Kimbrough
Dr. Paula Carabell
Independent Study
14 May 2009
The Carnival in the Work of Kara Walker
As a child with secret artistic ambitions, I was always drawn to masks. There is an image from ancient Greek theater that I have always liked, a mask with half a laughing face and half a sorrowful one. This mask has always seemed to me a representation of the country where I was born, especially during carnival. Haitians, like the ancient Greek comedians, have always balanced their tragedies with laughter, using distressing situations as the subject of satirical songs and jest. I have also always linked the French expression jeter le masque, which means to show one's true colors, to Haitian carnival, imagining carnival as one intense moment during which so many colors are shed that each person walks in the street parade with a rainbow above his or her head.
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat a native Haitian, novelist, and essayist, was born the same year as African American artist Kara Walker. This quote is from her nonfiction book After the Dance, which is about Carnival in Danticat's native country. Like Walker, Danticat is descended from enslaved people, in her case people who were probably brought to the Caribbean in the 17th century. Raised by an aunt in Haiti, Danticat went to live with her parents in a heavily Haitian neighborhood in New York when she was a teenager. Her experiences as an immigrant, and a descendent of enslaved and colonized people, form the subject of both her fiction and nonfiction. Her quote is particularly useful for this paper because she makes reference to use of the carnival to cope with tragedy and hardship. She also mentions the mask, which, I will contend is what all the characters in Walker's works wear via their depiction as black, silhouette cut-outs.
Kara Walker, a contemporary of Danticat, is recognized as one of the most important artists of the last decade. Her work, political and philosophical in nature, comes out of her experience as a woman of the post- civil rights and post -feminist era. Dealing with race, gender, class, morality, and ethics, Walker's work has shocked and surprised. Many revered African American artists, such as Bettye Saar and Faith Ringgold, have spoken out against Walker's depiction of African Americans as demeaning and negative, while other members of the art community have praised her. Controversial though she might be, there is no denying the stunningly attractive beauty of Walker's work. Although Walker chooses to depict the lowest point in American history, the so- called peculiar institution of slavery, she does so beautifully. Her impressive formal skills have allowed her to depict ugliness in a way that is both spellbinding and repulsive. Not only does she join form and content successfully, she is also able to use the space of the contemporary gallery or museum, the white cube, in a way that few others before her have done. The white cube becomes part of her work, rather than simply occupying the space she has been allotted by the curator. Walker makes extensive use of philosophy in her work. In this paper I will argue that the use of the Bakhtinian carnival is what makes Walker's work so powerful. It is through the carnival that Walker can show the tragedy of slavery without losing her viewer. The viewer's willingness to look into the world that Walker has created, and contemplate ideas contained within, is due to the carnivalistic nature of the work.
Kara Walker, an African American woman born 104 years after the end of the Civil War, has taken on slavery as her subject matter. Walker has absorbed both the memory and the images of slavery. She refers to her "inner plantation," the place in her mind where she is constantly aware of herself and her relation to the past. Walker represents her inner plantation with silhouettes, a form of art popular in the nineteenth century, and creates a modern version of the tableau vivant. Embedding the grotesque, the abject, and the psychological in a carnivalistic trope that references the old south, medieval carnival, and the bible, Walker skewers the images of slavery that popular culture has inspired. The carnivalistic trope is a perfect match for the old south, a society based on European aristocracy combined with a utopian vision of a new world. Like Mikhail Bakhtin's Russia, it was a world based on agriculture that employed master slave relationships in order to achieve economic prosperity. Both the Deep South and Russia were religious societies, that embraced Christianity and its rules, as well as a social etiquette, both ritualistic aspects of community that are open to satire within the carnival.
The Mythic South
Popular culture has embraced the myth of the old south, a myth that is replete with sassy belles, dashing heroes, white columned mansions, magnolias, Spanish moss, loyal family retainers, and a genteel way of life. Gone With the Wind is the most popular purveyor of the myth as produced by Hollywood. William Faulkner, in The Unvanquished, fought the myth by making the slaves real characters, but the myth took hold, and lingered. Southerners celebrate their mythic heritage with pilgrimages and festivals. Period costumes are donned, and mint juleps are served to tourists by young ladies in hoop skirts. The myth is a fantasy. Difficulties of plantation life are not discussed. The isolation that accompanied this rural and agricultural world is unseen. The fact that humans were owned, and expended, in this world, falls away. The use of humans for other humans' economic gain is ignored, although sometimes an antebellum mansion will be described as having been built by slave labor.
