Camille Martin

 

FAT TUESDAY’S
HETEROTOPIC SPLASH

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Mardi Gras in New Orleans contains multitudes, and one of the best places to appreciate its polymorphic revelries is the French Quarter on Fat Tuesday. One need only avoid most parts of Bourbon Street, with its sophomoric attempts of balcony occupants to cajole young women on the street below to bare their breasts for the price of a few dangled beads of glittering plastic. A few steps away, a heterotopic paradise opens up: two fantastic walking parades (the Society of St. Ann and the Krewe of Kosmic Debris) and the Bourbon Street Awards, a mostly gay costume contest, fill the streets of the Vieux Carré with explosions of color and fantasy. Here, desires are loosed, not in a monoculture of desire, but in a fantastic excess of passion rendered visible: its expressions range from sublime to ridiculous, mundane to bizarre, deadpan to satirical, blatantly erotic to sweetly innocent, unpretentious to outrageous. Some costumes mimic or satirize the familiar pop idol, while others celebrate unrecognizable life forms. The parades feature no overriding theme, but instead invite individuals and groups to allow desire free reign to explore uncharted and prismatic identities through masking. Categorical sexual identities are drained and then re-imagined, suggesting a plethora of newly invented gender cocktails. In the great street theater of Mardi Gras, the private has little place, and the public realm reigns supreme. Yet normal conventions of public encounters, such as averting one’s gaze from the approaching stranger (at a distance of eight to ten feet, according to a study in Manhattan) or avoiding unnecessary verbal exchanges, do not apply. One calls out to the other (“Hey, Pink Showgirl!” “Look here, Mirror Man!”) and the other graciously obliges with a smile and a wave, or poses with dignified or wild theatrics, grateful for the recognition and acknowledgement. Thus one becomes a participant, an actor, in the theatrical conversation. Exhibitionism and voyeurism are the symbiotic soul of this public promenade, where it might be considered a faux pas not to gaze in awe, amusement, or pleasure, or to show off one’s own phantasmagorical transformation into an alterity that one might normally keep carefully veiled. One performs one’s freakishness to satisfy narcissistic urges and to give delight to the gazer (and photographer); one gazes for one’s own pleasure and for the gratification of the performer. Thus a spirit of cooperation flourishes in order to maximize the theatrical dialogue in the streets as chance conjunctions of identities and attitudes suggest odd or outright bizarre narratives. Carnival in the French Quarter revels in incompatible sites: it is the epitome of the celebratory heterotopia. Are the identities revealed through this carnivalesque mining of the psyche more true to the self than the one that wakes on Ash Wednesday, groggy and perhaps hung over, to a severely diminished and color-drained universe? Where did the fanciful self that flourished yesterday scurry off to? When will it re-emerge? And, a question in the mind of every denizen of the Crescent City, what will post-Katrina Carnival bring? Part of the answer to the latter question, of course, is, how could there not be Carnival after Katrina? How could there not be revelry, no doubt with a spirit of defiance in the face of such appalling disaster and enormous personal and public loss, which have elicited a complex spectrum of emotions? I imagine that the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras will likely seize those emotions in order to explore every facet of the catastrophe. Satirizing, celebrating, and lamenting, it will explode those feelings into a prism of possibilities. I imagine demons and angels freely roaming the streets, unarmed and yet disarming the tragedy in a sublime, ever-shifting, and very public allegory. I hope I can be there. Camille Martin Toronto, November 2005   See photographs

  (c)Martin 2006