Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory 9783110772715, 9783110772630

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
1 Introduction
2 A Short History of Cajun Culture and Cajun Literature
3 Framing Collective Memory and Literature: Some Theoretical Observations
4 Memory as Awakening: Cris sur le bayou and the Emergence of Cajun Poetry
5 Tim Gautreaux: Navigating between Memory and Forgetting
6 Jeanne Castille’s Nostalgic Vision of Cajun Culture
7 Migrating Literature: Zachary Richard’s Cajun Tales
8 Ron Thibodeaux’s Hell or High Water: How Cajuns Counter the Rita and Ike Amnesia
9 Darrell Bourque’s Poetics of Broken Memory
10 Kirby Jambon’s China Baroque Poetry
11 Conclusion and Outlook
12 Works Cite
Index

Citation preview

Mathilde Köstler Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory

Buchreihe der Anglia / ANGLIA Book Series

Edited by Andrew James Johnston, Ursula Lenker, Martin Middeke, Gabriele Rippl, Daniel Stein Advisory Board Derek Attridge, Laurel Brinton, Elisabeth Bronfen, Philip Durkin, Olga Fischer, Ursula K. Heise, Susan Irvine, Christopher A. Jones, Verena Lobsien, Liliane Louvel, Christopher Morash, Terttu Nevalainen, Susana Onega, Martin Puchner, Ad Putter, Peter Schneck, James Simpson, Emily Thornbury

Volume 78

Mathilde Köstler

Cajun Literature and Cajun Collective Memory

Die vorliegende Arbeit wurde vom Fachbereich 05 Philosophie und Philologie der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz im Jahr 2020 als Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie (Dr. phil.) angenommen.

ISBN 978-3-11-077263-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-077271-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-077277-7 ISSN 0340-5435 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022941684 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements This book is the culmination of my decade-long preoccupation with Cajun culture and memory. I am deeply grateful to my advisor Manfred Siebald, who shadowed my progress from my first explorations in both fields on. Our conversations both kept me focused on my argument and opened new avenues of research. His professional guidance and unrelenting patience gave me confidence and strength of purpose to see this project to fruition. My deepest gratitude also goes to Véronique Porra for her helpful directions on not only francophone matters but also transcultural thinking, and for our enriching talks “aux quatre coins du monde,” notably at the Congrès du Conseil International d’Études Francophones in Grand-Baie, Mauritius; San Francisco, California; and Fort de France, Martinique. I keep our meetings in very fond memory. During my stay at Université de Bourgogne in Dijon, Mark Niemeyer provided me with useful suggestions on various matters, but especially regarding Longfellow’s Evangeline and 19th-century America. His encouragement and enthusiastic support continued all through the “hybrid” dissertation defense: Thank you! I am also thankful for Winfried Herget’s continued interest in my work and constructive criticism regarding my research grant proposals. Thanks are owed to the Professor Dr. Friedrich Schubel-Stiftung at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz for awarding me a grant to launch my doctoral research as well as to Université franco-allemande/Deutsch-Französische Hochschule for funding an eighteen-months stay at Université de Bourgogne in Dijon, which allowed me to make significant progress on my research and writing. The Library of Michigan, the Universitätsbibliothek Mainz, the Bibliothèques universitaires de l’université de Bourgogne, and especially the Universitätsbibliothek Basel supported my research in providing me with a wide range of material. My gratitude also goes to those who helped to improve the text and my argument. Katherine Steele Brokaw, Annette and Lennard Güntzel, George Hoffman, Cécile Köstler, Geoffrey Miller, and Maguy Pernot-Deschamps provided invaluable comments on my drafts as well as much valued encouragement. During my research and writing process many people supported me in various ways. I thank my extended family as well as Juliane Braun, Ben Fagan, Florian Freitag, Asynith Palmer, and Pat and John Rubadeau for our entertaining discussions on Cajun culture and the bane and boon of doctoral research.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-001

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of Chapter 7 and parts of Chapter 9 previously appeared in the European Journal of American Studies (“Migrating Literature: Zachary Richard’s Cajun Tales,” 2014) and in Textes & contextes (“The Grand Dérangement—A Wound Not Healed?” 2014). Katja Lehming and Matthias Wand at De Gruyter prepared the final version of this book. I thank both for their much-valued swiftness and competence. Many thanks, too, to Ulrike Krauss at De Gruyter who organized the first contact with the editors of the Anglia Book series, notably Daniel Stein. Daniel Stein and I met in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the beginning of my doctoral research. It is the most wonderful serendipity that our second encounter closes my doctoral journey. I am enormously grateful for his precious suggestions which made my work a better book. My principal debt is to my father, Joachim, and my sisters, Fleur and Cécile. They pushed me further during challenging times and often brought me back to the ground with their serenity. There are no better listeners, and this book would not have been completed without their unwavering belief in me. I dedicate this book to them and to my mother, Marie-Odile.

Contents 

Introduction



A Short History of Cajun Culture and Cajun Literature



Framing Collective Memory and Literature: Some Theoretical 44 Observations Mapping out Collective Memory 49 55 The Unveiling of a Collective Memory in Cajun Culture Modes of Remembering in Cajun Literature 60 Mnemo-Cultural Dynamics and Literature 85

. . . .

1 18



Memory as Awakening: Cris sur le bayou and the Emergence of Cajun Poetry 91 95 . Cris sur le bayou: Awakening as a Mnemonic Process . The Afterlives of Cris sur le bayou: Counter-Memories 125 . Conclusion 150

 Tim Gautreaux: Navigating between Memory and Forgetting 156 . In Search of a Sense of Place . Between Absent and Present Pasts 173 . Gautreaux’s Fiction as a Hybrid Space 186 . Conclusion 207

153

212  Jeanne Castille’s Nostalgic Vision of Cajun Culture . Uncommonplace: The Singularity the Cajuns Share 218 . Castille’s Life Writing as histoire-mémoire 233 . Jeanne Castille: Pioneer of the Francophonie in Louisiana . Conclusion 257  Migrating Literature: Zachary Richard’s Cajun Tales 262 . (Re)Locating Cajun Culture 267 . Recovering Roots—À la recherche des racines perdues . Transnational Echoes and Trajectories 294 . Conclusion 300 

244

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Ron Thibodeaux’s Hell or High Water: How Cajuns Counter the Rita and Ike Amnesia 306 312 . A Tale of Louisiana’s Coastal Parishes . Disasters Revisited 322

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Contents

Collaborative Remembering 348 Conclusion

336

 Darrell Bourque’s Poetics of Broken Memory 354 358 . Bourque’s Acadie Tropicale . Negotiating Historical Memory 370 . Creating a Universal Cajun Poetry Through Transmediality . Conclusion 405  Kirby Jambon’s China Baroque Poetry 409 . Jambon’s Gombo School 412 427 . History as Chain of Memory . Cultivating the Tie That Binds 437 . Conclusion 448  Conclusion and Outlook  Works Cited Index

515

467

453

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1 Introduction In the fall of 2014, Louisiana’s literary community celebrated the national and international recognition of two of its poets. Darrell Bourque won the Louisiana Writer Award for his contribution to Louisiana culture, and Kirby Jambon was the proud recipient of the Prix Henri de Régnier of the Académie française, the supreme institution regarding the French language in Paris, for his second poetry collection, Petites communions: Poèmes, chansons et jonglements (2013).¹ Seemingly opposed by different language choices—Bourque writes his poems in English whereas Jambon mixes the dialect of Bayou Lafourche, a Louisiana French patois, Standard French, and some English—their poetry nonetheless possesses a likeness in its cultural background and humanistic worldview. Both poets were born and still live in Cajun Country, the region inhabited by the Cajuns, a French-speaking minority in Southwest Louisiana known for its mix of French (French Creole or colonial French), Acadian, Spanish, Native American, African, Caribbean, German, Italian, Irish, and Anglo-American heritage.² Bourque and Jambon are by far not the first nor the only writers reuniting these and other cultural properties pertaining to the Cajuns. Their concerted affinity for poetry and their common cultural context hint at a larger phenomenon. Since the early 1980s, the body of texts that can be called Cajun literature, including francophone and anglophone writings, has been developing.³ Apart

 Created in 2000 by the Louisiana Center for the Book, the Louisiana Writer Award “is given annually to recognize outstanding contributions to the literary and intellectual heritage of Louisiana” (“Louisiana Writer Award” [2014]). The Prix Henri de Régnier has honored and supported literary creation since 1994 (“Prix Henri”).  “Cajun” is generally regarded to be an Anglo-American corruption of “Acadian,” “Acadien” in French, which developed in Louisiana at the end of the nineteenth century through Americanization. According to the OED, the term “Cajun” appeared for the first time in Putnam’s Magazine in 1868. Spelling variants include “Cajan,” “Cajen,” and “Cajian” (“Cajun”). “Creole” originally referred to descendants born in the colonies (“Creole” as a noun) as well as to all products produced there (“creole” as an adjective). The term has undergone several semantic changes since then. See below for more details on “Cajun” and “Creole.”  Introduced by French geographer Onésime Reclus in 1886, the term “francophone” applies to the French-speaking people as well as to those who speak another language in addition to French. The derivative noun “Francophonie” refers to a totality or part of the francophone world, for instance, Belgium or Quebec (Reclus). In 1962, Léopold Sédar Senghor gave the following definition of “Francophonie”: “La Francophonie, c’est cet humanisme intégral, qui se tisse autour de la terre: cette symbiose des ‘énergies dormantes’ de tous les continents, de toutes les races, qui s’éveillent à leur chaleur complémentaire” (“Le Français” 844). Today, the capital-F Francophonie differs from the lowercase-f francophonie in that the former refers to the members https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-002

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from Bourque and Jambon, writers such as Jean Arceneaux, Tim Gautreaux, Jeanne Castille, Zachary Richard, and Ron Thibodeaux disclose in their works a unique Cajun identity based on a strong sense of place partly linked to bilingualism, an intricate history, and the hybrid constitution of the Cajun community. As we will see, regional, transnational, and transcultural elements interact and create a distinctly hybrid geo-cultural space. The strong interest in Cajun culture today, both on a public and a scholarly level, pertains, however, to two other cultural practices. Thanks to their national and international recognition, Cajun music and Cajun cuisine have grown into the culture’s calling cards, manifesting distinct cultural features.⁴ The worldwide fascination originated during the so-called Cajun Renaissance starting in the late 1960s, a period that represents the self-assertion of a Cajun identity, including the celebration of the French heritage, and the emancipation of the Cajuns as an ethnic group. The new literary movement emerging several years later is a logical spin-off of that revival movement generated by both grassroots and elite organizations. Apart from interrogating Cajun identity in the context of twentieth-century American culture, historians and ethnologists also began to critically analyze the Cajun past. Since the 1980s, the Cajuns’ early history has come to figure most prominently in academic and public discourses, and, with some delay, in Cajun literary works. Tracing their ancestry back to the Acadians, the seventeenth-century French colonists who settled along the Bay of Fundy on the east coast of Canada and founded the second North American colony Acadie,⁵ the Cajuns can look back on an eventful history of wandering around the Western hemisphere, suffering time and again from wars, migration, and discrimination. Their expulsion from their homeland by British and New England forces between 1755 and 1763, known as the Grand Dérangement, and the subsequent arrival of several groups of Acadians in Louisiana from 1765 onward have become landmark events in Cajun history and major linchpins of their collective memory. Significantly, the search for a promised land has become a leitmotif in the Cajun

of the International Organization of the Francophonie, established in 1970, while the latter also includes French-speaking countries which are not part of the (official) Francophonie. It was only in October 2018 that Louisiana joined the Francophonie as official observer member (Cheramie “Quelques réflexions”).  For studies on Cajun music see Broven; Sacré; Bernard, Swamp Pop; Brasseaux and Fontenot; Ancelet and Morgan; Ancelet, Cajun Music; Ancelet and Gould; R. Brasseaux, Cajun Breakdown; Stivale; Kilpatrick; Le Menestrel, Negotiating.  The Spanish settled Saint Augustine, Florida, in 1565, 39 years prior to the founding of Acadie.

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historical discourse. From the twentieth century on, Americanization has made the Cajuns cling to the Acadian past, sparking commemorations and eventually leading to a cultural preservation movement, notably the preservation of the French language. That Acadian history figures more prominently in recent literary writings is obviously related to several events taking place during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Cajun activist Warren A. Perrin’s decade-long struggle for the recognition of the atrocities committed during the Grand Dérangement came finally to an end in 2003, when the Queen of England signed the Royal Proclamation, an official document repealing the order of exile and acknowledging the crimes against the Acadians. Also, the ecological disasters in 2005 (Hurricanes Katrina and Rita) and 2010 (the Deepwater Horizon oil spill) seem to have spurred the Cajun writers to engage with their origins, above all with the experience of loss and displacement. In the face of events threatening the survival of Cajun culture, the deportation experience serves visibly to consolidate the establishment of a founding myth of the Cajuns. The ever-encroaching mainstream American culture⁶ as a part of other homogenizing processes resulting from globalization as well as ethnic denigration and natural disasters puts the authenticity and viability of Cajun culture at stake.⁷ The slow but sure disappearance of Louisiana French, commonly called Cajun French (Valdman and Rottet xii),⁸ is the most visible avatar of the culture’s tribulations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Language as a major cultural pillar functions as the most important communicative tool for the transmission of knowledge and traditions in a society. Although the demise of French was presaged in scholarly circles as early as 1803 and the statutory proscription of speaking French in schools in 1921 worked toward the coup de grâce of that language (Ancelet, “Marginalité” 366), French in Louisiana, time and again, has rekindled. Indeed, the ongoing production of francophone works is evidence that French in Louisiana is not likely to disappear very soon.

 American English and American popular culture, relayed by educational institutions and the mass media, exert the greatest influence on Cajun culture.  I understand “authenticity” here as both “being genuine” and “being rooted in a concrete experience,” especially thoughts and creative works coming from within the group that understands itself as Acadian. This also entails outside ideas the group adapts to its own purposes, including stereotypes.  For more details on Cajun French and its socio-linguistic history, specific language phrases, socio-cultural language shifts, and its relevance in the classroom see Dubois “Attitudes”; Rottet, Language; Dubois and Horvath, “Let’s tink”; Dubois and Horvath, “Sounding Cajun”; Dubois, Salmon, and Noetzel; Rottet, “Évolution”; Salmon.

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The question of how the Cajuns preserve their culture, above all the French language that was common practice until the first few decades of the twentieth century,⁹ is one of cultural survival and, therefore, essentially connected to collective memory. It addresses both the past and the present, and involves the future. In light of the numerous adversities challenging Cajun culture, the current interest and involvement with the Cajuns lead me to agree with the scholarly opinion that “[t]he problem of collective memory … arises in a particular time and a particular place … where collective identity is no longer as obvious as it once was” (Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, “Introduction” 8). Given the hybrid constitution of Cajun culture and the rapid socio-cultural changes affecting it, what, then, does the collective memory of the Cajuns entail? While the fight for preserving Cajun culture becomes more acute than ever, the recent literary accomplishments indicate a meaningful shift in the culture and identity of the Cajuns. Originally based on oral traditions such as music and folktales, Cajun culture now shows a disposition toward preserving specific cultural elements, and increasingly negotiates its culture and the Acadian past in a written form. The new literary Cajun writings highlight the culture’s uniqueness and respond to the threats posed by the dominating influence of mainstream American culture. As a medium of collective memory, literature can provide evidence for mnemocultural processes since it features similar capacities: It stores events, experiences, ideas, etc., much like human memory. German literary scholar Renate Lachmann made the intriguing claim that [w]hen literature is considered in the light of memory, it appears as the mnemonic art par excellence. Literature is culture’s memory, not as a simple recording device but as a body of commemorative actions that include the knowledge stored by a culture, and virtually all texts a culture has produced and by which a culture is constituted. Writing is both an act of memory and a new interpretation, by which every new text is etched into memory space. (“Mnemonic” 301)

As culture’s memory, literature retrieves, selects, and organizes the material at hand to construct something new. Cajun literature, too, constructs new images and perspectives. In their writings, the Cajuns not only explore the present state of their culture and identity, but necessarily reflect on their past. This proc-

 Although Reconstruction Laws officially eliminated French after the American Civil War, people continued to speak French and to print French newspapers and other writings. Allegedly, 1945 constituted the tipping point when French was formally given up by the Cajun population (J. Castille 24, 39 – 40).

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ess entails the negotiation with the collective memory of Cajun culture as a hybrid culture. This book explores the mnemocultural strategies to which the Cajuns as a group have recourse in order to constitute and preserve an identity of their own. It tackles the question of how the emerging Cajun literature represents the dynamic processes of remembering. Today, three major characteristics define Cajun culture, unveiling the workings of collective memory: self-assertion in a dominant, but markedly different society through a distinct sense of place; memory of the past; and a will to adapt and incorporate foreign influences. Referring to representative francophone and anglophone Cajun works, the present analysis scrutinizes not only the mnemocultural shift in the collective memory of the Cajuns mirrored in the development from an oral to a scriptural culture, but also the linguistic dualism of this culture. Despite the striking convergence of such works that is endemic to the emerging genre of Cajun literature, a joint analysis of both anglophone and francophone Cajun writings has thus far been bypassed. Looking at how the Cajuns use memory to create a Cajun identity, this study offers a new perspective on the self-image of the Cajuns and on how the Cajuns imagine themselves through remembrance. As a matter of fact, the medium of literature works as a contact zone with the past: “The encoding of versions of the past—from life experiences to national histories—is inconceivable without literary forms” (Erll and Nünning, “Literaturwissenschaftliche Konzepte” 6; my translation). As the province of literature includes the transmission of a culture’s history, values, and identity, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction provide the most comprehensive approach to a community, an epoch, and cultures, and, thus, serve as an ideal testing ground for the investigation of the collective memory of a group. Literary works reveal both the historical and aesthetic evolution of literature as well as the development of a people’s identity. While the Cajun oral tradition used to serve as the repository of collective memory, today this function has gradually shifted to the written tradition. Cajun literature can be considered a repository of the Cajun collective memory, carried by those poets, prose writers, and songwriters who identify with Cajun culture, and reflecting the history and identity of the Cajun people. As we will see, Cajun literature has undergone several changes, and the place-based focus has now shifted to a more diversified focus, opening up to both explorations of the past and productive exchanges with the outside world. The authors under examination strongly identify with Cajun culture; they express close ties to the region, to family and community, and to Cajun traditions such as music and food, as well as to a certain religious or spiritual belief. The most conspicuous elements uniting the anglophone and francophone works are their Cajun setting, the promotion and preservation of values and traditions com-

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mon to Cajun culture,¹⁰ the commemoration of the Acadian past, and a tendency to legitimize Cajun identity. Yet, there are also deviations, for instance, when allusions to other events of the past or to other cultures are included. Malleability defines Cajun literature, just like Cajun oral traditions such as Cajun music or folktales. The capacity to adapt, then, originates from the oral nature of these traditions and their free exchange with foreign influences, including the dominant mainstream American culture. Constant change necessitates a disposition for adaptability. This marker also determines Cajun literature as it becomes a storehouse of Cajun identity—or identities. Far from being the epitome of Cajun culture, the new literary form seems nonetheless to be well on the rise and to become another of its hallmarks. Despite the current popularity of collective memory as a theoretical concept, the collective memory of the Cajuns has never been considered systematically,¹¹ let alone studied through the lens of literature. The interdisciplinarity of the concept of collective memory transgresses constricting boundaries and illuminates the synergies working in Cajun culture, both amid the various cultural influences and the various media transmitting culture and memory. We will see that Cajun collective memory is defined by a transversality cutting across various ethnic heritages as well as a number of disciplines such as history, literature, arts, and politics. This study wants not only to provide an insight into the forms and functions of the collective memory as represented in Cajun literature, but to reveal the dynamic changes and diversity of these forms and functions. Ultimately, it seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Cajun culture and an increased visibility of Cajun literature that might well serve as an example for other minorities that struggle to preserve their traditions, and to show how to build an identity from within. In Cajun Country (1991), the first comprehensive overview of the Cajun way of life and ranging from history and folklore to leisure activities in Cajun culture, the authors provide a perhaps perennial definition of the Cajun character: To understand today’s Cajuns, one must take a long, hard look at their culture and history. Friendly, yet suspicious of strangers; easy-going, yet stubborn; deeply religious, yet anticlerical; proud, yet quick to laugh at their own foibles; unfailingly loyal, yet possessed of a frontier independence—Cajuns are immediately recognizable as a people, yet defy facile defini-

 Examples of ethno-historical accounts about the Acadian migration, the genesis of the Cajuns, and the specificities of their culture include Conrad, Cajuns; Rushton; Hallowell; Dormon, People; Esman, Henderson; Griolet, Cadjins; Henry and Le Menestrel.  Scholars briefly touching upon collective memory in Cajun culture include Bergeron-Maguire, Stivale, Brundage, and Le Menestrel, Negotiating.

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tion. As the saying goes, ‘You can tell a Cajun a mile away, but you can’t tell him a damn thing up close.’ (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre xvii)

Today this sarcastic description of the intangible Cajun identity is still valid. Defining Cajun identity remains difficult, for instance, when attempting to give a concrete number of the Cajun population. According to the American Community Survey of 2013, about 100.000 Louisiana residents claim to speak French, including Cajun French (U.S. Census Bureau). In contrast, the 1970 Census produced estimates of over 500.000 French-speaking persons in Louisiana, while the 2000 Census listed 250.000 persons proficient in French.¹² Most members of the Cajun community call Cajun Country their home, a region of 22 parishes also called Acadiana and forming a triangle west of New Orleans. As a melting pot of assimilated cultures, Cajun Country is a place where history and narratives of memory necessarily collide. Cajun culture’s hybrid constitution, the linguistic development of “Cajun,” and the concomitant rejection of the term by some members of the community complicates any attempt to give a precise definition of Cajun identity. Indeed, the terminological perplexity of “Cajun” is a result of historical intricacies and linguistic development. Moreover, the stereotypical ascription of “Cajun” to lazy, ignorant, backwater Frenchspeaking Louisianians from the nineteenth century until the 1960s and 1970s adds to the ambiguity. Until the end of the twentieth century, there existed various spellings of “Cajun,” making “Cadien/Cadjin” common in Louisiana French, and “Cajun/Cajan/Cajin/Cajen” in English. Today, “Cajun” is the accepted spelling in the English context. In the French context, opinions still diverge: Well-known dictionaries list “Cadjin,” “Cajun,” and “Cadien,” with “Cajun” and “Cadien” being the prevailing terms today.¹³ Another problem concerns the indiscriminate use of “Acadian” and “Cajun.” Lauren C. Post in his book Cajun Sketches (1962), for instance, “uses the words Acadian and Cajun interchangeably. … The shifting from one term to the other merely expresses a degree of formality or a degree of corruption of speech” (2– 3). Ten years later, Del Sesto and Gibson argued in favor of a clear-cut distinc-

 Both the disappearance of the French-speaking generation as well as a new selective sampling method of the U.S. Census Bureau issued in 2000 are the causes of the wide discrepancy (Henry and Bankston 5 – 6).  Cécyle Trépanier opts for “Cadjin” in her article in order to avoid confusion with the word “Cadien” used in early writings about Acadians (“Louisiane”). Also, there is a growing tendency of the francophone community to use “Cadien” and reject “Cajun.” For a diachronic and synchronic view about the transformation of the labelization of the Cajuns see Henry, “From Acadian to Cajun to Cadien.”

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tion between “Acadian” and “Cajun.” Considering that “Acadian” refers to the inhabitants of Acadia, they advocated a restriction of that term to the first generation of Acadian settlers seeking refuge in South Louisiana after their expulsion from Acadia. “Cajun,” in contrast, should refer not only to the descendants of the Acadians, but to “everyone who has been brought up in, and assimilated, the particular lifestyle prevalent in Cajun Country” (Del Sesto and Gibson 3). Today, “Acadian” is still used as a synonym for “Cajun,” though not as frequently as the alternative expression “Louisiana Acadian.” The vagueness of Cajun identity resulting from the ambiguous orthography and terminology of “Cajun” is compounded by the conflicting views about who can be considered Cajun. Ethnographic investigations energized by the ethnic revival movement of the 1960s and 1970s identified a Cajun consciousness. According to Del Sesto and Gibson, there is [f]or all the obvious physical and cultural differences within Acadiana, … a cross-cutting unity; there is a manifest sense of ‘being Cajun’ and of identification with the region. In spite of modern changes, this thread of continuity with the past has acted to weld the Cajuns together like few other contemporary ethnic enclaves. It serves as the adhesive for group structure in dealing with non-Cajuns as well as specifying the range of proper or tolerated behavior in relationships with Cajuns. (8 – 9)

Aiming at a comprehensive standpoint, the researchers give a good picture of how the historically complex and ethnically hybrid constitution complicates the definition of “Cajun.” They extend the term to include Acadians as well as any person brought up in Cajun Country and identifying himself as a Cajun: [A] Cajun is a member of and participant in Cajun culture. Indians, Blacks, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, French Nationals, French Canadians, and Anglo-Saxons are all Cajuns if they perceive of themselves as such and are so perceived by others. … Subtle internal differences notwithstanding, a Cajun is most emphatically identifiable as an individual who is typically Roman Catholic, is rural or of rural extraction, emphasizes kinship relations over those of non kin-based associations, and who speaks both English and Louisiana French. (3)

Clearly, Acadian ancestry, a Catholic faith, the knowledge of French and celebration of Cajun traditions identify somebody as Cajun. Revon Reed, a Cajun cultural activist and radio presenter endorsed a more comprehensive view about Cajun identity based primarily on Acadian descent. According to him, a Cajun is proud of his Acadian heritage and celebrates it, no matter whether the last name is Fontenot, Granger, Ortego, Schexnayder, Brown, Israel, Grazaffi, or McGee, whether he is poor or rich, Catholic or Baptist, black, white or half-Indian, educated or uneducated (7– 8). During the second half of the twentieth century,

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“[t]he term [“Cajun”] ceased to describe a mainly French-speaking, non-materialistic, impoverished people on the fringe of American society and instead referred to a largely English-speaking, consumer-oriented, middle-class community whose members closely resembled mainstream Americans” (Bernard, Cajuns 146). Now that Cajun Country is part of the global village, “culture, not blood, defines today’s Cajun,” as journalist Jim Bradshaw astutely observed in 1991. As Reed writes, “la vieille langue des Normands” no longer serves to identify somebody as Cajun.¹⁴ Against what has been predicted, the disappearance of Cajun French and of a few Cajun traditions has not resulted in the disappearance of Cajun culture.¹⁵ In 1997, the linguists Sylvie Dubois and Megan Melançon came to the same conclusion in their article “Cajun Is Dead—Long Live Cajun: Shifting from a Linguistic to a Cultural Community,” which dealt with how the demise of French concurred with the growing celebration of Cajun culture. Instead, a more standardized French and modernized traditions indicate the malleability of Cajun culture. The definition that comes closest to today’s view of Cajun identity stems from the Cajun literary scholar Maria Hebert-Leiter, who posited in 2009 that “Cajun no longer refers to a strictly Catholic, French people descended from Acadians, but [that] it does still name a Louisiana ethnicity made up of distinct music, foodways, an English dialect influenced by Cajun French, and religious beliefs” (Becoming Cajun 148). As they strive to celebrate and perpetuate Cajun culture, the Cajuns reveal a certain sense of community. Not only are they what Bellah et al. call a “community of interest,” i. e., a community in which “self-interested individuals join together to maximize individual good” (134). They also act as “a community of memory, defined in part by its past and its memory of its past” (Bellah et al. 333). The Cajuns’ joint understanding of their present living, their memories of the past as well as their visions of the future mirror a community of memory and coalesce to form a Cajun collective memory. The Cajuns are not the only ethnic group with a French heritage. When it comes to the analysis of French culture in Louisiana, contemporary scholars

 At the time Reed’s book was published (1976), there still prevailed the erroneous view that the Acadians had come from Normandy in France.  In an interview in 2006, poet David Cheramie, who was raised by Cajun parents in English and learned French at school, gave a convincing example of the conflicting points of view: “My neighbour has a boat and spends every minute of his spare time in the swamps hunting deer, squirrels and ducks and catching barbues [catfish]. He dances, and he knows everything about Cajun food. But he doesn’t speak a word of French. And then there’s me, who does none of this, who never hunts or fishes, but who speaks French. Who’s the real Cajun?” (qtd. in Nadeau and Barlow 337).

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identify four ethnic groups that have contributed to today’s francophone Louisiana landscape: The white Creoles centered around New Orleans; the Cajuns; the black Creoles, or Creoles of color; and the Houma, a historic Native American people. The public and scholarly discourses about Cajun culture involve especially Cajun and Creole traditions.¹⁶ Like “Cajun,” “Creole” is difficult to define as it has now adopted multiple meanings. In its broadest sense, “Creole” can refer to a mixed ethnic background, independent from a colonial background.¹⁷ In contemporary Louisiana, “creole” is most often linked to language, food, and music.¹⁸ The view that south Louisiana is south of the south and north of the Caribbean rim draws attention to Louisiana’s connection to the Creole people of the Caribbean (Spitzer). In the first half of the twentieth century, Louisiana was viewed as “a misplaced piece of Caribbean culture where more people spoke French than English” (J. L. Burke, “Hammering”). The ongoing intercultural exchanges between Cajun and Creole cultures further impede the definition of Cajun and Creole identities. Today, the Louisiana Creoles of color, the Houma, and the Cajuns make up the three major French-speaking minorities of Louisiana. The Cajuns constitute the larger minority, but together with the Creoles of color and Native American communities they mutually influence each other, and all witness the demise of their dialects in the face of the dominating English, or Standard French languages. In contrast to the Cajuns, though, the Creoles of color and the Houma have been able to maintain French because their lower social status marginalizes them. Today, they might well be the last stronghold of French-speaking people.¹⁹  Consider, for instance, the publications by Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales; Ancelet and Allain; Ancelet and Gould; Ancelet and Morgan; and Valdman and Rottet. From 1979 onward, there were underground posters for the Hommage à la musique créole—Tribute to Creole Music. The Festivals Acadiens et Créoles, cooperative of independent festivals and founded in 1977, changed its name in 2008, adding “et Créoles” to its official name (“History: Festivals Acadiens et Créoles”). In 1974, the University of Southwestern Louisiana established the Center for Acadian and Creole Folklore (“About Us: Center”). Opened in 1990, the Vermilionville living history museum and folklife park “promotes and propagates the cultural resources of the Acadian, Native American, and Creole people,” from 1765 to 1890 (“Vermillionville”).  Generally, its etymology is traced back to the Portuguese term criollo, which was used to refer to descendants of colonists born in the colonies as well as the products used there (Brasseaux, Fontenot, and Oubre xi – xiv; Dormon, “Preface” ix).  I will use the upper-case “Creole” to refer to people and cultural elements of Creole Louisiana. The lower-case “creole” will refer to creole elements in general.  While earlier studies on francophone Louisiana such as William Faulkner Rushton’s ethnological account on the Cajuns of 1979 distinguished between “three separate but interestingly interrelated French cultures” (4), i. e., the French Creoles, the Cajuns, and the Creoles of color, more recent studies show a shift toward including the francophone Native Americans

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Although scholars have been referring to Cajun literature since the mid1980s, the definition they give is anything but clear. The first to speak of, and directly engage with, Cajun literature was Peggy Castex, who addressed the “dilemma of Cajun literature” in 1985. In her article, Castex considered the francophone Cajun works of the previous decade. Alluding to the gap concerning the scholarly investigation of Cajun literature, Castex points out that before the 1970s, “there are barely a handful of references to what we might call Cajun literature, essentially commentaries and transcriptions into English or Standard French of oral tales, proverbs, songs and sayings,” while articles on Cajun French linguistics abound (53). She then poses the legitimate question that “[i]f Revon Reed’s work is the first Cajun book, can we rightly contend that there is, indeed, such a thing as Cajun literature?” Her reply is anything but satisfactory: “To be frank, the answer is yes… and no” (52). According to Castex, this was due to several obstacles, for instance, the lack of readers. Today, more than 30 years later, the answer is definitely “Yes,” for more works in French have been published and have received awards. Although what Castex terms “Cajun literature” refers to the emerging francophone genre, it must be noted that the notion of an anglophone Cajun literature was also developing, albeit with some delay.²⁰ While the figurative birth of a Cajun poetry led francophone scholars to speak of the emerging French literary phenomenon in Cajun Country as “littérature cadienne,” or “poésie/littérature franco-louisianaise” (see Beaulieu, “Affirmation;” Guenin-Lelle; Tardif), firmly establishing the genre in Francophone studies, “Cajun literature” has been used in an unsystematic way. In contrast to Castex, who included only francophone works in her concept of Cajun literature, The Companion to Southern Literature provided the following definition of “Cajun literature” in 2002: Cajun literature shares a relationship to southern literature in that it can be characterized by its regional flavor. Most Cajun literature depicts a kinship between residents and their native terrain, and setting serves a more crucial role than simple backdrop against which plots develop independently. Rather, characters survive on and define themselves by the land they inhabit, as well as by the distinctive dialect they speak. Still, writers of

of Louisiana. Both Carl A. Brasseaux’s French, Cajun, Creole, Houma: A Primer on Francophone Louisiana and the collective Dictionary of Louisiana French: As Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities include the all too often forgotten indigenous people of Louisiana.  In an article from 1989, Darrell Bourque presents a selection of his early poems and includes a slight hint at Cajun literature as a distinct literary form: “I have never been aware of writing these poems as Cajun poems. … Perhaps the most that the poems can do is a reflection of sorts, tell something of how one Cajun writer experiences and articulates the world around him” (“Plainsongs” 37).

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Cajun literature do not idealize the region. Authors use realistic detail to investigate difficulties resulting from cultural stigmas, racism, economic hardship and modern industrialization. It includes authors beginning with George Washington Cable’s fictional observations on the Acadians/Cajuns to Tim Gautreaux’s fictional writings. (Duet 122)

According to Tiffany Duet’s description, “Cajun literature” means fiction about Cajuns. While the first part of the definition on the regional character of the literary form applies to Cajun writings, her assessment as a whole leaves much to be desired. First, Cajun literature apparently encompasses works by Cajuns (Tim Gautreaux) as well as non-Cajuns (George Washington Cable), but Duet neglects to make the distinction. Moreover, besides leaving out the Acadian background, she also neglects to mention the French literary productions. The brief allusion to “the distinctive dialect” does not do justice to the important fact that Cajun literature also includes francophone works, which, arguably more than anglophone Cajun literature, “investigate difficulties resulting from cultural stigmas, racism” (Duet 122). Lastly, Gautreaux and Cable are representatives of the prose genre. Duet brushes aside poetry, drama, and life-writing. Literary scholar Maria Hebert-Leiter’s pioneering work Becoming Cajun, Becoming American: The Acadian in American Literature from Longfellow to James Lee Burke (2009) perpetuates this limited view as it only considers the representation of the Cajuns in Anglo-American fiction writing. She uses the notion of “Cajun literature” and “Cajun fiction” to describe her corpus, but never provides a clear definition. Finally, if we consider that African American literature, Native American literature, or French literature entail a certain sense of belonging to an ethnic group or nation, her use of “Cajun literature” seems inappropriate, considering that she includes writers who have no Acadian ancestry such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or George Washington Cable. Although the anthology Akadien: ein französischer Traum in Amerika edited by Ingo Kolboom and Roberto Mann (2005) has a francophone perspective, it shows similar deficiencies. The focus is mainly on Acadian literature, but the anthology devotes a chapter on Cajun literature with a curious arrangement. The chapter’s first part, “Lyrik des 19. Jahrhunderts”—“Lyric Poetry of the Nineteenth Century”—features four prominent French Creole poets of nineteenth-century Louisiana, including Dominique Rouquette, Charles-Oscar Dugué, Georges Dessomes, and the Creole of color Rodolphe Ancien Desdunes. It is followed by the second part, entitled “Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts,”—“Literature of the Twentieth Century”—featuring poems by Louisiana Acadians. Curiously, the two parts constitute the chapter that bears the title “Louisiana—Literatur der Cajuns,” “Louisiana—Literature of the Cajuns,” which is an anachronism with respect to the first part, since the French Creole tradition is not contemporaneous

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to Cajun literature. Despite the formal separation between the two different literary epochs, the subtitles create the misleading impression that Cajun literature is a seamless resumption of French Creole literature. The fact that the history of francophone literature in Louisiana is actually defined by a break is left aside, as is the distinction between New Orleans and Cajun Country as two distinct literary centers.²¹ Lastly, although the chapter explicitly refers to the broad category of literature, the editors not only ignore all other genres apart from poetry, but also Cajun writings in English. Considering the biculturality of Cajun culture, it is a given that both the francophone and anglophone varieties complement each other and that a formal distinction on linguistic or cultural grounds would create an incomplete picture. Since other minority literatures such as Native American or African American literature have acquired a standing of their own, I would like to posit the existence of Cajun literature in its own right and offer the following definition: Cajun literature is the body of literature produced by writers originating from Cajun Country (or embracing its culture) and who are driven by a wish to preserve particular elements necessary for constructing a Cajun identity such as traditions, language, values, and a creative disposition to improvise and accept innovation. They perform what Bellah et al. call practices of commitment: People growing up in communities of memory not only hear the stories that tell how the community came to be, what its hopes and fears are and how its ideals are exemplified in outstanding men and women; they also participate in the practices—ritual, aesthetic, ethical—that define the community as a way of life. We call these ‘practices of commitment’ for they define the patterns of loyalty and obligation that keep the community alive. (154)

In Cajun culture, the practices include such cultural elements as music, cuisine, and storytelling and they express a distinct community spirit evidenced in the mutual appreciation expressed through dedications and the use and transformations of phrases and motifs. However, as the community evolves, practices are undergoing constant change. While French has stopped being a major practice of linguistic commitment, it is still a very conspicuous identity marker for the Cajuns. The value of religion, too, has changed. Most of the selected authors presented here are Catholics, yet some have other religious beliefs such as Zachary Richard or Darrell Bourque, who have turned to Buddhism. Cajun literature can be considered a “practice of

 Except for the Creole of color Rodolphe Desdunes, no birthplace is mentioned for the other three poets. No reference to New Orleans as a literary center is made (Kolboom and Mann 767– 770).

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commitment,” for the community of Cajun writers purveys a set of morals and values common to the community. This trait is not unique to the Cajuns. Indeed, they share it with non-Cajun writers from Louisiana: “Louisiana’s poets are remarkably generous. … [They] champion a sense of togetherness, a close-knit kin who share— whether at present or in memory—a profoundly beautiful and unique area of the United States. … This sense of community is most evident in the poetry … [thanks to] recurrent patterns and tendencies …” (Wright 6). Cajun literature is thus an additional panel to the polyptych of Louisiana literature. The corpus under examination focuses on works of poetry and prose relating to Cajun Country, Acadian history, and the instinctive ability of the Cajuns to adapt.²² The writers all come from the Acadian triangle and most of them were born around the middle of the twentieth century, between 1942 and 1962. A considerable number of them were and are educators, like Jeanne Castille, who taught at a high school, and Kirby Jambon, who is teaching at an elementary school. Darrell Bourque, Tim Gautreaux, and Barry J. Ancelet taught at university level. Zachary Richard is a world-famous poet-singer-songwriter, and Ron Thibodeaux is a journalist. These writers have published at least one full-length work and have been locally, nationally, and internationally recognized by the public and academia. I excluded those works that had a short print run and are, therefore, difficult to obtain or have not gained much attention. Guided by the confidence that other writers will be grateful for “what is left in the inkstand,”²³ I will deal with the works of less essential Cajun authors only peripherally and leave their deeper analysis to future scholars. My conceptual approach resorts to a diversified, that is, an international and transdisciplinary, selection of studies on memory. It shows that three interlocking strategies of remembering prevail, focusing on representations of the geographical and socio-cultural space, the past, and the assimilation of foreign elements. First, Cajun literature reflects above all contemporary daily life and discloses a Cajun consciousness mirroring the conflicting views of Cajun identity. It is based primarily, yet not exclusively, on strong ties to the land, the family, old and adapted traditions, and bilingualism. Second, references to the distant past

 For the impact of Cajun theater plays see Camoin, Louisiane. Francophone Cajun plays were of high relevance during the 1970s and 1980s, but the production of plays has diminished since then. Considering that Cajun plays are geared to a Cajun audience and are written in Cajun French, they have little prospect of being staged outside of Louisiana, let alone of receiving many reviews and reaching a wide exposure. Furthermore, the poetic and prose genres rely on other methods of preservation than drama, which relies on performance.  See Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s line in the fifth verse of his Elegiac Verse: “Let us be grateful to writers for what is left in the inkstand” (Longfellow, Writings 5: 276).

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add a temporal frame and actualize the Cajun founding myth. Although a sense of the past is present in Cajun consciousness, it is only since the 1990s that the Cajun writers have begun to actively engage with Acadian history. Third, the identity created by the senses of place and the past is further formed through the addition of new elements, seemingly at odds with the culture. Old myths are transformed and new myths are generated. In assimilating foreign elements, the Cajun writers continuously innovate to ensure the survival of their culture. In this last stage, Cajun literature opens up to other places and becomes increasingly cross-cultural. It is not surprising that the metaphors describing Cajun culture, ranging from such typical dishes as gumbo or jambalaya, to such living organisms as marsh grass, or sponges, illustrate this hybrid and dynamic character. In that respect, Cajun culture resembles very much other creole cultures of the Caribbean. In fact, the emergence of francophone Cajun literature can be compared to the emergence of Caribbean literature. The comparison is not beside the point given the strong interconnections between Louisiana and the Caribbean—Cajun Country is situated along the northern rim of the Caribbean, which has facilitated exchanges. Édouard Glissant’s concepts of relation and the Tout-Monde, for example, provide a productive approach to analyzing the collective memory of the Cajuns. In his magisterial work Poétique de la relation, he sets forth a theory of the interrelatedness of all things, starting with languages. Like the francophone culture of the Caribbean, Cajun culture presents a good example of a malleable and adaptive culture. Taking the immediate surroundings as a point of departure, the perspective is extended toward the past and then to the wider world. With respect to the identity space within multicultural societies, the theme of memory and literature becomes relevant especially in today’s mixing communities and promises fruitful insights. The fact that literature itself shows a distinct all-encompassing character and as such bestows the writer with an important function led Glissant to the description of the writer as his own ethnologist: It is he who integrates in his work the diversity of both the world and techniques of exposing the world, of expressing the correlation between communities, modifying the perspectives of literatures (Glissant and Leupin 121). Literature is an ideal medium to assess and prove the vitality of Cajun culture. In selecting themes, images, and forms to be remembered, Cajun authors not only create a literature of their own, but “make” their own collective memory and identity, an approach that can function as a template for other minority cultures facing a dominant group. With the theoretical tools at hand, I will analyze selected Cajun literary works—poetry, fiction (novels, short stories, and tales), and nonfiction (life writing and literary journalism), both francophone and anglophone—which include

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various elements defining Cajun literature. The selected literary works, some of which have majorly contributed to Cajun culture, to the extent of becoming themselves mnemonic objects, are evidence of the dynamics and development of collective memory in Cajun culture. The French- and English-speaking literatures of Louisiana provide the benefit of this bicultural approach. The intertextual references, that is, the textual communication between francophone and anglophone writers, show how both the francophone and English texts complement each other. In order to show the linguistic variability of Cajun French, I have chosen to reproduce text passages without commenting on what would be deemed an error of transcription in Standard French. However, I use “sic” to inform the reader about mistakes of spelling or grammar in academic writings by Cajun scholars. This book intends to reveal the fundamental character of Cajun collective memory through the lens of the literary landscape of Cajun culture. It thus attempts to give a more accurate picture of the Cajuns and their culture through the prism of memory processes discernible in anglophone and francophone Cajun literature. We will see how Cajun culture has become a memory culture based on the regular reference to place and the Acadian dispersal to the purpose of establishing a collective identity. Finally, the study of the collective memory of Cajun culture also allows us to look into the mnemonic processes of a hybrid ethnic group. The result differs from those processes of more homogeneous nations in that Cajun culture is arguably more dynamic and flexible regarding change. Despite the Cajuns’ struggles as a minority, their successful adaptability could serve as an example to other minority cultures. In view of the heterogeneity of Cajun culture, this study not only enhances the research field of Cajun Studies, but also contributes to several other research fields, notably American and Francophone Studies as well as Caribbean Studies and Acadian Studies. The present study will not provide a final answer to the intricacies of collective memory. Given the constant evolution of collective memory due to historical and socio-cultural changes, it is far from being exhaustive and shows, therefore, only a glimpse of a growing research field. What follows, hence, are provisional assertions inviting further research and discussion. Ideally, this book will take the reader on a tour of Cajun literature. The reader, like French poet Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur in a memory palace, will observe both the familiar and exotic characteristics of Cajun literature. The study, while offering one of many views on Cajun literature, also provides possibilities for development. It not only shows the basic constitution, but also the evolution of it. Literary echoes are like passageways from one room, i. e., one work, to another, visualizing a network of memories related to one another. In other words, they are like a flowing

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water course, a bayou, joining other meandering bayous until all come together and make one big river.

2 A Short History of Cajun Culture and Cajun Literature The history of the Cajuns does not begin with their “discovery” in the second half of the twentieth century,¹ nor with their arrival in Louisiana in the second half of the eighteenth century. As a matter of fact, the history of the Cajuns is a story about transnational migration that covers a large geographical expanse and reaches 400 years into the past: from France to North America, then scattered around a space extending from the New England colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, to the European continent (England and France), to the French Antilles (Saint-Domingue—today Haiti—, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Santa Lucia), to South America (French Guiana and the Falkland Islands), to the overseas collectivity of St. Pierre et Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland, and to Louisiana (Mounier 100 – 126; Debien; Cherubini; Savennec).² The numerically most significant group of Acadian descendants live in Canada: in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec. In the United States, the largest group of Acadian descendants are the Cajuns in Louisiana. Smaller communities of Acadians live in Maine, Texas,³ and California.⁴ In France, small numbers of Acadian descendants live in Belle-Île-en-Mer and the areas around Archigny, Aulney, Martaizé, and La Chaussée (see Mounier; Carl A. Brasseaux, “Scattered”). The first to land in the region of what would become Acadie ⁵ were French explorers led by Pierre Du Gua de Monts and Samuel de Champlain. They settled  The Cajun Renaissance has been considered not only a boon, but also a bane for Cajun culture. Cajun musician and accordion builder Marc Savoy responded to the question “if he regretted that the Cajuns had been ‘discovered’” saying that he was even sorrier that the Cajuns had “discovered themselves” (Ancelet and Morgan 154).  For a comprehensive overview of the wanderings of the Acadians see Carl A. Brasseaux, “Scattered.”  The Cajuns who moved to Texas during the oil boom years in the 1920s settled in the Beaumont-Port Arthur-Orange area, the so-called Golden Triangle. It has also been called Cajun Lapland to designate the area “where Louisiana laps over into Texas” (qtd. in Rickels 245).  The Cajun community in California is the result of an out-migration of Louisiana Cajuns in the mid-twentieth century.  Acadie belonged to the extended territory of New France which stretched from the Canadian wilds to the Louisiana bayous. As the second European settlement on the North American continent, it precedes the settlement of Jamestown (1607) and the arrival of the Mayflower (1620). There exist various versions of the etymology of “Acadia.” The Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazano named a part of the Atlantic coast “Arcadia” for its abundant vegetation reminding of the legendary Greek Arcadia. In the seventeenth century, after a number of orthographic changes, “Acadia” was adopted to designate the French colony. It is also speculated that the term was https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-003

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along the Bay of Fundy, on the east coast of Canada in 1604, and later established Port Royal, which became the capital of Acadie. In the following years, the area was settled by colonists with their extended families from the western regions of France: the Poitou, the Vendée, and Brittany (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian 8).⁶ While the Acadians lived in peace for most of the seventeenth century, the European dynastic wars, taking place from 1689 to 1763, proved fateful. After Acadia had changed hands between France and Great Britain more than a dozen times, the British finally conquered the colony in 1710. This Conquest of Acadia, renamed Nova Scotia,⁷ foreshadowed the end of French power in North America. The Acadians were allowed to keep their lands, but they became British subjects (B. Arseneault 102). As a result of the constant power struggles between France and England, the Acadians repeatedly refused to take an unconditional oath of allegiance to the British Crown and requested not to be obliged to take arms against any of the parties. This wish to remain noncommittal earned them the designation of “French Neutrals” (Faragher, Scheme xviii). Nevertheless, according to Naomi Griffiths, scholar of Acadian studies, they considered themselves a distinct and self-reliant people, different from the French of France. It was their sense of an Acadian national body which made them reluctant to take sides (Migrant 463 – 464). Both the strong family ties and social cohesion of the Acadians helped establish a society with a national character, bound to endure during the exile they experienced in the second half of the eighteenth century (Griffiths, “Acadians” 71– 72). The Protestant British, on their part, mistrusted the French-speaking, Catholic neighbors and their strong group-cohesiveness. Most of all, they eyed their fertile lands that the Acadians had gained from using an inventive system of sluices they called aboiteaux. ⁸ Led by two New England governors, William Shirley from Massachusetts and Charles Lawrence from Nova Scotia, they quickly set up a plan to do away with the Acadians and people their abundant lands with English citizens (Griffiths, Migrant 463). In July 1755, a deportation order was issued, and in the following months troops sent by Charles Lawrence rounded up about 7.000 Acadians. Almost half of the Acadian population was deported in a first wave to the New England colonies, and in a second wave to France

derived from local Native Americans who called the region “la Cadie,” referring to the fertile, rich fauna and flora of the place (Basque, Barrieau, and Côté 16).  About 47 % were immigrants from an area called La Chaussée, a commune in the department of Vienne in Poitou-Charentes (Ancelet, Edwards, Pitre 3).  Port Royal was renamed Annapolis Royal.  The “aboiteaux” also serve as the emblem par excellence of Acadian culture.

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and England. The removal operation lasted till 1763, by which time more than 10.000 Acadians were scattered across the Atlantic world (S. White, “The True Number” 21, 56; Faragher, Scheme 470 – 472). Not content with putting up with the degrading and inhuman living conditions, the exiled Acadians soon dreamed of moving to a place where French was spoken and where they could live in peace. While some returned to their homes, many others chose French Louisiana, subjected to similar, though less violent, imperial conflicts, as their destination. When the first Acadians landed in New Orleans in 1764, they had to face the fact that Louisiana had changed hands and was under Spanish sovereignty.⁹ The Spanish, intent on fortifying the frontier against British invasions and Indian attacks, saw the Acadians as a convenient buffer and willingly provided them with land and cattle (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 14). Between 1764 and 1788 about 2.600 – 3.000 refugees arrived in Louisiana in five successive waves, which are a good indicator for the strength of Acadian group cohesiveness (Carl A. Brasseaux, Founding 91; Carl A. Brasseaux, French 17).¹⁰ Interestingly, although the event of the Grand Dérangement figures prominently in Cajun consciousness today, scholars have emphasized the absence of Acadian eyewitness accounts. The testimony by a missionary visiting the Chezzetcook Acadians in 1790 suggests that the material losses the Acadians suffered—of land, homes, goods—did not play a significant role for them. What they talked about instead was the torment of family separation (Faragher, Scheme 443 – 444). Without personal testimonies to assess the role of the victims and without a ritualistic effort to remember, memories in an oral culture are prone to disintegrate after three generations. Arguably, it needed a certain triumphal fictionalization of the Acadian exodus for the event to re-enter the collective memory of the Cajuns. Almost one hundred years after the expulsion, the story of the Acadians reemerged in the collective consciousness of both the United States and Canada, thanks to a poet who transformed a story he had heard probably around 1840

 France ceded the area west of the Mississippi to Spain by virtue of the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762. With the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756 – 1763), Great Britain received the rest of the Louisiana Territory (Rodriguez 112– 113).  In 1764, about twenty Acadian exiles arrived from New York. There followed several hundreds from detention camps in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1765. Between 1766 – 1770 several groups trickled in from Maryland and Pennsylvania. About 1.600 Acadians arrived from France in 1785 and between 1795 and 1800 about 19 St. Pierre Island refugees resettled in Louisiana (Carl A. Brasseaux, French 18 – 20).

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(Hawthorne and Longfellow Dana 171– 172)¹¹ into the now most well-known poetic work about the Grand Dérangement. This fictionalization popularized Acadian history and embedded the Acadians and Cajuns in literature. The epic poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie by New England poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recounts the tragic love story of Evangeline Bellefontaine and Gabriel Lajeunesse from Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia. Separated from her lover on their wedding day by British soldiers and the New England militia, Evangeline travels south to Louisiana and later into the West in search of Gabriel. They meet again in a hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Evangeline, now a Sister of Mercy tending to the sick, finds Gabriel on his deathbed. Their reunion is short-lived, for they are separated by Gabriel’s untimely death. The poem was praised for its depiction of the virtuous, stoic, and innocent Acadians, epitomized by saintly Evangeline, who became the paragon of humility and Christian fortitude in the United States.¹² What seemed to make both peoples converge was that they had experienced oppression by the British. At a time when the United States was engaged in the Mexican War and the divide between the North and the South was developing, and ultimately led to the Civil War, the poem only fostered the growth of American nationalism. Nonetheless, Longfellow’s fictionalized story very soon sparked debates regarding its truthfulness and historical accuracy: The Maine-born poet had never been to either Acadia or Louisiana and had no interest in giving a historical account.¹³ The controversy over what happened crystallized especially with the emergence of an Acadian nationalism in Canada at the end of the nineteenth century (Griffiths, “Longfellow’s Evangeline” 35).¹⁴ Today, not only the British are held responsible, blame is also laid on New England (Faragher, “’Scheme’” 91).

 References to the story of Evangeline appear in The Neutral French: Or, the Exiles of Nova Scotia (1841) by Maine author Catherine R. Williams and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s account in The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair (1841).  This holds for Canada, too, where the story of Evangeline was used by the Catholic Church for propaganda purposes to portray a negative and terrifying anglophone culture endangering the souls of the noble and defenseless Acadians (Chiasson 149).  Since reliable sources were still scarce then, Longfellow had to improvise (Carl A. Brasseaux, Search 10). Relying on such historical sources as L’Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770 – 1820) by the French Jesuit priest Guillaume Thomas François de Raynal and An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia (1829) by Nova-Scotian historian Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Longfellow freely interpreted Acadian history and gave the American public a virtuous people they could adulate.  Griffiths points out that the literary debate on the historical truth of Evangeline was not just one between historians and scholars (Francis Parkman published Montcalm and Wolfe in 1884). She places the argument in the context of a growing Acadian nationalism which was sparked

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Since Acadian culture primarily relied on oral tradition and the only records on the deportation originate from colonial papers, the Grand Dérangement reaches back into seemingly mythical times and becomes an “already forgotten tragedy,” whose continued remembrance is a key factor in constructing national genealogies (Anderson 201). As a consequence of the dearth of eyewitness accounts, misrepresentations facilitated the fabrication of the Evangeline myth. It is noteworthy, for instance, that in Longfellow’s poem the Acadians’ country of origin, France, is almost ignored, except for three nostalgic references. The Acadian houses resemble those of Normandy “in the reign of the Henries” (Longfellow, Poems 54). The women wear “Norman cap[s]. … brought in the olden time from France” (Longfellow, Poems 55) and Evangeline’s father sings songs like those his forefathers sang “in their Norman orchards and bright Burgundian vineyards” (Longfellow, Poems 58). Interestingly, Normandy and Burgundy are named as the Acadians’ region of origin, not the Centre-Ouest region of France. In referring to the “Henries”¹⁵ and in locating the Acadians in Normandy and Burgundy, two regions known for their royal heritage, Longfellow ascribes noble qualities to the peasant Acadians. Furthermore, Longfellow does not mention the Grand Dérangement by its commonly used name.¹⁶ Instead, he uses “exile” and “scatter” to portray the expulsion—the Acadians are “Scattered like dust and leaves” (Longfellow, Poems 53)—and eclipses the French connection through the use of elusive references to the victims’ place of origin. Additionally, the group with whom Evangeline travels takes an overland route to Louisiana. In reality, the Acadians reached Louisiana solely by ship.¹⁷ Longfellow’s poem celebrates the expanse and beauty of the land, and highlights North America (Longfellow’s United States) as a land of refuge, a nation welcoming strangers to settle the promised land, welcoming the Acadians to the “Eden of Louisiana” (Longfellow, Poems 73) which was still the Louisiana Territory. What Longfellow failed to consider is that the Acadians went to Louisiana of their own will. Instead, he suggests that it was the United States that beckoned the Acadians to find their promised land and live there as a free people.

primarily by three national conventions held from 1881 to 1890 in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia (“Longfellow’s Evangeline”).  An allusion to Henry III, Henry I de Lorraine, and Henry IV, and probably to the Wars of Religion, a series of civil wars in France, one of which is known as The War of the Three Henrys (1587– 1589) (“War of the Three Henrys”).  The term was first introduced by Acadians of the Beaubassin region in 1773 (R.-G. LeBlanc, “Du ‘dérangement des guerres’” 12– 13).  The common assumption that the Acadians had also traveled on the Mississippi still prevailed in 1979, even among scholars (see Rushton 68).

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Translations made Longfellow’s poem available in foreign countries where it was met with equal success.¹⁸ The legend sparked numerous adaptations, including the stereotypical depictions of the Acadians, not only in Canada and the United States, but also in Europe.¹⁹ Although the poem became the crest of the pervading cultural icon of Evangeline, symbolizing courage and endurance, it is anything but a truthful portrayal of the diaspora and the genesis of the Cajuns. This rose-colored account not only contributed to the strengthening of the American national sentiment of the time; the Cajuns, for want of a founding myth, also readily accepted the New England poet’s retelling of the Grand Dérangement and appropriated it as their own founding myth (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun 153). Apart from the attraction that the virtuous and strong Acadians and saintly Evangeline exercised on the American public, the myth also offered the Cajuns the opportunity to distance themselves from the American foundational myth of the Pilgrim Fathers. While “myth” implies the falsification of historical facts and the manifestation of a false consciousness, Aleida Assmann argues that it can also reveal a particular attitude toward history, namely a search for identity. Against this background, myth corresponds to the affective appropriation of the group’s distinct history. This foundational history is endowed with an enduring relevance that keeps the past accessible in the present and potent for orientation in the future (Schatten 40). Longfellow’s poem has had a great impact on the Cajuns’ self-perception and identity, not least because of its affinity to older myths, such as the expulsion from the garden of Eden—hence the cognate names “Eve” and “Evangeline”—and the search for the promised land. Visiting Louisiana in the mid1880s, the French-Canadian Roman Catholic priest Henri-Raymond Casgrain noticed the Cajuns’ awareness of the Grand Dérangement and their complacent attitude toward the event: “Ils parlent sans amertume du grand dérangement, et gardent souvenance de l’Acadie, qui évoque toujours dans leur esprit l’impression de l’Eden perdu” (158). Forgotten were the wrongs committed by the British and New England soldiers. What remained was an idealized romantic image of Paradise lost, born out of a romantic poem and developed into the founding story of the Cajuns. Considering that between the end of the deportation in 1763 and the first crowd-pleasing rendition of the exodus more than 80 years

 In Canada, the French translation of Evangeline by French-Canadian Pamphile Le May in 1865 was even more influential than the original: It turned Evangeline into a francophone founding myth for the Quebecois and the Canadian-Acadians.  Harriet Beecher Stowe also drew on Evangeline for her character Eve in her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (see McFarland).

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elapsed, it is legitimate to say that the maximum time span of transmitting the living memory of the dispersal was exceeded. It is important to note that Acadia as a region ceased to exist after the breakup of the Acadian community, and remains absent from official maps. Still, Acadia has not disappeared from discourse and has even become an essential element of the collective memory of Acadian descendants.²⁰ In their new home country, the Acadians set out to rebuild a “Nouvelle Acadie” and organize the way of life they knew from Acadia (B. Arseneault 266 – 267, 269; Carl A. Brasseaux, Founding 34; Carl A. Brasseaux, “Scattered” 70). “New Acadia” figured as a diachronic replica of “old Acadia,” a new place succeeding the old.²¹ Although, or because, neither of the places are on maps, they are “portable symbol[s] of the past” that establish a link to the past and thus provide continuity.²² Acadia today functions as an imaginary space connecting Louisiana and Maine in the United States; New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island in Canada; Belle-Isle and Archigny in France; French Guiana in South America and the Falkland Islands. Without doubt, the Acadians form an imagined community par excellence. The Louisiana Acadians did not emerge directly from the Acadian refugees. The long and frequent wanderings of the Acadians as well as their encounter with other cultures in the multicultural Louisiana of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries subjected the group to various influences. Moreover, the strong social cohesion of the Acadians was a key factor in absorbing neighboring cultures and insuring the endurance of their traditions. Despite the frequent changes of administration—ten different flags flew over what is today Louisiana (Dufour)—, the predominance of French culture outweighed all other cultural influences until the dawn of the twentieth century. Considering that the first literary writings such as poetry appeared in the 1770s (Brosman 29), Louisiana literature was only in a fledgling stage when the first Acadian exiles arrived, whose only

 Despite the fragmentation, the population living in what used to be Acadia expresses a strong national sentiment. As sociologist Jean-Paul Hautecœur revealed in L’Acadie du discours (1975), Acadia has a strong presence in political and historical discourses of the 1960s and 1970s specifically, which proves a distinct Acadian ideology.  Benedict Anderson notes how explorers and colonizers named newly discovered spaces by using the name of the mother country or hometown and adding the epithet “new” to symbolize continuity. Thus, it was possible to “feel connected to certain regions or communities, thousands of miles away” (187– 192). While the two new homelands are diachronic replicas of “old Acadia”—new places succeeding the old place—, they are also synchronic replicas of each other.  Portable symbols include place names that serve to indicate the identification with the mother country and establish a sense of community across distances (Lowenthal, “Past Time” 9).

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cultural baggage was the orally transmitted traditions and customs.²³ Native authors who had mostly been educated in France started to write about Louisiana’s sublime landscapes and hybrid culture.²⁴ The most common features of Louisiana’s francophone writers were their appreciation of and their eagerness to imitate French Romanticism.²⁵ While Louisiana entered into the Union in 1812, which meant that the Acadians became de facto Americans, French culture and the arts blossomed. In the course of the nineteenth century, the surrounding materialism of Louisiana’s plantation society resulted in fragmented settlement patterns of the Acadian community and led to its stratification (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun 3). The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 galvanized the striving for wealth as AngloAmerican planters arrived in Louisiana and engaged in the plantation system.²⁶ The staple crop production served as a catalyst to transform the Acadian community from an economically homogeneous and classless group of subsistence farmers and ranchers into three social classes: a planter class, a bourgeoisie (where the wealth of the Acadian community concentrated [Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun 9 – 10]), and the lower class. Despite their egalitarian disposition, some of the Acadians were unable to resist the commodities of the French Creole and Anglo-American planter families. The rise of slavery in Louisiana drove a number of Acadians to improve their social position, so that between 1830 and 1860, these so-called Genteel Acadians, especially the sugar growers, rapidly accumulated wealth and slaves (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun 5 – 19).²⁷ The majority of the Acadian immigrants, however, rejected the materialistic attitude of the Genteel Acadians. Although they lived in remote areas, they also relied on exchanges with other people to survive. It is arguably this mix and the

 French Louisiana literature lasted from 1680, when Louisiana was established as a colony, to the beginning of the twentieth century. Reports, letters, and journals written by such early French explorers as Robert Cavalier de la Salle figure as the first colonial writings (Allain and Ancelet 1).  The most notable writers were members of Les Cenelles, a poetry club formed by seventeen Creoles of color.  The prime objective of such French Romantic writers as François-René de Chateaubriand was to introduce Louisiana and especially New Orleans to the French public in Paris.  Spain had secretly retroceded the Louisiana Territory to France with the Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800 (Rodriguez 207).  By 1860, thirty-eight (49 percent) of the seventy-seven French large slaveholders in Ascension, Assumption, Lafayette, Lafourche, St. James, St. Martin, and Terrebonne Parishes were Acadians (Estaville, “Changeless Cajuns” 133).

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highly stratified social set-up of Southwestern Louisiana that impeded the development of a distinct collective consciousness: “[L]ocal and subregional differences inhibited the rise of a unified Cajun culture or sense of collective identity during the nineteenth century” (Esman, “Festivals” 201). Even the common francophone background of many of the ethnic groups did not help to create a common consciousness (Trépanier, “Louisiane” 370). Intermarriages with other ethnic groups such as the French Creoles, the Spanish, Germans, Native Americans, and African slaves, Creoles of color from the Caribbean, and Anglo-Americans completed the blur of cultures (Bernard, Cajuns xix).²⁸ French culture reached its zenith in the first half of the nineteenth century as the prolific literary arts from this period show. Yet the continuous arrival of non-francophone migrants put a stop to the upswing (Clermont 8). With the immigration of Anglo-Americans to Louisiana, the gap between lower-class and Genteel Acadians widened to the extent that, by 1877, “many members of the upperclass [sic] no longer considered themselves Acadian … [They] experienced little contact with their mother culture, which they conspicuously avoided while doing everything possible to become full participants in the Anglo-American mainstream” (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun xiv). In contrast to the prosperous Creoles and Genteel Acadians who invested in a good education for their offspring, the poor Acadian petits habitants were a “largely nonliterate people” (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun xiii – xiv), and oral traditions in Cajun French, notably the song and storytelling traditions, determined everyday life. According to ethnohistorical research, the Civil War acted as an early turning point in the Cajuns’ genesis.²⁹ Although the petits habitants avoided conscription —true to their ancestors’ spirit of neutrality in cases of strife—the war caused them great personal and economic afflictions. Similarly, the harsh regulations imposed on the Confederate States made many Genteel Acadian planters, who had been the push force in politics and had voted for secession (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun 60), lose their property.³⁰ Creole planters were equally affected by extreme poverty. It is out of this lower stratum that the Cajuns

 The German immigrants, enticed by John Law, settled the area of the German coast, west of New Orleans, in 1721. For more details about ethnic interaction of the Louisiana French see Estaville, “Mapping.”  In The People Called Cajuns (1983), Dormon opposes the pre-Civil-War Acadians (1755 – 1865) to the post-Civil-War Cajuns (1865 – 1982). Carl A. Brasseaux also considers the Civil War as an incisive event in Cajun history. Yet he thinks that the Cajun people emerged a decade later, at the end of Reconstruction in 1877 (Acadian to Cajun xi).  Carl A. Brasseaux points to the paradox that there were three Acadian brigadier generals and a large group of lesser officers in Louisiana’s Confederate forces (Acadian to Cajun 58).