Looking back at history, it is impossible to know the truth of individual slaves and masters. Articles of torture and restraint, as well as branding irons, are part of this story. Artist Fred Wilson found some of these items in the Maryland Historical Society Museum and used them in his piece, Mining the Museum, much to the chagrin of the board of the museum. These articles are preserved, sometimes hidden away, but they are there all the same, pieces of our past. Mixed race children were born and their descendents live among us as a testament to the actions of the past. Violence and cruelty have been and always will be with us. It is therefore almost unbearable to imagine the sort of cruelty that could be visited upon enslaved people. Even more horrifying is the idea that if strong, adult men were vulnerable, how much more vulnerable were women and children? These kinds of thoughts are not part of the myth of the old south. They have been replaced and concealed by Gone With
the Wind, The Little Colonel, North and South, pilgrimages, antique furniture and silver, young women of all colors in hoop skirts, hospitality, regional cuisine, and antebellum mansions. These are the currency of the myth.
Walker's work then is the first visualization of slavery. She has made nightmare thoughts about American slavery and the American south visible. Her skillful high-jacking of the myth, through the use of appropriated imagery from the past, brings viewers face to face with the imagined and real horrors of our history. By using a trope of the nineteenth century, the silhouette, which all genteel southerners possessed, she evokes the past and negates the individuality of her figures. They are merely shapes, black shapes, but tidy, economical, and skillfully rendered. Walker manipulates them like paper dolls, trying out combinations and possibilities, creating narratives and scenarios. Her goal is to "unconceal" the memories from her 'inner plantation.' She does this by utilizing the carnival concept, something that has been part of western society since ancient Greece. Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote extensively on carnival, shows that the carnival itself makes possible "the narrowing down of the world though a permanent process of exclusion and reduction." Walker has reduced all our imaginings about slavery into universal images that play on the idea of carnival. These visions, in many ways gruesome, are both familiar and new, existing as they do on Walker's imaginary plantation. This familiarity combined with the grotesque and the abject, make these images compelling. No one expected to be attracted to such gruesome concepts. But there we are looking into this world that is both lost and present.
The Carnival
Walker's work is most definitively narrative in nature. Her larger works are often based on specific texts, such as Gone With the Wind or Uncle Tom's Cabin. The play that occurs within the narrative is directly related to Walker's use of imagined memory. Imagined memory, as the genesis of this work, is a textual and narrative concept in itself. Walker will move her figures around in a kind of play. Here play has double meanings; play as in children acting out, and play as in an acted out drama. The narratives are allowed to take off on tangents, altering their original meanings, and approaching spontaneity. It is this method that allows Walker to bring the carnival into her work.
It is the carnival, combined with Walker's excellent technical skills and formal abilities that allow the viewer to even approach artwork about the vileness of slavery. Bakhtin, "a man who was to become the philosopher of heteroglossia and carnival," identified an ancient description of carnival as "a priest's mystic vision of hell." This could be a description of Walker's work as well. Like Bosch before her she pulls us into her world with imagery that is both seductive and repellant. Again echoing Bosch and Bakhtin, Walker gives us images that have multiple texts. Do not forget that she is a writer as well as a visual artist. The many voiced and multi-layered images create textuality, which is something that the history of slavery lacks. Carnival, like Walker's work exists outside of law and religion. It is "a world upside down." Carnival in America started in Mobile, Alabama, where it is celebrated annually. It officially begins when King Felix is crowned the Lord of Misrule. King Felix is chosen by the Mobile Carnival Association, a group composed of business and society leaders, from their own ranks. Typically he is a young white man, a college graduate, from a wealthy and prominent family, who can and will uphold the traditions of carnival. No matter what his given name is, he will effectively be King Felix for the few days of his 'rule.'
