Emotional trauma of being displaced
Malane Collins by Betty Wooddy, 2007; 4700.1951
Click photo to enlarge
Malane Collins.
TEMPESTS: Storms in the Archives
Malane Collins: It was hard, because I'd lived, you know, New Orleans, then Houston, then Mobile, and then here. So you're dragging around these seventy or eighty boxes and eighty paintings. And you really can't think. One day I was in a drugstore in New Orleans getting prescriptions, and this woman said, "Don't move. I want to show you something." In the Times-Picayune, on the Living section, the whole page was devoted to what we were feeling. Because I thought I was losing my mind. But there it was, she must have seen that look. It says we have short term memory loss, we can't concentrate, we're depressed. I thought, "Oh, that's me." I can jump off of a bridge and nobody will care. Because every symptom that was there, and it still exists, because I still talk to friends in New Orleans, and they're miserable, because their life has changed. Basically, your life was taken away from you. Everything you knew, every place you ate, every friend you had, every connection you had, every physician you had for thirty . . . It was all gone and you just couldn't get your act together. So I kept that. I don't know where it is, but it described how pitiful, even people who lost their homes, that was worse. But the main issue of the article was you lost your life.