What can literature teach us about natural disasters?

Over a year on, the impact of the horrendous floods of February-March 2022 remain a challenge in the daily lives of many Northern Rivers residents. Here, Nic Margan considers three books that might provide solace, knowledge and inspiration as the region continues its recovery.

As we pass the anniversary of last year’s major flooding in our region, some will now find themselves ready to reflect on what meaning we can make of the event – as well as the terrible earthquake experienced by those in Türkiye and Syria this year. Like me, you may be still replacing those sodden titles you threw out. If you’re looking for some books that might help, here are three pertinent titles – by a seismologist, a social and political theorist, and a psychologist.

The Big Ones (2018) by Dr Lucy Jones

This book is a social and cultural history of how our understanding of natural disasters has changed over time, with the aim of suggesting we actively shape that response to better prepare for future events. It is quite slim and easy to read but the examples chosen are fascinating and effectively sequenced.

The intensity, lethality and duration of some of the disasters described is mind-boggling. One of the most intense is the Laki eruption, in Iceland in the 1780s, which is described as follows:

The eruption… deposited a fifty-foot-thick blanket of lava over six hundred square miles… Most of the lava came in the first forty-five days, when it was described as flowing as fast as a river in spring flood.

Terrifying.

There was so much sulphur dioxide pumped into the stratosphere by the Laki eruption that heat from the sun couldn’t reach the earth. Global temperatures dropped by several degrees over the following winter and widespread crop failures occurred throughout Europe.

Jones recounts how the interpretation of natural disasters in the past was highly religious. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 struck in the morning of All Saints’ Day, when almost the entire Catholic population of the city were in mass. Protestants in the Netherlands saw the disaster as God punishing the Catholics for the Inquisition, while in Lisbon itself, the scapegoating of Protestants led to about thirty of them being executed.

About this, Voltaire wrote in Candide:

After the earthquake had destroyed threefourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fé; for it had been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking.

In another example, from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, intellectuals of all kinds evaded persecution by finding inventive ways to contribute to earthquake research – literature professors pored over ancient books to study any reference to earthquakes, veterinarians collected citizen-reports of strange animal behaviour in a (failed) attempt to correlate it with plate movement. Earthquakes were seen from ancient times as an indictment of the ruling power, so control over them was pursued as the ultimate symbol of success by Mao. I found a poster from the era that reads: ‘Earthquakes don’t frighten us, the people will surely vanquish nature.’

The book also tells stories about how common a social response blaming the victim is, which I can relate to in the Lismore context. It wasn’t long after the flood that one D-grade politician said: ‘You’ve got people who want to live among the gum trees – what do you think is going to happen? Their house falls in the river, and they say it’s the government’s fault.’

Finally, there are some great stories about people finding a sense of purpose and community after natural disasters.

The example given in the book is in the wake of Fukushima. One person had this to say about her new sense of perspective:

Love, thank and cherish your loved ones every day of your life… It sounds like a cliché, but that is what many cannot do anymore and miss the most… My town and other disaster areas are talked about in the sense of disaster prevention/ preparedness and reconstructions very frequently, but I think we can also be the ones to talk about ‘love’ because many of us have found our own definitions of what that is.

The Big Ones is published by Penguin Random House.

A Paradise Built in Hell (2009) by Rebecca Solnit

This book focuses in on how natural disasters can provide the opportunity for personal and social transformation. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1908, a sign over a makeshift community kitchen read: ‘One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.’

Taken in abstract, this would gloss too easily over the hardship experienced by people and communities following a disaster. But Solnit takes great care to consistently recognise the damage that disasters do. This book is written methodically, adding evidence and taking away conjecture, indicating what is estimated and where the sum ends, and the result lies. Yet, it never lacks passion.

Solnit begins by presenting evidence that the way people respond to disasters is often to help one another and feel happy doing it. She then raises the idea that this might indicate we desire a greater sense of community identity.

It is summarised:

Disasters provide a temporary liberation from the worries, inhibitions, and anxieties associated with the past and future because they force people to concentrate their full attention on immediate moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs within the context of the present realities.

Strangely enough, I did feel strong, purposeful and connected after our floods.

There were times that I felt the evidence was being stretched. Some of the doubts arose from the content itself. The book is overtly political and this makes it hard to always know how much fact and how much interpretation there is in any given part. But as I continued reading, my resistance weakened, and I was soon taken with the revolutionary spirit that ebbs beneath its lovely words.

