and missing mother. However, in the play Hushpuppy is a slightly older, illiterate white boy. For Nyong’o, the incompossibility of the two Hushpuppies queers Beasts’ Hushpuppy since the protagonist “slip[s] between black and white, male and female bodies” (Nyong’o, 2015: 254). Continuing Nyong’o’s investigation into Hushpuppy’s queerness, I argue that Beasts’ Hushpuppy is also queered through her ecological impregnation or birthing of a more sustainable relationship between humans, nonhuman animals, and the land. Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s theorizations on hope and utopia, José Esteban Muñoz informs us that queerness “is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (Muñoz, 2009: 1). By these terms, Hushpuppy is queer because she represents a not-yet-here futurity in which the norm is human and nonhuman animal symbiotic coexistence. Her queerness as “a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us [viewers] to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present (i.e. human-produced climate change)” (Muñoz, 2009: 1) is sutured to ways of seeing that refuse to recognize the racialized violence upon which this black death-birthing narrative depends. “Picturing Katrina” engages with the cinematic production of a queer Hushpuppy and how her othering, which is part and parcel of the transient performance of antiblack and refugee disciplinary structures, elucidates a black death-birthing narrative tied to disaster.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

As a black death-birthing narrative, Beasts does not interrogate the conditions of possibility for the black subject (specifically the black girl child) but rather imagines a remaking of a world that maintains the status quo—an environment hostile to black life. Through the portrayal of Hushpuppy and her relationship to the swampland environment as well as the ahistorical predator versus prey metaphor where the destructive aurochs are replaced by industrialized society while the Bathtub community remains the prey, the film investigates alterity to an anthropocentric world. In alignment with posthuman discourse that advocates for a “rethinking [of] our relations to the waters with which we live and upon which we depend” (Neimanis, 2017: 23), Beasts critiques the seemingly endless exploitative use of nature’s resources that has characterized the West since at least industrialization and posits, instead, what posthuman feminist Astrida Neimanis might term “a more-than-human hydrocommons” (Neimanis, 2017: 2), that is, a more symbiotic space in which humans, nonhuman animals, and the environment coexist. In fact, since its premiere at the 2012 Sundance film festival, Beasts has received critical acclaim on numerous fronts ranging from the ecological narrative it espouses to the acting and Zeitlin and his crew’s embrace of magical realism. The film is narrated by Hushpuppy. Played by Quvenzhané Wallis, Hushpuppy lives on the “other side of the levies” in the aptly named Bathtub. She inhabits a poorly constructed house made of bits and pieces of things, which is adjacent to her emotionally abusive father’s home. Hushpuppy’s narrative authority and the triumph of the Bathtub community over the predatory dry-side inhabitants at the end of the film belies the fact that the imagined, more sustainable future is predicated on black death.

Although the predator-prey dichotomies analogized in the film take place in vastly different eras and physical environments, the aurochs and people on the dry-side of the levee function similarly. In the historical narrative of the film, during the era of cavemen, aurochs reigned supreme in the realm of predators. It is only because of the Ice Age that humans gained control, or as articulated by Hushpuppy, “If it wasn’t for giant snowballs, and the iced age, I wouldn’t even be Hushpuppy. I would just be breakfast.” Here Hushpuppy notes that the Ice Age, a harbinger of glacial natural disaster, changed the food chain system with the elimination of the aurochs. Hushpuppy relays this information following a scene comparing the strange ways of people residing on the other side of the levee, who have “fish stuck in plastic wrappers,” “babies stuck in carriages,” and “chickens on sticks.” Hushpuppy’s description connotes imprisonment and highlights the disparities between industrialized modern society and the romanticized precarious living conditions as viewed through the eyes of a young, black girl, orienting the viewer to the film’s central narrative—humans have replaced the aurochs as top predator and in doing so, have disrupted the “natural” order of things. The images of jubilant Bathtub residents running freely, celebrating with drink, and dance that create this scene validate Hushpuppy’s positionality. For Hushpuppy (and the film since it is largely structured through her perspective in both voiceover and point of view shots), the ways of modern society parallel the destructive nature of the aurochs. Replacing predators who could only be stopped by the Ice Age, the “developed” humans also attempt to dominate the earth and all its inhabitants. The Bathtub residents’ relationship with the world (and Hushpuppy’s in particular) represents an alternative to predation, a form of mutualism that still manages to pay tribute to the prevailing Christian doctrine that Man rules the land and all the animals that inhabit it.