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formed, a community very different from the dynamic and highly stratified prewar Acadian population (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun 150). Besides socio-economic changes, which brought the Cajuns into contact with the rest of the United States,³¹ educational and cultural changes had fundamental consequences for the use of French. As the Cajuns had no educational system of their own, the families, nuclear social groups, and the Catholic Church were responsible for the children’s education (Carl A. Brasseaux, “Acadian Education” 213). In France, and then in Acadia, the only public education had been religious, while the family was in charge of the practical instruction (Carl A. Brasseaux, “Acadian Education” 214). This informal education system was reestablished in Louisiana and maintained until the Anglo-Americans, streaming into Louisiana after the Battle of New Orleans (1815), demanded a secularized education system. “Acadian disinterest in a ‘classical’ education in the Anglo-American sense of the term” persisted even when, in 1845, a statewide, public school system was established (Carl A. Brasseaux, “Acadian Education” 216). In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of 1868, also called the Carpet Bag Constitution,³² imposed English in public elementary schools of Louisiana (Marcantel 36). French, nevertheless, continued to play an important role. The Reconstruction period after the Civil War further stamped out Acadian resistance toward a public school system (Carl A. Brasseaux, “Acadian Education” 216). The literary landscape of Louisiana at the turn of the twentieth century saw the mingling of the French Creole tradition and the Anglo-American tradition. As literary scholar May Rush Gwin Waggoner pointed out, the anglophone and francophone American literatures have coexisted for a long time, “separate but equal” (Waggoner, “‘Separate but Equal’” 158). One work exemplifying the (literary) interpenetration of the two cultures that has greatly impacted Cajun literature is Acadian Reminiscences: The True Story of Evangeline, written by Louisiana

 The completion of the “Sunset Route” by the Southern Pacific Railroad Company in 1883, connecting New Orleans with California, brought more outsiders and immigrants to Louisiana (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 26). The influx of people increased with the discovery of oil at the Heywood well in Jennings, Louisiana, in 1901 as it attracted investors and increasing numbers of Anglo-Americans in search of work. The progressive construction of an infrastructure in Louisiana established by the government of Huey P. Long in the 1930s finally brought the Cajuns out of the bayous as they began to leave Louisiana for oil jobs in Texas, where the first oil well was found at Spindletop near Beaumont in 1901 (Smiley 2).  The Carpet Bag Constitution refers to the Constitution created by the Carpetbaggers, a demeaning term for Northerners traveling to the South after the Civil War with the purpose to reconstruct—and sometimes plunder (Heylen 453; J. Castille 24). The Carpet Bag Constitution also formally prohibited the use of French in judicial affairs (Smith-Thibodeaux 36).

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Acadian judge Felix Voorhies from St. Martinville and published in 1907.³³ Like most Louisiana writers, Voorhies hailed from a rich and educated family and received a bilingual education. Furthermore, he was obviously influenced by the French Creole tradition. Astraddle between the French and English cultures, he wrote his works in French but had his major works translated into English.³⁴ The fact that the French original of Acadian Reminiscences was never published but immediately translated into and published in English is evidence of the moribund French Creole literature in Louisiana and of the publisher’s aim to cater for an English readership. According to Voorhies, the two star-crossed lovers Evangeline Bellefontaine and Gabriel Lajeunesse really existed, though with different names. In fact, Evangeline was no other than Emmeline Labiche, an orphan who was taken care of by Voorhies’s grandmother. Separated from Louis Arceneaux during the British invasion in 1755, Emmeline ends up in Maryland. From there, she takes the overland route via the Tennesse and Meschacebe rivers to Louisiana with a group of Acadians (Voorhies 122). In contrast to Longfellow’s poem, Voorhies’s narrative ends in St. Martinville, where Emmeline, after seeing that Louis has found another sweetheart, dies inconsolable under an oak tree. Voorhies pledged the authenticity of the tale in referring to his grandmother’s authority. As his descendant Birney Voorhies proclaims in the introduction: He “was best able to present this story as it was handed down to him by word of mouth by his grandmother, who adopted Evangeline when orphaned at an early age” (10 – 11). However, as Carl A. Brasseaux revealed in In Search of Evangeline (1988), the alleged memory handed down by Voorhies’s grandmother was a hoax. And yet, the publication of Voorhies’s little book had tremendous consequences for the identity of the Cajuns, for it announced the emergence of an Acadian/Cajun consciousness in Louisiana. The hoax with its South Louisiana focus functioned as a means to inspire cultural pride in the Cajun community (Carl A. Brasseaux, Search 18 – 19). Significantly, Emmeline’s resting place is not in Philadelphia, but under an oak tree in St. Martinville, the so-called Evangeline Oak. Having Evangeline/Emmeline die in St. Martinville “was to basically force the

 Both the story of the Acadians and the character of Evangeline inspired a number of other Louisiana writers who consolidated the myth of Evangeline through their imitations, which continued the romanticized version. For a detailed analysis of Evangeline’s afterlives see McFarland.  Despite Voorhies being bilingual, all of his works, including his manuscripts, were written in French. A note by Edward Laroque Tinker to Acadian Reminiscences says: “[É]crit en français, traduit en anglais pour la publication.” Tinker did not mention the name of the translator. Besides Acadian Reminiscences, two other originally French tales by Voorhies were translated into English for publication (Tinker, Écrits 491– 493).

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story to have forever a Louisiana connection. … [The image of Evangeline] was a source of pride and something of a cultural icon for those people who were educated in the English-speaking public schools in the early part of this century” (Évangéline en quête). As Cajun culture lacked a body of “cultural texts” (A. Assmann, “Was sind kulturelle Texte” 241– 243), foreign cultural texts such as Longfellow’s epic or Voorhies’s tale served as ersatz cultural texts. According to Acadian sociologist Joseph Yvon Thériault, the change of Evangeline’s resting place from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to St. Martinville, Louisiana, benefited the Cajuns in several ways. In making Evangeline a “Cajun” story, Voorhies’s account symbolized the entrance of the Cajuns into the American nation. At the same time as it allowed the ethnic group to enter the American grand narrative, it also put more distance to the French Creoles who had participated in the peculiar institution. The new Evangeline narrative by Voorhies purged the Cajuns of such stereotypes as “White Trash” or “Acadian Nigger.” The Cajuns, thus ennobled, were entitled to dream the American Dream as their virtuous mores and happy lives made them worthy representatives of that dream. This change became the starting point for the new appreciation of their past, from where they would develop an ethnic pride (Thériault 294). The new myth Voorhies had created cemented the myth of Evangeline. The success of Voorhies’s adaptation mirrors the developing obsessive Evangeline cult, with St. Martinville’s second steam-powered fire engine (Carl A. Brasseaux, Search 20), a parish,³⁵ and a community in Louisiana bearing the name of Evangeline. In 1919, a bread was labeled Evangeline Maid, and with the distribution of the silent movie Evangeline in 1921, a statue of Evangeline, modeled after the main actress Dolores del Rio, was erected close to the Evangeline Oak. In 1934, the Longfellow-Evangeline State Historic Site in St. Martinville, the oldest state park site in Louisiana, was founded, inviting visitors to explore the place’s Acadian and Creole past. Evangeline became a fitting symbol as it allowed the Cajuns to identify both as Acadians and Americans: “Evangeline developed into the national and regional symbol of Louisiana Cajuns in part because Louisianians, including Acadian descendants, realized her value to tourism. … In many ways, she became a significant link that allowed for the double bind Cajuns experience today as both Acadian descendants and Americans” (HebertLeiter, Becoming Cajun 165).

 The parish curiously shows a higher percentage of Creoles than of Cajuns (Carl A. Brasseaux, French 72– 73).

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In the 1930s, Dudley LeBlanc, a Democrat and Louisiana State Senator, was involved in celebrating the Acadian heritage of Cajun culture.³⁶ He rekindled the public interest in the Acadian heritage in traveling with the Evangeline girls— young women attired in the outfit described by Longfellow—around the country and to Canada.³⁷ His The True Story of the Acadians (1927), which was considered authentic until the 1980s, fed the public’s desire for the mythical, romantic, and virtuous Acadian story.³⁸ But like its model Evangeline, it is nothing more than another fictitious rendering of the Grand Dérangement. ³⁹ The publications of these alleged historical books show that the expulsion occupied a prominent place in the cultural life of the Cajuns. In reality, these books only continued the tradition of stereotyping the Cajuns. Against this background, the Grand Dérangement functions as a turning point in Acadian and Cajun history. Strikingly, Cajun literature’s contribution to the topic of the Acadian expulsion has been mostly overlooked by scholars.⁴⁰ The prominent presence of the Acadian story and of the character of Evangeline in Cajun literature calls for a mnemohistory of Evangeline. The developing Evangeline cult coincided with the English-only movement, culminating with the Anglo-centricity of the Progressive Era, to which the Cajuns submitted, seeing that it meant a better social status (Carl A. Brasseaux, “Acadian Education” 218).⁴¹ The Constitution of 1921 sounded the death knell for

 Nicknamed Coozan Dud for his Acadian heritage, LeBlanc was known far beyond his hometowns Erath and Abbeville: He invented Hadacol and is considered the father of the old-age pension in Louisiana (Clay 163).  See the diary of one of the Evangeline Girls of 1930 (Perrin, Seeking). See also Brundage.  Zachary Richard credits LeBlanc’s The True Story of the Acadians (1927) to be the first anglophone non-fiction book, emphasizing the crucial influence of the Acadian heritage movement in Cajun culture (Histoire 108).  Ellipses, such as the omission of the full nineteenth century in Louisiana Acadian history (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun 3), called for a revised version which appeared in 1932, followed by another revised and expanded version in 1966, entitled The Acadian Miracle. D. LeBlanc’s literary improvisation of Cajun history defies the label of academic work, but the references to the cultural connector of Evangeline perpetuated the Acadian myth: “The LeBlanc book was marked by a powerful appeal to an ethnic ‘heritage,’ but its appeal is ultimately made to the heritage of the Louisiana/Acadian elite. It is, then, part of the ‘Golden Age’ tradition and the Longfellow/Evangeline cult” (Dormon, People 80).  For instance, Quebec scholar Robert Viau only briefly mentions Voorhies’s Acadian Reminiscences and Dudley LeBlanc’s historical work and its revision in his analysis of the Grand Dérangement in Acadian, Quebec, and French works (Grands Dérangements 9, 38).  In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that “[w]e have room for but one language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people

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French as it stipulated that only English be spoken in schools, thus eliminating French from the school grounds (Marcantel 36 – 37). If children did speak French on the school grounds, they were punished. Eventually, the French heritage became an object of scorn and embarrassment for the Cajuns. Also, the link between Cajun ethnicity and material disadvantages discouraged many Cajuns “from passing on characteristic traits, such as a language” (Bankston and Henry 1). Unable to resist the lure of the American mainstream and domination of the English language, the Cajuns gradually abandoned their French heritage. The period between the 1880s and the 1970s saw the parallel increase of outsiders’ descriptions of Cajun culture, research on Cajun folklore, and the first texts written by Cajuns. Most works dealt with the expulsion of the Acadians, mirroring the increased involvement with the Acadian past that culminated in the Bicentennial Celebration commemorating the expulsion in 1955. Outsiders continued to exploit the exoticism of the Cajun lifestyle, often to the detriment of the Cajuns, for they only added and consolidated stereotypes.⁴² Instead of portraying a romantic people, English and French outsiders and travelers exaggerated the characteristic traits of the Cajuns to the point that they became socially marginalized: “He is either depicted as an ignorant, therefore superstitious, swamp-dweller living in squalor in a moss-draped, reptile-infested wilderness which is truly a backwater of American civilization; or he is projected as a creature of simple but solid virtue who consumes great quantities of beer and boudin, while inhabiting a timeless, changeless land of great natural beauty” (Conrad, “Acadians” 1). If the Acadians were viewed as virtuous and patient during the nineteenth century, the view of the Cajun character changed in the twentieth century. No longer regarded as passive and resigned, Cajuns were described as

out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse” (Roosevelt).  See, for instance, Pouponne et Balthazar: Nouvelle acadienne (1888) by Sidonie de la Houssaye; Bonaventure: A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana (1888) by George Washington Cable; Bayou Folk (1894) by Kate Chopin; “When the Bayou Overflows” (1899) by Alice Dunbar-Nelson; The Cajun: A Drama in One Act (1926) by Ada Jack Carver; The Triumph of the Acadians (1930) by J. T. Vocelle; Madame Toussaint’s Wedding Day (1936) by Thad St. Martin; “Chains” (1936) by Elma Godchaux; Gumbo Ya-Ya (1945) by the Louisiana Writers Project; Evangeline and the Acadians (1957) by Robert Tallant; Cajuns on the Bayous (1957) by Carolyn Ramsey; Blue Camellia (1957) by Frances Parkinson Keyes; The Story of the Acadians (1955) by Amy Boudreau; The Hard Blue Sky (1958) and The Condor Passes (1971) by Shirley Ann Grau; Of Love and Dust (1967), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), A Gathering of Old Men (1983), and A Lesson Before Dying (1993) by Ernest John Gaines; Cajun (1982) by Elizabeth Nell Dubus; James Lee Burke’s mystery Dave Robichaud novels (see also Gaudet’s article “The Image of the Cajun in Literature”).

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brutal and uncivilized, uneducated and simple-minded. The general assumption that the Acadians and later the Cajuns were illiterate and ignorant originated not only from the disparaging attitude of Genteel Acadians and the Creole planter neighbors toward the poorer Cajuns, but also from the increasing influx of Anglo-Americans who saw only the Acadians’ bizarre language, their exotic lifestyle in remote homes, and their general rejection to apply the state laws of public education.⁴³ The socio-cultural changes of the twentieth century greatly affected communal gatherings. With the introduction of the radio in the 1920s and television in the 1930s, the initial purpose of the veillées (small gatherings in the evenings) became increasingly obsolete (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 49). Likewise, the appearance of dancehalls in the 1940s contributed to the disappearance of the bals de maison (neighborhood folk dances). Furthermore, the introduction of electricity, the invention of such food storage appliances as refrigerators and freezers, and the advent of supermarkets rendered the boucheries (rural butcheries) superfluous. Instead of disposing immediately of the freshly killed pig due to the hot weather, it could now be frozen for later use. The ramasserie (a communal harvesting with a festive atmosphere) disappeared due to mechanization, including modern and dynamic machines which replaced the workforce.⁴⁴ Thanks to “social security, health insurance, worker’s [sic] compensation, and other trappings of money-based economy” (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 51), the traditional coup de main has become antiquated. As a concomitant circumstance to the transformations affecting the communal life of the Cajuns, the disappearance of Cajun French caused above all the gradual disintegration of the storytelling tradition. While the introduction of compulsory education and the ban on French in the first two decades of the twentieth century supplanted the matrix for the oral transmission, they simultaneously opened the way to another mode of transmission: the literary tradition. As a “transition from an oral culture to a literate culture … [and] a transition from

 Désirée Martin’s Les Veillées d’une sœur: ou Le Destin d’un brin de mousse, published posthumously in 1877, is one example overturning the assumption of the uneducated Acadian petits habitants. This autobiography, written in Standard French, describes the tragic circumstances Martin (1830 – 1877) experienced in her early life. Due to financial struggles, the widowed mother sent Martin to a convent against her will at age sixteen. Martin’s text also includes references to the Acadian expulsion, the “colonisation de notre terre natale” (D. Martin 47). Written in the last couple of years of her existence, the Veillées are musings about Martin’s life of abnegation and sacrifice—a portrait which evokes the virtuous character of Evangeline.  See Allain, “Twentieth-Century Acadians” 132– 133, 135; Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 46; Le Menestrel, Voie 65; Carl A. Brasseaux, French 77.

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incorporating practices to inscribing practices” (Connerton, Societies 75), this shift bears resemblance to previous shifts in literature such as the medieval French literature or the Antillean Creole literature (Ancelet, “Mainstream” 1249 – 1250).⁴⁵ The prevailing circumstances during the 1950s and 1960s, pushing back French culture, brought scholars to declare that French Louisiana literature was dead (Viatte, Histoire 299; Griolet, Cadjins 102), which was true for French Creole culture. Yet, as Patrick Griolet admits, the “fait cadjin” presented a broad and spontaneous literature (Cadjins 102), mostly visible in Cajun music and storytelling. The conscription to World War II brought the Cajuns not only into contact with American society and its mainstream culture, but also impacted the Cajuns’ view on French. Cajun GIs stationed in France for the first time experienced that their French-speaking ability was of considerable advantage and proved to be an asset for the American army. They realized they had one thing in common with the French: the language (Bernard, Cajuns 6 – 10). Longing for the familiar traditional Cajun music, the returning soldiers engendered a renouveau of traditional Cajun French songs in the midst of the English-centered Swamp Pop era of the 1950s (see Bernard, Swamp Pop). The participation of such Cajun musicians as the Balfa Brothers at the Newport Festival in 1964 had even more serious repercussions. It was not just a local triumph but brought Cajun music to national attention and sensitized the Cajuns to their culture. After the success of Cajun music, upper-class Cajuns followed suit and engaged in saving the French language. In 1968, at a time of social upheaval in the Western world, James Domengeaux initiated the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL),⁴⁶ a state organization “empowered to do any and all things necessary to accomplish the development, utilization, and preservation of the French language as found in Louisiana for the cultural, economic and touristic benefit of the state” (“About CODOFIL”). This period was pervaded by a profound ethnic pride and fervor, a movement Bernard calls “Cajunism”: From this grassroots pride and empowerment movement rose a vague philosophy that might be called Cajunism—the feeling that the Cajun lifestyle was the best way of life. As with black power, brown power, and similar movements, Cajunism nurtured a sense of ethnic pride and self-confidence, wiping out the former notion that Anglo-American culture was superior and should be emulated at all costs. For most Cajuns, this new attitude

 Similar to the Native American Renaissance and especially Acadian literature (see Lincoln; Runte, Writing America), Cajun literature continues to absorb the oral tradition.  The original term was “Council for the Development of Louisiana-French” (“About CODOFIL”).

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did not entail questioning their American patriotism; it simply meant attending regional festivals, enjoying traditional Cajun music and cuisine, maintaining close family ties, making occasional fishing expeditions to the Atchafalaya, or declining to leave south Louisiana for better jobs abroad. To a handful of radical activists, however, Cajunism meant a rejection of American culture and values. It embodied an alternative to what they perceived as the increasingly impersonal, homogenized, and decadent way of life engulfing the mainstream. (Cajuns 108 – 109)⁴⁷

While younger Cajuns did not consider Cajun French to be a requirement for being Cajun, most cultural activists opposed that view (Bernard, Cajuns 109). The positive echo Cajun music received at the Newport Festival generated not only the Louisiana French Movement, connecting it to the larger phenomenon that focused on the celebration of the French language and culture in the world,⁴⁸ but it was followed by a growing academic interest in Cajun culture and cultural preservation efforts. Research by Cajuns about their culture expanded in parallel to the ethnic revival, “further reflecting the ethnic group’s revitalized sense of pride and empowerment” (Bernard, Cajuns 132). These works, too, focused primarily on the Acadian past and cultural traditions. Considerable support came from Quebec, where historians, geographers, and sociologists became interested in their “cousins” in the francophone enclave in the United States. Louisiana’s former mother country France also showed a renewed interest in the Cajuns. From the 1970s to the 1990s, works of fiction promulgated an exotic image of the life in Cajun Country,⁴⁹ further enlivening francophone Cajun literature. The emergence of francophone works during the 1970s and 1980s engendered a literary tradition that partly renewed the literary tradition of the nineteenth-century Creole authors in Louisiana. Unlike the nineteenth-century French Creole tradition, however, the center of the new tradition was Lafayette,

 Rushton also used the term “Cajunism,” though he used it to refer to the “form of a North American neo-paganism” (Rushton 7).  This includes Charles de Gaulle’s visit to Louisiana in 1960 (de Gaulle 259); Senegal’s president Léopold Sédar Senghor’s promotion of the concept of the “Francophonie” in 1968; the establishment of the leading association of francophone studies, the Conseil International d’Études Francophones (CIÉF), in Louisiana in 1987 (“Historique—CIÉF”); and numerous twinnings.  See Maurice Denuzière’s six-volume saga about a plantation family’s life in Louisiana from the 1850s to the middle of the twentieth century; Michel Tauriac’s Évangeline (1995) and Un grand pas vers le Bon Dieu (1989) by Jean Vautrin which received the prestigious French literary Prix Goncourt. See also chapter 6.3.2. Quebec singer and writer Lili Maxime, who spent seven years as a participant in the Projet Louisiane in Louisiana in the 1970s (Maxime, “Survivants”), wrote down her experiences of that time in a tetralogy. This saga, Ma chère Louisiane (2004– 2009), takes place in Cajun Country and New Orleans from 1977 to 2007.

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and not New Orleans. Today, Lafayette is where the French heart beats in Louisiana: “L’émergence d’un cœur régional est une nouveauté. … Depuis la fin des années 1960, Lafayette, le centre géographique de la région, a réussi à s’imposer comme capitale régionale, surtout parce qu’elle est le foyer du mouvement officiel de renaissance culturelle représenté par le Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL)” (Trépanier, “Louisiane” 376). More actions for the preservation of French were undertaken, and several events further strengthened the Louisiana French Movement, though not without controversies. For instance, the CODOFIL imported teachers from France, Quebec, Belgium, and Africa. With hindsight, scholars have hinted at the controversial objective of superimposing Standard French and further demeaning the Cajuns for their Cajun French (Ancelet, “Perspective” 348). Nonetheless, the official reinstatement of French in schools and its public celebration were like a drop in the ocean. Despite the efforts of many people, including Domengeaux’s successor John Bertrand, who implemented a few educational language reforms such as the French Immersion Programs in 1992 (Bernard, Cajuns 140), French in Louisiana remains in a precarious state. The winds of change accompanying the ethnic pride movement spurred the production of Cajun literature which helped establish a sense of place and a sense of Cajun identity. The popular movement surrounding the musical revival and organized by grassroots activists merged with a movement led by educators, young scholars, and artists. Following up on the musical renaissance, and parallel to the historical reassessment, a group of Cajun activists started to write and publish in French, using both Standard French and Cajun French and Cajun English.⁵⁰ Most notably, the emerging Cajun literature represents the creation of a written French code (Brown, “Social Consequences” 68). The increased production of Cajun literary texts mirrors not only a shift from the heretofore distinct oral tradition to a scriptural tradition but also the bicultural status of the culture.

 For works by Ancelet/Arceneaux, Zachary Richard, and Kirby Jambon see chapters 4, 7, and 10. Other works include C’est p’us pareil (1982) by Richard Guidry; Acadie tropicale: Poésie de Louisiane (1983) by Barry and Gould; La Charrue: Poésies (1982) by Carol J. Doucet; Lait à mère (1997), Julie Choufleur: ou Les Preuves d’amour (2008) and L’Allée du souvenir (2017) by David Cheramie; Le Hantage: Un ouvrage de souvenance (2018) by Nathan Rabalais. Beverly Matherne’s works include Je me souviens de la Louisiane: Poetry in French and English = I Remember Louisiana (1994); Images cadiennes: Poems in French and English = Cajun Images (1994); La Grande Pointe (1995); Le Blues braillant: Poèmes en français cadien et en anglais = The Blues Cryin’: Poems in English and Cajun French (1999), which includes a CD; and Lamothe-Cadillac: Sa jeunesse en France (2009); and Bayou des Acadiens / Blind River (2015).

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Such scholarly journals as the bilingual La Revue de Louisiane, issued by the CODOFIL in 1972,⁵¹ overviews of Cajun culture such as Revon Reed’s Lâche pas la patate (1976), the Louisiana French comic strip Bec Doux et ses amis, featured in such local newspapers as the Kaplan Herald from August 1969 through mid-July 1992,⁵² represent the first steps toward the dissemination of Louisiana literature in French. Another field negotiating the state of the French oral tradition was drama. The theater group Nous Autres, created in 1977, performed a dozen plays in French inspired by family legends or contemporary scenes. The scripts were written in Cajun French and as such were aimed at the juncture of the oral and written repertoire. For the theater plays, “[i]l s’agissait de saisir l’oralité des conversations dans la langue de tous les jours” (Marteau 199). Nevertheless, Cajun drama was less likely to appeal to a wide audience than, for instance, instrumental entertainment through Cajun music, or Cajun poetry with its tendency to Standard French. The first compilation of Cajun drama, Une Fantaisie collective: Anthologie du drame louisianais cadien (1999), not only testifies to that tradition but preserves it in a written form. Folktales, poetry, song lyrics, and theater plays make out the oraliture, a literature based on the oral tradition (Ancelet, “Valoriser la variabilité” 145). And yet, the writers during the Cajun Renaissance movement were faced with a linguistic dilemma: Should they use standard French, their own Cajun vernacular, or a combination of both, and in what proportions? Although their entire literary education necessarily came from external models, written in standard French, their primary readership (or audience) in Louisiana would feel alienated by this stylistic norm, which deviated too much from the daily oral usage of vernacular Cajun French and, consequently, rang false. But writing in Cajun French also implied transcribing an oral dialect, posing another set of difficulties. In order to reach a wider public and obtain recognition in the francophone world, and, in the absence of local editors, publish their works in Acadie, Québec, or France, should the Cajun writers aim for a more universal French? These underlying complexities of writing in French in Louisiana in the 1980s resulted in an ongoing metalinguistic reflection on Cajun poetics and stylistic, as well as transcription practices. (Leroy, “Imaging Cajunness” ix)

 Patronized by the universities and high schools of Louisiana, it was renamed Études Francophones in 1987. In 1991, the literary journal Feux Follets appeared.  Using the characters of Bec Doux and Zirable, the creators Ken Meaux and Earl Comeaux experimented with form and content. The majority of the strips deal with the daily problems and are written in an inconsistent form of Cajun French, reflecting the dilemma of how to transcribe the oral language.

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As a strategy of “epic self-legitimation,” Cajun writers began to draw on the popular repertoire of Cajun music, “a body of tropes best suited to express the Cajun narrative” (Leroy, “Imaging Cajun-ness” xi). The literary Acadian renaissance starting in the 1960s and consecrated by Antonine Maillet’s first novel Pélagiela-charette also inspired the development of francophone Cajun literature.⁵³ Several factors were responsible for the development of a francophone Cajun literature: The Cajuns writers were motivated by a desire to preserve the oral tradition in their writings and to communicate visually the specificities of Cajun French. They also wanted to develop an imaginary which tapped into the symbolic capital of the Cajun community (Ancelet, “Valoriser” 145). Besides the wish to preserve the French heritage and language, the Cajuns saw in writing an appropriate outlet to counter stereotypical descriptions by outsiders. To counter untruthful and stereotypical depictions of the Cajuns, historians started debunking the Evangeline myth—to the benefit of other myths cropping up in Cajun Country. Thanks to the first revisionist historical studies by such Cajuns as historian Carl A. Brasseaux in the 1980s, some Cajun writers have begun to negotiate their past also through the narrative genre. They can finally draw on accurate material and counter the Evangeline myth, to reject a romantic past. As a result, more writers incorporate the Acadian history in their works and reclaim the authentic representation of their heritage.⁵⁴ In contrast to anglophone Cajun literature, which mostly includes fiction, francophone Cajun poetry has been the prevalent genre within the Cajun community. From the mid-1990s onward, the publication of works dealing with the self-scrutiny of the Cajuns expanded, with poetry becoming the preferred genre selected by Cajun writers (there is no francophone full-fledged novel yet).⁵⁵ The 1990s also saw an increase in children’s literature and folktale collec-

 Maillet has acted as a considerable source of inspiration for several Cajun writers. Her fictional account of the aftermath of the Grand Dérangement, which received the Prix Goncourt in 1979, represents an act of legitimizing power. Also, her monologue La Sagouine served as a basis for Émile Des Marais’s theater play Mille Misères (1979) (Waggoner, Une fantaisie collective 3). It is also the basis of Richard Guidry’s monologue collection C’est p’us pareil (1982) (Allain and Ancelet 267).  Trois saisons by Antoine Bourque, a pseudonym for Carl A. Brasseaux, is a series of novellas which retell the Acadian deportation. It is the first full-length fictional representation of the Acadian past in French, based on reliable sources, but the collection had only a small distribution. Richard’s three animal tales and “Histoire Acadienne” in Chant (19 – 42) by May Rush Gwin Waggoner also include retellings of the Grand Dérangement.  Anglophone Cajun writings include Marshland Brace: Two Louisiana Stories (1982) and Marshland Trinity: Three Louisiana Stories by Chris Segura (1997); What They Wrote on the Bathhouse Walls, Yen’s Marina, Chinese Bayou, Louisiana (1988) and Leechtime: A Novel (1989) by Al-

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tions.⁵⁶ Works of creative non-fiction gave additional insights into culture.⁵⁷ In contrast to poetry, which converges with song lyrics, the language obstacle is more difficult to overcome for Cajun writers with respect to a novel in French. Not only do poets seem to act as guarantors of outsiderness (Paré 8); poetry is also the language of this outsiderness: “La poésie est non seulement un instrument de réflexion sur la littérature, elle est aussi le langage même des marginalités” (Paré 11). In reevaluating “their image and worth as a people” (Bernard, Cajuns 108), the Cajuns laid the foundation for a collective Cajun consciousness that also acknowledges the ban on French at schools and the resulting stigmatization as determinants of Cajun identity. Starting first as a grassroots movement, the Cajun Renaissance quickly gained momentum mainly through increased tourism in Cajun Country. Generally regarded as a watershed in the cultural emancipation of the Cajuns, the Cajun Renaissance reflects the revolutionary power of memory whose potential is unlocked in historic moments of defeat or powerlessness (A. Assmann, “Metaphorik” 23). The realization of Cajun culture’s dire state during the 1960s and 1970s became a movement of empowerment and pride. The existential threat and the danger of losing a part of their identity set free a power of memory within the Cajun community. Although the Louisiana French Movement did not do away with the repeated death-sentence of French, and Cajun culture respectively (see Tentchoff; Bankston and Henry; Guirard), the prediction made in 1976 that Cajun French would have died out by 2010 (Ryon 58) is doubtlessly wrong. The fore-telling has not yet become reality (Angelloz), a sign that points to a very vibrant Cajun collective memory. Both the tourist and entertainment industries during the ethnic pride movement created what Arjun Appaduarai termed an “armchair nostalgia, nostalgia without lived experience or collective historical memory” (Appadurai, Modernity 78). For want of authentic sites of memory, Cajuns started to reconstruct a sort of ersatz-sites of memory, some of these sites becoming ersatz nostalgia, or rather fakelore.⁵⁸ The emerging Cajun literature goes against this attitude and seeks to present Cajun culture in its authenticity. As a result, the 1990s saw a renewed

bert Belisle Davis. Other Cajun anglophone writers are Ken Wells, Martin Pousson, and Hardy Jones. For works by Tim Gautreaux, R. Thibodeaux, and D. Bourque see chapters 5, 8, and 10.  These include Ancelet’s Cajun and Creole Folktales (1994); Qui est le plus fort? (1999) by Ancelet and Joël Boudreau; Graines de parasol (2012) by Jude R. Chatelain Sr.; Jean Arceneaux’s Le Trou dans le mur: Fabliaux cadiens (2012); and Barry Jean Ancelet’s Jean-le-chasseur et ses chiens (2016).  See, for instance, “Atchafalaya” (1987) by American essayist John McPhee.  The term “fakelore” was coined by American folklorist Richard Dorson in 1950 (“Folklore”).

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upsurge of the Cajun revival movement with a special focus on the Acadian heritage. Cajuns actively engaged in the historical research and reconstruction of the Acadian past. Such mnemocultural monuments as the Acadian Memorial, built in St. Martinville in 1991,⁵⁹ as well as sociocultural institutions in charge of preserving these monuments emerged. Louisiana’s political, educational, and cultural alignment to Acadia (Clermont 9) culminated with the first quinquennial Acadian World Congress in 1994 and engendered a pan-Acadian movement spearheaded by academic exchanges. As the largest Acadian reunion taking place in areas inhabited by Acadian descendants and providing a popular opportunity to reconnect with Acadian descendants, the Acadian World Congress has become a site of pilgrimage and transnational network; and it contributes to what some refer to as the “Acadian diaspora.”⁶⁰ This imaginary community commemorates not only the Grand Dérangement but celebrates the living Acadian heritage, a so-called acadianité, and a francophone outlook.⁶¹ The ceaseless general attraction to Cajun culture stems from its exotic and unique character, a trait it shares with Louisiana’s culture in general. Scholars have continuously underscored Louisiana’s uniqueness within the United States.⁶² Its exceptionalism ranges from its colonial history as a former French colony, to its geography, environment, and climate, and to its political and religious constitution (the state is divided into parishes and Catholicism prevails). The French language, especially, seems to single out Louisiana to the extent that a scholar deemed it “une île figurée, la Louisiane, pays d’une minorité culturelle et qui a une conscience insulaire” (Landner 377). Taking into account the various place names referring to an island, including both the barrier islands and small river islands,⁶³ the image of the island persists within Louisiana on a figurative and literal level. Moreover, the “chênière,” a synonym for “island,” is a typical feature of Cajun Country: “Dans cette camargue démesurée scintillaient des îles. En Louisiane, les îles ne sont pas toujours entourées d’eau;

 The Acadian Memorial houses the Wall of Names (a wall listing the names of the Acadians arriving in Louisiana in the eighteenth century), the Eternal Flame (to symbolize that the Acadians have always known to rekindle as a people despite difficulties), and the Deportation Cross.  See asterisk in Magord 11.  As a cultural phenomenon, acadianité is generally used to refer to the spirit inherent in the Acadian culture of the Maritime Provinces. Cadienneté is the more current term in Cajun culture (Leroy, “Bec Doux” 91). Both terms shed light on the close connection to the African legitimization movement spearheaded by Senghor’s francité (Senghor, “Francophonie” 131).  “[U]nique, as the only former French colony in what is now the United States” (Brosman 3).  The barrier islands include among others Pecan Island, Marsh Island, Grand Isle, Beauregard Island, Isle Grande Terre, Chandeleur Islands, Isles Dernières, and Timbalier Island. Small river islands are, for instance, Avery Island, Cow Island, and Palmetto Island.

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elles peuvent surgir de la prairie tremblante ou d’une savane, souvent couronnées de chêne [sic] verts. Nous avons appelé nos îles des chênières: Grand-Chênière, Petite-Chênière, Chênière au Tigre” (Des Marais 350 – 351). The image of an island recalls Cuban author Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s idea of the archipelagic nature of cultures, displayed in his essay “The Repeating Island” (1985) which accentuates the extremely complex legacies in Caribbean cultures.⁶⁴ Using the image of the reduplicating of islands in archipelagos, Benítez-Rojo endeavored to describe the repetition of spaces, time, events, thoughts, etc. In his view, the Caribbean is a repetition of islands on both a synchronic and a diachronic level. Cajun culture, too, can be considered a repeating island, as a francophone island in a sea of Americanness, forming with other francophone islands an extension of the Caribbean, an archipelago.⁶⁵ Likewise, Cajun literature finds itself in an insular position. The fact that it developed on the literary fringe suggests a comparison to what Ontarian literary scholar François Paré identifies as littératures de l’exéguité, litteratures of exiguity. Although marginalized and undervalued, literatures of exiguity hold the most creative potential, for they allow the author to include different perspectives (Paré 7). The Cajun writers acknowledge their otherness and insularity, originating primarily from the use of the minority language, French (or the reference to the francophone background), and the recourse to orality, which is a common feature of literatures of exiguity. Disconnected from university bases, minorities opt for the oral expression to either defy the canon or to imitate their source of inspiration (Paré 24– 25). As several Cajun texts show an affinity to both incorporate oral traditions and refer to other marginalized and discriminated groups such as Native Americans, African Americans, and Jews—groups that celebrate their oral traditions—they investigate the marginal existence of their culture. Scholars have pointed to the parallel emergence of the francophone and anglophone literary traditions (Bernard, Cajuns 123; Hebert-Leiter, Becoming Cajun 126). The two traditions, nonetheless, reveal conspicuous thematic differences. The littérature cadienne of the 1980s clearly differed from anglophone Cajun literature as it was very much concerned with the preservation and promotion of the French language as well as with the resolute assertion of a Cajun identity.

 In 1992, Benítez-Rojo republished the article in an enhanced book form with the same title. In 1996, with the second edition, two more chapters were added, thus exemplifying through the addenda his own concept of the “repeating island.”  In 1986, two geographers from the U.S. and Quebec introduced the idea of French archipelagos in the USA and Canada with Du continant perdu à l’archipel retrouvé: Le Québec et l’Amérique française, including essays on the various francophone groups on the North American continent.

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The fact that francophone Cajun literature started to negotiate and creatively rework the Acadian past prior to anglophone texts hints at the necessity to root Cajun culture into a legitimizing historical context. Lastly, in contrast to anglophone Cajun literature (and French Creole literary tradition during its heyday in the nineteenth century), francophone Cajun literature today remains on the fringe. The predominance of the English language makes it difficult for Louisiana authors writing in French to find a ready market for their works, especially for the folktale tradition, as “the complex taletelling tradition, far more intimate and language-bound, persists hidden from those who are not fluent in French” (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales ix). Some writers choose to provide an English translation,⁶⁶ a recourse that is another marker of minority literatures (Paré 19).⁶⁷ Three obstacles contributed to the marginal state of francophone Cajun literature: the language choice, the lack of models Cajun authors could emulate, and the lack of a written code. What is more, the promotion of French in the 1970s ended in a double bind. Caught in-between English and Standard French, the Cajun community found itself affected by an acute linguistic schizophrenia: “The disruptive split functions on several levels for it has distorted individual attitudes, has served to widen the generation gap between old timers and youngsters and has produced conflicting schools within the Cajun community as a whole” (Castex 54). It is, therefore, no surprise that the first generation of Cajun writers used pseudonyms. On the one hand, the pseudonyms served to bolster the legitimation of francophone Cajun literature.⁶⁸ On the other hand, they were also an indicator of the extreme social fragility of the minority community. It seems to be a good omen that the Cajun writers have cast off their pseudonym(s). The use of French led to a highly complex debate since francophone Cajun literature as a minority literature relies heavily on institutions such as publishing houses, academic journals, public readings, or awards. Up to the 1980s there was

 Je suis Cadien by Jean Arceneaux and Plainsongs by Darrell Bourque are bilingual editions that present first the French work and then the English translation. While both poets commissioned the translations, Beverly Matherne herself translates all her poems from English into French. Richard’s first two Cajun tales are now also available in English.  The fact that the number of translations has not changed in the last two decades indicates that either the Cajuns favor the tone and effect of writing in the original language, or that the publishing houses still consider translations unlucrative.  Carl A. Brasseaux alias Antoine Bourque; Barry Jean Ancelet alias Jean Arceneaux; Zénon Cheramy alias David John Cheramie; David Émile Marcantel alias Émile Des Marais alias Marc Untel de Graves alias Pierre Cocodrie.

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no publisher in Louisiana who would publish works in French so that Cajun writers had to look outside the United States, to Quebec, New Brunswick, and France, to get their French works published and find a wider francophone readership.⁶⁹ This translocation of the publication of Cajun works allowed their spreading to a wider French-speaking readership. More importantly, it helped legitimize Cajun literature since the small number of early francophone Cajun distributions in Louisiana, their handcrafted look, and their insufficient marketing hampered the visibility of francophone Cajun literature.⁷⁰ Circumstances changed with the turn of the twenty-first century. The Éditions Tintamarre of the Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, founded in 2003, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press make Cajun works more visible. Anthologies are a crucial means not only for disseminating literary works, but also for consolidating the collective memory of a group. Similar to a literary canon, consecrated works transmit and commemorate a culture.⁷¹ They determine especially university teaching. The publication of poems in anthologies takes the poems out of their archival isolation. Once in circulation, the process of consolidation and remembering begins. Remarkably, besides their first publication in Anthologie: Littérature française de la Louisiane (1981), francophone Cajun poems have also been included in anglophone anthologies and university textbooks as well as in French and Acadian anthologies.⁷² Although existing on the literary fringe, the stable presence of francophone Cajun literature is a symbol of the refusal to disappear. Growing out of a lack of a written tradition and the negotiation of (literary) stereotypes,⁷³ Cajun literature  For instance, Lâche pas la patate, which its author Revon Reed considered as the first francophone book (1976), was published by the Éditions Parti pris in Montreal, Quebec. Likewise, Les Éditions Intermède in Montreal, Quebec, published Cris sur le bayou: Naissance d’une poésie acadienne en Louisiane (1980) and Les Intouchables, also in Montreal, Quebec, published Richard’s three Cajun tales (1999, 2007, 2010).  “Même Cris sur le bayou n’est paru qu’en 3 400 exemplaires, Acadie tropicale en 200 exemplaires” (Waggoner, “À la recherche” 63).  Aleida Assmann studied the importance of the canon for cultural memory in Erinnerungsräume.  See, for instance, Ann Dobie, Uncommonplace (1998); Serge Patrice Thibodeaux, Anthologie de le poésie acadienne (2009); Poslaniec and Doucey, eds., L’Insurrection poétique: Manifeste pour vivre ici (2015). The fact that the entry on francophone poets of the U.S. in the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012) lists Ancelet, Z. Richard, Matherne, Carol Doucet, Jambon, and Cheramie clearly shows that the francophone Cajun poetry has finally found its way into the American literary canon (Kane, “Francophone Poets” 518).  Films, especially, spread the stereotype of the idle, stupid Cajun. These include Southern Comfort (1981), No Mercy (1986), and The Big Easy (1987) (Allain, “Talk”). In the 1990s, the show Saturday Night Live featured Cajun man, aka actor Adam Sandler, who perpetuated the

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has increasingly become more autonomous thanks to the institutionalization of a literary apparatus in Louisiana and the ingenuity and creativity of Cajun writers. To write is one way for a minority to speak up. To write is also an “assurance of the continuity of the past, an individual voyage in the bosom of traditions and an uninterrupted starting point for the future” (Barry, “Renaissance” 56).

image of the dumb Cajun as he answered questions in monosyllables ending in nasals. The distortion of the Cajun character continues in the twenty-first century with Disney’s The Princess and the Frog (2009) and its depiction of Raymond, a Cajun firefly, and the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) (Scott; Cheramie, “Beasts”).

3 Framing Collective Memory and Literature: Some Theoretical Observations While the 1980s witnessed the emergence of Cajun literature in Louisiana, the same period was also highly symptomatic of another more global cultural phenomenon in the Western world, namely the unrelenting and passionate preoccupation with memory. Frequently described as a veritable boom,¹ this preoccupation with memory has come not only to cover a large area of the public discourse, but also to crisscross various academic disciplines, nationally as well as internationally. Hailed as the new paradigm of Kulturwissenschaften (J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 11),² the concept of memory is also at the origin of the now transdisciplinary field of memory studies.³ The journal Memory Studies, founded in 2008 by Sage publications, best represents the scope of memory studies, as it “examines the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technical shifts affecting how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember and forget” (“Memory Studies,” Sage). The present study focuses specifically on the memory of a group—commonly known as collective memory. As the memory boom has acquired global proportions, appearing even as a viral growth to some scholars (J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 11), it has led others to condemn the overuse and to question the viability and longevity of the paradigm of collective memory (see Maier; Rosenfeld). The various alternative expressions including, for instance, the frequently used “social memory” and “cultural memory,” and other analogous  The mushrooming of museums, monuments, and commemorative events bears witness to the public obsession with the past (see Huyssen, Twilight 1– 9; Winter, “Generation”; Blight). Likewise, academic research on memory abounds to the point that the talk is of a “memory industry” (Rosenfeld 123). In 2001 appeared the first extensive encyclopedia of memory (in German) by Pethes and Ruchatz.  “Kulturwissenschaften” is translated as “cultural studies” in the English version of J. Assmann’s book (Cultural Memory vii – viii). Both terms, however, differ in origin and denotation, as does the alternative term “culture studies.” Experts, therefore, have suggested to speak of “the study of cultures.” See the name of the “International Graduate Centre for the Study of Cultures,” a research center based in Giessen (A. Assmann, “Cultural Studies”). For a concrete elaboration of the Anglo-German opposition see also Musner.  Memory Studies is a field of research where different disciplines and different cultures converge. It focuses on three approaches: transcultural memory, the mediality of memory, and memory and narration (“The Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform”). While some scholars refer to “Collective Memory Studies,” the most common term is simply “Memory Studies” (Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning”; Erll, “Cultural Memory Studies”; Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, “Introduction” 4). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-004

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terms that claim to be more specific such as “public memory,” “popular memory,” “political memory,” “national memory,” as well as the binaries “official memory” and “vernacular memory,” “common memory” and “shared memory,” reflect the conceptual ambiguity and dissension within the academic community regarding the appropriateness of the terms. However, this inconclusiveness is also a sign of a fecund field of research. Despite the terminological criticism and the prediction of its desuetude, collective memory is still widely discussed. Today, scholars—and the public—show an unabated interest in memory. The developing field of theorizing memory studies as well as the development of what the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann termed “mnemohistory” further emphasize the relevance of memory studies.⁴ Studies attest to the newest trend of memory studies: the global impact of memory, its transnational and transcultural outreach, and the dynamics behind it. Especially since the turn of the twenty-first century, the dynamics of memory forms have become one of the principal research topics in the human and social sciences.⁵ For memories are by no means linear; they are always in flux and adapt to changes. Past experiences and events are repeated, reformed, and adapted to the current needs of a group. Cajun culture no doubt provides challenging areas of research since its heterogeneity and mutability supposedly forego any concrete localization of the group’s memory. Additionally, up to the middle of the twentieth century, the Cajuns were not aware of themselves as a distinct group, and Cajun collective identity or memory was more disparate than unified. It was only with the ethnic pride movement fueled by the Cajun Renaissance that there emerged a sense of belonging uniting the Cajuns. The Cajuns began to scrutinize their attitudes and habits, as well as existing and often conflicting descriptions of themselves, in order to establish a common ground upon which to build a Cajun identity. Remarkably, the various traits of Cajun culture such as language, cultural traditions, and historical events coalesce in Cajun literature, which hints at a collective sense of belonging and, by extension, a collective memory. Considering that “[m]emory is a central, if not the central, medium through which identities are constituted” (Olick and Robbins 133), investigating the col-

 The Collective Memory Reader is the first anthology of texts relating to memory with a sociological focus, which appeared in 2011 (Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy). J. Assmann explored mnemohistory in Moses der Ägypter: Entzifferung einer Gedächtnisspur (2000).  One of the first transdisciplinary and transcultural publications with a focus on the historical representation of memory is the series Formen der Erinnerung, initiated in 2000. It aims at reconstructing history from Antiquity to the twentieth century, covering diverse fields of research from social sciences to the arts (see “Formen der Erinnerung”).

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lective memory of a group entails questions about both culture and identity. In contrast to individual memory, which is located in the brain, collective memory is without a biological support. Instead, collective memory depends on such external carriers of memory as family, institutions, and media—which ultimately relate to culture (Halbwachs, Cadres 130 – 131). Moreover, as the “nonhereditary memory of the community” (Lotman, Uspensky, and Mihaychuk 213), culture undergoes changes as each generation needs to continuously assess the group’s self-perception, adapt to transitions, and (re)construct mental images. As a consequence, memory also changes. These transformations manifest themselves most plainly in writings and other artifacts created by people, the carriers and producers of memory. Literature and the arts thus mirror how the habits and mentality of a culture evolve. More specifically, literature and the arts are media that select, discard, and distribute mental images, all processes these media share with memory. Based on experiences and memories, literary as well as musical and visual arts are deeply rooted in, and engage with, issues of personal, political, and cultural memory (A. Assmann, Cultural Memory xi). As a matter of fact, individual remembering and storytelling are two congenial processes.⁶ Likewise, the production of history shows that collective memory underlies narrative processes.⁷ Ultimately, literature not only shapes the reader’s memory, it serves as a long-term repository of memories—an archive—and reflects the socio-cultural changes that affect the worldview of both the individual and the community. The emerging Cajun literature, therefore, promises to offer valuable clues to memory processes in addition to a diachronic overview of the changes since the 1980s. Understandably, literacy plays a key role: It is “necessary to the sense of historical perspective” (P. Burke, Renaissance 149), for “literate cultures enforce a clearer, more objective distinction between the past and the present” (Whitehead 39). On a global scale, the invention of writing triggered significant transformations, above all the creation of an externalized field of communication—literature: “The invention of writing opened up the possibility of an all-encompassing, revolutionary transformation of this external area of communication, and in most cases, this transformation actually occurred” (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 8). Cajun culture, however, was mostly defined by oral traditions and myths until after Reconstruction, when laws pushed for compulsory education. After  See “La mémoire élémentaire,” the second part in Janet, L’Évolution 249 – 272. Additional information can be found in Janet, L’Intelligence.  Historians first pointed to the parallel use of “collective memory” and “narrative,” which was, presumably, a result of the influence of linguistic philosophy and literary criticism on history (Gedi and Elam 30).

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1916, when public education became mandatory, Cajun culture did not turn into a literate culture immediately. For the Cajuns lacked the infrastructure of a written literature, above all writers, readers, and publishers (Leroy, “Imaging Cajun-ness” viii – ix), and “a society is unlikely to supply historical awareness without both literacy and relatively rapid social change” (Schudson, “Journalism” 87). Moreover, historical change frequently results from the awareness of a linguistic change (A. Assmann, Erinnerungsräume 50). The profound socio-cultural and linguistic changes of the mid-twentieth century finally brought about the revolutionary transformation of Cajun culture from an oral to a written culture. The following theoretical framework for the analysis of the dynamics of collective memory mirrors the developing collective consciousness of the Cajuns, disclosed by memory processes visible in Cajun literature from the 1980s onward. While the early writings are concerned with the self-image of the group as well as with the Cajun environment, i. e., the immediate geographical, cultural, and social milieu, subsequent texts progressively enter in dialogue with the past as a means to understand and justify the culture’s existence. Finally, later texts present an even broader horizon as they take into account other cultures and the outside world. This mnemonic unfolding from the local to the temporal and to the global bears much resemblance not only to the cognitive development of a child, who is capable of reconstructing the past only after having acquired sensorimotor and language skills.⁸ It also mirrors French philosopher Pierre Janet’s thoughts about the evolution of the human intellect over time. People went forth and adapted to their surroundings. Also, people’s first intellectual actions correspond to spatial practices: The first conquests in science (geometry, astronomy) relate to space. Only recently did people start to focus on and struggle against time (L’Intelligence 168 – 169). On a more global scale, the nineteenth century with its development of historicism and nationalism, meant to consolidate nation states, stands as a period when the sensitivity toward space progressed to a sensibility regarding the notion of time. It was then that the past became paramount for identity formation. These two senses of space and time serve as bases for the next stage defined by invention and the creative incorporation of foreign material.

 In his theory of cognitive development, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget distinguishes four stages in the development of the human intelligence of a child. These stages focus all on the five senses. Only later does the child develop the notion of time (see Naissance). For the study of the development of the sense of time see Piaget, Développement.

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The present study aims at reflecting this gradual development in following a tripartite structure. Each chapter of my analysis thus centers around what I call three mnemonic modes that correspond to three levels of identity formation or memory processes. The first relates to a growing awareness of the self and its anchorage in space, constituted by concrete geographical places as well as contemporary socio-cultural surroundings. Shared by the group, this growing awareness plays an important role in creating a distinct sense of belonging. In a second mode, the sensibility of a geo-socio-cultural locatedness is heightened by a growing awareness of the past. Through the construction of a historical past, and embedding Cajun culture in that particular Acadian past, a communal sense of the past is established that legitimizes the existence of the Cajuns. The third mode is defined by a sense of mutability, a fundamental Cajun characteristic. As the more recent literary texts show, the Cajun perspective has turned toward other cultures, adding to the spatial and temporal frames a sense of fluidity through the crossing of boundaries. Not only do the Cajuns attempt to negotiate between their francophone heritage and American culture; they also increasingly incorporate other socio-cultural elements from the wider world. On the one hand, this process serves to demarcate the culture from other dominating and unifying forces such as the American mainstream. On the other hand, Cajun collective memory is governed by both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective. The equilibrium of centripetal and centrifugal forces highlights how the Cajuns consolidate their collective memory in focusing on their heritage and, simultaneously, assimilating unfamiliar cultural elements. The ability to connect to outside influences reflects the current cultural phenomenon of globalization. Indeed, the tangled state of memories seems to be the emblem of our time: “In view of the fact that one has to reckon with several ‘cultures of memory’ existing simultaneously in one and the same society rather than with only one … there will be certainly competition between these memorial cultures and the canons that serve as their archives” (Grabes, “Canon” 313). The notion of “tangled memories” put forth by American scholar Marita Sturken also applies to Cajun culture. In the past two decades, works about non-linear memory processes have increased. Comparisons to a multidimensional net visualize memory’s interconnected processes. The global turn has extended the reach of memory studies, visible in the upsurge of such synonyms as “cosmopolitan memory” (Levy and Sznaider, “Memory Unbound”), “multidirectional memory” (Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory”), “nœuds de mémoire” (Rothberg, “Introduction”), “global memory” (Assmann and Conrad, eds.), “travelling memory” (Erll, “Travelling Memory”), “palimpsestic memory” (Silverman), “transnational memory” (de Cesari and Rigney), or “transcultural

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memory” (Crownshaw), which all describe the extending and transcending processes of memory. As a case in point, literature best reflects the memory dynamics of a group as it transmits its historical knowledge and represents the contemporary mentality. It is a distillation of the communal narrative of a group and thus inextricably linked to memory. The last part of the chapter then deals with the theoretical approaches to the cross-cutting dynamics of memory in literature in particular.

3.1 Mapping out Collective Memory The term “memory” describes both the place where experiences and images are retained, and the result of the act of remembering. “Memory,” states the American philosopher Susanne Langer, “is the great organizer of consciousness. … [W]hile actual experience is a welter of sights, sounds, feelings, physical strains, expectations, and minute, undeveloped reactions … [m]emory … simplifies and composes our perceptions” (263). What characterizes personal memories is the fact that they are fragmented, fleeting, and unreliable, or unstable because they largely depend on the personal experiences and the correlating emotions of a person (see Hacking). Autobiographical memory best exemplifies how the memory of an individual is affected by emotions (see Damásio). Defined by a unique perspective, autobiographical memory differs from one person to the next and as a part of a combination of memory systems points to the complexities of individual memory (see Damásio; Schacter and Tulving, “Memory”; Schacter and Tulving, Memory Systems). Yet memory does not just refer to an individual entity; it may be collective as well. As British psychologist Frederic Bartlett found out between 1910 – 1932, an individual organizes his life in schemata that are culture-specific images emerging from socially shared knowledge systems and guiding the person’s perception and remembering (Bartlett 199). These collective representations correspond to the memory of a given collectivity in which memory is formed, shared, and transmitted among individuals. They describe an organic process of interpenetration of experiences and knowledge. Furthermore, this communally shared or collective memory, like individual memory, has various memory systems. Maurice Halbwachs’s statement, “[i]l y a, en effet, plusieurs mémoires collectives” (Mémoire collective 135), conjoins findings by other scholars about multiple systems of collective memory (see Welzer, Das soziale Gedächtnis).

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There exist, therefore, what has been called “Erinnerungskulturen,” or memory cultures.⁹ A memory culture shares memories, imaginations, experiences, and knowledge that have a certain recognition value for the respective group and that create a sense of belonging. The different memory cultures develop a self-image in various ways, depending on the history, social organization, and cultural understanding of the group: “Societies conceive images of themselves, and they maintain their identity through the generations by fashioning a culture out of memory. They do it … in completely different ways” (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 4). This complicates the definition of any memory culture. Defining the memory of a group is no easy matter in another respect, for there exists a dissent as to which term to use. Alongside “collective memory,” the terms “social memory” and “cultural memory” are often used synonymously.¹⁰ Strictly speaking, the three terms have, nonetheless, different meanings. Contemporary studies on the memory of groups are based on “mémoire collective,” a concept refined by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in his seminal works Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre sainte (1941), and the posthumously published La Mémoire collective (1950). Although he did not invent the notion of “collective memory,” he is generally considered the pioneer in researching the social mooring of individual memory and the sociological impact of the shared memories of a group. Collective memory depends on an externalized support (institutions, monuments, media). Therefore, Halbwachs’s term can be employed only in a metaphorical sense and must be understood as a metonymy. Individual and collective remembering are, however, not two separate processes—they interact. In fact, awareness is linked to individual memory as it entails the remembering of the experiences to assess them. At the same time, remembrance relies on social ex-

 See J. Assmann’s first chapter of his opus magnum for a detailed presentation of “Erinnerungskultur”: “‘[M]emory culture’ is concerned with a social obligation and is firmly linked to the group” (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 16). Assmann also refers to Pierre Nora’s “collectivité-mémoire,” which he translates as “Gedächtnisgemeinschaften.” However, Nora uses the term only in relation to the farmer’s class and fails to give a definition of the term (Lieux 1: xvii). “Memory cultures” also evokes the term “community of memory,” introduced by Bellah et al. in 1996 (333). In 1997, The Gießener Sonderforschungsbereich 434 Erinnerungskulturen at Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen started to concretely research the plurality, constructionism, and dynamics of the contents and forms of cultural memories (“Erinnerungskulturen: Konzept”).  Astrid Erll, in The Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, juxtaposes all three terms: “Cultural memory (or, if you will, ‘collective,’ ‘social’) …” (“Cultural Memory Studies” 1). She foregoes any differentiation of the terms, as do a number of other scholars, too. In an article about memory and journalism, Schudson clarifies that he “will use the terms social memory, collective memory, cultural memory and public memory interchangeably” (“Journalism” 85).

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change so that conforming memories of individuals become the collective memory of a group. So while individual memory defines the fundamental character of each being, the fundamental character of a culture lies in its collective memory. In our case, it is at the confluence of particular shared individual representations that the collective memory of the Cajun community becomes apparent. Alongside Halbwachs, other scholars have investigated the processes of individual and group memory.¹¹ Yet not all of them referred to “collective memory.” The term “social memory,” for instance, features in the works of Halbwachs’s contemporaries, German philosopher Karl Mannheim and German art historian Aby Warburg.¹² In contrast to Halbwachs, both Mannheim and Warburg considered social memory as transcending the recent past. Mannheim’s concept of social memory focused on the transmission of memories across generations, while Warburg’s concept referred to the endurance of distant memories in art, the socalled “afterlives” of the past. The concept of collective memory gained wider currency during a second memory wave in the 1980s.¹³ Answering objections to Halbwachs’s view that history was not part of collective memory, a group of scholars around Jan and Aleida Assmann developed the concept of memory fixed in cultural forms and media, making thus a functional distinction between “cultural memory” and “communicative memory.” In their theoretical formulations—Jan Assmann’s Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (1992) and the sequel Erinnerungsräume (1997) by Aleida Assmann—the couple combined Halbwachs’s and Warburg’s theories, arguing that “cultural memory” refers to the distant past, going beyond the time frame of lived memories, and that it comprises more or less ordered memories. Cultural memory relates to the pastness of things and stands in binary opposition to “communicative memory,” which refers to memories of the recent past. This latter type of memory has a short span, about three to four generations,

 Besides Maurice Halbwachs as its most famous representative, the first wave of memory research taking place around the turn of the twentieth century included fellow sociologists (Karl Mannheim), psychologists (Wilhelm Wundt, Frederic C. Bartlett, Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud), and scholars of philosophy, arts, and literature (Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, and Marcel Proust).  Mannheim and Warburg use “soziale Erinnerung” and “gesellschaftliche Erinnerung” (Mannheim, “Das Problem” 177; Gombrich). Halbwachs mentioned “mémoire sociale” a few times but did not distinguish the expression from his “mémoire collective” (Cadres xi, 320, 391; Mémoire collective 99, 130).  This movement was led by scholars of various disciplines in France (historian Pierre Nora), Germany (Egyptologist Jan Assmann and his wife, Aleida Assmann, a professor of English literature and culture), Great Britain (cultural theorist Stuart Hall and the Popular Memory Group), and the United States (Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi).

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i. e., 80 years approximately. It is unorganized and spontaneous, and thus more liable to change. Halfway into that time span seems to be a critical time when communicative and cultural memory overlap: “After forty years those who have witnessed an important event as an adult will leave their future-oriented professional career, and will enter the age group in which memory grows as does the desire to fix it and pass it on” (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 36). In view of Halbwachs’s neglect of the distant past, Assmann’s “communicative memory” equals in some way Halbwachs’s “collective memory.” Furthermore, with respect to cultural memory, Jan Assmann argues that the neurological basis defining individual memory is replaced by culture, “a complex of identity-shaping aspects of knowledge objectified in the symbolic forms of myth, song, dance, sayings, laws, sacred texts, pictures, ornaments, paintings, processional routes, or … even whole landscapes” (Cultural Memory 71– 72). Today, “cultural memory” has obviously become an extremely popular term, affecting not only the diverse fields of human sciences and social studies, but also crossing national boundaries.¹⁴ Nevertheless, there are also voices opposing its use. Some critics object especially to a separation of cultural and communicative memory.¹⁵ Other scholars have stressed the communicative aspect of memory. While Middleton and Edwards addressed the role of conversational remembering, Harald Welzer expanded the concept of “communicative memory,” providing yet another perspective of “social memory.” In contrast to the intentional production of memories, his “social memory” describes how the past is created “en passant” through unintentional remembering (“Das soziale Gedächtnis” 15 – 21). As her later works published since the turn of the twenty-first century show, Aleida Assmann began to refrain from referring to “communicative memory” and to use “social memory” instead.¹⁶ Generally, “social memory” tends to be used more frequently in studies regarding sociological memory processes, while “cultural memory” has come to describe memory processes in literature, arts, and popular culture.

 The sense of “cultural” in the handbook A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies goes beyond the Assmannian understanding (Erll and Nünning).  Ludwig Jäger, for instance, maintains that collective memory is a space of performative memory processes and Jan Assmann’s “cultural memory” fails to consider the space of interaction where memory is negotiated (68). Also, Angela Keppler argues that with the influence of mass media it is more appropriate to highlight the interference of both notions (157– 159).  Social memory in A. Assmann’s understanding is part of three other formats of memory including generational, political, and cultural memory (“Vier Formen”; Schatten 33). For J. Assmann, social memory equates Erinnerungskultur (“Zeitkonstruktion” 87– 89).

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Nonetheless, it has to be noted that the term “cultural memory” also appears in other works, denoting a broader meaning (Namer 163; Sturken 3). Marita Sturken, for instance, unacquainted with Assmann’s theory, used the term “cultural memory” to distinguish it from personal memory and history (2)—unlike Jan Assmann, who positions his concept between individual memory and communicative memory. Also, in the English translation of her introduction to memory studies, Erll proposes a broader concept of cultural memory that differs from the approach provided by the Assmanns in that it unites “all possible expressions of the relationship of culture and memory—from ars memoriae to digital archives, from neural networks to intertextuality, from family talk to the public unveiling of a monument” (Memory in Culture 101).¹⁷ The provisional definition of “cultural memory” provided by Erll’s handbook underlines the scholar’s broad understanding of the term: “[T]he interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts” (“Cultural Memory Studies” 2). Most significantly, “[c]ultural memory studies is therefore characterized by the transcending of boundaries” (“Cultural Memory Studies” 4). It must be said, however, that this extremely inclusive definition, which, incidentally, prevails in American memory studies and makes a difference between the social and the medial, is no less confusing than “collective memory.” Several reasons guide my choice to use “collective memory.” With respect to the present project, “collective memory” and “social memory” and “cultural memory” seem suitable, since collective, sociological, and cultural aspects play into the memory processes represented in Cajun literature. However, Assmann’s focus on society as opposed to, for instance, “ethnic group” presents a drawback, as Cornelia Siebeck demonstrates in her critical discussion of the Assmannian memory paradigm. Likewise, to speak of the “social memory” of the Cajuns could be misleading since they do not constitute a society of their own. The lack of specific Cajun institutions—a Cajun government, a Cajun educational system, a Cajun Court of Justice—preempts a Cajun “social memory.” As I will show as well, the memory processes transpiring in literary texts transcend the “social sphere” of the Cajuns. Similarly, “cultural memory” as defined by the Assmanns includes categories such as national and political memory. With respect to Cajun culture, the term “cultural memory”—just like “social memory”—is inappropriate since the Cajuns do not present a nation, nor was their mobilization beginning in the  In the English translation of her book Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen, Astrid Erll introduces an orthographic distinction between the more generic “cultural memory” with a lower-case “c” and “m,” and Jan and Aleida Assmann’s concept of “Cultural Memory” with an upper-case “C” and “M” (Memory in Culture 27).

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1960s and 1970s political (Esman, “Celebration” 10). Although the search for a Cajun identity has had political implications, politics have played a marginal role and there has been no serious Cajun nationalism. As American citizens, however, the Cajuns share a social memory, or cultural memory, with their American countrymen. Furthermore, Cajun literature might seem a perfect counter-example to the separation of cultural and communicative memory. Being on the threshold between oral and written cultures, Cajun culture preempts a strict separation of both memory modes. The Cajun oral tradition can be approached via oral history,¹⁸ a research field that actually combines cultural and communicative memory,¹⁹ and thus contrasts with the Assmannian theory which leaves out oral history to focus instead on canonical texts of culture. Considering that Cajun literature still lives from a symbiosis between the oral and the written traditions, it is impossible to ignore the communicative aspect feeding the Cajun texts. Today, the Cajun writings still very much continue to draw on Cajun oral history, a sort of vernacular memory. It epitomizes the interaction of cultural memory and communicative memory, for it combines both oral and literary modes of remembrance. The present project then is geared to highlight the shift from a previously oral to a written culture, a significant change not only pertaining to Cajun culture, but also shared by other minority groups. Two other phenomena that are relevant in the context of collective memory today and that figure among the most discussed topics in politics, literature, and art are creolization and hybridization. Halbwachs already noted that memories are “en rapport avec tout un ensemble de notions que beaucoup d’autres que nous possèdent, … avec toute la vie matérielle et morale des sociétés dont nous faisons ou dont nous avons fait partie” (Cadres 51– 52). Given the composite past of Cajun culture and the lack of a political or governmental power that would wield much control over the collective memory of a group,²⁰ the Cajun collective memory is much more diversified and hybrid. If we take into account the

 British sociologist Paul Thompson is generally considered as the pioneer of oral history, a research field he introduced with his work The Voice of the Past in 1978.  The German historian Lutz Niethammer introduced oral history in Germany in the 1980s and was the first to study this field in connection with collective memory. See Lebenserfahrung und kollektives Gedächtnis: Die Praxis der “Oral History.”  See A. Assmann: “While political memory tends toward standardization and instrumentalization, cultural memory resists such restricted perspectives because of its medial and material constitution. Its inventoried elements are impossible to unify” (Schatten 58; my translation).

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various ethnic constituents, Cajun collective memory is made of multiple collective memories, a myriad number of representations.²¹ Indeed, Cajun culture might offer arguments against Jan Assmann’s approach and underscore the obvious objection to his binary—one likely to be raised by North and especially Latin American readers and scholars—, namely that his concept of cultural memory is too uniform. His theory focuses on early civilizations, leaving aside the current debate on hybridity. It presupposes a basic commonality of social memories that may apply to relatively homogeneous societies such as Ancient Egypt (or maybe even Germany) but which is less applicable to societies characterized by a colonial divide, especially those in which incompatible group memories are based on equally incompatible forms of mediation (Winthrop-Young 123). With the emergence of Cajun literature, Cajun culture has reached a turning point, for the written tradition now shares the role of preserving the culture with the oral traditions. Although Jan and Aleida Assmann acknowledge both the retrospective and the prospective side of memory,²² their studies do not fundamentally engage with future-oriented memory processes. As Cajun literature deals— explicitly and implicitly—with the past and the future (via the present) of Cajun culture, “collective memory” is the more fitting term, for it stresses the collective constituents and their capacity to connect and form a net of memories.

3.2 The Unveiling of a Collective Memory in Cajun Culture It is no accident that the fascination with memory coincides with the emergence of Cajun literature. Scholars argue that memory is most likely to emerge at a crucial turning point in history, usually in the wake of social, political, or cultural turnovers. Jan Assmann, for instance, suggested that the current sweeping interest in memory stems from substantial changes, a transition from old to new, determining that something is coming to an end: Every substantial break in continuity or tradition can produce the past whenever the break is meant to create a new beginning. A Renaissance or a Reformation will always be shaped by a recourse to the past. Cultures rediscover this past while developing, producing, and constructing a future. (Cultural Memory 18)

 This suggests a hall of mirrors, or a funhouse, such as T. S. Eliot’s “wilderness of mirrors” in his poem “Gerontion” (Collected Poems 39).  Cf. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 60 – 66. The concept of “fama” is also present in A. Assmann, Erinnerungsräume 33 – 60.

