Joy Harjo uses color imagery in her poem to illustrate the complex race relationships in New Orleans in particular and America, in general. The use of color imagery has the effect of making history come alive for us. Harjo uses dark, earthy colors to symbolize the struggle of people of color, while colors associated with coldness and artificiality represent suppression and colonialism. Three historical events form the poem’s backdrop: one, the attempts of Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto (referred to as DeSoto in the poem) to colonize North America. Driven by lust for the fabled gold in the American South, DeSoto crossed the Mississippi in the 16th century. However, he is said to have been drowned by the local indigenous people. Two, was the removal of indigenous Creek people from the Southeast via New Orleans to designated “Indian territory” in Oklahoma in the 1830’s and 1840’s. Many Creeks dies of the cold on their way west; many drowned in the Mississippi near New Orleans when a steamboat struck their boat. The third historical event was the period between 1811 and 1862 in which New Orleans operated as a mass market for slaves. The historic French Quarter was an open market place for the buying and selling of people of color, especially black people.
This traumatic history informs the binary use of color in “New Orleans.” We see an example of this in the “blue horse/ caught frozen in stone” that pops up in lines five and six of the poem. The horse is a statue, of course, but its blue color indicates sadness and numbness. The horse is cold, no longer alive and cannot talk. It symbolizes the attempts of Spanish colonizers to suppress indigenous America.
Brought in by the Spanish onan endless ocean voyage he became madand crazy. They caught him in bluerock, saiddon’t talk.
Like the animal is rendered blue and dead, the voice of the native peoples was gradually suppressed in history. The blue horse that stands in a city square also symbolizes the manipulation of history, where events of conquest and subjugation are painted as heroic. Further, the poet says the brown Mississippi mud has voices buried in it, a reference both to the drowned Creeks, as well as the brown and black people sold into slavery. The Mississippi mud is ripe with their blood, some of the red strains of which flow through the Native American poet too. In contrast with the brown and red tones is DeSoto’s lust for pale, glittering gold. Gold symbolizes avarice and materialism; DeSoto came seeking it, only to be subsumed by the raw earthiness of the land.
The “ivory knives” being sold in the market represent white -- the colour of the colonizer - as well as the exploitative ivory trade, which went on at an unprecedented scale during the colonization of Africa. Ivory was procured from poached African and Indian elephants and used to make decorative items, piano keys, and billiard balls in Europe. Often, slaves were forced to carry the heavy tusks of the animals onto ships. It is ironic that shops in New Orleans still sell ivory, a relic of colonialism. Later, the poet notices “shops that sell black mammy dolls/ holding white babies,” a reference to the legacy of slavery. This irony is also echoed in the poet’s realization that although DeSoto was drowned in the Mississippi, his materialistic spirit must have gotten away, because it still lives on in New Orleans, as evoked by the “silver” paths.
But he must have got away, somehow,because I have seen New Orleans,the lace and silk buildings,trolley cars on beaten silver paths,graves that rise up out of soft earth in the rain,shops that sell black mammy dollsholding white babies.
The silver paths represent avarice, while the black mammy dolls holding white babies symbolize the way offensive race stereotypes still exist, and sell, in American society.
The reference to "tobacco brown bones" conjures up the images of the slaves bought and sold in their droves in New Orleans, when it was a major center of the slave trade. "Tobacco brown" refers to both the color of the slaves' skin and of the crop that many of them toiled long hours to pick.
Continuing the theme of slavery, the speaker tells us that she has a memory steeped in blood, which corresponds to the magic red rocks sold by the trinket vendor, and which threaten to destroy him. The vendor, blissfully unaware of the rocks' cultural significance for Native-Americans, is ignorant of the past whose remnants he sells to tourists as souvenirs. The speaker's blood-red memory, like the magic rocks, can also destroy, steeped as it is in the horrors of a troubled past marred by slavery and oppression.
https://frenchquarterbxb.com/2019/06/20/poet-laureate-joy-harjos-new-orleans/
One significant example of color imagery is in the juxtaposition of the image of "gold cities" with "shining streets / of beaten gold" that the Spanish conquistador, DeSoto, hoped to find with the image of the brown "earth towns" he really found, which were not golden at all. The color of brown is specifically mentioned in the third line, when the speaker says that while in New Orleans, she watches for "tobacco brown bones to come wandering / down" the street. She references this more obliquely in the final lines, which describe DeSoto dancing with a "woman as gold / as the river bottom," which would be, in fact, brown.
The stark contrast between what the explorer would have expected and what he would actually have encountered upon landing in the New World —shining golden versus earthen brown, respectively—paints a vivid mental picture for the reader, showing us rather than simply telling us. However, it also points to the humanity of the people DeSoto conquered and their authentic reality versus his materialistic fantasy.
No comments:
Post a Comment