The ecological move away from the predator-prey relationship establishes a queer temporality of progress that comes to a head in the last scenes of the film. The evening after the hurricane hits, Hushpuppy envisions a sandstorm from which the aurochs emerge, charging towards some unnamed destination. In a voiceover, she proclaims, “Strong animals, they know when your hearts are weak. That makes them hungry and they start coming.” Hushpuppy’s flight of fantasy foreshadows the Bathtub residents’ eviction from their homes by hurricane relief entities who represent the ultimate predator-style of living Hushpuppy eschews (a point which will be covered in the next section). When Hushpuppy confronts the aurochs upon their arrival to the Bathtub, although the animals lie down in ostensible deference, Hushpuppy remarks “You’re my friend, kind of.” In this utterance, Hushpuppy proposes a more humane way to coexist with nonhuman organisms—up until this point the film has framed the aurochs as creatures dangerous to humans. With the aurochs imagined as alive, the past and present collide as more livable geographies are imagined to exist in a future in which humans reconnect with the land. In the narrative of the film, Hushpuppy serves as an exemplar of progress as regression, that is, a return to a form of primitivity or at least deindustrialized society to create a more sustainable future. Yet this regression coexists with the dry-side where progress is defined through linear movements towards modernity—“regimes of human rights, citizenship, and property [that] for the most part all depend on individualized, stable, and sovereign bodies—those ‘Enlightenment figures of coherent and master subjectivity’” (Neimanis, 2017: 2). However, despite the fantasized move away from the unsustainable predator-prey relationship, both the current relationship and the imagined future depend upon black precarity—in both relationships black proximity to death is not reimagined. An analysis of Beasts indicates that the meeting point of ecological sustainability and the regimes that structure industrialized society is black death. Framed in a cultural imaginary in which “the transmutation from enslaved to freed subject never quite occurred” (Holland, 2000: 15), Beasts offers a cleverly hidden, recycled, colonial narrative in which the nation is built by black people who largely have yet to be recognized as human. Even though Hushpuppy, a black girl, serves as the harbinger of this new era, the narrative does not foresee an alternative to black death; Hushpuppy ushers forth a future not meant for her survival.

