Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World

I read Catherine McKinley's "Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World" not knowing quite what to expect. I knew it was a memoir and a searching, but didn't know it was also deep research into Africa and the history and context of African textiles and culture.To me this is the PERFECT kind of memoir or story. It combines very personal passions and uncertainties along with a deep and lived experience. Because Ms. McKinley was doing a kind of ethnographic/qualitative/experimental cultural studies/memoir, many readers will not get it. This type of writing requires a sophisticated and poetic sensibility along with an interest in examining the connections between culture and the self.I found Ms. McKinley's writing to be a type of "indigo" in itself: seductive and elusive. Yes, there are some typo/ editing issues about the dates of things--and these can be easily remedied with some cursory research-as reviewers have done here. Yet, history and culture are not only about facts and figures but are also about passions, questions and interpretations. This travelogue/memoir/cultural exploration of African textiles is an interdisciplinary journey in the experience of research of both oneself and the culture one she is exploring. Therefore, there are many fibers being woven into the cloth--it is more like a tapestry than a plain weave. Many pieces are being held at one time and are brought into the mix when their time has come.Ms. McKinley's writing is fresh, thoughtful, and open. We go on a journey with her. We feel the shame of obsession and public humiliation with her. We fear the war with her as she walks down the road trying to get to the high end hotel with her American companion. We see Africa from many sides. We see the divisions between the elites and people; between the city-folk and bushmen; between those who know, or claim to know, and those who must pretend they don't know.Because this type of interdisciplinary writing is a new form of writing, readers will have to engage with it differently than more authoritative/authoritarian styles. It is open. It is a journey. It is an exploration, an adventure. It demands both openness and critical thinking (different than being critical, btw). It asks the reader to accompany the author on her journey and to be open to the adventure of it.I was thrilled to read the book! I couldn't put it down! I felt as if I had gone on the journey with her. Her work has inspired me to learn more about Africa, and African textiles.

Unfortunately, Catherine McKinley’s “Indigo” is another one of those books that could go grossly overlooked because it’s informative. Truly her search for indigo revealed the severe tie between cloth and world history everywhere.A reader will get much more than the story of indigo in the world of textiles. In this narrative ethnography, full of desire and color, the reader will be introduced to the Nigerian medical doctor who discovers a cure for AIDS but then just a few pages later the reader gets folded back into cloth while learning that the Netherlands was the fourth-largest, slave-trading nation whose Dutch textiles made up 57 percent of the goods exchanged for human lives during their slave trade. Cloth constituted more than 50 percent of European exports to West Africa on a whole by the late 1600s—so that we see the incredible importance of cloth to West Africans that they would exchange lives for it. Concurrently, abolitionists over in America were staging boycotts of indigo and all of this information goes very well towards feeding the reader with the zeitgeist of the times.Cloth takes on its own persona in "Indigo." McKinley makes cloth come alive as she explores its processes and its history in pre-colonial Africa as well. She effectively runs through the various types of cloth that were exchanged from East to West and North to South. Everyone around the world loved cloth in all its colors and textures. She also succinctly points out on a general note that the making of the ‘beauty’ during colonialism is also the making of the crisis that consumed many West African countries post-colonialism.Every bit of indigo McKinley can find not only furthers her Fulbright research but furthers her insatiable desire to 'feel' the history of the people when it is not readily communicable from its owners. She believes in understanding by osmosis so that when she lacks the information to steer her in the right direction for more culture, rather than assuming there is no more knowledge to be gotten, her self-determination, sheer faith, and belief in the power of cloth pushes her straight through to the places she needs to go and the people she needs to meet over and over again throughout her West African journey.The textile cultures McKinley discovers have been in West Africa for a very long time and as the needs of a global economy loom, she explains how that has necessitated that many West Africans start to place the pursuit of financial gain over the maintenance of laborious yet ancient and rare textile traditions. These cloth traditions do more than impart beauty but also translate generational heritage as indigo has been included in dowries passed down from mother to daughter and the symbolism embedded in the cloth itself expresses the various cultural values from ethnicity to ethnicity and country to country that she explores.

Conventional wisdom says, never judge a book by its cover. Not so with Indigo. The lush dye-pot indigo blue of the outside cover and the detailed designs on the inside cover are a fitting wrapper for an exquisitely crafted book in which multiple threads of the author's search for indigo unfold in line after line of beautiful Renaissance fonts inlaid on rich stock.An indigo lover myself, I could not put it down. Willingly, I meandered intoxicated through stories of the carefully concealed link between slavery and indigo; the rise and fall of indigo in the U.S. South; India's textile traditions; the path taken by the cloth from an artisanal ancient practice of dyeing handed down through generations to an industrialized synthetic-based production by the behemoth Vlisco, adulterated even further by China's growing grip on the African textile industry; African burial practices; African proverbs and world views; culture clash when Africa meets the West; women as financial powerhouses (read, Mama Benzs)and a the West Africa of old juxtaposed with statehoods teething pains of the early 21st century. Not lost in this rivetingly woven canvas is the author's own journey from New Englander and big city New Yorker to Africa where she functions as part obruni, shop girl, researcher, pilgrim and intrepid traveler in search of her indigo pot of gold.A collector's item, the author brings a piercing vision and skilled wordsmithing to a story whose multiple overlays could have been numbing to the casual reader attracted by the book's cover. I kept going intrigued by one of Africa's great textile traditions, as well as the sub-plot of McKinely's own search for self, using the cloth as metaphor.

Of course if like me, your interested in all things to do with Indigo you'll find it interesting as I did. There are parts that are terrific, with some real nuggets of information and insight. But on the whole it's not that well written, some very awkward 'trying too hard to have a writing style' bits, it's much better when the writing relaxes into just 'telling it', rather than trying to be a bit smart, which is sometimes what I felt. I have a little theory that the first half or so, was written perhaps several years ago and the second half (which is on the whole the better simpler writing), written more recently with a certain confidence and maturity - that certainly is how it felt to me.

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