The tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina looms here in New Orleans, an event for which I had every intention of lowering my head and keeping quiet. I was on a mountain in the Catskills when Katrina hit, in August of 2005, awaiting the publication of a book of mine the following day. I belong to that ignominious group of people whose response to a disaster, no matter how fundamentally humane, nevertheless includes some voice in their head yelping, “This is not good for the book!” (Or movie, or exhibition, or conference, or birthday party, etc.)

I watched footage of a submerged New Orleans at a remove that was physical as well as emotional. I could not have imagined that our fates would one day be entwined. Then, in 2008, I moved here. And so my feelings about Katrina have always been bifurcated: empathy for the people who went through it, and a constant awareness—and guilt—about the way I felt while up on that mountain.

Almost the first thing I learned about New Orleans was how little I understood about Katrina. It happened during one of my interviews before being hired at Tulane University. The woman in whose office I was sitting was calm, professional, even a bit subdued. We were chatting amiably about New York City, where I lived at the time, and New Orleans.

“I guess Katrina was for New Orleans what 9/11 was for New York,” I said. “Except Katrina was a natural disaster and 9/11 was man-made.”

She brought her fingers to her mouth, thinking, perhaps, Here is a teachable moment. Or maybe, Resist the urge to hit him with the paperweight! She sat forward and explained, in a voice only slightly raised, that Katrina was a man-made disaster, too. I don’t recall the exact words, though I would bet “flood” and “levee failure” were mentioned. Part of my misunderstanding stemmed from my desire to find connections and echoes between New York and New Orleans, even to incorporate New Orleans into New York somehow, and make it a sixth borough, one long, last stop beyond Rockaway Beach.

All of this came back to me when I read a blog post by Eve Troeh, the news director of the local NPR station, in which she asked the public for feedback on a matter of language. “In newsrooms across the city and, yes, the nation and presumably the world, journalists are staring down blank whiteboards with the headline: Ten-Year Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina,” she wrote. “We are figuring out how often and in which contexts to gracefully add the phrase ‘and the federal levee failures’ without upsetting sentence structure, or whether to simply call everything ‘the flood.’”

This was, I felt, an attempt to include the people of New Orleans in a discussion about Katrina that is contentious and emotional. Part of the reason it’s contentious and emotional is because of how Katrina is understood, or misunderstood, everywhere else.

When I arrived in New Orleans, the streetcars had just started to run again. I found them beautiful but also incredible, creaking along in the heavy dusk of August, their wood interiors lit by a warm orange glow. The houses they passed had an equally unreal quality. It felt like a stage set. A performance of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” had recently been staged in the Lower Ninth Ward. Placards advertising the play had been stuck in the ground all over town, including along the streetcar route on St. Charles Avenue; they featured a drawing by the show’s producer, Paul Chan—two charcoal figures, their heads offset by blue. They seemed to be lying face down on the ground, like silhouettes of bodies at a crime scene. Some of the placards had been knocked over by wind. Everywhere, the feeling of aftermath.

New Orleans is famous for its distinct vernacular, and one of the things I had to absorb was the vernacular of Katrina. “Defend New Orleans” T-shirts were prevalent, and reflected the general mood. I realize that this iconography has become commonplace—I recently saw one that said “Defend White Plains”—but they captured a pride, an anxiety, and a defensiveness that was expressed in many others words and slogans: “It Was the Flood, Not the Storm”; “Make Levees, Not War”; “New Orleans: Proud to Call It Home”; and “Hold the Corps Accountable.”

This last one, about the Corps, is the work of Levees.org, an organization that has done more than any other to educate the general public that Katrina was not a “natural” disaster. The group believes that the blame for the destruction of New Orleans lies entirely with the incompetence—in the most generous iteration—of the people who built the levees that broke: the Army Corps of Engineers.

Eve Troeh, the NPR news director, moved here from a small town in Missouri after college, in 2000. When Katrina hit, she was out of town, on a fellowship, but she moved back as soon as possible, and witnessed the city’s ordeal of recovery. She left for Los Angeles in 2007—the departure precipitated by having been a victim of a violent crime—and on the way out wrote a piece for NPR called “Dear New Orleans, I’m leaving you.” It was, in form and in tone, a kind of break-up note. “I talk to friends about New Orleans like a dysfunctional romance,” she wrote. “I gush over it one day, then call up bawling and heartbroken the next. Why can’t it change? Stop being self-destructive and violent? It has so much potential.”

She moved back to the city in 2013 for her current job at NPR. I met her at a Mid-City coffee shop, the Bean Gallery, near her home; she was pregnant enough that I didn’t have to feel fearful about congratulating her on being pregnant.

Why, I asked, has this issue of blame remained such a hot-button issue in New Orleans? She suggested that just as the crisis itself was brought on not by the initial storm but by the subsequent flood, the trauma of Katrina was partly about what happened in the city, and partly about what everyone else had to say about it.

“There was something about the coverage at the time that suggested that New Orleans had been asking for it,” she said. “That it deserved what it got. “

I pointed out that there were fringe elements in America who said that about New York after 9/11.

“Yeah. But no one was saying, ‘Bad choice, New Yorkers, what did you expect living in the global finance capital?’” she said. “In the media, after Katrina, there was a lot of sympathy, not a lot of empathy. It was like, ‘Those poor people.’ When people suggested it might be best to not rebuild the city at all, the response was, ‘Jazz hands!’” She raised her hands and wiggled her fingers. “It felt like New Orleans was treated like an ornament. That it was expendable.

“With Katrina, there was a question of responsibility, and blame. New Orleans is associated in the public imagination with the enjoyment of sex, unhealthy food, drinking. It was somehow like the country was saying to the city, ‘Let’s look at your life decisions. What did you expect when you were wearing that sexy dress?’”