On Minneapolis and St. Paul as East African Cities

 

I’ve dwelt in Minnesota (except for 18 months in a Dallas suburb) from the time I was six years old.  Until I was 24, I lived in the suburbs of Minneapolis or downtown when I was a student at the University.  Since that time, I have spent time in Minneapolis and St. Paul at least once a month.  My mother lives in Eden Prairie, s west suburb, and, of course, I see her from time to time. The Twin Cities are familiar to me and, therefore, it was a surprise to learn that they are East African.   

Julie Mehretu is an artist, described as Ethiopian-American, although she has lived in the United States since she was six, at first in Lansing, Michigan.  (Her parents are an Ethiopian geology professor and Jewish-American Montessori teacher).  She is a graduate of East Lansing High School and Michigan State at Kalamazoo.  She now lives in New York City but has been resident-artist for extended periods of time in Minneapolis and Berlin.  Mehretu is a very gifted artist and works on an epic scale – many of her pictures are as big as houses.  I attended her retrospective at the Walker Art Center in January 2022 and was much impressed by her work.

As a side-bar to the main exhibition, occupying four large galleries at the Walker, an alcove in a corridor documents Mehretu’s Walker residency in 2003.  At that time, she worked with girls from East African refugee communities in the Twin Cities – these young women would be the daughters of Somali, Sudanese, and Ethiopian parents fled from war in their home-countries to the United States.  It appears that Mehretu collaborated with these girls on maps of the Twin Cities locating these immigrant communities and establishing cartographic corridors linking these neighborhoods.   At least, this is how the products of this collaboration look to me, although I didn’t inspect them too thoroughly.  The idea was to identify gathering points for East African refugees, connect them with painted lines and show other landmarks important to this diaspora community.  A number of photographs show Mehretu, a handsome woman, bare-headed among smiling teenage girls, all of them wearing headshawls.  Everyone seems to have found the collaboration exhilarating.  The name of the projects created by this alliance of young women (at the time Mehretu was about 31) is Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African Cities.  

At the time of her residency in the Twin Cities, Mehretu was creating very large paintings with an underpinning of architectural drawings or, in some cases, maps.  (It must be recalled that her father was a geographer.)  The network of mechanically drawn (or traced) architectural details or city maps is covered with battalions of small hatchmarks, resembling, in some case, old military engravings showing battlefield maneuvers.  Geometric bands of color decorate the paintings and they are dense with vortices, calligraphically drawn in India ink in forms that seem derived from Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of swirling water.  The work done with the students is less elaborate, but clearly related to Mehretu’s large apocalyptic-looking paintings, massive designs covered in tiny marks that accumulate to an explosive force.  

It is in the context of these apocalyptic images that Mehretu announces her revelation: The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul are East African cities.  I found this disclosure jarring.  Good art has this effect – it forces one to re-evaluate customary thinking.  And, so, I find myself asking if East Africa has somehow come to inhabit the Twin Cities.  This thought has to be judged in the context of reflexes in the White viewer that are possibly racist.  My visceral emotional reaction to Mehretu’s work with the refugee children was disquieting to me.

I suppose that any city with a sizeable percentage of people who have immigrated to the United States takes on some of the characteristics of the country from which this population has moved.  One might say, for instance, that Austin, the place in Minnesota where I live, is a “Mexican city” – about 30% of the population speaks Spanish at home and comes from Latin America (or Texas border towns).  Mehretu’s collaborative project doesn’t proclaim that Minneapolis and St. Paul are only East African cities.  Therefore, I conclude that any American metropolis (since we are, after all, a nation of immigrants) might be comprised of various cities identified with the places from which people have immigrated.  If I translate Mehretu’s declaration into the words: Minneapolis and St. Paul have sizeable East African neighborhoods, there would be nothing surprising about that revelation.  But, at least, sometimes, art is supposed to surprise and, even, alarm – hence, the uncompromising nature of Mehretu’s designation of the Twin Cities as “East African.”

