Colonization and

White Nativism

in the Swamps,

on the day after St. Joseph’s

some critical-race-anti-imperialism-deep-personal thoughts, in process

 

by Catherine Michna

The other day, over a few drinks at a gentrifying hotspot in the Bywater, a few of my non-native New Orleans friends started talking about going bird watching in the swamps. I made a few comments about how I could show them some real swamp tours if they wanted to join me on one of my near-daily treks to visit family in Slidell. Then I turned to join another conversation. I continued to half-listen, however, as they talked about the beauty of the Louisiana wilderness and how camping and birdwatching here compare to that in other places. It was an innocent conversation by caring, respectful new New Orleanians who are deeply invested in social justice work here. But as I listened to my friends talk, something in me snapped–

I pounded the table and interrupted them loudly–”There’s some colonizing going on here and I’m going to stop this conversation right now,” I told them. “The swamps are the new thing. The swamps are THE new thing,” I told them. “First they took the city, now they’re taking the swamps? No. That’s one working-class space I’m not going to let ya’ll take.” I snorted a bit in derision before pulling back, embarrassed with myself for this unwarranted outburst.

Now, I am neither working class, nor am I from rural Louisiana. My friends who were having the swamp-loving conversation identify more with those backgrounds than I do. They weren’t both white either–one fits that mold, racially, but her politics and life practices are deeply anti-racist and she’s taught me more about the new-racism/colonizing mentality sweeping New Orleans than anyone else I know. The other identifies both as a first-generation American from a decolonized country and as African American. Why did their conversation cause me to accuse these two, well meaning friends of wanting to colonize South Louisiana? How did my friends suddenly become, in my mind, part the “they” who is taking over New Orleans? And how did I, a white professional woman who lives Uptown suddenly become part of the “us” whose land and identity is being colonized?

Almost every day since I’ve moved home last August (and before that, during visits home), I’ve encountered someone who is surprised to discover that I am “from here.” Because of my race and profession, strangers, neighbors, colleagues, and new friends regularly take me for a new New Orleanian. I am never okay with this. Each such encounter creates a wound inside me, and I find that I’m increasingly walking around the city angry at cultural imperialism and gentrification, even as my class and race background identify me more with the gentrifiers than with the working-class African American residents who have been most injured by the city’s uneven recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

(my dog Jaylen in Slidell last week)

What does it mean to be a white New Orleanian, like me, who claims to be “from here” but who arrived back home as part of the latest post-post Katrina influx of young, predominately white professionals? Like my white friends who were born here and never left, I am struggling to define myself apart from new settlers in the city without contradicting myself in really ridiculous, privilege-blind ways.

Increasingly, I am desperate to find a way to WEAR my Louisiana heritage on my body. My husband does this flawlessly. Somehow he always just speaks and looks like an original South Louisiana Saints fan no matter what he wears. But I don’t have an accent or any physical way to let all the people I encounter know that my mom lives around the corner, that my father is buried down the road, that I grew up singing jackamo fi ya yay before I had any idea what it meant, and that my earliest memories are of eating crawfish in my grandparents’ back yard, catching the little critters as they tried to escape out the pot. Sometimes I manage to stay quiet and not over-emphasize my Louisiana roots, but lately, I find myself making rude outbursts or TMI assertions about my background anytime someone even so much as hints that they’re not respecting the ground which I feel I need to claim.

All this, and I’m not even really a native. I was born in Baton Rouge and didn’t move to New Orleans till high school. Still, Mardi Gras, Mr Bingle on Canal Street, and all of our unique South Louisiana traditions are at the core of my childhood memories. I douse my breakfasts with Crystal; my gumbo tastes good; I can pronounce Tchoupitoulas and Burgundy; and my redbeans have just the right amount of ham hock. My family has lived in Louisiana for generations. My husband grew up here too. We were teenagers in New Orleans; we got married here; we had our first, second, and third apartments here. From the time when we moved away in our early/mid-twenties until we moved back, last August, I felt like I was only half-alive when I was not home (JBK, ya’ hear me??). So I spent every bit of time here that I could–2, 3, 4 months a year. We rebuilt our relatives’ homes after the storm. We watched my husband’s father die as a result of the polluted, stressful process of doing that. We came home every Mardi Gras. And we struggled for 14 years to find a way to permanently return home–because until you social innovators arrived here, there were very few decent paying jobs for local college graduates, and there still aren’t–unless you went to college or graduate school someplace else. Which I did. And when I graduated, my Boston-based degree is, ironically, what finally allowed us to move home.