The making of refuge(es) ¹

The violent removal of the Bathtub inhabitants to a relief center/shelter and the cleansing acts that occur at that location both depict the evacuees as at least partially at fault for their precarity and illustrate some of the violences involved in turning a refugee (or de facto noncitizen in this example) into a recognizable citizen-subject. The removal and subsequent shelter scene opens with a couple of white men who attempt to enter the Doucets’ dwelling and force them to evacuate. The scene then cuts to a group of white men kicking in the door to the home of Little Jo, a white woman Bathtub resident. She resists, and the men physically detain her while yelling “hold her down.” The scene cuts back to the Doucets and the men are holding down each Doucet and yelling, “Stay down sir, stay down,” while Wink yells “let her [Hushpuppy] go.” The jarring visuals caused by the cuts as well as the unsteadiness of the handheld camera emphasize the use of unnecessary force on the Bathtub residents. The use of the same degree of violence against a black man and a white woman serves as a spatial irruption since it pictorially marks that in sites of spatial dispossession, sometimes class or subject positioning relative to the state overdetermines treatment rather than the more visual mitigating constructions of race and gender. In addition, the evacuee teams’ overuse of violence seeks to establish the dry-side’s dominance as well as portray their understanding of the Bathtub residents as violent, uncivilized, and disruptive to the otherwise civil environment (state). As detailed by Espiritu, U.S. refugee policy marks foreign others as in need of rescue and the United States as the ideal site of refuge, and in doing so, “‘write[s] out the specificities of forced migration’. . .enabling Americans to remake themselves from military aggressors into magnanimous rescuers’(Espiritu, 2014: 10). While in this scene, Beasts critiques domestic forced migration that speaks to U.S. humanitarian endeavors overseas, the film doesn’t interrogate the inequitable distribution of resources and othering that validate state interference with the Bathtub’s community way of life. In other words, the position taken by the film and many of its critics is that the crime committed by the state is the forced push of the Bathtub residents towards modernity, that is the gift of freedom. So while in this scene the film provides a much needed critique of government sanctioned violence wrapped up as humanitarian aid and in doing so, questions the “need to be saved” narrative espoused as well as the locating of the “problem” within the bodies of de facto refugees (in fact, Beasts names the evacuators as the problem—they don’t understand the Bathtub’s way of life), it remains problematic because Beasts doesn’t recognize the fact that a real, material problem exists: the government’s compliance with and maintenance of inequities pre-hurricane that left the Bathtub community vulnerable post-storm. It isn’t until Hushpuppy, Wink, and several of their community members blow up the levee to disperse the salt water that was rapidly killing their means of survival (i.e. plant and animal life) that the Bathtub even registers in the purview of the dry-side. As noted earlier in this article, the lived experience of citizenship for African Americans is levied with forced migrations and violent exclusionary practices. It is only the removal of the border separating the civilized from the not, rather than the hurricane and its aftermath that causes the state to call for a mandatory evacuation of the Bathtub. It is only then that the Bathtub residents are acknowledged as lives worth and in need of saving.

The official narrative surrounding the evacuation of Bathtub residents (which mirrors narratives about Hurricane Katrina) and the disciplining procedures enacted in the relief center(s) illustrate one of the ways in which the state and aid agencies draw on an archive of experience working with refugees to address displaced citizens. Following the forced removal of the Doucets and Little Jo, the film cuts to the shelter. Largely filmed through Hushpuppy’s point of view, the oversaturation of white and blue that color the exterior and interior of the center, including the clothing of the workers and the de facto refugees’ blankets, gives the center a hospital vibe and connotes a feeling of cleansing. In her work on the polyvalent roles medicinal care played in 20th century Cambodian refugees lives in the United States, Ong argues that the state’s disciplining of the refugee into a body that fits into the national body politic emphasized cleanliness measures. She argues, “The prominence of desensing and sanitary measures drove home the ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’ message of cultural citizenship—good hygiene as a sign of democratic sensibility. Refugees had to erase the smells of their humanity, submitting to a civilizing process that can be measured out in daily mouthwashes and showers” (Ong, 2003: 97). Packaged as aid, sanitation and health requirements tried to remake the Bathtub residents into modern subjects that fit the national body politic, which loosely correlates to the standards embodied by the reigning capitalist society on the dry-side of the levee. Evidenced in the scenes in which Wink lies drugged up and sedated, as well as the “schooling” scene in which a white teacher yells at a kempt Hushpuppy, who, despite appearing to be docile subject characterized by her a blue dress attire and her neatly done hair, refuses to conform her deportment, the project of the relief center is to discipline (or if unable to, then subdue) refugees into democratic, capitalist subjects. As a whole, the film’s ecological argument, its black death-birthing narrative, illustrates that local and global assemblages that create and support the spatial dispossession of some people, but not others, collide across the ostensibly distinct barriers of citizen, noncitizen, and stateless and articulate a democratic, capitalistic system that only functions through the maintenance of the precarity of people deemed less than human, a category the state needs to define itself against. In addition, even liberal pushback against this predatory model, exemplified in the critical acclaim for Beasts, call on black death to protect white futures. An analysis of Beasts, its reception, and historiography (especially as it serves as an allegory for Hurricane Katrina) highlight that dominant past, present, and future models of American habitation have and continue to imagine the black body as a necessary expenditure in the project of livable futures.