The book is as much about social possibility as it is about dismantling its counterpoint: the belief that people are at their worst when the rules break down after a disaster.

The main spear of the book lands when Solnit writes about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It’s hard to overstate how wildly off-mark beliefs about what was happening in the city at the time were.

Maybe this sums it up best: a policeman explaining that his captain thought they needed to leave their hotel because the wild, lawless people were going to burn it down and kill everyone, and the policeman recalling: ‘At this point it’s like four days into it, and we’re trying to explain to the captain, these people are so tired and thirsty and hungry they couldn’t flip over a lawn chair if they wanted to riot.’

As is clear from the case studies in the book, human nature isn’t more often ‘fight-or-flight’ than ‘tend-and- befriend’ in a crisis.

In the end, the point of the book is both that terrible things happen when we are afraid of each other and that wonderful things can happen when we aren’t. In almost all common people there is the latent ability to connect, participate, find purpose and be altruistic. And the disaster isn’t confined to the event – the knowledge and desire and belief that we have right now are what we will take into a disaster, and they will shape how the disaster affects us and those around us. Survival quite literally depends more on how we shape those than on how much the plates shift.

I was so glad I read it. I gave Solnit’s book a big kiss on the cover when I finished it.

A Paradise Built in Hell is published by Penguin.

The Body Keeps the Score (2014) by Bessel van der Kolk

After all that positivity, I felt it was important to learn about one of the major social damages that was spoken about after our flood: trauma.

I struggled at times with this book. It is long, quite technical, very heavy and the through-narrative occasionally tenuous. But I eventually decided that if it hadn’t been difficult in the way that it was, it wouldn’t have been as well written. It’s a book that has a very specific intention – that people understand the information and apply it to improve their own or others’ lives – and it needed to be methodical to ensure that information was communicated. Additionally, writing a book that may influence highly vulnerable people, that doesn’t go to lengths to support itself with the science it is based on, is irresponsible.

This idea is borne out in studies presented later, in which it is shown that the bodies of some people after a traumatic event will continue to secrete stress hormones long after any threat has passed. These emotions can make rationalising difficult, so that a small problem can be blown out of proportion because of the inability to self-regulate.

At the start of the book, we meet a soldier who will not take his pills because he feels he must remain a living memorial to the damages of the war, so that the deaths of his friends won’t have been in vain. This introduces the idea that some part of traumatised people remains stuck in the past.

There was a lot for me to learn about basic neuroscience. Prefrontal cortex, limbic brain and brainstem were all foreign terms to me; I thought of them as obscure, but I can now say they are legitimately useful to learn about. In the same way that it’s good to know your stomach hurting probably won’t be fixed by getting more air into your lungs, it’s good to know that the overarousal of the limbic system may be out of reach of any rationalisation by the prefrontal cortex. One of the main features of what makes an event potentially traumatic is if the event endangers the person’s sense of safety around other people. This could be from experiencing the horror of what people are capable of in war, or the horror of being sent to war by a government you trusted, or abuse or neglect by a carer or loved one. Thinking back to the floods, I realised how important it was that people helped themselves and one another. I also made connections between this and what I have read about Hurricane Katrina. The physical horror would have been made so much more unbearable by the sense that the government and the population of the broader nation had turned their backs on them. There are those in our region who are still battling an unsympathetic bureaucracy for decent and stable housing.

Trauma can also affect memory. The details of events become repressed or are experienced unlike other memories (in a sequence or narrative), but in sharply exposed, jumbled and incomplete sensations. Historically, trauma has been deemed made-up or the fault of the victim. When soldiers after World War II were treated for PTSD, doctors ‘almost invariably found the root cause in pre-war experience: the sick men were not first-grade fighting material… The military proposition is [that it is] not war which make men sick, but that sick men cannot fight wars.’

Most of the second part looks at treatment options. While talking therapy has its place, much of the thrust of the book is about the limitations of language and the possibilities for healing presented by other options. These include eye movement desensitisation and processing, yoga, internal family systems therapy, psychomotor therapy, music, dance and theatre. I appreciated that van der Kolk gave so much space to solutions.

Ultimately, though I struggled with it, the book has achieved the admirable task of identifying a set of social problems that are pervasive to such a degree that they are often regarded as normal, then giving ideas as to how we can change.

The Body Keeps the Score is published by Viking Press.