The Blood Dazzler

I don't even know where to begin. The book overall was very touching. As I read the remainder of the book, I began picturing my family and myself in the situations that the people in New Orleans were in. How they waited on help to come and it never came made me feel sympathetic. How they were told to evacuate, but they didn't see a point in doing so. When we read the book last class I was amazed at how Patricia Smith decided to start off her book of poems. It was as if she was talking about the people being "owned" or consumed by the Mardi Gras and taking New Orleans for granted and how Hurricane Katrina "owned" or consumed the city itself. As you get farther into the book, the poems seem to pick up speed. They become more vibrant but hostile at the same time. The lost of love ones become more graphic, the emotion of loss become more elaborate and the poems itself become more impersonal or insensitive. It seems as if the blunter the poet becomes the more she wants the reader to understand what was actually happening at that time. While we were eating big hearty meals, people were dying without food. While we were cozy in our beds, children AND babies were being raped at that same moment. While we had our own room, more than just thousands had to share the Super dome and be cramped in uncomfortable places.

I decided to pick at least three poems that I would like to share in class. The first one is What Was the First Sound on page 19. This is the first poem to me that seemed more visual. She uses the color purple to set the tone and describe the sound heard from the hurricane. The bodies that were consumed, she said were filled with water. And immediately I could picture bodies afloat on the water, more plumply in size because of all the water it sucked in. She states in her poem that the trees can hear it. I'm guessing only because she is describing the water splashing up against the tree and hearing the tree break in half as well. All these sounds of disaster causing chaos and depression is followed at the end of her poem by the bodies in the water; ever so silent filled with so much water, but still floating gently.

The second one is What to Tweak. It mainly takes place in an e-mail from Marty Bahamonde and his boss Michael Brown. Then Patricia decided to tweak the e-mail in a sense because the e-mail was sugar-coated and Patricia wanted to explain what really happened. It is a long poem but is in the middle of the book, which I think was a good choice to put it as if it was rising action in a story, which in this case it still is; a story of thousands of people who either lost their lives or cannot get their old ones back. The first stanza sounds disoriented. It sounds like everyone is out of it. So much loss and danger the human mind cannot comprehend reality and what is going on at this particular moment. In the third, it talks about the people being together but there is no food. And although there is water everywhere, there is none to drink. The babies are starving the most but there is nothing anyone can do. At the end of this stanza is Italicizes the dialogue of what Hurricane Katrina can possibly be saying, " I have killed you....I have bled you dry" indicating how much pain that was inflicted on all this people by the hurricane causing desperation, automatically ending in a horrible death. Now with the fourth stanza, it begins with the smell of death. The smell of death is so strong it kills, literally and figuratively speaking. "And up on the roofs of tombs" sticks out to me in that stanza because on the news when this horrible incident occurred, I remember seeing people on roofs of houses, but nothing close to land to be found. Some people where so isolated that the roof would be their tomb, the place where they would lay to die. Another part of the stanza stood out to me, "sinking mothers claw the sky pray the rising river away from their scream". This was indeed horrifying for me because I was able to picture my mother trying to risk her life for mine. And of course no one likes to thing of such vulgar and upsetting things. In the fifth stanza which is probably my favorite is how she refers to former President Bush as "Dubya". I thought it was very creative. She says "wave Dubya down from the sky", to me is sounds like they're trying to get help from him but he is too high or far up in society that the black and poor mean nothing to him, which allegedly what they thought. Following that statement, it talks about the lies that you can occupy the victims with to give them hope and to actually believe that help is actually going to come. Needless to say, from my perspective nothing positive came out of that gesture. It even goes as far as to say in other words we will punish all who have participated in helping the rest of the citizens evacuate or help with food. She ends with part of the letter asking if there is anything that needs to be done or tweaked, just like the letter itself was tweaked.


Last but not least, the reason for the book's title. Siblings on page 75 talks about all the hurricanes and their capabilities but at the end calls Katrina the "blood dazzler" because she is the only one that has caused the most damage and killed more than just thousands and left even more thousands homeless and without families. This also leads me to the other poem "What Betsy Had to Say" which is just being hard on Katrina, like an older sister would do, telling her all you had to do was kiss the land, but instead you wanted to kill everyone, even those that were not in your path. It is in first person describing what the hurricane did and is criticizing all that Katrina did.

In the end, Patricia Smith was indicating that Hurricane Katrina enjoyed doing what she did. She goes on a murder spree and decides to take everyone out. In a way throughout the book, Patricia personifies Hurricane Katrina. It sounds like though all the people had faith, right down to the very end they did not blame God for the cause, instead they cursed Katrina which in a way cannot be personified. By personifying Hurricane Katrina, it gives the poet, the reader, and all the victims someone to blame for destroying all the lives during that time and how heartless "She" was during the incident. It was a very good read; I was touched as a poet and a human being. I can also relate to the victims in a way of how they felt in terms of the government coming to help because I am an African-American who is basically living off the government and sometimes my mother and I do not believe it to be fair of how they treat "us". Even though some of the imagery was distorted visually and uncomfortable, this knowledge of happened for real is very important. It gives those unaware of the situation insight of what the victims endured and how the emotional stress affected the victims and the rest of the nation.