America was perceived as a new world, a place where democracy could flourish, and riches were available to all. The American south, however, was created by British immigrants who came to the new world to seek their fortunes. Britain had already discovered that wealth was easily produced in the British West Indies through the production of sugar, and they quickly found rice and tobacco easy to cultivate in what is now Virginia, the Carolinas, and along the Georgia coast. Of course these crops were labor intensive and, to be profitable, required slave labor. Slaves were already being taken from West Africa to the British West Indies, so it was only logical that they be brought to the south to create greater wealth for the British immigrants and their descendents. When the rice crop failed, planters simply moved further south, to the interior of Georgia, down through Alabama, Mississippi, and into Louisiana, where King Cotton created new generations of millionaires. All the while this beautiful and untouched country, a paradise of natural wonders and fecundity, was being poisoned by the death dealing devil that was slavery. This horror was dealt with in a variety of ways; laws and codes were written into civil law, customs and manners were developed, secret lives were lived. Plantation life, which was rural and isolated, became its own community, including its own customs and celebrations, evolving through European and African tradition. The carnival, which had been used for centuries to deal with aristocracy, was a natural outgrowth of this life.
Carnival is a participatory event, open to all. It is performative and a "syncretic pageant of a ritualistic sort." Carnival was created to surprise and subvert the status quo. It embraces change and is by nature unstable. It is a many voiced occurrence, and one can see this clearly in Walker's work, populated as they are by many people having many various and unusual experiences. Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil
War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart, made in 1994, meets the criteria for the carnival. The typical old south images of moonlight and trees draped with Spanish moss house a strange tableau. A belle in a hoop skirt is being kissed by a dashing soldier. Unexpectedly there are four legs under her dress, one pair looking like they belong to a child. The soldier's sword, attached to his waist is pointing to the right, where it lands in the buttocks of a young pickaninny, who is strangling a chicken. In front of the child is a black woman sprawled on the ground. She shakes her finger at the child admonishing her, for what? Hurting the chicken? Destroying the master's property? Messing with their food supply? The tableau continues with two children engaged in oral sex. A black child pleasures a white child who is pointing upwards into the sky. There a black woman is floating away, made buoyant by some sort of protrusion, her belly? A tumor? A man stuck inside of her? This is not a typical old south picture. It is completely subversive, suggesting that the belle is using her slave for sexual gratification under her skirt while the soldier kisses her. The soldier is punishing the pickaninny that in turn is killing the chicken. The negress who is sprawled out is scolding the child but we do not know what for. It is possible that the child pushed the woman down. Other children are engaged in sexual acts that are inappropriate. There is the question of what a slave should do for his or her master here. It is a crazy scene, like an adult sort of Alice in Wonderland.. It is a far cry from the moonlight and magnolias south that is sold to tourists or Hollywood's version of the old south as seen in Gone With the Wind. No visible sex takes place in GWTW, although Scarlett's unrequited desire for Ashley is the focal point of the story. We never see any hint of sex between master and slave, although this was the reality of plantation life. The only sexual threat happens when Scarlett is attacked during reconstruction driving along on sawmill road. The result of this threat is that the white men in the community organize into the KKK and go out and kill Scarlett's alleged attacker. Later on we see Rhett take Scarlett by force, but she wakes up singing. It is a bit carnivalistic. Walker's Gone also includes a child with piles of excrement coming from her body and a woman being carried off by a white man. She is a typical slave woman with her pipe bouncing out of her mouth and a rag around her head. It is a scene of strange carnality in a world that has been billed as a bastion of tradition and gentility.
Carnality, the many uses and functions of the body, as well as excretion of bodily substances is a typical part of the carnival. Walker uses these tropes almost to excess in order to make her work carnivalistic. Many of Walker's characters eat, sometimes food, sometimes each other, in a parody of Holy Communion. Holy Communion represents eating the body of Christ, who is one with God, our Holy Father. Here it may represent the consumption to devour the white father or the master. The buttocks as an orifice are emphasized in the carnival as the apotheosis of the head. Feces are often seen streaming from bodies, or are left behind as a figure moves through the tableau. This allows for "the boundary between body and world to be drawn in a different way than the 'natural' boundary allows…" The excrement producing bodies are also referencing the production of new life, as babies are excretions that arrive in a mass of bodily fluids. Creation and destruction become manifest as the body is now seen as something that we inhabit in between the stages of life and death. This is an ideal metaphor for slavery as an existence that is only temporary and one that will be rewarded in another world. All kinds of images of consumption parody death, as the dead have no need for any sustenance other than spiritual. The carnal body mocks its own mortality. The carnal functions of the body are set up in the carnival to mock traditions, just as they are in Walker's work.
