Ghosts Amongst Ruins: How Disaster Breaks the Clock
By Safa Figal
A tornado ripped through Nashville, Tennessee earlier this year. What it left in its wake were ghostly reminders of the past that beg for a reconceptualization of how we perceive the present and our prioritization of the future.
I felt like I had gone back in time as I drove through North and East Nashville, entering a time machine and landing a month prior when the tornado hit. Neighborhoods I was once familiar with and buildings I used to frequent were littered, broken, and even unrecognizable at times. My naive assumptions of the strength of progress failed me, and for some reason I had assumed that, over a month later, signs of the tornado would be hard to spot, slowly becoming a thing of the past. I felt a strange, embodied sense of dislocation facing the destroyed Basement East, a music venue in East Nashville, half expecting it to be magically fixed up. Instead, I faced heaps of rubble. Granted, the current coronavirus pandemic and necessary stay-at-home orders have slowed clean-up efforts– volunteer groups, for example, are now limited to only ten people, if they happen at all. However, of course mass destruction cannot simply be cleaned up in a matter of days. In these neighborhoods, time seemed to be in a sort of standstill, and the laborious and slow nature of recovery and fragility of narratives of progress were made painfully clear with each exposed house, crumbling church, and debris-strewn lot I passed.
On March 3, 2020, in the dead of night, multiple tornadoes touched down across my home state of Tennessee. Traveling west to east, one of the most damaging tornadoes tore through the capital and my hometown of Nashville. Winds from these tornadoes reached up to 165-175 mph, killing a total of twenty-five people and injuring hundreds. Over a thousand residential buildings and over four hundred commercial buildings were affected, many of which suffered major damage or were completely destroyed.
The most prominent, initial headlines covering the catastrophe focused on the affected communities of East Nashville and Germantown. Both of these neighborhoods are highly gentrified and “up-and-coming,” filled with popular restaurants and hip tourist attractions. One of the main, and more eerie, images circulating the media of the tornado destruction is of the Basement East, where almost everything was destroyed except for a surviving portion of the wall with a mural that reads “I Believe in Nashville.”
Photo Credit Safa Figal 2020
This mural, which was created in response to the tragic floods that ravaged the city in 2010, is meant to represent Nashville’s strength and resiliency. However, it has also become one of the most prominent backgrounds tourists use for Instagram photos, becoming a symbol of gentrification and increased tourism as well. In the days following the March tornado, it soon became clear that poorer neighborhoods– both more rural towns farther east and the historically Black neighborhood of North Nashville– were especially damaged by the storm as well. Despite the blow they took, these neighborhoods did not gain the sort of immediate media attention that wealthier, “hipper” neighborhoods initially received and were even simply lumped together and described as “other areas” in some news reports.
It wasn’t until I finally made it home from college on spring break that I was able to see, firsthand, the destruction the tornado left. Following its path from North to East Nashville felt like driving through a ghost town. Even with few people on the street going for their daily walks, the sight of crumbling houses, missing roofs, bent store signs, and piles of rubble transform an average neighborhood into the backdrop of an apocalyptic movie set. The smell of fresh, spring air felt out of place drifting through torn-open houses. The chirping of birds and occasional distant conversation felt eerie contrasted with evidence of chaos. Wooden planks and metal rods jutted out of larger buildings, bending and pointing at angles only the most treacherous of forces could cause, yet frozen, still in place. Trees that may once have been overlooked had been stripped of their leaves and thrown into unnatural positions, demanding the attention of those who pass by.
Photo Credit Safa Figal 2020
I had a hard time imagining what this landscape looked like a month prior– directly after the tornado– if ruins still persisted now, and simply thinking of this was overwhelming. Some buildings remained standing, yet barely holding on as insulation tumbled down the now-exposed, skeletal interior. Others were not as lucky, and piles of rubble act as the only remains of what once was, leaving one’s imagination to fill in the missing gaps.
Within these gaps and amidst this wreckage, ghosts appear. They show up in personal items left in the piles of rubble, creep out of busted windows and crumbling walls, and linger over recently vacant lots. Ghosts emerge in the presence of absence, and in their haunting they provide a nagging reminder of what once was, what could be, and what currently is not.