As detailed by black feminist scholars including bell hooks, Sharpe, and Jayna Brown, Beasts “isn’t the first case of black children being depicted as insensitive to pain, or of black suffering and survival being used to symbolize American democracy” (Brown, 2012). Black people and black trauma have been used in numerous cinematic and other narrative forms to depict the triumph of freedom. Black children in particular have been depicted as uniquely resilient in the face of extreme trauma. This article now briefly turns to a “real-life story” tied to Hurricane Katrina about a pararescuer and (previously) unidentified black girl that illustrates a nonfiction black death-birthing narrative centered on a queer child subjected to violence engendered by state engagement with de facto refugees. By putting this story in conversation with Beasts, I hope to suggest not only the breadth of media forms that utilize black death-birthing narratives centering on childhood and disaster, but also begin to interrogate the material conditions that enable the proliferation of these narratives as well as the narratives’ material effects.

“Katrina Girl” and the Vet

On 24 March 2015, People magazine posted the article “Help this Vet Find the Little Girl He Rescued from Hurricane Katrina” by Michael Miller on their website. The photograph accompanying the article features the torsos and heads of former Staff Sergeant (now retired Master Sergeant) Mike Maroney and the (then) unidentified black girl (LaShay Brown) depicted in the headline. The pair embrace: Maroney, eyes closed, smiling, in uniform with his right arm encircling the girl and resting on her back as he holds her up, and the “mystery girl”, arms wrapped around Maroney’s neck, eyes slightly opened, and smiling towards the camera. While Maroney is only partially attired in his government issued gear (he is not wearing his jacket), the inclusion of a visual of the inside of the helicopter as well as military vehicles in the background of the frame heighten the legibility of Maroney as a representative of the nation. An analysis of the formal elements of the picture, in addition to Maroney’s (and the media’s) narration of the child’s effect on him, position the Maroney-Brown story firmly in the black death-birthing genre.

The image of Maroney and the unidentified child is another instance where a black girl’s affect and precarious situation are utilized in a black death-birthing narrative that attempts to occlude racialized and classed governmental neglect. The representation of the black girl’s innocence through the citation of her hug, smile, and affective response to the destruction of Hurricane Katrina are framed as catalysts of Maroney’s psychological rebirth. About two weeks prior to the taking up of Maroney’s story by several independent news agencies, Maroney posted a nineteen-and-a-half-minute video on his YouTube channel about his role as a para-rescuer during Hurricane Katrina. Near the end of the video, Maroney finally narrates the event that has been taken up by the media. Maroney states,

. . .she wraps me up in this hug and I’m just like, everything bad melts away, everything, all that matters is this little girl’s giving me this hug and I’m just in heaven. And they snapped the picture and a lot of people were like ‘Oh look, his sunglasses are on his head,’ or you know, ‘It’s a fake.’ If you look my eyes are closed and I am 100% enjoying that hug. That is one of the top five hugs of my life, and actually if nothing ever happened again, that hug made pararescue, my trip to New Orleans, my career—that hug made it all worthwhile. (Maroney, 2015)

In this excerpt, Maroney articulates the girl’s hug as transformative. For him, the girl’s joy in face of Hurricane Katrina gives him an emotional reset. In the video, Maroney also claims that “If she didn’t have her family with her, I would have kept her; she was the most beautiful girl ever” (Maroney, 2015). Maroney’s conditional statement marks the girl as both something to be possessed and as well as lacking agency. Intentionally or not, Maroney tells his audience that if the girl’s family hadn’t been around, he would have taken her for himself, regardless of orphanage status or the desires of the child. By positioning the black girl as a beautiful object, Maroney situates the story in a hauntingly familiar narrative in which black flesh is desirable and sought after to be consumed by white (colonial) subjects.

Maroney’s statement and subsequent press releases press on this desire to consume the black child, propagating the consumption of the black girl’s body through representations in commodity form. The photograph of Maroney and the girl first came into commodity form through its usage on Burger King placemats and AT&T phone cards back in 2005 when the picture was first taken (Davis, 2015). In the immediate aftermath of the storm, the picture not only circulated as a visual representation of state efforts to aid Louisiana residents, but also served as evidence of black resilience and joy made possible through the gift of freedom. Understanding this manifestation of the gift of freedom as a narrative attempt to repackage poor government response to one of the costliest disasters in the United States (Fulscher, 2015) that led to the death of nearly 2000 citizens in the Southeast, one can begin to comprehend the mass circulation of the Katrina girl images and the black death-birthing narrative, which paints a benign image of the military during a decade of increasing criticism of U.S. intervention in other countries, including Iraq and Yemen, as well as widespread domestic protest against discriminating practices utilized by the police and the lack of justice served for police murders of black people, that continues to frame the picture more than 10 years after its initial introduction.

