If Hurricane Katrina offered a contemporary example of ethnic cleansing in the United States, then the power of Trouble the Water, the 2008 Academy Award–nominated documentary, comes from its brazen ability to summon the voices and spirits of those who, by force or by choice, have not — could not — return to New Orleans. As a visual archive, Trouble the Water intervenes on the behalf of a city that lacked the bodies and the political will to make that intervention itself; it troubles the accepted archive of disaster.
The film tells the story of Kim Rivers Roberts, a twenty-four-year-old New Orleans resident and aspiring rapper, and her husband, Scott, as she documents their experiences before and after the hurricane. Roberts uses a handheld video camera that she purchased for twenty dollars on the street prior to the storm. Produced in collaboration with Tai Leeson and Carl Deal (Citizen Koch, 2013), the film presents Roberts telling a story of loss, trauma, precarity, and resilience in New Orleans using archival footage that she herself shot.
Trouble the Water exists in part because of the economic hardships faced by Black women, as well as so many Katrina survivors. Survival is, of course, a distinctly improvisational mode of navigating the world, and Trouble the Water harnesses the rhythms of Black improvisation via Roberts’s audio and visual narration. As such the film stands in striking opposition to other popular representations of a contemporary and gentrified New Orleans, including the popular Hollywood film Girls Trip, which presents the city in a vibrant, celebratory light, despite the real-life trauma experienced by its Black women characters.
As Roberts suggested in 2015, a decade after Katrina, “She’s still interrupting quality of life for citizens of New Orleans who are not middle class and rich. For people in other neighborhoods, it’s still tough. The lower ninth ward didn’t get enough help or money to rebuild …the kids don’t even have access to bathrooms in a park here — that’s Katrina in another form.” It is this notion of “another form” that lies at the heart of my interest in Trouble the Water as it serves as a metaphor for the tensions around, in this case, a Black woman’s archive, her curation of that archive, and the question of what might get lost.
In one of the film’s opening scenes, as Roberts and her husband Scott prepare to be interviewed by the filmmakers, Roberts clearly states that she wants “this” to go “worldwide,” and not remain merely “local.” Her comments serves as an indication of Roberts’s resistance to victimization and her exertion of agency. Significantly, Roberts’s captured footage features her in the role of the “breaking news” reporter, interviewing neighbors, especially children, about their plans as the storm approaches.
Here, Roberts allows for condemnation of state-sanctioned neglect both well before and after the impact of Katrina. In one instance, Roberts approaches a group of preteen Black girls, who all respond to the coming storm with a level of Black girl sass embodied by Roberts’s own filmmaking. One of the girls introduces herself with “I’m from the uptown 3rd Ward, ya heard me,” referencing a well-circulated New Orleans colloquialism. Yet the phrase “ya heard me” also holds relevance as the title of a song recorded by rap artists Soulja Slim on his 2001 album The Streets Made Me.
Soulja Sim, who hailed from “the uptown,” is one of several New Orleans–based musicians who were born in the Magnolia Projects, including Juvenile and Jay Electronica, who contributed to the national relevance of New Orleans rap music via the labels Cash Money and No Limit Records. The young girl’s affirmation of her origins may well have been emboldened by pride in the memory of Soulja Slim, who was murdered in 2003, and whose posthumous collaboration with Juvenile, “Slow Motion,” topped the pop charts the year before Katrina’s landfall.
The video for “Slow Motion” served as a memorial not just for the late Soulja Slim, but also, unwittingly, for the Magnolia Projects, and New Orleans public housing writ large, by wedding the city’s musical traditions with a built-environment that, in the wake of the hurricane, largely disappeared. Roberts privileges the worldview of a group of Black girls, generally dismissed both in Black and larger white communities as sources of knowledge.