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“[A]s an index of loss” (Davis and Starn 4), memory harkens back to the central idea of memory: Only that which is extraordinary and striking gets impressed on the mind. Harald Weinrich’s phrase “Only that which is crooked becomes fixed in memory” (Weinrich, Saltzwedel, and Widmann; my translation) concurs with this idea and emphasizes how major changes trigger a memory surge. Literary scholar Richard Terdiman reinforces this point when he argues that the “memory crisis” is a symptom of modernity made apparent by the French Revolution (3). Especially from the second half of the twentieth century onward, a number of crucial turning points reshaped the Western world, and initiated a growing interest in memory. The technological and socio-economic changes account for the most part for the upsurge of memory worldwide (see Lipsitz; Huyssen, Twilight). These changes have led to a “growing concern that modern forces were attenuating group memory and identity” (Rosenfeld 139) that propelled ethnic minorities, driven by the urge not to disappear, not to be forgotten, to search out their roots. Significantly, [t]he most common feature underpinning most contemporary manifestations of the memory craze seems to be an insecurity about identity. Circumspice: in a world in which opposing certainties come into frequent conflict with each other and in which a multitude of identity-possibilities are put on display, insecurity about identity is a possibly inevitable by-product. In such a situation there is ample reason for ‘memory’ to come to the fore. A rule might be postulated: where identity is problematized, memory is valorized. (Megill 39 – 40)

Incidentally, the focus shifted from a national to a regional consciousness, and made marginal groups visible. These changes of modernity have also affected Cajun culture in peculiar ways, leading to visible socio-cultural shifts in the perception of Cajun consciousness and the awareness of a Cajun collective memory. The Cajun Renaissance, as a part of the larger context surrounding the emancipation of ethnic minorities taking place from the 1960s onward, represents such a change. As the Cajuns grew aware of the growing influence of mainstream American culture, they turned against that influence to save their endangered culture. In exploring Cajun identity and preserving cultural traditions, they have developed a new sense of identity, ultimately giving rise to a distinct Cajun collective memory.²³

 As an example, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s argument with respect to Jewish culture can also be applied to Cajun culture: “The modern effort to reconstruct the Jewish past begins at a time that witnesses a sharp break in the continuity of Jewish living and hence also an ever-growing decay in Jewish group memory” (86).

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Subsequently, the new awareness triggered new attitudes toward the past, as well as not always unanimously accepted “traditions.” Another catalyst for the intensified debate about memory concerns the progressive disappearance of Holocaust survivors, triggering a moral duty to remember the atrocities of World War II. Likewise, the increased instability of and growing concern to save Cajun culture results from the realization that the Cajun generation still speaking Cajun French is about to disappear. With their passing, a crucial pillar of the Cajun collective memory will be lost, causing a considerable part of Cajun culture to break away. It is also in this context that Cajun scholars began to publish revisionist works on the Acadian past (see Conrad, Cajuns). These revisionist tendencies of Cajun history and cultural traditions are a sign of self-reflexivity and an academic commentary, both of which have recourse to and consolidate the collective memory. According to Paul Connerton, this is how societies remember, for “[t]he distinction between what was held to be mythical and what was considered to be historical came into being when it became possible to set one fixed account of the world beside another so that the contradictions within and between them could literally be seen” (Societies 76). As a case in point, Carl A. Brasseaux’s revisionist publications, above all In Search of Evangeline, contributed to the deconstruction of the Evangeline myth and simultaneously constructed a historical version of the Cajun genesis. The general revisionist tendencies in historical scholarship were accompanied by a fundamental change in their approach. Oral history was valorized, finally giving a voice to the vernacular history of the people. This development did not bypass Louisiana, where scholars of the Folklore department at Southwestern University of Lafayette contributed significantly to the establishment of an oral history archive in 1974, the Center for Acadian and Creole Folklore (“About Us: Center”). Today, the Center hosts an impressive collection of records and tapes of important fieldwork by John and Alan Lomax, Ralph Rinzler, and Elizabeth Brandon, among others. Along with the publication of history books by Cajuns, the emerging literature in both English and French also contributed to the fixation of a Cajun oral history. Paradoxically, the ethnic revivals of the 1960s and 1970s and their focus on traditions were concomitant with the end of rural life in many countries, making way for an increased urbanized society. In the context of global technological and socio-economic shifts, historian Pierre Nora emphasized this shift from a rural to an urbanized life (“L’Avènement”). Focusing on France, he demonstrated how industrialization and urbanization had brutally done away with traditions, professions, and lifestyles, thus accelerating the death of a long-establish-

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ed fundamental pillar of French society: agriculture.²⁴ Pierre Nora’s observation about France can also be applied to Cajun Country. Apart from such socio-economic changes as the development of American mass culture and tourism, the rapid growth of the oil and petrochemical industries in Louisiana for much of the first half of the twentieth century attracted a high percentage of Cajun farmers and ranchers and thus contributed to the shift of Cajun Country from a rural to an increasingly urban area. The effects of industrialization, mechanization, and globalization notwithstanding, the traditions have not totally disappeared. Indeed, traditions continue to exist in other forms: “The interesting thing is that Acadians have largely turned to traditional activities to fill their newly acquired leisure time” (Allain, “Talk” 137). The revival of the boucherie is evidence of the Cajuns’ constant love to gather for a meal, “to bring people together to socialize and experience a sense of community. Like other traditional gatherings, it once served a practical purpose and also served to break up the physical isolation of rural dwellers. Today, it serves to break the spiritual alienation of urban folks” (Allain, “Twentieth-Century Acadians” 137). Cajuns continue to meet at dancehalls or festivals, especially the Festival de la musique Acadienne et Créole and the Louisiana Festival, which act as a kind of ersatz of the bal de maison and fais-do-do. These new communal gatherings are fundamental centers for preserving the Cajun collective memory, for “[l]a mémoire collective ne peut exister qu’en recréant ainsi matérielement des centres de continuité et de conservation sociale” (Bastide, “Mémoire collective” 87). Although they have changed, these centers have remained important social frames, and “[i]t is this changed functional context of old customs and institutions that pervades and perhaps most emphatically describes modern Cajun culture” (Del Sesto and Gibson 8). Another attitude the Cajuns have retained is their French esprit de clocher, i. e., a certain parochialism, and their religious beliefs (Allain, “Twentieth-Century Acadians” 139). In the 1990s historians studying the intersections of history and memory came to see them as contiguous entities which coalesce instead of polar opposite terms (P. Burke, “History”; Hutton; Ricœur). For the historians Peter Burke, Patrick Hutton, and Paul Ricœur, history and memory converge. This convergence has to do with a fundamental valorization of memories and oral transmission (A. Assmann, Schatten 47), with history being one way of remembering besides oral history and literature: “We are currently facing, reconstructing, and discussing new forms of memory that open up an access to the past that is distinct

 Pierre Nora sees 1975 as a signal moment, with the economic crisis as one of three major phenomena triggering the memory boom (“L’Avènement”).

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from, and complementary to, that which is provided by historical scholarship” (A. Assmann, Cultural Memory 6). Considering the impermanence of “culture,” collective memory always needs to be faced, reconstructed, and discussed by subsequent generations. This is especially true for the self-image and the collective memory of the Cajuns, for not only does the hybrid Cajun identity contribute to obscuring and complicating a clear definition. Mainstream American culture has exerted some considerable force in steamrolling and stamping out Cajun traditions, most notably the French language. Two motives define the formation of the self-image of a group: The social group that forms a memory community preserves its past mainly through two factors: its peculiarity and its durability. Through the image that it creates for itself, it emphasizes externally the difference that it plays down internally. It also forms a consciousness of its identity over time in order that remembered facts are always selected and proportioned according to parallels, similarities, and continuities. The moment a group becomes aware of a radical change, it ceases to be a group and makes way for another constellation. But because every group strives for durability, it tends to block out change as far as possible and to perceive history as an unchanging continuance. (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 26)

The change or disappearance of social frames, or parts of them, engenders a break in socio-cultural continuity. To avoid forgetting, the resulting void needs to be filled with elements drawn from memory (Halbwachs, Cadres 377). As twin arts,²⁵ memory and forgetting are always dependent on such structures and networks as family, religion, work, and community events. It is these structures that prevent the disruption of social frames. The ban on French certainly signified the loss of such a social frame, for it caused the forgetting of both French and French-related traditions. Concomitantly, Cajun parents who started to give their children English names and spoke English exclusively denied their French heritage and further pushed the process of forgetting. As a rule, ruptures in memory tend to be fixed. Whenever there occurs a substantial break in everyday life, memory has the inherent function to repair the damage, and history of memory means to tackle these “nœuds de mémoire,”

 The connection of memory and forgetting reaches as far back as Greek mythology, with Lethe and Mnemosyne, the two rivers of the underworld. Drinking water from Lethe, the river of oblivion, was believed to drown a person’s memories (Weinrich). The visual poem by New Zealand poet Mark Young, entitled “#178 Memory” and accompanied by René Magritte’s painting La mémoire, starts with spelling out “souvenir” until the final letter “r,” and then goes on to spell out “oublier” in reverse (M. Young).

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“knots of memory” (Petitier 106).²⁶ As in a torn fabric, loose ends are stitched together and produce a new assemblage. These “nœuds de mémoire” concur with what Jan Assmann calls “Bindungsgedächtnis”: “Broadly speaking, it is mainly a lack of congruence between ethnic, cultural, and political formations that sets off the process of reflection, and this leads to a loss of given values and a growing consciousness of the need for a binding cultural sense” (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 124– 125). One way to avoid forgetting and to reflect on a binding cultural sense is to transpose memory onto such cultural media as literature.

3.3 Modes of Remembering in Cajun Literature While Cajun collective memory became visible only with the emergence of a Cajun collective consciousness during the Cajun revival, its presence reaches far into the past. The mere fact that Cajun culture has defied several odds is strong evidence for the existence of a collective memory: “Such motivation [to migrate to Louisiana], more often than not, springs from an intense desire to perpetuate a way of life, real or imagined, in a practical or idealized version of something remembered. It is, in a word, a desire to perpetuate cultural identity” (Conrad, “Acadians” 11). This desire, a “dur désir de durer” (Éluard), suggests that cultural identity rests on particular modes of collective memory. The Cajun literary productions from the 1980s onward exemplify a certain mechanism to perpetuate Cajun identity. According to Jan Assmann, three elements compose the memory of a group. These so-called figures of memory, which are based on Halbwachs’s “imagessouvenirs,” or memory-images,²⁷ act as orientating tools and consist of the reference to time and place, the reference to the group, and the reconstruction of the past (J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 38). Taking into account the marginal position of Cajun culture, its hybrid constitution, and the shift from an oral to a written culture, an analysis of Cajun literature demands an adapted approach. I will, therefore, distinguish between three modes of collective memory, each of which corresponds to a specific sense. They include the sense of belonging,

 Nora was the first to offer “nœuds” as a synonym for “lieux.” He specifies that “[m]oins les lieux, que les nœuds de mémoire où sont venus se prendre les fils éternellement flottants du souvenir et de l’oubli; autrement dit les matrices de notre mémoire politique contemporaine” (Lieux 1: xii).  Assmann translates Halbwachs’s “images-souvenirs” as “Erinnerungsfiguren,” which entails more than just images. Halbwachs adopted the term from Henri Bergson (Matière et mémoire).

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necessary for self-examination and expressed through references to space and the group; the sense of the past emerging through the reconstruction of the distant past; and the sense of malleability that entails the capacity to appropriate and incorporate foreign elements as a means to rejuvenate and guarantee the continuance of Cajun culture. Although the memory processes underlie a gradual development, the three modes, or senses, already exist subliminally in all three stages. In a spiral movement, the Cajun collective memory passes each of the stages, which gradually overlap and mix. This structure corresponds roughly to one of the two models of the transformation of memory proposed by Michel de Certeau. In a sketch—a circle divided into four quarters, each designating a portion of the memory process—the French philosopher and historian explained how memory undergoes various stages, and that each state (i. e., location) of memory is linked by time: [D]ans la composition de lieu initial (I), le monde de la mémoire (II) intervient au bon ‘moment’ (III) et produit des modifications de l’espace (IV). Selon ce type de différence, la série a pour commencement et pour fin une organisation spatiale; le temps y est l’entre-deux, étrangeté survenue d’ailleurs et produisant le passage d’un état des lieux au suivant. En somme, entre deux ‘équilibres,’ l’irruption du temps. (128)

According to de Certeau, space is the basis of memory, and interceding time is responsible for the move from one space to another. In reconstructing and assembling images, ideas, or experiences of the past, we reproduce past events (space IV), though not the exact same events (space I). De Certeau’s argument combines two notions. The first state, which rests on elements of a concrete space, evokes the notion of ars memoriae, the art of memory. This technique, originating during classical Antiquity, served as a spatial orientation or an organizational tool. Various social actors condition the collective memory of a group so that the sense of place also entails a sense of social and emotional attachment to a group. It is the social locatedness of memories which defines and insures their preservation: “[O]ur social environment affects the way we remember the past” (E. Zerubavel 283). During the eighteenth century, however, “the spatial paradigm of mnemotechnics gave way to a temporal focus” (A. Assmann, Cultural Memory 21). Naturally, the recourse to the past is futile if it is not fastened to social frameworks. This prerequisite establishes an interdependence of the factors conditioning memory. While the early Cajun writings of the 1980s are mostly defined by a sense of regional and social belonging, and direct their attention to the concrete space of Cajun Country with its fauna, flora, and cultural traditions, the publications of the 1990s show how the focus shifted toward the past, revealing a temporal sense of belonging as an additional framework. Finally, the works of the first

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and second decades of the twenty-first century present hybrid processes in a mutating space and open up to the wider world. An analysis of Cajun literature brings to light these developmental stages which gradually modify the Cajun collective memory. Today, all three modes interactively constitute the collective memory of the Cajuns and define Cajun literature. They are the basis for the representation, imagination, creation and, ultimately, endurance, of Cajun culture. The first two modes are relevant for the genesis of memory: The classification, or identification of memories follows their schematization, i. e., geographical and temporal localization (see Heinz 83). Associative processes relating memories to the emplacement of individuals and the past ensure the preservation of memories. According to Jan Assmann, every culture possesses such a “connective structure” which has a binding effect that works on two levels—social and temporal. It binds people together by providing a ‘symbolic universe’ …—a common area of experience, expectation, and action whose connecting force provides them with trust and with orientation. … It also links yesterday with today by giving form and presence to influential experiences and memories, incorporating images and tales from another time into the background of the onward moving present, and bringing with it hope and continuity. (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 3)

As a case in point, the Acadians’ strong ties of kinship, both in Acadia and in Louisiana, have been the determining reason for ensuring the transmission of memories, traditions, and values across generations. Since the group is subject to generational changes and, hence, concomitant socio-cultural changes, memory is also subject to change. Considering that the past is (re)constructed in the present, its representations differ with each individual, each generation, and each perspective. Nonetheless, [t]he changeability of memory raises important concerns about how the past can be verified, understood, and given meaning. … Memory is crucial to the understanding of a culture precisely because it indicates collective desires, needs, and self-definitions. We need to ask not whether a memory is true but rather what its telling reveals about how the past affects the present. (Sturken 2)

Likewise, instead of examining whether a tradition is true or invented (see Hobsbawm and Ranger), the question regarding the role of that tradition tells us more about the culture. While assimilation up until the Cajun Renaissance can be considered an act of remembering mainstream American culture (and an act of forgetting Cajun traditions), the ethnic revival appears very much like an awakening of Cajun collective memory. The rejection of, and the protest against, Cajun stereotypes created by mainstream American culture then resemble a memory

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in reverse, or anti-memory, which paradoxically cannot do without connecting to mainstream American culture. Memory’s connective structure, therefore, relies on two principles, namely repetition and “presentification”²⁸: “The basic principle behind all connective structures is repetition. This guarantees that the lines of action will not branch out into infinite variations but instead will establish themselves in recognizable patterns immediately identifiable as elements of a shared culture” (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 3). These patterns need to be interpreted and infused with meaning before they are repeated again. Repetition and interpretation are two equivalent processes and responsible for the creation of cultural coherence. For memory scholar Ann Rigney, “collective memory is not a matter of collecting, but of continuously performing. It is constantly in progress, involving both recollection and forgetting in the light of changing patterns of relevance and shifting social frameworks” (“Divided” 93). The fact that remembrance is “constantly ‘in the works’” does not mean that remembrance is perennial; “[t]o bring remembrance to a conclusion is de facto already to forget” (Rigney, “Dynamics” 346), and silence is performed oblivion. In incorporating foreign elements, a new imaginary space is created. Traditions that do not receive new influences begin to whither until they disappear so that memory dynamics hint at a culture’s ability to change, the condition for the survival of traditions or a culture. The impact of globalization exacerbates these memory dynamics and the collective memories of groups become themselves globalized. With each new element entering memory, the ramifications become broader. The crossing, overlapping, and continuing of various forms of memory not only help to create coherence and credibility, but also confirm the valence of these memories. The following framework serves as a blueprint for the memory construction of modern hybrid societies.

3.3.1 Finding Orientation: The Geographic Localization and Social Conditioning of Memories The expression “to take a walk down memory lane” is used to describe moments when people reminisce about the past and evoke personal memories. Strikingly, the metaphor for personal reminiscences evokes an image not of time, but of place. Collective memory, too, “seeks its local habitations” (Davis and Starn 3)

 J. Assmann uses the term “Vergegenwärtigung” in the original. The English translation draws on the French word “présentification” by J. P. Vernant (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 3, 73 – 76).

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through references to place: “[I]l n’est point de mémoire collective qui ne se déroule dans un cadre spatial” (209), states Halbwachs in La Mémoire collective, which includes a whole chapter on “La Localisation des souvenirs” and on how memories can be localized according to “points de repère collectifs” (Cadres 171), collective points of reference. The concept of the locatedness of memories has a long tradition. The idea of place as a mnemonic tool reaches back to the ars memoriae promoted by Greek and Roman philosophers and rhetoricians. The origin of this mnemotechnics, or “art of memory,” as English historian Frances Yates called it (4), is said to hail back to the sixth and seventh centuries BC. Three treatises about rhetoric—The Institutio Oratoria by Quintilian (ca. 95 BC), the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (ca. 80 BC), and De Oratore by Cicero (55 BC)—recount the tale of the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos (c. 556 – 468 BC) to illustrate how memory depends on places—loci—and images—imagines. As legend has it, Simonides was attending a banquet held by Skopas II of Krannon when the roof of the reception hall collapsed, killing all of the attending guests instantly, except for Simonides. As the sole survivor, he was asked to identify the perished guests so that the relatives could perform the proper burial rites. Although the dead were beyond recognition, Simonides was able to identify them in reconstructing the destroyed seating order he remembered. This event is reported to have inspired Simonides to develop a memory practice, a system of improving memory. In ordering the imagines and loci like a house, the famous “memory palace,” Simonides was able to reconstruct the past. In the context of memory, the legend leaves no doubt about the impact of perception on remembering, a view shared by Halbwachs centuries later: “Il n’y a … pas de souvenir sans perception” (Cadres 372). According to German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the importance of forming a mental picture of the outside world relies on the sense of sight, the strongest of the five senses (Aesthetics 631).²⁹ The legend of Simonides also reveals the importance of emotionally evocative images and the associative character of remembering. Depending on the degree of emotional response, an image is more or less likely to be retained. What is perceived and interiorized enters in relation with other images. The sudden death of the guests Simonides witnessed unquestionably left a highly emotional imprint on his mind. The fact that he possessed mental images of the seating order of the guests allowed him to associate these to the images of the dead bodies.

 It is no surprise that architecture figures as the first of Hegel’s five major arts.

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Obviously, images of place and landscape have a determining effect on the self-image of a group. They trigger collective remembering and function as spatial anchors. With respect to Cajun culture, the sense of locatedness as the first mode of memory is doubtlessly fundamental for establishing a collective consciousness. Early Cajun writings and most Cajun authors’ first publications share the tendency to focus on the present state of Cajun culture. The frequent references to the landscape and geography in Cajun Country give a first impression of a Cajun consciousness. They also show the growing awareness of the concrete habitat surrounding the Cajuns and serve to anchor Cajun culture locally. References to urban centers, in contrast, only appear in later writings. Also, with the increasing mobility modernity has brought about, and the vulnerability of ecological systems, place has become an essential anchor of contemporary memory cultures. As a case in point, recent ecological catastrophes have rendered the preservation of Cajun culture more urgent and have accelerated the recourse to memory forms. The consequences of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the BP oil spill, and the land loss of the Mississippi Delta all affect the very foundation of Cajun culture—the land of the Cajuns—so that place and landscape make up an ever more important identity marker in Cajun culture.³⁰ Apart from the importance of place, the legend of Simonides gives prominence to the social aspect of memory. It is thanks to Simonides’s presence at the social event that he was able to remember the other participants. In the memory discourse, socialization contributes highly to the sense of place. The first to formulate a theory about the relation between social groups and memory was Maurice Halbwachs. Combining French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theory of individual memory—images-souvenirs—with French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s theory of the collective consciousness of a group—représentations collectives—(see Mucchielli), he laid out his concept of the social conditioning of memory. Contrasting memories of the past with memories of dreams, he demonstrated that we are dependent on our social surroundings for accurately remem-

 Today, place remains a crucial mnemonic element in memory studies. The first studies to direct attention to memory providing “landscapes of the mind” (Lowenthal, “Past Time” 23) appeared in the mid-1970s. The interest in the subject increased as the emergence of terms like “topology of the remembered” (Casey 184), “Gedächtnislandschaften/landscapes of memory” (A. Assmann, “Erinnerungsorte” 13 – 29), “lieux de mémoire/Erinnerungsorte/sites of memory” (Nora, Lieux), or “spaces of memory” (A. Assmann, Erinnerungsräume) shows. British historian Simon Schama continued to study the relationship between landscape and memory.

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bering the past:³¹ “[L]a mémoire dépend de son entourage social … [car] le plus grand nombre de nos souvenirs nous reviennent lorsque nos parents, nos amis, ou d’autres hommes nous les rappellent. … c’est dans la société que normalement, l’homme acquiert ses souvenirs, qu’il se les rappelle, qu’il les reconnaît et les localise” (Cadres vii – viii).³² To coherently and continuously remember, individuals rely on external support groups such as the family, work colleagues, friends, or members of a religious community. These social entities frame each individual’s memory and represent so-called “cadres sociaux,” social frameworks, within which memories are evoked, circulated, and reconstructed in accordance to the prevailing beliefs of society: “[L]es cadres collectifs de la mémoire … sont … précisément les instruments dont la mémoire collective se sert pour recomposer une image du passé qui s’accorde à chaque époque avec les pensées dominantes de la société” (Halbwachs, Cadres xi). The frameworks extend to a limitless number depending on each individual’s interaction with a group: the school, the workplace, a sports team, a political party, an age group, an ethnic identity, etc. Visibly, “the process of mnemonic socialization also continues beyond the family” (E. Zerubavel 286), whose role in mnemonic socialization is critical. Thus, memory requires the support of a social group. An important question which defines the social aspect of memory and which Halbwachs (as well as his colleagues Pierre Janet and Frederic Bartlett) failed to consider in detail is the transmission of collective memory from one generation to the next.³³ It was Karl Mannheim, a German sociologist, who remedied this neglect. At about the same time Halbwachs was investigating collective memory, Mannheim undertook to solve the “problem of generations” and developed a

 While dreams show distorted and fragmented pictures whose chronology differs from the moment they happened, memories correspond more closely to the actual past (Halbwachs, Cadres 1– 53).  At the turn of the twenty-first century, post-colonial scholar Edward W. Said noted the “burgeoning interest in two overlapping areas of the humanities and social sciences: memory and geography, or more specifically, the study of human space” (175). Significantly, Said considered memory as being defined by both spatial and social elements. In the same vein, Hoelscher and Alderman, arguing some years later that memory and place are key elements in the production of modern identities, added the social aspect to the connection of memory and space: “Social memory and social space conjoin to produce much of the context for modern identities—and the often-rigorous contestation of those identities” (348).  Several scholars addressed Halbwachs’s omission to consider the transmission of memory across generations (see Bloch). In 1941, Halbwachs responded with La Topologie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre sainte to the criticism. Yet even later scholars, such as Paul Connerton (“Epilogue”), were in want of an answer from Halbwachs.

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theory of generational memory. In his essay “Das Problem der Generationen,” written in 1928, he argued that each generation witnesses a specific event differently. Furthermore, Mannheim addressed the importance of space for memory and pointed out the relevance of the “similarity of location” (Kecskemeti 290, 297) for creating a common memory. Not the same chronological time defines a generation, but the “social location”³⁴: “[W]hat does create a similar location is that [the people] are in a position to experience the same events and data, etc.” (Kecskemeti 297). As Mannheim saw it, a common mentality acts on the social cohesion and solidarity of the group. Through contemporaneous experiences and participation, a common sense of unity between members of an age group develops: [A] generation as an actuality is constituted when similarly ‘located’ contemporaries participate in a common destiny and in the ideas and concepts which are in some way bound up with its unfolding. Within this community of people with a common destiny there can then arise particular generation-units. These are characterized by the fact that they do not merely involve a loose participation by a number of individuals in a pattern of events shared by all alike though interpreted by the different individuals differently, but an identity of responses, a certain affinity in the way in which all move with and are formed by their common experiences. (Kecskemeti 306; my emphasis)

The subjective experiences of each individual are different in their concrete expressions, yet based on a common prevailing mood, a joint responding, moving, and creating. This mood corresponds to the mentality of a group, including attitudes, feelings, and a collective understanding, and it provides the basis of collective memory: “Le processus du souvenir est socialement déterminé et doit être expliqué par conséquent en terme d’attitudes, de sentiments et de conventions collectives, de la part des groupes d’individus” (qtd. in Bastide, Religions 339). In the context of Cajun literature, it is striking that the first writers share several traits which identify them as a generational cohort. According to Mannheim, a cohort begins to establish a unique generational character at around the age of 17: “The possibility of really questioning and reflecting on things only emerges at the point where personal experimentation with life begins—round about the age of 17, sometimes a little earlier and sometimes a little later” (Kecskemeti 300). The majority of the Cajun pioneer writers were born around the 1950s. At the time of the Cajun Renaissance, they were around seventeen to twenty years of age, a moment when they started to question and reflect on the present, and to develop a perspective of their own, usually in opposition to the older gener Karl Mannheim’s term “soziale Lagerung” was translated as “social location” in English (Kecskemeti).

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ation. Confirming Mannheim’s claim, Schuman and Scott show that “[t]he reasons for mentioning various events and changes also differ across cohorts in ways that indicate that generational effects are the result of the intersection of personal and national history” (Schuman and Scott 359). The fact that the ethnic revival occurred during the formative years of the Cajun writers is of significant consequence, as are the intersections and resemblances in Cajun literature which reveal the shared memory of the cohort of Cajun writers. According to sociologist Henk A. Becker, socialization within important new situations has longterm repercussions if it is reinforced at a later time.³⁵ The impact of the Cajun music revival on the Cajuns was obviously so intense that they have not stopped their endeavors to save Cajun culture. Several decades after the first memory wave, another scholar provided important insights into the social framework of collective memory. While Halbwachs had emphasized the importance of the group for the continuance of the collective memory, the French sociologist and anthropologist Roger Bastide clarified that the structure of the group, and not so much the group as a group, was the determining factor (Religions 340). He proposed that “[l]a continuité sociale dépend de la continuité structurelle, et il est à craindre que si cette continuité structurelle venait, pour une raison ou une autre, à se briser, la tradition s’effriterait aussitôt. En un mot, la mémoire collective est bien une mémoire de groupe, mais à condition d’ajouter qu’elle est une mémoire articulée entre les membres du groupe” (Religions 341– 342). The structural organization of a group provides the frameworks of collective memory because the group is a system of interindividual relations (Bastide, “Mémoire collective” 85; Bastide, Religions 343). Otherwise it would be a mystery why individual memory needs the support of the entire community (Bastide, Religions 343). This perspective also applies in part to Cajun culture. With respect to Cajun culture’s endurance in multi-ethnic Louisiana, scholars have repeatedly emphasized the social values and strong cohesive ties in the Acadian/Cajun community: “Acadian life is invariably family- or kin-oriented” (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 71). Indeed, there is a long tradition of strong social belonging. The Acadian community was composed of extended families which had inhabited the same region in France. In Acadia, the survival strategy of the Acadians consisted in overcoming frontier life as well as French or English incursions together. The significant demographic increase in Acadia not only was the cause of a strong so-

 H. A. Becker termed this kind of socialization “initiële socialisatie,” or “initielle Sozialisierung”—initial socialization (H. A. Becker, “Onderzoek” 149; H. A. Becker “Mannheim’s ‘Problem’” 213).

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cial network, but it also sustained the sense of social belonging. In Louisiana, the Acadian immigrants established large family settlements, far from cities like New Orleans and outside influences. Up until the twentieth century, they maintained the tradition of intermarriage,³⁶ thus allowing for the preservation of cultural traditions as well as the enhancement of social cohesion. Catechism was transmitted within the community and ritualistic meetings insured the continuance of other cultural traditions, as it is the case in scriptless cultures. The Cajun Music Radio & TV Show “Rendez-vous des Cajuns,” the Cajun French Music Association (CFMA),³⁷ and the countless other festivals in Cajun Country provide a platform where the group convenes and participates. In coming together, the members of a group have access to the group memory and create a space where it can circulate: “Through regular repetition, festivals and rituals ensure the communication and continuance of the knowledge that gives the group its identity. Ritual repetition also consolidates the coherence of the group in time and space” (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 42). The strong social networks among the Cajuns have been the basis of the transmission of traditions, knowledge, and experiences. Both the references to regional and to social belonging give orientation in the present and show the importance of social “places.” They also highlight the urge of the Cajuns to delimit concrete boundaries of a collective Cajun identity. The social cohesion ultimately relies on language, without which even Simonides would have failed in his endeavor to reconstruct the past. As an important element in conditioning memory and social cohesion, language is an imminently social fact,³⁸ “[l]es hommes pensent en commun par le moyen du langage” (Halbwachs, Cadres 73). For Halbwachs, language consists of a certain attitude of the mind within a society, imagined or real: “[C]’est la fonction collective par excellence de la pensée” (Cadres 93). For instance, such Acadian surnames as Boudreaux, Brasseaux, Comeaux, Martin, Perrin, Thériot, and Thibodeaux have helped to reveal the community of memory between Cajuns and Acadians. The fusion with other dialects and languages, however, causes language to evolve—and a social frame to shift. The realization of this evolution sets in when the older language stage is preserved and the difference to the newer stage is significant enough (J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 32). In the case of Cajun French, the Cajuns realized they were losing the language when  Endogamy was a common practice among Acadians until first-cousin marriages were legislated against in 1900 (Domínguez 60 – 61). See Ada Jack Carver’s play The Cajun (1926).  The Cajun French Music Association was established in 1987 in Basile, Louisiana, to promote Cajun music and culture (“Home”).  [L]e langage est … éminemment un fait social” (Meillet 230).

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the younger generation was incapable of understanding the songs their parents and grandparents sang. Consequently, the community is responsible for collective memory and the language to continue: “Only the group can bequeath both language and a transpersonal memory” (Yerushalmi xv).

3.3.2 History as a Mnemonic Anchor: Establishing a Collective Past In Michel de Certeau’s sketch, the move from one space to another, i. e., memory, is facilitated by the irruption of time. Actually, time is an essential operator in memory processes. As a retrospective action,³⁹ remembering relates to the past and thus adds a temporal dimension to the geographic and socio-cultural anchors. Moreover, people intuitively relate memory to the passage of time rather than to place. In turn, the past becomes meaningless if the collectivity does not give it some purpose: “[L]a collectivité,” wrote French philosopher Simone Weil, “a ses racines dans le passé. Elle constitue l’unique organe de conservation pour les trésors spirituels amassés par les morts, l’unique organe de transmission par l’intermédiaire duquel les morts puissent parler aux vivants” (113). The past is a downright vital aspect of memory, for “nous ne possédons d’autre vie, d’autre sève, que les trésors hérités du passé et digérés, assimilés, recrées par nous. De tous les besoins de l’âme humaine, il n’y en a pas de plus vital que le passé” (Weil 150). Saint Augustine of Hippo provided the first reflections on the meaning of time for humanity in his Confessions. Dividing humanity’s consciousness into three times, he argued that “the time present of things past is memory” (O’Donnell 157). Reformulating Augustine’s statement, Richard Terdiman gave a compressed definition of memory in his study of memory’s persistence since modernity: “[M]emory is the present past” (8). Much more than being a simple state (“memory is…”), memory reflects a constructive process: “[O]n … reconstruit [le passé] en partant du présent” (Halbwachs, Cadres xi). A blunter description holds that “we create [a present] by robbing the past” (Carl L. Becker, “Everyman” 226). Each memory is a constructed representation of a past perception formed according to present circumstances and depending on current needs and purposes (Halbwachs, Cadres 36 – 53). Like a sluice, the present filters the experiences and perceptions, storing only what is necessary and adapting various elements: “Le présent agit donc avant tout comme une écluse qui ne laisse passer que ce qui peut s’adapter aux circon-

 Globalization and assimilation contribute to a growing consciousness of the fact that modern societies focus on the future just as much (Dudai and Carruthers 567).

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stances nouvelles, ce qui en tout cas ne les contredit pas, mais obstrue les représentations trop contrastantes” (Bastide, Religions 352; Bastide, “Mémoire collective” 79). Consequently, it is impossible to relive past events, as memories can only approximate them: “Une telle reconstitution du passé ne peut jamais être qu’approchée” (Halbwachs, Cadres 121). Memory recreates the past as we want to have it, but not as it actually was. As T. S. Eliot aptly put it in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “[The] difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show” (16). As a result, memory is competitive; it selects and discards and lets past events fall into oblivion. This volatility of memory is omnipresent, including in putative objective representations like history, where “[t]he past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” (Hartley 9).⁴⁰ It is, therefore, no surprise that Halbwachs initially considered “mémoire historique” an inept term and viewed history as incompatible with memory, dismissing it for its lack of concrete contact to the present (Mémoire collective 130 – 131).⁴¹ Clearly, Halbwachs’s notion of collective memory corresponded to recent history, i. e., autobiographical memory. Today, distant history has entered the memory discourse and is dealt with as a variant of memory. The movement between the present and the past is not a straight, one-way course from the present to the past since remains of the past continue in the present. While remembering is an act which occurs in the present, the past also survives in the present. The familiar present helps to understand the less familiar past, and the past helps to form the present.⁴² It was the German art historian Aby Warburg, using a different approach than Halbwachs, who analyzed the connection between the distant past and the present. Juxtaposing and superposing paintings from the Classical age to the Renaissance, Warburg identified certain recurring gestic formulas of the painted characters which he called “Pathosformeln.” He viewed “art as an ‘organ of social memory’” (Gombrich 241), and he based his concept of social memory on what he called “Nachleben,” i. e., “afterlives” (Gombrich 16, 307). His uncompleted Mnemosyne Atlas, a collage of art

 In 1985, American historian David Lowenthal used the phrase for the title of his book about the heritage boom of the 1980s (Past).  Halbwachs revised his stance about excluding history from collective memory in La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte.  Italian historian and philosopher Giambattista Vico elaborated on historical consciousness and the two-way processes of memory in his work New Science (1744), a poetics of memory defining history as an art of memory and introducing the science of historiography. Patrick Hutton views him as the guide of “this new science of history with which historians would seek to reimagine the past” (36).

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paintings organized by themes, was an attempt to visually represent his understanding of social memory. Likewise, the American historian Carl L. Becker emphasized the relationship between history and memory in the 1930s. He viewed history as “the memory of things said and done” (“Everyman” 223), as “the artificial extension of the social memory” (“Everyman 231). Identifying history with knowledge of history, he distinguished “two histories: the actual series of events that once occurred; and the ideal series that we affirm and hold in memory” (“Everyman” 222). Consequently, “every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history. … Without … historical knowledge, this memory of things said and done, [Mr. Everyman’s] to-day would be aimless and his to-morrow without significance” (“Everyman” 223). Similarly, “Cajuns draw on images of the past to understand and interpret their present-day lives” (Henry and Bankston 135). According to Carl L. Becker, the role of the historian does not differ much from oral transmitters of yore. The historian by profession is of “that ancient and honorable company of wise men of the tribe, of bards and story-tellers and minstrels, of soothsayers and priests, to whom in successive ages has been entrusted the keeping of the useful myths” (Carl L. Becker, “Everyman” 231). The rural ancestors of the Cajuns relied on the oral tradition for the transmission of their history. As the nineteenth-century Cajuns gradually lost their links to the family homes in old Acadia, the memory of the deportation started to wane. The facts that present-day Cajuns do not have first-hand knowledge of the tragedy and that outsiders’ perspectives outweigh the sparse testimonies by Acadian refugees raise the question whether the representations of their collective past are accurate. Dudley LeBlanc’s organized pilgrimages of Evangeline girls around Louisiana, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick in the 1920s are evidence of the public (and partly scholarly) enthusiasm about the Acadian past. Yet these images, first constructed over 100 years after the event, were far from genuine and only perpetuated a distorted version of Acadian history. Moreover, the handful of publications of the first half of the twentieth century which gave an inside perspective into Cajun history still depended on prejudiced outsiders’ perspectives. In the end, the lack of unbiased academic scholars prevented the Cajuns from establishing an official group history. More importantly, the tight-knit Cajun community had no need for a professional historian: The deeply rooted oral tradition preempted any commemorative institution. The social and technological changes contributed to the disintegration of the Cajun traditional social gatherings and with it the waning of the Cajun oral tradition. The Cajuns realized the need for an official history to legitimize their identity. Considering that “unaided memory is notoriously fickle” (Carl L. Becker, “Everyman” 224), the historian, as a guardian of memory, provides the indispen-

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sable memory support—history—for the group. A serious and well-founded historical discourse on the Cajun past developed in the 1980s, which ultimately contributed to the consolidation of an official Cajun collective memory. Additionally, the Cajuns reconnected with old Acadia in establishing the Acadian World Congress in 1994. Cajun literature reflects this emergence of a Cajun historiography, for while the first Cajun writings maintain a peculiar silence about the past, works from the 1990s onward consciously incorporate historical references. Still, the persistence of the Grand Dérangement in Cajun culture does not detract from the constructedness of its memory. Today’s Cajuns come to know the Acadian past only as a “vicarious past” (J. E. Young 1– 11), a reconstructed past they retrieve from historical as well as from fictional accounts. The flowering of Cajun history coincided with the historical turn and the second wave of the memory boom in the 1980s, marked especially by the popular preoccupation with heritage.⁴³ It was also then that French historian Pierre Nora stated that memory as it was once practiced had disappeared: “On ne parle tant de mémoire que parce qu’il n’y en a plus” (Lieux 1: xvii). His seminal Les Lieux de mémoire, a three-volume analysis of France’s sites of memory published in 1984, 1986, and 1992, analyzed the mnemonic properties of places and their nation-building power, and provided the influential concept of “lieux de mémoire,” sites of memory, which has gained worldwide acceptance today, emphasizing both modernity’s obsession with memory sites and the opposition of history and memory.⁴⁴ A site of memory comes into being when history breaks away, when the present is no longer compatible with the past. With respect to the Acadian past, the materiality of events is rather limited. The physical and psychological strains of the dispossessed Acadian exiles prevented them from transporting any reminder of their former homes or of the tragedy. Furthermore, since Cajun Country lacks any original place, material ruins, or remains of the Acadian deportation—there is no authentic site of memory—, the Cajuns search for alternative ways to reconnect with the experience of the expulsion to honor and preserve the past. What Aleida Assmann called a “truncated past” (Cultural

 See F. Davis; Lowenthal, Past; Lowenthal, Heritage; Lowenthal, “Fabricating Heritage”; Boym.  This multi-volume work engendered an avalanche of books about the national memory of other countries. See, for instance, Michael Kammen’s Mystic Chords of Memory (1993) on American sites of memory, Jay Winter’s study on European sites of memory (1995), Mario Isnenghi’s and Aldo Agosti’s I luoghi della memoria: Personaggi e date dell’Italia unita (1997), or Étienne François’s und Hagen Schulze’s Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (2001). For a more detailed analysis see den Boer.

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Memory 292),⁴⁵ a discontinuous past solidified in ruins and relics such as Grand Pré in Nova Scotia, does not exist as such in Cajun culture. In constructing monuments such as the Acadian Memorial, the Cajuns restore a part of the past. Most of all, the material reconstructions reinforce the exile experience. Even if the literary works dealing with the Grand Dérangement do not fulfill German historian Leopold von Ranke’s aim of objectivity—“wie es eigentlich gewesen” (Ranke vii)—they function as another agent to fill the gap in Cajun history, for the creative literary variations subliminally allow the past to endure. Nora further remarked that lieux de mémoire only exist because the “milieux de mémoire” have disappeared (Lieux 1: xvii), a circumstance accounting for the multiplying commemorations and the upsurge of commemorative memory. With respect to Cajun culture, the lack of sites of memory before the Cajun Renaissance presupposes the organic existence of milieux de mémoire. Until the midnineteenth century, one of the reasons why Cajun culture survived were the strong communal ties, cultivated through such milieux de mémoire as the aforementioned social meetings of the veillée or boucherie. As real environments of remembering, they made up for the lack of sites of memory. However, affected by the global socio-cultural changes, the milieu of the French-speaking generation where storytelling was regularly practiced and traditions were transmitted is disappearing to the point that some real environments of remembering like cochon de lait have become lieux de mémoire. Some endeavors have been undertaken to introduce new environments of remembering. Cajun literature functions as another milieu de mémoire, where ongoing events and topical themes are commingled with history. Once the first-generation authors will have disappeared, their works might become monumental texts, i. e., lieux de mémoire. The Cajun collective memory then combines two spaces in which memory is constructed: a space of commemoration and a space of direct transmission. Nora’s opposition of lieu and milieu corresponds not only to Carl L. Becker’s two kinds of history, but also to the binary presented by German historian Jörn Rüsen and his colleagues. Besides historical memory, “erinnerter Geschichte,” there also exists a historical awareness, “Geschichtsbewusstsein,” which is a special kind of historical memory, for it emerged from it and has similar characteristics. It puts distance between the past and the present to lend it a specific “historical” significance (Rüsen 15). Both historical memory and historical awareness are important elements of identity formation: They establish a border between an individual’s familiar sphere of living and the exterior, foreign, world (Rüsen 13). The Cajuns depend all the more on history because of their minority

 A. Assmann’s original term is “abgebrochene Geschichte” (Erinnerungsräume 309).

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status: “[W]hat it means to have a history is the same as what it means to have a legitimate existence: history and legitimation go hand in hand; history legitimates ‘us’ and not others” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 355). Remembering the historical past and reenacting foundational memory images is a means for the group to reaffirm its collective identity (J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 53). Nevertheless, each time the group recalls its history to reaffirm its identity, changes occur so that a once valid story might one day become a myth.⁴⁶ The research field of mnemohistory, introduced by Jan Assmann, deals with such changes, with how the past is remembered and with how the memories change over time: “Unlike history proper, mnemohistory is concerned not with the past as such, but only with the past as it is remembered. It surveys the story-lines of tradition, the webs of intertextuality, the diachronic continuities and discontinuities of the past. Mnemohistory is not the opposite of history, but rather is one of its branches or subdisciplines. …” (J. Assmann, Moses the Egyptian 8 – 9). In the Cajun context, not only the representation of the deportation, but especially Evangeline as a Cajun icon present interesting cases for mnemohistory. What was once seen as history has turned into a myth. The fact that Dudley LeBlanc’s Evangeline dresses bore no resemblance to the original costumes of the Acadians presents what Hobsbawm called an “invented tradition,” ⁴⁷ which relies on the ability to formalize and ritualize the past through repetition, and which shows that the mental horizon of the Cajun community did not include an accurate version of the Acadian past. The historical inaccuracy was set straight only fifty years later. Yet Evangeline has not lost her attraction and continues to inspire artists and scholars alike, thus perpetuating a memory figure. From the turn of the twenty-first century onward, the references to the traumatic events surrounding the Acadian expulsion have increased, both in public discourses pushed by the debate surrounding the Royal Proclamation, and in literature. The celebration of the Acadian past, from such edifices as the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville and the Acadian Museum in Erath to festivals and literature dominate the Cajun self-image. Despite the temporal distance from the

 “In the history of history a myth is a once valid but now discarded version of the human story, as our now valid versions will in due course be relegated to the category of discarded myths” (Carl L. Becker, “Everyman” 231).  “‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past” (Hobsbawm, “Introduction” 1).

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event, this development is reminiscent of British historian Peter Burke’s remark that “[i]t is often said, that history is written by the victors. It might also be said that history is forgotten by the victors. They can afford to forget, while the losers are unable to accept what happened and are condemned to brood over it, relive it, and reflect how different it might have been” (“History” 106). In the Cajun context, the most obvious reason for the continued work on the past lies in the Cajuns’ striving for legitimating their identity and their search for truth. Traumatic experiences criss-cross Cajun history, to the extent that writers invoke other crimes against humanity, establishing links between the Grand Dérangement, the slave trade, the decimation of the Native American population, and the Holocaust. In the context of trauma and memory,⁴⁸ memories of experience which are transmitted from one generation to another have been categorized as “transgenerational memory.” Transgenerational memory happens unknowingly and entails the transmission of crude contents to subsequent generations who have to deal with conflicts which are not theirs in the first place. Transgenerationality describes both an intergenerational relationship pattern and a specific form of remembrance (Jureit). For instance, the feeling that French is a harmful cultural legacy presents such a transgenerational memory in Cajun culture. P. Burke’s claim that “in certain circumstances, a social group and some of its memories may resist the destruction of its home” (“History” 102) is especially true for the Cajuns who, time and again, have been confronted with the destruction of their homes. Their “traditional patterns of belief and conduct … are very insistent” (Shils 200). While the past has also been deemed burdensome if not pernicious by scholars,⁴⁹ there is no doubt that the recourse to various calamities in the past, above all the Grand Dérangement, serves various social purposes common for the notion of being a people, and hence a Cajun collective memory: La dimension temporelle du passé est au cœur du concept de peuple—elle en est la partie intégrante. … Le sens du passé est quelque chose qui fait que l’on agit dans le présent autrement qu’on aurait pu le faire. C’est un instrument que l’on utilise contre des adversaires. C’est un élément essentiel de la socialisation des individus, du maintien des solidar-

 The second half of the twentieth century, especially, saw an increase of works dealing with the impact of trauma on memory. Cathy Caruth, among others, established a research field dealing with the concept of “cultural trauma”, which explores memory through the lens of trauma. This concept is highly controversial. See chapter 8.  “Man, on the other hand, braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: it pushes him down or bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden” (Nietzsche, “On the Uses” 73).

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ités de groupe, de l’établissement ou de la contestation de la légitimation sociale. (Wallerstein 105 – 106)

Legitimizing the existence of a group also means that the group can counter its past: “To be a member of any human community is to situate oneself with regard to one’s (its) past, if only by rejecting it” (Hobsbawm, “Social Function” 3). Works which record or creatively imitate Acadian history, such as, for instance, Carl A. Brasseaux’s historical studies or Richard’s and Bourque’s poetry, use outsiders’ perspectives to refute them. These counter-memories present a transformed, often opposite view of memory (Foucault, Language 160), and they are evidence of the Acadian experience having become a recurring motif of loss. Since historiography related to identity originates both in times of decline and times of growth and innovation (J. Assmann, “Zeitkonstruktion” 92), Cajun historiography was bound to develop. The question arises whether the central preoccupation with the Grand Dérangement does not blot out other historical perspectives of the past. The Acadians’ relationship with the Native Americans in Louisiana, or their involvement with slavery, for instance, are themes which have rarely been addressed. One thing is certain: The historical references to Acadia and France extend not only the temporal frame of Cajun history. They add a geographical frame which crosses regional boundaries.

3.3.3 Mnemo-Cultural Dynamics In the fourth phase of de Certeau’s sketch, memory is rooted again in space from whence the cyclical movement begins anew. What this sketch obscures, however, is the complex operations of memory, for memory works in more than one direction. Although the global connectivity of memory has caught scholars’ interest only in the past two decades, memory’s dynamic character is not new. Already Halbwachs described the process of individual remembering as ever-tightening concentric curves.⁵⁰ The fact that memory is an ongoing process and always in flux was also addressed by Karl Mannheim, who emphasized the dialogic nature of the relation between generations as each generation acts and reacts on the

 “Ainsi nous allons vers nos souvenirs en décrivant en quelque sorte autour d’eux des courbes concentriques de plus en plus rapprochées, et loin que la série chronologique soit donnée d’abord, c’est souvent après bien des allées et venues entre tels points de repère au cours desquelles nous retrouvons les uns et les autres, que nous rangeons nos souvenirs dans l’ordre de succession où tout indique qu’ils ont dû se produire” (Cadres 48).

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legacy of the previous generation. Similarly, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, a picture atlas assembling paintings of different epochs, unveiled the interconnectedness of artistic paintings. With his pathos formulas, Warburg revealed the existence of the afterlives of those artworks through the ages and in different cultures. Warburg’s findings that art is built on the afterlives of Classical art which traveled through the centuries, is not solely appertaining to art.⁵¹ German critic Walter Benjamin described the complex entanglements and never-ending combinations of memory using the metaphor of the fan: To open the fan of memory means that there will be no end of remembrance, each detail leading to a smaller detail (Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle” 6). Although Halbwachs, Mannheim, Warburg, and Benjamin were aware of the complex workings of memory, they did little more than acknowledge the mutability and diversity of memory across time and space. The first to investigate the intricate dynamics of collective memory of a group was Roger Bastide. His major work Les Religions africaines au Brésil (1960) focused on the interpenetration of civilizations and the resulting impact on the memory processes of selected ethnic groups in Brazil. Investigating how the candomblé, a religious African tradition, had survived the enslavement and deportation of Africans to the Northeast of Brazil, he explored the metamorphosis of collective memories which had crossed geographical boundaries and prevailed in living cultures across time, a factor which Halbwachs had neglected in his studies. In a groundbreaking article a decade later, Bastide expanded his idea in proposing a new sociology combining Halbwachs’s “mémoire collective” with the “sociologie du bricolage” laid out by French cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in La Pensée sauvage (1962). “Mémoire collective et sociologie du bricolage” propunded that societies solved problems by using already existing elements. “L’homme,” Bastide argued, “est à la fois répétition et création; par conséquent toute sociologie des créations ou de rétentions culturelles doit prendre en considération la Mémoire et l’Imaginaire. Le présent innove en répétant et répète en innovant” (“Mémoire collective” 77– 78). Almost two decades later, Anglo-Irish historian Benedict Anderson dovetailed Bastide’s claim of interconnected heterogeneous cultures across space. In his Imagined Communities (1983), Anderson replaced the idea of a group memory resulting from direct contact with people with one which constitutes itself on an imaginary, virtual level.⁵² Both the

 Warburg’s social memory is echoed in Walter Benjamin’s concept of ideas as “constellations,” fleshed out in his symbolical Arcades Project (Arcades).  Halbwachs came close to Anderson’s idea when he referred to “mémoire de la nation” in La Mémoire collective (98).

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Francophonie and the pan-Acadian community developing in the 1990s are perfect examples of such imagined communities. The approaches of both Bastide and Anderson can be viewed as precursors to the studies of global memories starting at the turn of the twentieth century. In 2008, Ann Rigney pointed at this “shift from ‘sites’ to ‘dynamics’ within memory studies [which] runs parallel to a larger shift of attention within cultural studies from products to processes, from a focus on cultural artifacts to an interest in the way those artifacts circulate and influence their environment” (“Dynamics” 346). This new trend is no coincidence, for the shift is clearly the result of one major force of worldwide proportions: “Global conditions have powerfully impacted on memory debates and, at the same time, memory has entered the global stage and global discourse. Today, memory and the global have to be studied together, as it has become impossible to understand the trajectories of memory outside a global frame of reference” (Assmann and Conrad, “Introduction” 2). Globalization and its concomitant digitization, mass migration (Lowenthal, Heritage 9), and extended transport systems certainly contribute to the limitless accessibility and opening of multiple combinations within collective memory. In an attempt to adequately reflect this plasticity and to highlight how memory depends on each person’s perspective, Aleida Assmann suggested the use of Hegel’s term of “horizons” instead of Halbwachs’s “social frames” (A. Assmann, “Vier Formen” 186). In the context of globalization, the Indian-American anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s description of the contemporary global landscape as being a body of shifting scapes is equally applicable (Appadurai, “Disjuncture” 296). If exchanges between cultures have always existed, globalization and the technological revolution have further spurred the myriad movements affecting almost all strands of human life. Likewise, such concepts as transnationalism and transculturalism, standing for the exchange of goods, people, and thoughts, have become engaging paradigms in the academic field of memory studies as these concepts affect the economic, political, social, educational, and cultural levels.⁵³ Louisiana’s francophone culture is one such example of transnational and transcultural exchanges. As Barry Ancelet observed: “Serious research in the literature, history, architecture, music, oral tradition, and culture of French Louisiana has led us to the rest of the French-speaking world in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, as well as the rest of North America” (“Mainstream”  In 2015, Routledge launched a new series, entitled Memory Studies: Global Constellations, which engages with “the social and cultural stakes around forgetting, useful forgetting and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and globally” (“Memory Studies: Global Constellations”).

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1248). Given the hybrid constitution of Cajun culture, the collective memory of the Cajuns serves as a productive example of how a culture adopts and mixes with seemingly disparate memories of other cultures. Historian Carl A. Brasseaux has already pointed to the Mississippi Delta as a “unique living laboratory” (French 2), seeking to define that cultural hybridity and comparing Cajun culture to the marshes of the Mississippi River: [T]he Acadians have been very much like the coastal marshes, one of the most distinctive topographic features of their native French provinces, their pre-dispersal Canadian settlements, and their adopted Louisiana homeland. Although continuously buffeted by winds and tides and thus continuously changing, these fragile ecosystems somehow find the means to endure. Even when overwhelmed by periodic flooding, they simply absorb the resulting sediment, adapt to the new environment, and regenerate with greater resilience and vigor. (French 40)

In contrast to the memory metaphor of the net, the coastal marshes serve as a convincing secundum comparationis to show how endurance and adaptability define the Cajuns. It is the sediment flowing down the Mississippi River which helps to build the alluvium. If the history and culture of the Cajuns is like the coastal marshes, then their collective memory necessarily also bears resemblance to these wetlands. However, the comparison is misleading in several respects. First, the top layer of the alluvium is only connected to the adjacent layer, but never to the lower layers. Also, the top layer, as the only visible layer, hides all other layers. A lateral cut is necessary to reveal each of the lower layers. What distinguishes Cajun culture is not the additive character translated through the image of the alluvium, but the relational and associative quality typical of creole cultures. A prominent voice to advocate the relational aspect of creolization processes was Martinican writer Édouard Glissant. Both his biography and his work are shining examples of transculturality and transdisciplinarity as they combine literature, linguistics, history, ethnography, and anthropology. Glissant, whose major themes deal with exile, errantry, and the search for identity, dismisses the concept of rootedness and emphasizes the circular nature of the search for identity: “[L]e déracinement peut concourir à l’identité, l’exil se révéler profitable, quand ils sont vécus non pas comme une expansion de territoire (un nomadisme en flèche) mais comme une recherche de l’Autre (par nomadisme circulaire)” (Poétique 30). Glissant’s Caribbean discourse concurs with the Cajun discourse about exile and the search for identity, adding to Louisiana’s historical link with the Caribbean world. Both the Cajuns and the Creoles from the Caribbean have endured the experiences of deportation and fatal ship passages. Oppressed in the past,

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they are oppressed today by the imposing traditions of a dominant culture. As a matter of fact, Cajun identity depends not only on a belonging to a specific place, i. e., Cajun Country. As Cajun literature shows, Cajun identity reaches across physical boundaries to other places, from Acadia, to France, and to the Caribbean (Saint-Domingue). The relational element of the Cajun collective memory resides thus in the migratory past, the conception of an imagined community, and the heterogeneous constitution of the Cajuns. The point of convergence of the metaphor of the alluvium and the source of Glissant’s relational theory lies in the image of sedimentation, the superposition of different layers. Capitalizing on the philosophy of the rhizome laid out in Mille plateaux by the French sociologists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,⁵⁴ Glissant extended his notion of the relational Caribbean identity to the idea of the rhizomatic interconnectedness of the world, the multicultural set-up of creole cultures, the Tout-monde. ⁵⁵ For Glissant, the rhizome is [une] racine démultipliée, étendue en réseaux dans la terre ou dans l’air, sans qu’aucune souche y intervienne en prédateur irrémédiable. La notion de rhizome maintiendrait donc le fait de l’enracinement, mais récuse l’idée d’une racine totalitaire. La pensée du rhizome serait au principe de ce que j’appelle une poétique de la Relation, selon laquelle toute identité s’étend dans un rapport à l’Autre. (Poétique 23)

Cajun culture can be compared to a composite culture, “dont la composition ne fut pas d’une conjonction de ‘normes,’ mais bâtie dans les marges, avec toutes sortes de matériaux qui par nature échappèrent à la patience de la règle” (Glissant, Poétique 105). The Cajun collective memory, just like the intricacies of the bayou landscape in Cajun Country, a vertiginous network of ever-changing waterways, bears resemblance to Glissant’s rhizomatic perspective of history, literature, and language. Glissant’s link to Louisiana is consolidated by his stay in Baton Rouge and by other scholars drawing on his relational theory for studies on Cajun culture (Glissant and Leupin; DeWitt). His theoretical and practical involvement with memory (Thomas, “Edouard”) is supporting evidence of a hybrid memory concept while his decentralizing cultural concept, the “dialectique de détournement” (Poétique 28), lends itself to the present project. Neither fully rejecting

 Deleuze and Guattari conceived knowledge as rhizomatic, i. e., with multiple surface roots, instead of single arborescent roots, i. e., a single, hierarchic underground root.  First presented in his first novel La Lézarde (1958) and fully developed in Poétique de la Relation (1990) and Tout-Monde (1997), among others.

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nor accepting the dominant culture, the Cajuns constantly negotiate the relationship between the regional and the global. In contrast to Lévi-Strauss’s bricolage, which is based on intentional and deliberate actions, Glissant’s relational theory is characterized by unintentional and unforeseeable developments. The point when bricolage and relationalism converge is when the Martinican describes memory as an archipelago.⁵⁶ It is only a logical consequence that the approaches of the rhizome and the relational have been applied in the context of memory dynamics in the past decades. For American literary scholar Michael Rothberg, “acts of memory are rhizomatic networks of temporality and cultural reference that exceed attempts at territorialization (whether at the local or national level) and identitarian reduction” (“Introduction” 7). Furthermore, Rothberg emphasizes that, rather than lieux de mémoire, the actual points of convergence of memories are nœuds de mémoire, and that they require people to ensure the continued production of memory: Nœuds de mémoire … are not static conglomerations of heterogeneous elements … sites of memory do not remember by themselves—they require the active agency of individuals and publics. … Such agency entails recognizing and revealing the production of memory as an ongoing process involving inscription and reinscription, coding and recoding. (“Introduction” 8 – 9)

Regarding processes of coming to terms with the past, he offers a model termed “multidirectional memory,” which “posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites” (“Introduction” 11). Multidirectional memory explores and discloses dynamic and productive connections between various victimized groups, such as the commonality of the African slave and Jewish experiences.⁵⁷ The model has become extremely popular as it asserts interconnections which reach other minorities. With regard to Cajun culture, scholars have compared the traumatic past to the sufferings of the Jews and the African slaves

 “La mémoire est un archipel, nous y sommes alors des îles que les vents inspirés mènent à dérader” (Glissant, Esthétique 163). For a detailed analysis of Glissant’s definition of memory as an archipelago see Bonnie Thomas’s articles.  See Hannah Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), originally “Imperialism: Road to Suicide. The Political Origins and Use of Racism” (1946); W. E. B. Du Bois in “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” (1949); Aimé Césaire in Discours sur le colonialisme (1951); Frantz Fanon in Peau noire, masque blancs (1952); André and Simone Schwarz-Bart in Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes (1967).

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(Conrad, “Acadians” 10). Zachary Richard also draws a parallel with the Jews and the Native Americans to answer the question about identity and collective memory in Cajun culture: “We are the Jews of America. It’s true. We are the Indians, the people who have been disenfranchised, and through all of that we have maintained a good spirit and we have been able to have a good time” (Allman). Cajun poet David Cheramie, too, draws a link between the Cajuns and the Jews when the speaker of his poem “22.000 pieds au dessus du Canada” consults a Jewish doctor, and both acknowledge bearing a cross (Julie 45 – 47). Thanks to its genesis, Cajun collective memory is multidirectional both with respect to its traumatic past and the hybrid constitution of the group. There exists another image which, arguably, excels in explaining and visualizing the myriad workings of the collective memory of the Cajuns: coral. This cultural paradigm was introduced by Mauritian cultural theorist Khal Torabully in his poetry collection Chair corail, fragments coolies: Poésie (1999) to describe today’s creole cultures, especially of archipelagic communities, and to conceptualize what he termed “coolitude.” Extending Glissant’s relational theory, Torabully compares the various creolizing processes in hybrid cultures to the life of a coral. The metaphor of “coral” stands, by definition, in opposition to the rhizome: The coral, a hybrid marine organism, thrives in a living habitat and develops an agglutinating connectivity. Like a palimpsest, it builds in layers and concretion all the while remaining open to all currents. Symbolizing the concretion of memories and imaginations, it is a work in progress and represents multiple combinatory possibilities. As the foundation of biodiversity, it also allows for cultural diversity (Torabully, “Quand les Indes” 70 – 71). The coral’s diversity, woven out of aquatic material, parallels Cajun culture’s diversity and watery environment. The fossilized trunk of the coral serves as a foundation for plankton and other micro-organism. Actually, natural coral is not a particular feature of Louisiana’s aquatic life. Nonetheless, the Louisiana offshore oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico have come to be regarded as an important ecological habitat for plants and animals as these artificial corals reproduce the ecosystems of coral reefs. Finally, archipelagic characteristics inscribe Cajun culture in the post-colonial notion of the archipelization of creole cultures. Like a “repeating island,” Cajun collective memory reproduces elements from France, to Acadia, via places in exile, to Louisiana.⁵⁸  Torabully’s concept of hybridity can be inscribed in the larger discourse about hybridity. Besides Glissant’s and Benítez-Rojo’s works, other scholars have tried to describe the mixing of cultures. While American scholar Gloria E. Anzaldúa introduced the notion of new mestiza in Borderlands: The New Mestiza—’La frontera’ (1987), which focuses on the mixed and marginalized people along the US-Mexico border, French historian Serge Gruzinski (1999) analyzed how,

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The field of TransArea Studies revived the concept of the coral and the archipelago, a research field spearheaded by German literary scholar Ottmar Ette (TransArea; WeltFraktale) that conceives of culture including history as a vectorial movement. In contrast to the transnational approach which presupposes the existence of a nation, the “transareal” dismisses national boundaries and other constructed spaces. Transnational literature—or transnational memory for that matter—is more applicable in the context of an advanced nation-building process (Ette, TransArea 40), so that Cajun literature can be described from a transareal perspective.⁵⁹ Drawing on the image of coral and the concept of the transareal facilitates the description of memory dynamics in Cajun culture without the limitations of national boundaries. Mirroring the hybrid qualities of the Cajuns, coral is a fruitful metaphor in many respects. In contrast to the two-dimensionality of the rhizome, coral is defined by its multi-dimensionality and numerous points of connection. In contrast to such images as the net, the fabric, the wax tablet, the house or memory theater, coral is organic and adaptable. Similarly, Cajun collective memory as mirrored in Cajun literature absorbs crucial foreign elements in a natural way. The reef of Cajun culture consists of many corals, with Cajun literature as a part of it. Everyone who participates in and contributes to the collective memory of a group attests their membership to the group. Collective memory is, therefore, defined by place, time, and a special identity (J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 39). In the case of the Cajuns, their hybrid identity leaves no doubt about a hybrid memory. Given the mixed ethnic background of the Cajuns and the hybrid connections present in Louisiana, the various terms describing the entangled processes of memory can all apply to the Cajun collective memory. Indeed, contemporary Cajun culture, which is intrinsically hybrid, exhibits both transnational (i. e., from the USA to Canada and France), transcultural, global, multidirectional, traveling, and transareal processes. This hybrid memory of the Cajuns as it is represented in Cajun literature reveals a great degree of plasticity to the point that there emerges another locus memoriae, a hybrid memoryscape.⁶⁰

from the age of conquests in the fifteenth century until today, from South America to Great Britain to Korea, the creolization of ideas and cultures created a pensée métisse (in contrast to a pensée sauvage).  The Cajuns are not a nation, nor have they ever expressed such national tendencies as the Québécois during the Quiet Revolution under the leadership of Jean Lesage in the 1960s, or the Acadians ten years later under Louis J. Robichaud, the first Acadian prime minister of New Brunswick elected in 1960 (Basque, Barrieau, and Côté 31– 32).  For Jens Brockmeier, cultural memory sets free hybrid perspectives (“Introduction” 12). Günter Österle, too, refers to the hybrid organization of collective memory (13).

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3.4 Mnemo-Cultural Dynamics and Literature In the context of the dynamic turn in memory studies on the eve of the twentyfirst century, the arts proved a fertile ground for exploring the multiplicative intersections of memory. Since the 1990s, scholars have begun to consciously engage with the relationship of the arts and memory, contributing to an ever-widening interdisciplinary field.⁶¹ The association reaches in fact back to Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory and mother of the nine muses of the arts, six of whom personified the literary arts. Especially poets, but also writers of other genres, have continuously invoked one muse, sometimes more, for inspiration.⁶² The arts, including music and visual art, are responsible for immortalizing life in narratives and “provide a continuous discourse on the potentials and problems of cultural memory” (A. Assmann, Cultural Memory xii). Hence, memory can be paralleled with reciting, narrating, telling. Walter Benjamin, for instance, viewed memory as a narrative capacity connecting one generation to another: “Memory is the epic faculty par excellence. … Mnemosyne, the rememberer, was the Muse of the epic art among the Greeks. … Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation. … It starts the web which all stories together form in the end” (“Storyteller” 97– 98).⁶³ Additionally, memory plays a crucial role in the art of discourse and is tied to metaphors of writing and inscription such as the wax tablet, or as the emblem of modern times, the computer. Clearly, memory depends on narration, be it oral or written: “Le phénomène essentiel de la mémoire humaine, c’est l’acte du récit” (Janet, L’Intelligence 163). We tell stories because we want to know who we are, where we come from, what our dreams are, which makes the connection memory-identity come full circle. Narration allows people who were absent during certain events to act as if they had been present: “[L]e récit transforme les absents en présents” (Janet, L’Intelligence 163 – 164). Through narration they can become cognizant of the events occurring before their birth (Janet, L’Intelligence 166).

 Works exploring the relation of literature and memory include the series Literature and Cultural Memory (2000) edited by Theo D’haen. These proceedings of a conference about comparative literature in 1997 show the very intricate combination patterns of literature and memory. See also Nalbantian, Memory in Literature.  Clio, one of the muses and the goddess of history, stands for the connection between history and memory.  “Epic” here has to be understood as “narrative.”