My entire life has revolved around a love for this state and a desire to build a permanent life here, not a temporary one. So, when people mistake me for a new settler, it hurts. I walk around in the contradictions and hypocrisies of it all: I am white, I am middle class, my kid goes to Lusher, I pay post-Katrina high rent rates without blinking (or without blinking much), yet I feel like I am part of a multi-faceted oppressed group that is rapidly losing access to my own “authentic” cultural place-based identity because of how it is being romanticized, commodified, and OCCUPIED by others.

I know that I am not alone in these complicated feelings. I see my New Orleans native friends on a regular basis separately from our new New Orleanian companions. When we’re together–black or white–we complain and bitch about all that’s changed–neighborhood names, neighborhood identities, how people dance, what people eat. When we’re employed, we do our best to use up the assets that the whiter, wealthier city presents to us, but we understand ourselves to often be outsiders to the profits that those assets generate. It’s as if all the new restaurants and parks and “renewed” neighborhoods are part of a new city–NOLA–where we don’t admit to live, but which we love to visit. We bitterly relish the memories of pre-storm New Orleans that no one else in our professional lives seems to have anymore. Sometimes we look up and realize we’re sitting in the same restaurants as the people we’re complaining about. But often, we aren’t. We know what places to avoid when we want to feel, really, at home. CC’s or PJs, not Orange Couch. DBA or the Maple Leaf, not Bacchanal. Carrollton or Esplanade, certainly not St. Claude. Metairie. Church. Our mothers’ front porches.

The contradictions in such conversations are deeper for white natives than non-white natives. We grew UP in the knowledge that in other U.S. cities, white folks can’t access the benefits of white privilege unless they assimilate out of their own ethnic and linguistic cultures. Maybe sometimes they celebrate their cultural and religious roots, but with few exceptions, such celebrations are limited to holidays and family gatherings, and not part of a daily way of life as culture is in white families in South Louisiana. In the U.S., it is exceedingly rare to be able to hold onto white privilege at the same time as one holds onto what one imagines as one’s native/ethnic culture. We–I–am afraid of losing this. What does that mean? It means that I am afraid of losing my white privilege and my native culture at the same time. A double loss. Doubly complicated.

In New Orleans, white residents have always had both racism and our city’s rich African American heritage to reckon with. Somehow, again, we never traded culture for white privilege: through racial romanticization and Creolization, we managed to keep both. I’m not saying this process was ethical or just–it was certainly NOT. Still, it is a fact of life in New Orleans that white identities here have always been as much about negotiating Creoleisms as black identities have been. So, as much as there is that divides us by race, New Orleanians of all racial backgrounds continue to share (albeit often unequally) cultural elements ranging from food, to speech, to music, to the different parades that are at the core of who we are.

I think white native New Orleanians often have a deeper understanding than newcomers of that which divides and connects people across race here. I don’t, for instance, know any native white New Orleans resident who would go to take photos at the Mardi Gras Indian St. Joseph’s Night celebrations. I was thinking about this last night as I watched on Facebook as many of my white new New Orleanian friends posted picture after picture of St. Joseph’s Night in Central City and the Seventh Ward. There’s a sacredness to the separateness of black/African diasporic/Afro-Creole culture in New Orleans, and as much as white New Orleanians have helped to create and have benefited from that separateness, we’re often more able than newcomers to respect the boundaries of the sacred collectivities that have resulted from it. By contrast, my new New Orleans friends jump into just about any parade they can find. They also assume they can move into any neighborhood they please. They act first and think later. It’s the opposite with people who were raised here. We take culture and neighborhood spaces more seriously. This approach can nurture stratification and stagnation. But it also helps to generate dignity and more grounded spaces from which one can, perhaps, better attune to our city’s problems as well as its fragmented social relationships.