On 2 September 2015, People Magazine posted a follow up story: “‘Katrina Girl Found’! Airman and the Girl He Rescued During the 2005 Hurricane Will Finally Be Reunited”. According to the article, Maroney and LaShay Brown (referred to as ‘Katrina Girl’ in article) were scheduled to meet in New Orleans ² that month even though neither of them live in Louisiana. Although it appears that the reunion in New Orleans did not actually occur, Maroney and Brown were reunited on “The Real,” a national talk show, in September 2015. The hosts first bring out Maroney, who recounts the narrative articulated above and emphasizes Brown’s effect on him as well as his decade-long search for her (The Real Daytime, 2015). Then Brown is invited on stage. As one might imagine, an emotional scene of what Ong might term “refugee love” unfolds—one that neatly fits into a black death-birthing narrative that positions Maroney as patriot and Brown as a conduit for joy. Recognizing that refugee love is not a new practice and in fact, was utilized during chattel slavery, Ong defines the term as “a liberal variation of humanitarian domination, as enacted by refugee workers, social workers, the police, and some health providers, who in their various capacities provide pastoral care in the broadest sense of the term to refugees” (Ong, 2003: 145–146). I would like to extend Ong’s concept to include other state agents, like pararescuers, with seemingly benevolent intentions tied to de jure and de facto refugee practices and procedures. Further, I argue that refugee love also can be mobilized by transcribing care onto the precarious figure rather than the state agent. In the Maroney-Brown case, Maroney maps care onto Brown’s body, creating a heartwarming narrative that occludes the causes of Brown’s precarity in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that led to the hug as well as the position of privilege from which Maroney speaks, which enables the unquestioning of a middle-aged military man’s 10-year desire to find a (not) lost black girl. The subject position of Maroney, in his role as a para-rescuer, obfuscates the material conditions in pre-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans and the government’s latent response to the storm. In the Maroney-Brown black death-birthing narrative, the transient performance of refugee love becomes clear as trans-historical structures of racial visibility politics, possession, and projection of care unfold in this human interest story about a de facto refugee and government aid.

Just days after The Real episode broadcast, People released their second follow-up news piece (written by Becky Randall) on the Maroney-Brown story: “After 10 Years Search, Air Force Vet Has Emotional Reunion with ‘Katrina Girl’ He Saved: ‘You Rescued Me More Than I Rescued You’.” The article opens with a composite photograph that juxtaposes the aforementioned famous image and a picture of Maroney and Brown hugging on The Real. Like the original, the second photo is a medium shot emphasizing the connection between Maroney and Brown. The pair’s pose mirrors the 2005 photo: Brown’s arms are wrapped around Maroney’s neck and Maroney’s arms encircle Brown; both Maroney (notably in full uniform) and Brown are smiling. The juxtaposition of the two photographs highlights a time lapse. Placed next to the luminous photo aided by artificial lighting, the Katrina photo appears washed out and dated in contrast. In addition, the shadowing, caused by natural light, present in the Katrina photo serves the authenticity narrative espoused by Maroney. Likewise, the reversal of the height differential between Maroney and Brown further maps a linear cause and effect narrative in which a black child can grow up because of the heroic efforts of a state agent. However, a more nuanced investigation of the composite showcases the constructed-ness of the black death-birthing narrative cited here.