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While in oral cultures such special representatives as poets act as carriers of memory, guarding and transmitting the memory of the group (J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 53), print cultures adopt other mediums for the transmission and consolidation of memories.⁶⁴ Cajun culture is clearly based on oral traditions, yet it cannot provide an epic in the traditional sense, handed down across generations. The lack of rulers and learned men in the Acadian community, the Acadian experience of migration and separation, and the development toward a heterogeneous minority in Louisiana obviously hindered the development of an epic. With the emergence of Cajun literature, however, we have been witnessing the construction of a grand narrative, not least because of a certain myth based on a written medium, Longfellow’s Evangeline. Memories clinging on to specific objects such as writing enable the transition of these memories through time and the continuance of their narrative. Literature constitutes one of these medial supports in the form of narrative: It not only provides us with windows on specific aspects of a group or a culture, but it also transmits wisdom, knowledge, experiences, and models of life to future generations. It thus has the power to preserve the past—a trait it shares with memory. Most importantly, literature is a place where memory, representation, and imagination converge: “[L]iterary fictions disseminate influential models of both individual and cultural memories as well as of the nature and functions of memory” (Birgit Neumann, “Literary Representation” 333). The associative processes occurring in literature mirror the dynamic nature of memory. Elements of belonging crystallize and reveal the conjunction of individual and collective remembering. As a mnemonic medium, literature mediates between the past, present, and future generations, presenting itself as the perfect medium to both present the circular dynamics of memory and assure its continuance. It is a means to store memories, to disseminate memories, and to act as a cue for other memories (Erll, “Literatur” 254– 256). Given that literature mediates memory, writers are not only the agents of literature, but also the carriers of memory. Writing also serves to support the establishment of identity, which counters Plato’s claim that writing obliterates identity (Winthrop-Young 126). From classical antiquity onward, writers have continued to address the weight of literature for identity formation and the transmission of memory.⁶⁵ Not only personified memory figured in texts of classical antiquity. Aristotle’s Poetics (ca. 335 BC)  Anderson convincingly showed how print culture presented imagined communities and thus crucially helped consolidate national identities (24– 26).  These include works by Aristotle, John Locke, Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin, among others.

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and Horace’s Ars Poetica (ca. 19 BC), for instance, mention literature’s trait of imitation besides its relevance for education and entertainment, revealing the ultimate goal of making literature memorable and perennial.⁶⁶ Still, a systematic overview of the connection between memory and literature appeared only in the first decade of the twenty-first century.⁶⁷ A group of German scholars of English literature and culture set up a theoretical basis to probe the nexus of memory, literature, and identity. Their approach distinguished between three interlocking categories: “memory of literature,” “memory in literature” and “literature as a medium of collective memory.” The first category, the memory of literature, focuses on the interreferential components of literary texts. It includes three sub-categories, namely “intertextual mnemonics,” “genres as repositories of memory,” and “the canon and literary history as institutionalized memory” (Erll and Nünning, “Literature” 264 – 265). Intertextual mnemonics include, for instance, the art of memory, Warburg’s pathos formulas, or topoi. In her analysis of the literary interpenetration of texts, Renate Lachmann introduced the now commonly accepted phrase that “[t]he memory of a text is its intertextuality” (Memory 15).⁶⁸ If we consider that, as Karlheinz Stierle remarked, the intertext is a never-ending process, memory of literature is also circular and never-ending. No text stands on its own but is in dialogue with another pre-text (Stierle 8). An intertext can emulate or counter or deform previous texts. It is composed of the two principles of “imitatio” and “inventio”: They allude to, quote from, paraphrase, or incorporate other texts. Memory and literature thus mutually influence each other: “The mnemonic function of literature provokes intertextual procedures, or: the other way round, intertextuality produces and sustains literature’s memory” (Lachmann, “Mnemonic” 309). As in a funhouse, the text mirrors both the memory of a culture and the memory of other texts: “Just as a text en-

 Especially Horace’s work set the basis for the motto of prodesse et delectare, meaning that literature was meant to instruct and to delight. The intellectuals of the Enlightenment Age drew on that motto and thus allowed for the consolidation of classical ideas regarding literature.  See Erll, Gymnich, and Nünning; Erll and Nünning, “Literature”; Erll and Nünning, Gedächtniskonzepte. Erll and Nünning have also been editing the periodical journal Media and Cultural Memory since 2004.  Lachmann draws on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “dialogism” of speech and literary texts introduced in The Dialogic Imagination in the 1930s, and Julia Kristeva’s concept of “intertextuality” which she proposed in her article “Bakhtin: Le Mot, le dialogue, le roman” in 1967. There, Kristeva postulates that every new text is based on pretexts. As such, literature relies on two exchanges: The first exchange concerns the production of the text, which takes place between one writer and another. The second concerns the reception of the text, which takes place between the writer and the public.

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ters the memory theater of culture as it would enter an exterior space, so it gives another sketch of this theater insofar as it draws other texts into its inner space” (Lachmann, Memory 15). Moreover, intertextual processes also include genres. Literary forms of memory such as the historical novel, or genre memories, i. e., conventionalized patterns which are used to create a biography, for instance, also produce collective memory. While scholars in antiquity used to hold history as incompatible with poetry, the two genres began to converge during the Romantic period (Abrams 101). Commemoration addresses as well as historical and journalistic writings underlie similar narrative conditions as the lyric or prose genres and thus belong to the literary genre (see H. White).⁶⁹ They are defined by a narrative form, Hayden White’s so-called “emplotment” (7), and operate with such rhetorical devices as repetition, metaphor, rhythm, voice, etc. Life writing is the most evident example of genre-related memory writing: Rather than giving us direct access to unmediated memory, what such texts reveal is, instead, memory cultures. When we study life-writing as a source for cultural memory, that is, our conclusions will also be literary-critical ones: interpretations of the ways in which memory was produced, constructed, written, and circulated. (Saunders 323)

Finally, literature can also be considered as a social system. Such frameworks as canon formation and literary history organize and preserve the memory of literature (Erll and Nünning, “Literature” 277– 280). The exclusion or inclusion of Cajun literature in American anthologies or the publication of a proper anthology of Cajun literature marks a shift to a conscious choice by a select group of people to make Cajun literature and culture visible and memorable. The category of memory in literature, also referred to as “mimesis of memory” (Erll and Nünning, “Literaturwissenschaftliche Konzepte” 4– 5),⁷⁰ engages with the literary representation of individual memory. These narratives are based on “mimetic models of the relationship between memory and literature,” between extra-textual cultural reality and literature (Erll, “Concepts” 20 – 21). These models include the “‘prefiguration’ of the text,” i. e., “its reference to the pre-existing extra-textual world” (mimesis I), the “textual ‘configuration’

 The title of the German translation of Hayden White’s book Metahistory reads: Auch Clio dichtet—“Also Clio Composes Poetry.” In 1999, Jeffrey K. Olick also picked up this idea of the dialogic movement of memory in texts and showed the connective structure of May-8 speeches by German politicians (Olick, “Genre Memories”). See also Sims.  For examples of memory in literature see Terdiman; Nalbantian, Aesthetic Autobiography; Nalbantian, Memory in Literature; Nalbantian, Matthews, and McClelland.

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that creates a fictional object” (mimesis II), and the “‘refiguration’ by the reader” (mimesis III) (Erll, “Concepts” 21). Literature is a platform where individual memory crystallizes (through such different narrative techniques as first-person narrative or interior monologue); where trauma is addressed and conflicting memories compete with each other; and where the memory discourse can be delivered. The third approach concerns literature as a medium of collective memory. As carriers of collective memory, poets, artists, and scholars preserve what Aleida Assmann calls “kulturelle Texte” (“Was sind kulturelle Texte” 232), “cultural texts,” oral and written narrative forms of shared memories which define the identity and the history of a group. These texts mediate memories while it is the carriers who are in charge of assuring the circulation of those memories. As for literature, it establishes the link between culture and text and involves long-term processes, connecting the present with the past and the future. As a logical consequence, the capacity to read the cultural texts is paramount: “People who can read what has been handed down in writing produce and achieve the sheer presence of the past” (Gadamer, Truth 163). When Halbwachs defined his social frames, he also pointed to the necessity of a reading competence. More importantly, he signaled that the social frames depended on medial support (Cadres 89). Literature functions as a meeting point between human beings and media, and discloses the reciprocal exchanges between memory and the group. Medial processes are equally relevant in the study of the dynamics of memory. Developing Warburg’s concept, Erll and Rigney implemented the concept of remediation in their analysis of mnemonic processes in such media forms as film and literature: “[M]emorial media borrow from, incorporate, absorb, critique and refashion earlier memorial media” (Erll and Rigney, “Introduction” 5). Through remediation a counter-memory is introduced; a memory narrative is deconstructed and reconstructed. In the context of literature, collective memory “largely consists of a re-telling, though with a significant difference. This guarantees continuity, yet also implies creativity” (Grabes, “Introduction” xi). Sometimes the meaning of a symbol changes, which has consequences for the discourse analysis surrounding the symbol. Or, the multiple combinations of genres such as in ekphrasis reveal the presence of memory in literature. Literature then is marked by spiraling and interlaced movements; it combines the unified with the diverse, the uniform with the multiple. Of the mentioned literary approaches, the project does not favor one over the other. Rather, it highlights the mixture of categories, the collage-like layering and patchworking of memory of and in literature as well as of literature as a medium of memory. If memory is the emplotment of culture, then literature is the emplotment of memory. In general, the province of literature includes a culture’s history, values,

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and identity. As a culture’s written tradition, it reveals both its historical and aesthetic evolution as well as the formation of a group’s identity. Interestingly, strong socio-literary ties mark Cajun literature. Such implicit and explicit textual references as dedications, motifs, phrases, and song lines outline a distinct community of Cajun writers. Furthermore, literature not only represents and transmits knowledge, it also “construes intertextual bonds between literary and non-literary texts … [as it] recovers and revives knowledge in reincorporating some of its formerly rejected unofficial or arcane traditions” (Lachmann, “Mnemonic” 306). The mnemonic capacity of repetition and adaptation in literature mirrors the non-linear but circular workings of memory. Ultimately, “by generating a suitable and attractive style, literature can not only give expression to cultural memory in all its complexity but also establish a tradition of its own and bring together quite different cultures of remembrance” (Grabes, “Introduction” xii). If cultural traits of a minority have persisted until today, they most certainly fulfilled some important functions in the past (Bastide, “Memoire collective” 65). Similarly, those traditions of the Cajuns which continue to exist must necessarily have a specific purpose. By contrast, if new traits are adapted, they are deemed helpful for the survival of Cajun culture. Hence, an equilibrium between the past and the present is crucial for identity formation, according to Friedrich Nietzsche: “[T]he unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture” (“Uses” 75). T. S. Eliot, too, drew attention to the necessary balance between tradition and the individual talent of writers when he gave a definition of the historical sense: “The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; … [the] historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional” (“Tradition” 28). Cajun literature is not only evidence of the emancipation of the Cajuns. The self- identification process visible in the selected texts also sheds light on the unfolding collective memory of the group. Feeding on external as well as internal myths and historical sources, Cajun culture establishes a distinct foundational memory without ever being at the mercy of the past and fossilization. It is thanks to its hybrid character that Cajun culture is prone to continuous hybridization. The continuous appropriation of foreign elements insures the unrelenting rejuvenation of Cajun culture.

4 Memory as Awakening: Cris sur le bayou and the Emergence of Cajun Poetry “C’est rendu l’heure de se réveiller, / De crier pour une renaissance” (J. Arceneaux et al. 55). These last lines from the poem “Appel à l’éxil” by Jean Arceneaux encapsulate the cultural change governing the Cajun Renaissance since the 1960s. They also echo the title of the anthology that includes “Appel à l’éxil.” Published in 1980, Cris sur le bayou: Naissance d’une poésie acadienne en Louisiane is the first poetry collection written by Cajuns and stands as a watershed of what is now considered a new literary form. The juxtaposition of “cris” with “naissance” in the title of the anthology, and of “crier” with “renaissance” in the line of the poem, evokes the cry of a newborn. This metaphor is clarified in the preface revealing the poets’ concern with the long-awaited birth of a genuine Cajun voice: “Cette collection de poésie représente les premiers cris d’un enfant qui a longtemps attendu pour voir le jour. Enfin, le silence est brisé. Qu’il crie, cet enfant! Qu’il braille, qu’il râle, qu’il s’exercise les poumons. Il en a besoin. Il y a beaucoup à dire, et c’est si tard” (Ancelet, “Préface,” Cris 13). In the collection, the birth metaphor is substantiated through the use of such synonyms as “renaissance,” “réveil” and its corresponding verb “réveiller,” “résurrection,” or even the neologism “rerenaissance.” Together with the image of spring, they connote a veritable awakening—the Cajuns’ awakening to their heritage and culture. As a matter of fact, awakening, explained Walter Benjamin in the notes for the Arcades Project, is the exemplary case of remembering: [H]istorical facts become something that just now happened to us, just now struck us: to establish them is the affair of memory. And awakening is the great exemplar of memory —that occasion on which we succeed in remembering what is nearest, most obvious. … There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of ‘what has been’: its advancement has the structure of awakening. (Arcades 883)

This concept of awakening implies that the knowledge of things past is inherent in memory, albeit unconscious, and that its resurfacing parallels an awakening. Drawing on individual and collective memories, the new Cajun poets began to reflect on their ethnic identity and on what they considered being “poésie acadienne en Louisiane.” This act involves a growing consciousness of a distinct Cajun identity in which experiences, attitudes, and views stored in a pool of memories rooted in Cajun culture and space come to the fore. It is also highly emancipatory since it is the first time that a joint group of Cajuns actively and publicly engaged in questioning their own views as well as received views https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-005

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about Cajun identity and culture. Relying on personal experiences and imaginations, they openly disengaged from any outsider’s influence. Initially, Cris sur le bayou was a reaction to the Louisiana French Movement led by CODOFIL President James Domengeaux. While promoting bilingual education in Louisiana, i. e., Standard French and English, Domengeaux and his followers deemed all things Cajun unsophisticated. He opposed efforts by such Cajun teachers as James Donald Faulk, who provided Cajun texts in English transcription, and condemned these as “even worse than redneck English” (qtd. in Ancelet, “Perspective” 349). Rural Cajun French, it was argued, was oral and unintelligible to the French of France and, therefore, incompatible with education reforms and the progress of tourism in Louisiana. Instead, tourism and the economy would profit much more from Standard French. In fact, Domengeaux wanted to avoid any separatist movements which were a daily occurrence in Quebec at the time.¹ But he could not suppress the revolt of local Cajun activists. Domengeaux’s harsh statements became a catalyst for the publication of Cris sur le bayou, which appeared as the poets’ poetic response, challenging the erroneous belief of the Louisiana Acadian elite that Cajun French was just an oral dialect, and proving instead that it had a grammar and a syntax, and could indeed be written.² Another event contributed to triggering the inception of Cris sur le bayou. In July 1978, the Rencontre des francophones de l’Amérique du Nord was held in Quebec City. Organized by the Conseil de la langue française,³ this initiative was meant to celebrate the 370th anniversary of the founding of Quebec by Samuel de Champlain. Invited were francophone representatives from Canada and the USA to discuss topics relating to the theme of Fête du retour aux sources (Louder and Waddell 9). When the organizing committee asked the Louisiana delegation for a written contribution to the program Paroles et musique, the choice first fell upon a selection of folktales. Yet, considering the poetic and symphonic composition of the program, which included works by celebrated Canadian artists like Michèle Lalonde, Claude Léveillé, and Herménégilde Chiasson, the prose genre was deemed ill-suited as it would present Louisiana, “illiterate” as it was without a contemporary French literature, as inferior. Instead, the

 In the second half of the twentieth century, the Quebecois started to seek independence as a province. The support for sovereignty of Quebec peaked with the October Crisis in the 1970s when violence erupted about controversial political decisions (D. Smith, “October Crisis”).  Bernard recounts the anecdote of how Ancelet surprised Domengeaux with a copy of Cris sur le bayou (Cajuns 128 – 129).  In 1977, the Conseil enacted the “Charte de la langue française,” making French the official language of Quebec (“L’Office”).

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Cajun representatives resolved to present to the audience an original contemporary poetry which would sing “l’âme de la Louisiane française, mais qui donnait quand même [sic] l’air d’être poétique” (Ancelet, “Préface,” Cris 9 – 10). They finally selected one of Zachary Richard’s poems, and the positive reception made the Cajun participants fully realize the urgency to do more for the Louisiana French Movement and push for a literary revival: “[S]i le mouvement en Louisiane doit réussir, il faut que la culture grandisse, qu’elle ait plus de débouchés qu’asteur, et la littérature écrite en est un aspect important de ce grandissement” (Ancelet, “Préface,” Cris 11– 12).⁴ Upon the return of the Louisiana delegation, an imitation of Paroles et musique was organized in Lafayette, Louisiana, which furthered the idea of a poetry collection in French. Other Cajuns came forward with French poems they had written in spare moments of creativity and now dug out from drawers. Two years after the Rencontre, Cris sur le bayou was published.⁵ Thus, the collection not only mirrors an emancipatory change in the Cajuns’ collective consciousness, it is also a harbinger of a critical literary turn, indicative of the transformation of Cajun culture from a previously oral tradition to a literary tradition. It paved the way for other Cajun writings in French, especially poetry, which gave rise to what scholars of Francophone studies soon considered a separate literary field. As it appears, this French-speaking tradition evokes the French Creole literary tradition which had slumbered for almost a century. And yet, from the onset, francophone Cajun literature illuminates the singularity of Cajun culture through the use of Cajun French dialect and distinct Cajun subject matters, corroborating the claim of a separate literary tradition, free of any external impulses. “Cette renaissance,” Cajun folklorist Barry J. Ancelet points out, “rappelle l’activité littéraire du XIXe siècle, mais en diffère profondément car aujourd’hui ce que nous voyons n’est pas un mouvement dû à des influences venues de l’extérieur, mais une impulsion qui jaillit des sources profondes de la culture même et qui répresente [sic] fidèlement ses origines louisianaises” (Allain and Ancelet 260). Written in a French blend, ranging from Cajun French to Creole French to Standard French, with some English words and phrases, Cris sur le bayou as well as subsequent poetry collections reveal the heterogeneous linguistic map of French Louisiana. More importantly, it is its indebtedness to the oral tradition which makes Cajun poetry stand out as a genre separate from the French Creole tradition.  “Asteur” is Cajun French for “à cette heure,” meaning “now.”  According to the dates written below Arceneaux’s poems, the corpus was written during the period from July 1978 to April 1979, which implies that the Rencontre was indeed a catalyst for Arceneaux.

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And yet, despite the emphasis on the genuine character of the poems and the rejection of any foreign influences, the preface appears as a double discourse. Denying that they imitate poetry of other francophone cultures, for instance, nineteenth-century French Creole, French, and Quebec literatures, the poets simultaneously attest to their awareness of them. Referring to major Quebec and Acadian francophone writers in the preface, Ancelet acknowledges the group’s knowledge of their works. Especially the reference to Antonine Maillet, the doyen of Acadian literature, and Ancelet’s implicit approval of her statement that Acadian literature—and hence Cajun literature—has to come from the gut (“Préface,” Cris 11– 12), is a first indication of the Cajun writers’ awareness of Acadian culture and contradicts the rejection of foreign influences. A look at later poetry collections confirms that the authors owe de facto part of their inspiration to other francophone writings. Already the authors’ choice to designate Southwest Louisiana as Acadie tropicale underscores the link to Acadie in the north.⁶ Without a doubt, while Cris sur le bayou stands as a Cajun ur-text, literary influences become more and more pronounced in subsequent poetry collections, where the poets freely acknowledge their indebtedness to other poetic figures and establish a map of poetic relations and intertexts. Consequently, Cris sur le bayou achieves a slightly different status when silhouetted against subsequent poetic works. Although scholarly criticism on Cris sur le bayou easily exceeds that on other Cajun literary works, none of the articles has analyzed the various influences on Cajun poetry to venture a first assessment of the Cajun collective memory.⁷ The juxtaposition of Cris sur le bayou with subsequent volumes of poetry by contributors of that pioneering work will allow us to make out distinct features of the collective memory of the Cajuns as well as the literary memory dynamics over a time span of more than two decades. For this purpose, the present chapter is divided into two main parts. Focusing first on Cris sur le bayou, I will explore the elements instrumental in the formation and expression of the Cajun collective memory visible in a selection of poems. I will also show how the awakening as a metaphor helps to create a collective identity. In a second part, I will use selected poems from different collections published after Cris sur le bayou as a

 See Barry and Gould, Acadie tropicale: Poésie de Louisiane (1983).  Ancelet, “‘The Cajun who went to Harvard’”; Pallister, “New Departures”; Barry, “French Literary Renaissane”; Brown, “Social Consequences”; Beaulieu, “Affirmation”; Guenin-Lelle, “Birth”; Barry, “De l’oral à l’écrit”; Beaulieu, “Dimension”; Tardif, “Poésie”; Ryon, “Language Death Studies”; Russo; Ancelet, “L’Exception”; Bergeron-Maguire, La “conscience diasporale”; Giacoppe, “North America’s Francophone Borderlands”; Giacoppe, “More Than Music and Food”; Jacquot, “Le Cri (première partie)”; Jacquot, “Le Cri (deuxième partie” ); Caparroy.

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contrast to show how socio-cultural changes affected the development of Cajun poetry and the Cajun collective memory.

4.1 Cris sur le bayou: Awakening as a Mnemonic Process According to Ancelet, one prerequisite of Cajun poetry is that it comes from the core of Cajun culture. As he points out in the preface, the authors’ prime motive is that literary creation must come “de chez nous pour être la nôtre” (“Préface,” Cris 12). Dismissing the claim of literary influence, the new francophone Louisiana authors seek to distance themselves from such other French literary traditions as the French Creole literature of the nineteenth century, or from any foreign contemporary literary model in French. The “profound sources” quoted above exist only in the Acadian triangle, in the space surrounding the Cajuns and in their daily lives. It stands in opposition to New Orleans, the center of French Creole literature, to Paris, and Quebec. It is important, writes Ancelet, que cette nouvelle littérature écrite se développe d’une façon saine et naturelle. Si elle doit vraiment refléter la culture, il faut qu’elle vienne du cœur (ou des tripes, comme dit toujours Antonine Maillet) de la culture, de l’héritage. Avec une richesse comme celle de la tradition orale acadienne et créole, ne serait-il pas un crime que d’aller imiter la France, ou le Québec, ou n’importe quelle autre culture française du monde où il y a une longue tradition de ‘belle littérature?’ (“Préface,” Cris 12)

Inspiration must come from within, from traditions firmly rooted in Cajun culture, such as the oral traditions. Strikingly, Ancelet takes for granted the existence of a Cajun literature and refers to “[l]a nôtre,” “our literature,” and “la nouvelle littérature écrite.” Indeed, Cajun culture has always had a literature, but prior to the first writings it was an oral literature based on oral tales and songs (Allain and Ancelet 201– 202). Pushed by the motivation to exploit the culture’s richness and to foster the natural development of the new literature, the group of young francophone Cajun writers turned toward the heart of Cajun culture and sought out its “Cajunness,” the typically Cajun elements. Significantly, the writing process corresponds to the process of awakening. It is while writing that the poet becomes aware of the subject matter as his inward turn to draw on experiences starts a process of remembering. Hegel, for instance, equated remembering with the process of awakening.⁸ The German word for “to

 Hegel defined the capacity of intelligence to interiorize an exterior thus: “[I]n its immediacy [intelligence] is the awakening to itself, its recollection into itself in this immediacy” (Hegel 184).

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remember,” “erinnern,” aptly describes this inward turn. To remember is to awaken to our inner self, to ourselves: “In one sense recollection [Erinnerung] is certainly an unfortunate expression, in the sense, namely, that an idea is reproduced which has already existed at another time. But recollection has another sense, which is given by its etymology, namely that of making oneself inward, going inward, and this is the profound meaning of the word in thought” (Hegel, Lectures 2: 34). We appropriate and then internalize experiences and impressions from the outside world. The Cajun literary Renaissance corresponds then to a Cajun awakening, a self-reflection leading to a literary emancipation. The Cajuns’ literary awakening began in Quebec, with the demarcation from Franco-Canadian literature being a way to assert self-reliance and cultural independence. As a result, the injunction to turn toward Cajun culture corresponds to the forgetting of other surrounding literary traditions. The new Cajun poets express the necessity of making a clean sweep to allow for an independent thinking of the individual. One cannot help but be reminded of tabula rasa, a concept circulating among philosophers in ancient Greece and developed by the philosophers of the Enlightenment Age.⁹ In Lockean terms, the tabula rasa is a blank slate, a “white paper,” which is the precondition for the beginning of thinking.¹⁰ In a similar fashion, the Cajun poets wish to be free of all preconceived forms and ideas so that an objective vision is imprinted on their literary “white paper.” The assertion of the poets’ refusal to imitate nonetheless hints at a certain anxiety of influence, a notion developed by American literary critic Harold Bloom, who claims that “[p]oetry is the anxiety of influence” (95). As a “variety of melancholy or … anxiety-principle” (7), Bloom’s concept explains the ambivalent feelings of a young poet toward his or her master. In their greatest admiration the young poets cannot help but emulate the father/mother poet. However, “in order to clear imaginative space” (Bloom 5) for themselves, and to be acknowledged as original poets, they must refute their indebtedness to their master, which amounts to an act of forgetting. Similarly, the fledgling Cajun poets have no wish to borrow, but want to establish a poetry of their own. If it is not theirs, they will fail to convince. Considered from this angle, this anxietyprinciple is also salutary, since forgetting becomes an important means for inno-

 In Antiquity, the wax tablet was a common metaphor for memory. Experiences were impressed on that tablet with each new impression canceling the old. The metaphor appears in Plato’s Theaetetus (c. 360 BC) and Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia (350 BC) (Whitehead 15 – 27).  In his 1689 essay about human understanding, John Locke argued that “[a]ll ideas come from sensation or reflection.—Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas” (104).

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vation: “Only by forgetting does the mind have the possibility of total renewal, the capacity to see everything with fresh eyes, so that what is long familiar fuses with the new into a many leveled unity” (Gadamer, Truth 15). The plural “Cris” in the title of the collection herald the polyphonic cries emitted by the various poets in the anthology, exemplifying Cajun culture’s heterogeneous composition and cultural richness. It represents, therefore, a collective awakening and expresses for the first time the collective memory of the Cajun community in a written form. The eight poets—Jean Arceneaux, Debbie Clifton, Émile Des Marais, Karla Guillory, Francis Leblanc, Iry Lejeune, Kenneth Richard, and Zachary Richard—contributed about one hundred texts, most of them poems in free verse. Jean Arceneaux and Émile Des Marais are two noms de plume for Cajun folklorist Barry J. Ancelet and activist David Émile Marcantel respectively.¹¹ All contributors hail from the same region, except for Debbie Clifton, who was born in Ohio but moved back to her family home.¹² Furthermore, the majority of them claim Acadian descent, again with the exception of Debbie Clifton, who was born to African American parents and, therefore, is the only representative of the black Creole community. As for Émile Des Marais, who contributed two prose texts to the collection, his ancestors came directly from France at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Léchot). The inclusion of both Clifton and Des Marais represents the heterogeneity of Cajun culture, with Clifton’s seven poems in Creole French illustrating the mutual influence of the Cajun and Creole oral traditions.¹³ A look at the contributors’ professional background reveals that they constitute a homogeneous group, even a closed circle, whose aim has been to promote Cajun culture and the French language. Except for Kenneth Richard, a musician and carpenter (Allain and Ancelet 275), the majority of the contributors are intellectuals, educators or scholars, with some of them associated with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (UL Lafayette). Led by Ancelet, professor at UL Lafay According to a fabricated interview with Jean Arceneaux and Barry J. Ancelet conducted by Olivier Marteau in 2006, Arceneaux was born in Quebec City on the occasion of the Rencontre in 1978 (Marteaux 196). For Marcantel see Charpentier. Except for the last folktale collection Jean-lechasseur et ses chiens (2016), Ancelet has used his pseudonym for his poetic works and folktales and his real name for academic writings.  Clifton is part of the so-called Creole migration, a term designating the Louisiana Creoles who emigrated for economic purposes to other U.S. states in the mid-twentieth century. For more details about the Creole migration see Jolivétte, Louisiana Creoles 53 – 71.  Creole French has almost disappeared in Louisiana, which is why there is not much poetry in Creole French. Sybil Kein, alias Dr. Consuela Provost, is another poet from Louisiana writing in Creole French. She published Gumbo People in 1981.

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ette and pioneer of Cajun Studies, they actively participate in the advancement of French and Cajun culture. Clifton is adjunct instructor at UL Lafayette, scholar, feminist, and minority rights activist. Des Marais has also been an important actor in the French literary movement. Together with Guillory he has been promoting the Théâtre Cadien. Zachary Richard, who grew up and went to school with Ancelet (carours), is mostly known for his musical success and enjoys a large Canadian French following.¹⁴ But he also wrote half a dozen poetry collections,¹⁵ three folktales (see chapter 7), and participated in various documentaries about Cajun and Acadian culture.¹⁶ American by birth, he is Francophone at heart, cherishing and cultivating the heritage of his ancestors, an attitude he expresses in writing his songs in both French and English. Apart from the famous singer-songwriter Iry Lejeune, who was born in 1928 and died tragically at the age of 26 in 1955,¹⁷ the majority of the contributors were born around the 1950s, so that most were in their thirties when Cris sur le bayou was published. Lejeune, whose songs were posthumously published in literary anthologies,¹⁸ holds considerable prestige in Cajun culture today. It was he who made French songs popular again after World War II, a time of acute Amer-

 In 2013, Richard received his sixth Félix by the ADISQ, the Association québécoise de l’industrie du disque, du spectacle et de la vidéo, for being the “chanteur francophone le plus illustré au Québec” (Amédée and Brûlé 233). He recorded over 20 albums, both in English and French.  Voyage de nuit: Cahier de poésie, 1975 – 79 (1987); Faire récolte (1997); Feu (2001); Outre le Mont: Poésies (2015). Originally published in 1987, Faire récolte received the Prix Champlain in Quebec in 1998. It was re-edited in 2014 by UL Press. Feu earned the Roland Gasparic Award in Budapest, Romania, in 2002. Zachary Richard also acted as Louisiana’s first French language Poet Laureate (2014– 2016).  Richard co-produced the movie Against the Tide, which was directed by the Cajun Pat Mire and awarded the prize for the best historical documentary by the National Education Television Association. The French version Contre vents, contre marées received the prize Historia from the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française in 2003. Several songs of Richard’s album Cœur fidèle (1999) served as soundtracks (Mcbride; Mire; Fournier). Richard also contributed to the twentysix part Canadian series Cœurs Batailleurs, aka Acadia: North and South (Magny); the ecological documentary Vu du large by Ole Gjerstad (2015); the historical documentary Kouchibouguac: L’Histoire de Jackie Vautour et des expropriés (2006) (Bourbonnais); and the autobiographical documentary Zachary Richard, toujours batailleur (2016).  His tragic death in 1955 led to his induction into the hall of fame of Cajun music as a “vrai poète du peuple,” composing most of the songs himself with his friend Eddie Shuler (Allain and Ancelet 261). For more details see Ancelet, “Cajun Music” 293; Ancelet, “Cajun Music Festival” 307.  His songs were first included in the pioneering anthology of French literature in Louisiana in 1981, Anthologie: Littérature française de la Louisiane (Allain and Ancelet 261– 264).

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icanization. As a matter of fact, the concurrence of the authors’ Cajun heritage, their cultural and social involvement, and their efforts in the preservation of cultural heritage form the social frame necessary for a collective memory. The poems are assembled in alphabetical order according to the poets’ surnames, with the poems of the two most important figures of the Cajun literary Renaissance framing the collection: Jean Arceneaux’s poems function as openers whereas the poems by Richard conclude the volume. Both poets contributed the bulk of the poems.¹⁹ Almost all of the poems reveal one or more Cajun points of reference. The natural environment, selected cultural traditions, and the debate on language constitute the collective perspective of the poets, and, by extension, the Cajuns. While most poems deal with the present state of Cajun culture, some also refer to the recent past. Three exceptions are Karla Guillory’s poems. Written in Standard French, her contributions are personal musings which tell pithy tales about daily life with no reference to time or Cajun culture. In the other poems, the emphasis on fundamental traits of Cajun culture points to the motives which guided the poets’ writing. Besides achieving a linguistic emancipation, the poets wanted to liberate their culture from common assumptions after decades of stigmatization. The poem which opens the volume can be read like a programmatic epigraph. Though it has no title, the four-verse poem reflects the collective preoccupation of the participants of the Cajun Renaissance regarding the gradual demise of French: “Perdre le français? / Ayoù on est rendu-là / Dans notre histoire, / Ça serait un maudit / Dénousment quand même” (J. Arceneaux et al. 15). This view is central for the collection as several poems discuss the loss of French and French as a minority language, assessing the consequences of assimilation and calling for a fight for the preservation of French. The last verse gives also an idea of the poets’ free play with language. In Standard French, the correct spelling is “dénouement.” Far from being a spelling mistake, the additional “-s” leads to a change of meaning, and “dénousment” evokes the image of how the Cajun collective, “nous,” is disjointed. Actually, it corresponds to a “dismemberment,” or rather “dismembering” of the Cajun community and culture, which can only be countermanded with the act of re-membering. The “dénousment” then is concomitant with forgetting, and unless there is no action undertaken, oblivion, emblematic of postmodern fragmentation, will progress. One

 The poems are distributed as follows: Jean Arceneaux (44), Debbie Clifton (7), Émile Des Marais (2), Karla Guillory (4), Francis Leblanc (1), Iry Lejeune (10), Kenneth Richard (3), and Zachary Richard (28).

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way to hamper this development of dismembering is the promotion of Cajun literature.

4.1.1 Placing Cajun Culture on the Map Besides the image of a new-born, the title Cris sur le bayou evokes that of a bird call on the bayou. Louisiana’s rich ecosystem presents a natural habitat for thousands of native birds and serves as a stopover for migratory species. Also, the natural environment as the first provider of food and work has always played a significant role in the Cajuns’ lives. Yet the many exotic accounts by outsiders have glossed over the diverse features of the Louisiana landscape. Since Longfellow’s rendition of Evangeline, such clichéd references to tranquil bayous or moss-draped oak trees have governed the public’s notions about Louisiana. Ancelet recalls that the organizers of the Rencontre des francophones de l’Amérique du nord wanted something “typical,” covered by Spanish moss and bathed in bayou water (“Préface,” Cris 9). In the end, the selected poem “La Ballade de Beausoleil,” written by Zachary Richard and later included in Cris sur le bayou, did not present the expected stereotypical elements. It concurred with the rest of the poems in Cris sur le bayou and Ancelet’s claim in the preface that “[c]ette collection n’imite rien. Elle vient du creux de la Louisiane” (“Préface,” Cris 12). The title of the collection then translates exactly this view: Cajun poetry is natural and emits the first sounds from deep down the bayou through its age-old oral traditions. It addresses the seeing and hearing senses, and it makes geography and music predestined subject matters. The words “bayou,” “acadienne,” and “Louisiane” in the title and subtitle of the collection are geo-cultural markers and refer to a recognizable Cajun setting, i. e., the bayous as a natural space in Louisiana and, more precisely, the area with an Acadian heritage. Likewise, the poems mainly paint portraits of the distinctive landscape with its fauna and flora, as well as the local seasons and their meaning for traditions. Significantly, one third of the poems in Cris sur le bayou describe the landscape, the seasons, and the climate.²⁰ Repeated references to oak trees, traditional celebrations, and Cajun music evoke images recognizable for the Cajun community. They give orientation and function like a Cajun art of memory. Some of them have even become virtual sites of memory for the Cajuns. The oak tree, for instance, has always figured as a defining symbol in Lou-

 A quarter of Arceneaux’s poems and over two thirds of Richard’s poems treat the subject of Nature.

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isiana.²¹ Famous are the long oak alleys leading up to such majestic plantation houses as the impressive Oak Alley, or Allée des chênes, of Oak Alley Plantation.²² Today, the oak tree is a popular motif in Cajun poetry, and the frequent references underline the strong attachment and identification with the environment. In contrast to its connotation to the plantation past, however, the oak tree in Cajun culture embodies the link between nature, memory, and Cajun identity as it has lent its French name to such places as Bayou Chene, Pointeaux-Chenes, or Baie des deux Chenes.²³ While the Evangeline Oak in St. Martinville, Louisiana, is meant to transmit a romantic image, the poetic reference to oak trees illustrates their endurance. As Bertille Beaulieu remarks, “[les] représentations du chêne vert qui défilent dans le paysage littéraire sont tirées du réel concret et mettent en évidence les attributs de cet arbre séculaire” (“Dimension” 7). Oak trees are considered a symbol of Cajun culture, standing tall against all odds and linking the past to the present. In his “Apologie du peuple français de Louisiane,” Cajun author Émile Des Marais gives a succinct description of the significance of the oak for the Cajuns: “Les chênes, titans dans la nature, nous ont accueillés. Au soleil couchant, à contre-jour, ils se dressaient devant nous, symboles de notre tenacité et de notre enracinement, comme nous, agrippés à la terre” (Allain and Ancelet 350 – 351). Besides connoting fecundity, the oak tree then also acquires the meaning of liberty for the Cajuns, a symbol which was also common during the French Revolution (Lach 85). Similarly, the oak tree in Arceneaux’s poem “Chêne vert” is “vert / Et noir, / Et fort, / Plein de glands / Qui tombent impuissant / En automne” (J. Arceneaux et al. 24). The deep roots and majestic height turn the oak tree into a transcendental symbol linking heaven and earth. The endurance of the oak is, however, not perennial. After the hint at fall there follows a lament, for the times are changing and the oak tree has to make room for civilization: “… les nouveaux toits / Qui ont envahi son ombrage, / Qui ont coupé ces racines / Pour faire  The oak tree has a symbolical value in Louisiana, and the Louisiana literature of the 70s draws considerably on the geographical and cultural environment. “Under the Green Oak Tree,” or “En bas du chêne vert” is a popular Cajun song by D. L. Menard, originally recorded in 1976 (Ancelet, “Cajun Music” 289). For a detailed analysis of the symbol of the oak tree in Louisiana see Beaulieu, “Dimension.”  Oak Alley Plantation in St. James Parish is known for its alley lined with 28 oak trees, planted around 1700 by an unknown Frenchman. The entangled branches create a shadowy canopy (Tauriac, La Louisiane 192– 193).  Richard’s first full-length poetry collection Faire récolte features poems which include the reference to Chênes au Marais, Richard’s place of inspiration where he moved in December 1981 (17).

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leurs fondations, / Qui ont tronqué ses branches / Pour faire de la place / Et pour embêter les écureuils / Qui se mêlent dans leurs courses / Après trois cents ans d’habitudes” (J. Arceneaux et al. 24). In the Cajun community, where life is centered around nature, the destruction of oak trees means the loss of the natural and wildlife habitat. The temporal reference at the end of the poem—“Après trois cents ans”—no doubt refers to the colonization of Louisiana in the second half of the seventeenth century. As an endangered species in the face of destroying elements represented by the continuous construction of new houses, Arceneaux’s oak tree represents an entity threatened by mainstream American culture. The link to the oak tree’s longevity, which reaches sometimes several hundred years, gives hope that Cajun culture will also endure (Beaulieu, “Dimension” 7). In another poem, “Poème Aux Grands Chênes Verts,” the speaker praises the strength coming from the past as well as the shelter the oak tree offers from both the sun and the rain: “… terrain d’énergie / venue travers plusieurs / siècles d’envoyage / de force lente / et patiente faire / tentacules d’humus / d’humidité de lourd ciel / gonflé d’eau // caverne comme au fond de la mer” (J. Arceneaux et al. 121).²⁴ Here, the oak symbolizes a by-gone past. Again, the defining characteristics are endurance—“plusieurs siècles d’envoyage,”²⁵—and protection through its shade—“caverne comme au fond de la mer”—, against the heat that reigns over Louisiana most of the year. Heat and humidity are an essential part of the Southwest Louisiana climate, but their role is ambiguous in Cris sur le bayou. On the one hand, the hot and humid climate in Arceneaux’s “Jeu d’été entêté” is like the suffocating influx of strangers and tourists (J. Arceneaux et al. 34). In “Nuit chaleureuse,” on the other hand, the suffocating heat and humidity connote also passion and love (J. Arceneaux et al. 59). In contrast to the unaccustomed strangers, the Cajuns consider the Louisiana heat as a defining part of their culture. The number of season-related poems is impressive and ranges from wet springs, to hot and humid summers, falls—symbolizing the speaker’s memory of his aging father —, and even winters. Usually, winters in South Louisiana are clement due to the seaside climate, and the local change of seasons is less pronounced than in other parts of the country. In “L’eau haute du printemps,” the speaker coun-

 As the geographical reference below the poem reveals, Richard was obviously inspired by “L’Allée des Chênes.” His second poetry collection, which also includes the poem, reveals that it cannot be the alley at Oak Alley Plantation, for the paratextual note at the end of the poem has an addendum: “chez Télesphore Roman, dans son allée de chênes, en Louisiane, janvier 1978” (Voyage 51).  “Envoyage” comes from the verb “envoyer,” “to toss” (“envoyage”).

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ters the common assumption that Louisiana does not have seasons: “Qui c’est qui dit / Qu’on a pas de saisons? Asteur, c’est la pluie, / Et ça monte jusqu’aux ponts /. … Ça mouille, ça mouille des avalasses. / Ça fait tout ressembler à terre basse” (J. Arceneaux et al. 58).²⁶ Richard’s poems also mostly focus on seasons, climate, and nature. His introductory poem sequence on spring and its blossoming flora, entitled “Mars,” “Avril,” “Mai,” and the dozen poems about water, ranging from rain, to fishing, to rainbows, underline the Cajun tropes of nature and water. Indeed, the image of water prevails in Cajun poetry. In springtime, heavy rain and high water are common meteorological traits in Louisiana. Water defines Louisiana, but not only because of the avalasse. The Atchafalaya Basin with its bayous and the coastal marshes stand for expansive waterscapes. In this context, Saint Médard’s Day has a special significance in the festive calendar of the Cajuns. “Ça fait souhaiter qu’on est pas pris / Avec les quarante jours et les quarante nuits” (J. Arceneaux et al. 58), concludes the speaker in “L’eau haute du printemps,” referring implicitly to la Saint Médard on June 8,²⁷ and the traditional belief that if it rains that day, it will rain for forty days (“Saint-Médard”).²⁸ These lingering popular beliefs testify to the Cajuns’ connection to agriculture and nature. Likewise, Richard’s two poems “Le Jour Avant Le Saint Médard” and “Saint Médard” attest to the endurance of this popular belief (J. Arceneaux et al. 124– 125).²⁹ Other cultural traditions and important festive days are Saint Valentine (Richard’s “Au Saint Valentin”), the rural Cajun Country Mardi Gras (J. Arceneaux’s “Mardi Gras, Mamou” and Richard’s “Partir au Grand Mardi Gras I, II, III”),³⁰ Ash Wednesday (Richard’s “Haiku de Mercredi des Cendres”), and Easter (Richard’s “Pâque”) which revives the theme of awakening: “… espérant le moindre / son le premier signal / de cette arrivée si attendue /… l’annonce en / tremblement d’air, / respiration d’ange. / Ouverture, Réveille et / Résurrection” (J. Arceneaux et al. 122). Although these dozen poems allude to a religious background, the

 “Avalasse” is archaic French. It is used repeatedly to describe rainfall and the subsequent rising waters of the bayou (“avalasse”).  Saint Médard de Noyon was a bishop from the region of Picardie in the sixth century and is considered the patron saint of farmers (Schäfer).  As a symbol of the cosmic order and a recurring feature in literature, the number “forty” symbolizes waiting, trial, and isolation. For instance, Moses’s stay on Mount Sinai, the Israelites’ journey through the desert, and the apocalypse, all last for forty days (Gramatzki 466).  The expression in Standard French is “la Saint Médard.”  The Cajun Country Mardi Gras differs greatly from the New Orleans Mardi Gras. See Ancelet, “Capitaine”; Lindahl and Ware; Ware; Bienvenu, Brasseaux, and Brasseaux.

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Catholic belief in Cajun culture today plays only a secondary role. Even if Cajun traditions have lost their original purpose, they continue to exist in different forms. Fixing them in a written form ensures their endurance and preserves the Cajuns’ collective memory. Apart from these geographical, climatic, and ritual cornerstones, the new Cajun poets draw on another deep-rooted tradition for poetic inspiration. As a matter of fact, Cajun culture’s heritage is best preserved in music. The success of Cajun music in the 1960s has made it one of the spearheads of the cultural preservation movement. Considering the song and folktale heritage, maintained through forms of entertainment, and the popularization of Cajun music, it is only natural that Cajun poetry owes much to the music and storytelling traditions. The emergence of Cajun poetry revealed the poets’ intention to link this written form to the poetics of orality present in songs (Ancelet, “L’Exception” 79). Cajun music is one of the fundamental ingredients in Cris sur le bayou and, therefore, responsible for creating a bridge from the oral to the written tradition. After all, five of the contributors were, or are, musicians. Several poems refer to such famous musicians as Blackie Frugé, Nathan Abshire, Larry Ménard, or Happy Fats Domino, and honor their contribution to the Cajun collective memory.³¹ A good example of the union between music and poetry is “Chanson pour Louise,” which, according to Ancelet, is not a song strictly speaking (Ancelet, “L’Exception” 79). The title recalls Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano composition Für Elise, and its content deals with the parting from Louise, presumably the speaker’s lover. On a figurative level, the poem connotes the parting from Louisiana as the speaker addresses his beloved country as Louise. Leaving Louisiana symbolizes in a way a sense of awakening, for it is when we have to let go of something that we realize the importance it holds for us. The majority of the texts referring to music in Cris sur le bayou are placed in the last third of the collection. Lejeune, son of a family of musicians from Pointe Noire in Acadia Parish, was influenced by other famous Cajun musicians, such as Amédé Ardoin, a Creole of color considered as the father of Cajun music and Zydeco, a spin-off of the Cajun music genre developed by the Creoles of color (Savoy 152). Most of Lejeune’s songs refer to towns in Acadiana such as Bosco, Grand Duralde, and Lacassine. Against this background, Lejeune can be considered as a medium transmitting the memory of other famous musicians to future generations.

 Regarding their structure and themes, six of Arceneaux’s poems relate to music: “Chanson pour Louise,” “À Larry Ménard et tout le reste,” “La nouvelle valse du samedi au soir,” “Blues du besoin,” the two-step “RPSVP,” and “À la musique.”

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Lejeune contributed not only to the development of Cajun culture, but also to the continuation of French. After World War II, the Cajuns and especially the homecoming GIs longed for the good old days which they found in, for instance, “La Valse du Pont d’Amour,” which Lejeune recorded in 1948 with his accordion in the old pre-American style. He sang with such an emotion and energy that for the first time after more than a decade, the Cajuns became attracted to this old music, his music: “Iry Lejeune représentait tout se qu’on avait peur de perdre. Sa musique symbolisait l’héritage. Son disque connut un succès inattendu et tout d’un coup la musique acadienne renaissait” (Allain and Ancelet 261). In incorporating Lejeune’s song lyrics in the collection, Ancelet both commemorates the musician, his songs, which become collective memory, and the mood of the time. Yet instead of being just lieux de mémoire, i. e., unchanging texts, his songs have started having a life of their own. Such contemporary Cajun musicians as Steve Riley, Wilson Savoy, and Wayne Toups ensure the continuation of Lejeune’s music. They reuse his songs, for instance, “The Convict Waltz,” and modulate both the melodies and texts to create their own songs (Riley, Savoy, and Toups). Transformed from their originally oral form, the afterlives of Lejeune’s songs present altered oral as well as written versions. In referring to defining features of Cajun culture such as landscape and Cajun traditions, the poets create a strong sense of place. This poetic construction of a distinct Cajun space creates a unique Cajun microcosm recognizable for the Cajuns and distinguishable from not only the Creole culture of New Orleans, but also the surrounding mainstream American culture.

4.1.2 Glimpses from the Past: An Acadian Amnesia? Although the past plays a vital role in the construction of identity and the understanding of a group’s collective memory, it is striking that the story of the genesis of the Cajuns is almost left out in Cris sur le bayou. The prevailing veneration of a romantic Acadian past, which had gained momentum in the second half of the twentieth century partly in reaction to technological progress, partly because of the bicentennial anniversary of 1755, was incompatible with the project of a poetry about Cajun contemporary identity. The historical revisions of Cajun history by Carl A. Brasseaux, which appeared in the 1990s, turned the tables and a more researched and differentiated view of the Acadian past entered the literary discourse.³²

 The magisterial work Histoire et Généalogie des Acadiens (1965) by Acadian historian Bona

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Equally, in the rich song and folktale tradition, scholars have not found a single song referring to the Grand Dérangement: “… aucune trace de ce qui fut l’évènement le plus traumatique de l’histoire acadienne” (Allain, “Quatre hectares” 304). Lejeune and most of the other poets do not mention the distant Acadian past, but the melancholy which expresses the personal and collective loss has been said to connote the loss endured during the Grand Dérangement. Many Cajun songs include much heartache where the singer usually cannot help but “brailler,” “cry”: Dewey Balfa, for example, has often remarked that the sad songs of the Cajuns, like the blues of American blacks, are expressions of a long-felt communal pain. They reach beyond the isolated situations described in individual songs to voice the despair of an entire culture. According to Balfa, the songs of loneliness and abandonment still carry memories of the Cajun exile of the eighteenth century. (Lindahl, “‘It’s only Folklore’” 151)

Lejeune experienced much misery in life himself, but the melancholy in his music also reaches into the collective past. Early Cajun poetry remains silent about the past for understandable reasons, for, whenever a group awakens to its culture, the focus lies on the present first, leaving no room for an examination of the past. Still, apart from the juxtaposition of Louisiana and Acadia in the subtitle— “poésie acadienne en Louisiane”—there is also evidence of the Acadian connection in a few poems. “Paris, 1979” and “Exil II” by Arceneaux, for instance, describe the exile a group of Cajuns experience outside of Louisiana. “Exil II” refers explicitly to the Acadian diaspora as three young Cajuns share the sense of alienation and feeling of living in another diaspora in “Paris, Québec, and Moncton”: “De nouveau, l’Acadie est en exil, / Volontairement pour une fois, pour une raison. / À Québec, à Moncton, à Paris, / Richard, Broussard, Guidry, / Jeunes Cadiens s’attachent à des nourrices / Pour se préparer pour une rerenaissance, / Cette fois vraie, née d’un mariage légitime / La musique ayant enfin épousé la langue” (J. Arceneaux et al. 37). This exile of the three Cajuns—presumably Zachary Richard, Earlene Broussard, one-time CODOFIL president and best-known member of the Théâtre Cadien (Waggoner, Une fantaisie collective 363), and Richard Guidry—in francophone cities, the “foster mothers” of Cajun culture, is, however, voluntary and necessary for the advent of the “rerenaissance,” a second renaissance, this time in a literary form, catalyzed by and merging with

Arseneault had already been published, but the study received more attention from the Cajuns only with the publication of Carl A. Brasseaux’s works in the 1990s.

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the Renaissance of Cajun music. Francophone Cajun literature is the result of the “legal marriage” between Cajun music and the French language. While both Arceneaux’s “Paris, 1979” and “Exil II” make implicit references to the historical memory of the Acadian deportation, his “La nouvelle valse du samedi au soir” denounces the saccharine portrayal of the Acadians in Longfellow’s Evangeline. The speaker makes fun of those Louisiana Acadians who still stick to the romantic image of an Acadie in Louisiana, and finishes with the long-lasting stereotype of the saintly Acadians: “Comme si on était toujours in the forest primeval / Après se promener avec Melle Bellefontaine / En Acadie, home of the happy, / Doux, doux, doux, / Content, heureux, fout-pas-mal” (J. Arceneaux et al. 23). The repetition of such famous stock phrases from Longfellow’s poem as “forest primeval” and “home of the happy” are subverted to present a sarcastic picture which ends with an expletive. A couple of Richard’s poems also shed light on a growing consciousness about the Cajuns’ past. “Poème Aux Canards Sauvages,” for instance, contains an implicit reference to the Cajun-Acadian connection: “Dans les marais, / Les ailes, / La mémoire / Venue du grand nord, / Repose, repose” (J. Arceneaux et al. 118). The theme of migration and the juxtaposition of “marais,” symbol of Cajun Country, to “grand nord,” symbol of francophone Canada, establish an imaginary Acadia embracing all descendants of the scattered Acadians. Voices of the distant past emerge especially in two other poems: “Réveille” and “La Ballade de Beausoleil,” the only two poems that have become Richard’s signature songs.³³ “Réveille,” the second poem in Richard’s section and his most performed and anthologized song, recalls the misfortunes of the speaker’s “grand grand grand grand père” (J. Arceneaux et al. 113). The speaker time-travels back to the moment of the expulsion and describes how his ancestor was taken away and imprisoned by the “goddams,” the British soldiers, who also burned his ancestor’s house and harvest, and tore the family apart. This poem embodies a threefold “cri,” uniting the past with the present. On a concrete level, it reenacts the past with “Réveille” as a wake-up call for the Acadians about the approaching British soldiers. On a symbolic level, “Réveille” calls out the injustices committed to the Acadians in 1755, and at the same time wants to alert the Cajuns about yet another American invasion of their culture. Through the imperative in the first line, “Réveille, réveille, c’est les goddams qui viennent,” “[o]n sent viscéralement l’appel au réveil, non seulement dans une histoire lointaine, mais aussi dans la génération contemporaine,” explains Ance-

 In fact, the two poems are originally songs: “Réveille” is featured on the album Bayou des mystères (1976) and “Ballade de Beausoleil” on Migration (1978).

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let (“L’Exception” 80). It simultaneously commemorates the past and calls attention to the imminent danger Cajun culture finds itself in. The origin of the song can be traced back to Richard’s first trip to France in 1973. Deeply impressed by the folk scene in Brittany, especially by French folk musician Alan Stivell, Richard composed “Réveille” in a stroke of inspiration shortly after his return to the USA (Amédée and Brûlé 135 – 136). In 1975, in the midst of the Acadian revival in the Canadian Maritimes, Richard performed “Réveille” at Les Veillées d’automne in Moncton, New Brunswick, and was cheered by the Acadian public.³⁴ Inspired by the Acadian nationalism he had just experienced, he sought to incite the Cajuns to also vindicate their cultural and linguistic heritage. When Richard performed “Réveille” in Lafayette, Louisiana, at the second Tribute to Cajun Music Festival that same year, his militant activism backfired. While a Canadian read out a pamphletary call-to-arms and Zachary was brandishing his fist, a self-made flag showing an oak tree in the center and above it the words “solidarité et égalité” was rolled out. He received a luke-warm reception from the uncomprehending audience, and his cause was lost in front of the apolitical Cajuns. It was not lost on James Domengeaux, though, who, denouncing any radicalism, barred him from future festivals (Ancelet and Morgan 95). Already in 1972, Domengeaux had emphasized the non-political nature of the Louisiana French Movement in Louisiana: “What the French Movement means is that the Council will give to Louisianians the pleasure, the power, the influence of speaking two, and more languages. I would be the first to sabotage the Council and fight French if I thought the movement was a nationalistic one” (Domengeaux 5). Richard’s coup at the Tribute in 1975 remains the only instance when Cajun culture came close to a certain Cajun nationalism. Banned from the Louisiana music scene, Richard continued to perform “Réveille” in Canada, moving fanatic crowds. The turning point came finally in 1993, when Richard undertook again to sing “Réveille” at the Cajun Music Festival, almost twenty years after his calamitous scene at the second Tribute. This time the public sang along with Richard (Ancelet and Gould 142). An even more powerful moment was Richard’s emotional and crowd-pleasing performance at the first Acadian World Congress in Moncton in 1994. As one music critic noted, not only did the performance enter the collective memory of the Franco-American music repertoire, the spec-

 Les veillées d’automne in Montreal were documented in Gosselin. The fourth episode of the documentary, “Le son des Cajuns, 4e partie: Réveille!” by André Gladu and Michel Brault, also features the Veillées.

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tators’ reaction suggested a silver lining for French in America: “La prestation du plus célèbre Cajun, interprétant ‘Réveille’ lors du spectacle de clôture à la Plage Parlee au Nouveau Brunswick, demeurera sans contredit dans les annales de la Franco-Amérique chansonnière. Le silence religieux d’une foule subjuguée par la parole laisse entrevoir un vent d’espoir” (Lamothe 45). Richard especially impacted the younger generation such as the Cajun band Réveille that first performed at the Cajun Music Festival in 1993. “Réveille” also briefly refers to the Acadian folk hero Joseph Broussard, dit Beausoleil. He receives, however, more attention in “La Ballade de Beausoleil,” the second text of Cris sur le bayou reaching into the distant past and, in fact, the first tribute to Beausoleil in Cajun literature. Beausoleil is known as the chief of militant Acadians opposing the English and leader of the first group of Acadians arriving in Louisiana (see Perrin, Acadian Redemption). Since the turn of the twentieth century, this Acadian folk hero has gained in popularity as the Cajuns started to realize the potential in commemorating an authentic historical figure. Strikingly, the Acadian resistance around Beausoleil contrasts with the passivity and resignation of the Acadians in Longfellow’s poem. In Warren A. Perrin’s opinion, “there was a need for a tangible symbol of the Acadians’ history which all Acadians could respect” (Acadian Redemption 122– 123). This symbol ended up being Beausoleil. Curiously, like the other poems of the collection, Richard’s poems on Acadian history are written in the present tense, thus not participating in the time frame typical of narration, and eluding the control of dominant history narratives. This allows the theme of displacement to transcend time and space, and become a shared experience of today’s Cajuns. In contrast to the quasi-absence of the distant past, the collection is rich in references to the more recent past. For instance, in “Réaction,” the speaker uses a historical Cajun term to distinguish between “le vrai monde” and the “Cadiens dorés,” who exhibit the stereotypical Cajun for the sake of touristic purposes, keeping quiet and being compliant. Arguing that the “real Cajuns” are not better than the “golden Cajuns,” the speaker compares them to “ces marais-bouleurs dans le temps / Qui avaient l’habitude d’accrocher leurs chapeaux / Sur leurs couteaux / Plantés dans le mur dans la salle de danse / chez Esta Hébert” (J. Arceneaux et al. 19). “Marais bouleurs” is a term which goes back to the oral tradition and refers to the lieux-dit of Marais Bouleur, a swampy area around Cankton where the Lafayette, Acadia, and St. Landry Parishes meet.³⁵ The local place name is a composition of “marais,” meaning swamp in French, and “bouleur,”

 The bigger towns are Church Point in the northwest, Grand Coteau in the northeast, Carencro in the southeast, and Rayne in the southwest.

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allegedly a mispronunciation of Buhler, the name of a local German landowner (W. J. Thibodeaux, “Marais Bouleur”). Today, the marais bouleurs refer to the legendary group of marauders from around the turn of the twentieth century, known for their hard work, but also for their ruthless habit of causing trouble and crashing dance hall sessions in the Marais Bouleur area. The other enigmatic reference in the poem is Esta Hébert, the owner of a dance hall which was “the closest public meeting place on the edge of civilization,” who functioned as arbitrator between the band of ruffians and the guests (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales 186). Although the place of Marais Bouleur is not represented on contemporary roadmaps, the legend of the marais bouleurs constitutes one of the most famous historical tales in the Cajun repertoire of the Lafayette area. According to Clence Ancelet,³⁶ the members of the band were easily recognizable: All wore big black hats with a red kerchief around the neck. Additionally, “[a] bully from the Marais Bouleur traditionally indicated his presence in the dance halls by sticking his knife in a post or wall and hanging his hat on it” (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 106). Like the marais bouleurs, the real Cajuns are hard-working, but their actions are not conducive to saving their culture for the fact that they keep quiet about their ability to speak Cajun French will not be helpful for the preservation of the French language. The speaker of the poem denounces not only the self-display of the “Cadiens dorés,” but also the true Cajuns for their “silence maudit” (J. Arceneaux et al. 19). Moreover, the comparison to the marais bouleurs includes an underlying hint: The only remains of the band of ruffians who existed over a century ago seem to be folktales —a fate which might also be in store for the Cajuns if they do not change their attitude. The cultural history surrounding the legend of the marais bouleurs presents an interesting case of the construction and development of collective memory. Although it is absent from maps, it is still a reality in the Cajuns’ minds and memory. It is not surprising that the term “marais-bouleurs” appears in a poem by Arceneaux, alias Ancelet. For the presence of the legend can be found in the repertoire of the local Cajun cast Nous Autres. Martin Wèbre et les Marais Bouleurs (une pièce en français ‘cadien par Nous Autres) is a theatrical adaptation of the historical legend and was first performed in 1978 (Waggoner, Une fantaisie collective 3). Together with lay actors, Barry Ancelet staged the story drawing on the plot of the historical tale. The play is based on a version

 Clence Ancelet was Barry Ancelet’s uncle and one of Ancelet’s interviewees for his folktale collection. Thanks to Ancelet’s fieldwork and research, which he started in 1973, the family story was fixed in his groundbreaking folktale collection (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales lviii).

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handed down in Barry Ancelet’s family which also features Martin Weber, who was a constable and the husband of a sister of Barry Ancelet’s grandmother (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales 187). The legend of the notorious constable of the village of Ossun, Louisiana, was known to local storytellers, who described him as a courageous strongman. His bailiwick included the northwest corner of Lafayette Parish, until relatively recently on the western edge of civilized country. … An abundance of ruffians in the nearby Marais Bouleur made it virtually impossible to keep a dance hall open for any length of time (despite the best efforts of owner Sully Babineaux and others), so folks from that area frequently came to Esta Hebert’s hall in Ossun and to Forrestier’s hall in Vatican. (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 108)

As a renowned scholar and author of numerous works on Cajun culture, Ancelet is responsible for the dissemination of the historical tale. He contributed to its consolidation through the creation of the above-mentioned theater play based on family memories and its inclusion in the folktale collection. Although the tale is predominantly an Ancelet-family memory, and, according to a scene in the play Martin Wèbre, probably unknown to people from Erath in Vermillion parish, 35 miles south of Cankton (Waggoner, Une fantaisie collective 159), other instances refer to the marais bouleurs. The first written reference to the bullies is allegedly found in the song “La valse du marais bouleur” by Cleoma Breaux Falcon, the famous female pioneer of Cajun music who first recorded it in 1928.³⁷ Cleoma Breaux Falcon was from Crowley, only 25 miles northeast from Cankton, and obviously familiar with the marais bouleurs legend. Likewise, it is no surprise that Darrell Bourque, who grew up in Church Point, less than 20 miles from Cankton, entitled one poem in his first poetry collection Plainsongs, “Plainsongs of the Marais Bouleur” (12– 13). Despite its absence on local maps, “marais bouleur” has endured through its mediation in various genres such as music, drama, and poetry, and has become part of Cajun collective memory. Other allusions to more recent historical events include the feats and failures of the promotion of French in Louisiana. Arceneaux’s poem “Colonihilisme” and its correlate poem “Assimilation,” for instance, investigate the tragic consequences of the ban on French in 1921 and the complicity of some Cajuns in the assimilation process. Not only did Americans cause the demise of French, Cajuns themselves are guilty, for in assimilating they renounce their own heritage.

 There exist various titles: “Marie Buller Waltz,” “Marie Buller,” “Buller’s Swamp Waltz” (Savoy 102; R. Brasseaux, Cajun Breakdown 61).

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Such other poems as “Réaction,” “Un état bilingue,” or “Dix ans après” meditate with skepticism, sometimes even sarcasm, upon the achievements of the CODOFIL and their effects a decade later. In “Dix ans après,” a poem written in 1978, the speaker concludes that Cajun culture is “une orpheline retardée / qui sait pas encore s’expliquer elle-même, / Qui sait pas encore décider pour elle-même” (J. Arceneaux et al. 25). The culture, symbolized by a retarded orphan, is still in the phase of awakening. Concerned with the current and future state of Cajun culture, the poets attack those Cajuns who they view as betraying their culture and assimilating into mainstream American culture. The repetition of the phrase “Pour sauver l’héritage” (J. Arceneaux et al. 22, 46, 113) accentuates the urgency of preserving the Cajun heritage and, at the same time, transmits a prospective view. Similarly, in Arceneaux’s poem “Pour mes enfants que je n’ai pas encore faits” (1978), the speaker gloats over surprising linguists—“pouvoir étonner quelques linguistes” (J. Arceneaux et al. 21)—who see the death of Cajun culture as the only possible future. At the end of the day, the core message of the poems is that anything is but accomplished; the objective to save Cajun culture has to be fought for every day.

4.1.3 Negotiating Cajun Identity Apart from Cajun cultural traditions and the past, the manner in which outsiders have defined Cajun identity in the past influences the Cajun collective memory in a substantial way (Le Menestrel, Voie 35). Cajun poetry presents a people torn between two languages and two cultures, a people caught between the complexities of assimilation and the will to dismantle stereotypical views. Especially language, as a pillar of collective memory, is of paramount importance for identity formation. Understandably, the French language stimulates the Cajuns’ growing awareness of their culture and identity, and it features as a central theme in Cris sur le bayou: By overcoming the obstacles of writing in Louisiana French, and by choosing to express themselves in that code, local writers are demonstrating cultural unity and solidarity and, in effect, are making a social statement. In other words, the orthography is itself a presentation of oneself, one’s identity, a direct reflection of the culture. In light of the language shift, the writers are creating a norm and archiving the code. (Brown, “Social Consequences” 84)

The key message of the collection is the consensus among the poets to write in French and to express their self-understanding in French. Furthermore, the poets

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consciously chose language variability over codification. Since neither Cajun French nor Creole French have a written form, the poets introduced a variable form of French, adding Standard French and English to Cajun and Creole French to achieve more linguistic freedom, thus creating a malleable written code of their own. The poems express the Cajuns’ capability to write—in French and about their identity—, to enact and accomplish authorship. They store cultural perspectives, attitudes, and values for future generations. And yet, storage is not the ultimate goal. Instead, the poets strive to consolidate collective memory through change and improvisation. Indeed, as Ancelet explains in an interview, Cajun poetry is far from documenting Cajun culture: “La poésie n’est pas une documentation mais une impression, une représentation, une métaphore: elle n’essaye pas d’expliquer ce qui se passe dans le même détail qu’un travail historique ou sociologique. Elle joue là-dessus, encadre ou intensifie à un moment. Ce n’est pas à la poésie d’écrire l’histoire moderne de la Louisiane” (Marteau 204). Besides denouncing linguistic assimilation and codification, the poets promote a cultural variability and create a distinct Cajun poetics. Adapting and replacing stereotypes and clichés, they innovate Cajun expressions and motifs. They review clichéd portrayals and counter the distortion of their collective memory. In using language variability and introducing a cultural counter-memory which goes both against American culture and Cajun stereotypes, they give evidence of Cajun literature as improvisational art and contribute thus to the revitalization of the Cajun collective memory. Ultimately, besides the cry of a newborn or a bird call, a cry can also stand for outrage and rebellion. The outcry confirming the presence of the Cajuns is expressed through the medium of language. As the first written statement about Cajun culture and identity, Cris sur le bayou becomes a performative utterance —an utterance which, far from only describing the status quo, also brings about major transformations.³⁸ In the present case, it is a threefold change including codification, a call for action, and intertextuality. Moreover, a number of poems clearly indicate that “Cris sur le bayou stands as a poésie engagée in Acadiana, a means to instigate social and political change” (Guenin-Lelle 440), vindicating the cultural and social objectives of the Cajun activists. This kind of poetry prods the reader to reflect and take a stand concerning these objectives. Lastly, the creative use of intertextual references take on a performative  J. L. Austin first introduced the term “performative utterance” which describes how what is said is done, in contrast to simply describing the action. Especially minorities such as slaves or mentally disabled persons make use of the concept of performative utterance to protest against their alleged incapacity of writing and self-expression. Writing then becomes a means to show the “capacity for—and accomplishment of—the fact of self-authorship” (Bérubé 341).

