“Someone, you finally realize, has sufferedyour exact misfortune before you.
carrying grayed-out swirls—ghosts—to greed’s unbroken refrain.”
Even fishermen put out of work by the spill feel too tied to the oil industry to hold much rancor toward BP, Hardin says. “Every family has a relative working in the oil industry,”
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BP has barred employees and contractors from talking to journalists and banned media from observing the worst damage, but even apparently pristine coastline offers dark surprises. “You step on what looks like a normal beach and it seeps,” Hardin says. “The oil is right underneath the seemingly clear surface.”
Coffman and Hardin, also a filmmaker, started bumping into each other at academic conferences in the mid-90s. By 1996, when they began actively corresponding, Coffman was teaching at Tampa State and Hardin was teaching at the University of Arizona. In 1998 he came to Chicago to teach at Columbia College.
In the fall of 2003, a colleague of Coffman’s at Tampa State, poet Martha Serpas, invited Coffman and Hardin to film a trip down Bayou Lafourche. The bayou, south of New Orleans, was an outlet of the Mississippi until it was dammed early in the last century. The area was settled by French-speaking Acadians expelled from Canada by the British in the 1700s and remains a center of Cajun culture. A native of the region, Serpas has been called the poet laureate of Bayou Lafourche. On that first visit Serpas introduced Hardin and Coffman to people whose homes and livelihoods were being swallowed by the rising Gulf of Mexico.
“I keep urging her to write about the oil spill,” Hardin says. “But you can’t put a quarter in and something pops out.”
Sun 6/13, 6-8 PM, Wishbone, 3300 N. Lincoln, $30 minimum contribution includes dinner, music by Cajun Toujours, RSVP to ecoffma@luc.edu or thardin@colum.edu, veinsinthegulf.com.
