The Convoluted Logic of Creolization the New Orleans Way

??? COHPAnATIST THE CONVOLUTED LOGIC OF CREOLIZATION THE NEW ORLEANS WAY Benton Jay Komins The essay that foUows describes some of the cultural ambiguities of the city of New Orleans, which, in its guise of either subtropical Parisian oasis or plague-infested port, has always been multiple, existing as an imaginary destination and a real metropolis. Beyond the specificities of New Orleans, my encounter with "The Convoluted Logic of Creolization the New Orleans Way" tells another story. As a physical and social "inland island" surrounded by pestilential swamps and antagonistic neighbors , this city developed a culture that responded and continues to respond to the social and economic realities of geography, ethnic mixing, and diversity. In New Orleans, Creole describes a people (peoples) as much as it describes a cultural process.1 The same phenomenon that linguistically turned colonial Zweigs into Creole La Branches (a local "German" famüy name) today integrates East Asian and Central American emigrants into the quirks ofthe city's culture. I evaluate the fictional parameters of this convoluted creolization Odyssey in the work of Ruth McEnery Stuart, Shirley Ann Grau, and Ellen Gilchrist—three exemplary authors who use and manipulate this problematic process to different narrative ends. In addition to these fictional works, I discuss a group of nonfictional texts—travelogue anecdotes, ethnographic work, and a suggestive jazz composition—which describe the experiences of New Orleans' visitors, "permanent residents," and immigrants. I close with a few postmodern reflections that connect New Orleans' logic of creolization to other cultural discussions. My structure foUows the convoluted nature ofthe topic; avoiding any clear definition, New Orleans' creoUzation meanders through travel narrative , fiction, ethnic study, and theory.2 Rather than presenting a sustained , Unear argument that describes what creolization means or represents , I approach the topic from its periphery, borrowing the tropes and images of the works I examine. I organize my encounters with the city's versions of creolization the New Orleans way around suggestions of ideological manipulation, cultural difference, and popular history. These sections yoke texts with different interpretations of the creolization question, highlighting its ambiguities, cUchés, and mythic potential. In New Orleans, "circumstances favored the reciprocal acculturation of Creoles of various lineages," states Joseph Roach in his Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), "within a unique network of African, American, and European practices" (9). Roach roots the multicultural aspect of New Orleans to the settlement pattern of colonial Vol. 23 (1999): 99 CREOLIZATION THE NEW ORLEANS WAY Louisiana and the reality of its cultural isolation, from environmental factors to the juridical circumstances of the French colonial Code Noir. Despite the inequities of slavery, Africans and Europeans developed a mutually reliant economy and culture in colonial New Orleans, which consisted of Gallic traditions, Native American memories, and African performances. The city's collective culture later absorbed aspects of Anglo-America.3 This colonial interdependence suggests that creolization means more than becoming Creole; the early French settlers, "their" enslaved Africans, and Native Americans added elements to the city's early culture, not as lost ingredients in a local melting pot, but rather as important constituents of a civic culture that hesitantly integrates yet always allows ethnic identities and cultural expressions to flourish. On this inland island, an elusive mechanism integrates different traditions, continually synthesizing European, North American, West African, Caribbean , and Asian practices, myths, and expressions. Beyond colonial history, creolization continues to integrate in a convoluted fashion, allowing both residents and visitors to join the city's local culture while maintaining their differences. 1. Ideological Manipulation A) Ruth McEnery Stuart's The River's Children: The Ideology of Creolized Hope The New Orleans local color author Ruth McEnery Stuart offers a remarkable expression of creolization in her novel The River's Children: An Idyll ofthe Mississippi (1904), which romanticizes the lives of newly impoverished New Orleans gentry and their ever-loyal ex-slaves during Reconstruction. In this novel, Stuart's luxurious descriptions of New Orleans flora and fauna and clichéd representations of freed mammies and stoic planters gravitate around the figure of a young woman, Miss Agnes "Blossom" Le Duc, a character or perhaps abstract embodiment of a creolized future in the face of historical upheaval...