Read The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness Online
Authors: Rebecca Solnit
Mardi Gras and Carnival are not synonymous; the latter is a weeks-long season from Twelfth Night in January to the last day before Lent, during which krewes put on public parades and private balls. Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, is that last day. Rex is the central parade of Mardi Gras, led by the business elite of the town, and only grudgingly integrated after being forced to do so by the city (some of the other oligarchical Carnival krewes, Comus and Momus, just stopped parading rather than integrate). The city sponsors and organizes none of Mardi Gras; it just prevents unintegrated krewes from marching, polices a lot, and sweeps up the tons of debris afterward.
So there’s Rex, but it has to wait for Zulu, which is a parody of Rex and of stereotypes of African Americans—it features the city’s black elite in grass skirts and leopard skin with spears and jungle floats. Zulu’s procession goes before Rex and traditionally, I’m told, likes to keep Rex waiting. Louis Armstrong was once the king of Zulu—the Carnival krewes create their own royalty—and once said to the king of England, “This one’s for you, Rex,” when he sang “(I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead) You Rascal You.” The spirit of Carnival let a son of the New Orleans streets spit in
a king’s eye. More recently, a queen of Zulu, Desirée Rogers, became Obama’s social secretary.
Zulu, like a lot of the African-American krewes, isn’t just an organization that puts on a parade. It’s an outgrowth of the social aid and pleasure clubs that were once widespread in the South, and the clubs are a version of the benevolent societies that were once a huge social force for the working class of the United States. My friend Eric Laursen has written about them. He says:
Fraternal orders (which also included women’s organizations) were an enormous social force among American working people in the first half of the 20th Century—nearly as significant as labor unions. Also known as mutual aid societies, their defining features were [what David T. Beito described as] “an autonomous system of lodges, a democratic form of internal government, a ritual, and the provision of mutual aid for members and their families.”. . .
The legions who joined the fraternal orders were not anarchists. The orders tended to be organized in a rigidly hierarchical way, and their leaders loved to underscore their Americanism and denounce radicals and revolutionaries. But perhaps they protested a bit too much. Anarchists have always projected mutual aid as the basic organizing principle of a non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian society. And despite their many defects, the fraternal orders carried out perhaps the most ambitious experiment in mutual aid in U.S. history—a project that cut across classes and gave immigrants and people of color a tool for advancing themselves when government and capitalist business structures were both geared to keep them in their place.
The orders provided a powerful demonstration that mutual aid could serve as an alternative method for organizing a complex modern society.
African-American social aid and pleasure clubs grew out of the benevolent societies of the nineteenth century, which, as Laursen points out, provided funerals, medical coverage, and accident and unemployment insurance to their members. Put that way, they sound as dreary as the corporations I write checks to for my health care and other insurances, but they were vibrant organizations that provided a real sense of membership. You weren’t giving your money to the faceless bureaucracy and hoping for
something back; you were taking care of your brethren, who would take care of you. Put another way, they provided tangible necessities (social aid) when things went wrong but intangible ones (social pleasure) when they went right. Zulu’s website proclaims that “during the Christmas season, the organization gives Christmas baskets to needy families, participates in the Adopt-a-School program, contributes to the Southern University Scholarship Fund and donates funds and time to other community organizations.”
In one sense Carnival keeps the mutual aid societies of New Orleans alive, but in another sense the societies keep Carnival alive. Mardi Gras is one day, and the big downtown parades are only one aspect of a festival that, like most Carnivals, lasts for weeks. There are a lot of other organizations parading, from Muses, the women’s krewe, which is sort of feminist and sort of raunchy, to informal things like Julu, the klezmer-inspired takeoff on Zulu my friend Rebecca Snedeker belongs to. I joined Julu in 2008, and we roamed the streets and stopped off for drinks and ducked out to see other parades. There are about nine gay krewes with their own balls, and there’s an AIDS ritual involving cremation ashes on the day of celebration, one day before Ash Wednesday.