Back to the swamps. I think my friends’ excitement about taking a trip to Bayou Sauvage or Jean Lafitte Park rubbed me the wrong way because it cut right to the race and class complications and contradictions that make up our Louisiana home culture. The Louisiana swamps dually signify maroon/outlaw black masculinities — the diverging Bras Coupe/Juan Malo mythologies that threaten, excite, and correct public memories of race and power in this city–and “authentic,” Cajun/white working-classness. Either way, the swamps abound with signification of authenticity and cultural resistance that resists assimilation and refuses to be bound by hegemonic power systems and social constructs of race. The swamps always already exceed their meaning–they’re always already understood as more OUTSIDE than they can possibly truly be. This mythologizing of the swamps-as-excessive-outsideness is partly what has caused them to be both victimized and neglected by economic interests in the cities. Through their imagined outsideness, the swamps and wetlands also create a mythology of New Orleans as a kind of urban borderland, one where we native residents walk a fine line between being culture bearers for the nation and being outside of the nation’s bounds. White New Orleanians, I think, feel empowered by this positionality, and so we cling to it. Newcomers covet it. Thus, we cling to it even more.

The swamps and wetlands also represent that which we, in South Louisiana, are always on the verge of losing, not only culturally but geographically and environmentally–especially today with the threat of global warming and the growing impact of the oil companies multi-generational rape of our land. This was the narrative of Beasts of the Southern Wild, right? We can retreat into our “bathtub,” our nativeness–our imagined swamp outsideness–when we embrace our creolecrawfishalligatorsnakevoodoojockamo childhoods. It’s safe space for us. If we imagine our culture, wrongly, as something that was once wholly sacred and safe, we don’t care. This imagining is us. And we don’t want THEM to take it. They can build their pop up restaurants and their charter schools, they can photograph and sell our city, but they will never have what the swamps represent to us.

But what happens if rural South Louisiana becomes a cultural hunting ground, like Super Sunday or St. Joseph’s Night? It would serve white Louisianians right, I guess. After hundreds of years of participating in the structural oppression of others, we deserve to lose a big cultural something. Not that the bayous are a white place–their endangered realities impact people from myriad, complex racial and ethnic backgrounds. That’s why the Bathtub community in Beasts could be–and HAD TO BE–so multi-racial.

For city dwellers, whose images of wetland communities are often mythologized, inaccurate, and wrapped up in racism and classism, the food, music, culture and history of the South Louisiana swamps and bayous somehow still get to the heart of who we are as a people, and what we share. Thus us-ness is complicated and sometimes it is violent and oppressive. But in this capitalist world, there’s a rare humanity in it, something we’ve preserved together, and it would be tragic if it disappeared.

In New Orleans I feel colonized even as, because of my race and privilege, I am a colonizer. Life here is more of a contradiction than ever. Next weekend, I think I’ll take my new NOLA friends with me into the swamps.

++++++++++++++

 

Catherine Michna

My name is Catherine Michna, and I’m a Louisiana native. I was nurtured in New Orleans and educated in New York, California, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. This year, after 14 years living away, I finally moved home.

Right now, I’m working as an A.W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Tulane University. At Tulane, I’m teaching American Literature classes and finishing the research for my first book. My book is about writers and artists in New Orleans who’ve drawn on the aesthetics and ethics of local African American parading and performance traditions to create art forms and institutions that strengthen democracy and nurture collective social justice movements.

My research for this book began after Hurricane Katrina in the high school classrooms of Students at the Center, a writing and digital media program in the New Orleans Public Schools. It’s evolved, in the years since, as a practice of conversation and deep listening with New Orleans educators, theatre artists, writers, and residents.

I’ve published articles about New Orleans culture in American Quarterly, TDR: The Drama Review,Theatre Forum, and The Journal of Ethnic American Literature. In the past, I’ve taught at the University of Rhode Island, Boston College, the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Fremont High School in Oakland, CA. The classes I most love to teach focus on urban literature, critical geography, African American literature and theatre, performance studies, social movement histories, and, of course, New Orleans.