These images do not represent events as they happen. They are an imagined world based on Walker's knowledge of the history of slavery combined with her own ideas about what might have happened. "It seems like I had to actually reinvent or make up my own racist situations so I would know how to deal with them as black people in the past did. In order to have a real connection with my history I had to be somebody's slave. But I was in control. That was the difference," states Walker of her imaginary plantation. Henry Louis Gates, the director of the W.E. B. Dubois institute for African American studies at Harvard University, says that "…only the visually illiterate could mistake their post-modern critiques for realistic portrayals, and that is the difference between the racist original and the post modern, signifying, anti racist parody that characterizes this genre of artistic expression." Walker turns the world of the old south upside down. Despite the concept of America as a 'Christian' nation, and the South, also known as the 'Bible Belt,' being the most explicitly religious region of America, a completely unchristian culture, based on slavery, was allowed to flourish. This in itself is an overturning of reason and ethics. It is my contention that without the aspect of the carnival, Walker's work would be unbearable.
The Grotesque
Walker's inner plantation is a terrible place, one where violence flourishes and is visited upon women and children. There is no need to hide the violence as it is conducted on rural plantations, far from polite society. Bell hooks, in her essay Selling Hot Pussy, 1992, quotes from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, remembering how Jacobs "described that 'peculiar' institution of domination and the white people who constructed it as "a cage of obscene birds."' The viewer experiences this violence on the walls of galleries or museums, out in public, for everyone to witness, as big as life.
These acts are Walker's "rememories" of that inner plantation. W.J.T. Mitchell, in his essay Narrative, Memory, and Slavery, states "…one thing that gives rememories endurance and objectivity is, of course, the very act of telling about them, which has the potential to produce a reexperiencing of the original event, a "passing on" of the rememory." Our memory can become confused, as we add to or subtract from the actual memories of the event. This can create a whole other text that replaces the original memory. This is the problem of memory: it cannot be trusted to give us the truth. Walker's created world has no resting places, and wherever the viewer looks, she sees excrement, sexual perversion and brutality, and bodies with unnatural parts. Like a slasher film, which we watch to see unrelenting acts of meaningless violence, looking at a work such as Slavery! Slavery!
Presenting a GRAND and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery or
"Life at 'Ol' Virginny's Hole (sketches from Plantation Life). See the Peculiar Institution as never
before! All cut from black paper by the able hand of Kara Elizabeth Walker, an Emancipated
Negress and leader in her Cause, from 1997, displays visions of child abuse, public defecation, vomiting, rape, voyeurism, and murder played out panoramically. Our desire to know the unknowable, the 'truth' of slavery, to confront the terror of human beings as commodity, and to admit to our own feelings of complicity, come together. Walker's grotesque is beautifully rendered. Formally she creates a visually compelling tableau. Walker grew up in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, close to the cyclorama at Stone Mountain, where a tableau of the Civil War is a tourist attraction. It is no accident that she chose this wide angle and cinematic view of slavery for her vehicle. She grew up in the presence of a similar tableau, depicting the southern story of what that region delicately calls 'The War Between the States.' In 1996 Walker made this statement, "Well, from the moment that I got started on these things I imagined that someday they would be put together in a kind of cyclorama. I mean, just like the Cyclorama in Atlanta that goes around in an endless cycle of history locked up in a room, I thought that it would be possible to arrange the silhouettes in such a way that they would make a kind of history painting encompassing the whole room." Patricia J. William's essay On Being the
Object of Property, 1988, discusses the totality of slave relations describing them "engaging the master and slave in exchanges in which each must take account of the entire range of belief, feeling, and interest embodied by the other…" Walker's silhouettes take the viewer into the embodiment that Williams describes, creating a physical and psychic discomfort designed to imitate the all encompassing dread of master slave interaction.
Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, in Seeing the Unspeakable The Art of Kara Walker, draws a comparison between the use of the grotesque by German George Grosz and Walker. She states that "the political drawings of the German Dadaist George Grosz which mock the pretensions and failures of the Weimar bourgeoisie also echo in the grotesque characterizations and political overtones of Walker's images." Looking at Walker's Virginia's Lynch Mob, 1998, parallels between Walker and another German artist, Max Beckmann, can be seen. Beckmann's triptych Departure, 1932, is a startling image of what the Nazis were doing in Germany. A drum beats, either as a call to arms or a prelude to an execution. Humans are being restrained and tortured. The center of the triptych is the departure of the title, a mother and child, with kings, are setting out on a voyage. The iconography here is a clear reference to the holy family. Walker begins Virginia's Lynch Mob (if one reads her images from left to right) with a black female child flying off into space, followed by a drummer marching behind her. This piece has the feeling of a parade (another aspect of carnival). The procession goes on with gun toting children, captives held aloft, a Klan hood, excrement, and a whole host of troubling images. Like Beckmann Walker is reacting to a society gone mad, only she is not living through it the way that Beckmann did, but imagining it, a century later, and presenting it to the viewing public. The message of both of works is death and destruction. The presentation is vastly different. Beckmann, coming out of the German Expressionist tradition, uses a high art convention, traditional history painting, and expressionistic color, to make his point. Walker uses an archaic and low art method, the silhouette. Neither artist names anyone. The characters in each picture are anonymous. Beckmann does give his figures faces and that accentuates their suffering. Walker's black silhouette figures, however, are like slaves were, nameless, and mostly faceless. They are like ghosts or spirits, not real people. Homi K. Bhabha, in the introduction to The Location of Culture, writes on Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved. He describes Beloved this way "she is the daughter made of murderous love who returns to love and hate and free herself. Her words are broken, like the lynched people with broken necks, disembodied, like the dead children who lost their ribbons…" Beloved says "I want to join." She wants to be human, like Beckmann's figures. Instead she remains a shadow, like Walker's silhouettes.
The Silhouettes
This brings me to two actual photographs of slaves, Delia, and her father Renty, both enslaved in South Carolina, were photographed in 1852. These photographs were taken to prove that the black race was inferior to the white race. These people were captured by a new technology, the camera, to prove a new theory, evolution. Delia is shown in what look like mug shots, stripped to the waist, and staring into the camera. There is a side view, a profile, and a front view. Renty is only seen frontally, and while Delia looks sad but composed, Renty's face is contorted into what can only be interpreted as intense suffering. Walker has made use of Delia's image in silhouette form and it is much easier to look at her without a face or an expression. Slavery in the American south is compared to the Holocaust. Both historical events were tragic, and in turn shaped the nations they took place in. However, the Holocaust, which began in 1938 and ended in 1945, was an attempt to wipe out European Jews. It was not an economic system, nor was it generational. The victims of the holocaust were educated people, wealthy people, people who had lives and homes and, most importantly, names. The first slaves in America were in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, brought from the British West Indies, where Africans were already being imported to work on British owned sugar plantations. The United States banned the slave trade 189 years later. All slaves were freed in 1865. The slaves that lived in America for the 246 (two hundred and forty six) years that slavery was legal, were nameless and faceless people. Edward Ball, in his history of American slavery on his ancestor's plantations in South Carolina, Slaves in the
Family, goes to great lengths to find descendents of the slaves owned by his ancestors. Plantation owners kept excellent records of their crops, and their slaves. Unfortunately slaves had no last names. Families were separated by the will of the master and were lost to each other. In many ways these people were homeless orphans. Consider that they were brought to America in terrible conditions. They arrived in a strange land, not knowing the language or the customs, as property. They are placed on a block and sold. Separated again from the people they came over with, they are now completely lost and hopeless. If one set out to obliterate a person's complete identity and self concept, this would seem to be an excellent method.
Walker's tragic narrative is accomplished with the old fashioned form of the silhouette. Silhouettes come out of the 18th and 19th centuries, originated in Europe, and were co-opted in the formerly colonized American South. Recognized as 'ladies art,' most southerners of a certain class still have silhouettes of their ancestors and display them proudly. This form, which is a predecessor of the photograph, has the feel of a mechanically created object, and can be seen as an objective representation, as it is without facial features and devoid of feeling. Anne Wagner writes about Walker's figures "each of her characters is both an invention and a citation: each is cut from a freehand drawing into shapes whose sheer vitality and obscenity reanimate and darken racial stereotypes." A silhouette from 1796, in the collection of the Stratford, Connecticut historical society is titled Flora. A slave woman's silhouette accompanies her bill of sale. The image with the text creates an oddly telling narrative about slavery and identity. Commodification is most evident and reminds us of another commodity, the book. Silhouettes were used as illustrations in the 18th and 19th centuries. The form seems naturally to lend itself to narrative and that is one reason why it is so suitable for Walker's imaginary plantation. Flora herself is easily identified as black, as her silhouette features kinky hair and Negroid facial features. Darby English, in his essay "This is not about the Past Silhouettes in the work of Kara Walker," identifies the silhouette as "a concrete objectification of the metaphysics of presence and all that that would have implied to the vaunted subjects of Enlightenment." Historically slavery in the American South took place during the Age of Reason, so while philosophers mapped out methods to free humans from the bonds of aristocracy and religion, black people were summarily being treated like property. The financial gains for slave owners far outweighed the moral turpitude of their acts. Walker uses the grotesque to emphasize this point.