I felt the presence of numerous ghosts as I visited these neighborhoods affected by the March tornadoes. There are the ghosts of a young couple, Michael Dolfini and Albree Sexton, walking the streets of East Nashville, reminding neighbors of their absence and tragic death down the block. Damaged buildings support phantom structures that fill in where walls were missing and roofs once were, their previous lives survived only by insulation and wooden skeletons. Personal items peeking out from under bricks represent those who are displaced, leaving the observer to wonder where they could be now. The traces of the tornado still visible over a month after the event leave these neighborhoods marked by tragedy and haunted by destruction, transformed into a playground for ghosts.
Photo Credit Safa Figal 2020
Of course, we are always living with ghosts. Whether they be the ghosts of lost loved ones with whom we have unresolved conflict or larger issues prematurely reserved to the past, such as the violence of slavery, we walk amongst ghosts everyday. However, I believe disasters have a particular way of shaking reality, sometimes quite literally, in a way that dislodges and throws ghosts more visibly into the everyday, demanding those living to reckon with them.
According to sociologist Avery Gordon, ghosts are a social force that must be taken seriously in order to understand the present that they haunt.(1) Gordon’s ghosts may not necessarily be the white, translucent apparition that floats above your bed and shouts “BOO,” but rather that from the past which can be felt lingering in the present. These sorts of ghosts are the ways in which “something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there…makes itself known” and are similarly described by anthropologist Anna Tsing as “the vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the present.”(2) Ghosts haunt us until their demands are not only acknowledged but influence and change our current times. They are always lingering, yet become particularly visible during moments that rupture our normative senses of time, such as in a tornado. As Gordon puts it, “being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition” (emphasis mine). It is this opportunity for transformation, rather than simple recognition, that I posit ghosts provide during times of crisis.
There are the ghosts of those who have died, whose memory haunts loved ones and neighbors. There are the ghosts that take the form of rubble and ruins, the pile of bricks and splintered wood that represents the home that used to be but no longer is. But then there are the more abstract ghosts, the ones that align more with Gordon’s description of hauntings and draw the past into the present. Nashville’s past histories with natural disasters, such as the 1998 tornado and devastating 2010 flood, are no longer things of the past but rather important ghostly fixtures in the present. They become reminders of our city’s resilience and community, acting as a model for what to do (or not do) during relief efforts. In light of the current tornado, these past disasters bring back memories for some, anxieties for others, or are news to recent Nashville transplants. However, while these past stories of natural disasters that have ravaged Nashville are often mobilized in the present day as illustrations of the city’s fighting spirit and altruistic community, like any story, narratives have gaps, and it’s through these gaps that ghosts creep out.
What is often left unsaid in these stories is that present-day Nashville is haunted by the mass displacement that followed these historical disasters, and the cries of these same ghosts are deafening after the March tornadoes. The lingering ghostly presence that became most noticeable to me as I drove through both East and North Nashville was that of wealth disparity and the violent reminders of gentrification that the tornado has laid bare. As a white person driving around the predominantly Black neighborhood of North Nashville taking photographs of destruction, a ghost brushed up against me and reminded me of the wealthy, often white, investors that have circled this neighborhood moments after the tornadoes in attempts to capitalize off of tragedy and suffering. The ghost’s haunting reminded me of the immediate attention East Nashville received after the tornado, with earlier news articles only referring to the North Nashville area as “Germantown,” the newly gentrified neighborhood that encroaches upon historical North Nashville, if at all. Ghosts crept out of the busted windows and broken roofs of North Nashville homes that stand directly next to newly built “tall skinny” houses, many of which remained untouched and undamaged.
Photo Credit Safa Figal 2020
Ghosts make more visible what has always been there– the tornado simply provided them a platform. Facing these hauntings means to face the ugly reality that is gentrification in my city and history of displacement that runs the risk of being repeated.