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function. The linguistic diversity, the reflective and critical views, and the repetitive use of phrases known from oral traditions such as Cajun music turn Cris sur le bayou into a performative utterance. Although the contributors are part of the generation whose parents stopped speaking French to their children after French was banned from the school grounds, they know French and consciously choose to write in French. The contemporary francophone Cajun poets were taught French despite the stigma. The choice of a mixed code mirrors the linguistic history and gives insight into the defining elements of the Cajun collective memory. The dilemma of the Cajuns then resides in the opposition of silence and protest. Their attitude before the cultural and literary emancipation can be compared to Julia Kristeva’s stranger who is stuck in a “mutisme polyforme”: Ne pas parler sa langue maternelle. Habiter des sonorités, des logiques coupées de la mémoire nocturne du corps, du sommeil aigre-doux de l’enfance. Porter en soi comme un caveau secret, ou comme un enfant handicapé—chéri et inutile—, ce langage d’autrefois qui se fane sans jamais vous quitter. Vous vous perfectionnez dans un autre instrument, comme on s’exprime avec l’algèbre ou le violon. Vous pouvez devenir virtuose avec ce nouvel artifice qui vous procure d’ailleurs un nouveau corps, tout aussi artificiel, sublimé—certains disent sublime. Vous avez le sentiment que la nouvelle langue est votre résurrection. … Vos maladresses ont du charme, dit-on, elles sont même érotiques, surenchérissent les séducteurs. … Ainsi, entre deux langues, votre élément est-il le silence. (Étrangers 26 – 27)

Like Arceneaux’s metaphor of Cajun culture as a retarded orphan in “Dix ans après,” Kristeva’s comparison of the stranger to a disabled person translates the supposed disadvantage of bicultural minorities amid dominant monolingual cultures. Performative utterance, as opposed to silence, is meant to be heard and remembered. And, indeed, being part of a poésie engagée, most of the poems in Cris sur le bayou protest against the rapid and blind assimilation of the Cajuns to American culture and the English language, against the Anglo-American cultural and linguistic hegemony, against the linguistic stigmatization through derogatory and stereotypical depictions by outsiders, and the resulting “alienation caused by cultural rifts between the poets and the rest of society” (Bernard, Cajuns 131). Incidentally, the use of the French language and the creation of a distinct Cajun poetics in a number of poems constitute forms of protest which break the silence and ultimately become remembering. 4.1.3.1 The Linguistic Question “[L]e langage,” wrote the French linguist Antoine Meillet, “est éminemment un fait social” (16) and thus part of the collective memory of a group. As the first Cajun poetry collection to be written in Louisiana French, Cris sur le bayou is a pioneer work in Louisiana and evidence of a Cajun social framework. Ancelet

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reminds us that we cannot take the new written tradition in Louisiana for granted: “[I]l faut se rappeler que la grande majorité des franco-louisianais n’ont jamais eu l’occasion d’avoir une éducation en français. Leur langue maternelle orale, c’est bien le français, mais leur langue maternelle écrite, c’est l’anglais” (“Préface,” Cris 11). Unlike nineteenth-century New Orleans, Cajun Country has no genuine written heritage. Thus, Cris sur le bayou introduces a different French heritage, based on the French language, but lacking a written code and defined by various dialects. Significantly, it is thanks to the French language that the poets were able to represent Cajun Country according to their imagination: “La venue au monde du pays des Franco-Louisianais, c’est donc aussi et surtout sa venue au monde par le biais de l’écriture, de la parole” (Tardif 178). After years of stigmatization, French came to be considered as the “langue problématique” with an uncertain future. The literary renaissance was a major turning point: “On avait commencé à écrire dans la langue problématique, ce qui était une très grande étape dans le mouvement vers une renaissance parmi les Acadiens et les Créoles” (J. Arceneaux et al. 10). The use of French emphasizes the endurance of a Cajun social framework in the midst of mainstream American culture. Several linguistic facts motivated the authors: Ceux qui ont écrit des pièces, des poèmes, des chansons et des contes ont été motivés par leurs propres besoins et intérêts, par des pressions qui venaient de deux sources essentielles: d’une part, le désir de préserver une spécificité orale dans leurs écrits, et, de l’autre, le désir de communiquer visuellement en l’absence de l’oral. (Ancelet, “Valoriser” 145)

The wish to preserve and to establish written evidence of the existence of Cajun French guided the poets’ project. Debating about which form would best render the oral tradition, the poets established a written norm of French void of rules and marked by a continuous variability. The poets decided not to judge each writer’s French and allowed each to choose his or her own strategy. Some tended more to visually represent the orality of Cajun French, others looked more to ways of communicating without hampering the pronunciation.³⁹ The poems then mirror not only the problem of writing in Cajun French, but also the linguistic freedom of a non-codified language. The linguistic inconsistencies have been compared to pre-sixteenth-century French, with a Rabelaisian variability (Ance-

 Karla Guillory and Jean Arceneaux strove to emphasize the visual aspect and not the pronunciation like Clifton, Marcantel, Guidry, Richard (Marteau 198).

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let, “Valoriser” 135).⁴⁰ Without any value judgment, these inconsistencies show considerable linguistic potential (Marteau 204). With respect to the vocabulary, a glossary is appended at the end of the collection, giving the necessary explanations for words which do not exist in Standard French, such as, for instance, “envoyage” or “patasa” (bass). Several poems are indicative of the poets’ proficiency in French, including linguistic puns such as “Eau travaille,” “water works” in English, the title of a poem by Arceneaux describing a road trip to work on a highway over a watery expanse and which is homophonous to “au travail,” or “to work” (J. Arceneaux et al. 57). References to typical Cajun places such as Mamou, Lacassine, Grand Durald, Grand Basin (“bassin” in French; obviously Richard’s term for the Atchafalaya Basin), Lac Begneaud, and Marais Bouleur contribute not only to locating the Cajun collective memory but establish a French enclave amid American culture. English place names are either left out or spelled according to the French pronunciation. Like the literary stereotype and the geographical references in song lyrics, the French place names in the poems revitalize French and the collective memory of the Cajuns. They are also a means to ostracize outsiders, for several place references are known solely to insiders, such as Marais Bouleur or Lac Begneaud, e. g. in the poem “Trouve Lac Begneaud” (J. Arceneaux et al. 139). According to Melanie Tardif, the mentioning of French place names in Cajun Country is meant to delimit the territory. It corresponds not only to taking possession of the territory (Tardif 177) but is a means to make the French context in Louisiana come into existence and fix it in the collective memory. Sometimes the poets render the places in a different phonetic transcription. In “Tambours,” for example, the first five locales the speaker drives past on his way from Baton Rouge to Lafayette on the Interstate 10 are signposted: “Après brûler le chemin / Entre Baton Rouge et Lafayette, / Après regarder en avant / Et dans le miroir / En succession rapide. / Grosse Tête / Maringouin / Bayou des Glaises / Ouisqui Baie” (J. Arceneaux et al. 38).⁴¹ “Ouisqui Baie,” however, is impossible to locate for non-Louisianians because it is the phonetic translation in French of “Whis-

 Ancelet repeatedly compares Cajun French to the French at the time of writer François Rabelais. See back cover of J. Arceneaux et al.; Marteau 204; Ancelet, “Valoriser” 146. Two incidents mark the affirmation of French in the sixteenth century. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts was officially ratified in 1539 and called for the use of French in all official documents. In 1549, poet Joachim du Bellay published Défense et illustration de la langue française, a manifesto advocating the use of French as national and literary language (Walter 95).  Used as a preposition, “après” means “in the process of” (“après³”).

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key Bay.”⁴² The name refers to the Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel which Interstate 10 crosses after passing the stream Bayou des Glaises. Through this playful handling of language, the Anglo-American presence is completely excluded in this “virtual French utopia” (Guenin-Lelle 443). Richard’s poems best show the linguistic inconsistencies. Taught how to speak French by his grandparents, Richard never learned how to write it. For Richard, the spelling and grammar mistakes in his poems are a necessary means to express that he was never taught French in school: “Zachary Richard avait dit lui-même, concernant sa poésie, que ses fautes d’orthographe faisaient partie de son message: on lui avait enlevé l’occasion d’étudier le français quand il était jeune; donc ses erreurs faisaient partie de son message” (Marteau 198). As a result, his poems reappropriate his ancestors’ memory and make it collective memory, which simultaneously becomes a performative utterance on a linguistic level. Interestingly, Richard’s œuvre reveals a development from a loose handling of the French language in his early poems to a tendency to use Standard French in the later works. For instance, in the original version of “La Ballade de Beausoleil” in Cris sur le bayou, Richard uses such older French spellings as “cestait” for c’était, and “çaurait” for “ça aurait.” The online version of the song lyrics, however, is in Standard French (Richard, “Réveille;” Richard, “Ballade”). Other changes include the lexis. The refrain of the song “Réveille” repeats “Pour sauver le village,” whereas the poem in Cris sur le bayou ends with “Pour sauver l’héritage,” a phrase which is repeated several times and has now become a motto in the Cajun cause.⁴³ The appeal to the collective memory is stronger in the poem than in the song (which focuses on the place, the saving of the village) since saving the heritage encompasses the past, the present, and the future. The dilemma of “being torn between two cultures and two languages, one spoken because it was the mother tongue, the other because it was necessary to survive in the modern world” (Bernard, Cajuns 131), is an ongoing concern in Cajun poetry. The contemporary generation of Louisiana writers is looking for forms and stylistic expressions which render in a written form what they have to say while preserving their own voice of identity and searching a way to communicate with the outside world (Ancelet, “L’Exception” 78). Ancelet affirms that they don’t seek to be French but prefer to be themselves in French (“L’Exception” 78). Karla Guillory, for instance, calls her poems “pensées frança This recalls James Donald Faulk’s unsuccessful attempt to introduce a Cajun dictionary with an English phonetic transcription.  Arceneaux’s poem “190 West” also mentions “pour sauver l’héritage” in the second line (J. Arceneaux et al. 46).

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ises” because she expresses in French what she doesn’t dare say or think in English (Allain and Ancelet 276). The hiatus between English and French, and the problem of the dominance of the English language is broached in Arceneaux’s “Schizophrénie linguistique,” a poem reflecting on the disastrous effect of banning French from schools. In mixing both French and English, it describes the divided attitude toward French and English. The repetition of “I will not speak French on the school grounds,” a phrase which Cajun schoolchildren were told to write a hundred times as a punishment for speaking French on the school grounds,⁴⁴ recalls the blame of the past and becomes a symbol of linguistic discrimination. Arceneaux goes even further and, like a child who learns to speak, probes the linguistic territory with such portmanteaus⁴⁵ as “génosuicide,” an amalgamation of “genocide” and “suicide,” or the neologism “colonihilisme,” which yokes together “colonialism” and “nihilism” to describe the Anglo-American dominance over Cajun culture. The poets’ choice to write poetry also results from the wish to uphold the oral tradition. The use of French, however, should not be taken for granted. It is obvious that the written poems transform the forms and functions of the oral tradition because poetry requires forms and functions of its own. Thus, the logical consequence is an intrinsically hybrid poetic genre: Les écrivains semblent essayer d’utiliser ces images, ces stratégies d’expression mais d’une façon complètement nouvelle: on ne pourrait pas dire d’un poème de Zachary Richard ou de Debbie Clifton que c’est de l’oralité pure. Ça respecte l’oralité, ça utilise l’oralité, mais c’est une forme hybride, ‘créolisé,’ qui se veut aussi visuelle sur la page. Et même si on lit ces poèmes à haute voix dans une performance, il n’y a aucun conteur ou chanteur qui l’aurait fait comme ça. C’est quelque chose de nouveau, d’hybride. On fait référence à des effets culturels, sociaux ou historiques mais d’une façon complètement différente. (Marteau 199)

With folktales, music, and poetry as foundation for the new Cajun literature, there is no doubt that orality is the major influence. While the poets protest against the discrimination of Cajun identity and culture, they also self-consciously analyze the writing process. They are dependent on the written transmission as it represents the only way to depict Cajun identity and keep a record of French. And yet, they also question the utility of their writing because, since it is in French and those proficient in French are disappearing,

 See Hadley Castille’s song “200 Lines: I Must Not Speak French.”  A portmanteau is “a word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from a blending of two or more distinct forms” (“portmanteau”).

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nobody will read or understand it. In Arceneaux’s “Combustion spontanée” the speaker laments that nobody will read the lines since poetry in general is devalued and supposed to be in English: “Pourquoi écrire. / Personne va lire. / Tu perds ton temps / À cracher dans le vent. / La poésie, c’est grand, / Pas pour les enfants, / Ni les illettrés, / Ni les acculturés. / Ils ont rien à dire / Et, ça qui est pire, / Même s’ils en avaient, / Il faudrait le faire en anglais” (J. Arceneaux et al. 33). There is nonetheless a change in the Cajuns’ behavior. Some do react (see “Réaction”) instead of remaining passive and tolerating American assimilation. Things are about to change: “Mais ça change dans la grange” (J. Arceneaux et al. 33). The winds of change are perceptible, and the smoke the Cajuns make will render them more visible, like smelling “fumier” (J. Arceneaux et al. 30, 65), manure: “Il y a du nouveau foin / entassé dans le coin / Et il va se faire voir, lui. / Il a attrapé de la pluie” (J. Arceneaux et al. 33). 4.1.3.2 A New Cajun Poetics The cultural change, the smoking “new hay,” is also visible on a rhetorical level. The poets operate with motifs, symbols, and references to highlight the ambivalent nature of Cajun identity. Arceneaux’s final duo “Enfants du silence, I” and “Enfants du silence, II” introduce the motif of silence and the image of the mute Cajun. The speaker in both poems claims that the Cajuns are harming themselves with their silent acceptance of their disappearing culture. Thus, the two poems, opposing silence to protest, are a call for action to end the silence: Enfants du silence, / Levons nos voix ensemble. / Chantons du cœur en chœur, / Ils commencent à nous entendre. / La marée américaine / Commence enfin à baisser / Après tant d’années / De nous avoir noyés / Par les fossés dans nos levées. / Il faut réclamer notre terre / Pour replanter nos rêves / Dans le fumier de nos peines. / Le soleil brille fort encore, / C’est la saison acadienne. (J. Arceneaux et al. 65)

Now is the “Acadian season,” the time to speak up together, to finish with the Cajuns’ passiveness and assimilating attitude, “silence maudit,” and to stop the tide of Americanization threatening to drown Cajun culture. It is time to break the silence, to make the smoking “new hay” visible. The voicing of an audible Cajun identity is an act of remembering and is necessary for the culture’s continuity. The wake-up call denounces both the pressure coming from American assimilation and the passive willingness of the Cajuns to assimilate to the mainstream American culture. Franco-Ontarian author and critic François Paré identified silence as a marker of minority literatures: “… la peur du cataclysme … cette peur folle de disparaître. Se taire pour toujours. Ourdir le

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silence” (18). From this it follows that if the Cajuns keep silent, they will forget their heritage, and Cajun culture itself will disappear and be forgotten. In “Enfants du silence, II,” the speaker calls on the audience even more vehemently to counter the long-lasting silence: Enfants du silence, crions ensemble. / On comprend tous notre parenté commune: / Un silence comme l’attente d’un chanteur avant son tour, / Un silence, comme deux amoureux qui découvrent une faiblesse, / Un silence comme un cri étouffé par le tremblement de la tristesse, / Un silence comme le froid dans le creux de la honte, / Un silence comme le grincement de la peine, / Un silence comme le feu dans les yeux de la rage, / Un silence comme la mort en face avant son temps. (J. Arceneaux et al. 66)

The anaphoric use of “un silence” combined with the speaker’s injunction “crions ensemble” is a clear exhortation to remember, for silence becomes an act of forgetting since no memories will be shared and transmitted to posterity. This development from a silent culture—a minor culture (“unmündig” in German, i. e., incapable to express one’s own opinion),⁴⁶ at the risk of falling into oblivion—to a mature, self-confident culture also corresponds to the act of awakening. In order to be heard, the voice needs to be loud and strong. A “cri” usually carries a message: It can express enthusiasm or mourning, both leading to a cathartic solution. Even a silent cry, as depicted in the Skrik series of Norwegian painter Edward Munch to represent existential angst, seems to carry an audible message. Cris sur le bayou severs the silence and testifies to the existence of a concrete body. The Cajun poets assert that the Cajuns have not disappeared. In order to save Cajun culture, its heritage has to be remembered. Silence is also decried in Arceneaux’s “Réaction.” The speaker takes stock of “cette renaissance du français-là” and concludes that a decade after the reintroduction of French in Louisiana, a difference between “le vrai monde et les autres” is discernible. The “true Cajuns” are almost invisible presumably because of their low social status and silent submission.⁴⁷ They will not stand up for defending Cajun French: “‘Nous autres, on parle pas le vrai français. / Nous autres, on parle juste le français cadien’” (J. Arceneaux et al. 19; my emphasis). The act of becoming invisible, however, is tantamount to dissolution and forgetting. As to the “Cadiens dorés,” the wealthier, Americanized Cajuns, they contribute to the distortion of Cajun culture with their parades, “[t]heir fanfarades” (J. Arce The Latin word “infans,” meaning mute, incapable to speak, has come to be used as an expression for “infant, child” (“infant [n.]”).  The motif of the invisible man, introduced by Ralph Ellison in his novel Invisible Man in 1952, has become recurrent in francophone minority literatures. See, for instance, the bilingual story L’homme invisible / The Invisible Man (1981) by Franco-Ontarian author Patrice Desbiens.

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neaux et al. 19), which is a different kind of forgetting. Using metaphors, similes, and irony, the speaker denounces the silent assimilation of the authentic Cajuns as well as the exaggerated Louisiana tourism promoted by the “Cadiens dorés” in Cajun Country, which will finally become an amusement park showcasing the Cajuns: “‘Where can we see some Cajuns?’ / Ça me fait de la peine, / il y a pas encore un zoo. / Mais ça s’en vient. Ça s’appellera / Six Flags over the Cajuns” (J. Arceneaux et al. 20; bold print in original).⁴⁸ As in amusement parks, Cajuns act and fake their identity to the point of forsaking that very identity. The predicament of the true Cajuns betraying and bringing about the demise of their culture is echoed in Émile Des Marais’s prose piece “Les Faux Jetons.” The speaker compares the “vrais Cadiens,” the Cajun activists, to “faux jetons” because, even if they maintain a certain Cajun identity, they are educated the American way and finally leave some of their heritage behind: Nous, nous sommes de faux Cadjins. Nous ne parlons pas le vrai langage Cadjin. Nous ne jouons pas la vraie musique cadjine. Nous-autres, on est des Cadjins en l’imitation, des faux jetons. Nous sommes des non-authentiques. Les authentiques se foutent pas mal. Les authentiques se déguisent en paillasse et se garochent gaiement après les poules qui courent. Après tout, un Cadjin instruit, c’est un non-sens comme si on disait un cercle carré, un vide plein. … Dès qu’un Cadjin est assez ouvert d’esprit pour avoir la moindre prisette de conscience, c’est déjà trop tard. Il n’est plus Cadjin. Il a perdu sa cadjinitude. Il ne fait plus parti du peuple. Il est comme nous du non-peuple. (J. Arceneaux et al. 80 – 81)

In the end, it seems as if there is no solution because even education leads to cultural loss. The “vrai Cadien” is an oxymoron, and like the “faux Cadien,” it is part of a non-existing people. This struggle between silence and protest, between the true and the golden Cajuns, the “vrais Cadiens” and “faux jetons,” emphasizes that the schizophrenia of the Cajuns is not just linguistic, but also cultural. The majority of the politically engaged poems were written by Arceneaux, Richard, and Clifton. Yet while Arceneaux and Richard considered the linguistic and cultural struggle in Cajun culture, Clifton’s Creole poems, among them “Blackie Frugé” and “Situer situation,” additionally address the discrimination of race and gender. “Hey, Blackie, mo nèg! Ti gain pou d’être ein de ces / Dirty Red Frenchmen / I can tell by you marché / I can tell by you parler / I can tell by you dirty Red lafidji / Et ein aut’ chose, Blackie, / Nous-aut don’t serve no green-eyed / White-assed,

 Six Flags is an amusement park corporation whose first park Six Flags over Texas was opened in Arlington, Texas in 1961. It takes its name from the six flags of Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate States of America, and the United States of America which all flew over Texas (“Six Flags Over Texas”).

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sauvage Red Frenchman niggers icit…..” (J. Arceneaux et al. 68; ellipsis in original),⁴⁹ says the speaker in “Blackie Frugé.” In “Situer situation,” the speaker is “la fille d’agonie / Toute ma vie té passé en agonie / Et probablement je va mourir en agonie. / La misère, c’est ça mo l’héritage. / J’ai été éné à l’agonie, sorti d’eine race en agonie / D’ein peuple qui jamais conné arien d’autre.”⁵⁰ The misery and agony of the African people is what the speaker inherits at her birth. Similar to other ethnic minorities, the Cajuns strive to reconcile their American heritage with their French heritage. This dichotomy is best exemplified in the poets’ recourse to French pseudonyms, mostly of Acadian origin and related to family ancestors, which function as masks with two faces. The masks hide the writers’ identity, like the faces of the runners during the Cajun Country Mardi Gras, and allow them to play-act and, thus, lose inhibitions. “Le masque,” Cécile Camoin argues, “objet ambivalent qui étouffe l’identité en même temps qu’il la libère en la voilant, est le ventre de la renaissance franco-louisianaise” (“Cri” 117). The change of persona through the use of pseudonyms can be seen as an act of liberation frequently occurring in literatures of exiguity. Like the linguistic variability, the pseudonyms hint at a performative function: “C’était comme du théâtre!” (Marteau 197). It is the result of a feeling of inferiority and the ambition to experiment with new forms. This literary self-reflection is both an interrogation and an assertive testimony of Cajun culture. The demystification of myths and the use of particular motifs also have a performative and legitimizing effect. Frequently, the poets in Cris sur le bayou use and adapt expressions and lines from famous song lyrics, thus giving a particular picture of Cajun culture. Arceneaux’s “La nouvelle valse du samedi au soir,” for instance, draws on the collective memory of Cajun music. The opening line “Laissez le bon temps rouler,” usually associated with Cajun culture, is a calque from “Let the good times roll,” coined by New Orleans blues musician Louis Jordan with his song “Let the good times roll” (1946). The poem ends with a reversal of the line: “Le buddha de Basile avait raison: The good times are killing us all” (J. Arceneaux et al. 23). Instead of Jordan, the poem evokes the famous Cajun accordion player, Nathan Abshire.

 “Hey, Blackie, my friend, you have all to be one of those Dirty Red Frenchmen / I can tell by how you walk / I can tell by how you speak / I can tell by your dirty Red lafidji / And another thing, Blackie, / We don’t serve no green-eyed / White-assed, savage Red Frenchmen niggers here….” (my translation).  The speaker is “the daughter of agony / All my life I spent in agony / And I will probably die in agony. / Misery, that is my heritage. / I was born in agony, emerged from a race in agony / Of a people who has never known anything else” (J. Arceneaux et al. 78; my translation). For a detailed analysis of Clifton’s poems see Malena.

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Abshire, whose other nickname became Mr. Accordion, contributed to the return of the accordion together with Lejeune. Thanks to his “bluesy style and soulful presentation … [he] became a favorite accordionist among Cajuns” (Savoy 14). Commonly known as the “buddha de Basile,” Abshire used to call out his motto “The good times are killing me” during his performances, obviously a variation of Jordan’s line. He had even inscribed the phrase on his accordion in gold letters. Additionally, the phrase also appeared on one of his LPs of 1975 and was used in a documentary film title about the musician in 1975, hence becoming a popular recurring slogan among Cajuns and frequently used in Cajun music (Reed 75; Ancelet and Morgan 105; Hannusch). Adopting Abshire’s famous phrase, the speaker in the poem denounces what Richard Dorson called “fakelore,” the commercialized celebration of invented traditions (“Folklore”). The good times, which are only good for the tourists, are bad for the Cajuns, for they are an inauthentic representation of the Cajun way of life. Along with other such stereotyping references as Evangeline, Spanish moss, raccoons, or crawfish, the speaker debunks these very elements. The same goes for the stereotype of Jolie Blond, eternalized in Harry Choates’s “Jole Blon,” which the Cajuns have adopted “as a cultural anthem, as if to prove that it is the Louisiana soil and not the missing girl that lies at the symbolic center of the song” (Lindahl, “‘It’s only folklore’” 150).⁵¹ While Francis Leblanc’s untitled poem laments, in true Cajun fashion, the speaker’s loss of his Jolie Blond to a Texan (J. Arceneaux et al. 91– 92), Arceneaux’s “Northbound and down” contests the general assumption that Jolie Blonde is the personification of a Cajun woman. In his poem, Arceneaux gives a twist to the myth about Jolie Blond, claiming that she was actually not Cajun, but came from Magnolia, Mississippi, thus denouncing the encroaching Americanization from the North, the influx of Americans into Louisiana’s oil industry. Facing “Northbound and Down” is “Fille Cadienne,” a poem also by Arceneaux about an authentic Cajun girl, not blond, but “brune aux yeux noirs” (J. Arceneaux et al. 53).⁵² The Cajun girl thus has much more in common with the speaker’s girl named

 In 1929, Amédé, Ophy, and Cléoma Breaux recorded “Ma blonde est partie” in Atlanta, Georgia. Adapted by various other Cajun singers, the song gained nationwide popularity with Choates’s version “Jole Blon” in 1946 (R. Brasseaux, Cajun Breakdown 161– 178). The character of Jolie Blond was even used to teach French at school, where the “Jolie Blonde à l’école” workshops meant to guide teachers in the regionalization of their French classes (Ancelet, “Perspective” 352).  Alcée Fortier remarked on one of his visits to an Acadian ball that he was struck by the black eyes and black hair of Cajun women. See Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 47.

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Colinda in Francis Leblanc’s poem.⁵³ Finishing off with the stereotypes about the Cajuns, Arceneaux’s poem demonstrates how controversies have a consolidating effect on collective memory. The clichés of “Jolie Blond” and “Let the good times roll” are replaced by authentic elements, indicating an activist purpose. The poems represent thus an empowerment and a cultural crusade against outsiders’ ascriptions and descriptions. Lastly, contemporary stock phrases by famous Cajuns have entered the poetry repertoire: “Ça fait comprendre la suggestion de Marc Savoy / De remplacer ‘Lâche pas la patate’ / Par ‘On va les embêter.’ / Je trouve ça bien intéressant / De voir autant de monde qui s’intéressent à voir / Si la patate, elle va-tu bien tomber ou non” (J. Arceneaux et al. 20). Two famous Cajun representatives stand out in these lines from “Réaction”: the accordion maker Marc Savoy and Revon Reed, who popularized with his book of the same title the Cajun saying “Lâche pas la patate,” “Don’t drop the potato” in English, meaning “Don’t give up.” To this phrase, the speaker opposes Marc Savoy’s rallying cry “On va les embêter.” As Ancelet explains in The Makers of Cajun Music, “Marc Savoy is an unrelenting social and cultural critic. He is, though, a hopeful cynic, as his rallying cry, ‘On va les embêter’ (literally, ‘We’ll fool ‘em,’ i. e., ‘We’ll survive’) clearly indicates. His concern for the survival of tradition echoes Alan Lomax’s plea for cultural equity” (Ancelet and Morgan 137). The two expressions “On va les embêter” and “Lâche pas la patate” have now entered common Cajun knowledge and are continuously used to express the Cajuns’ fight for their heritage and opposition to assimilation. The act of writing poetry serves as an outlet for the poets’ bridled emotions rooted in the torment caused by the colonial experience in Acadia and the American domination. As an outcry, their poetry is driven by obstinacy and independence, defying mainstream American culture and discourse. The unconventional, usually not codified language expresses both vulnerability and resistance. As the poets capitalize on their bilingualism and play with outsiders’ stereotypes, expectations, and previsions, they give the necessary innovative impetus for the continuance of Cajun poetry. Cris sur le bayou shows how the Cajun collective memory consistently draws on local elements and clichés, be it just to revise outsiders’ perspectives.

 “Colinda” is a very popular Cajun dance song which originally referred to a dance of African origin, the Colinda (Bernard and Frederick).

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4.2 The Afterlives of Cris sur le bayou: Counter-Memories Almost two decades after the publication of Cris sur le bayou, a poetry collection appeared containing a poem which bears the familiar title “Cris sur le bayou” and echoes that inaugural anthology vigorously: “Un cri sur le bayou / Comme je l’avais jamais entendu. / Fort et résonnant … / Un cri tranquille et beau, /. … Un cri venant / Loin loin là-bas, / Loin loin dans bayou” (Richard, Faire récolte 20). In the silence following a hurricane, which evokes the invasive American culture, the speaker hears a distant cry from the bayou and hopes that others have heard it too. Although a sense of hesitation governs the last lines, there is also hope, for the poem and the collection manifest the continuity of Cajun poetry. The delayed publication of the title poem of Cris sur le bayou reconnects to a cultural text of the past and contributes to its establishment as collective memory.⁵⁴ The reference to the image of the “cri” indicates the ongoing relevance of the emancipation of, and fight for, Cajun culture. Indeed, the number of published poetry collections after 1980 demonstrates that Cris sur le bayou is anything but an isolated case. Of the eight contributors of Cris sur le bayou, Arceneaux, Richard, and Clifton have published full-length poetry collections of their own in which they continue to draw inspiration from Louisiana culture. Nonetheless, their poetry also shows signs of new departures, for from the 1990s onward, the poets start to profess a deepened sense of the past and to openly acknowledge other poetic and cultural influences in their poems. Against this background, post-Cris sur le bayou poetry collections lay bare the literary memory process of poetic influence. Richard’s Voyage de nuit (1987), a collection about his travels in the U.S., Quebec, France, Mexico, and Panama, is the first French-speaking Cajun poetry collection by a single author following Cris sur le bayou. ⁵⁵ It includes 98 poems written between 1975 and 1979, twenty of which were already published in Cris sur le bayou. Likewise, Arceneaux’s bilingual chapbook Je suis Cadien, written from 1978 to 1982 and published in 1994, features selected poems from Cris sur le bayou. ⁵⁶ The presentation of untitled poems on a dozen pages makes it re-

 Although the poem was composed by Zachary Richard in 1981, it was published only in his second poetry collection, Faire récolte, in 1997.  After being published in Louisiana by Les Éditions de la Nouvelle Acadie, Voyage de nuit was republished by Éditions Intermède in Québec in 2001.  Je suis Cadien is the second chapbook in the “Cajun Writers” series of Crosscultural Communications. Cajun anglophone poet Sheryl St. Germain provided the English translations of Jean Arceneaux’s poems. It includes “Schizophrénie linguistique,” “Enfants du silence, II,” “À la musique,” and “Combustion spontanée” from Cris sur le bayou. The titles, however, are left out.

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semble a long poem. In 1997, Richard issued his second collection Faire récolte. The prizewinning 95 poems were published by the Éditions Perce-neige in Moncton in the Acadie Tropicale series and are written predominantly in Standard and Cajun French, with five poems featuring English in the titles, in verses, or in bracketed notes at the end. Although the poems, ordered chronologically, disclose Richard’s various destinations, the focus is on themes of cultivation, growing, and rootedness. As the first multimedia poetry book, it includes a CD, featuring Richard reading his poems. A year later, in 1998, Jean Arceneaux’s Suite du loup appeared. This collection of new and selected poems from Cris sur le bayou consists of five parts, including “Suite du loup,” “La mienne est une littérature,” “Chansons,” “Morceaux de mémoires en prose,” and the already published long poem “Je suis Cadien” as a closing section. Both the first and the last parts each merge four earlier poems from Cris sur le bayou with new creations.⁵⁷ The title of Suite du loup refers to the introductory 10-poem wolf series written from 1978 to 1989. First introduced in the first five poems of Cris sur le bayou, Suite du loup extends the theme of the wolf into a 15-poem series, in which the wolf represents the poet torn between two languages and two cultures. As in Cris sur le bayou, references to the fauna and flora of Cajun Country are fundamental for establishing an enduring sense of place. The new collections feature mostly the seasons, the climate, the night, and remarkable vistas. Characteristic cultural references, above all to Cajun music, function as mnemonic connectors to Cris sur le bayou. While the poems continue the programmatic originality firmly rooted in the land and culture of the Cajuns, they also lift the veil of memory and start exploring Cajun history. More importantly, whereas the emphasis lay on the originality of the poems in Cris sur le bayou, later publications acknowledge the inspiration drawn from other poets. These hidden intertexts come from Acadia, the USA, France, and the Caribbean. Ancelet, Clifton, and Richard have widely traveled the globe and draw on their extensive knowledge of literature. Significantly, the authors openly acknowledge their inspirations and also start to tap into previous Cajun literary texts and images, thus creating a group spirit and further consolidating both Cajun literature and Cajun collective memory. Apart from remembering the culture, the new collections also recall the pioneering poetry collection. This technique of call and response increases with each new poetry collection and presents a concrete development of Cajun poetry.

 “Suite du loup” takes up four poems of the loup series: “À la crève de la faim,” “Le loup en hiver,” “Le rêve du loup,” “Blues du besoin.”

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4.2.1 The Emergence of Acadie Tropicale The poetry collections following Cris sur le bayou continue to exhibit a strong attachment to Cajun Country. Such typical features as the Atchafalaya, bayous, oak alleys, birds, the weather, and festive days like Saint Valentine, Ash Wednesday, and Saint Médard present an inventory known and internalized by the Cajun community. Nature is the selected theme of Arceneaux, Clifton, and Richard. Especially Richard’s poems celebrate nature, yet with each new collection, they shift to more urban descriptions. His Voyage de nuit, for instance, is a bestiary with animals like crawfish, wild ducks, foxes, wolves, dolphins, guinea fowl, or stray wolves in cities. Another defining motif is the hurricane, often used as a metaphor of the dominant American culture steamrolling Cajun culture. In addition to Richard’s aforementioned “Cris sur le bayou,” the reference to hurricanes appears in Arceneaux’s hurricane series “Ouragan I,” “Ouragan II,” and “Ouragan III” in Suite du loup. In the second poem, the hurricane is compared to a wolf. With each line it gains mystical status as the image is extended to the fairy tale of Three Little Pigs: Le vent hurle comme un énorme loup / Qui bave à l’idée de manger autant de rêves. / Les branches du chêne grattent le mur / Comme les pattes du loup enragé. / On peut entendre ses reniflements / Autour de la maison qui secoue dans le noir. / Il guette sa chance d’entrer dans la plus petite craque / Pour souffler et souffler et souffler / Et détruire la maison de tous ces petits cochons / Qui croyaient que bois et briques pouvaient résister / Aux allures du temps, aux allures du vent / Aux allures de la pure et simple nature. … (46)

Hurricanes have always been major threats to the existence of the Cajuns and thus present metaphorical means describing how the foundations of Cajun culture risk being breached and finally drowned by mainstream American culture, with the hurricane and the wolf acting as a double metaphor. The reference to the fable helps to visualize the danger and to maintain the oral connection. Cajun music, too, continues to be a source of inspiration in post-Cris sur le bayou poetry. Arceneaux’s seven songs in the “Chansons” section of Suite du loup recall Iry Lejeune’s song section in Cris sur le bayou. Frustrated by the lack of communication with the Cajun public and disillusioned with the overflexible poetry, Arceneaux started to write songs like his friend Richard, who has always mingled poetry and music in his work: “Mon audience principale, ce sont des gens ordinaires de la Louisiane: c’est pour eux que j’écris. Et c’est l’une des raisons pour laquelle, dernièrement, je me suis tourné de plus en plus vers la chanson” (Marteau 200). Today, several of Arceneaux’s songs are reaching a wider audience as they have found their way into the Cajun music repertoire. Cajun singer-songwriter D. L. Menard and the three Cajun bands

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Wayne Toups, Jambalaya, and Richard LeBoeuf & Two Step recorded seven of his poems,⁵⁸ which gave them additional exposure, and, in turn, heightened the chance that they turn into collective memory. Also, Arceneaux evokes Nathan Abshire and his motto “The good times are killing me” once again in “Charge: Lui (Living Under the Influence)” in Suite du loup (36 – 37). Richard, of course, also tapped the Cajun music repertoire. For instance, the programmatic title of the poem “La vérité va peut-être te faire du mal” in Faire récolte is originally a line from Iry Lejeune’s “La valse de quatre-vingt-dix-neuf ans,”⁵⁹ a love song and complaint about a convict sentenced to 99 years in prison. Richard develops the song into a poem which does not lament the loss of a lover, but the loss of French and Cajun culture. Over the course of eight stanzas, the speaker accuses the Cajuns’ refusal to acknowledge the fact that they are forsaking their culture, and closes with the radical injunction: “Parle français ou crève maudit” (118). This mixture of poetry and music ensures that both the poetic and musical heritage is not lost, but continues to be preserved and extended in Cajun literature. The post-Cris-sur-le-bayou poems also disclose a tight-knit group of Cajun writers. Ancelet and Richard, with Richard being nine months Ancelet’s elder, spent their childhood together, and have been living as close neighbors in the Church Point area (carours). They are the most renowned Cajun activists. In their poems, Arceneaux, alias Ancelet, and Richard reveal a secret understanding through dedications and implicit references between each other. For instance, the speaker in Arceneaux’s “Vol de nuit” relates his flight from Paris to the U.S. He travels with Ralph—without doubt Zachary Richard, whose second name is Ralph. Also, certain details correspond to Richard’s life story. Like Ralph, Richard fell deeply in love with a girl named Christina from Miami and of Cuban heritage (J. Arceneaux, Suite 82; Amédée and Brûlé 87). The speaker is of course not identical with Arceneaux/Ancelet, yet the similarities nevertheless reflect the vital exchanges between the two poets. Likewise, some of Richard’s poems refer to Arceneaux.⁶⁰ “Têtu” in Faire récolte, for instance, emphasizes the strong relationship between the speaker and

 “Tard dans la vie,” “Une nuit à la roue,” “Une autre bière,” “Ma misère,” “Les petites heures de la nuit,” “Tu rêves de lui,” “Une dernière chanson” (J. Arceneaux, Suite 105). In 2016, Ancelet issued his first music album with musician Sam Broussard, Broken Promised Land.  “The Convict Waltz” in English (Savoy 166).  See Richard’s reference to Jean Arceneaux in “Poème pour la défense de la culture” from Cris sur le bayou. In Faire récolte, “La première rencontre” (28 – 29), “La Fête des Acadiens” (61), “Têtu” (67– 70), “Piège piégé” (80), and “Shells of Shotgun” (99 – 100), all include dedications and references to Arceneaux.

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his “frère” (67) Arceneaux. The last line reflects the like-minded attitude as it repeats Marc Savoy’s motto “on veut les embêter” (70), which Arceneaux had introduced in “Réaction” in Cris sur le bayou. Other poems refer to other Cajun activists and reveal the existence of a closed group of Cajun militants. The poem “Première rencontre,” for instance, relates the encounter of Earlene Broussard, Richard Guidry, and Jean Arceneaux (28). “La Fête des Acadiens” is another example which depicts an Acadian celebration joined by Jean Arceneaux and Pauline Boudreaux (61).⁶¹ Both Cajun music and the fight for French offer the Cajun poets social frameworks. These enduring circles reflected in Cajun poetry ensure the survival of Cajun culture.

4.2.2 Recreating the Past In contrast to Cris sur le bayou, subsequent poetry collections are visibly more concerned with the distant past. Especially Arceneaux’s collection Suite du loup and Richard’s Feu investigate the Cajun past. In the last section of Suite du loup, “Je suis Cadien,” the speaker tellingly explains that he has “une mémoire d’un autre temps, / Un temps que les vieux m’ont raconté, / Un temps qui n’est pas dans les livres, / Et je rêve” (99 – 100). Significantly, it is the connection to Acadia which stands out prominently. Arceneaux’s poem “Mine de rien” serves as a bridge linking l’Acadie tropicale in Louisiana to l’Acadie du nord in Canada: “La Coulée Mine,” obviously Bayou Coulée Mine, a stream in Lafayette Parish, “coupe mon monde en deux” (39), and juxtaposes the peaceful place covered by oaks in the east with the troubled prairie in the west the speaker scans with his eyes. This scene is set against the Baie des Mines in the second stanza, actually Bassin des Mines, or Minas Basin in Nova Scotia, which “coupe mon histoire en deux.”⁶² Characterized by its northern snowy climate, Baie des Mines stands in geographical and temporal opposition to the first stanza. Arceneaux reconstructs his vision of an Acadian past centered around a place in both Acadia and Louisiana, and between a Cajun and an Acadian character, Jacques Babineaux and Joseph Dugas, whose identities can only be conjectured.⁶³ While the water seemingly separates the two places, it also connects

 Pauline Boudreaux is the name of Zachary’s mother (Amédée and Brûlé 28).  The Minas Basin was the Acadian stronghold where the majority of Acadian settlements existed (B. Arseneault 73 – 74).  There existed a Jacques Babineaux who was the father of Lafayette lawyer Allen Babineaux, one of the founding members and the first director of the CODOFIL (Bernard, Cajuns 81). As to Joseph Dugas, it is not clear whom the name refers to. Many Acadians were called “Dugas.”

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them through the shared history. The opposition of Cajun Country and Acadia, present and past, night and day, is only superficial. ⁶⁴ The Acadian past is especially visible in the section “Morceaux de mémoire en prose” in Suite du loup. The first three of eight prose poems, which bear the titles “Richard Dugas,” “Louis Arceneaux,” and “Mélonie Brasseux,” are monologues spoken by the title characters.⁶⁵ While Richard and Louis are historical characters, Mélonie Brasseux’s authenticity is unclear. All three emerge as Acadian refugees in Louisiana, offering personal accounts of how they experienced the deportation, and describing their lives in Louisiana. Thus, these fictional tableaux of Acadians contribute to the construction of an Acadian memory in Louisiana. Most importantly, all three are counter-memories to the Evangeline myth, for in presenting alternative plots of the myth, they deny the veracity of the accounts by Longfellow and Voorhies. Richard Dugas, for instance, remembers how his neighbor Pierre Arceneaux, who sailed with Beausoleil Broussard to Louisiana, had a son named Louis Arceneaux, a name usually associated with the Evangeline myth thanks to Voorhies’s story of Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux in Acadian Reminiscences. Dugas unravels both Longfellow’s and Voorhies’s accounts as hoaxes and replaces them by a new Cajun version: Pierre Arceneaux était dedans le même bateau. Je le connaissais, lui aussi. Il venait du même village que moi. Asteur, le monde dit que son garçon Louis a été séparé de sa belle, une nommée Emmeline Labiche, mais le garçon à Pierre Arceneaux est né ici dedans la Louisiane, lui. Et moi, j’ai jamais connu une Emmeline Labiche dans notre village à nous autres. Je crois que quelqu’un a imaginé tout ça. Il y avait un nommé Longfellow qui a imaginé une autre délaissée qui s’appelait soi-disant Évangeline. Ou peut-être c’était supposé d’être la même. Je me rappelle plus comment l’histoire va. Dans tous les cas, moi, j’ai pas connu ni une ni l’autre. (J. Arceneaux, Suite 73)

The second monologue is held by that very Louis Arceneaux, who vehemently rejects the myth of the star-crossed lovers for several reasons. First, Louis was not yet born when the first Acadians arrived in Louisiana. Second, Voorhies was not there either in order to authenticate the events, nor was his grandmoth “Mine de rien,” a famous phrase Robert Desnos used in his poem “État de veille—mine de rien” (1938), means “although it does not seem like it.”  The remaining five prose poems are not linked to any historical event. “Lormand’s Bar” portrays players at a bourrée game, and “Sauvagesse Brune” and “Vol de nuit” narrate the speaker’s initiation to love as a teenager. The two remaining poems of the section, “Ailes de bébé” and “4 +1=5; 5 – 2=3,” have no temporal reference frame. While the first resembles an interior monologue in which the speaker philosophizes about babies having wings until they can walk, the second is a dialogue between five Cajun fishermen.

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er. She was not even born yet. Voorhies simply wanted the story by Longfellow, who was not there either, to end in Louisiana. Lastly, there did not exist such family names as Lajeunesse or Bellefontaine in Acadia: J’étais même pas là, moi. C’était pas mon histoire. Je devrais bien savoir. On a perdu notre terre, mais on a pas perdu la tête, quand même. Je te fais serment sur la tombe de ma grand’mère que j’ai jamais connu d’Évangeline Bellefontaine et ni d’Emmeline Labiche. … c’est juste pas vrai. Ce Félix Voorhies-là. Il était pas là, lui. C’était longtemps avant lui. Et sa grand’mère était pas là non plus. Elle était pas née encore. J’ai connu sa mère à elle, sa grande grand’mère, mais elle est morte avant qu’il est né. Il a imaginé son histoire. … Il voulait juste refaire l’histoire de Longfellow pour que ça finisse dans la Louisiane. Et Longfellow, lui non plus, n’était pas là. … Il y en a pas un qu’a vu pour lui-même quoi c’est qu’a arrivé. Il y avait pas de Lajeunesse et ni de Bellefontaine dans toute la sacrée Acadie. (J. Arceneaux, Suite 75)

In fact, there existed a Louis Arceneaux in Louisiana, and since he was born there in 1768, he could not have experienced the great expulsion (Carl A. Brasseaux, Search 23, 53 – 4). Incidentally, Ancelet is a descendant of the Arceneaux family who arrived in Louisiana in 1765 (Godin). It does not surprise, therefore, that Arceneaux, alias Ancelet, debunks the myth about his ancestor and gives Cajun history a new twist. Finally, Mélonie Brasseux, too, acknowledges to having heard about Évangeline and Gabriel, and Emmeline and Louis. Like the other two characters, Mélonie dismantles the verity of both versions accusing the assumed passivity of the Acadians: C’est tout bien beau si t’as envie de pleurer, mais nous autres, on avait pas le temps de perdre courage, ni de perdre la tête. Il fallait se débattre pour garder corps et âme ensemble. Personne avait trop envie de mourir en bas d’un chêne vert ou n’importe ayoù. … Évangeline et Emmeline? Heuh. Elles ont eu un tas de malheurs, mais quoi c’est qu’elles ont fait? Espérer? Heuh. (J. Arceneaux et al. 77)⁶⁶

Mélonie goes on to tell her experience of the expulsion. Promised to Henri Doucette, but separated from him by the British, she goes in search of him, but without success. She marries Justin Leblanc and founds a family in Louisiana. Later she hears of Henri who is said to have landed in France. She concludes that they both have had to go on with their lives as best as they could. These memory pieces are strongly connected to history, but they still contain fictional elements. Arceneaux gives the historical characters a voice and a chance to tell without an intermediary how they experienced the tragedy. Dis “Espérer” in Cajun French means primarily “to wait for, await” (“espérer”).

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mantling the Evangeline myth, he creates new myths, based partly on historical characters, and he thus maintains a connection to the past through narrative. Jan Assmann defines narrative as “[t]he most preferred form [of myths] …, and … these past glories shed luster on the present” and the future (Cultural Memory 63). Arceneaux’s renarration of Longfellow’s Evangeline sheds light on the Cajun present and, as a new myth, its founding function becomes what J. Assmann calls “contrapresent.” The contrapresent function of the myth “conjures up memories of a past that generally takes the form of an heroic age” (Cultural Memory 63). Especially Mélonie Brasseux’s character is given heroic features. Contrary to Evangeline or Emmeline, she is stripped of her passivity, making her fighting spirit synonymous with the fight for Cajun culture. The “Morceaux de mémoire en prose” show how the founding myth established by Longfellow and consolidated by Voorhies functions as what J. Assmann calls a “mythomotor”: A directional impetus can change any foundational myth into a contrapresent one (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 63). With the three accounts by Dugas, Arceneaux, and Brasseux, Arceneaux the poet offers alternative versions of the deportation, allowing for a more differentiated view and replacing the notorious Evangeline myth with other fictional accounts. Similarly, Zachary Richard engages with the past in his later poetry collections, including poems about such famous people as French pirate Jean Lafitte. What causes Richard the most disquiet, however, is the terrible expulsion of the Acadians. In “La vérité va peut-être te faire du mal” in Faire récolte, the speaker laments the hardships the Cajuns have had to endure: “Les pauvres Cadiens” were “chassés de leur pauvre pays dans les / pauvres bateaux, arrivés pauvres / aux pauvres côtes de cette pauvre rivière / pendant que ma pauvre grand-mère / chantait sa pauvre berceuse / pendant qu’on avait rien à manger / et qu’on était pauvre” (115). The epanaleptic reference to the misery of the Acadians—emphasized through the fifteen repetitions of “pauvres” including three repetitions of “pauvres Cadiens”—, turns into sarcasm nonetheless. It is the fear of not fitting into the mold of mainstream American culture which turns the Cajuns into another kind of victim: “Bande de couillons pauvres pervertis … la vérité c’est / qu’on a trop peur franchir barrière, trop peur de fâcher le voisin, on est trop civilisé, trop antiseptisé / trop américanisé, / baptizé dans l’hypocrizie / la folie nous fait fléchir et tourner de bord / avec remord on s’est tailler un costume / de Sainte-Victime. …” (115). Just like Arceneaux’s speaker, who denounces the silence of the Cajuns, Richard’s speaker laments the self-inflicted victimization of the Cajuns.

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While Richard’s early poetry only sporadically mentions the Acadian past, it is in Feu that the Acadian discourse reaches its climax.⁶⁷ In his third full-length poetry collection, Richard intensifies the themes about the Acadian heritage. In the poem “Terre,” for instance, the speaker explores his past through the various places of his ancestors—Belle-Île and Grand-Pré—and concludes that “la terre de mes ancêtres / n’est nulle part. / Ni en Louisiane devenue USA, ni en Acadie qui n’existe plus, / ni au large de la côte bretonne. / Être Acadien, c’est être / à côté de son âme, / jamais bien dans son cœur. / Un îlot déraciné qui flotte dans un océan noir, / s’ennuyant du pays en voyage, / mais jamais chez soi une fois rentré” (Feu 32– 3). The speaker is caught in the perspective of belonging nowhere. At the same time, this vagrancy entails a connectedness to various places. Indeed, the idea of an “îlot déraciné,” an “uprooted island,” recalls Glissant’s archipelagic concept and relational poetics. Furthermore, the speaker’s travels make him think of the deportation. He is like an exile with the difference that he chooses to be one: … [V]oyage chronique / Dont je me suis lassé il y a / Déjà des années, exil perpétuel choisi et / Donc pas pareil qu’en 1755: / Les hommes encore chez eux, / Entendant les goddams sabots / Traversant les champs récemment récoltés, / Écrasant, la catastrophe imprévue, / Tirer le fou dans un jeu de pendu, / Bateau du diable empilé d’humanité, / Sans espace pour s’allonger, étouffé / Par l’odeur réfugiée, les larmes, / La merde, la puanteur cruelle, le désespoir. / En 1755, ce n’était pas la même complainte que la mienne. (Feu 82)

The speaker compares his nomadism to an old scar, an imprint left from the past six generations (83), and he mentions the Acadian expulsion explicitly through the fateful date of 1755 and implicitly through a reference to his song “Réveille” when he repeats the words “goddams” and “récoltés.” Migration, nomadism, and uprootedness characterize both the Acadian and the Cajun experience. In the second section of the collection, entitled “Arrangements pour la catastrophe,” the speaker concentrates on his acadianité and elaborates on his experience during the First Acadian World Congress in 1994 in Moncton, New Brunswick.⁶⁸ Written in the style of a journal, the 17 poems describe each day from August 1 leading up to the National Acadian Day on August 15. Most of the poems deal with the question of how to preserve a minority culture in the

 Feu is divided into 4 sections: “Feu” (43 poems), “Arrangements pour la catastrophe” (17), “Français d’Amérique” (6), “Un à la traîne” (5).  The recording of Cap Enragé in 1996 presents a turning point in Richard’s music. As the first album in French since his time in Quebec, it heralds Richard’s great predilection for singing in French.

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face of globalization. In the last third of the section, the past is actualized through the nine repetitions of “Deux cent trente-neuf ans,”⁶⁹ plus the two instances of “deux cent ans,”⁷⁰ and establishes a connection to the past. The time reference has a specific significance, since 239 years before 1994—in 1755 —the Grand Dérangement occurred. Together with the four repetitions of the fatal date of 1755, the references leave no doubt about the impact and legacy of the Grand Dérangement. Moreover, the speaker (who could also be Richard) recalls in “8 août” the performance of his song “Réveille,” the song which preserves the brutal memory of the communal Acadian history in hateful formaldehyde: La nuit passé, une salle pleine, / Huitième génération depuis la déportation, / Chantant Réveille sans manquer une parole, / … / Moi, je suis compositeur / De la chanson qui préserve dans le formaldéhyde haineux / La mémoire brutale de notre commune histoire, / La mémoire du sort de ces gens exilés que je n’ai jamais rencontrés, / Et qui sont morts deux cents ans avant que je sois né, / Mais qui sont toujours à mes côtés. … (Feu 88 – 89)

The metaphor of formaldehyde not only hints at the song being “saved” on Richard’s vinyl LP. Formaldehyde is also used to fixate dead animals for longterm preservation. Thus, the speaker denounces the fixed view of an Acadia révolue, impossible to recover. The poem “11 août” develops into an accusation of the media for preying like vultures, only waiting to see how the Acadians will fare and for how long they will prevail since, like the Native Americans, they were stripped of their land. The speaker turns the tables and acts as a journalist, summarizing the Acadian deportation in a report: Je me fais journaliste, et je propose ce rapport: / 5 septembre 1755, Grand-Pré, Bassin des Mines, Nova Scotia. / Question posée aux détenus sur le point de se faire déporter: / “Êtes-vous prêts à embarquer dans des bateaux, / Pour transport d’esclaves ou de bétail, dans un espace / Large comme vos deux épaules, et moins encore, / Le noir de la cale comme les ailes de Lucifer vous envelopper. / Jamais encore voir votre pays, votre maison, votre femme, / Ni vos enfants, votre mère, votre père, frère, sœur, / Amant. Et mourir en grand nombre de la peste sur des bateaux / Perdus dans les ports d’un pays où vous êtes haïs. / Voir la mort autour de vous, sa faux ensanglantée à La Rochelle, / À Saint Malo, à Molé en Saint-Domingue, à Philadelphie, / À New York, à Baltimore, à Bristol, à Liverpool, en Guyane, / Dans les îles Malouines, à Charleston, à Savannah, à Morlaix, / À Saint-Jean-de-Luz et dans une centaine d’endroits encore plus / Perdus, pendant que

 “[D]eux cent trente-neuf ans” is also repeated two times in the last but one poem of Feu, entitled “Chignectou” (133).  This is a rough count by Richard, who looks back to the time of his birth in 1950.

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vos enfants vous seront enlevés, / Ou mourront devant vos yeux, souffrant les pires souffrances, / Que la nature peut même souffrir. / Jamais revoir ceux et celles que vous aimez. / Pour que, dans deux cent trente-neuf ans, / Vos descendants, les descendants que vous aurez peut-être, / Puissent donner une conférence de presse / Pour un grand spectacle regroupant les plus grandes vedettes / Acadiennes, québécoises et françaises, et transmis par satellite / Dans toute la francophonie, regardé par des millions de spectateurs / Du monde entier, un spectacle qui sera le bijou / Dans la couronne de toute l’expérience acadienne, / Et suffisamment grandiose pour faire honneur à votre terrible sort, / Le fait que vous serez traités avec une brutalité sans borne / Et chassés comme des bêtes, / Êtes-vous d’accord pour vous faire déranger?” (Feu 94– 95)

The speaker’s narrative is the Grand Dérangement reenacted and it ends with a rhetorical question directed at the ignorant journalists. (Of course, nobody is expelled from their homeland by choice.) After “Réveille,” “11 août” is one of Richard’s most militant Acadian poems. While there is much evidence to show Richard’s attachment to Acadia before the event, the congress of 1994 became a watershed in Richard’s life, for it gave him the opportunity and means to process the Acadian deportation. In “13 août,” the speaker tells how he arrives in Shediac where the sight of a young boy presents a silver lining: “La mémoire de la déportation / Assuré pour une autre génération” (Feu 97). And yet, mainstream American culture seems to thwart the speaker’s optimism. The younger generation does not want to have anything to do with their past: Finalement, on n’a rien compris. / Pendant qu’on est assis en Acadie, / La jeunesse du monde / Est debout à Woodstock. / … / Ils cassent avec le passé, / Créant un nouveau monde, / Débalançant le vieux, / Faisant une nouvelle balance. // C’est la fin pour nous. / L’Acadie est finie / Depuis deux cent trente-neuf ans, / Laissez-la donc / Se reposer en paix. (Feu 101)

Finally, the speaker appeals to the francophone community to help the Cajuns save their culture and prevent complete assimilation: Je lance un appel au secours à tous les Français d’Amérique et du monde de la part des Cadiens de la Louisiane. Nous sommes tombés de la falaise. La prochaine génération sera la première, dans les deux cent trente ans de notre histoire, à ne pas entendre parler le français cadien. La défense de la langue française ne consiste pas à empêcher l’abandon de la langue par des communautés dorénavant francophones. Si la frontière tombe, le pays est en danger. (Feu 104)⁷¹

 A video clip of Richard’s overwhelming on-stage performance in 1994 provides a very similar introduction to “Réveille”: “Je lance un appel au secours de la part des Acadiens de la Louisiane. On a [sic] tombé de la falaise, mais on n’a pas encore touché la terre. La prochaine génération en

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The present with its linguistic dilemma is central here, but it is put into perspective through the reference to the 230 years of history. With Feu, Richard creates an imaginary space of the descendants of the Grand Dérangement.

4.2.3 Unveiling “Foreign” Influences: Une Américanité en Français Although Cris sur le bayou is moored in the regional culture of Cajun Country, the collection also connects to other cultures. While the references to the Acadian past are scarce, the link to present-day Acadia in Canada is visible on several levels. As a matter of fact, Acadia and Quebec have had a considerable share in the creation of the volume, for the Rencontre des francophones de l’Amérique du Nord gave the Cajun poets the opportunity to meet Acadian and Quebecois poets who influenced them. Cris sur le bayou reveals a certain latency of the Acadian context, signaled by the adjective “acadienne” in the subtitle. Moreover, the Acadian student revolt, concurring with the worldwide agitation in 1968, and especially such emerging militant Acadian writers as Raymond Guy LeBlanc, Gérald Leblanc, and Antonine Maillet obviously served as a decisive impetus for the Cajun poets. Significantly, if the presence of Acadia in Cris sur le bayou is only peripheral, later publications develop and point out the symbiosis between l’Acadie du nord and l’Acadie tropicale. Cajun poetry creates a virtual overpass to Acadian poetry. Additionally, a couple of poems by Arceneaux, Richard, and Clifton confirm that the literary and cultural connections transcend the Acadian frame of reference. Poetry collections following Cris sur le bayou establish connections with other francophone and anglophone literatures as well as with American popular culture. The decisive tendency to actively engage in the fight for French and be part of the francophonie associates Cajun poetry with other such emancipatory minority literatures as Black literature in French (see Kesteloot), Quebec literature (see Borduas), or Acadian literature (see Lonergan, Acadie 72). This alignment with poetry of resistance by other minorities corroborates the claim that Cajun poetry is also a poésie engagée. While Cris sur le bayou occasionally draws from previous cultural texts, subsequent collections make no secret about the poets’ inspirations. Adopting forms, motifs, and ideas from other literatures highlights the transnational perspective of Cajun poetry. Instead of simply Louisiane sera la première à probablement ne pas parler le français depuis deux cent ans—faudra comprendre que, la sauvegarde de la langue française, c’est pas d’empêcher l’assimilation des paroles anglo-américaines dans le vocabulaire, mais c’est d’empêcher l’assimilation des communautés francophones à la frontière” (Rousselle).

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imitating them, the poets creatively reshuffle motifs and play with the language, thus helping Cajun poetry to evolve. This process of adapting elements from a non-Cajun collective memory furthermore contributes to the expansion and consolidation of the Cajun collective memory. The transnational perspective transpires most visibly in Richard’s poetry where the poet indicates for almost each poem where it was written. The various places mentioned in his first collection, with the telling title Voyage de nuit, are evidence of Richard’s extensive travels to Louisiana, Canada (Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario), France, and Mexico. The poems in Faire récolte, too, were composed in various places, from Quebec to Ontario, Belgium, and Louisiana. Likewise, the poems in Feu originated in places such as Chênes du Marais in Louisiana; “Mont Réal,” Sept-Îles and “Québecville” in Québec; Port-Coton (on Belle-Île) and Bougès in France; and Panama. Remarkably, although Cajun French remains “la langue de [s]on cœur” (Richard, Feu 10), Richard increasingly uses Standard French in his writings. For him, Feu is “une déviation linguistique” (Feu 9) as it is almost exclusively written in Standard French. Even if they do not explicitly document their travels in their poems, Arceneaux and Clifton also explore the theme of border-crossing. Through literary references and intertexts the poets associate themselves with other poets or marginalized persons, and they bridge different cultures with polyvalent imagery. According to Richard, three American poets—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder—stand at the origin of his poetry. Even if Voyage de nuit makes no direct reference to Kerouac, the speaker’s journeys echo Kerouac’s famous novel On the Road (1957), a fictionalized account of that author’s travels across the USA. It is not surprising that Kerouac serves as a muse for Richard, for the best-known poet and novelist of the Beat generation was Franco-American, and his Quebec heritage certainly contributed to Richard’s affinity for him. Richard started to write songs and poems after an encounter with Kerouac’s travel companion Allen Ginsberg whom he had met in New Orleans in 1969 (Richard, “Monthly Report 2002”). Gary Snyder had the greatest influence on Richard’s style (Richard, “Monthly Report 2002”). Haiku, a short traditional Japanese poem and the signature form of the Beat poets, became Richard’s preferred form.⁷² Formally, the haiku is irregular and consists of three lines with five syllables in the first and the last lines, and  About one fifth of the poems in Richard’s first two volumes are haikus: 18 in Voyage de nuit, including variations (“presque-haiku” and “surhaiku”). 17 in Faire récolte. Feu contains only eight haikus out of 71 poems, a sign of Richard’s development toward longer and more complex forms of poetry.

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seven syllables in the second line. The last line resembles a summary, set off by a caesura from the first two lines. The content is characterized by the use of a natural image and a seasonal reference, called kigo in Japanese, which can be drawn from a list of other kigo (Crowley 592– 594). Richard’s haikus, too, use seasonal references. The typical Louisiana weather, fauna, and flora turn the originally oriental haikus into creative Cajun haikus. Nevertheless, the American and Japanese resonance in Richard’s poetry was not always looked upon favorably by fellow Cajuns: “Zachary Richard, il essayait volontairement de se détacher en écrivant des haïkus. On a eu beaucoup de disputes, moi et lui, là-dessus: ‘on n’est pas Japonais’” (Marteau 200), recalls Ancelet. Significantly, the Beat movement not only sowed the seed for Richard’s own writing career (Amédée and Brûlé 111), but it was also responsible for Richard’s conversion to Buddhism, a trait he shared with Ginsburg and Snyder (Damon 173 – 174). Drawing on poetic forms from the Japanese via American poets, and writing in French, Richard’s poetry showed an impressive degree of hybridity early on. While Voyage de nuit represents Richard’s enthusiasm for the Beat movement, the counter-culture of his time, it is also a testimony of his search for his Acadian past. For his first visit to Quebec in 1974 not only triggered an interest in his Acadian heritage, but also prompted him to start writing in French.⁷³ Of the 98 poems in Voyage de nuit, 27 were written between 1975 – 1979 and already published in Cris sur le bayou. Yet literary scholar Janis Pallister thought Voyage de nuit heralded a new departure because the most militant poems “Réveille” and “La Ballade de Beausoleil,” which initiated a whole generation into their history (Ancelet, “L’Exception” 79 – 80), were missing from the collection (Pallister, “New Departures” 20). It is, nonetheless, questionable whether Richard turned away from his original militantism. For, although the 1987 volume lacks the two poems, it contains other forceful poems which display an equal urge to act.⁷⁴ “Poème pour la défense de la culture,” for instance, present in Cris sur le bayou, remained in Voyage de nuit. Written for two eminent Acadian poets from New Brunswick, Guy Arseneault and Raymond LeBlanc, as well as for Cajun Jean Arceneaux,⁷⁵ the dedications and shared cultural engagement confirm the claim of a connection between militant Acadian and Cajun poets. That Richard shows an interest in rebels, especially Acadian rebels, is clear from his poems dealing with Beausoleil and Louis Mailloux in Faire récolte.  Apart from his song lyrics for his albums from 1976 – 1997, Richard has never written a poem in English.  Apart from the two missing activist songs, the 2001 edition of Voyage de nuit does not feature the love poem “J’t’ai jouée une valse d’amour.”  Gerard Blanchard, the fourth name in the list of dedications, is impossible to identify.

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There is, however, a more recent character which seems to haunt Richard considering the amount of works he created in his honor. “Kouchibouguac” in Voyage de nuit is yet another poem with a rebellious undertone (104). The poem which describes the calm nature on a first summer’s day is dedicated to Jackie Vautour, an Acadian whom Richard met in 1977 and who defied the Canadian government’s decision to seize the land of his ancestors for founding a National Park, the Kouchibouguac National Park on the east coast of New Brunswick (Rudin, “Making Kouchibouguac” 163 – 164). Vautour’s courage and resistance impressed Richard to the extent that he wrote the poem “Kouchibouguac” and two songs, “La Ballade de Jackie Vautour” (Richard, Migration) and “Petit Codiac” (Richard, Cap enragé) in Vautour’s honor. Richard also participated in the documentary Kouchibouguac: L’histoire de Jackie Vautour et des expropriés (2006).⁷⁶ Another poem in Voyage de nuit displays Richard’s activism. “Poème aux têtes de cochon” celebrates August 15, the Day of the Acadians, and is dedicated to Rhéal Drisdelle, producer of the Centre Acadien, the National Film Board’s French Regional Production Center, from 1980 – 1981 (Brideau 10), with whom Richard obviously shares a number of memories (Richard, Voyage 24). In a longer note added below the poem, Richard recalls two arguments with the Canadian police in July and August 1975. The first encounter occurred at the U.S.-Canadian border, where officers refused to let Richard pass without a passport. The other confrontation happened during the celebration of the National Acadian Day, which the Canadian police obviously scorned. The reference to the “têtes de cochons,” i. e., pig heads, in the title is polysemic. On the one hand, the phrase, used literally as a slur, might hint at the inappropriate behavior of the Canadian police in both instances. On the other hand, the phrase also refers to the historical background of the Acadian student revolts in 1968. Opposing the pressure of English assimilation, Acadian student rebels presented Leonard Jones, the mayor of Moncton, New Brunswick, with a pig’s head on his desk (Laxer 103). Richard recalls this incident in his blog decades later: In those days I was playing pingpong with the map, bouncing between Louisiana, Québec and Acadie. After my first visit to the Acadian homeland in 1975, I returned frequently to

 Kouchibouguac was not the first film project about the expropriation of the Kouchiouguac residents. As early as in 1979 a documentary on the Kouchibouguac events was released, shot by Rhéal Drisdelle, an active supporter of the “expropriés” of Kouchibouguac and ONF-representative of the tour of that documentary, and poet Gérald Leblanc (Rudin, Kouchibouguac 225 – 228).

