Process Essay for "Ekphrasis"
This poem responds to a photo printed in Shane Lief and John McCusker’s Jockomo: The Native Roots of Mardi Gras Indians. The black-and-white snapshot captures a group of Mardi Gras Indians on February 26, 1903 in what is the earliest known photograph of people practicing this particular tradition. Via ekphrastic analysis, this poem documents and seeks to expound upon the visual details through the historically and critically-informed lens of available literary texts. One such resource is an essay written by American Studies scholar George Lipsitz titled “Mardi Gras Indians: Carnival and Counternarrative in Black New Orleans,” in which he conducts a survey of the confluence of African and Native American traditions that resulted in what we observe today (and, as the photograph illustrates, at the turn of the twentieth century) as the Mardi Gras Indian tradition. In the anthology titled When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature, Lipsitz glosses some of the originary interactions between cultural and racial groups that formed the foundation for such a syncretic tradition to arise:
Despite the limiting language of Lipsitz’ article, his assessment offers a window into the kind of context the people pictured in the photo might have known firsthand or inherited from recent generations. However, it also raises a number of questions about the specifics of their experience. As if in response to some of these questions, Lief and McCusker quote historian Richebourg McWilliams’s observations that:In slavery times, Indian communities offered blacks a potential alternative to a society in which to be black was to be a slave and to be white was to be free. In New Orleans, black slaves mingled with Indians in local markets, and interactions between Native Americans and blacks gave many Louisiana blacks a historical claim to joint Indian and African American heritage. (221)
These observations provide another entrypoint into the possible experience of those pictured in the photo, though the poem’s opening lines “as grainy as my view of them / in history’s record, still,” connect the physical lack of clarity of the 1903 photograph to the way it resists symbolic interpretation as well. The lines that follow seek to relay literal details, which in themselves further illustrate relative obscurity that remains.“masking like Native Americans, it created an identity of strength. Native Americans under all the pressure and duress, would not concede. These people were almost driven into extinction, and the same kind of feeling came out of slavery. [...] In masking, they paid respect and homage to the Native American by using their identity and making a social statement that despite the odds, they’re not going to stop” (106).
Although there is a wealth of contemporary documentation of the Mardi Gras Indians that leaves less room for varied interpretations, this photo presents an opportunity to hold in tension what Lipsitz refers to as the “myriad of contradictory images and icons” which generations of people in and out of the Bulbanacha region have drawn upon to “fashion a syncretic identity” (Lipsitz 221). Though it is unclear which path they march, the memories of the Chitimacha people’s calumet ceremony with the French remains embedded in the land. Likewise, the mythos of positive collaboration and liberation found between Black and Native groups during slavery and in its aftermath would have likely informed the sense of pride and honor in carrying out the march pictured here. As with each of the works in this Lyric Histories series, this poem resists simple assumptions not supported, even if obliquely, by the historical record. However, there is no concrete signifier of Indigenous tribal belonging that would answer the second and third questions the poem explicitly poses. Indeed, the photographed figures are Mardi Gras Indians, but what can be said further about their “Indian” identities?
The line beginning “only the power tower” underscores the irony present in the relative clarity of an urban infrastructure marker at the photo’s horizon compared to the interpretive ambiguity of the figures in its fore. The language of “power tower” also evokes the hierarchical colonial social structure that largely drove intercommunal formations between Indigenous and African American communities. Across the lines that follow, the idea of a “power tower” calls forth the cross-cultural implications of Mardi Gras tribe names such as “Yellow Pocahontas” and “Black Cherokee” in the context of performative versus innate forms of identity. It is unclear whether “masking Indian” is a mere costume for the performers pictured, but the long history of violence enacted by minstrel performers, mascots, and others is clear and haunts such a photograph beyond the recourse of concluding metaphor. The final question instead shifts the lens back to the paradox of attempting to understand the interiority of a space for which one exists always outside. The poem’s closing returns to the ephemerality of the historical record and, for all of the project’s prismatic insights, ultimately recognizes the limit of this creative enterprise’s span.