The blackness of the silhouette is often discussed in relation to Walker's images. It is the opaque and matte finish of black construction paper, bringing to mind children's art projects as well as printed matter. Blackness is the only representation of humans in Walker's tableaus, and it creates an odd equality for the figures. All the figures are objectified, not just the actual black people. Viewers may take a moment to identify who is what race. There is also the fact that these figures are as large as the viewers, and that they are presented on pristine white walls, upon which the viewers find their own shadows becoming part of the panorama. This merging of time and space is done in such a subtle way that one barely notices it happening. However it is symbolically important as Walker seems to be saying that we are all complicit in the crime of slavery, black and white, male and female, African American and European American. Our existence in the 21st century is negligible because in this work we are forced to interact with figures as large as life. The blackness of the past absorbs us as the ultra modern walls of the white cube are covered with an old fashioned and cheap material that serves to mock our enlightened selves.
Sophisticated viewers of post-modern art are used to seeing conceptual, idea based, work. Narrative history painting is considered stilted and old fashioned. Walker's subversion of this post modern idea is masterful in the way that form and content are linked. This linkage of the past and the present is accomplished through the use of the grotesque and the carnival. "Bludgeoning, cannibalization, shitting, and eating are extreme activities even for mammies, pickaninnies, sambos, belles, dandies, carpetbaggers and the like," states Hamza Walker writing on Kara Walker's work. One is reminded of the beginning of GWTW, when Mammy reminds Scarlett to eat before she goes to the barbeque at Twelve Oaks, so as not to appear unladylike. Bodily functions of all kinds constitute the grotesque and Walker's imaginary plantation is rife with these transgressions.
A Host of Bodily Functions
These repulsive bodily functions used by Walker to inform her viewers of this unfortunate part of American history interact ingenuously with the refined, bourgeois, and ladylike art of the silhouette. If these images were rendered in paint it would be impossible to be objective. Painting shitting, eating, and fornicating objectively is impossible. A painter is successful when she can inject herself into her picture, no matter if it is a narrative picture or a non-objective one. Walker's removal of her hand by using the silhouettes is similar to Sherrie Levine re -photographing the work of Walker Evans. The subject can be seen as the artist and the artist is simply the appropriator, the one making the choice of what to call art, or the messenger. Walker has invented these characters and is, in her own words, "in control." We can see her as a medium, interpreting the lives of ghosts, or imagined slaves, in the same way that Toni Morrison conjures Beloved in the novel of the same name. Scissors bring the characters to life, and that in itself is a sort of violent entrance into the world. Unlike Christian Boltanski, who makes works to remember victims of the holocaust by creating installations of personal objects that serve to emphasize the absence of these people, slaves presumably had few if any possessions. Walker cannot pile up their worldly goods or make us mourn these people as individuals. What we see when we see Walker's tableau is a lost world, dreamily and unrelentingly vicious, one that denies names and places, occupations, families, even love.