In the first photo Brown’s gaze is directed at the camera, marking an awareness of the camera’s presence. In the more recent photograph, it is Maroney who gazes at the camera. In addition, unlike the Katrina image, in The Real photo, Brown’s focused, slightly downward gaze suggests that there are multiple cameras capturing the reunion; her focus is on a camera adjacent to the one that captured the pictured photo. If this supposition is true, it begs the question why the photo with Maroney engaging with viewers of the photograph was chosen over the one with Brown. The change in subject focus from Brown (in the first image) to Maroney (in the second image) illustrates that the savior has become the saved; through her hug, smile, and queer affect ³ Brown saves Maroney emotional despair. Not only is Brown’s affect represented as queer or strange in the prevailing Maroney-Brown narrative that highlights Brown’s smile as indicative of her resilience, I argue that as a queer child—one framed as giving Maroney new life—the affect and affective structures tied to Brown are also queer since, in the dominant narrative, they are the sources of the rebirth indicated in the headline “You Rescued Me More Than I Rescued You,” which is a quote by Maroney. This hypothesis is further supported by what remains in focus in each frame. As mentioned earlier, the Katrina photo captures military vehicles, which, while backgrounded, remain in focus. However, in The Real photograph, except for Maroney and Brown, everything in the frame is out of focus, suggesting the unimportance of the location of the reunion; affect and care or more specifically, the power of refugee love, is on display.

Despite media usage of Brown to articulate a black death-birthing narrative, Brown circumvents the inscription for at least a decade through her unvisibility—Maroney could not locate her. What does it mean to remain in/unvisible for so long in a system that is predicated on the hypervisibility of black bodies, particularly in a world of hypersurveillance? I argue that in the case of LaShay Brown, it is a spatial irruption. Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness locates visibility and imagery as sites of contestation. Drawing largely on the work of Steve Mann (and to a lesser degree, McKittrick and Spillers), Browne situates the intersection of black resistance and surveillance as “dark sousveillance.” “Dark sousveillance” is “a way to situate the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight” (Browne, 2015: 21). While one could reasonably assume that Brown may not have avoided “being found” intentionally, I argue that intentionality does little to mitigate the fact that Brown remained unvisible in a society built on and still functioning under a logic of visualization that mandates black hypervisibility. If we understand Brown’s unvisibility as part of a broader history of dark sousveillance (one inclusive of both intentional and unintentional actions), then Brown enacts a form of resistance by failing to be visible. In her un-locateability, Brown disrupts the continuation of a black death-birthing narrative.

Conclusion

Beasts and the stories around the Maroney-Brown picture function as black death-birthing narratives that center on the death of a black girl and illustrate the transient performance of antiblack and refugee policies. Despite taking place in two different mediums, both narratives call upon a child living in a site of precarity to perform a reproductive action that doesn’t support black life. An analysis of the formal elements of each index the ways in which editing and shot composition are used to produce black pain for public consumption. However, the Maroney-Brown photo differs from Beasts in that the articulation of a black death-birthing narrative is contingent upon the written and performance pieces about the photograph. Unlike a film, which frequently circulates through trailers as well as press reviews, photographs outside the realm of gallery-level artistry do not have a large ready-made audience. Maroney and his media accomplices needed to create a story around the photo that would appeal to a broad audience. Wrapped in a blanket of patriotism in the face of natural disaster, the Maroney-Brown story circulated (and continues to do so) ⁴ as a human-interest story. Even though Brown performed a spatial irruption in her refusal to be found for 10 years, the black death-birthing narrative attempts to swallow up that irruption by using the large time gap to fuel the flames of a linear hero-savior narrative.

In the follow-up People story with the juxtaposed photographs, Randall informs her readers that since Hurricane Katrina, both Brown’s and Maroney’s families have faced economic hardship. As articulated by Randall, “Unfortunately, both families have hit hard times since Katrina (Maroney is injured and therefore cannot currently serve), so the pair was shocked and overjoyed when the hosts [of The Real] presented each family with a $10,000 check” (Randall, 2015). Echoing the insights provided by Little Jo’s forced removal in Beasts, this additional information points out that neither the state agent nor the black girl are free from the encroachment of the aurochs. In other words, as the destructive tendencies of capitalism pervade the hierarchies of Man, more and more subject positions are pushed towards “the end of the world [that] already happened [for some].”