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play a club, the Cachot (dungeon) at the University of Moncton. The friends I made during that period had a great influence on the evolution of my militant French identity. Gérald LeBlanc [sic], Rhéal Drisdelle, Laurent Comeau and others revealed to me the Acadian reality of my generation. The confrontational attitude that animated much of their activities resonated in my heart. Only a short time before, young Acadian militants had burst into the office of the mayor of Moncton, Mr. Jones, a noted French basher, to place a pig’s head upon his desk. Inspired by the growing militancy of the Québec separatists as well as the American anti-war counter culture of which I was part, young Acadians refused to accept the second class status to which French language culture had been relegated in New Brunswick. They struggled for the recognition of their linguistic and ethnic rights. My kind of folks. (“Monthly Report 2006”)

While both “Kouchibouguac” and “Poème aux têtes de cochon” are void of militancy, the paratextual references hint at Richard’s involvement in the Acadian student revolt. The reason for excluding “La Ballade de Beausoleil” and “Réveille” might, therefore, be rather owing to the fact that both are part of Richard’s song repertoire and crowd-pleasing songs. There exists one Acadian literary work which doubtlessly served as a blueprint to Cris sur le bayou and validates the Cajun-Acadian literary connection. Cri de terre, the first volume of poetry to be published on Acadian soil, appeared in 1972 and has since become a classic.⁷⁷ Written by Raymond Guy LeBlanc,⁷⁸ to whom Richard dedicated a few of his poems, the collection presents unmistakable parallels to Cris sur le bayou. Both poetry collections refer to the birth of a minority literature through the use of the metaphor of “cri,” and they both express a cry of revolt toward the dominating Anglo-Canadian culture or AngloAmerican culture respectively. The major difference concerns the location. While R. G. LeBlanc’s single “cri” rises from firm land, implying the dilemma of Acadia as an imaginary region, the Cajun outcry—“cris”—is multiple, and located in a concrete Cajun space, the Louisiana bayous. Cris sur le bayou also shows linguistic similarities with Cri de terre. Not only did R. G. LeBlanc write several poems in Chiac, the Acadian French dialect combining French and English,⁷⁹ he also exploited the richness of his bilingualism:

 A fourth edition appeared in 2012 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of R. G. LeBlanc’s Cri de terre. Although other events, preparatory for the Acadian literary emergence, predated the publication, the year 1972 marked the birth of Acadian literature thanks to LeBlanc’s poetry collection (Lonergan, Acadie 72; Lonergan, “Une poésie” 54).  Raymond Guy LeBlanc readopted his middle name in 1988 with the publication of Chants d’amour et d’espoir (Viau, “Les Poètes”).  Although written in Standard French, Éloge du chiac by Gérald Leblanc (1995) is considered the reference work about legitimizing Chiac.

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“C’est à NOUS l’étudiantalprofessoros / De crachifier la mairie Johnastique / Par la démastication décisive / Du ruminage bon-ententiste // C’est à NOUS la pêcheuragriviente / De hachissifier les arbivorastres feuillages / Pour que les panaches orgastiques dégringolossent” (Cri 49).⁸⁰ While neologisms in Cris sur le bayou like “colonihilism” are few and graspable, R. G. LeBlanc’s linguistic inventiveness and verbal gymnastics reach a point where it becomes difficult for uninitiated readers to understand their meaning. Besides the corresponding titles and the linguistic play, the themes of silence and identity in Cris sur le bayou also relate to Cri de terre. The first part of R. G. LeBlanc’s collection, entitled “Silences,” consists of ten poems which articulate the speaker’s anxiety and “mal de vivre”⁸¹ in today’s world. The theme of silence reaches a turning point when the speaker awakens to his identity in “Je suis Acadien,” the last poem of R. G. LeBlanc’s collection. This poem is another piece of evidence of the Cajun-Acadian connection as it finds expression in Arceneaux’s long poem “Je suis Cadien,” a Cajun correspondence piece. For “Je suis Cadien” at the end of Suite du loup echoes not only the title of R. G. LeBlanc’s poem. R. G. LeBlanc’s poem culminates in the speaker’s inner conflict about his Acadian identity: “Je suis acadien / Ce qui signifie / Multiplié fourré dispersé acheté aliéné vendu révolté / Homme déchiré vers l’avenir” (Cri 53). Similarly, Arceneaux’s poem contains a jeremiad-like, hyperbolic list of participles: Hé, tu connais / Il y a des fois que je me sens / Embêté, empêtré, empêché, emmêché, / Cogné, pogné, / Manié, gagné, / Jeté, gelé, / Gâté, pâté, / Plaqué, laqué, / Giflé, reniflé, / Gagé, naufragé, / Hâlé, câlé, emballé, / Rapporté, redouté, renvoyé, / Lâché, fâché, mâché, craché, / Gardé, lardé, / Ruiné, fouiné, / Roulé, foulé, / Plumé, écumé, enrhumé, / Consumé de fumée, / Amarée, tarré, carré, / Barré, bourré, beurré, / Fané, damné, tanné, boucané, / Fouetté, guetté, / Quêté, quitté, / Fatigué, castigué, / Hanté, denté, / Choqué, bloqué, moqué, / Dépêché, léché, / Encaissé, abaissé, délaissé, / Délayé, effrayé, / Donné, abandonné, /désordonné, / Fêlé, mêlé, sellé / Dupé, stupéfait, / Malaccordé, malabordé, /Ridé, vidé d’idées, / Et cassé des pieds. … (Suite du loup 103 – 104)

The thematic (discrimination) and formal (list of participles) equivalence signals a certain understanding between the poets. And yet, Arceneaux’s speaker plunges into a tirade only to end with a sentence which puts his previous claim into perspective: “Mais d’autres fois, je me sens pas mal du tout” (Suite du loup 104).

 The expression “mairie Johnastique” refers to Leonard Jones, the mayor of the city of Moncton, New Brunswick, between 1963 and 1974, who strongly opposed the use of the French language (Cox).  “Mal de vivre” is also the title of a poem of the section (R. G. LeBlanc, Cri 16).

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This positive feeling contrasts with the deeply negative view in R. G. LeBlanc’s poem, and it harmonizes with the general Cajun attitude of joie de vivre. Subsequent Cajun poetry collections develop and open up to other cultural spaces becoming increasingly transnational. Richard’s Faire récolte and Feu, which nurture the bonds between Acadian and Cajun poetry clearly deviate from the American influence and transcend the Cajun space. It is in Feu that Richard shows his cosmopolitanism and connection with the francophonie most emphatically. Paratextual and intertextual references disclose his dynamic transnationalism. “Poètes dans la basse ville,” for instance, is dedicated to three Acadian poets from New Brunswick: Gérald Leblanc, Herménégilde Chiasson, and Dyane Léger.⁸² The reciprocal dedications denote that all Acadian and Cajun poets are in the same boat as they counter the paternalism of established literatures. This community of Acadian authors is extended in “Français d’Amérique (suite)” (Feu 110 – 114), a longer poem about the interconnections of the francophone world. Besides Kerouac, it mentions singer-songwriter and Quebecois political activist Félix Leclerc as well as poet, writer, and Quebecois political activist Gaston Miron (Feu 112). “Mohican,” the concluding poem of the section “Français d’Amérique,” is dedicated to Philippe Rossillon, a high-ranking French official and important activist for the francophone cause in Canada, who influenced Richard’s life considerably (Feu 124– 126).⁸³ Richard’s transnational sources of inspiration also transcend time. Several of his poems connect to poets of the distant past such as “Rouge d’amour (Rouge de Namur) à Arthur Rimbaud” (Richard, Faire récolte 110). Another poem, “Chêne vert” (Richard, Faire récolte 121), is dedicated to American poet Walt Whitman, whose poem “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing” (1867) deals with the benefits and detriments of friends and family. The people he is close to support him, but they also make him feel dependent and unfree (Whitman, Leaves 108). The poem “Poètes dans la basse ville” further reveals the influence of allegedly abominable master poets: “Y a des poètes / dans la basse ville, / et je les entends d’ici. / Voilà qu’ils arrivent, / mal rasés, impolis / sentant une haleine / D’extase et de mort. / d’alcool et de viande rouge / bande de sarrasins, / bande de pervers, / bande de sans-scrupules” (Richard, Feu 58 – 59).

 Four Acadian poets, Herménégilde Chiasson, Rose Després, Gérald Leblanc, and Dyane Léger, incorporated the Éditions Perce-Neige Ltée (established in 1980) in 1986 (Centre Culturel Aberdeen). Gérald Leblanc, also editor and fervent ambassador of Acadian culture, was a close friend of Richard and a driving force for Faire Récolte (Richard and Shoeffler Comeaux).  See Richard’s statement in his biography: “C’est Rossillon qui m’a éveillé à la nécessité de se battre pour la francophonie. … Il avait la conscience très douloureuse de faire partie d’une espèce en voie de disparition. C’étaient les derniers des Mohicans” (Amédée and Brûlé 138).

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These threatening poets are “Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine, / Whitman, Ginsberg, Kerouac / antisociaux. … bande de criminels. …” (Richard, Feu 59). All of them are revered poets. Yet they also have a tainted past, for in their time the public did not approve of their poetry. This passage doubtlessly expresses an anxiety of influence, resulting necessarily from the generational link between poets as well as poems. According to Bloom, poetic influence, or, poetic misprision is necessarily the study of the life-cycle of the poet-as-poet. When such study considers the context in which that life-cycle is enacted, it will be compelled to examine simultaneously the relations between poets as cases akin to what Freud called the family romance, and as chapters in the history of modern revisionism, ‘modern’ meaning here post-Enlightenment. (7– 8)

Bloom’s assertion that “[e]very poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem … [a] poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety” (94) leaves little hope for the aim of the new Cajun poets to dissociate themselves from any literary tradition outside of Cajun culture since “nothing is got for nothing, and selfappropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to create himself?” (5). In contrast to the preface of Cris sur le bayou, however, the speaker in Richard’s poem does not fight the influential past. Instead, he accepts the past and the poets as his muses: Mais je les aime quand même, / bande de grotesques personnages, / à cause que quand ils parlent / C’est comme des anges qui chantent, / le rythme de leurs palabres comme / de l’eau bénite sur mon / Âme gercée, comme une / pommade sur la peau brûlée / de mes souffrances. / Y a des poètes / qui sont venus chez nous. / laissant des traces, / Des rayures sur les meubles, / des égratignures sur mon cœur. (Feu 60)

The fact that the Cajun poets cannot help being influenced by the traces, scratches, and scrapes left by other poets is exactly what contributes to their collective memory and perpetuates their culture. Similarly, Ancelet acknowledged in 2006 that he communicated with a number of Acadian and Quebec French-speaking poets such as Patrice Desbiens, Gérald Leblanc, Herménégilde Chiasson, Rose Despré, Gaston Miron etc. Nous partageons un même défi: essayer d’exprimer une même américanité en français. C’est compliqué: c’est à la fois moderne et traditionnel. C’est exprimer en français une réalité qui normalement s’exprime en anglais. Il y a un défi: peut-on capturer une certaine existence moderne sans se déchirer du passé? (Marteau 204)

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This challenge is shared by all these poets and symbolized by the metaphor of schizophrenia. It is interesting to note that this linguistic schism was already thematized prior to Arceneaux’s poem “Schizophrénie linguistique,” namely in the play La vie et les temps de Médéric Boileau: ou Y a t’y quêquechose de plus en ville, qu’y a pas dans le bois? by Franco-Ontarian playwright and musician André Paiement.⁸⁴ What remains the most quoted and most analyzed part of the play is the ballet and final chorus in French and English: “Schizophrénie! Schizophrénie! / ‘You will’ bien vouloir excuser / ‘Our’ manière de parler / Mais nous comprenons ‘what we say.’/ Schizophrénie! Schizophrénie! ‘Is what we be!’” (Paiement 56). It is more than likely that the scene inspired Arceneaux to write “Schizophrénie linguistique.” Remarkably, the visibility of Arceneaux’s poem through scholarly criticism and its inclusion in anthologies contrasts with the invisibility of Paiement’s play. Arceneaux’s letter-like prose poem “Chère Dyane” in Suite du loup is another example of assembling French, English, and American cultural references. Through enigmatic hints at works by European Romantic poets from Englishman John Keats to the Frenchmen Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, Arceneaux moves from one poet to the next, from one work, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” to the next, Les Fleurs du mal, through a singular linguistic play based on semantic connections and resemblances between sounds: “Ode on a Grecian Urn. La Grèce me détraque. J’ai beau avoir l’air… Beaudelair. Les fleurs de l’avenir bien plantées dans la terre du mal. Mallarmé. Mal armé” (J. Arceneaux, Suite 42; ellipsis in original).⁸⁵ Lastly, the name “Dyane” in the title allegedly refers to Acadian poet and artist-painter Dyane Léger from New Brunswick.⁸⁶ Her works include prose poetry which resemble entries in a private journal. Arceneaux’s choice of the letter form establishes a connection between the two. Apart from the literary references, the poem features elements from American popular culture, mostly from folklore. They include such phrases as “Hiyo Silver and gold” borrowed from “Hiyo Silver Away,” the theme song of the successful Lone Ranger series of 1949 – 1957 and written by Scottish singer-songwriter Jim Diamond, as well as the military cadence “Hup, two, three, four.” With the

 André Paiement composed the play, an adaptation of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire, between 1973 and 1974. The playwright and his work have been neglected in the past, presumably because Franco-Ontarian literature suffers most from assimilation to English. Paiement’s suicide at age 27 might also be a reason for his being forgotten.  The italicized words are my emphasis to indicate the title of the poems.  In 1980, Dyane Léger became the first Acadian woman to publish a poetry collection, Graines de fées. Additionally, Graines de fée is the inaugural work of the Acadian Éditions Perce-neige (Lonergan, Paroles 181– 182).

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remark “[t]he poet of the prairie rides again,” the speaker puts himself in the American poetic tradition of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg who celebrated the American prairie.⁸⁷ Here, however, the speaker refers to the Cajun prairie. Still, the underlying context of the two American poets suggests that the Cajun prairie is also part of the American landscape. Moreover, the author’s knowledge of folklore transpires in the phrase “Sliding right into the Promised Land” (Suite du loup 42), taken from the line “Slide right out of the devil’s hand and slide over into the promised land” in Christopher Allen Bouchillon’s successful “Talking Blues” of 1926.⁸⁸ While Bouchillon had no particular promised land in mind, the capital letters in the Cajun poem suggest that the speaker thinks of a concrete promised land, i. e., Cajun Country. In summary, the letter draws a picture assembling collage-like images of the prairie, the Wild West, and of the promised land theme, all bathed in a Cajun heritage. The most original topos in Cajun culture to enter Cajun poetry is that of the loup garou. The loup garou, which is French for “werewolf,” is a recurring figure in Louisiana folktales and rooted in the collective memory of the Cajuns (Deutsch and Peyton 85).⁸⁹ The new Cajun poets use the metaphor of the wolf and the loup garou to describe the Cajuns’ linguistic-cultural dilemma as well as the poets’ disconnection with the outside world. The section “Suite du loup” in Arceneaux’s homonymous collection is significant in two ways. The series of the five loup poems from Cris sur le bayou is stretched into a full-length 15poem sequence in which the speaker finds himself torn between being a man and a loup garou, who “rôde,” i. e., rides, runs, roams, or strays, during the night. Half animal, half man, the speaker is destined to negotiate between two ways of life. This image recalls the schizophrenic feeling of some Cajuns who val-

 In “America’s Characteristic Landscape,” Whitman declares that “the Prairies and the Plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape. Indeed through the whole of this journey, with all its shows and varieties, what most impress’d me, and will longest remain with me, are these same prairies. Day after day, and night after night, to my eyes, to all my senses—the esthetic one most of all—they silently and broadly unfolded. Even their simplest statistics are sublime” (Prose 221). Sandburg’s The Cornhuskers, too, manifests a love of the Midwestern landscape, especially the poem “The Prairie”: “O prairie mother, I am one of your boys. / I have loved the prairie as a man with a heart shot full of pain over love” (Complete Poems 85).  Chris Bouchillon is said to have introduced the “talking blues” style to American culture. The title of his song comes from the alleged claim that Bouchillon had a dreadful singing voice. It served as inspiration to many songwriters with the most notable covers by Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan (Weissman 232).  Originating in the Middle Ages, the motif of the werewolf or wolf denotes not only force (of nature), freedom, evil, but also motherliness (Rösch 486 – 488).

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idate this double consciousness through pseudonyms. The motif of the loup garou comes to signify a mode of being in two cultures and transmits the feelings of loss, melancholy, loneliness, and the need for belonging. There is an impressive number of “night” poems in which the recurrent use of the moon further underlines the melancholy and solitude of the speaker. The link of the wolf to the wild can be interpreted as a comparison to the Cajuns as being uncultivated, uneducated, and unsociable outside of their community. For the speaker in Arceneaux’s poem, the loup garou is his “other,” a hidden personality which emerges during the night. In a staged interview, Arceneaux talks about this situation and admits that it is tout le jeu d’avoir peur de se découvrir, de reconnaître qu’on a un côté ‘qui court la nuit,’ qui s’intéresse à des choses qu’on ne peut pas nier. Pendant longtemps, on avait peur de se rencontrer[, Barry Ancelet et moi], jusqu’à la dernière étape où son passé est devenu mon avenir. Maintenant je vis mon côté ‘loup-garou’ sans préjugé, sans jugement, sans conflits. Avant je le vivais malgré moi. Parfois, cela devient flou: on ne sait qui parle. J’ai déjà eu l’expérience de me chuchoter et de me taire. C’est une schizophrénie délicieuse, pas seulement acceptée, mais glorifiée: il y a un certain côté libérateur. Quelquefois, on est plus honnête en jouant un rôle. (Marteau 202)

Although his condition entails a life in solitude, it also allows the speaker to freely live a more honest life, for he can shed whatever bonds are constraining him. Following the famous phrase by French poet Arthur Rimbaud, “Je est un autre” (“Lettre” 340), the speaker finds fulfillment in the separation of his self. The seventh poem of “Suite du loup” modifies the image of the werewolf with the use of the adjectival neologism “louvain”: “Le loup es devenu / Tellement louvain” (Suite 19). The origin of the neologism is unclear, but it entails two possible interpretations. On a linguistic level, “louvain,” to be translated with “wolf-like,” could be derived from the feminine form of wolf, “la louve,” to describe the aspect of the wolf. On a cultural level, “louvain” refers to the city of Louvain in Belgium.⁹⁰ As it happens, the term becomes heavy with meaning when considered against the context of the Flemish-Walloon conflict, a linguistic controversy originating in the 1960s. The Flemish, favoring Dutch, demanded the closure of the francophone department of the Université catholique de Louvain, against which the francophone representatives strongly protested. The so-called Affaire de Louvain from 1967 to 1968 resulted in a split, with the Dutch-speaking Katholieke Universiteit Leuven remaining in Leuven and

 Similar declinations include “neuf / neuvain.” Since the ending is not “-vin” as in the homophonous declinations “bœuf / bovin,” or “Poitou / Poitevin,” it is more probable that Arceneaux was thinking of the second, cultural implication.

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the francophone section opening the Université catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve in Wallonia (Laporte). Considering Louisiana’s relation with Belgium through the import of teachers by the CODOFIL in the 1970s, and UL Lafayette as the first university in the U.S. to offer a course on Belgian literature (Ancelet and Leroy, “Vingt ans” 8), it is probable that Arceneaux exploited the term for his purposes: Both Louvain-la-Neuve and Cajun Country suffered a linguistic crisis and attacks on bilingualism. Hence, “louvain” becomes a fitting metaphor to describe the bicultural dilemma of the speaker and the linguistic struggle in Acadiana.⁹¹ The wolf is also a subject matter in Richard’s poetry so that, in addition to the reciprocal appreciation through dedications and references, the connivance between Richard and Arceneaux extends to the shared use of the wolf image. In Voyage de nuit, Richard dedicates “Jeune loup” to Charles Baudelaire. Written in sonnet form, a one-time occurrence in Richard’s poetry, the poem is about the solitude of a young wolf turning into a young dog, then into a young poet, and finally into the “Fantaisie de muse” (67). It is worthy to note that Baudelaire, who published poems he called Petits Poèmes lycanthropes (later entitled Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose), felt rejected from society and considered himself a loup garou.⁹² Richard certainly felt like Baudelaire, misunderstood and rejected by the Cajun community, which is revealed in a chapter from his biography entitled “Jeune loup,” a reference which refers to Richard’s time as an angry young man (Amédée and Brûlé 83). In “Nuit blanche à Moncton,” dedicated to Gérald Leblanc, the speaker calls to the addressee like “Un loup sur / La montagne” (Faire récolte 10). Another poem from Faire récolte, also entitled “Jeune loup,” features a stray wolf rummaging in bins of a backyard which mirrors the solitude of the wolf/poet. The image of the wolf serves to underscore the speaker’s separateness from society and reflects the poet’s self-image. Significantly, the speaker’s comparison to other accursed poets, “poètes maudits comme moi” (Richard, Feu 68), establishes a Franco-American line of  Richard’s poems “Diable dans cœur,” “Rouge d’amour (Rouge de Namur) à Arthur Rimbaud,” and “Ronces dans la neige” also reveal links to Belgium where he spent the summer of 1987 (Faire récolte 101– 106, 110 – 111, 112– 113). Also, Lafayette has been twinned with the Belgian town of Namur since 1979 (“Un peu d’histoire”).  Baudelaire compared himself to a loup garou in a letter to Victor Hugo (Baudelaire, Baudelaire 598). Interestingly, Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris, written between 1857– 1864 and published posthumously in 1869, could also stand at the origin of the “Morceaux de mémoire en prose,” the fourth part in Suite du loup by Arceneaux. Spleen de Paris was Baudelaire’s attempt to revolutionize the rigid poetry form. However, it is not so much the poetic principle which stands out, but rather the refutation of myths and the creation of new myths. Likewise, Suite du loup is nothing else than the creation of a new Cajun myth.

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poetic descent. The speaker repeatedly refers to himself as a “poète maudit” (Richard, Faire récolte 88; Richard, Feu 68), a term which not only Baudelaire used to call himself. Paul Verlaine coined the term in his work Les Poètes maudits (1884) to designate a group of French poets outcast from society. It makes sense that Richard used the term since the Beat poets, apart from drawing on French existentialism, also drew on the French maudit tradition (Damon 173 – 174).⁹³ There is, however, another metaphor which supersedes the wolf-image. Describing himself as a “Caméléon de culture” (Richard, Voyage 26), the speaker, aka Richard, emphasizes his hybrid cultural background.⁹⁴ In contrast to the image of the werewolf, the chameleon is a much more positive image, for it entails the acceptance of cultural diversity, both instinctive and acquired. It is also an apt comparison considering that Richard taps into various music genres of Louisiana such as folk, jazz, blues, country music, and rock ‘n’ roll, and is thus responsible for innovating Cajun music. Significantly, the speaker in one poem of Richard’s Feu has turned into “l’ex-poète maudit” (76). Whether this change, obviously a reflection of the public’s enthusiastic reception of the poet, is beneficial, stands to reason. For the “ex-poète maudit” has nothing to say to his change of direction, he has no “explication pour expliquer son départ / Dans l’autre sens” (Richard, Feu 76). The wolf/werewolf metaphor was further developed and expanded by Debbie Clifton. A year after Suite du loup, in 1999, she published A cette heure la louve, a sort of female counterpart to Arceneaux’s volume. In contrast to Arceneaux’s and Richard’s first full-length poetry collections, which presented selected poems from Cris sur le bayou, Clifton’s collection contains only new writings and centers around the narrative of a she-werewolf torn between her loyalty to the pack and her love for a man. The she-werewolf story, written in Standard French, opens the collection and is cut across by poetic interludes, written in Creole French, except for the prose piece “Dansantes,” which is written in English (Clifton 35 – 38).

 The French Symbolist poets also influenced David Cheramie. His poem “Il y a des loup dans mon pays” from his collection Lait à mère (1997) is preceded by a stanza quoted from Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Bal des pendus” which includes the line “les loups vont répondant des forêts de violettes” (17). Cheramie’s poem describes how, in the speaker’s country, the wolves (the activists) struggle to define their identity through writing. Already the title of the collection introduces the wolf theme through a linguistic play: “lait à mère,” “mother’s milk,” is a homonym of “lait amer,” “bitter milk.” The milk of the mother tastes bitter to the speaker, for the language he learned to speak –French– he can only write in secret and with a lot of pain (18 – 21).  The expression “roi des Cadiens bicéphales,” which a journalist attributed to Richard, also presents the image of the cultural split (Denis).

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Among the 43 pieces of the collection are ten prose texts which narrate the falling in love of a man with a bitch, the “louve,” the difficulties they encounter due to their differences, and the inevitable break-up of their relation. The werewolf story is interrupted by poems, some of them resembling songs, which are generally about love and heartbreak. After exploring race relations in Cris sur le bayou, Clifton, the other voice in the rather male-oriented circle of poets, takes upon herself to present a female voice in a poetry collection of her own. The female counterpart to Arceneaux’s roaming werewolf serves to denounce the double bind to which the bitch is subjected. Her bicephal aspect and female identity cause her to be marginalized. As a female, she is excluded from the other werewolves while as a werewolf she is different from human beings. Just as in Arceneaux’s poems, the metaphor of the loup garou in Clifton’s poems serves to describe the in-between state of the poet. Her two-headed quality connects her to the cultural dilemma of French-speaking Louisiana: French— in her case Creole French—and English are both part of her identity. While the werewolf story is written in Standard French with Cajun expressions such as “être après faire quelque chose,” the rest of the poems use mostly Creole French. In contrast to Arceneaux’s loup garou that is shot and disenchanted (by mainstream American culture?),⁹⁵ Clifton’s bitch has to choose between living as a wolf or living as a human. Regarding Clifton’s poetry, the dilemma between Standard French and Creole French, male and female, human and mythical animal can be extended to the dilemma between black and white. In the end, writing Louisiana French poetry is a solitary fight which cannot even surpass the feeling of being rejected by the community or having to submit to social constraints. The loup garou is also an appropriate symbol to describe the linguistic and cultural cleavage in Cajun and Creole culture. It is very productive, for not only Acadian folklore features the loup garou (Jolicœur 55 – 58). The legend of the loup garou is a common feature in the Caribbean voodoo culture as, for instance, “Le loupgarou” (1958) shows, a poem from the sonnet sequence “Tales of the Islands” by St. Lucian Nobel prize winner Derek Walcott (Walcott, Poetry 35). The speaker is similarly torn apart by his multicultural heritage and becomes a loup garou. The common folk belief of the loup garou in both Cajun and Caribbean culture reveals the difficulty of bringing together the different cultural and racial heritages. Through the use of the metaphor of the loup garou, the Louisiana-Acadian-French-Caribbean connection comes full circle. Remarkably, the loup garou, already part of the collective memory of the Cajun community, becomes

 “[A] loup garou can … be disenchanted by bleeding” (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales 159).

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a common trope in the Cajun literary community. The connecting link present in both the francophone and marginalized element, and the variegated use helps fix the motif.

4.3 Conclusion Cris sur le bayou was conceived at a time of social and cultural change. Since there were no Cajun writings as models, the poets first had to take stock of the conditions and elements defining their culture. In that sense, Cris sur le bayou represents not only the first expression of, and a template for, Cajun literature. This new poetry stands also as a wake-up call for cultural change in the Cajun community, as an awakening to the past and a call for action. There is no doubt that Cris sur le bayou is like the Trojan horse from which the Cajuns have leaped out to conquer a literary space of their own. As Walter Benjamin put it: “The coming awakening stands, like the Greeks’ wooden horse, in the Troy of dreams” (Arcades 392). Once they had assessed their identity, the Cajun poets explicitly started to deal with their past. Put differently, the distant past was silenced because historical memory had not yet been formed or become consciously adopted as integral to their identity. Drawing on a common contemporary consciousness as well as on a common past, they started to consolidate the Cajun collective memory and establish a Cajun literary memory. Purported legends promulgated by outsiders such as that of Evangeline, or clichés including the moss-draped oak trees or the allegedly Cajun attitude of laisser les bons temps rouler, were demystified and replaced by such authentic cultural symbols as Beausoleil or the loup garou. While it has been argued that the act of writing leads to forgetting,⁹⁶ the Cajun poets use writing to work against forgetting. From the start, they expressed the need to write. Arceneaux’s poem “Le loup en hiver” evokes the image of the “somnambulist hand” of the loup garou: “Mais sa main lui brûle. / Elle somnambule / Pour se trouver un coin / Où elle se reposerait point / Mais exploiterait / Des rêves délibérés” (J. Arceneaux et al. 47; Suite 15). Writing in an uncodified French gives the poets the necessary freedom to act out their self-conception and legitimize their bicultural identity. In contrast to Acadian authors who give contour to an imaginary Acadian space through their writings, the Cajun poets are able to refer to a specific geographic space. Indeed, Cajun literature

 In the dialogue between Sokrates and Phaedrus, Socrates points to writing as the enemy of memory (Platon 274d).

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is firmly entrenched in Cajun Country. References to the landscape—the wetlands, the Cajun Prairie, the bayous—are the most conspicuous markers of this literature. Being highly evocative for the Cajuns, these elements are prime constituents of the Cajun collective identity and memory. The themes of place, cultural traditions, music, language dilemma, and assimilation continue to be basis material in post-Cris sur le bayou poetry collections. These are nonetheless shaped by perspectives of the past relating mostly to Acadia. It is a both new and recycled poetry, whose roots reach into the soil of Louisiana, Acadia, Quebec, and France. Francophone Cajun poetry brings together a myriad of elements defining Cajun culture, its Acadian past, and its mutability. Foreign influences have been present from the start, but it was only with later poetry collections that the Cajun poets stopped emphasizing their literary independence. They now openly refer to their muses. The poetry collections appearing after Cris sur le bayou function then as a second birth, a second awakening. They reflect the moment when the poets first discovered the dialectic of influence, with poetry being both internal and external to Cajun culture. In integrating older poems from Cris sur le bayou, they maintain the connection with the inaugural text in subsequent collections. This development then shows how memory processes become dynamic and actually rely on exchanges with the Other. Collective memory in Cajun poetry is no longer solely marked by a Hegelian interiorization. Instead, it shows how the collective memory is defined by an interplay of interiorization and exteriorization of memory. Steeped in the collective memory of the Cajuns, the poems become collective memory for later generations. Not so much the distant past, but the more recent past is emphasized. More importantly, “la renaissance de [l’écriture du français] au XXe siècle devient un signe de sa légitimité” (LaFleur, “Politique” 74). Cajun poetry receives its legitimization through yet another means. It shares the choice of activist subject matters and of writing in the minority language with other minority literatures, especially of the francophonie such as the Acadians, the Creoles of the Caribbean, or the Walloon in Belgium. The poems addressed in this chapter even go beyond the francophone scope and, as Clifton does, find ways to converge with the Nahua in Mexico,⁹⁷ or the Native Americans. “Tambours” by Arceneaux makes the link to the Attakapas, a vanished Native American tribe of Southeast Louisiana about to be forgotten. The landscape the speaker passes through on his highway-ride from Lafayette to Baton Rouge conjures up the past and has him delve into an imaginary past:

 The poem “Cuauhtémoc” is about Cuauhtémoc, the last of the Aztec ruler of Tenochtitlan from 1520 – 1521 (Clifton 40).

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“J’éteins enfin la radio / Pour essayer d’écouter / Les tambours des Attakapas / Dans le silence, / Dans la distance du temps. / Ils étaient pourtant / Nombreux et courageux. /. … Mais leurs tambours ne font / Plus de bruit. / Ils ont pourri avec le temps, / Et asteur ils font partie / De la terre du territoire” (Suite 38). The fact that the tribe is gone despite the strength and craftiness of the members gives pause to the driver, for it might well be the fate awaiting the Cajuns. Like the Mohicans (see Rossillon in Richard’s poem “Mohican”), the Cajun poets necessitate the solidarity with other cultural or linguistic minorities. Strikingly, Richard’s collection Feu strategically combines the Acadian past with the future of humanity not only to call attention to the Acadians’ and Cajuns’ uniqueness and marginal position, but to give more weight to his criticism of pollution, mass-consumer society, globalization, and the absurdity of war. In 2014, in an interview assessing the endemic state of francophone literature, Ancelet made the following remark: “On est toujours en train de fouetter les fesses de ce bébé, pour le faire brailler. Il est toujours en pleine naissance” (Ancelet, “Littérature”). Like a growing child, Cajun poetry has matured. It is continually extending both the temporal and spatial frames, establishing links to the past and the outside world. If, at first, the poets seem to struggle with the collective consciousness and veer into a split personality, they progressively acknowledge this double linguistic and cultural consciousness. The nascent literature in Cajun Country interestingly functions similarly to Cajun music: It is self-referential and acts as an echo of other literatures. The natural consonance between the French language and Cajun music ignited a turn toward the written tradition, a return to writing in French after almost a century which has not abated today. Francophone Cajun poetry, although developing in an English-speaking country, is French in both form and content since the French language determines both aspects. The alignment with other ethnic minorities fighting to preserve their linguistic and cultural identity serves to give more weight to the argument of the Cajuns. No doubt, the Cajuns have overcome their anxiety of influence and gradually accepted foreign influences. In widening their repertoire, they consolidate the collective memory and literature of Cajun culture. The reference to fellow poets and the use of their poetic motifs certifies the unity and solidarity between the poets.

5 Tim Gautreaux: Navigating between Memory and Forgetting Timothy Martin Gautreaux is undoubtedly one of the most celebrated prose writers from Cajun Country today. With the increasing nation-wide acclaim and critical attention, his reputation has come to rival other writers of the American canon such as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy (“Same Place, Same Things”; Hicks 281; Nisly, Wingless Chickens xi). The comparisons to O’Connor and Percy evoke two important elements of collective memory defining the contemporary Cajun consciousness: a distinct sense of place and the Catholic tradition. What makes Gautreaux different from others is his “sympathetic understanding of working-class sensibilities and Cajun culture” (“Same Place, Same Things”). Since “[t]here aren’t many people down there writing ‘literary’ fiction about blue-collar Cajun culture” (Hebert-Leiter, “Interview” 116), he is praised for introducing a genuine Cajun voice to American fiction. Indeed, as Margaret Bauer asserts, it is this “previously unheard voice” which makes his “identity as a Cajun writer … so important” (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 136). Gautreaux was born in Cajun Country in 1947, and has spent most of his life there. In contrast to non-Cajun authors who write about the Cajuns, he is in the position to give a far more authentic view of Cajun culture. His short stories and novels offer a powerful voice from inside that culture, and they reveal how the land, the traditions, and above all the Catholic religion influenced his life. With a family name which immediately discloses his Acadian heritage, Gautreaux brings together two elements shared by fellow Cajun writers. While the start of his writing career coincided with the literary awakening of the francophone Cajun poetry in the 1980s—he published his first short story “A Sacrifice of Doves” in 1983 and started writing his first novel by the end of the 1980s—,¹ he gained national recognition only in the second half of the 1990s, after publishing two short story collections, Same Place, Same Things (1996) and Welding with Children (1999),² as well as the novel The Next Step in the Dance (1998). The Clearing (2003) and The Missing (2009) are Gautreaux’s other two novels, with

 It took Gautreaux almost a decade to write and publish his first novel: “[E]ight years of diddling around” plus the time he was given with the position as the John and Renée Grisham Southern Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi from 1996 – 1997 (Levasseur and Rabalais 51).  Waiting for the Evening News, published in 2010, integrates his short stories of the two previous collections into a single volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-006

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the latter being lauded as his masterpiece (Larson, “Novelist”). His latest publication is the short story collection Signals: New and Selected Stories (2017). With regard to the body of his work, he easily outperforms his fellow Cajun writers: He is the first Cajun author to figure in four monographs and a collection of interviews has been dedicated to him.³ His achievements reflect his skills and (inter‐)national presence.⁴ Among other recognitions, he received the 2005 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature at Longwood University, “to honor one of the greatest—and most often ignored—American writers of the twentieth century” (“Dos Passos Prize”). He was also selected for the Louisiana Writer Award in 2009 (“Louisiana Writer Award” [2009]), which he felt to be “especially gratifying because it comes from the region that gives birth to my stories. It’s an affirmation of my attempts to portray the culture and history of Louisiana, the trials and little daily successes of the people who call this state home” (Larson, “Best of”). Although Gautreaux has repeatedly rejected the descriptor “Cajun,” his œuvre features key elements characteristic of Cajun literature. Apart from the landscape and traditions typical of Cajun Country, names figure as markers of Cajun identity in his stories. In an interview, he points out that “[i]f you’re going to set a story in south Louisiana, you’re going to have to have some ‘-eaux’ characters in it. It’s sort of unavoidable—just look at the phone book” (Kane, “Postmodern Southern Moralist” 58). Acadian family names like Thibodeaux, Boudreaux, Bergeron, Leblanc, Cancienne and popular nicknames like Nonc René, T-Jean, and T-Bub further mark the typical regional identity prevalent in Cajun Country.  He has contributed to such notable magazines as The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, and GQ, and his short stories have regularly appeared in such noteworthy anthologies as Best American Short Stories and Stories of the South. The monographs include three books, each with a chapter on Tim Gautreaux: Bauer, William Faulkner’s Legacy; Hebert-Leiter, Becoming Cajun; Nisly, Wingless Chickens. Margaret Bauer published the first full-length critical edition on Gautreaux’s works: Understanding Tim Gautreaux. Nisly assembled 18 interviews with Gautreaux from 1993 – 2009 in Conversations.  His achievements include the fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and Literature in 1993; the 1995 National Magazine Award for Fiction for “Waiting for the Evening News”; the SEBA Book Award (today called SIBA Award [“SIBA Book Award”]) in 1999 for The Next Step in the Dance; the 2005 Heasly Prize from Lyon College (Nisly, Conversations xxii); and the nomination for the 2010 Edgar Award for The Missing. A German translation of Same Place, Same Things (Verschollen in Vegas) appeared as early as 1998 and his novels were translated into French: (in order of appearance) Le Dernier Arbre; Nos Disparus; Fais-moi danser, Beau Gosse. For the raving French reviews, fueled by his presence at the 7th Festival America in Vincennes in 2014, see “Tim Gautreaux,” 2013; Ferniot, “Le Dernier Arbre”; Chaudey; Corty; Ferniot, “Nos Disparus.”

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Besides the Acadian ancestry of some of the characters and the intimate portrayal of Cajun culture, there is a thematic element that reveals Gautreaux’s Cajun sensibility. The notion of loss—from the discourse about the Acadian past, to the poetics of Cajun music (see Emoff), to the gradual demise of the French language—equally pervades Cajun literature and Gautreaux’s fiction in particular. Clearly, Gautreaux has been called “le romancier de la perte” (Séry), the novelist of loss, with good cause. Especially with the publication of his highly emblematic last novel The Missing (2009), Gautreaux has established himself as a chronicler of loss. Many of his characters endure all kinds of losses: Some suffer brain damage from tragic accidents, or mental diseases rob them of their memory⁵; close relatives pass away or are murdered; children vanish; an economic depression makes characters lose their livelihood. These losses cause a profound disorientation in the characters since important frames, or carriers of memory, disappear, which ultimately leads to forgetting. Tellingly, the Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definition of the transitive verb “to forget”: “to lose remembrance of; to cease to retain in one’s memory” (“forget, v.”; my emphasis). Similarly, the French dictionary Le Littré defines “oubli” as “perte du souvenir” (3: 1285), the loss of memory. As Halbwachs explained, it is the disappearance—the loss—of important frameworks that causes forgetting. Loss is thus closely connected to memory and oblivion. Significantly, the twin processes of remembering and forgetting are not only present on the individual but also on the collective level. Gautreaux’s stories deal with the characters’ geographical and inner journeys, in search of what is missing or lost. More often than not, the characters share their experience of loss with the people around them. In order to hold onto or find their identity, they try to remember and recover what has been lost with the help of socio-cultural anchors. A shared sense of place, a consolidated group memory, and enduring traditions act as orientation tools and help avert or delay forgetting. On another level, Gautreaux’s historical novels go beyond the presentist discourse about loss, extending it toward a temporal experience of loss. They recall the by-gone and nearly forgotten pasts of Louisiana: the economic downturn of the early 1980s, or the era of the lumber industry and steamboat excursions during the 1920s. Some of the characters, like Gautreaux himself, carry a heritage of loss through their Acadian ancestry. With the loss of the Acadian homeland and a number of Acadian traditions, the Grand Dérangement becomes tantamount to  In The Next Step in the Dance, Paul Thibodeaux, trapped in a boiler, receives severe brain injuries, and Mr. Jeansomme, Colette’s father, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. The priest in the short story “Attitude Adjustment” (2015) also loses the capacity to remember due to an accident, which poses a problem when he returns to the pulpit.

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loss. However, the Acadian past is virtually nonexistent in Gautreaux’s work, a peculiarity that reveals a more complex kind of loss: the forgetting of loss itself, “the loss of loss itself” (Butler 467). Gautreaux’s novels are evidence of his attempt to recover loss through writing about a past that is closer in time and to which the Cajuns – and also other people from Louisiana—can relate. This chapter looks at the interdependency of remembering and forgetting: How does place and, to some extent, how do language, music, food, and family serve as anchors and as guides to the characters? Even though the past, ideally implemented in a founding history, is fundamental for endowing a people with identity, it is curious that the past in Gautreaux’s fiction never goes beyond three generations. Finally, I will endeavor to outline Gautreaux’s literary mechanisms for healing loss. In including non-Cajun elements, mixing oral storytelling with knowledge from selected American authors, and extending his Catholic values toward a humanistic and tolerant worldview, Gautreaux manages to create a hybrid Cajun literary space, allowing him to dismantle stereotypical depictions of the Cajuns and further distinguish Cajun culture from the surrounding AngloAmerican culture. In interweaving different traditions, Gautreaux remains true to the Cajun tradition, characterized by adaptation, and infuses Cajun literature with a necessary new impetus.

5.1 In Search of a Sense of Place Following the publication of Gautreaux’s first short story collection, the introductory comments to an interview with him stated that “[i]n a world characterized by increased transience, Tim Gautreaux is a writer with a strong sense of place” (Bolick and Watta 17). Gautreaux not only reveals this trait in his works, but he also expressly affirms in a later interview that “[a] sense of place was always important to me” (Hebert-Leiter, “Interview” 111). Not without reason has he been called “le peintre le mieux coté des paysages humides de Louisiane” (Séry). The setting for most of Gautreaux’s short stories is Southwest Louisiana. Born and raised in Morgan City, Gautreaux evokes the scenes and landscapes of his hometown in his writing: “I write about Acadian culture or blue-collar families because that’s where I’m from. It’s just a fact that I was raised in a rough oil-patch town on the gulf, Morgan City. We had thirty-two bars and eighteen churches. That’s my territory as a writer” (Joyal 26). The prevailing feature of Gautreaux’s geographical settings is the wetlands and the bayous. References to Louisiana fauna and flora not only contribute to a distinctive sense of place, but also evoke a strong connection to nature. The hot and humid climate, and the

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poetic tableaux of oak, cypress, and pecan trees, of sugarcane fields and bayous, of egrets, crawfish, nutria, and frogs, all create a vivid picture of Cajun Country with its unique landscape and wildlife. Topographical references to Lake Pontchartrain, to St. Martin and Cameron Parishes, as well as to bigger well-known cities and towns such as New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, New Iberia, or Pierre Part (20 miles north of Morgan City) delimit an identifiable region. Smaller communities named Grand Crapaud, Gumwood, Pine Oil, Prairie Amère, Woodgulch, and Troumal are the more usual settings, and most of them are fictional. Most of Gautreaux’s plots are centered in Tiger Island and its surroundings. This semi-fictional town figures in several short stories, in The Next Step in the Dance, where it is the main setting, and in The Clearing, as the closest real community to that novel’s swamp setting and sawmill town Nimbus. Gautreaux explains that Tiger Island is really “a composite of three or four little towns—Morgan City … Donaldsonville, Houma, and Thibodeaux” (Larson, “Writer Next Door” 22– 23). As it happens, Gautreaux’s hometown Morgan City used to be called Tiger Island, in reference to an unknown cat spotted by U.S. surveyors in the early nineteenth century.⁶ In mixing familiar historical and fictive locations, Gautreaux creates an imaginary space that bears a striking resemblance to his home, remaining recognizable for both local people and visitors to the state of Louisiana. The importance of place is especially tangible in Gautreaux’s first novel, The Next Step in the Dance. The strong visual details describing Tiger Island and its surroundings evoke a comprehensive mental image of a Cajun community: [T]he whole region was much like Tiger Island, small villages spread out along the Chieftain River, peopled by Cajuns, Cajunized Germans, maudlin Italians, and a sprinkle of misplaced Bible Belt types, whom Paul’s grandfather called les cous rouges. Tiger Island was the most knuckle-knocked of the river towns: The only theater was the Silver Bayou Drive-In; the largest building was a metal shed where oil-field equipment was sandblasted. The best restaurant was in the Big Gator, next to the dance floor, where Nelson Orville’s band would sing French versions of old rock songs, accompanied by pawnshop guitars and a ten-button accordion. … something about Tiger Island was slightly out of balance, a little too littered, sun-tortured, and mildewed. Most of the houses were old. A band of big weatherboard family places spread along River Street, but away from the levee, the houses were small, on small lots, as if they had been steamed and shrunk by the welding-hot morning sun and the daily afternoon thunderstorm. (16)

 Before the Civil War, Tiger Island was renamed Brashear City, after Walter Brashear, a sugar cane planter. From 1876 on it was called Morgan City, in honor of Charles Morgan for making Morgan City a trade hub (“History of Morgan City”).

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Like Tiger Island, Chieftain River is a fictitious name. Its Native American connotation, however, obviously alludes to the Atchafalaya River,⁷ which runs through Morgan City. Fishing and hunting in the bayous and the Mississippi Delta are important and popular activities of Cajun culture, and they also play a major role in the novel, mirroring the strong attachment to nature and the deep roots of these traditions. Nature, and the Louisiana wetlands specifically, are crucial because they signify the sole resource for the protagonists of the novel to make a living. It soon becomes apparent that the sense of place is not restricted to geographical locations, but that social anchors and traditions are equally defining. The Next Step in the Dance has a certain cultural relevance today. Primarily a love story, it also pays tribute to a certain time in a certain culture (Nisly, “Catholic” 124). Set in the mid-1980s, it chronicles the traumatic collapse of the oil industry in Acadiana, which affected above all Morgan City, “the gateway to the Gulf of Mexico for the shrimping and oilfield industries” (“Welcome to Morgan City”) since the beginning of the twentieth century. While the OPEC oil embargo on the United States during the early 1970s had made Morgan City an important platform for oil-related businesses (McGuire 73), the repeal of the embargo by Saudi Arabia ten years later caused a major crash for the Louisiana economy. Due to the world-wide drop of oil prices, the unemployment rate in Louisiana oil country skyrocketed and led especially blue-collar workers of small bayou communities to leave their homes in search for another workplace (McGuire 73 – 74). Generally seen as an economic phenomenon, the oil bust was “something [Gautreaux] lived through. … [T]he entire oil industry in Louisiana crashed and burned during the eighties. [He] saw the effects firsthand: the out-migration of white-collar people and skilled workers, the idle boats and oil rigs, and so many people out of jobs” (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 137). The ensuing dislocation of workers and their families made the changing landscape even more apparent: Empty towns with dilapidated houses adjoining abandoned and overgrown factories dominated the landscape. According to Gautreaux, then in his thirties, “[i]t was a tremendously interesting time. So many people had to pull up stakes and move out of Louisiana. So many people suffered and stepped down several levels in their employment and in the amount of money they were making. It was really a time of great trauma for this state and certainly deserved a literary piece to memorialize it” (Larson, “Writer Next Door” 22). Gautreaux’s portrayal of Cajun culture in the 1980s is an attempt to embed the period into the collective memory of the Cajuns which, otherwise, would have been forgotten: “I tried in

 “Long River” in Choctaw (Read 14– 15).

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The Next Step in the Dance to record the culture as it was in the 1980s. … Because I found that if I didn’t nobody else would.”⁸ Gautreaux’s fictive Tiger Island of the mid-1980s eventually becomes symbolically charged as it represents all Louisiana towns struck by the oil glut.

5.1.1 A Topology of Loss According to critics, “[l]ocation never overwhelms [Gautreaux’s] characters, but determines some of who they are and will be” (Bolick and Watta 9). Like thousands of Cajuns, the protagonists of The Next Step in the Dance, Paul and Colette Thibodeaux, a young married couple in their twenties, are afflicted by the calamity of the oil bust. Whereas Paul, a machine buff, avid dancer, and lover of Cajun food and music, is content with his modest home and hedonistic life in Tiger Island, Colette feels imprisoned and dreams of a better place. She knows that “[a]s long as she stayed in Tiger Island, she would be a little girl in [the] minds [of her relatives and friends]” (Gautreaux, Next Step 31), and she longs to move to New Orleans. Dissatisfied with her position as a common bank teller, her marriage to an unambitious and philandering husband, and her residence in what she considers a mud hole where nobody aims high, Colette, one day, takes off and takes the train, not to New Orleans, but to California. In Los Angeles, she does her best to adapt to the unfamiliar West Coast landscape and culture, and is soon promoted in her job. Her behavior corresponds to what historian Shane K. Bernard observed about the Cajuns who faced American progress: Although a traditionally antimaterialistic people whose Acadian ancestors hailed from precapitalistic France and whose recent forebears had been subsistence laborers, the Cajuns now found it increasingly difficult to resist tantalizing goods offered by mainstream America. Many embraced its consumer ethos: they wanted good jobs so they could acquire luxury items and participate in the American Dream. (Cajuns 34)

Gradually, though, Colette realizes that living the life of celebrity people she knows from such glossy magazines like Cosmopolitan, Victoria, and Woman’s World is an illusion. Paul, who has been patiently waiting for her to come back to him, finally follows Colette to save their marriage. He feels displaced from the beginning, but he manages to build a new life, too.

 Apart from the historical events of the 1980s, elements of the previous three decades such as fist-fighting scenes are included (Hebert-Leiter, “Interview” 116).

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After both Paul and Colette realize that the American West does not offer what they expected—a secure and fulfilling life for Colette, and reconciliation for Paul—they both return to Louisiana empty-handed and alone. Unlike the traditional hero who, after fulfilling his quest, comes back transformed from his initiation journey, they leave California with an increased feeling of being lost. What is more, the place they find in Louisiana is a foreign country to them: The economy has changed for the worse and has left its traces on the landscape, presenting abandoned towns and rusty machine carcasses to the passers-by. Relatives and friends have lost their jobs, and Paul and Colette, too, struggle to make ends meet. To make matters worse, the breakdown of the economy and the disintegration of the Louisiana landscape symbolize the couple’s disintegrating marriage. It will take a number of misfortunes before Paul and Colette remember where they belong and realize the importance of their cultural roots. Initially, Paul and Colette display two diverging positioning systems. Each of them is driven by their own dreams and beliefs. Colette clearly does not appreciate her home and complains about the “[m]ud and snakes and piles of roadside garbage. Little burned-out fishermen—” (Gautreaux, Next Step 22). She is ashamed of her family; Tiger Island, in her opinion, is “a small muddy pond” (Gautreaux, Next Step 2). It would be wrong not to travel to at least one other place. During one conversation with Paul, she reminds him of what their “old drunk of a history teacher” had told them in high school about Louisiana: “Even the first explorers who came through went back to France and told their children that if they were real bad, someday they would be sent to Louisiana.” And Paul retorts: “Those guys were just passing through. … They weren’t born here” (Gautreaux, Next Step 22). For Paul, birth ties a person to the land. Unlike many others in Louisiana tempted by the encroaching Americanization, he feels no need to leave home, not even for New Orleans, which he calls “Pervert City” (Gautreaux, Next Step 24). Paul knows about Colette’s longings, though, and he knows that it would be hard to leave Louisiana as this would be concomitant with forsaking her roots: Colette wanted to leave Tiger Island to do what other people with good looks and brains would do—which is to say, examine at least one other place in the world. Tiger Island was dragging her down in its humid, sun-blistered way. She was a local girl to the bone, related to half the town, and it would be hard to leave the ceremonial of kinship, her food and dance and the cemetery where her people had been buried for two hundred years. (Gautreaux, Next Step 20)

In contrast, with his love of machines, dancing, and women, Paul has a different navigation system than Colette. He does not feel the need to travel until Colette leaves him. The first night after their break-up he stays at his grandfather’s

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house, where he realizes the deeper implications of this change of location: “He gained the kitchen and looked at the two places set on the porcelain table. It seemed he was already out of his house, misplaced” (Gautreaux, Next Step 11). The chipped plate on the table is a subtle indication of the disintegrating marriage. When he returns to his “peeling green house” the next day, it seems to be “a place out of his past” (Gautreaux, Next Step 12). Trying to understand Colette’s dissatisfaction with their place, he tours around and starts to feel utterly out of place: “It seemed that the town he’d become used to like an old pair of pants no longer fit him” (Gautreaux, Next Step 68). He understands that the real link to home is Colette, so he follows her to Los Angeles. Significantly, both Paul and Colette focus on the landscapes around them to orientate themselves. Paul is struck by the exotic landscape he passes by while riding on the Sunset Pacific to Los Angeles. When Paul’s seatmate, a professor, lectures on La Salle and how “Louisiana must have seemed like another planet” to that European explorer and visionary, Paul can only acquiesce (Gautreaux, Next Step 74). Upon his arrival at the Los Angeles train terminal, Paul feels “like de Soto wandering uncharted territory” (Gautreaux, Next Step 75). This sense increases in Los Angeles, where Paul feels like the Indian brought to London by English explorers (Gautreaux, Next Step 111). He decides “that California was easy on the eyes and that it was impossible to get bored here, but for someone from Tiger Island, the place was like a movie set—too pretty, too shaped for effect. … One day he took the tour of Forest Lawn and was beside himself with disorientation” (Gautreaux, Next Step 82). It is not so much the transitoriness inhabiting Forest Lawn, a cemetery in Glendale, California, that bewilders Paul, but rather its artificiality and the removal of death as an element of Man’s life on earth.⁹ Even the California forests and mountains like Mount Shasta cannot convert Paul, for whom his stay is like a “permanent vacation,” an expression which sounds like death to Colette (Gautreaux, Next Step 121). California makes Paul feel like being in a Disney-movie: “If I look at another big pine tree, I’ll turn into Bambi” (Gautreaux, Next Step 121). Likewise, Colette realizes after a while that Los Angeles is more hype than substance and that she does not belong there: “Something was happening to Colette. … She had driven the length of California, from the Oregon border to Tijuana, and knew that she had been too greedy with the landscape, had eaten it up too quickly” (Gautreaux, Next Step 199). Resurfacing memories of Tiger Island,  Forest Lawn was founded in 1906 by businessmen from San Francisco, California. The tombstones are ground-level instead of visible and erect like monuments, and the park-like cemetery features art. It has become “an unlikely magnet for tourists who see the feel-good cemetery as a distinctly California invention,” and has been called a “Disneyland of death” (Pool).

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Cajun food, and her family finally pull her back home. Paul and Colette’s experience in California is one of superficiality, of, in Jean Baudrillard’s terminology, “hyperreality.” Anonymity and, above all, speed serve to erase any traces of living, leading ultimately to amnesia: “La vitesse crée un espace initiatique … dont la seule règle est d’effacer les traces. Triomphe de l’oubli sur la mémoire, ivresse inculte, amnésique” (Baudrillard 15). Paul’s two-day road trip back to Louisiana leads him through the desert of New Mexico, a hostile and threatening place: “As he backtracked through cactus and stone, Paul felt like a broken-down pioneer who couldn’t take the frontier anymore. … He looked over the cholla and prickly pear at the trillion-thorned desert, every plant armed, every rock blistering hot, then turned back to the car, which waited at the edge of the melting asphalt like a cool white mint” (Gautreaux, Next Step 133). Even the car seems unsuitable to Paul, who deliberately chooses that means of transport over the train or the plane. Paul willingly forgets all the unknown spaces he traverses. Again, Baudrillard’s words apply here: “Rouler est une forme spectaculaire d’amnésie. Tout à découvrir, tout à effacer” (19). Paul’s decision to take his Crown Victoria to travel back to Louisiana through the inhospitable desert offers a way of forgetting the surreal episode in Los Angeles. At the same time, however, the desolate landscape confronts Paul with an increased sense of loss. Actually, as Édouard Glissant observed, both the feeling of displacement and sense of loss can cause identity to disintegrate: “Si l’exil peut effriter le sens de l’identité, la pensée de l’errance, qui est pensée du relatif, le renforce le plus souvent” (Poétique 32). Indeed, Paul experiences an identity crisis as he just cannot assimilate to that alien and hyperreal space of the American West. Shifting landscapes not only occur through the characters’ move from one place to another, but industrial and economic changes resulting from the oil crisis also have effects on the landscape. Paul’s father expresses this radical change of the landscape on one of his son’s visits back home: “‘T-Bub, you won’t believe how everything’s gone down in the little bit of time you been away.’ Paul had heard. He watched the traffic and noticed what he didn’t see: pipe trucks carrying oil-well drill columns, blue Schlumberger x-ray trucks, red-and-gray Halliburton cement trucks. … Tiger Island had changed for the worse” (Gautreaux, Next Step 114). These changes unsettle the protagonists even further upon their return. Paul, for instance, after having left California for good, watches the disintegrated landscape in Louisiana with astonishment, the result of the heavy cut in the oil production:

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Many kinds of loss showed at the side of the highway. Oilfield offices sat empty, their parking lots blowing with weeds. Pipe yards showed only empty racks; hangarlike equipment buildings were padlocked and chained. On the outskirts of Tiger Island, one of the biggest offshore fabrication yards in the world was now a moonscape of white clamshells, crows racketing about the empty construction bays. Two barrooms were burned-out hulks, erect thistles mocking the parking lots. When he crossed the bridge into town, he looked down the Chieftain River and saw rafts of tugs and offshore supply boats tied side by side in the willows. (Gautreaux, Next Step 134)

The dramatic change of Louisiana’s landscape confronts Paul with a disenchanted reality determined not only by material loss, but by the breaking up of the community. Without jobs, people have no other choice than to move away: “His brother was now out of a job and running crawfish traps. Driving by Leblanc’s, he tried not to look at the weeds and the rust. All day he looked for a job, but the places that were still open had on skeletons crews. … [H]e could tell by the thin traffic and the many FOR SALE signs in front of houses that luck would be scarce” (Gautreaux, Next Step 137). Similarly, when Colette returns to Tiger Island, settling in does not come easy: “For two weeks she looked for work with the desperation of a newly landed immigrant” (Gautreaux, Next Step 148). As a consequence, Paul and Colette have to adapt to yet another unfamiliar environment on their return home. The foreign-looking landscapes of both California and Louisiana increase their forlornness in a changing world. They experience loss twice. First in Los Angeles, where they realize how rooted they are in Cajun Country, and a second time upon their return to Louisiana, where the economic breakdown irrevocably shatters their expectations of home. Moreover, both Paul and Colette are thrown into life-changing situations. When Paul hears that Colette is expecting a baby, “some part in the universe of Tiger Island [falls] out of orbit” (Gautreaux, Next Step 130). That child, called Matthew, will eventually bring the two together again. Furthermore, falling prey to a jealous Texan, Paul finds himself trapped in a broken boiler, and he is almost scalded to death. He is rescued, but his brain is severely damaged. This near-death situation provokes a change in Paul, who, as a machine expert, feels “betrayed by one of his machines” (Gautreaux, Next Step 168). Paul’s brain accident evokes more than the chimera of industrialization. Losing his mental capacities also involves the risk of forgetting Cajun traditions, which Paul, in contrast to Colette, highly values. Ultimately, the incident serves as a symbol of the potential demise of Cajun culture. Conversely, Paul’s healing signifies a silver lining for Cajun culture. Loss is also a condition for remembering. For philosopher Edward Casey, “[t]o be placeless in one’s remembering is not only to be disoriented, it is to

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be decidedly disadvantaged with regard to what a more complete mnemonic experience might deliver” (183 – 184). Fortunately, Paul and Colette are not placeless, for they still remember where they belong even if the surroundings have changed. Taking advantage of their stored memories, they make use of their past in the present. Colette seems to be the first to be capable to adapt. Forced by financial problems, she takes matters into her own hands and, recalling her childhood pastimes of fishing and hunting, she decides to hunt nutria in the wetlands.¹⁰ Eventually, though not without toil and trouble, Colette finds her place in this old-new landscape of the bayous, untouched by globalization and teeming with memories of the past. The journey, starting and ending in Louisiana, involves more than just physical dislocation. California is merely a detour, an occasion for Paul and Colette to gain an outsider’s view. They need to get decentered in order to be able to re-center. Location is one element of the milieux de mémoire which Paul and Colette missed in California. Family and the socializing traditions are the other crucial elements.

5.1.2 Socio-Cultural Anchors In view of the characters’ dislocation as well as the shifting landscapes, it seems that place no longer functions as the ultimate point of reference, nor as the sole “guardian of memories” (Casey 201). As the characters need other means of positioning for finding their place, other mnemonic anchors emerge. As a case in point, religion, that is the Catholic faith, and Cajun French expressions permeate the novel. Gautreaux likes about Cajun Country “that everyone knew everyone else, everyone was Catholic, I like the fact that everyone eats the same things. They share a common heritage” (Larson, “Writer Next Door” 23). More impor-

 Besides the oil crisis, The Next Step in the Dance also recalls how nutria hunting became fashionable in Cajun Country in the 1980s. Introduced in the 1940s, the nutria population quickly exploded because of their ability to self-replicate in massive numbers. The nuisance peaked in the 1980s and 1990s due to several factors: On a global scale, the fur market became saturated and declined as the fashion sector turned away from fur apparel, obviously triggered by the emerging animal rights movement. In Louisiana, “several unusual warm winters and the nutria’s reproductive ability” caused the nutria overpopulation (Bernard, “M’sieu Ned’s Rat?” 292). In addition to keeping this pest-like growth in check, nutria hunting has been a way of providing the jobless Cajuns with an occupation and money in times of oil crises. The fluctuating oil industry also contributed to the cliché that Cajuns have no real profession. During bad times, the Cajuns usually have to turn to some stable business so they have something to fall back on. As a matter of fact, fishing and hunting not only provide the Cajuns with money, but also with food. For Colette, nutria hunting is the key to her and her son’s survival.

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tantly, recurrent references to such cultural markers as food, music, and social life contribute to develop a distinct sense of place and to the collective memory of the group. Sound, sight, smell, and taste are paramount gateways for the flow of memories and these triggers provoke feelings that “are bound up in place” (Welty 118). The short story “Floyd’s Girl” from Same Place, Same Things anticipates the relevance of food, community, and traditions that characterize The Next Step in the Dance. When Floyd’s little daughter Lizette is kidnapped, the grandmother of Floyd’s cousin T-Jean can only think of “the gumbos Lizette would be missing, the okra soul, the crawfish body. How could she live without the things that belong on the tongue like Communion on Sunday? Living without her food would be like losing God, her unique meal” (Gautreaux, Same Place 169). Indeed, Cajun traditions are vital: [T]here was something wrong with a child living [in Texas] who doesn’t belong, who will be haunted for the rest of her days by memories of the ample laps of aunts, daily thunderheads rolling above flat parishes of rice and cane, the musical rattle of French, her prayers, the head-turning squawk of her uncle’s accordion, the scrape and complaint of her father’s fiddle as he serenades the backyard on weekends. (Gautreaux, Same Place 170)

Fortunately, Lizette is saved. When the two elderly ladies, T-Jean’s grandmère and Mrs. Boudreaux, succeed in stopping the kidnapper, T-Jean’s grandmère lectures him: “‘[I]f you woulda went off with her, all you woulda got was her little body. In her head, she’d never be where you took her to. Every day she’d feel okra in her mouth’” (Gautreaux, Same Place 180). Again, it all comes down to food as a defining trait of Cajun identity. With respect to sound, language is most likely the prime mnemonic tool for the characters. Not only is sound connected to Cajun music, but French and the Cajun dialect in particular seem to trigger distinct images and feelings. Gautreaux, whose father was proficient in French but failed to teach it to his children, admits being unable to speak French (Hebert-Leiter, “Interview” 60). Nevertheless, fragments of French phrases, italicized, provide an intimate look into Cajun culture and evoke a distinctive Cajun atmosphere. The fact that the characters use French infrequently reflects the contemporary marginal position of French. Compared to Gautreaux’s other works, The Next Step in the Dance includes numerous examples of French words and phrases. While such expressions as “grand-père” and “grand-mère” indicate the ancestral French heritage, it is especially the dialogues between the characters which reveal each character’s attitude toward French. Interjections like “Mais / Mais non,” affectionate expressions like “bébé,” “chère,” “morceau de chou” (Gautreaux, Next Step 57), or

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expletives like “couillon” (Gautreaux, Next Step 198), “cou rouge” (Gautreaux, Next Step 232),¹¹ or “Coonass” (Gautreaux, Next Step 57, 157, 163)¹² spice up the English narrative. References to plants, “jonc cupon,” and food, “pain perdu” (Gautreaux, Next Step 3, 10), a movie dialogue dubbed in Cajun French from the western series Gunsmoke: “Lâche ton fusil, toi” (Gautreaux, Next Step 301),¹³ and language interference used sarcastically by Cajuns: “Mais oui. … On the nother side that door, they got some jeune [sic] filles for forty dollars what look like them Dallas Cowgirl” (Gautreaux, Next Step 57) further suggest the French surroundings. Gautreaux also includes Cajun images: “His head spun like a pirogue caught in an eddy” (Gautreaux, Next Step 172); expressions such as “googoon,” a local term for head¹⁴; or pseudo-French references such as, for instance, in the comparison of Paul’s cousin Ted and great-uncle Octave with Alphonse and Gaston when they play with the bar door of the Little Palace in The Next Step in the Dance (67).¹⁵ Not all Cajuns in Gautreaux’s stories speak French: “[T]here is a clear generational difference” (Dubois and Horvath, “Sounding Cajun” 275). Elderly characters like Grand-père Abadie or Mrs. Fontenot in The Next Step in the Dance represent a by-gone past, mostly defined by using Cajun French. Besides such familiar phrases as “‘Comment ça va?’” and “‘Ça va,’”¹⁶ there are longer statements, usually triggered by feelings of respect or affection. “‘Ah, tu veux manger mon doigt?’” (270), asks Abadie Colette’s new-born baby. Abadie’s daughter affectionately asks her father in French: “‘T’a oublié quelque chose?’” to which Abadie answers: “‘Je crois que c’est ça’” (328). Abadie also talks to his chickens  “Cou rouge,” “redneck” in English, usually refers to White non-Cajun American outsiders and alludes to the white skin prone to sunburn.  “Coonass” is a racial slur for the Cajuns. Its unverified origin is usually traced back to the French slur word “connasse” or the raccoon (Sexton; Bernard, “Bayou Teche Dispatches”; Ancelet, “Coonass”).  Strikingly, in the only instance when television is referred to, the program is in French. Gautreaux writes “dubbed in Cajun French,” yet the dialogues were in Standard French. Gunsmoke was aired as Police des plaines by the Lafayette-based regional television station KATC in the 1960s (Bernard, Cajuns 42).  “[Y]ou got a bump on the googoon that’s gonna make you wreck for sure’” (Gautreaux, Same Place 173). “‘He got him a fever and a bad bump on the googoon.’ Abadie knocked the side of his head with a fist” (Gautreaux, Next Step 338).  The comparison refers to an American comic strip by Frederick Burr Opper of 1901, which shows how the two Frenchmen Alphonse à la Carte and Gaston de Table d’Hôte outdo each other in politeness. The phrase “After you, Alphonse. – No, you first, my dear Gaston!” has entered the American vocabulary (“Ohio Cartoonists”).  By the end of the novel, Paul echoes Grand-père Abadie’s “‘Comment ça va?’” (Gautreaux, Next Sept 10, 37, 337).