These thoughts lead one in the direction of a conservative bugaboo – that is, the idea of “reverse racism.”  This is a thought experiment that involves reversing the declaration offensive to White people into something that is grammatically equivalent but that, somehow, has a very different meaning.  In response to Mehretu’s pronouncement, I might say “Minneapolis and St. Paul are Northern European cities” or “Scandinavian cities.”  This seems to be an identical declaration to Mehretu’s statement, but, as a reaction to her art project’s caption, seems racist – I am saying, in this context: “No, the Twin Cities aren’t East African, they are predominantly Northern European (or Scandinavian”.  This statement is not controversial and, probably, inoffensive except when considered in the context of Mehretu’s claim.  When the two grammatically identical statements are examined side-by-side one of them becomes implicitly racist.  This is a consequence of the juxtaposition of the two claims.  

A declaration that a majority of the population living in Minneapolis and St. Paul are ethnically Northern European states something that is obvious.  Therefore, the declaration doesn’t need to be made.  It is redundant to what everyone can observe, even people whose parents are immigrants who sought refuge in the Twin Cities due to conflicts in East Africa.  But to state the obvious in this context somehow seems tinted with bias.  Mehretu’s contention is that these refugee communities should be made visible, should be brought into public view – therefore, she makes a surprising claim about these immigrants that will attract the attention (and distaste even) of people such as myself.  We don’t need to bring into focus the Northern European heritage in Minneapolis-St. Paul – that ethnicity is already on clear display and, indeed, describes the dominant culture in this area, at least up to this writing. Therefore, the statement of an obvious truism must have some other purpose.  A speech-act that names something that is so well-known as to be accepted without question must have some other function.  In this case, the purpose is to posit that the Twin Cities are primarily and historically White Northern European and that Mehretu’s claim is untrue.  And, if her claim is untrue, it may well be that the countervailing declaration implies a negation – “No, Minneapolis and St. Paul are Northern European cities and the presence of East Africans in these places is an anomaly, indeed, a disturbing anomaly.”  This claim may (but need not) implicate the idea that the East Africans don’t really belong here – that is, that Minneapolis and St. Paul, at least with regard to their structures of power and hierarchy, are Northern European, will always be Northern European, and the East Africans are strangers here, or, at best, guests.   When I initially considered Mehretu’s claim, my interpretation immediately turned toward the idea of exclusivity: my goodness, I thought, surely she’s not proclaiming that Minneapolis and St. Paul are exclusively or, even, primarily East African cities.  This response to Mehretu’s claim is clearly a projection of my own perspective, but refracted through her declaration.  At heart, I am inclined to view Minneapolis and St. Paul as obviously Northern European and mostly Northern European with other ethnic components of the population mostly invisible.  In other words, the White racist ascribes his racism to the African-American making a claim that is surprising, but obviously not intended to exclude other ethnicities – it’s unfair to contend that Mehretu’s declaration should mean that the Twin Cities are only East African.  To interpret her claim as one of exclusivity is to make apparent certain anxieties that I feel but that aren’t really her problem.  

This interpretative crux is similar to the controversy that has arisen with respect to the slogan (and movement) “Black Lives Matter.”  This movement condemning police violence against people of color is attacked by many White critics for not declaring “All lives matter.”  Once, again, this motto is grammatically identical with the declaration which it parodies.  But grammatical identity isn’t the same as meaning.  People declare “Black Lives Matter” because it is their claim that this slogan arises in a context in which certain people in power (that is police) don’t believe this assertion.  You have to proclaim that “Black lives matter” because this assertion is not self-evident to some authorities.  The statement is made, therefore, to resist a state of affairs that is practically (it is claimed) to the contrary.  To say that “All lives matter” is to state a platitude with which everyone would agree and, therefore, to trivialize or make insignificant the assertion that “Black lives (also) matter.”  We don’t need to consider the specific implications of saying “Black lives” matter when we trivialize the declaration by substituting the phrase “all lives.”

This raises an important issue: grammatical equivalence is not applicable to matters involving race.  Racial issues pose questions of asymmetry of power and meaning.  In a field that is defined by asymmetries we must be cautious about asserting that A = A.  For instance, “people of color” is identical with “colored people” in terms of grammatical meaning.  But the one description would be regarded as possibly racist (“colored people”) while the other phrase is used indiscriminately by politicians and the media without controversy.  Similarly, a grammarian might say that “slave” is the same as “enslaved person” but this is no longer self evident.  If Julie Mehretu says that Minneapolis and St. Paul are Eastern African Cities, the statement can’t be reasonably construed from its context as being racist.  If I say “Minneapolis and St. Paul are Northern European Cities,” I think it might be fair, under these specific circumstances, to consider whether I have racist intent in making that declaration.