In the Face of Nature’s Chaos
By Matthew Kliewer
Bonar Menninger's and Hell Followed with It takes readers through several documentary perspectives of the 1966 EF-5 tornado that decimated parts of Topeka. Menninger’s clear interest throughout this book, beginning with the title and epigraph, is attempting to find the “why” and the “how” in the metaphysical explanations residents reached for in the storm's aftermath—the stories people sometimes must tell themselves to make sense of something so catastrophic.
Throughout the book, Menninger does his best to historicize the place of Topeka by engaging with the peoples who lived there at the time of the storm and those who inhabited the land for millennia. However, Menninger's retelling of the Indigenous histories (as well as his bibliography) leave quite a bit to be desired in terms of engaging with actual Indigenous worldviews. Poorly sourced tales of "burial grounds," a mysterious medicine man, and a vague curse all read as a sort of collective fear of retribution for the ills of settler colonialism. Menninger doesn't do close to enough research to land this plane, and one does not need to be familiar with the work of Phillip Deloria or Robert Berkhofer to recognize these trope-laden narratives.
Toward the end of his book, after painting a vivid, albeit Rockwellian portrait of Topeka and its residents before and after the Storm, Menninger wonders, "[I]f the tornado wasn't an agent of Chief Burnett or the Great Spirit, then was it God who informed its actions? Did an angry God unleash the destruction to punish the city? Or was it a merciful God who protected so many from the pitiless wrath of Satan." While Menninger notes "maybe it was just physics," he also goes out of his way to ascribe biblical weight to the tornado's path, timing, and toll, at nearly every turn entertaining the very providential readings he claims to hold at arm's length.
In general, I found Menninger's prose to be stylistically disjointed and unable to capture the weight and gravity of the tragedy. The imagined dialogue that occurs between Menninger's documentary subjects felt flat, stereotypical, and reminiscent of a true crime television show reenactment. The choice to include these dialogic moments at all leaves me a bit perplexed, although these are sins equally attributable to both author and editor/press.
But where the prose and characterizations we see from Menninger are far too steeped in uncritical Americana for my tastes, either Menninger, the now-shuttered Emerald Book Co publishing company, or a combination of both, deserve credit for the inclusion of a substantial amount of documentary photography. While Menninger stylistically differs quite a bit from James Agee, it's difficult not to be reminded of Agee and photographer Walker Evan's seminal collaboration in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
The photographs themselves tell a story that the prose almost refuses–weather can act senselessly. Despite the violence, the collective trauma, and the real human toll a storm may take, to attribute grander, metaphysical narratives to a storm is to prefer a clean, teleological narrative. These photographs, much like massive natural disasters themselves, refuse such emplotments and remind us of our own vulnerability in the face of nature’s chaos.
Originally from Cimarron, KS, Matt Kliewer is a Professor of Humanities at Austin Community College in Austin, TX. Matt is a scholar of Native American and global Indigenous literature, film, and media, and he holds an MA in English from the University of Oklahoma and a PhD in English with a certificate in Native American studies from the University of Georgia. His scholarly writing has appeared in The Georgia Review and Transmotion. Additionally, he served as an editorial assistant for the anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry.