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in French: “‘Mangez les, alors. Ça me coûte vingt-cinq sous’” (185). Likewise, in Gautreaux’s short story “Easy Pickings,” eighty-five-year-old Mrs. Landreneaux speaks “Acadian French to her chickens because nearly everyone else who could speak it was dead” (Welding 62). Most of the time, however, the elderly speak English since the younger folks would not understand them otherwise. Although the younger characters in The Next Step in the Dance have lost the proficiency of speaking French, they still make some efforts to converse with the elderly in French. To Abadie’s “‘Comment ça va?’ … ‘Vous voulez du café?’” Paul responds: “‘Mais yeah’” (Gautreaux, Next Step 195). Likewise, Colette asks Abadie out of “politeness for the old man”: “‘Alors, Monsieur Abadie, tu veux un peu de café?’” (Gautreaux, Next Step 138). Abadie, in turn, speaks French out of habit. The use of French also indicates a shift in emotions. In California, reminiscing about the past, Paul does not miss his accordion, but “Mammas and daddys. Aunts and uncles” (Gautreaux, Next Step 111). As his conversation with Colette continues, tension builds up, and when Colette asks if he misses the red bugs, Paul starts answering in French: “‘Pas du tout.’” Thereupon she continues her interrogation in French: “‘Et les écrevisses?’ He sighed ‘Tout le temps.’ – ‘Et Nelson Orville et son accordion?’ – ‘Un ‘tit peu. Et toi?’” (Gautreaux, Next Step 112). With each memory of Louisiana, they come closer to each other and to their past, to the extent that even their French resurfaces, there, in the middle of California. Hebert-Leiter argues that the French language underlines their difference with the surrounding American culture (Becoming Cajun 127). It keeps them from entering the community in California. For instance, Colette feels that she does not “fit in with her fellow workers, who thought she talked funny, the way she flattened her a’s. The people she longed to be like made jokes about her, called her ‘the swamp queen’” (Gautreaux, Next Step 75). It is, however, also an important mnemonic act. Paul and Colette cling to the Cajun French language used in the most intimate moments. It links them not only to their community in Louisiana, but also to their Cajun past. Furthermore, The Next Step in the Dance displays how essential cultural elements are embedded in the Cajuns’ lives. Without doubt, Cajun music is a major ingredient of Cajun culture, and the very title of the novel sets the tone for a Cajun atmosphere governed by music and dancing. Both Paul and Colette are very musical. The bar scenes in the novel illustrate through evocative and rhythmic prose how tightly music is anchored in Cajun culture: From the dance floor came the snort of the accordion, the thump of a beer-soaked drumhead, the caroming thug of a bass guitar, the waspy drone of a fiddle, and finally the

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nasal falsetto of Nelson Orville singing ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown’ in French. (Gautreaux, Next Step 18)

Originally not of Cajun origin, but a national hit from 1973 by American folk singer Jim Croce, the song “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” illustrates how American popular culture influences Cajun culture. The fact that Nelson Orville sings the song in French brings the tradition of the French language home.¹⁷ Nelson Orville is not the only one to sing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” Colette’s cousin Clarisse also sings a few lines of the song and makes no secret of what she thinks of Paul: “‘Mauvais, mauvais Leroy Brown, le plus mauvais boog dans toute la ville, plus mauvais que vieux King Kong…’” (Gautreaux, Next Step 18; ellipsis in original). Nelson Orville’s other songs are also highly evocative. The lines “‘Mon cœur fit mal … Mon cœur est tout cassé’” (Gautreaux, Next Step 25) are frequently used in Cajun heartbreak songs. Later, when Paul tries to coax Colette into forgiving him, he also uses a famous Cajun song line. However, he cannot fool Colette with “‘Donne-moi une autre ‘tite chance?’”—a line from “One More Chance,” recorded by Aldus Roger, in the 1960s.¹⁸ She responds curtly: “‘You can’t speak French worth a damn. You stole that line from an old song’” (Gautreaux, Next Step 19). The reference to “[a] five-piece band of middle-aged men called Boogielicious … thumping out some early sixties rock and roll,” who sing “‘Matilda, Matilda, I cried for you…’” (Gautreaux, Next Step 31– 32; ellipsis in original) and are joined by Clarisse, recalls the hit song “Mathilda” of 1959, a melancholic ballad by the swamp pop band Cookie and the Cupcakes based in Lake Charles, Louisiana, formerly known as Boogie Ramblers.¹⁹ The frequent references to Cajun music not only give the novel a flowing rhythm. They function as mnemonic signposts for the (Cajun) reader as they break down the rich Cajun music repertoire. The omnipresence of Cajun music in the characters’ lives clashes with the lack of it in California. When Paul crosses the Mexican desert and approaches the Louisiana border, the mere sound of the accordion on the radio evokes memories of home: “He turned on the radio and the reedy complaint of a diatonic accordion buzzed into him, the sound of homeland. The music made him think of food and loss” (Gautreaux, Next Step 133 – 134). It is, therefore, no surprise that

 In 1974, the French singer Sylvie Vartan recorded “Bye Bye Leroy Brown,” a French language version of “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”  Aldus Roger is considered the King of the French Accordion (Savoy 198, 202).  The band Cookie and the Cupcakes dissolved in the early 1970s (Bernard, Cajuns 115 – 124). The fictional band Boogielicious is without doubt an intentional combination of the two band names based on the references to food and “boogie.”

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sounds, emanating from language and music, play an integral part in Gautreaux’s desire to create a distinctive sense of place in his fiction. References to gumbo, étouffée, and strong coffee underscore Cajun foodways as another predominant cultural and mnemonic marker in the novel. Especially in Los Angeles, the absence, or rather difference, of Cajun food is noticeable. When Paul decides to get used to the city, he first heads for a place to eat on a daily basis, as he had in the Little Palace back home. The first time he walked into a restaurant, he asked for a poor boy, and the waitress looked at him as though he had lost his mind. She handed him the menu, which showed no red beans, gumbo, or étouffée. He looked up at the tanned waitress, feeling stupid and alien. He ordered a cup of coffee, then stared through the weak brew to the bottom of the cup, feeling naked without his food. (Gautreaux, Next Step 80)²⁰

The adjectives “stupid,” “alien,” and “naked” show how, because of the missing traditional dishes from South Louisiana, Paul is further destabilized and feels vulnerable. On another occasion, he enters a Cajun restaurant that offers “authentic dishes from the bayou state” (Gautreaux, Next Step 80). Paul is disconcerted at the sight of the dried starfish decorating the dining room and even more at the sight of his neighbor’s plate, the “blackened swordfish” seeming more burned to Paul. When the waiter tells him that it is “the most traditional way of cooking seafood among the Cajuns” (Gautreaux, Next Step 81), he chooses a gumbo, but is no less startled at the spiciness of the dish. The statement of the waiter that “[i]t takes time to develop a true Cajun palate” (Gautreaux, Next Step 81) turns the situation into an ironic moment. Surprisingly to Paul, Cajun culture in California is different from Cajun culture in Louisiana. Of course, Paul does not know Paul Prudhomme’s famous dish of Blackened Redfish (Gutierrez 135 – 136).²¹ Overwhelmed by the unexpectedly unfamiliar Cajun culture he encounters, memories of home resurface. In this nostalgic moment, Paul feels out of place and starts “thinking of a medium-brown roux Colette had made last winter as the base for a shrimp gumbo. He closed his eyes and saw her hands cutting up onions” (Gautreaux, Next Step 81). From then on, “[m]emory of Colette’s food began to follow him like an aroma” (Gautreaux, Next Step 81).

 A poor boy, or po’ boy, is a typical Louisiana sandwich made of French bread and filled with meat or seafood, sometimes lettuce, tomatoes, or pickles.  Paul Prudhomme was a Cajun chef in New Orleans who popularized Cajun cuisine in the 1980s.

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These memories are reminiscent of Marcel Proust’s episode with the madeleine in Du côté de chez Swann. The narrator, who tastes the French biscuit soaked in tea, is invaded by a surge of childhood memories of his vacations at the home of his aunt Léonie (Proust 144). The sensations triggered by the madeleine are what Proust called “mémoire involontaire,” involuntary memory.²² Both Paul and Colette experience this emergence of involuntary memory, an attempt to make the past present again.²³ Unlike Proust’s narrator, however, they remember without any concrete cue. It is the absence of the food that triggers reminiscences in both their minds. Gautreaux’s characters do not dwell on the past, they live in the here and now. They seldom fall back into reminiscences, and if they do, it is only for a short moment. Furthermore, this involuntary memory is not solely individual. Indeed, as Benjamin remarks about Proust’s work, the term “involuntary memory” bears the traces of the situation that engendered it; it is part of the inventory of the individual who is isolated in various ways. Where there is experience [Erfahrung] in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine in the memory [Gedächtnis] with material from the collective past. … In this way, voluntary and involuntary recollection cease to be mutually exclusive. (“Motifs” 316)

Music and food in Cajun culture are anything but individual experiences—in their function as associative cuing they are also highly collective. As a means of subsistence, food plays an important role also in social life, where it “constitutes the glue that holds the Cajun community together” (Bienvenu, Brasseaux, and Brasseaux 65). Indeed, Paul and Colette’s involuntary memories are always connected to the family. Colette, who begins “to cook for herself, making shrimp gumbo, sometimes white beans and pork roast, eating her one serving and freezing the rest” (Gautreaux, Next Step 100), realizes how much she misses her family: “Colette missed people to eat with and discovered that eating alone was only half a meal. She would stare at a bowl of gumbo and remember her brother, mother, and father gathered with her in the old high-ceiled kitchen back home” (Gautreaux, Next Step 100). In the end, the realization of her wish of

 Marcel Proust thus confirmed the claim about the associative nature of memory processes explored by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. For Ebbinghaus, the involuntary reproductions of the past occur regularly and are defined by the laws of association (1– 2).  Benjamin highlighted that Proust’s strategy was the actualization of memories: “À la recherche du temps perdu is the constant attempt to charge an entire lifetime with the utmost mental awareness. Proust’s method is actualization, not reflection” (“Image” 211).

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“breaking loose from all those silver cords of relatives and friends, the gumbos of the aunts, the homemade sausages of the uncles” (Gautreaux, Next Step 31) makes her so miserable that she returns to Tiger Island. In Paul’s family, too, familial bonds are valued highly. When Paul asks his father if he could have lived in Alabama, he answers: “‘I don’t know, T-Bub. Maybe if I had some family around. Family was more important them days than it is now. But the damn food couldn’t be eat, and everybody talked that twangy twang; so you couldn’t understand half what they said. … Some people are like birds and can live wherever they light. … Some people’” (Gautreaux, Next Step 64). Yet, there are other people who cannot help but stay where they live. What the novel celebrates and excels in is its sense of community. Tiger Island is like a big family whose members meet in the bar Little Palace to play a game of bourré or pool. Paul’s and Colette’s experiences in California and the encounters of Paul’s father in Alabama reflect Gautreaux’s own experience when he left Louisiana for his doctoral studies in South Carolina. As a twelve-year-old, Gautreaux could not have answered the question “Are you a Cajun?” Leaving Louisiana makes him realize his diverging perspective: It was when I moved to South Carolina when I was maybe twenty-one, twenty-two years old (for graduate school), that I found myself in a different culture at that point, and realized how different Louisiana was, south Louisiana in particular, from the rest of the country. … [T]he food was totally different, and the religion was different, the politics was different, everything was different. Attitudes were different. (Hebert-Leiter, “Interview” 115)

As Gautreaux’s recollections indicate, Cajuns in the mid-twentieth century were unaware of their Cajun identity. It is through a pseudo-“exile” experience that they realized how cultural traditions such as language, music, food, and family are linked to memory and become important mnemonic anchors. Besides the disorientation caused by an economic crisis, there exists another kind of disorientation, which is not immediately linked to collective memory. When individual members of a community disappear as carriers of memory either through memory loss or death, the only resource for the victims and those left behind is the support of the community and the strength of their collective memory. Memory loss and death actually concern the individual in the first place, but Gautreaux’s stories highlight how the family and community are of paramount importance for each individual. Incisive events such as the death of a family member have an effect on the whole community, which turns into a collective system of support. For instance, when Mr. Jeansomme, Colette’s father and the retired principal of the little rough-and-tumble high school, dies, it is “everyone’s loss”: “Something important had happened, not only for

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Colette but for Tiger Island. Looking up the hot concrete of River Street, past the tin roofs, crape myrtles, and hackberry trees, [Paul] thought of people who considered themselves children again when they were around Principal Jeansomme” (Gautreaux, Next Step 275). In addition, Paul’s severe brain injury through a boiler accident generates a change of mind in Colette, who realizes how important Paul is for her small family. Musing about the zeal of the Coast Guard boys to find Paul in the stormy sea, she is sure that “[n]o one will look for you like someone who’s known you all your life. Nothing fosters a rescue like the ties in the blood” (Gautreaux, Next Step 295). The depiction of social life in The Next Step in the Dance shows the importance of the family and community with its traditions and memories. In Louisiana, family and community perform the works of an analyst: “Colette began to understand why several of her coworkers went to analysts” (Gautreaux, Next Step 108). According to sociologists Henry and Bankston from UL Lafayette, “Lousianians who define themselves as Cajuns … emphasize strong family ties. … [U]nder exceptional circumstances, Cajun families do indeed play an essential role” (117). Besides the economic and familial troubles that befall Colette and Paul, another such exceptional circumstance also occurs in Gautreaux’s short story “Floyd’s Girl.” In the final part, which bears the telling title “Ensemble” (Gautreaux, Same Place 177), T-Jean’s grandmère tells the Texas man that “‘[t]his child belongs with her papa. She’s got Leblanc in her, and Cancienne way back, and before that, Thibodeaux. … Before the Thibodeaux was more Thibodeaux living in a house made of dirt’” (Gautreaux, Same Place 178). Another example of tight family bonds is the short story “Sorry Blood,” where the likeness of facial features and gestures serves as a cue for recognition and strengthens the familial connection (Gautreaux, Welding 159). The senior protagonist Etienne Leblanc has lost his mind after his wife’s death, and, unable to remember which car in the parking lot is his, follows a young man who claims Etienne is his father only to take advantage of him. In the end, it is the sight of the facial features Etienne recognizes in his grandson’s face that brings him home. He recognizes “the LeBlanc nose, … [traced] the round-topped ears of his wife. He knew him, and his mind closed like a fist on this grandson and everything else” (Gautreaux, Welding 159). The final picture that appears in Leblanc’s mind is the setting of his house: “He closed his eyes and called on the old farm in his head to stay where it was, remembered its cypress house, its flat and misty lake of sugarcane keeping the impressions of a morning wind” (Gautreaux, Welding 159).²⁴

 The Next Step in the Dance extends this connection to the community when Colette sees “bits

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In contrast to the Louisiana Acadians’ strong ties to the land for subsistence reasons, the characters show another motif for their love of the land. It is where their roots are. Despite the hardships, Paul and Colette manage to construct a new space where they feel at home. Their experience as outsiders in California is a first step toward finding their identity. The second step is the realization of what they are about to lose: their home and culture. Through the experience of loss, they become aware of what defines them: place, community, and traditions. The call of the land, of the family, of the food, and of the past is so strong that they readjust their views and start to embrace their culture and cherish their heritage. All these elements combined give the landscape its meaning and function as a compass. Paul and Colette’s reassessment helps to reconstruct not only their lives, but their relationship as well. In going back to nature, reviving skills performed during their childhood, and relying on the help of the family and Cajun community, the couple finally “grows up” and finds the way back to each other. The story explores the characters’ search for individual fulfillment as well as their place in the Cajun community and American society. Ultimately, something lost is not necessarily forgotten. As long as we can remember the object we once possessed and look for it, it is more likely that we find it.²⁵ Gautreaux is looking for such elements on the verge of being forgotten. His endeavor to chronicle loss in order to prevent forgetting actually reflects what has already been lost. Referring to The Next Step in the Dance, literary critic Susan Larson indicates this ambiguity: “This is both an elegy for a disappearing way of life and a celebration of enduring values—work and love and family and home” (qtd. in Nisly, Wingless Chickens 115).

5.2 Between Absent and Present Pasts The sense of cultural belonging is not only delimited by patterns of geography. According to literary scholar Frederick Hoffmann, history equally contributes to a distinct sense of cultural identity (12 – 16), and Gautreaux’s interest in history

and pieces of her father in [people’s] faces [who came to the wake, the funeral Mass, the burial, the house] and in the way they spoke and in how they scratched themselves and turned their heads and held their lips” (275).  Commenting on the parable of the lost Drachma in Luke 15, 8 – 10, Saint Augustine of Hippo argues that if we remember that we lost something, the image of that lost item must still be in our memory (Weinrich 38 – 39).

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was obviously conducive to writing historical novels about Louisiana’s past.²⁶ Considering Gautreaux’s Acadian background²⁷ and the omnipresence of Cajun culture in several of his works, above all in The Next Step in the Dance, references to the Acadian past would seem self-evident. But the Acadian past is almost nonexistent in Gautreaux’s fiction. While his first novel and all of his short stories are marked by a conspicuous contemporaneity, or by the repercussions of a recent past, it is necessary to look at his last two novels to get an idea about his vision of the past. It is in The Clearing and The Missing where he delves into almost forgotten Louisiana history. Set in south Louisiana during the 1920s, the two historical novels go back three generations and recall practices of a bygone time. The Clearing pays homage to the laborious work of the lumber mills in the labyrinthine and brutal world of the Louisiana cypress forests during the 1920s. Presbyterian mill manager and Pennsylvania native Randolph Aldridge is in search of his brother, Byron, who has been fleeing the horrors of the battlefields during World War I in France since his return to the United States. Within a five-year-span, from 1923 to 1928, Randolph experiences the saloon life controlled by bootlegging Italians and their roustabouts who do not shy away from killing the people close to him. With respect to The Missing, an adventure story about how Cajun Sam Simoneaux tries to find redemption for having failed to prevent the kidnapping of a German girl by restoring her to her parents, the novel evokes the exciting leisure activities on steamship cruises up and down the Mississippi during the 1920s. The storyline is set in New Orleans, a few other, smaller Louisiana places, and Graysoner, Kentucky, where the abductors keep the child hidden. Most of the action happens, however, on the steamship Ambassador. The search to recover the child also represents another search. As an infant, Sam was the sole survivor when his family was brutally murdered by outlaws. Chasing the kidnappers thus becomes a search for his own past. Remarkably, Gautreaux’s fiction does not reach back more than one hundred years, and although the early twentieth century is marked by the emerging Evangeline cult in Louisiana, promoted by the Acadian elite, the Acadian past is almost absent. Allegedly, “[a]s twentieth-century Cajuns became more American, their memory of an actual past faded” (Hebert-Leiter, Becoming Cajun 112). It seems, then, that events of the remote past—from the founding of Acadia in the seventeenth century to the formation of the Cajuns as an ethnic group

 Gautreaux minored in history in college (Meyerling 100).  Gautreaux’s ancestors arrived in New Orleans in 1785 after having stayed for thirty years in France without being capable of assimilating (Ashbrook 168).

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around the turn of the twentieth century—are of no consequence in Gautreaux’s work. The distant Acadian past is shielded by the more immediate past, and the few allusions seem to serve rather as a mise en scène than as a militant statement. As a result, the rare passages referring to the distant historical past, including the Acadian expulsion, are indicative of a social forgetting, consolidating an attitude of presentness. As Nietzsche maintained, forgetting corresponds to an unhistorical state whereas remembering always entails a historical perspective. Both the unhistorical and historical perspectives are important: “[T]he unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of a culture” (Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations 63). Gautreaux’s fiction at best commemorates a recent past in Cajun Country still known to contemporary Cajuns because of its presentness through shared family memories. On the one hand, this approach counters the stereotypical Acadian past used for touristic purposes. On the other hand, the recounted events of the past in his last two novels indicate the high degree of the Cajuns’ Americanization. The Cajuns’ contemporary mentality does not hinge on the past, yet it is not solely disconnected from it either. Gautreaux’s texts try to mirror that equilibrium between the past and the present, which differs from those texts that emphasize the Acadian past.

5.2.1 The Opacity of Historical Memory The Next Step in the Dance presents one explicit reference to the Acadian expulsion that simultaneously points to the importance of genealogy for the Cajuns. When Paul and Colette ask Abadie to lend them his boat for nutria hunting, a rush of memories comes back to the old man, and he recalls his great-greatgrandfather’s boat-building skills. He continues to trace the family genealogy all the way back to his exiled ancestor: “Before Zefirin was Arsène, and before that was François, who was thrown out of Nova Scotia by those damned English. The what—the Spanish gave him some land that one time covered half of downtown. It’s in the records,” says Abadie, pointing toward the church (Gautreaux, Next Step 197). To some extent, the theme of dislocation and the quest for a home evokes the Acadian exile. Indeed, in his book about the Americanization of the Cajun people, historian Shane K. Bernard compares the Cajun exodus of the 1980s to the Acadian diaspora in the mid-eighteenth century: “Faced with unemployment, mounting debts, and bankruptcy, Cajuns departed their homeland by the thousands, seeking better economic opportunities abroad. … Although self-imposed, the mass-exile naturally begged comparison to the eight-

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eenth-century Acadian diaspora, as Cajuns formed ethnic enclaves in metropolitan areas across America” (Cajuns 124). In this context, Paul and Colette’s separation, wanderings, and search for belonging seem to echo Longfellow’s Evangeline. In both the poem and the novel, Acadians and Cajuns are made to leave their homes and land due to adverse conditions. However, this parallel soon dissolves after a second look at Gautreaux’s character construction. Besides the difference that it is Paul who follows Colette, the ending of the novel is all but tragic. For Paul and Colette eventually return to their roots, confronting the dire results of the oil bust and coming together again whereas neither Evangeline nor Gabriel find their way back home. Also, Gautreaux reveals a distanced attitude toward the Evangeline myth through sarcastic statements by his characters. Colette, knowing that Paul is on his way to get her, imagines him as a tragic hero whose fateful search for her ends with his death and subsequent sainthood: “Then for a thousand years people in Tiger Island would talk about the man who went out to California to his wife and was killed for his love. He would be a regional saint. Nelson Orville would write a song about him and sing it in the Big Gator” (Gautreaux, Next Step 75 – 76). Though Evangeline is not mentioned, and the protagonist is not female, there is a familiar echo to the myth and its cultural history. The theme of Acadian genealogy is also implied in “Floyd’s Girl” when kidnapped Lizette passes rice and cane fields of “those dogged Labats or Thibodeauxs, who had owned the land for more than two hundred years” (Gautreaux, Same Place 176). The story is also the only one to mention Evangeline explicitly, though briefly. When Nonc René hears the news of Lizette’s kidnapping, he sees his view confirmed that all the women he knows are stricken by Evangeline’s fate: Every woman [Nonc René Badeau] knew was an Evangeline bearing some great sorrow in life, and now he imagined his grand-niece dragged off to live among lizards and rock and only Mexican accordion music. How could she bear to stay there without the buzz of a fiddle and the clang of a triangle in her pretty head, the love songs sung through the nose? (Gautreaux, Same Place 174)

Of course, this statement denounces both the Evangeline myth and the Genteel Acadians’ blind veneration of the icon, perpetuated through saintly, passive Evangeline-like figures such as Voorhies’s Emmeline Labiche, Grace King’s Adorine Mérionaux in “The Story of a Day,”²⁸ or the shallowness of the female char-

 In her short story, collected in Balcony Stories (1892), Grace King drew on the angelic but doomed character of Evangeline. The narrator, visiting St. Martin parish, recounts the story of

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acters in Shirley Ann Grau’s The Hard Blue Sky,²⁹ which reinforces the cliché of a subservient, inferior being. A look at Gautreaux’s female characters, however, shows that they are anything but passive or shallow. On the contrary, they all show mental strength, obstinacy, and courage, be they young girls like Lizette, whom her father considers to be “smart, smarter than [himself], the kind of smartness that sometimes got you in trouble with people” (Gautreaux, Same Place 167), or elderly women like Mrs. Boudreaux and T-Jean’s grandmother who, despite their age, manage to contain the Texan kidnapper. Likewise, Colette in The Next Step in the Dance is a strong Cajun woman mostly of necessity. Constrained to fend for her baby boy Matthew, she cannot afford to be passive. Gautreaux emphasizes the challenges women had to face around the mid-twentieth century: Life then was very hard for women in the 1950s, in that Louisiana was a poor state. It’s always been a very poor state, and very often women had to work at jobs in addition to raising a family. … The women had to be very tough, and they also had to assert their dominance in the family. … the Cajun mother was very influential and strong. She had to keep her husband in line. … And if she was a push over, she had a miserable life. … This attitude, I think, was passed on to the daughters, because I remember even on the playground the girls were pretty darn mean. (Hebert-Leiter, “Interview” 117)

Gautreaux’s descriptions of Cajun women, above all Colette in The Next Step in the Dance, invalidate and deconstruct the Evangeline myth, dismissing the innocent and docile female image to promote a more authentic portrayal of the tenacious Cajun women. Obviously, Gautreaux engages with twentieth-century history instead of the distant past. Both in The Clearing and The Missing, World War I functions as a historical event determining most of the characters’ actions. Of greater historical importance in The Clearing is the tradition of the “last tree.” Set in Nimbus, a lumber camp in the Louisiana cypress forest, it pays tribute to the arduous work of felling the huge cypress trees in a delimited radius in the dangerous Lou-

the star-crossed lovers Adorine Mérionaux and Zévérin Thériot. Hearing Adorine’s beautiful singing voice, Zévérin, who is to marry her in a week, cannot help but take the pirogue and cross the overflowing bayou to join his beloved. He never arrives, and when his pirogue is found, it is surmised that he must have drowned.  Shirley Ann Grau depicted the Cajuns in her books The Hard Blue Sky (1958) and The Condor Passes (1971). Both works feature Cajun French dialogues which, however, are referred to derogatorily. The Hard Blue Sky, one of the better portrayals of Cajun culture, describes in a genuine and rich way the geography and the human ways of the Cajun community on Îsle aux Chiens off the Louisiana Gulf coast during the mid-nineteenth century.

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isiana swamps. With the felling of the last tree, solemnized by a ritual, the lumber camp is officially closed. Again, Gautreaux wants to pay tribute to this lost tradition of a certain time and in a certain place. Another instance when the past is negotiated is when Merville Thibodeaux, the septuagenarian town marshal of Tiger Island, feeling dizzy from three drinks of brandy and the swaying movement of the train, is caught up by the past. Merville and his son Minos are the only Cajun characters in The Clearing and have always lived in Tiger Island. Although they play a secondary role in the story, they are significant for understanding the past. Merville especially provides insight into the Cajun collective memory. Lying on a bench at the station, he has a moment of contemplation, and his imagination floats among distant memories. His walk down memory lane begins with a recollection of himself as a ten-yearold boy in a war, most probably the Civil War. Merville struggles against this memory, and an earlier memory of good and peaceful times emerges. He recalls typical Cajun traditions and halts at the image of his grandfather, old Nercisse, who recalls the 1700s and how the cultures of the Acadians and Native Americans clashed.³⁰ These imbricated memories contain the account of a brutal ambush by the Acadians, an attack which made the Native Americans leave and settle further south into the marsh. Even if the account about the relations between the Native Americans and the Acadians in Louisiana comes peculiarly close to the theme of the Acadian dispersal, the latter event is never mentioned. Instead, the memory of the brutal skirmish makes Merville’s memories of the Civil War resurface, and he relives the horrible time when Acadians were caught between Unionists and Confederates: [I]nside his mind men in dirty blue wool who stank worse than any Indian were knocking flat a year’s work in the cane fields to build a three-day’s camp, kicking down the fence for firewood and taking shrieking piglets on their bayonets. … [Merville] and his mother and sisters were hiding under the beds with the chamber pots, silently praying Notre Père qui es aux cieux, and watching the filthy boots punish the brick-scrubbed floors as the soldiers cursed the family for having so little. A corporal grabbed the house’s shiny new rifle, and Merville watched as it winked out of the doorway and was gone. His father stood in the yard and shook his fist until knocked down and kicked, left talking blood, his body ruined for two planting seasons, at least. The next day at noon, a hundred and fifty horsemen, some in gray uniforms, most in homespun broadcloth and carrying shotguns, rode over the flat fields from the east, breaking down tall cane in a panic, their animals bleeding at the bits. They had ridden by accident into a large Union force at Donaldsonville and

 Merville is almost seventy-five years old in the novel, so the date of his birth must be around the 1850s. Consequently, his grandfather must have been part of the Acadian exiles who settled Louisiana over a century before the events in The Clearing (250).

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thought those federals were chasing them, though they were not. (Gautreaux, Clearing 63 – 64)

Significantly, although the effects of the Civil War on the Louisiana Acadians were ignored for a long time, they were, nonetheless, considerable. David C. Edmonds’s Yankee Autumn in Acadiana: A Narrative of the Great Texas Overland Expedition through Southwestern Louisiana, October-December 1863 (1979), which was adapted by James Fontenot as Les Attakapas in 1987– 1988 for the Théâtre Cadien (Waggoner, Une fantaisie collective 5, 192– 236), and Carl A. Brasseaux’s historical analysis in 1992 are the major works dealing with the double bind the Civil War presented to the Louisiana Acadians who, deciding to remain neutral, were caught between the two fighting parties (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun 62– 69). In The Missing, which is also set between 1918 and 1927, but in a different place, Acadian history seems to be irrelevant, too. Other historical events are tackled instead, relating, for instance, to the discourse about the dilemma of Cajun French. On the very first page, protagonist Sam Simoneaux debates with a lieutenant, a lanky man from Indiana, about their respective accents. Both are traveling with other soldiers to support the French in the war against Germany. In the end, they will not fight because they arrive on the day of the armistice in 1918. Instead, they are ordered to clean up the battlefields. Sam’s ability to speak French seems to be a great advantage at first: “Eventually, because he could speak Cajun French, which to the Parisians sounded like a very bad seventeenth-century patois from the south of France, he was asked to perform some rudimentary interpreting. But every Frenchman he talked to raised his eyebrows in alarm, studied his pleasant face, and asked which colony he came from” (Gautreaux, Missing 7). In reality, Sam does not want to speak French since, as he tells his comrade Melvin Robicheaux from Baton Rouge, he does not want to look stupid: “I moved to the city so I could learn to talk better, pronounce my words, dress nicer, you know. I don’t talk like some college boy, but at least people don’t think I’m a fool. If you talk French in town people look at you like you’re stupid” (Gautreaux, Missing 12). When Sam returns home and visits his uncle Claude, who greets him “‘Comment ça va?’” he answers tongue-incheek: “‘Ça va en anglais maintenant’” (Gautreaux, Missing 307).³¹ Upon his re Already in Bonaventure: A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana George Washington Cable addresses the issue of the necessity of speaking English for the Acadians. The pastor of Carencro urges Bonaventure to “learn English, my boy; lean it with all speed; you will find it vastly, no telling how vastly, to your interest—I should say your usefulness. … Make haste to know English; in America we should be Americans; would that I could say it to all our Acadian people! But

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turn from France, Sam moves to New Orleans with his wife Linda, and he is glad to be “not on the farm, glad to be getting rid of his bayou accent, his sun-roasted skin” (Gautreaux, Missing 29). Significantly, The Missing addresses an important chapter of the history of the French language in Louisiana. It was during the first two decades of the twentieth century that major changes affected the French language, including the ban on French in public schools in 1921. When Linda tells Sam that “[i]t’s ok if [he] speaks French” (Gautreaux, Missing 305), he remembers his schooldays when [t]he schoolteacher used to beat me with a stick of lath when I spoke French. Even one word. I got the idea real quick when I saw him whip the Abadie kids. He hit them like their French was a fire he was trying to beat out. And they didn’t know enough English to realize why he was mad or what he was yelling at them. I thought, who needs it? ‘I think’ works as well as ‘je pense.’ (Gautreaux, Missing 305)

In addition to his missing parents, whom he lost in a brutal ambush, and to missing out on fighting in a war, Sam also missed out on speaking French fluently. The historical hint at the punishment of Cajun schoolchildren for speaking French, and thus the beginning of the loss of French, is brief, but it reinforces Gautreaux’s argument of the Cajuns being hardy.³² Moreover, non-Cajuns repeatedly offend Sam and other Cajun characters in The Missing with epithets such as “Frenchie” or “Frenchieman” (Gautreaux, Missing 85, 180, 244, 351). The Cajuns are regularly insulted for speaking French, being told: “‘Why don’t you mushmouths talk American? You sound like a bunch of pigeons in a tub” (Gautreaux, Missing 14), or: “Sounds like a monkey with a mouthful of olives” (Gautreaux, Missing 244). When uncle Claude goes to the parish where he suspects the assassins of Sam’s family, he finds “the red-face sheriff that said he didn’t chase nobody for no dumb coonass Catholic couldn’t talk good American” (Gautreaux, Missing 310). “Coonass” has been used to refer to Cajuns derogatorily.³³ Its origin is ambiguous. Some claim it comes from the French slur “connasse,” others argue that it is a combination of “‘coon,” from

I say it to you, learn English” (44). Bonaventure later in the story shows that he has learned the lesson, for he insists that “in America, you mus’ be American” (114).  The reference to the punishments seems curious and actually is anachronistic considering that the novel is set in the 1920s and that French was banned in 1921. Sam must recall his schooldays from 1910 – 20 at the earliest.  “Coonass” is a term which Bucky Tyler always uses pejoratively in The Next Step in the Dance (57, 157, 163).

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racoon, and “ass,” which is no less pejorative.³⁴ With the Cajun Renaissance, the Cajuns reclaimed it for themselves, and today it is used to show pride in the culture (R. Thibodeaux, “‘Coonass’”; Sexton). Considering that, as Shane K. Bernard found out, the earliest documentation of the term dates back to 1940 (“Bayou Teche Dispatches”), Gautreaux’s use of “Coonass” seems a little surprising. The negative view of the Cajuns was already prevalent in the 1920s, but “Coonass,” affirms Ancelet, “was not widely heard until the 1940s and 1950s” (“On Coonass”). Ultimately, the passages dealing with Sam’s linguistic peculiarity pay tribute to a period when the Cajuns were discriminated against, and confirm the wish to rehabilitate the Cajuns and their language.³⁵ Incidentally, Gautreaux rarely uses the term “Cajun” in his fiction, and in the few instances he does, it refers either to the fixed expression of Cajun French (Gautreaux, Welding 133; Gautreaux, Clearing 215), or is employed by non-Cajuns who disclose their preconceptions about the Cajuns. Most of the time, however, it condescendingly refers to Cajun identity. An interesting little piece of local history is provided by the scene in The Missing in which the mule called Gasser, which Sam acquired to get to the kidnappers, suddenly stops in the middle of the woods and refuses to budge. Trying desperately to get the stubborn mule moving, Sam finally resorts to the French of his childhood, calling him a maudit fils de putain, at which the mule rolled his ears back all the way, though he didn’t budge. Sam noticed the ears and thought a moment, sucking a tooth. ‘En avant!’ he yelled, and the mule picked up his head and walked forward. Sam raised his hands and let them drop. ‘Eh bien, un mulet qui parle français!’ (Gautreaux, Missing 249)

Sam then tries to think of the origin of the mule’s name and remembers that “every village had a garde ça, an old rascal who sat in front of a store begging tobacco and telling dirty jokes. ‘Regardez ça!’ the women would exclaim, shaking their heads. ‘Look at that!’” (Gautreaux, Missing 249). Besides showing that French has some benefits to Sam, Gautreaux incorporates this little anecdote as a means to preserve a memory most likely already forgotten by many Cajuns. On the one hand, the silence about the Acadian past can be viewed as a defense mechanism or psychological repression that contributes in a certain way to the forgetting of Cajun culture. On the other hand, it could be argued that Gautreaux anticipates the cliché of Cajun history being restricted to the Acadian

 “Coon” is also an offensive term used to refer to a Black person.  In contrast, “Cajun” and “French” are used indiscriminately in The Clearing when referring to the language/dialect (Gautreaux, Clearing 215).

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past. The neglect of that part of Cajun history, Gautreaux seems to imply, indicates that it is not necessarily an element determining Cajun identity. His references to neglected and hidden historical events other than the Acadian past provide an authentic view of Cajun culture and inscribe that culture into the larger history of Louisiana and the United States.

5.2.2 Communicating Memory Since Gautreaux bypasses the distant past in his fiction, the question remains which past serves as a foundation for his characters. Limiting the references to historical memory, Gautreaux equips his narrative with events of a more recent past shining through the characters’ sharing of individual memories. Since “[f]amily is a connection to the past” (Henry and Bankston 115), family memories shape collective memory. These memories figure prominently in Gautreaux’s stories. Characteristically, family memories generally have a restricted time frame and need special carriers to circulate. Paul’s grandfather Abadie in The Next Step in the Dance embodies the elder guardian of memories of the community. Although slighted at the beginning because of his old age—he is eighty-five years old (Gautreaux, Next Step 138, 185), but he himself remains vague and says 84 or 86 (Gautreaux, Next Step 198)—he gains in importance and contributes to the happy ending. In terms of cultural preservation, Abadie is obviously the most important character. Holding on to his Catholic belief, to Cajun French, and to traditions such as boat building, he serves as a paragon and gives a certain stability to the family network. His regular place, the church pew under a live oak tree in the shop yard, symbolizes not simply old age and wisdom, but faith, endurance, and strength. Abadie is the link to the past, tradition, and religion.³⁶ Married for 61 years (Gautreaux, Next Step 10), he has all the rights to lecture Paul on how to make his marriage work. As the plot unfolds, his wisdom, experience, and memories function as an anchor for Paul and Colette, and help them find a sense of place. For instance, when Colette and Paul ask for Abadie’s old skiff for hunting nutria, he tells them about his father, his grandfather, and the tradition of building boats. Abadie’s father built two to three skiffs a year and learned the trade from his father,

 The short story “Welding with Children” also shows the connection between family values, wisdom, and religion. The grandfather goes to extremes to inculcate his grandchildren with some religious and moral values (Gautreaux, Same Place 1– 19).

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Paul’s great-great-grandfather (Gautreaux, Next Step 196). He also provides them with a navigation map of the swamp, which provokes an upsurge of memories: “He studied the map as though it were the breathing marshland itself, his face filling with so much memory that he forgot anyone was in the room with him, and he began to speak to himself” (Gautreaux, Next Step 197– 198). Ultimately, it is Abadie who goes in search of Paul, who gets lost during a hurricane, and who saves him. Abadie, as a living archive of family history, and Father Clemmons, the priest who reads the Church records, provide Paul and Colette with their family history and thus embody the collective memory of the community. Paul’s exclamation that he “never knew anybody who met [his great-greatgrandfather]” (Gautreaux, Next Step 196) shows how the links to the past are eroding. Abadie responds accusingly, laying blame on the young people and their indifference to their heritage brought about by modern commodities: “But you young people, you don’t care about that. Once somebody’s dead, you turn on that television and forget their name” (Gautreaux, Next Step 196). Abadie’s reproach points to the gap between the youth of the 1980s and their parents’ generation. Shane K. Bernard remarks that at that time “youths sensed not only a generation gap between themselves and their parents but also a cultural gap. They spoke English and, like young people across the nation, they listened to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan” (Cajuns 61). Mathé Allain’s statement of 1978 that “[t]he physical closeness of the extended family means that the generation gap is practically absent in Acadiana,” (“TwentiethCentury Acadians” 140) thus refers rather to the decades before the Cajun Renaissance, when Cajun culture was not yet at the center of attention. With respect to Abadie’s accusation, forgetting somebody’s name also implies forgetting the person and her life story. Urged by Colette, who wants to know the name of Paul’s great-great-grandfather in order to remember him better, Abadie and Father Clemmons begin to tell about several of Paul’s ancestors, with the result that Colette puts herself in Abadie’s position and sees “the town spread out in her imagination two hundred years back, the mud-and-moss farmhouses, the hand-ditched fields, a log chapel, a bal de maison with couples dancing in the yard, fiddlers on the porch scraping a tune from Arsène Abadie’s instruments, their music like wasps in a drainpipe” (Gautreaux, Next Step 197). This moment, which offers a look into the better past, is a break from the difficult present. The family, both close and extended, transmits a specific value system, and The Next Step in the Dance includes several examples. Besides Abadie, Mrs. Fontenot fills in a relevant educational position although Paul’s view of her is not exactly favorable at the beginning:

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Next door old lady Fontenot hacked at her garden, mixing in a wheelbarrow of manure with the dark soil. He could not see her face, but he knew it was a nest of wrinkles, her eyes two sharp dots at the end of the tunnel of her sunbonnet. She was singing something in French, the notes jerky with the work of her hoe. He had never paid much attention to her, but Colette said it was stupid for a ninety-year-old woman to kill herself in a garden for vegetables she could walk to the store and buy. He stared at old lady Fontenot, trying to figure if she was one of the ugly reasons Colette had left. (Gautreaux, Next Step 65)

The first impression shows a ninety-year-old cigarette-smoking woman, who wears a traditional sunbonnet, cultivates her garden, and seems to belong to the past, to another time disconnected from the present of the protagonist. What defines her is her old age and her adherence to traditional values. Like Abadie, she speaks her mind to Colette after she has thrown Paul out of the house. The fact that Colette turns to Mrs. Fontenot for babysitting Matthew (and occasionally lost Mr. Jeansomme, too) shows that this lusty lady acts, like Abadie, as an important foothold for the young generation (Gautreaux, Next Step 297). Paul’s love of such traditions as playing the accordion and dancing is an important lifeline to him and translates the natural link to the past. Although it takes her more time to realize this, Colette, too, begins to appreciate the ties to the past. The day after the passing of Colette’s mother, Abadie visits Colette and recalls how, at the age of twelve, Vera rescued him after he had fallen off his skiff. His parable-like narrative is a tribute to Colette’s mother and a healing memory that gives solace to Colette (Gautreaux, Next Step 138 – 139). In hearing Abadie tell the story about her mother as a girl, Colette begins to know and to understand the importance of the past. She learns about how her mother touched other people’s lives in the community, and how that community, in turn, shares the memories of the life and death of Colette’s mother. Even if the feelings are different for everybody, loss is a collective experience, and death bridges the present with the past. Colette, an “after-thought” (Gautreaux, Next Step 29) for her elderly parents, has to fend for herself and start to rely heavily on her community at a young age. The deaths of her mother and her demented father add to the economic misery. When Paul is severely injured through an accident, another anchor for family traditions is on the brink of getting lost for Colette. These tragic events trigger important memories of the past and have more far-reaching consequences. Once individual memory and with it the memory of long-standing, guiding traditions is lost, Colette realizes, she will be lost, too. This is the reason why the elders of the community look out for the young:

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Abadie probably still thought of Paul as a child, someone who needed all the help he could get. The old ones never admit that you grow up, he thought, looking over at Colette’s uncle Lester. … Only Lester’s memory of Colette as a sweet-faced girl-child could bring him into the boiling waters of the Gulf to fold up his arthritic knees and pick out from the shrimp the stinging hardheads and finger-killing oyster fish. Only in a place where people had known them as children could he assemble such a crew. (Gautreaux, Next Step 270)

The reference to Colette’s and Paul’s childhoods as well as Abadie’s unaided search of Paul are key scenes of family cohesion. Despite his increasing difficulties with handling a skiff, Abadie follows an inner urge to protect his grandson. In view of the characters’ instabilities, it is important that they find anchors to guide them through their lives, and it is the family that takes care of them. Abadie’s memories also include traditional wisdom. He shows Colette how “to bait the traps, how to tie them off to empty Clorox jugs, how to tie the knots for the trotlines” (Gautreaux, Next Step 224). On one of Colette’s fishing trips, she is finned by the poisonous dorsal spike of a catfish. Preferring to save the money, she does not go to the doctor but seeks out Abadie and asks for his advice to heal the wound: “What did you do in the old days, before you went to a doctor? I know you’ve been finned a hundred times” (Gautreaux, Next Step 226). Abadie gives Colette a piece of salt meat to put on the wound, securing it tightly with gauze. Twenty-four hours later the piece of salt meat has extracted the poison from Colette’s hand. This recourse to folk medicine is another element of Cajun collective memory. Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre argue that “Cajuns have maintained a well-defined body of folk medicine. Its practices occur at two different levels of Cajun society. On the one hand there is a large body of lore that is generally shared among most older Cajuns, particularly those of rural background. … Another body of lore is the special preserve of the folk curer, the traiteur” (Ancelet, Edwards, Pitre 95), meant to treat particular ailments. Paul Connerton maintains that “[e]very group, then, will entrust to bodily automatisms the values and categories which they are most anxious to conserve. They will know how well the past can be kept in mind by a habitual memory sedimented in the body” (Societies 102). In a similar fashion, Colette, troubled by financial problems, remembers her childhood habits of roaming the bayous, and she resorts to shrimping and then hunting nutria to nourish herself and her baby boy. Obviously, she has recourse to a form of “habitual skilled remembering [which illustrates] a keeping of the past in mind that without ever adverting to its historical origin, nevertheless re-enacts the past in our present conduct. In habitual memory the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body” (Connerton, Societies 72). The past is a guiding force that drives the characters to their destiny. Obviously, the “pastness” in Gautreaux’s stories relates to a past that is relevant

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for the characters.³⁷ They do not consider their memories or family history as irrevocably past. Instead, they use experiences of the past as long as they find a meaningful connection to it.

5.3 Gautreaux’s Fiction as a Hybrid Space Gautreaux has repeatedly emphasized his wariness of being labeled as a Southern writer, claiming that it is a “pretty empty label” (Birnbaum 75; Masciere 18 – 9). To critics who want to nail him down to a region, he replies that he is “not a Southern writer. I’m just a writer who lives in the South” (Scanlan 108). It is equally striking that the epithet “Cajun,” which Gautreaux also avoids, is used predominantly by non-Cajuns in his novels, and generally in a derogatory way. Understandably, Gautreaux wants to avoid thinking in clichés. Alligators, French accordion music, and a sheriff with mirrored sunglasses (probably a reference to James Lee Burke’s Cajun detective Dave Robicheaud) only restrict and even prevent an authentic view of the region’s culture.³⁸ Gautreaux’s stories are nonetheless lauded for the careful and genuine depiction of Cajun culture. Gautreaux’s out-of-state experience, which coincided with the Cajun Renaissance in Louisiana, greatly contributed to his Cajun perspective. His stay in South Carolina from 1969 – 1972 taught him to view Cajun culture with a critical distance. But the coinciding Cajun revival in his home state itself caused him to push back against stereotypes: None of us knew we were Cajuns until all the hoopla in the mid-1970s when a sort of Cajun Renaissance started and brought out of the closet, as it was, Cajun music and food. I really don’t consider myself some kind of dyed-in-the-wool southern cultural phenom. In southcentral Louisiana, I never really ran across many people that considered themselves southerners. And I don’t consider myself to be any kind of alligator-eating Cajun type. … [T]hat’s kind of superficial. (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 137)

Cajun culture dominates Gautreaux’s fiction, but he also introduces non-Cajun characters or chooses settings outside of Cajun Country, even outside of Louisiana. His first novel was born out of the spirit of the Cajun Renaissance, showing

 Paul Ricœur, drawing on Jacques Le Goff, Pierre Nora, and Michel de Certeau, argues that the past and history are defined by “pastness,” i. e., the understanding of the past being gone forever.  With the exception of the sheriff, the two other clichés do figure in The Next Step in the Dance. Visibly, the first novel served Gautreaux to sound the possibilities and limits of writing (Scanlan 108).

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a rather homogeneous group of Cajuns. The short stories and the next two novels are, in contrast, much more heterogeneous and present a diversified Louisiana. The theme of experiencing the Other and of being the Other constitutes Gautreaux’s œuvre, which gradually reveals his hybrid perspective. What defines Gautreaux’s writing is that it merges influences from major authors with the storytelling tradition he grew up with. Critics have pointed out Gautreaux’s literary, mostly southern influences. Indeed, he acknowledges the impact of such authors as Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Mark Twain on his work.³⁹ Oral storytelling, however, has a bigger influence on Gautreaux’s writing. Growing up with both family stories and American folktales, Gautreaux encountered another kind of literature as a child. Later, during his English studies, he read canonical literature. In the novels, he expands the frame of Cajun literature into a productive mix of the local storytelling tradition with the established canonical works of American literature and popular culture, mostly with authors from the South, a technique that exemplifies how “communicative” and “cultural memory” are interdependent. Gautreaux’s individual experience mingles with the collective memory of his ancestors and is enhanced by nonCajun elements. Innovative elements, such as outsiders’ views or clichés, function as foils from which the Cajuns can distance themselves and which they can reject. In her study on the Cajuns in American literature, Hebert-Leiter argues that “Cajuns can live as both Cajuns and Americans since Cajun identity is located between an Acadian history and an American present” (Becoming Cajun 13). It is due to “an understanding of the Cajun interstitial position and how it has been formed and informed by both cultural outsiders and insiders” (Hebert-Leiter, Becoming Cajun 13) that Cajuns continue to emphasize and be proud of their difference. Gautreaux’s works show another hybrid perspective. As an academic, Gautreaux mediates between educated and uneducated people and strives to give a voice to the forgotten people. He writes “‘broad-spectrum’ fiction, fiction that appeals to both intellectuals and blue collar types” (Kane, “Postmodern Southern Moralist” 65). This broad-spectrum fiction also relates to religion. Although Gautreaux has “always been a Roman Catholic, since baptism, since birth” (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 137), and his writings are infused by a deep Catholic sentiment, his novels transcend the Catholic outlook. His tenet that each story needs to have a moral force is, in fact, another example of bordercrossing. Although this moral force stems from Gautreaux’s Catholic faith, it

 Some of Gautreaux’s stories have been compared to William Faulkner (Bauer, William Faulkner’s Legacy 182– 195).

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has a far wider reach around the world, transmitting a tolerant and humanistic worldview. Despite the strong presence of Catholic elements in his stories, he does not promote an arch-Catholic, doctrinal belief system. This unrestricted belief system exemplifies the paradoxical definition of the Cajuns as being “deeply religious, yet anti-clerical” (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre xvii). Similarly, Gautreaux advocates a universal humanism and shows how his characters act in certain fateful situations according to their conscience and intuition.

5.3.1 The Impact of Outsiders in a Multi-Ethnic Community Southwest Louisiana and Cajun culture figure as the preferred backdrop in Gautreaux’s œuvre. His writings endow place with significance through minute observations both linguistically and culturally. “[E]very writer,” explains Gautreaux, “is limited by where he’s from, particularly someone who has spent his entire life in one region” (Bolick and Watta 8). Although, or rather because, Gautreaux spent an extended amount of time outside of Louisiana, he was able to work out the difference between Cajun culture and other cultures in a nuanced way. Like the characters Paul and Colette, Gautreaux learned what it means to be Cajun by leaving his home country. Curiously, both for the author and the characters, it is not the memories from these places that have stuck. Instead, it is as if the trips were just episodes whose sole function was to bring them back to their roots in Cajun Country. This readjustment has deep roots in Southern culture: “Southerners’ strong sense of place,” Robert H. Brinkmeyer argues, “underlines a striking geographical reorientation that took place during the 1920s and 1930s in terms of Southern identity” (4– 5). With the manifesto I’ll Take My Stand in 1930, the Nashville Agrarians “support[ed] a Southern way of life” and opposed “what may be called the American or prevailing way” (Twelve Southerners ix). Evidently, Gautreaux takes the same stand and highlights the hybrid Cajun way of life as opposed to the homogenized American way of life. The Next Step in the Dance sets the pattern for an exclusive look at Cajun culture. Besides its palimpsestic constitution from a topographical point of view, the fictional Tiger Island seems to be a hybrid town: “Paul had never seen a purebred dog in Tiger Island. Every animal seemed to be half collie and half beagle” (Gautreaux, Next Step 66). Yet even though Tiger Island is modeled on Morgan City, which, according to Gautreaux, is not a Cajun town, but a rather hybrid place (Larson, “Pelican Briefs” 6), its presentation in the first novel falls short of showing that hybridity. Indeed, it is striking that the characters of The Next Step in the Dance do not represent that kind of hybrid community for which Morgan City has been known (Larson, “Pelican Briefs” 6). Gautreaux’s more homo-

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geneous Cajun perspective obviously reveals his intention to commemorate Cajun culture as well as the out-migration caused by the oil glut. What further speaks against Tiger Island as a hybrid town is the marginal position of three non-Cajuns. Nelson Shapley is originally from Cleveland, Ohio, and has been working on outboat motors, a profession which brings him frequently into contact with Cajuns. And yet, “[i]n spite of the fact that he had moved down from Cleveland to Tiger Island forty years before, he was still known as ‘the Yankee’” (Gautreaux, Next Step 220). Another outsider is the priest Father Clemmons, who moved from Indiana to Tiger Island and has been running “the parish for twelve years but still seemed fresh from the wheat fields, unaffected by the south Louisiana ways of hard drinking, poverty, white heat, and green humidity, the general funk of the place. He was bald, optimistic, and tall, unlike everyone else in the parish” (Gautreaux, Next Step 35). Both Shapley and Father Clemmons seem incapable of fitting into the community. And yet, they do play important roles as they contribute in substantial ways to the Cajun community, be it through Shapley’s willingness to help Colette in her search for Paul or through Father Clemmons’s spiritual guidance. Although the Cajuns are known for their characteristically fast assimilation of foreigners and their traditions, it is not always easy for outsiders to find acceptance. Another Anglo-American character provokes rather strong reactions. The Texan character is presented as evil personified in Gautreaux’s stories. Gautreaux’s Cajuns consider the Texan as a kind of nemesis while the Texan expressly shows his disgust at the Cajuns. The Cajun aversion toward Texas is the main theme in the short story “Floyd’s Girl.” Floyd’s wife ran off with a “cou rouge,” a redneck, from Texas and left her only daughter with her husband. It is this new boyfriend whom she sends to get Lizette. Upon approaching the Louisiana-Texas border, the girl in the Texan’s truck “knew then they would pass out of the land of her blood and into some strange, inevitable place” (Gautreaux, Same Place 175). Similarly, friction between Cajuns and Texans appears in The Next Step in the Dance. “Go back to Texas if you don’t like my voice” (Gautreaux, Next Step 4), Colette tells a cowboy in the Silver Bayou Drive-in. When a Texan calls Etienne Leblanc, a friend of Paul’s and Colette’s, “nutria face,” Etienne responds with “‘Mange la merde et meurs, Texas’” (Gautreaux, Next Step 26). Hostility culminates with the character of the Texan Bucky Taylor, whom Paul humorously nicknames “John Wayne” (Gautreaux, Next Step 144). In Paul’s eyes, Bucky is “a worm for Texaco. He screws old people out their mineral rights” (Gautreaux, Next Step 39). In contrast, Colette, who longs for an American life outside of Louisiana, has cast an eye on Bucky. When she finds out, though, that he orchestrated Paul’s accident in the boiler, she sees through his real character and calls him “east Texas corn-shitting white trash” (Gautreaux, Next Step 180).

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The Cajun-Texas antagonism is obviously ingrained in the Cajun consciousness. It can be traced back to the time of the discovery of oil at the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawn by the oil fever, Cajuns emigrated to Texas after the strike at Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas, in 1901 and settled on the eastern border, along the Sabine River. Before the Texan came to be considered as a kind of nemesis, however, Cajuns were pulled to Texas as it promised adventure and a way to cure heartbreak. In her pioneering work on Louisiana French folk songs of 1939, Irène Thérèse Whitfield Holmes explained that [i]f the Cajun is no longer in the good favor of his belle, or if he thinks of faraway lands, the main place he sings of is Texas. … This is attributed to the fact that during the early days in Louisiana, Texas represented the far-off country of the unknown, the country of great adventure. Consequently, when a young maiden gave a “coat” to her lover (a donner [sic] un capot), signifying in the Cajun [sic] that he was to leave her house never to return … he went to Texas to face his destiny and forget his belle. (45)

Abandoned Cajun lovers went to Texas but came to see the new place as an evil force. As historian Bernard explains, [t]he move to Texas was so common that the experience became the subject of several Cajun songs including ‘Le blues de Texas,’ ‘Valse de Port Arthur,’ ‘Port Arthur Blues,’ ‘Austin Special,’ and ‘Grand Texas.’ Most of these compositions portrayed the migration negatively, for many transplants suffered abuse from the local Anglo majority and for the first time felt like members of an ethnic minority. (Cajuns 15)

In “Quitter la maison”⁴⁰ by Luderin Darbone, the speaker misses his mother, whom he has left after she told him she did not want him anymore. A deep feeling of loss is also present in “Grand Texas,” where the speaker pines for the loved one gone off to Texas. Folklorist Carl Lindahl sees another reason for the Cajun-Texas antipathy: “One more reason why Cajuns might view Texas not merely as alien, but as antagonistic: Texas was known as the place that nearly took the French language and the accordion out of Cajun music. In the 1930s and 1940s Cajun musical culture went through a period of serious assimilation” (“Grand Texas” 88). In the mid-twentieth century, it became more fashionable to sing in English, and stringbands became more popular than the traditional Cajun bands (Lindahl, “Grand Texas” 88). Since then, the rivalry with Texas has intensified, and for some the deep resentment toward the neighboring state has turned into the sorrow of los-

 The song is also known as “Leaving Home Blues” and was performed by the Riverside Ramblers before they became known as the Hackberry Ramblers (Savoy 121, 124).

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ing a loved one. Gautreaux’s presentation continues the negative and melancholic attitude toward all things Texan. The Texan, who becomes associated with mainstream American culture, serves as a foil to pinpoint the difference of the Cajuns. This difference, argues Hebert-Leiter, is a mode of empowerment: “For Cajuns, this self-determined performance of difference can and does become a recognition of empowerment, but only after the realization of assimilation to an American majority since the determination of such difference occurs in conjunction with a recognition of dominant notions of American identity” (Becoming Cajun 122). On the one hand, outsiders are of minor relevance in Gautreaux’s work. On the other hand, to reduce his writings to Cajun culture would give an incomplete picture. Even if Louisiana is Gautreaux’s native and literary territory, his fictional perspective transcends Cajun culture. Already his short stories show a great diversity with respect to the characters’ ethnic backgrounds, and with each novel the setting also becomes more diverse. The Cajun emphasis in The Next Step in the Dance seems, therefore, to be an exception. For instance, not all of his characters identify as Cajun or Southern. Non-Cajuns populate Gautreaux’s stories, especially his historical novels set in the 1920s. In The Clearing, the two main characters Byron and Randolph Aldridge are originally from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Additionally, Nimbus, the sawmill town where they are stationed, and the surrounding area including Tiger Island and Poachum, another fictional place, are peopled with Italians, Germans, and African Americans, which paints a rather heterogeneous picture of the Louisiana backwoods. Sam Simoneaux, the protagonist in The Missing, is Cajun, but he is intent on leaving his heritage behind when he moves to New Orleans, which teems with people of diverse cultural backgrounds such as the Wellers, a German family, whom he helps to find their kidnapped daughter. Moreover, Gautreaux gradually includes main settings outside of Louisiana. Even if Tiger Island appears as a recurring, though imaginary, place, the notion that Gautreaux’s fiction is locally restricted and centered around Cajun towns is outdated. Thanks to his travels to other states in the USA, he has been able to shift his perspective in recent short stories. His stories become more and more geographically diverse. “Idols” (2009), for instance, is the first short story to feature a plot outside of Louisiana, namely in northern Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee, while “Attitude Adjustment” (2015) is set in a North Carolina mountain town. As a matter of fact, The Missing can be considered as a transitional piece since the main setting is the steam ship Ambassador, which functions as

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heterotopia.⁴¹ The Ambassador is like a moving place, a place without a place, traveling up and down the Mississippi River and accommodating the most diverse people: from the crew consisting of Anglo-Americans, to an African American jazz band, to the German Weller family, to Sam Simoneaux, to the on-boarding excursionists including sawmillers and coal miners of remote towns along the Mississippi River. Apparently, Gautreaux’s choice is a reaction against the label of regional writer.

5.3.2 Crossing Oral and Literary Storytelling From a literary point of view, Gautreaux draws mostly on an anglophone heritage, and American culture’s dominance is clearly visible in his sources. While the lyricism in Gautreaux’s fiction can be traced back to his early poetry writing and teaching on British Romanticism,⁴² other authors from the American South had a more lasting impact on his writing. He acknowledges being primarily influenced by two other authors, both Catholics like him, from the American South. Although he is not a philosopher like Walker Percy (Larson, “Writer Next Door” 23), he considers himself “to be a Catholic writer in the tradition of Walker Percy. If a story does not deal with a moral question, I don’t think it’s much of a story” (Bolick and Watta 11). While he draws much from the teachings of Walker Percy for his ideas (who was his mentor in a short story seminar at Loyola University in New Orleans) (Larson, “Writer Next Door” 23), Flannery O’Connor’s moral writings also deeply influenced Gautreaux: Well, naturally an influence on just about everybody writing in the South was Flannery O’Connor. She’s probably the country’s premier short story writer. If you analyze her stories you see she was working with tragedy and humor, and irony. … Also, you know, she was Catholic, and I can relate to that because I’m Catholic. (Hebert-Leiter, “Interview” 112)

 As Michel Foucault wrote: “Le navire, c’est l’hétérotopie par excellence.” In opposition to utopias, heterotopias are real emplacements outside of places. They are places of otherness which exhibit a certain deviance to ordinary life (“Des espaces autres” 762).  As a matter of fact, Gautreaux owes much to the Romantics and their view of nature and the reflection of the self, as reveals his PhD dissertation, a volume of poetry entitled Night-Wide River (1979) (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 129).

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The commissioned short story “Idols” is a continuation of two of O’Connor’s short stories, “Everything that Rises Must Converge” and “Parker’s Back” (O’Connor 485 – 500, 655 – 675).⁴³ Besides the asserted influence of O’Connor and Percy, Gautreaux’s writings have been compared to Mark Twain’s, William Faulkner’s, and even Joseph Conrad’s. Like Faulkner’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi with the town of Jefferson as its county seat, the imaginary spaces in Gautreaux’s Louisiana center around a particular place, the Acadian triangle, with Tiger Island as the hub. The recurring setting in various stories as well as indirect allusions to events between stories give the impression of a strong inter- and intra-narrative connection. For instance, the Larousse twins Victor and Vincent, who decisively contribute to Paul’s rescue in The Next Step in the Dance, already appear in “Floyd’s Girl,” also in the roles of the girl’s rescuers.⁴⁴ With respect to dialogue, Twain provided Gautreaux with a feeling for the use of vernacular speech (Birnbaum 81). Moreover, the riverboat journey on the Mississippi in The Missing is highly reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn’s journey on the Mississippi, albeit set at a different time (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 142– 143). Ernest Gaines is yet another eminent author who exerted a particular influence on Gautreaux: “Reading Earnest Gaines made me more sensitive to idiom, and also race” (Kane, “Postmodern Southern Moralist” 37). Gautreaux, nevertheless, rarely explores race. Race is not Gautreaux’s prime literary subject matter: “I don’t write about race. I write about people” (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 144), because “the whole business about racism is very painful to write about” (Levasseur and Rabalais 46). The homeless Fernest Bezue in “Deputy Sid’s Gift” in Same Place, Same Things; May, Randolph Aldridge’s housekeeper, and the black sawmill hand Clarence Williams in The Clearing; as well as the African American music band on the steamship in The Missing are the few instances where Gautreaux approaches the question of race. What Gautreaux shares with Gaines is the strategy of drawing on oral storytelling. While Gaines got his stories

 For a detailed comparison of the three stories see Nisly, “Idolizing O’Connor.” Julian (who is also the—much younger—protagonist in “Everything that Rises Must Converge”) confronts life with arrogance and wants the mansion he inherited from his great-grandfather to be swiftly and cheaply renovated. He finds able-bodied and soft-spoken Obie (Obadiah in “Parker’s Back”) who helps him. As the two proud old men focus on objects of worhisp (Julian idolizes his mansion while Obie idolizes his wife), they will face the loss of their idols at the end of the story: Julian’s mansion burns down and Obie’s wife runs away.  T’Jean’s grandmother asks them if they were still bad boys over in Tiger Island, a reference to a fist-fighting scene in The Next Step in the Dance (Gautreaux, Next Step 179).

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from listening to women on porches, Gautreaux got his from the tugboat captains in his family. Despite the influence by notable Anglo-American authors, it is mostly from the storytelling tradition so distinct to Southern literature that Gautreaux draws his narrative skills. As “the master of the Cajun short story” (Balée 519)—the same critic also considered him one of the three best short story writers in America today—Gautreaux obviously has the storytelling gene. Since poetry is strongly linked to the oral tradition and the most natural of memorable genres, it is not surprising that he started with writing poetry. Against this background, his short stories and novels stand at the threshold of the oral and literary traditions. Indeed, Gautreaux acknowledges the heavy impact of the storytelling legacy of his ancestors, whose life experiences serve as an inspiration for his stories and novels. The importance of storytelling transpires, for instance, in the short story “Died and Gone to Vegas” in Same Place, Same Things, where a group of card players set out to outdo each other in telling tall tales. Moreover, storytelling constitutes an important element in the collective memory of the community of the characters. Toward the end of The Next Step in the Dance, when Paul is saved by the rescue team, Colette thinks of the “big stories the men would have about the weather when they came in, and she smiled, anticipating Etienne’s version” (Gautreaux, Next Step 288). Everybody will have a different view of the story to tell and add a different version to the collective memory of the group. From a historical point of view, Gautreaux certifies the memory of the oil bust and its consequences as a contemporary witness. Against this background, Paul’s and Colette’s experiences, behaviors, and struggle are living memory and are shared by today’s Cajun community. This living memory, consolidated by its circulation in the family and community, is the driving force of the novel. Stories also define the family and community life in Gautreaux’s other works. In The Missing, when Sam Simoneaux lands in Saint Nazaire, France, on November 11, 1918, the day of the Armistice, there is no prospect that he will ever fight. He wonders “what he would tell his friends back home of his war experience. The most valuable trophies of war were the stories, and this one was good only for a derisive laugh” (Gautreaux, Missing 4). In addition, when Sam tries to recall the murder of his family, “[t]he details of stories he’d heard whispered around him since infancy formed a whole mural in his mind, a speaking picture—words above everyone’s head” (Gautreaux, Missing 14). For Sam’s uncle Claude, stories also play an important role as “the matter at hand was always surrounded by narrative, placed in a frame of family history” (Gautreaux, Missing 370).