The Mardi Gras Indians, who date back to the 1880s, are small bands of African-American men in flamboyant, massive beaded costumes officially modeled after American Indian regalia. They are said to honor the relationship between slaves and American Indians in an earlier time, and their beadwork is really more Yoruba than it is American Indian, part of the mysterious survival in New Orleans of ties to Africa that largely vanished elsewhere. In
The World That Made New Orleans
, music historian Ned Sublette says, “The Indians embody resistance” and “collectively, they’re part of what knits New Orleans’s black populace together.” A common Mardi Gras Indian shout is “We won’t bow down.” The Mardi Gras Indians head out on their own without announced routes on Mardi Gras and a few other days every year, but making the costumes and maintaining the communities lasts all year.
To say that Carnival reconciles us to the status quo is to say that it affirms the world as it is. Now, for people in Rex, their Mardi Gras probably
reinforces their world, but for those in some of the other krewes and rites, the same is true, and the reinforcement of the survival of the mutual aid societies that emerged after slavery is not reaffirmation of capitalism, domination, et cetera. It reinforces, in other words, their ongoing survival of capitalism and racism. Carnival also reinforces joy and ownership of public space and a kind of confidence in coexisting with a wide array of strangers. New Orleans itself is the place where, unlike the rest of the United States, slaves were not so cut off from chances to gather and chances to maintain their traditions. Jazz and jazz funerals, second-line parades, and more derive in many ways from this subversive remnant of a non-European tradition. They didn’t bow down. This is something to celebrate, and it is what is celebrated by some of the people in the streets.
In 2006 and 2007 Mardi Gras in New Orleans was also proof to the city that it had survived Katrina, that it had not died. The parades were full of scathing political commentary, even the mainstream ones (and Krewe du Vieux started parade season in 2009 with the theme Fired Up! which brought in a lot of sexy devil costumes and floats depicting local political institutions as flaming hells). To say Carnival of New Orleans is to speak of dozens of disparate traditions and agendas braided together. Which makes the willingness of anyone to generalize about Carnival—which includes the Latin American, Caribbean, European, and New Orleanian versions—troublesome.
Really, I shouldn’t even be saying things so obvious except that defeatisms so obviously based on misapprehensions keep getting thrown into my face. Of course our society’s dominant culture of media and entertainment serves consumerism and asserts our powerlessness. But if the status quo is the world as it is, it also includes myriad subversions and strategies for survival, and these seem to me to also be reinforced by Carnival. Fifteen years ago a subversive group called Reclaim the Streets (RTS) began turning British political demonstrations into something festive and inventive and even joyous, with a raucous in-your-face joy. “We are about taking back public space from the enclosed private arena. At its simplest it is an attack on cars as a principle agent of enclosure. It’s about reclaiming the streets as public inclusive space from the private exclusive use of the car. But we
believe in this as a broader principle, taking back those things which have been enclosed within capitalist circulation and returning them to collective use as a commons.”
I’d argue that Reclaim the Streets in mostly Protestant Britain reclaimed the street festival, the Carnival spirit, as something deeply subversive. The group even called one of its demonstrations, the famous one on June 18, 1999, the Carnival Against Capital. London’s financial district was much disrupted that day by the masked, festive throng. The participants saw taking back public space, making it inclusive, giving it a function other than its everyday one, as radical. This is what Carnival does, and so by RTS’s terms, Carnival is radical, not reconciling us to the status quo but subverting it. Carnival is inherently against capital.
From another perspective, the June 18 street party was a bunch of rowdy white kids, but it had sister actions in dozens of countries, including Nigeria, and it prepared the resistant world for the profoundly successful attack on corporate capital at the Seattle WTO meeting later that year, which, with its famed giant puppets, costumes, marching bands and banners, was very Carnivalesque. The Committee for Full Enjoyment faced off the G-8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, with similar tactics. CIRCA, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, whose tactics were infinitely subversive and never oppositional, threw the police into confusion (but not rage). The performance theorist and activist Larry Bogad calls this “tactical carnival” and notes that in 2001, the FBI listed Carnival Against Capital as a terrorist group (failing to recognize that it was a concept, not an organization, but correctly recognizing that it doesn’t really reconcile us to the status quo).