Choosing to not face ghosts– to remain ignorant to their hauntings– requires that you remain in a forever-forward-facing, progressive, temporal mindset. Ideals of progress are the heartbeat of cities, a pulse that can be felt even more strongly in “up and coming” neighborhoods such as East Nashville. Swept up in capitalist rhetoric of productivity, cities, neighborhoods, and many individuals themselves internalize this forward-pushing temporality. It materializes in the new skyscrapers popping up across the skyline, trendy new start-ups encroaching on historically disenfranchised communities, and an average daily population growth hovering around eighty to one hundred people. On a more individual level, ideals of Progress can take the shape of unrealistic To Do lists, investing in the present simply for a future pay off, and measuring one’s value based on productivity. It is not that these progress logics are inherently wrong or bad. Rather, it is the act of seemingly always living in the future instead of grounding oneself in the present, and failing to acknowledge the ways in which the past impresses upon this present, that proves particularly fragile and able to be blown to bits with the passing of a tornado and the haunting of ghosts. As Tsing reflects, far too often “deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are bulldozed into gardens of Progress.”(2) It may not be until something as devastating as a deadly tornado occurs that these gardens are torn down and these graves are dug up.
Photo Credit Safa Figal 2020
Ghosts and disasters both force us to slip out of a future-oriented ideal of time and place and perhaps dip into new, somewhat non-normative modes of being. To start, tornadoes blast all normative senses of time to pieces. They have the power to take human life, ending an individual’s sense of progress forever, but also have the ability to destroy life in other ways: the life of buildings, of trees, of businesses. Things cannot progress as normal in the aftermath of a tornado– a landscape is forever changed. Writer Rebecca Solnit describes how disasters “throw people into the present.” When neighborhoods are devastated by tornadoes, daily living becomes a means of survival. Many cannot afford to entertain fantastical ideals of a supposed future when the here and now is demanding their attention, creating what Solnit describes as a sense of “supersaturated immediacy.” Disasters, such as tornadoes, reveal the fragility of tomorrow and expose the ways in which perhaps the only constant in our lives is uncertainty. Suddenly, future dreams are replaced with present-day necessities, and in some cases the landscapes of ruins that still exist weeks after the destruction act as permanent reminders of the past, frozen in place as progress is put on hold. This breakage in time and place makes ample room for ghosts to escape, always lingering yet now made more visceral. It is when people begin to scramble for normality, to regain their footing back to a track of progress when ideals of progress have been exploded, that the ghosts creep in.
A dual temporality is thus set up, one in which disasters throw us into the present, yet these ghosts remind us of the past. Tsing discusses this sort of temporal disruption that ghosts create in saying that ghosts are the “return to the pasts” that we “need [in order] to see the present more clearly.”(2) Ghostly figures and presences represent the ways in which the past pushes up against and shapes the present. Haunting shows us “multiple unruly temporalities” that beg a reconceptualization of normative understandings of pasts, presents, and futures as isolated time frames.(2) Both a severe tornado and the lingering of ghosts ask us to interrogate our tendency to be glued to images of the future, always forward facing towards the goal of Progress. It is through this interrogation that we come to see the gaps from which the ghosts escaped, in turn recognizing who and what has been left out, overlooked, and demanding our attention now more than ever.
Rebecca Solnit explains how after a crisis, when things feel like they are falling apart and may actually be physically falling apart, people tend to fall together. She argues that when you have “shared an experience with everyone around you, you often find very direct, but also metaphysical senses of connection to the people you suddenly have something in common with.” Disasters, such as tornadoes, have a way of exposing inherent interconnectedness among individuals as they come together in recovery after having experienced a shared trauma. Even from a thousand miles away from the site of disaster, and even though my family was not directly affected, I suddenly felt the strength of community more than I ever have days after the tornado, simply by having something in common with those who were grieving. Similarly, anthropologist Michael Jackson writes that ghosts “reflect the extent to which everyday life is pervaded by the experience of interrelationship.”(3) While tornadoes reveal the vulnerability of physical structures and create a shared experience for people to gather around, our shared ability to even be haunted by ghosts also acts as a unifying force as well. Ghosts not only illuminate the connections between the past and present but also of those who are haunted. Tornadoes stall out progress while ghosts force us to reckon with this progress, reminding us that time doesn’t pass but rather accumulates.
Though disasters create devastating destruction, they also grant us moments of pause– pockets of time in which we can pay adequate attention to the past in order to build a better present. Our shared ability to be vulnerable to both temporal shifts allow for opportunities of collective reorientation during a time when collectivism is needed most, and perhaps this is the silver lining that we can find among the wreckage of tornado destruction.
References:
(1) Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
(2) Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, et al. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
(3) Jackson, Michael. Minima Ethnographica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
