Not long after Hurricane Katrina, there was a single moment in American culture that burned with pain, confusion and rage: Kanye West on a benefit telethon, breaking from his TelePrompter script to declare: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Over the last five years, the toll from Katrina has been palpable in art, literature, cinema, television and music. Works like the following are marked by the same frustration Katrina's victims felt as their pleas for help went unanswered. And they suggest the wounds have yet to heal.

If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise

An astute observer of race issues in America, filmmaker Spike Lee saw many of his longtime concerns writ large in the continuing catastrophe of Katrina. Recently broadcast on HBO, If God Is Willing… widens the scope of its four-hour predecessor, When the Levees Broke (2006). Along with first-hand accounts of the flood and scenes featuring activist actors such as Brad Pitt, the new film presents the stories of people who suffered more trauma and displacement when the U.S. government took the opportunity to demolish the housing projects that had been their homes. If God Is Willing… ends on an inevitably dispiriting note – with the news of the BP oil spill.

The River in Reverse

This musical meeting between Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, the dean of New Orleans R&B, was an understandably bittersweet affair. The bespectacled Brit wrote the title track on Sept. 24, 2005, and performed it for the first time that night at a benefit in New York. “There must be something better than this,” went its mournful refrain, “’cos I don’t see how it can get much worse.” Even so, much of the music here and on its sister album, Our New Orleans: Benefit for the Gulf Coast (2005), demonstrates a spirit of defiance and even jubilation in the face of terrible adversity.

(Random House)

Zeitoun

Dave Eggers wrote this non-fiction account of the storm and its aftermath by drawing on interviews with Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-born painting contractor who weathered Katrina and rescued many of his neighbours, only to be accused of being a terrorist and eventually ground down by post-storm bureaucratic hassles. Josh Neufeld’s similarly acclaimed graphic novel, A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge, deployed a similarly unconventional approach to lend greater drama and urgency to the real stories people told.

Trouble the Water

A prizewinner at Sundance in 2008 and an Academy Award nominee for best documentary, this film by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal contains some of the most extraordinary first-hand footage of the catastrophe. It was shot by a 24-year-old aspiring rap artist named Kimberly Rivers Roberts, who turned the camera on her neighbours in the Ninth Ward. Other than Spike Lee’s films, Trouble the Water may be the most significant and stirring of the many documentaries about Hurricane Katrina. It also provides a much more complete and humane view of the event than enviro docs such as An Inconvenient Truth and The Age of Stupid, which use spectacular storm footage as convenient shorthand for the changes in weather patterns wrought by climate change.

Hurricane Season

Hollywood’s artistic response to the tragedy has been largely limited to charity projects like the 2005 telethon and Love Letters to the South, a benefit book that combined Katrina photos with letters of sympathy and support from celebs, including Johnny Depp and Justin Timberlake. Released straight to DVD in 2009, Hurricane Season was a docudrama starring Bow Wow and Forest Whitaker, about a championship basketball team assembled from students displaced from several New Orleans high schools. The storm also served as a setting and framing device for the romantic epic The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and as an engine for the plot of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), an anarchic crime flick that paired Nicolas Cage with director Werner Herzog.

Treme

This past spring, David Simon, co-creator of The Wire, crafted another critically adored series for HBO. Forgoing the cops-and-criminals milieu that defined Baltimore in his previous TV serial, Simon and collaborator Eric Overmyer shine a light on regular and not-so-regular folks in the New Orleans neighbourhood of Treme as they try to put their lives back together three months after the flood. The fact that many of the characters are musicians brought vibrancy to the 10 episodes to date, but more despairing notes are sure to be just as prominent when Treme returns for its second season.

In the Wake of Katrina

There was no shortage of TV news coverage of flooded neighbourhoods, desperate people on rooftops and confrontations on bridges and in the Superdome. Yet the still photographs may speak greater volumes about what happened. A Canadian photographer and poet who signed on with the prestigious Magnum agency in 1988, Larry Towell journeyed with novelist Ace Atkins to document the hurricane’s wake across Alabama and Louisiana. Books by Richard Misrach (Destroy This Memory) and Chris Jordan (In Katrina’s Wake) provide other stark views of the impact on the region and its inhabitants.

Tie My Hands and Get Ya Hustle On

New Orleans has had a reputation as a hotspot for southern hip-hop. Though its rap community was devastated along with so much of the city, many of its most prominent MCs gave voice to their pain, most notably in the track Tie My Hands by Lil’ Wayne, included on his 2008 disc Tha Carter III. (It’s also featured on Something Else, an album by his duet partner Robin Thicke.) Wayne’s loping lament included lines like, “I lost everything but I ain’t the only one.” Juvenile, a rapper whose home in Slidell, La., was badly damaged by the storm, took a harsher tack in Get Ya Hustle On: “F--- Fox News! I don’t listen to y’all ass/ Couldn’t get a n---- off the roof with a star pass!”

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.