Former RTS organizer John Jordan points out that quite a lot of peasant uprisings began during festivals. In his book
Carnival and Other Christian Festivals
, Max Harris recounts the theological basis for Carnival’s inversion of hierarchies, the passage in the Magnificat where Mary says (in Luke 1:52), in celebration of the impending birth of her son, “He hath put down the mighty from their seats and hath exalted the humble.” Carnival, he says, is a festival of inversion. Some inversions are symbolic, decorative, recreational, and temporary, but to discount even those is to discount
the way that culture can provide us visions, invitations, and tools to make such things more real and enduring, whether a full-fledged revolt, as at the Seattle WTO, or the survival of such things as aid and pleasure and pride and solidarity. Just to disrupt business as usual—as jazz funerals and second-line parades have always done in New Orleans and as Reclaim the Streets did for a few years in a few countries—is subversive.
Carnival doesn’t necessarily reconcile us to the status quo. But theories that defeat is inevitable, is our legacy, our history, and our future do. We have arrived in a future that is itself science fiction: we have turned our planet into something far more turbulent and uncertain than anyone anticipated; and to survive it and bring it back to something livable will require a massive subversion of the status quo of corporate production and excess consumption; it will require innovation, imagination, and profound change. The defeatism that says there is nothing we can do or that we have no power sabotages our survival. It is pre-emptive surrender.
Status quo
in Latin means “the state in which,” and the state things are usually in includes dominance, acquiescence, and refusal to bow down, in various mixes. More than ever, we need Carnival at its most subversive to survive, and to make resistance a pleasure and an adventure rather than only struggle and grim duty. This is the revolution that Emma Goldman wanted to dance to, the one that draws people in. Don’t bow down. To capital. Or to cliché or oversimplification or defeatism. Try rising up instead. It’s more interesting.
2009
The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening, but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their workday on board; there is of course Wi-Fi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.
Other days I think of them as the company buses by which the coal miners get deposited at the pithead, and the work schedule involved would make a pit owner feel at home. Silicon Valley has long been famous for its endless work hours, for sucking in the young for decades of sixty- or seventy-hour weeks, and the much celebrated perks on many jobsites—nap rooms, chefs, gyms, laundry—are meant to make spending most of your life at work less hideous. The biotech industry is following the same game plan. Hundreds of luxury coaches serve the mega-corporations down the peninsula, but we refer to them in the singular as the Google Bus, and we—by which I mean people I know, people who’ve lived here a while, and mostly people who don’t work in the industry—talk about them a lot. Parisians probably talked about the Prussian army a lot too, in the day.
My brother says that the first time he saw one unload its riders, he thought they were German tourists—neatly dressed, uncool, a little out of place, blinking in the light as they emerged from their pod. The tech workers, many of them new to the region, are mostly white or Asian male nerds in their twenties and thirties; you often hear that to be over fifty in
that world is to be a fossil, and the two founders of Google (currently tied for thirteenth richest person on earth) are not yet forty.
Another friend of mine told me a story about the Apple bus from when he worked for Apple Inc. Once, a driver went rogue, dropping off the majority of his passengers, as intended, at the main Apple campus and then rolling on toward San Jose instead of stopping at the satellite location; but the passengers were tech people, so withdrawn from direct, abrupt, interventionary communications that they just sat there as he drove many miles past their worksite and eventually dumped them on the street in a slum south of the new power center of the world. At that point, I think, they called headquarters, and another, more obedient bus driver was dispatched. I told the story to another friend and we joked about whether they then texted headquarters to get the email addresses of the people sitting next to them. This is a culture that has created many new ways for us to contact one another but atrophied most of the old ones, notably speaking to the people around you. All these youngish people are on the Google Bus because they want to live in San Francisco, city of promenading and mingling, but they seem as likely to rub these things out as to participate in them.