A Conversation with Ned Sublette
by Habitus · 09/16/08
You write that music in New Orleans, like parading, is a way of resisting one’s own erasure.
Absolutely. And the Mardi Gras Indians are the symbol of resistance par excellence. The Indians are not Native Americans, though not a few of them have Native-American ancestry, and many are very insistent on that point. But it’s not a native tradition that they are doing. This is something African.
In the early days of Louisiana, conditions were so harsh and so strange that both the Europeans and the Africans were forced to collaborate with the Indians in order to survive. There were all kinds of connections between the Africans and the Native Americans, which the Mardi Gras Indians of today memorialize with remarkable clarity of vision.
This tradition is not an easy thing to describe. These small groups of men are independent, decentralized, self-financed organizations. It requires an enormous commitment to participate. I heard [New Orleans writer and activist] Kalamu ya Salaam ask recently, “Do you know any working-class people in New York who would put up seven-thousand dollars, and get their friends to do the same, to come together and have a celebration?”
The Indians are about the continuity of community. When a Big Chief goes out, he has a Little Chief with him, learning the culture. These groups are very much about community structure. They are the backbone of black New Orleans. My wife said to me one night at a concert by Bo Dollis, “Without the Mardi Gras Indians, all the rest of this would crumble.” She verbalized what I was thinking at that moment.
Also, to speak of it as art for a moment: The elaborate, colorful hand-sewn costumes that they make every year are the most obvious aspect of what they do. But it’s really remarkable just what their artform encompasses. The Indians predate jazz. Their music is so fundamental to the African tradition: It is call-and-response with percussion. This is a very precious legacy. And it’s sung with that unique Louisiana character that, I’m willing to speculate, already existed at Congo Square. A particular New Orleans flavor.
And, critically, they are going out without asking permission from anyone—the police, the city—which is so critical to their concept of resistance. They don’t need anyone’s permission to take to the streets.
Another thing I’ve noticed, which brings us back to Haiti: The Mardi Gras Indians, who stress their connection to Congo Square, base their music on a fundamental rhythm you can hear all throughout the Domingan Diaspora. That same rhythm appears in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and eastern Cuba. And here it shows up in the most traditional African music heard in present-day New Orleans. I don’t think that is an accident. The Haitian Revolution was one of the generative explosions of popular music in the hemisphere.
When I read your ideas about the Haitian, or Domingan, Diaspora it strikes me as a kind of basic typology for peoples in motion. A great cataclysm spreads seeds of creativity all over the hemisphere. Do you think that’s a possible future for New Orleans culture, now that it has been so dispersed after Katrina?
I can imagine it, because the whole history of New Orleans is Diasporas, these great waves of migrations. But these can play out various ways: they can have a great impact, or they can dissipate and ultimately disappear. This particular Diaspora was structurally weakened from day one because the evacuees were very deliberately de-concentrated. They were given one-way tickets all over the country, and intentionally not sent to the same place. Some people didn’t even know where they were going. Some people ended up in Portland, some wound up in Arkansas, some in Chicago, some in New York. They were cut off. They were scattered in a way that was specifically meant to make it as hard as possible to regenerate and regroup. And, generally, they were in this position in the first place because they were people of modest means. So the odds are, to some degree, against the notion that a strong Diaspora culture will emerge.
That said, in some places—Houston is the most obvious place to look for it, because of the large numbers that resettled there—it might have an impact, the music might get a little funkier. [New Orleans pianist] Henry Butler is in Denver. Is Denver getting funkier? I don’t know. They have a long way to go!
I have yet to interview Henry Butler, but I do have his phone number. It’s a cell-phone number and it’s a [New Orleans area code] 504 number. As long as he’s got a 504 cell-phone, I wouldn’t write him off.
You are now writing a memoir of your own experiences in New Orleans in the year before the flood. I wonder if, through that process, you have a clearer idea of what exactly will be lost if New Orleans isn’t able to return as a viable city?
The more you look at New Orleans, the deeper it gets. There are more layers to it all the time. It’s just so enormous, and so fundamental to who we are as a nation, to our American history.
What happened in New Orleans in 2005 was the great radicalizing event of my lifetime. And I’ve been through a few. But much more so than even 9/11…
And you are a resident of lower Manhattan.
I say this as someone who breathed that smoke. The failure of the levees—I prefer not to call it Katrina. First of all, I think it’s really unfair to women named Katrina. It wasn’t a vengeful goddess. It was a human failure.