Throughout Roberts samples Black cultural ephemera. A trip to the store on her bike to buy red beans and smoked neck bones — New Orleans staples — produces another series of interactions and reflections that contribute to Roberts’s claim to “the world that we did have a world” before the storm. While sitting and joking with an uncle and his friends outside of the store, Roberts sings Patti LaBelle’s “On My Own,” which functions as commentary on law enforcement officers who were themselves fleeing the city.
In another example, Roberts and her husband, Scott, return to their neighborhood two weeks after the levees failed, and the couple is confronted by one of their family dogs who was left behind. The dog is named “Kizzy,” a nod to Roots, Alex Haley’s fictionalized account of his family’s origin story. In the context of the book and award-winning miniseries, Kizzy was the daughter of the main protagonist, Kunte Kinte, who describes her as one who “stays put.” Roberts’ family dog named “Kizzy” in fact, stayed put. It is unknown how familiar Roberts might have been with Roots or the character of Kizzy. This example, though, as with others, highlights Roberts’s deft use of Black vernacular to build a distinctly gendered metaphorical shelter from the damage of Hurricane Katrina
In her short introductions and signoffs throughout Trouble the Water, Roberts refers to her rap persona “Black Kold Madina.” Roberts’s sampling of musical lyrics and citing of popular culture, serve as an archive of Black survival and Black female transcendence of trauma and tragedy. Roberts believed that all her own recorded music had been lost during Katrina, but when she and her husband landed in Memphis at the home of a cousin, she discovered a recording of her music that she had given to her cousin months earlier when he visited New Orleans. Not surprisingly, Roberts’ sampling practices are most evident in the creation of her own music.
The centerpiece of Trouble the Water is Roberts’ performance of the song “Amazing,” which samples “You Got Me,” the commercial breakthrough for the Roots in 1999 that featured vocals from Erykah Badu and earned the group a Grammy Award. The song was co-written by a then–little-known Jill Scott, who originally intended to record the song with the group, but the Roots were encouraged by their record label to seek out a more established artist. Scott does sing on a live recording of “You Got Me” that was released months later on the album The Roots Come Alive. One hears on that version an almost mystical sense of perseverance from Scott, that foreshadowed her own breakthrough a year later with Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds, Vol. 1. The history of “You Got Me,” in its various iterations, illustrates the ways in which Black women’s labor was subsumed in the context of the music industry in the late 1990s.
In lyrics that detail the death of her mother from AIDS and Roberts’ own turn to dealing drugs , David O’Grady notes how Roberts’ “perseverance and resilience . . . literally redirect the lens pointed at the storm to reveal instead an America languishing in the shadows cast by a country’s shiny story of itself.” Roberts’s lyrics (“I was just a little girl caught up in the storm”) which were recorded pre-Katrina, makes the connection between the storm of poverty and the natural disaster that exacerbated it.
Trouble the Water, and Roberts’s presence throughout, exemplify what the late historian Clyde Woods calls the “blues tradition of investigation and interpretation . . . a newly indigenous knowledge system that has been used repeatedly by multiple generations of working-class African Americans to organize communities of consciousness.” Roberts’s narration draws on what Woods describes as “African-American musical practices, folklore, and spirituality to reorganize and give a new voice to working class communities facing severe fragmentation.”
In and of themselves, those practices constitute ways of indexing, ordering, and archiving Blackness amid material, spiritual, and, in some cases, physical loss. As Woods observes, “This tradition has been engaged in the production and teaching of African American history from its inception.” When queried as to why she decided to carry a handheld video camera during the storm, Roberts told the Brooklyn Rail, “I decided to film because I realized we weren’t going to be able to leave — that was the fact…if I died, people gonna know how I died. So, to some degree, I was feeling like my legacy should live on and people would know what had happened to us.”
A version of this essay appears in Black Ephemera: The Crisis and the Challenge of the Music Archive.
Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African American Studies and Professor of English and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. The author of several books including Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, both from NYU Press. His next book Save a Seat for Me: Notes on American Fatherhood will be published by Simon & Schuster.