Well, on Tuesday after the hurricane, they showed a
picture—flashed a picture of the Circle Food Store with water
up to the top of the doors. At that point, I said it's over. I mean,
that has never happened. I'm fifty-nine years old, and never has that
area flooded like that. I knew it was over at that point, and on
Wednesday, while watching CNN, I said we've got
Page 6to do
something. And one of the things, you know, I'm trained at and have
developed is this whole concept called
[unclear]
. I'm trained as a journalist.
[unclear]
trained me, and I didn't go to school for it. I mean, but I know
journalism front and back, and we developed this concept
[unclear] ,
[unclear]
being a West African storyteller/musician historian. From that
tradition, we take two things. One, writing about the history of the
culture, and the history and the culture of the communities we identify
with. And two, social commentary. So that was the
[unclear] portion of it, and neo was digital technology. I'm
very heavy into using digital technology, and we combined those two
together and that's what we call ourselves,
[unclear] .
We are not just writers. We say we write with texts, sound, and light,
and for us text is not just paper and pen or the computer, but also
using the internet. Sound is making CDs and radio broadcasting. I've
done a lot of radio work. In fact, I was doing five hours of live radio
a week, all the way up until Katrina. And light is video. We make
movies. So that's what I've been trained to do. So the Wednesday after
the storm, watching CNN, I said we've got to do something, and the thing
we're going to do is we're going to document people's
vision—what they saw, what they think, what they believe,
just however they [unclear] . And so I
came up with the concept of listen to the people, and said I was going
to make it happen. So that was it.