Examining Walker's work Slavery! Slavery! (1997), the viewer can consider the happenings on this imaginary plantation. The columned house, black, not white, and negative, not positive, sits on the left and in the distance. Picturesquely surrounded by groups of trees, it hovers above the action like an unreachable heavenly outpost. To the far left of the mansion sits a black child, looking like he has been plopped on his little ass. He kicks his feet out in front of himself, mindlessly. He is in a position that lacks dignity, thus negating childhood innocence and sweetness. He looks like a fool. The fool is a character that can be compared to the jester in carnival. Making a fool of oneself is sometimes the purpose of carnival, only this small boy does not seem to realize he is a joke. To his right a white belle shakes a figure that could be a doll or a deformed or violated child. It has dangling feet on the bottom and what looks like another buttocks and foot coming out where its head should be. The belle appears to be shaking it or holding it aloft, possibly wondering what to do with this failure of a person. Then the parade begins. This group moves across the foreground, the actual ground of the wall that it is pasted on, as if in procession. This is a world of the body. Walker gives the viewer a few clues to the time and place of the images, mostly; however, this drama is played out on the body, just as it is in carnival. This is a drama of the "collective body" of the old south, where death and birth, eating and drinking, growing, and evacuation are taking place. A woman walks saucily along, head held high, carrying a mask. The mask has the face of an African, complete with large, hoop earrings. She looks rather fancy, with high heeled shoes and a wide hoop skirt. She is followed by a child, who seems to be dressed in costume. This costume looks to be from some oriental culture. This child slave has on pantaloons, pointed shoes, and a tall hat. He carries a spoon and catches the belle's feces as she lets them fall while she walks. There is a clear reference to North African here, in the costume of the slave child. He is a black African dressed in the drag of the black Arab, and he is so abject that his job is personal shit carrier for his prissy mistress. The mask she holds indicates that she has made blackness and otherness into a fetish, which is for her own amusement. She walks right into a cloud of gas expressed by the backside of a man who is bowing in front of a strange structure. This white man kneels to a fountain like structure, which comprises the focal point of the piece. The fountain is topped by a nude Negress, who stands with one leg pointed outward. She has fluids sprouting from all of her orifices, mouth, breasts, and vagina. Her dance is similar to that of the Hindu god Shiva, who dances on the monster of ignorance in order to purify the earth. Like Shiva she has a hoop in her hand, resembling the drum that summons up the purifying fire. She stands on the back of another slave woman, one who forms the base of the fountain. She is vomiting, spouting out milk, and urinating all at once. Do her bodily fluids serve to purify the man who kneels before her? Will she absolve him of his sin, even while she is mocked by the belle with the mask? (Like Josephine Baker she pushes her buttocks out for all to see and admire.) In the distance, to the standing Negress' left, is a small strip describing another, more distant, plantation. It appears to have a similar fountain like shape that both echoes the fountain of women in the foreground as well as the dancing woman's raised leg. Walker's use of perspective here is admirable, and an entire paper could be written on that topic alone. Observing the dancer is a figure that stands behind her and to her right. He serves to inform the viewer of distance in the work. He is an adult male, standing with his feet out and his arms akimbo. He is caught between the distant plantation (home?) and the world where the dancing Negress acts as a fountain and a goddess. Back to the ground level, there is an older looking white man, wearing a big hat and pointy shoes. His hat and goatee make him look like Colonel Dixie while his pointy shoes conjure up images of a devil or a demon. He is raping a black woman, who is in shackles. She raises her head and parts her lips as he enters her from the rear. With his left hand he restrains her, which is redundant because her legs are shackled, preventing escape. His right hand holds some sort of small object. He seems to want to thrust this into her anus. They are followed by a man dressed in a frock coat and high boots, typical attire for a gentleman of the old south, who is inserting his finger into the mouth of a black slave boy. The boy is lifted off the ground and held aloft, in accordance with the mask held aloft by the belle. Surely this is not an optimistic situation for the boy. His feet do not touch the ground, so like the shackled woman, and the deformed child with three legs, he is powerless. A large pile of excrement sits to his right. Is he being punished for this? Our bodily functions can be controlled, but only to a point. Is this what being a slave is about? Coming up upon the pile of shit is a slave woman, walking but deeply stooped. She is spitting into her cupped hand and has a baby on her back, papoose style. She is literally walking into the shit. Way above her head is a black, five pointed star. Is she a reminder of the Virgin Mary? Does she carry the savior on her back? Surely they will find only trouble in this world, because it is doubtful that this cast of characters will be able to recognize baby Jesus in his black skin.
Slavery! Slavery! delivers a variety of meanings, both negative and positive. Is there hope here for the black Jesus? Will the fountain woman purify the misguided white masters and mistresses and make Walker's inner plantation safe? This is a possibility, and the presence of the star, positioned as it is directly across from the lives oaks draped with moss, seems to point to a fifty fifty chance at redemption. The moss draped oaks, however, deliver a different message, one of darkness and malevolence. Their fecund moss grows downward, into points, that direct the viewer's gaze into the earth, where the devil dwells. This parade, which is the major part of contemporary carnival, and an aspect of the medieval carnival, delivers a host of fools and devils, all trying to get what they need from someone else. This is the meaning of the master slave relationship for Walker. The master needs, and takes, whatever he or she wants from his or her slave. Like a fruit bearing tree the slave is ripe for the picking or the raping. The slave, confined to a life of constant negation, cannot conceive of him or herself as anything more than a fool or a fetish. This is why the Negress atop the fountain, who in silhouette could be Josephine Baker or any other dancing and fetishized black woman, is working so hard. She may be a god or goddess but she is powerless because she is still black and still a slave. Maybe she can distract the white people coming towards her from what is going on behind her. Maybe she can help protect the baby and its mother. Ultimately this seems unlikely. The mother will step in the shit, and trouble will befall her and the baby. Slavery cannot have a happy ending, even when one travels under a star.
Conclusion
W.J.T. Mitchell in his essay Narrative, Memory, and Slavery, refers to slave discourses within the context of "ekphasis (when mute objects seems to speak), prosopopoeia or personification (when the nonhuman acquires a voice)…" Slavery! Slavery! allows an artwork, a mute object, to speak to the viewer about the experience of slavery in the American south. The discourse that is created is between the characters on the wall, the viewer, and the artist. It serves as a chronotrope that makes time travel possible. This is of great importance to the concept of carnival, in which "all distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people." The societal barriers that separate humans breaks down, and Walker's inner plantation spills out onto the wall and into our twenty first century, post modern, post civil rights space. The physical space is negated by the size and flatness of the figures while the historical space is psychologically vanquished. We are in Walker's world now. The medieval carnival contained a Festival of Fools and this seems to be Walker's intention. All her characters, like real people, have become buffoons, and must suffer the consequences of their actions. This is the right and proper ending for these people as they exist (albeit in Walker's mind) in the last truly feudal society in the west. The American south, colonized as it was by England, created a new aristocracy that prospered due to the institution of slavery. These rich southerners, living in remote rural areas, controlled vast areas of land and became rich because of the successful cultivation of cotton, rice, and sugar. Like medieval Europe and its aristocracy, the planters did nothing. They lived like medieval lords, using their wealth for political gain and thus consolidating power among themselves. They married each other to either keep estates intact or to avoid sharing the wealth. Like European aristocracy the planters tried to provide religion for their slaves, but used it to keep them in line. In The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin writes that "rulers, rich men, thieves, beggars, heterae come together here on equal terms on a single; fundamentally dialogized plane…considerable importance is given to dream visions, insanity, obsessions of all sorts." Do the characters mourn their lost utopia? Walker's work leads to a conclusion that such a utopia never existed.
Bakhtin could be talking about Slavery! Slavery! or a number of other works by Walker.
This essay begins with a quote from Edwidge Danticat, a descendent of slaves, a native of Haiti, an island that is marked by the African Diaspora. She says her people "have always balanced their tragedies with laughter, using distressing situations as the subject of satirical songs and jest." Walker, too, uses the carnival to deal with her own sense of tragedy, but not necessarily her own personal tragedy. Walker is a successful artist, a revered woman, a teacher, a mother, and a public figure. She can look back at the world of southern slavery but she can also control how she represents it, how she presents it to her viewers. The planters do not rule Miss Kara Walker at all. She herself has said that she is in control and that is the difference. Her work does not pander to black stereotypes but frees them from their original meanings. The carnival itself has no telos, but Walker's art is full of ultimate purpose. By placing them in a carnivalistic tableau, Walker sets her imagining free. It is possible that the viewer too is set free. The amazing array of contradictions that the institution of slavery brings forth can be dealt with here. Walker says her inner plantation is a terrible place. Anything can happen to you here because you are vulnerable to all the evils of man. This is just the way of the world so deal with it in your imagination, in your mind, get it under control, and put it back out into space and time in the way that you want it to be seen. That is both the power of the artist and the power of the enlightened human being.
Danticat sees Haitians walking through the streets during carnival and imagines a rainbow above their heads. This is because they know the secret is to process the pain, to deal with it through humor, satire, and jest, and to put it back into the world cleansed of its obliterating power. Like the slave in Hegel's master slave relationship, they are truly empowered. To quote Dostoevsky "I must find myself in another by finding another in myself."
I
Works Cited
"Bakhtin and carnival culture as counterculture."
Bhabha, Homi K. Location of culture. London: Routledge, 2004.
Clark, Katerina. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge Mass: Harvard U.P., 1986.
M., Smith, Mark. Debating slavery economy and society in the antebellum American South. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. New York: University Of Chicago P, 1995.
Parkett. Vol. 59.
Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois, and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw. Seeing the Unspeakable The Art of Kara Walker. New York: Duke UP, 2004.
Writing on the Body Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.
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