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Besides classical works of the American South, folktales and the oral tradition have also impacted Gautreaux. He grew up reading folktales like the Mike Fink and Davy Crockett stories in B. A. Botkin’s A Treasury of Mississippi River Folklore, which shared “a kind of energetic hyperbole characteristic of much of America’s early campfire storytelling tradition” (Levasseur and Rabalais 38). Besides the tradition of the frontier humorists, whose stories were about men telling lies, he heard tall tales firsthand: “I grew up listening to a lot of old men tell stories to each other about their jobs” (Masciere 19). Gautreaux honed his storytelling skills later in college, where he “liked to talk, [he] liked to tell stories, because [he] was raised listening to people tell colorful stories” (Masciere 19). Of course, more than anything else, it is family legends and memories that fostered Gautreaux’s storytelling skills. Hailing from a family of captains—his father was a tugboat captain and his grandfather a riverboat captain while he himself worked as auxiliary wheelman for his father on the Mississippi (Ashbrook 170)—who possessed a large reservoir of stories, Gautreaux draws from stories he often heard and picked up from the adult family members and friends around him. He remembers that [t]he men would tell stories about work. The group I was always around was composed of very old men. To me, they were ancient, but they were in their sixties and seventies. They were retired riverboat men, tugboat pilots, or railroad men. … They would tell fascinating stories about what they used to do with their trains and their boats. There was a type of structure to the way they would tell their tales. The stories were spontaneous. … There would be this fantastic interweaving of stories because one man would make up facts, and the others would catch him, and their ‘facts’ would throw the story off on a tangent. It was great. These sessions taught me about the spontaneity, the organic structure, and the emotion that is involved in storytelling. Today, I see the short story not primarily as an intellectual endeavor, but as a cultural artifact tightly bound with a necessary narrative structure. (Levasseur and Rabalais 39)

Understandably, many passages of The Missing and The Clearing mix personal history, family legend, and history (Ashbrook 168). For instance, The Clearing is dedicated to Gautreaux’s family, especially his father, “Minos, who took [Gautreaux] into the swamps to show [him] the remnants of things,” as well as to his uncle Clarence Adoue, “who suffered in France and lived to tell the tale. My thanks to several old men, now dead, who didn’t know I was listening” (Gautreaux, Clearing iii). Most importantly, Gautreaux crucially contributes to the Cajun collective memory of World War I, for the role of the Cajuns in that war is still not fully assessed. He recalls that [m]any of the uncles in my family were in World War I, and they all came back with their stories, and I heard a lot of them. … I had an uncle that was in all eight major American

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engagements and endured some horrible things. And I knew what it was that he endured through family stories and through talking with him because he lived to be quite old. I knew him many, many years. Of course, he was very unlike the character in The Clearing, but nevertheless I could draw on the psychological damage that I witnessed in him to develop the Byron character in that novel. (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 138)

The Missing, which begins with Sam’s experiences in World War I, corresponds to what another uncle lived to see when he arrived in France after the end of the war (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 139). The First World War is, however, never the main theme, and although it figures at the beginning of The Missing, the novel deals with the steamship history, a period to which Gautreaux can better relate. As a witness of the last days of the steamboat era, Gautreaux got his inspiration for the Ambassador from the famous SS President, which was anchored in New Orleans and offered trips upriver to Davenport, Iowa. As a child, he sometimes went with his aunts and uncles on dance boats for moonlight cruises out of New Orleans or Baton Rouge (Ashbrook 171). For Gautreaux, “[i]t was sort of a window into the very early part of American history” (Ashbrook 168). This window also showed him the “big era of American music history” (Ashbrook 167) from 1910 to 1940. Of course, his stories about boats and ships mostly come from three generations of storytelling boat captains. Family memories about difficult times also inspired his writing. The Southern writer’s duty to remember his ancestors’ history, maintains Gautreaux, is a reason for the South’s fertile ground for fiction: The Southern writer loves where he’s from, warts and all. When I think of the history of my family, I think of how hard it was for people to work and survive and how much my family members suffered living in a tough climate and tougher poverty. Sometimes I recall one of my father’s first jobs, which was cutting down cypress trees that were five feet through the middle. He had to stand in waist-deep water, fighting snakes and leeches, and work with a crosscut saw in 95-degree heat. … Sometimes I remember that my grandfather worked under the thumb of a stingy plantation owner for sixty-five cents a day. You look back on all that history and all that misery and you almost feel like a traitor if you don’t respect the people you came from and the place they made. In one way or another, you have to tell their story. (Scanlan 109)

Even if Gautreaux does not put Cajun culture on center stage in his last two novels, the need to remember the life of his ancestors is a driving force. Apart from family tales, Gautreaux was inspired by stories he picked up outside of the family frame. “Welding with Children,” for instance, was conceived out of a dialogue Gautreaux overheard in a Wal Mart store (Keillor and Kenison 289). The character Sam Simoneaux “is a person [Gautreaux] got out of the police reports in the Times-Picayune. That’s how I get the seeds for a lot of my narra-

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tives. I read the police reports. I read about a kidnapping in which a child was almost abducted out of a retail center. I began to think, what would that security guard who foiled a kidnapping feel like if he hadn’t succeeded?” (Ashbrook 165). For Gautreaux, “[s]tories very often are found things. [“Little Frogs in a Ditch”] came to me entire while I was overhearing a radio broadcast” (E. Arnold 14). “Waiting for the Evening News” on the other hand, grew out of me reading the newspaper one morning. There was a train derailment in Louisiana, and then there was a passenger derailment in Mexico where the engineer ran away. Exxon Valdez was going on at the time. So I put the events together, and it all coalesced into this business of the ordinary man involved in an accident who runs off, instead of staying around and fessing up so his troubles would be over in a few days. (Joyal 33)

The process of adapting those real-life anecdotes reveals the creativity and imagination that Gautreaux received mostly through the storytelling tradition of his family. It is not surprising how easily Gautreaux transforms present material, a process that resembles the tall-tale tradition. The family tall tales Gautreaux overheard in public spaces and his own short stories overlap with the tradition of the Old Southwest (Piacentino 3 – 5). Arguably, Gautreaux might well function as a counter-argument to Walter Benjamin’s claim that modernity has killed the storyteller.⁴⁵ A defining feature of the storyteller is that he “takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale” (“Storyteller” 87). Likewise, Gautreaux draws not only on individual memory, but also on collective memory. He also does not explain why his characters choose to act as they do, a trait defining the craft of oral storytelling. He incorporates historical memory, which is another characteristic of the prose writer: “Reminiscence is the muse of the prose writer” (Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften II 3: 1282; my translation). While the novelist aims at immortalizing that memory, the storyteller’s prime objective is to teach and to entertain: What announces itself in these passages is the perpetuating remembrance of the novelist as contrasted with the short-lived reminiscences of the storyteller. … It is, in other words, remembrance which, as the Muse-derived element of the novel, is added to reminiscence, the corresponding element of the story, the unity of their origin in memory having disappeared with the decline of the epic. (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 98)

 “[Experience] teaches us that the art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly” (Benjamin, “Storyteller” 86).

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In short, various types of memory intersect, each needing the other to produce a new viable memory. The family memories together with the stories of the community in Gautreaux’s œuvre augment the Cajun storytelling repertoire and keep the tradition alive, not in an oral, but in a written form.

5.3.3 Transmitting Morals and a Humanistic Worldview Aside from his hybrid narratological approaches, Gautreaux’s moral worldview, which he draws from his Catholic upbringing, also transcends Cajun culture. Catholicism is one of the most dominant characteristics defining Louisiana, to the extent that the state is seen as a “Roman Catholic island in the Baptist American South” (Trépanier, “Catholic Church” 59). There also exists an important sociocultural divide in Louisiana, confronting the Catholic French-speaking South with the Protestant and English-speaking North. It is, says Gautreaux, “impossible to write about South Louisiana culture without writing about the Catholic Church, because it permeates everything” (Masciere 18). Catholic belief played an important role especially in Gautreaux’s childhood and teenage years when church rules wielded potent authority over students of Catholic schools. Gautreaux spent twelve years at a Catholic parochial school supervised by Marianite nuns, and his mother made sure he observed all church rules and attended every Catholic tradition (Nisly, “Catholic” 121– 122). Yet such Catholic traditions as the whitewashing of the family graves on All Souls’ Day, a family ritual Gautreaux remembers, have been waning (Angelier). Although the attitude toward Catholicism in Louisiana has visibly changed today, its legacy cannot be denied. Significantly, the “Catholic tradition … emphasizes the inescapable embeddedness of the person in history and community, and the continuity between past and present” (qtd. in Nisly, “Presbyterian Pennsylvanians” 117). The contribution of Catholic literature, of which Gautreaux’s work is part, to culture is that it articulates “the relationship between the individual and the community, the present and the past,” making individuals through their attachment to a religious view of the world essential to modernity (Cadegan 33). Religion, itself subjected to processes of traditionalization—“la religion entière se résume dans le processus de traditionalisation” (Halbwachs, Topographie 37)—, “implique … une mobilisation spécifique de la mémoire collective” (HervieuLéger, Religion 178). As collective memory adjusts to generational transformations, so is religion subject to change:

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La mémoire religieuse, bien qu’elle s’efforce de s’isoler de la société temporelle, obéit aux mêmes lois que toute mémoire collective: elle ne conserve pas le passé, mais elle le reconstruit, à l’aide des traces matérielles, des rites, des textes, des traditions qu’il a laissés, mais aussi à l’aide de données psychologiques et sociales récentes, c’est-à-dire avec le présent. (Halbwachs, Cadres 300)

In Gautreaux’s works, allusions to the Bible or to priests, and to such religious objects as crucifixes, prayer books, or rosaries testify to this enduring connection religion has with the past. Lost sons, or lost children, saved by grandparents, most often by grandfathers, are stock characters in Gautreaux’s short stories and novels, and they recall the parable of the prodigal son. The Catholic faith pervades, for instance, Gautreaux’s first short story, “A Sacrifice of Doves.” The dove hunt on which the two protagonists, Alex and Father McHart, go, seems to be a penalty for Alex and his sins. The story takes its title from biblical passages in Genesis 15:9 and Leviticus 1:14, where the sacrifice of doves symbolizes a guilt offering. Another example can be found in “Little Frogs in a Ditch,” in which old man Fontenot teaches moral values to his grandson Lenny, who had started a business of homing pigeons only to hoard money by cheating his customers. Fontenot reminds Lenny of the catechism class: “If you close your eyes before you go to confession, your sins will make a noise. … They’ll cry out like little frogs in a ditch at sundown” (Gautreaux, Same Place 140 – 141). The frogs’ croak, then, is an echo of the past and a gauge for righteous behavior. Similarly, “Floyd’s Girl” is teeming with references to a distinct Catholic belief. T-Jean’s grandmère gives Floyd a St. Christopher figurine, the patron saint of travelers, to put on the dashboard before he goes chasing after the Texan. Floyd understands that, as a Catholic, he is bound to the sacraments and cannot dissociate himself that easily from his frolicking wife: “She was still his wife, because once the priest married you, you were married forever, in spite of a spiritless divorce court and a Protestant judge and a Texas lounge bum in snakeskin boots” (Gautreaux, Same Place 167). Incidentally, priests appear frequently in Gautreaux’s stories, either as protagonists or as secondary characters, such as Father Lambrusco in “Waiting for the Evening News,” who brings the main character Jesse to confess that he caused a disastrous train accident and fled, instead of owing up to his guilt. Father Clemmons in The Next Step in the Dance embodies an advisory function with respect to Paul’s marital problems. He tells Paul that it is “a bad era, even for Catholics” (Gautreaux, Next Step 36), with so many couples getting divorced. Yet not all the priests are innocent. In “Good for the Soul” in Welding with Children, for instance, Father Ledet struggles against his alcohol addiction.

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The Catholic belief is negotiated especially in The Next Step in the Dance. As a child, Paul used to serve in the Mass of the Ladies’ Altar Society (Gautreaux, Next Step 272). Crucifixes adorn the interior of the houses (Gautreaux, Next Step 237, 279, 327), and deeply pious Mr. Jeansomme, Colette’s father, keeps “an old Sunday missal, a Way of the Cross booklet, a novena book, several holy cards” (Gautreaux, Next Step 272) in his top chest drawer, and each Friday he says the rosary in the Mass of the Ladies’ Altar Society. Repeated references to the church further demonstrate its central role in the narrative. It is in the Gothic church of Tiger Island that Paul finds his deceased father-in-law: “The old man had prayed off into the sorrowful mystery of death” (Gautreaux, Next Step 273). Although Colette seems to be the least devout character, Paul’s accident triggers a change, and she resumes going to church to pray (Gautreaux, Next Step 172, 175). The image of Saints in the stained glass windows of a church recurring in several works becomes a symbol of earthly suffering. When Paul is found by the rescue team, he “[rolls] his eyes up at Colette with the expression of one of the tortured saints in their church’s stained glass” (Gautreaux, Next Step 338). Equally, in The Clearing, Byron Aldridge, though Presbyterian, enters a Catholic church in war-ridden France and from his pew studies “saints soldered in the lightless stained glass, and standing flat and dark as negatives” (83). These scenes correspond to Gautreaux’s description of his community church: “Our church was a tall neo-Gothic structure full of elaborate glass windows and life-size stone statues of saints. It was a physical metaphor benefiting those who missed the point of words” (Nisly, “Catholic” 122). The references to Catholicism are, nonetheless, far from being an imposing presence, and Gautreaux does not commit himself completely to Catholic preaching in his works. Rather, the Catholic belief floats along with the narrative, as a background landscape. Although the Cajuns have been repeatedly characterized as pious Catholics, their attitude proves otherwise. Even if Catholicism defines their culture, they are not controlled by it. Today, “[l]es Louisianais francophones ne sont pas des catholiques assidus,” the ethnologist Cécyle Trépanier stated in 1993 (“Louisiane” 382). In another article, she noted that the Catholic Church as an ethnic institution in southern Louisiana has been weakening: “From a paternalistic colonial Church, the Louisiana Catholic Church has become an American one very much out of touch with the cultural character of the population it serves” (“Catholic Church” 59). One reason for this changed status is the religious crisis defining modernity. There is, however, another reason, which is very much entrenched in the Cajun past. The Cajuns’ “general resistance to the superimposition of European values” (Anelet, “‘Ôte-voir’” 124) includes the rejection of being controlled by the Cath-

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olic Church. As historian Carl A. Brasseaux convincingly showed, the Cajuns have never favored church control, or any other control for that matter. This attitude can be traced back to the Acadians in Acadia who, besides disapproving of the feudal system in France as well as of the possessive British, would not be governed by officials of the Catholic Church: “Acadians from all walks of life, but usually from the lower rungs of the economic ladder, resented encroachment of ecclesiastical authority when the Catholic church [sic] experienced explosive growth” (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun 32– 33). Moreover, rural Acadians “seldom attended mass, and religious instruction was, and would remain, largely the province of Acadian females” (Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun 37). There were regular clashes between local ecclesiastical and secular authority in the first half of the eighteenth century (Carl A. Brasseaux, Founding 157– 166). As a consequence, the Acadian family and community became important instances for the transmission of moral values. Obviously, this practice was transposed to Louisiana. Just as in Acadian culture, the Cajun family, strongly directed by the Catholic religion, is the last authority in matters of moral education. It is not surprising that the sheriff Merville in The Clearing disdains the priest’s attempts to make him come to church again. Arguing that “[r]eligion comes from the mamma” (27), he clearly takes after her, a Methodist, and not after his Catholic father. The anti-authoritarian attitude visà-vis the Church transpires mostly through dry anti-clerical humor typical of the Cajun oral tradition. In the first scene of The Next Step in the Dance, Colette’s verbal exchange with the ticket seller Russel LaBat of the Silver Bayou Drive-in is an example of such anti-clerical humor. Suspecting that Paul is dating another girl, she wants to take Paul to task and questions Russell if Paul is inside. Russell acts the fool asking: “Paul who?”—to which Colette wryly retorts: “Pope Jean Paul” (2), a reference to Pope John Paul II. With respect to this anti-clerical attitude, Ancelet explains that [f]rontier attitudes were later reinforced by sentiments imported from eighteenth-century France where revolutions and reforms separated church and state and gave rise to irreverent humor which survives in Louisiana French oral tradition, particularly in the treatment of the clergy as a continuation of the colonial mentality, further underscoring traditional attitudes concerning the church and its contemporary missionaries. Much in the way that the oil industry has allowed for the continuation of the frontier spirit with its adventure-laden routine, the continuing presence of missionaries in present-day Louisiana has preserved the anti-clerical attitudes they have always engendered. (“‘Ôte voir’” 124)

That Gautreaux introduces this characteristic in his fiction is a natural consequence of the influence of oral traditions.

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Nisly offers another explanation for the discord between the Cajun community and the Catholic Church. In his study about the impact of the Second Vatican Council on Catholic authors from the American South, he observes that the Council did not affect Gautreaux’s writing for several reasons. First, Catholicism was widespread in Louisiana, so there was no necessity to fight against another dominant denomination, in contrast to Flannery O’Connor, whose Catholicism clashed with the surrounding Protestantism (Nisly, Wingless Chickens xiii).⁴⁶ Second, the multi-ethnic constitution of the area in which Gautreaux lived was based on a sense of tolerance. Lastly, in referring to pastoral letters by U.S. Catholic bishops from the 1980s concerning the response to violence, Nisly claims that Gautreaux’s stories seem to follow the Just War stance of the Catholic Church (Nisly, Wingless Chickens 127– 128).⁴⁷ However, since Gautreaux was not affected by Vatican II, it is unlikely that the Just War idealism influenced him. A more fundamental reason lies indeed in the Cajuns’ rooted anti-clerical attitude. The fact that they have continuously rejected regulatory institutions shows, without doubt, their dislike of religious domination. Anti-clerical humor in Cajun culture serves yet another purpose. The Cajuns do more than reject the dominance of the church. As Ancelet convincingly explains, their anti-clerical stance also shows their take on the past: They reject the image of the meek Acadians, resigned to endure God’s challenges. Most importantly, it is a way to oppose American domination, including the stereotypical portrayal of the pious Acadians embodied in Evangeline: Folktales, legends and oral history are stylized reflections of a symbolic past. However, they often accurately reflect psychological truth. The way people feel about their past and the kinds of things they think are funny can help color the picture drawn by the facts. The abundance of anti-clerical humor in Cajun culture would seem to debunk the pastoral image of the Acadians as the tame and devoted flock of [sic] local cure popularized by Longfellow’s ‘Evangeline.’ The independence expressed in the Cajuns’ anti-clerical oral literature is based on the notion that priests and nuns are unnecessary mediators in the direct relationship they enjoy with their Deity. In their own stories, the Cajuns clearly believe in God, but in their own terms and not without a keen sense of humor. (Ancelet, “‘Ôte voir’” 130)

 O’Connor made an interesting observation about being a Catholic writer in the South: “When the Southern Catholic writer descends within his imagination—unless he happens to have the good fortune of being from southern Louisiana—what he is apt to find is not often Catholic life but the life of a region in which he is both native and alien” (qtd. in Nisly, Wingless Chickens 90 – 91).  The Just War theory proclaims that a just war needs to meet certain ethical and legal conditions (Rotzetter).

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The sense of humor emerging in a religious context, then, is a way of liberating the Cajuns from the stigma of being a submissive people. The distancing from American culture also happens on another level. As a matter of fact, the Cajuns’ Catholic belief runs counter to the Protestant work ethic of the Anglo-Americans.⁴⁸ According to Trépanier, [t]he Louisiana French, then, find the Catholic label a way to increase their contrast with Anglo-Americans and to be faithful to tradition. Because Protestant puritanism clashes with the joie de vivre mentality of the Louisiana French, the Catholic Church is likely to keep a special position in the area almost by default. But it is also likely that the assertion of one’s Catholicism in French Louisiana at a time of strong national influence may be an increasingly reliable way of saying ‘we are us—not them.’ (“Catholic Church” 73 – 74)

Paul’s lack of ambition in The Next Step in the Dance, for instance, is “typical of a lot of Acadians. They’re satisfied with what they have, and they don’t make themselves unhappy about what they don’t have” (Joyal 28). Moreover, a number of characters selflessly undertake to help another character who is in trouble. This attitude, too, says Gautreaux, constitutes Cajun identity: There are several of my stories that you could call intervention stories, where somebody’s in a bad way, and a character takes that step to help, breaks through the mirror, to go to the other side. There’s no story unless somebody does something like that. … But all of that comes from being raised Catholic where we have been taught to help people who are less fortunate than we are, not just by praying for them but by actually going out and fixing their busted air conditioners and stuff. (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 146 – 147)

This “sort of quid pro quo relationship” (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 147), a Cajun attitude embodied in the traditional coup de main, expresses the characters’ striving for grace and reflects Gautreaux’s Catholic understanding. Altruistic behavior is, however, not only present in such Cajun characters as Paul Thibodeaux or Sam Simoneaux. Randolph Aldridge, the Presbyterian from Pennsylvania, for instance, undergoes a transformation and seems to have adopted certain values by the end of The Clearing, echoing those in The Next Step in the Dance. Consequently, it is not a Catholic belief system that Gautreaux professes. Rather, his stories are lessons about universal values: “I think that if a story or novel doesn’t touch on a question of right and wrong, of good and evil, of indolence or personal striving, for example, it really isn’t a complete tale”  Max Weber’s magisterial and contested thesis in Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus argues that capitalism, especially in the United States, relies on the Puritan tradition which is based on a Protestant ethic that advises people to work hard and save money, all the while avoiding idleness.

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(Nisly, “Catholic” 125). Gautreaux knows about the ambiguities of human nature and the intricacies of relationships. This knowledge is not limited to Cajun Country (or the Catholic community); it crosses boundaries and connects the most diverse people: “Cajuns are in Louisiana; Catholics are all over the planet” (Bauer, “Interview” [2012] 137). The traditional ways of Cajun culture may be disappearing, but what remains are the values inflected by a Catholic understanding.⁴⁹ Gautreaux’s writing, because of the Catholic undertones, constitutes one thread in the fabric of Catholic writing. At the same time, it is also constitutive of universal moral fiction writing. Vengeance, as both a basic human instinct and a cosmic concern, serves as a good vantage point for teaching universal morals. The moralist Gautreaux emerges especially in violent scenes that feature acts of vengeance. The Clearing can be considered as the most violent work, with the various brutal, at times deadly, altercations between characters, including the final shoot-out, and the Louisiana jungle seeming even wilder than the Wild West and almost as dark as Joseph Conrad’s African jungle in Heart of Darkness (“The Critics” 101). Vengeance also appears in The Next Step in the Dance when the Texan Bucky Tyler takes revenge on Paul, who nearly gets killed in the burning hot boiler. In The Missing, Sam travels on the Ambassador on the “night-wide river” (Gautreaux, Missing 125) and then into Louisiana’s impenetrable and dark back country in order to recuperate the kidnapped girl and the memory of his traumatic past. Although the darkness of the cypress forest, the boiler, and the steamship trip evoke a sense of danger and forgetting, maybe even a sort of hell, the plots have happy endings with either the recovery of memory or a way to redemption. Indeed, the protagonists, above all the Cajun characters, show a tendency to refrain from seeking vengeance. Gautreaux makes clear that violence does not lie in the Cajuns’ nature, which is not so much a matter of religion than a social necessity: Cajuns … very often were just too poor to afford a grudge, and they really weren’t big on vengeance because the results of vengeance are something that hurt the family, and Acadians have always been very family oriented. Why perform an act of violence that’s going to land you in jail if you have children to support? That is sort of the Acadian take on violence and vengeance. (Ashbrook 176 – 177)

 Indeed, Andre Dubus’s writings are a good example of the universal humanism rooted in Catholicism. A Cajun and Catholic who moved in his thirties to Haverhill, Massachusetts, Dubus almost never wrote about his Cajun identity or Cajun culture. His writings are, however, suffused by a deeply Catholic worldview.

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Abstaining from vengeance, Gautreaux’s characters appear as selfless and determined to promote righteousness in the community. Ultimately, Gautreaux consciously promotes the theme of vengeance as a way of contrasting his writings to American literature: “I noticed that the archetype, the template, so to speak, the way that Americans look at any type of injury that is done to someone, or any type of tragedy that happens, that there should be some sort of a recompense, some sort of vengeance. Americans are very Old Testament when it comes to vengeance, and I didn’t want to write a book like that” (Ashbrook 173). This propensity to proclaim righteousness reflects a common sense of hope and trust in a positive outcome. It is symbolized through images evoked by the characters’ successful use of second chances or by life-affirming words like “dance,” or “Nimbus.” “Nimbus,” Gautreaux explains, is the meteorological term for a rain-bearing cloud, and “like a cloud that forms and then dissipates most of these lumber towns, particularly the isolated ones, just formed and disappeared” (Meyerling 102). It also aptly describes the customary heavy rainfall in Louisiana. “Nimbus” evokes yet another context. In its second meaning, “Nimbus” describes a saint’s halo (“nimbus, n.”). The reference to light implies that in every evil place there also exists some goodness. The Clearing, as the title already suggests, is not all about darkness, malevolence, and antagonism. Good and evil, light and darkness, remembering and forgetting are intrinsically tied together. Gautreaux’s perspective stands in stark contrast to how outsiders have portrayed Cajuns in film and fiction. Indeed, his Cajun characters undermine the now common trope of the violent Cajun in twentieth-century media: from the murderer Albert Cluveau in Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), to the one-armed Cajun trapper seeking revenge for the blowing-up of his home by a squad of soldiers in the film Southern Comfort (1981), to the cruel loader Grady “Coon-Ass” Travis in the American-British war film Fury (2014). According to Gautreaux, resisting vengeance is a way to distinguish Cajun fiction from American fiction: “The normal archetype in American fiction and American narrative is for some sort of tremendous amount of revenge to occur. And I thought what would it be like to construct a narrative in which this didn’t exactly happen” (Ashbrook 165). In their actions, most of Gautreaux’s characters show non-violent behavior, tolerance, and humanity instead of vengeance. They are offered second chances, and it is up to them whether they seize them. These second chances always entail some kind of forgetting. To renounce revenge and choose the way of redemption, for instance, functions as an act of forgetting, for to refrain from revenge means to forgive and ultimately forget. “Forgetting is essential to action of any kind,” assured Nietzsche, for “it is possible to live almost without memory,

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and to live happily moreover. … [B]ut it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting” (“Uses” 74). Loss, guilt, vengeance, and redemption are not just restricted to the Cajuns’ life experience, nor to that of Catholics—they are universal concerns. In making non-Cajun characters mourn tragic losses, negotiate between vengeance and redemption, such as Randolph and Byron in The Clearing for the murder of the housekeeper and lover May, or the German musician family in The Missing, Gautreaux makes the Cajun value system applicable to the wider world. Gautreaux’s characteristic, then, is to end on a hopeful note, giving loss not a pathological, but a productive trait: Loss is defined by what remains. This trait distinguishes him from his fellow Catholic writers O’Connor and Percy: “Plus optimiste que ses compatriotes, les écrivains sudistes Flannery O’Connor et Walker Percy, dont il est l’héritier spirituel, il trace son sillage, sans jamais forcer le trait” (Séry). More than “a writer who lives in the South,” Gautreaux is a Catholic writer.⁵⁰ And yet, Gautreaux transcends the notion of being a strict Catholic. A good example of his tolerance and rejection of classification is his marriage to his wife Winnifred, a practicing Methodist (Nisly, “Catholic” 122). This tolerance is also depicted in the short story “The Pine Oil Writer’s Conference” where a character is described as “an atheist who has a crucifix collection” (Gautreaux, Welding 107). In The Missing, the multicultural and urban setting of New Orleans and the heterotopia of the steamship ask for more religious diversification. Universal ethical themes govern Gautreaux’s works, which are driven by such moral questions as to whether it is better to kill one person to avoid a massacre. Nisly’s claim that Gautreaux’s work caters to a Catholic readership is only partly true since Gautreaux considers Catholicism as a means of connecting with the wider world. Of course, it will cater mostly to a Catholic audience, but it is not limited to a strict Catholic belief. His Catholic teaching ranges from a certain sense of religious morality to a tolerant human understanding. In an article about the modern Catholic writer, American poet Dana Gioia stated that [t]he Catholic writer must have the passion, talent, and ingenuity to master the craft in strictly secular terms while never forgetting the spiritual possibilities and responsibilities of art. … The Catholic writer has the inestimable advantage of a profound and truthful worldview that has been articulated, explored, and amplified by two thousand years of art and philosophy, a tradition whose symbols, stories, personalities, concepts, and correspondences add enormous resonance to any artist’s work. To be a Catholic writer is to stand at the center of the Western tradition in artistic terms. … The Catholic writer understands

 “Instead of adopting the tag ‘Southern Writer’ I prefer to think of myself as ‘A writer who happens to live in the South,’ so by extension I prefer to be ‘A Catholic who happens to write’” (Nisly, “Catholic” 123).

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the necessary relationship between truth and beauty, which is not mere social convention or cultural accident but an essential form of human knowledge—intuitive, holistic, and experiential. (“Modern Catholic Writer”)

Gautreaux might well fit Gioia’s view of the Catholic writer. Gautreaux’s statement that “I am a moral writer” (Joyal 33) discloses that, although his works are based on a Catholic belief, they represent a more universal and more humanistic reach. His œuvre negotiates and renegotiates Cajun identity as he presents the collective religious memory developing from a nominal Catholicism to a differentiated moralizing attitude. Faith and moral values are of paramount importance to counter the fragmentation and socio-economic migration characterizing our postmodern times.

5.4 Conclusion Literary scholar Maria Hebert-Leiter once noted that the publication of Gautreaux’s first short story in 1983 coincided with the publication of The People Called Cajuns (Becoming Cajun 1) in which ethno-historian Dormon argued that Cajuns rarely speak for themselves (36). Six years later, Marcia Gaudet still held this view when she claimed in an article about the representation of the Cajuns in literature that there were no Cajun literary voices yet: “[W]hile writers have produced a variety of stereotypical Cajuns that range from the totally inaccurate to the somewhat narrow, one-dimensional image, there has not yet been an accurate portrayal of the Cajun people or their culture by a major American literary figure” (“Image” 77). If Gautreaux was invisible, then, despite the publication of several of his short stories, his first novel brought about a decisive, and obviously intentional change, for he affirms that that novel is an answer to Gaudet: “Marcia’s statement that [Cajun culture has] not been well represented is true, and that’s why I wrote The Next Step in the Dance” (HebertLeiter, “Interview” 119). Arguably, it is the fact that it is a novel that brought Cajun culture to the fore. Gautreaux regards his novel as an “archetype, a tribute to a culture that could be imitated” (Hebert-Leiter, “Interview” 119). Against this background, Gautreaux’s fiction about Cajun culture joins the francophone Cajun poets in their quest to provide a blueprint for Cajun literature and to foster other Cajun literary writings, while at the same time trying to preserve Cajun culture and work against the forgetting of its traditions. Although Gautreaux denounces the homogenization of American mass culture, his writings are by no means a militant call. His works are, rather, acts of literary liberation and meant to give the reader the opportunity of fully immersing him- or

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herself in Cajun culture. In documenting Cajun culture, he gives orientation to the reader, who is invited to modify his or her own view of that culture. Gautreaux emphasizes the resources of Cajun literature in maintaining the old storytelling tradition and merging it with the literary canon, thus creating a new narrative space. With his insider perspective, Gautreaux contributes to the establishment of a Cajun literature in English, a literature about Cajuns written by a Cajun, or rather a Louisiana-Acadian. In peopling his stories with blue-collar workers, both Cajun and Anglo-American, he gives a voice to a social class usually forgotten by society. He weaves the narrative out of the area he was born and has lived in without the intention of “amazing” readers (Bauer, “Interview” [2009]). His statement that “everybody owns the territory he was born into” (Levasseur and Rabalais 35) corresponds to Eudora Welty’s view about place in fiction, namely that place is responsible for good writing: “[P]lace is where [the writer] has his roots, place is where he stands; in his experience out of which he writes, it provides the base of reference; in his work, the point of view” (117). The preponderance of location in Gautreaux’s stories helps to situate the characters’ daily lives and, by extension, Cajun culture. On a temporal level, “[p]lace serves to situate one’s memorial life” (Casey 184). In bypassing the Acadian past, Gautreaux successfully adds the new memory of a more recent and recognizable past to the pervading memory of the Acadian dispersal—and inscribes historical events and by-gone practices in the collective memory of the Cajuns and Americans. While Gautreaux functions as a contemporary witness in his first novel, the historical accounts of his other two novels rely on certified family memory. The depiction of a Cajun attitude proves that the traditions have lost neither their living context nor their function: They are practiced every day. Gautreaux might not consider himself a Cajun, but he affirms that there exists a Cajun attitude: In South Carolina “it began to be clear to me what being Cajun was. And it had to do with attitudes, the value of food, the value of religion, and things of that nature. And it’s sort of an attitude about life. The attitude that though people think they’re better than you, you know different” (Hebert-Leiter, “Interview” 115). When Gautreaux speaks about that distinctive Cajun attitude, which opposes the Cajuns to outsiders, it is an attitude that is clearly rooted in Cajun Country, in the land and in the community, including its past. Paradoxically, Gautreaux considers education, to a certain extent, as detrimental to the Cajun identity: Because … that’s the way with just about anybody who is raised [among] the lower-middle class or blue-collar people and becomes educated, begins making money, begins to pros-

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per, begins to move in the popular culture. [You] begin to feel that your plainer beginnings are something you should leave behind. And I think that’s sad. You begin to lose all sense of history and all sense of the past, and then you lose the sense of the importance of present things. (Hebert-Leiter, “Interview” 114)

His view resonates with that of Émile Des Marais regarding the “faux jetons” in Cris sur le bayou. Educated Cajuns have shed their Cajun identity. Yet education was necessary for Gautreaux to make him the Cajun writer he is today. Cajun culture needs constant work to endure. Fighting against “losing the sense of the importance of present things” means fighting for the preservation of the past and acknowledging change. The characters do not reject their past but they do not lose themselves in it either. In Hebert-Leiter’s words, “Gautreaux illustrates the importance of embracing Cajun difference and identification even as an American way of life continues to affect the traditional cultural values and traditions by introducing new technology that does not necessarily achieve any better results as old-fashioned understandings of geographical areas and cultural bonds” (Becoming Cajun 137). Gautreaux’s fiction shows that the Cajuns are not governed by the past but rather guided by it. Besides the historical Acadian dispersal including the Evangeline myth and other stereotypical depictions, the Cajuns have other lieux de mémoire, drawn mostly from personal memories transmitted by previous generations. It is this symbiosis that keeps the collective memory of the Cajuns alive. The past that goes beyond family memories disintegrates with time and is replaced by new memories. This change is necessary, as a strict adherence to traditions would only stifle the development of Cajun culture. The foreign elements help root the memory, for the inclusion into the bigger social frames begins a mechanism of comparison, i. e., repetition and thus fixation. The ending of The Next Step in the Dance shows the importance of a well-balanced relation of tradition and change. Colette does not abandon her heritage, but she has gone back to her roots. This is nowhere more obvious than in Gautreaux’s amalgamation of oral storytelling and canonical literature. Gautreaux’s prose is evidence of a “lifetime spent keenly observing the South, beyond the anesthesia of cultural homogeneity” (Bolick and Watta 8). His œuvre navigates between accounts of individual and collective memories, between past and present, between memory and history. Moreover, the development of his writing convincingly mirrors the development of Cajun literature. While his first novel and the majority of his early short stories focus on Cajun culture, emphasizing place, family, and socio-cultural actors such as Cajun music, Cajun food, and a Catholic belief, Gautreaux, with each new work, nonetheless, displays his effort to counter common clichés about Cajun culture, and

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opens up to other non-Cajun elements. Considering the switch from a Cajun-centered to a more global perspective, Gautreaux shows that although his writing is naturally influenced by Cajun culture and his Catholic upbringing, it also envisions the larger world through the lens of a universal value system. This humanism aims to teach moral values which commend personal communication and condemn the modern commodities hindering the younger generation to engage with their culture and build strong family bonds. An appropriate medium for this is storytelling which is permeated by a belief in Catholic and universal (Western/ Christian) morals. His stories “connect with people everywhere because they are built on [his] deep knowledge of human nature and relationships, and mankind’s old comrades, beauty and grief” (Proulx, “Waiting”). Ultimately, Gautreaux’s skill of dealing with human hardships while still finding a silver lining hails from a positive outlook, a positive prospective memory. Indeed, Gautreaux aims at offering alternatives to seemingly unsolvable situations. He recalls that Percy “was very adamant in letting us know that we’re all on some kind of a quest. … The characters are always looking for something … for what makes them happy” (Hebert-Leiter, “Interview” 112). It is no wonder, therefore, that almost all his stories have happy endings.⁵¹ In The Next Step in the Dance, which was originally entitled “Machinery of Dreams” (Larson, “Pelican Briefs” 6), the boats used to rescue Paul are called the Unsinkabelle and Dernière Chance, two names that suggest the positive outcome of the search. Moreover, “Paul’s victory over the machine and the Texan contains within it other Cajun victories, such as the settlement in Louisiana and the struggle to maintain cultural tradition in the midst of American assimilation” (Hebert-Leiter, Becoming Cajun 136). The novel’s last scene ends with Colette in her bank office—she has been rehired and promoted—listening to the whistling noise of the approaching train, the Sunset Limited coming back from California. The train recalls her past, her experience in California, without which she would never have learned to appreciate her home and culture. The view acquires symbolical value when Colette looks out the window: The ever-present Chieftain River is reminiscent of her favorite childhood pastime, the fishing tours, and of the hard times as a woman going nutria hunting to make ends meet. As a constant element, the Chieftain River is anything but the river of oblivion. Instead, it symbolizes, through its connection to the past, stability and hope. It has been flowing by forever, witnessing all the good and bad times.  The happy endings are foreshadowed by such telling details as Sam’s nickname “Lucky,” which was given to him because, as an infant, he survived the brutal killing of his whole family, leaving him an orphan; and because he is spared the barbarous fight on the French battlegrounds. Lastly, at the end of The Missing, Sam is reconciled with his tragic past.

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In the end, Colette’s point of view has changed and she has accepted Tiger Island and its dilapidated houses as her home. The last sentence is full of hope: “Then she looked down at the iron roofs of Tiger Island. Some were storm-worn and bent, some eroded and rusty, porous as a ruined soul, and some were scraped clean and gleaming with new silver paint” (Gautreaux, Next Step 340). This time, the landscape, despite its contrasts, still does give a sense of place to Colette because she has changed her attitude toward her home. Paul knows it from the start: “A good place is wherever you are, if you’ve got the right attitude” (Gautreaux, Next Step 22).

6 Jeanne Castille’s Nostalgic Vision of Cajun Culture In 1982, two years after the publication of Cris sur le bayou, another pioneering work of Cajun literature appeared, championing the French language and Cajun culture. The autobiographical account Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane by Jeanne Castille (1910 – 1994), then 73 years old and a retired schoolteacher from Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, is the second Cajun prose work in French after Revon Reed’s Lâche pas la patate (1976). Most importantly, Castille is the first Cajun woman writer, and her account is the first Cajun life writing in French to be published.¹ Mixing her autobiographical sketch with socio-cultural descriptions, the fervent advocate of Cajun culture deftly portrays both the development of Cajun culture and the precarious state of French in Louisiana. In retracing her people’s history, Castille accomplishes the feat of laying out a comprehensive picture of Cajun culture, starting with the Acadian expulsion of 1755 and ending with the peak of the Cajun Renaissance in the 1970s. Thus, her work, a little over than a hundred pages long, substantially contributes to the emerging francophone Cajun literature. Besides presenting a vast knowledge of Cajun and Louisiana culture, the slim book bears testimony to Castille’s personal experiences and her fight for the preservation of the French language and Cajun culture. Although Castille’s account also includes general reflections about the distant past, the larger part of her narrative is devoted to the recent past, more precisely, to the past 73 years of her lifetime. It thus blends in an unrivaled way the author’s personal memories with the Cajuns’ collective memory and demonstrates Halbwachs’s claim that “chaque mémoire individuelle est un point de vue sur la mémoire collective, que ce point de vue change suivant la place que j’y occupe, et que cette place elle-même change suivant les relations que j’entretiens avec d’autres milieux” (Mémoire collective 94– 95). The circumstances and ramifications of the book’s publication differ, nevertheless, from those of Cris sur le bayou. While the poetry collection testifies to the connection with Acadia, Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane manifests strong bonds with France. Issued by the French publisher Luneau Ascot Éditeurs in

 Strictly speaking, if we include writings by Acadians of the nineteenth century, Désirée Martin’s life writing Les Veillées d’une sœur: ou Le Destin d’un brin de mousse, published in 1877, predates Castille’s work. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-007

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Paris, the book was immediately celebrated by the French public.² It was awarded the prestigious Prix Saint-Simon,³ and the French journalist Bernard Pivot invited Castille to his prominent literary talk show Apostrophes (“Madame l’histoire”).⁴ Curiously, despite Castille’s success in France and her narrative’s invaluable and comprehensive insights into Cajun culture, only little attention has been paid to Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane since its publication. Though it is yet another example of the tangible presence of Cajun culture and French in Louisiana, both the author and the book remain absent in today’s major scholarly works about Cajun culture.⁵ Except for a dozen articles mostly from France and Canada, the major works dealing with Cajun culture remain conspicuously silent about Castille’s exploits. In 1997, in an homage to Castille three years after her death, Janis Pallister pointed to the public’s neglect of this francophone activist’s indefatigable fight for French in Louisiana (“Portrait d’auteur” 193). One article in an essay collection about Louisiana does little more than list Castille’s work among other French works inscribed in the tradition of an eternally romantic and enchanted Louisiana (Popa-Liseanu 21). Focusing on Castille’s life writing, this chapter explores the intersections of collective memory, life writing, and nostalgia. The economic and socio-cultural changes affecting the identity-forming landscape of Cajun Country and the bygone traditions indicate not only a strong sense of belonging, which helps to distinguish Cajun culture from other cultures. They reveal an inherent nostalgia. Fundamental to Castille’s narration is the Cajuns’ leitmotif, the allegory of the promised land, symbolizing the quest and longing for a home and for an identity. Interestingly, Castille extends the Cajun imaginary into the larger franco-

 The publishing houses France Loisirs and Tallendier (Cercle du nouveau livre) republished Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane in 1983.  The Prix Saint-Simon has been awarded each year since 1975 to outstanding works in the literary genre of life writing (“Saint-Simon”).  Apostrophes was a weekly prime-time French talk show, aired from 1975 to 1990 (Jeanneney 320).  Although a comprehensive and thoroughly researched book, Shane K. Bernard’s The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (2003) ignores Castille. Likewise, Zachary Richard fails to list her among the pioneers of the Cajun revival in his Histoire des Acadiennes et Acadiens de Louisiane (2012). Articles on Jeanne Castille include Pallister, “Jeanne Castille”; Fouchereaux, “Jeanne Castille”; Pallister, “Antonine Maillet’s ‘Evangeline Deusse’”; Pallister, “Portrait d’auteur”; Fouchereaux, “Portrait d’auteur”; Major; Thévenon; “Madame l’histoire”; Fohlen; Murray, “L’Acadie du nord et du sud: Des lieux-mémoires?”. Longer works mentioning Castille or focusing on her include Griolet, Cadjin 7; Castex; Wagner; Giacoppe.

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phone space by proudly presenting the role France and the French language have played in the survival of Cajun culture. As the written expression of her personal memories, Castille’s narrative belongs to the life writing genre which includes autobiographies, memoirs, biographies, diaries, and other forms of personal writing.⁶ Castille calls her work “[m]on autobiographie” (106), which, according to the definition in Le Pacte autobiographique by French literary scholar Philippe Lejeune, is a “[r]écit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité” (14). Castille’s narrative fulfills this autobiographical contract in a number of respects. The title of her work, Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane, begins like an oath, and the same phrase at the bottom of the last page seals her testimony. These two paratextual elements refer to a proper name, Jeanne Castille, a prerequisite of the genre of autobiography, for “[l]e sujet profond de l’autobiographie, c’est le nom propre” (Lejeune 33). Moreover, a number of verifiable elements confirm her identity as author, narrator, and protagonist.⁷ For instance, after an introductory anecdote, she presents herself on the third page as follows: “Je m’appelle Jeanne Castille. Je suis née en 1910, j’ai donc soixante-treize ans” (2). Besides Acadian ancestors on both of her parents’ sides, her family tree includes Spanish and Irish ancestors on the paternal side. This mixed heritage, which characterizes her as a Cajun, gives credit to her perspective as an insider and further supports her credibility and the validity of her text. With regard to the characteristics Lejeune lists to distinguish between the diverse autobiographical genres, Castille’s “autobiographie” seems to belong rather to the neighboring genre of memoir, for her personal life retreats behind more general events regarding the Cajun community.⁸ Contemporary scholars in the field of life writing would most likely hold Castille’s preoccupation with the historical and socio-cultural background of Cajun culture as a trait of the genre

 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson consider the terms “life writing” and “life narrative” “as more inclusive of the heterogeneity of self-referential practices. [They] understand life writing as a general term for writing that takes a life, one’s own or another’s, as its subject. Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential and therefore autobiographical. … Both memoir and autobiography are encompassed in the term life writing” (Smith and Watson 4).  Autobiographical accounts rely on autodiegetic narration: “Pour qu’il y ait autobiographie (et plus généralement littérature intime), il faut qu’il y ait identité de l’auteur, du narrateur et du personnage” (Lejeune 15).  Lejeune considers autobiography as one type among other types of autobiographical writing such as “mémoires, biographie, roman personnel, poème autobiographique, journal intime, autoportrait ou essai” (14).

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of the memoir.⁹ Historical and socio-cultural elements clearly outweigh the autobiographical reminiscences, making Castille’s personal life take a back seat. Furthermore, the quoting of documents—and Castille includes a number of documents or excerpts—is another trait of the genre of memoir (Bernd Neumann 53). Although Castille is the author-narrator-protagonist of the book, her presence fades behind descriptions of French and Cajun culture. For instance, two anecdotes precede Castille’s personal presentation, which is delayed until the third page. Set in the first few decades of the twentieth century, the two anecdotes—one recounting a discussion between Castille and her mother, the other a neighbor’s story—highlight the Cajuns’ dilemma of identifying both with the French heritage and their American nationality. The fact that Castille takes second place in this double introduction reveals her humble and unassuming personality, which shines through her entire work and is the reason she defines her life writing as “autobiographie.” She does not put herself in the center of public attention. Sprinkled here and there, the personal memories serve to better illuminate the portrayal of Cajun culture and to diversify her narrative. Ultimately, the distinction between autobiography and memoir remains blurred in Castille’s account.¹⁰ British literary scholar Roy Pascal already observed that both genres overlap (5). Castille’s account then is a good example of a border-crossing form, pertaining to both autobiography and memoir, and thus serving as a suitable form of Cajun life writing. Furthermore, this form corresponds to what Birgit Neumann called the “communal memory novel” where “the focus shifts from the formation of individual memory to the construction and consolidation of a collective, group-specific memory on which a collective identity builds” (Erinnerung 224; my translation). Castille’s work offers such a communal voice and transmits collective experiences, identity concepts, and values. Since her personal memories connect with such social frames as Cajun cultural traditions, Cajun history relating to both Louisiana and Acadia, institutions such as the CODOFIL, or even particular collective entities in France, Castille’s narrative clearly relates to the collective memory of the Cajun community: “Not individuality, but collectivity and communality of memory are the focus of that genre” (Birgit Neumann, Erinnerung 224; my translation). Indeed, when Castille writes “[m]on autobiographie, qui est l’histoire d’une septuagénaire à qui la fatalité de l’Histoire a failli ravir son pays” (106), she considers her history and that of her people as one.  According to experts on life writing, “memoir” has come to be the favored term by today’s public (Smith and Watson 3 – 4).  The few articles about Castille’s work do indeed designate her book as both an autobiography and a memoir.

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With reference to an autobiographical text, German literary scholar Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf writes that it not only shows a textual architecture reminiscent of ancient mnemotechnics but interrelates with the collective memory of a group. Castille’s life writing, therefore, represents a spatial setup of a memory pattern … which ties certain contents to a textual topography such as portraits of parents to the—topologically speaking—‘entrance’ of the text and … [at the same time evokes] the imagines stored in the cultural memory and thus [feeds] the individual memory out of the collective memory. (Wagner-Egelhaaf 15; my translation)

The dialogue between Castille and her mother about Cajun identity in the incipit provides the reader with an image of mother and daughter against the background of Cajun biculturality. In this way, Castille retrieves not only personal memories but also the images stored in the collective memory. Her view becomes ultimately representative of the Cajun collective memory, as her writing mirrors both her own personal development as well as historical and socio-cultural changes. Even if Castille’s life narrative follows primarily the course of history, it is not always chronological. Castille fast-forwards or flashes back for better illustration. The snapshots do not depict the full flow but illustrate the most important stages of her life. The text is formally divided into three parts, each set off by a blank page. The first part unveils the connected life stories of the Acadians and Castille, while the second part, equal in length to the first part, presents the richness of Cajun culture and reveals more about Castille’s character. In the last part, about half as long as the first two parts, Castille exposes the state of French and her tireless endeavors to revitalize the language and Cajun culture. The parts are not numbered and do not bear titles, except for three instances in the first twenty pages, which include “Le Grand Dérangement,” “Je suis l’une d’entre eux,” and “Je ne me suis pas mariée.” This open form gives the text an oral quality. Castille also demonstrates her storytelling skills in interacting with the reader through questions, interjections, and telling amusing anecdotes of her private life, which further put the text at the intersection of the oral and the written genres. Without doubt, the French language and Cajun culture are Castille’s “raison d’être” (J. Castille 111). Focusing on their transformations during the twentieth century, which resulted in the vanishing of the familiar landscape as well as the disappearance of French and age-old customs in Louisiana, Castille’s narrative exudes a strong sense of nostalgia. Nostalgia, originally an illness befalling

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the individual and meaning “homesickness,”¹¹ has come to connote the longing for things past such as childhood (Starobinski 263). Today, nostalgia implies a wider definition as it designates more than personal longing, namely a certain group feeling. According to literary scholar Svetlana Boym, collective nostalgia emerged with modernity and reflects the “interrelationship between individual and collective remembrance” (xviii). Castille’s account exemplifies how nostalgia concerns “the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory” (Boym xvi). Similar to sociologist Fred Davis’s argument that nostalgia is an emblem of contemporary culture with its social, economic, and political unrest,¹² Boym describes nostalgia as “an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world. Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (xiv). Obviously, the acceleration of time, a concomitant of modernity, and radical socio-cultural changes prompted Castille to pen her life story.¹³ Her use of such ominous words as “tuer,” “moribond,” and “agonie” in the context of French culture and Cajun culture creates an image of illness and imminent death (J. Castille 100). What is more, her exclamation in the penultimate paragraph of her autobiography leaves no doubt about the nostalgic feelings for her culture and the ambiguous effect of progress: “Américains de la Louisiane et de langue française, pourquoi ne pas reconnaître que nous avons la nostalgie d’un monde difficile à affirmer, qui chaque jour se délite un peu plus, et que la langue américaine, d’une part, et la technologie et les techniques américaines, de l’autre, repoussent plus encore?” (111). The strong presence of collective memory in Castille’s account, therefore, is not surprising since “collective memory offers a zone of stability and normativity in the current change that characterizes modern life. … The collective frameworks of memory appear as safeguards in the stream of modernity and mediate between the present and the past, between self and other” (Boym 53). Dislocation of place and a changing conception of time are the defining elements of nostalgia (Boym 7). Castille’s point of view is one of

 The Swiss Johannes Hofer coined the term “nostalgia,” Heimweh in German, in 1688, using the two Greek words nóstos, return, and álgos, longing (Starobinski 261).  Both Fred Davis and Svetlana Boym offer a socio-cultural study of nostalgia. At the core of the modern condition is the “mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility” (Boym xvi).  For the relation of time and history see Koselleck, “Gibt es eine Beschleunigung der Geschichte?” in Zeitschichten 150 – 176; Nora, Lieux 1: xviii; Halévy, Essai sur l’accélération de l’histoire.

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a “displaced” person aware of an irrecoverable past, and her work is imbued with longing, longing for French and longing for past traditions and former places altered through progress. Apart from giving spatial orientation, cultural space is also crucial for providing a temporal dimension as it resurrects the past. Nostalgia is not only a longing for a place, but also a longing for a different time: “[N]ostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress” (Boym xv). The past relives through the presentification of a specific place and the people living in it.

6.1 Uncommonplace: The Singularity the Cajuns Share Castille leaves no doubt about her attachment to Cajun culture. However, her inconsistent use of various terms denoting “Cajun” and “Cajun Country” causes confusion. At the same time, linguistic variability also mirrors the prevalent disparity concerning the definition of the Cajuns. When describing cultural traditions of the twentieth century, Castille uses “Acadien” and “Cadien” interchangeably. Highlighting, for instance, the social importance of the coup de main or dancing, she switches from “Acadien” to “Cadien” within one paragraph (72, 82). Once, she even uses “Cadien” in a nineteenth-century context (82). The adjectives “cadjun/cajun” also appear a few times, but they do not mean the same as “Acadien” and “Cadien.” Recalling the music scene of the 1920s and 1930s, Castille explains that, while the Americans called the Cajun bands “french [sic] bands” (the musicians playing the accordion, violin, and ‘tits fers in these French bands themselves also considered their music as French) (77), “la chanson cadjun” is, in fact, a result of the influence of American music as it differs significantly from older traditional songs: “Si aujourd’hui et sous l’influence de Nashville, la chanson cadjun évoque le sexe et les amours illicites … il n’en va pas de même avec nos vieilles chansons” (81). Castille sees the onset of the Cajun Renaissance as the dividing line. While she terms Cajun music prior to the Renaissance as “musique acadienne,” the music successfully played at the Newport Festival is “musique cadjun” as it becomes American-inflected with its national and international propagation and its collision with other genres.¹⁴ By the 1980s, Cajun music, which had incorporated the blues and country western styles, had acquired such a vast national resonance that it displayed

 My emphasis. Castille’s other attributive uses of “cadjun” include “le musicien cadjun” and “le chanteur cadjun” (74, 75, 76, 81).

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above all the American influence. Toward the end of her book, Castille uses the common Americanized epithet, dropping the “d”: “la renaissance de la musique cajun” (108). Castille’s refusal to stick to one term, let alone to give a definition of the various terms, only exposes their elusiveness and, most particularly, the fact that Cajun culture has been constantly evolving. Similarly, the use of “Acadie,” a term which permeates Castille’s account, raises questions. Castille regularly speaks of her home as “Acadie”¹⁵ although the term commonly refers to old Acadia. She repeatedly uses “Acadie” in the chapter about Cajun traditions, most probably to stress the strong link to historic Acadia. “Acadie” then refers to both a concrete space and a virtual space. Occasionally, in order to differentiate between Acadie in Canada and Acadie in Louisiana, Castille distinguishes between “l’Acadie d’en haut” and “l’Acadie d’en bas” (5, 9), or “l’Acadie du nord” and “l’Acadie du sud” (7). Additionally, Castille uses “Acadie,” “Acadiana,” “pays cadien” interchangeably. “Pays cadien,” mentioned twice toward the end, seems to put an emphasis on the French heritage, as opposed to “Acadiana,” of English origin (77, 112). It is noteworthy that in the six instances in which Castille mentions “Acadiana” to designate Cajun Country, she fails to give a definition or background information about the relatively recent origin of the term in 1971.¹⁶ She also fails to mention the Louisiana Acadian Flag although she makes special mention of the designer of that flag, Thomas Arceneaux, for his efforts for French in Louisiana.¹⁷ The synonymous use of “Acadie,” “Acadiana,” and “pays cadien” serves to underscore the singularity of Cajun culture, to distinguish it from other regions or such states as Texas. When Castille opposes Lafayette, the economic and cultural center, to St. Martinville, considered as an important pillar of the past, she arguably implies an opposition between “Cajun” and “Creole/Acadian”: “Si Lafayette, à cause de sa population, de sa richesse … joue un rôle indiscutable dans notre survie, reste que le cœur français de la Louisiane bat à Saint-Martinville” (4). While Lafayette, the capital of Cajun Country, is representative of all things Cajun, St. Martinville embodies the nineteenth-century Acadian (and French Creole) heritage.

 “L’Acadie compte plus de dix-sept mille puits—et cinq mille plate-formes dans le Golfe” (J. Castille 16).  In the first instance, she lists Acadiana along with “la deuxième Acadie, la Nouvelle Acadie.” The next three instances refer to the segregation in “Acadiana.” Other references include the long tradition of the “reels à bouche,” i. e., “mouth music” replacing the missing instruments, “dans notre Acadiana,” and her memory of a friend traveling through “Acadiana” for the promotion of French (8, 52, 53, 74, 100).  Castille mentions Thomas Arceneaux in the context of La maison française acadienne, of which he was the director (103).

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The vague terminology evokes an inclusive imagined community, and Castille insists on the communal aspect. The title of the second chapter, “Je suis l’une d’entre eux” (9; my emphasis), and the recurrent use of the first-person plural “nous,” “nos,” and “notre,” especially in landscape and cultural descriptions, show an attitude uniting Cajun and Acadian culture. Castille’s inclusive strategy exemplifies the turn to the ethnographic as another kind of contextualization that draws primarily on remembered scenes of collective memory in creating an image or performance that commemorates or revalues a past moment, and links the personal, communal, and ethnic. The collective history resituates an autobiographical ‘I’ within an ethnic ‘we’ that is necessary to configuring her identity. That is, the ‘I’s meaning is entwined with, read through, the ‘we’ of collective memory and authorized by it. (Smith and Watson 176 – 177)

Another example of the collectivization of individual memory is Castille’s love of dancing, which—as she asserts—she shares with all Cajuns and Acadians: “Comme tous les Acadiens, j’ai beaucoup dansé. … Comme tous les Acadiens encore, j’aurais tout donné pour danser” (J. Castille 74; my emphasis). It is important to note that, for Castille, the ethnic group of the Cajuns has a national character. Unsure how to call the Cajun music repertoire, she hesitates between the two terms “national” or “provincial” (75) but later speaks of “notre renaissance nationale” (77). Nations are generally defined by a space delimited by frontiers and national institutions, for instance. Despite the Louisiana Acadian Flag, “Jole Blon” as a pseudo-national anthem, and the cultural region of Acadiana, Cajun culture has no administrative, legal, or political institutions of its own. As scholars have pointed out, “[t]here is no Cajun nationalism within America, no cultural nationalism that has a political edge” (Ostendorf 238). Castille’s life writing symbolizes the rise of a collective Cajun consciousness. As Nora showed, national consciousness emerged during nineteenth-century France, a time when memoirs were written to transmit values and to contribute to the formation of a collective identity within a state (“Mémoires d’État”). Incidentally, Castille continuously refers to “mon peuple,” obviously meaning the Louisiana Acadians. Castille’s choice of “renaissance nationale,” therefore, correlates rather with Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities. Though the inconsistent use of various terms continues to blur the boundaries of a definition of “Cajun,” they establish an imagined community and accentuate the Acadian origin. Castille’s “nationalistic” tendencies concur with her nostalgic mood. She meditates on “history and [the] passage of time” (Boym 49), and she “lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time” (Boym 41). Nostalgia is, perforce, not a private affair: “Voluntary and

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involuntary recollections of an individual intertwine with collective memories” (Boym 50). Place and traditions, both liable to nostalgia, are the points of convergence of individual and collective memories. Opposing national and social memory, Boym offers a typology consisting of two ways of describing nostalgia, namely restorative and reflective nostalgia (41– 45). While restorative nostalgia typifies “national memory based on a single version of national identity,” reflective nostalgia is oriented towards an individual narrative that savors details and memorial signs, perpetually deferring homecoming itself. … [It] cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. … [It] can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection. (Boym 49 – 50)

Castille’s work reveals a reflective form of nostalgia. The diverse terms she uses to describe Cajun identity and her inventory of the multiethnic influences in Cajun culture show that it is not a national kind of memory that she depicts, but a memory defined by critical thinking and metamorphosis. Giving thought to the changing landscape and disappearing traditions, she also acknowledges how traditions still act as a social glue.

6.1.1 Castille’s Eden: A Geography of Longing The attachment to home, and by extension to the land, determines the Cajun attitude. In Lâche pas la patate (1976), Revon Reed explains that “[q]uand on parle de la philosophie des Cajuns-Américains de la Louisiane, on peut pas [sic] s’empêcher de voir comment ils ont retenu leur grande amitié et affiliation avec la terre” (27– 28). He proceeds to claim that, for the Cajuns, the love of the earth comes before the love of the family. Similarly, Castille emphasizes that “[p]our un Acadien, l’argent ne fait pas la richesse. C’est la terre qui fait le riche” (21). Deep-seated traditions like farming, hunting, fishing, and cattle ranching are ample evidence. It is no surprise, therefore, that Castille gives a special significance to landscape in her work. Her ancestral home is the village of Pont-Breaux, or Breaux Bridge, along bayou Teche, a place pervaded by the past and filled with memories, a place whose marvels Castille sings and adorns with paradisaical traits. When the Acadians arrived in Louisiana, the hot and humid climate and the swamps infested with blood-sucking insects, snakes, and alligators presented them with anything but a carefree future. Surprisingly enough, however, Louisiana has been frequently described as a paradise (Allain, “L’Invention”). During

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John Law’s campaign in the 1720s, meant to lure French citizens to Louisiana, pamphlets sang the praises of Louisiana as a land of plenty, “le plus beau païs du monde” (Waggoner, “Le Plus Beau Païs” 16 – 102), while reality looked the complete opposite (Waggoner, “Le Plus Beau Païs” 4– 5, 104– 200). Today, the arcadian image of Louisiana is firmly established in the Cajun consciousness. This is how Jeanne Castille concludes the episode on the Acadians’ search for a new home: “Six ans après leur déportation, ils pénètrent en Louisiane, leur terre promise” (8). Considering all the hardships and years of wandering, it is comprehensible that the Acadians considered their new emplacement as their promised land, a “New Acadia.” Castille’s edenic description of the landscape becomes an allegory of the promised land. “Dans ce paradis, quand Pont-Breaux est-il né?” (13), she asks. After a historical overview of Breaux Bridge, Castille embarks on a bucolic description of bayou Teche and that town, which turns into a declaration of love to her home place. The strong affection she bears to the place is not only tied to its beauty, but also to the past the place embodies: Aucun bayou pourtant ne m’est plus cher que le Teche. Le bayou Teche. On prononce sa finale comme dans le mot pêche. Aucun ne m’est plus cher parce que c’est le mien. Pont-Breaux est sur ses bords et je suis donc née sur les bords du bayou Teche. Et mon père et ma mère aussi. Et aussi mon grand-père maternel et ma grand-mère maternelle. Elle et son mari sont enterrés à Pont-Breaux. Le long du bayou Teche. (11)

The expression of “bayou Teche,” repeated four times here, seems to meander in the text and reflects the real bayou Teche, which also meanders around several places in Acadiana, thus referring to the aphorism of panta rhei, which describes the eternal circle of life and links birth to death (Liesenfeld 439). Indeed, bayou Teche is the place where Castille was born, where her parents were born, and where her grandparents were born and are buried. In that sense, bayou Teche, which belongs to Castille—“c’est le mien”—conveys a feeling of constancy and a sense of belonging. Breaux Bridge and bayou Teche are part of a paradise found, and they occupy a major place in Castille’s memories. She continues her eulogy about the loss of this paradise: Remarquez, je n’ai aucun mérite à aimer, plus que tout en Louisiane et plus que n’importe quel lieu au monde, le bayou Teche. Mon enfance et la familiarité que j’ai de ces lieux y sont sans doute pour beaucoup, mais aussi la nature propre du bayou: c’est le plus beau de tous. Chacun s’accorde à le penser et même les jaloux à quelquefois l’avouer. Le plus beau. Celui où la rencontre de l’eau et des arbres offre la plus grande douceur et un mystère certain. Celui où la lumière est la plus pure, les sinuosités de l’eau les plus coquettes, les

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crépuscules les plus tendres, la mousse espagnole incomparable. Une espèce de paradis qui devait l’être dans le temps. (11– 12; my emphasis)

In this nostalgic moment, disclosed by the reference “mon enfance,” the bayou Teche turns from a personal lieu de mémoire for Castille, maybe even her ultimate lieu de mémoire, into a collective site of memory: “[C]hacun s’accorde à le penser.” The superlative expressions “plus que tout en Louisiane,” “le plus beau,” “la plus grande douceur,” and “la plus pure,” create a picture of a veritable Garden of Eden and reveal the emotion underlying the close link between Castille and the place. It seems to tell the reader that the paradise the Acadians lost has been found in all its beauty. However, this enchanted place in Louisiana is vanishing. Louisiana was sought after not only by the oil industry. With the onset of World War II, American soldiers came to Southwest Louisiana for training since the abundant and vast nature offered them an ideal training ground (J. Castille 33). Finally, the growing tourist industry around the 1950s and 1960s added to the influx of strangers. As a consequence of these socio-cultural changes, the familiar surroundings have become unrecognizable, triggering a feeling of nostalgia, “a longing for that shrinking ‘space of experience’ that no longer fits the new horizon of expectations. Nostalgic manifestations are side effects of the teleology of progress” (Boym 10). These changes have been felt as a disorientation, even a loss of home. To unfold, the feeling of nostalgia, which is located in space and time, requires a sense of estrangement (Lowenthal, “Past Time” 4). With the rise of progress, the sense of estrangement rises along with nostalgia. Referring to the award-winning black-and-white documentary Louisiana Story of 1948,¹⁸ which depicts the lyrical beauty of Cajun Country, Castille insists that “[l]’enfant de Louisiana Story ne reconnaîtrait plus ses paysages” (17). The protagonist, the Cajun boy Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Le Tour, identified in the credits as “the boy” and played by Joseph Boudreaux, lives an idyllic life in the bayous, fishing and hunting. What Richard Ward calls a “Whitmanesque vision of a triumphant, infinitely bountiful land coupled with the indomitable spirit and resourcefulness of its people,” in fact glossed over the damage the oil industry had done already. Despite portraying a seemingly harmonious symbiosis of the nature of Cajun Country with technological progress, the film best represents the substantial changes caused by the oil industry. Almost fifty years after the first oil well had been drilled, the landscape of the bayous had radically changed. At the time Castille was

 Directed by Robert J. Flaherty and commissioned by the Standard Oil Company.

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writing her book, another thirty years later, it was clear that technology does not harmonize with nature, but radically changes, even destroys it, generating that “ache of temporal distance and displacement” (Byom 44) that indicates nostalgia. Toward the end of the book, Castille repeats how agricultural changes affect the landscape: “Le changement? Cette régression de la canne à sucre, du coton, immenses étendues vertes et jaunes qui sont les paysages de mon enfance perdue, et le surgissement, à leur place, du soja où la Louisiane, avec son passé, semble prendre congé du Sud, de l’Histoire et des mythes…” (88; my emphasis; ellipsis in original). Again, Castille succumbs to memories of her childhood, to reflective nostalgia, “a form of deep mourning that performs a labor of grief both through pondering pain and through play that points to the future” (Boym 55).

6.1.2 The Rich Tapestry of Cajun Traditions Besides reminiscing nostalgically about the landscape, Castille establishes a detailed inventory of Cajun traditions. “Pauvres, les ‘habitants,’ qui en douterait? Pauvres en France, puis en Acadie, puis en Louisiane” (J. Castille 22). From a material point of view, the Cajuns were poor indeed. Yet poverty does not necessarily mean that traditions and ideas are not transmitted. “J’ai remarqué une chose,” noted the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, “que quelque pauvre qu’on soit, on laisse toujours quelque chose en mourant” (Perier 22). As a matter of fact, it is their poverty which triggered the rich traditions of the Cajuns: “Acadie d’une nécessaire ingéniosité, que commandait notre pauvreté” (J. Castille 89). Unfortunately, there are traditions which have disappeared, and their loss reinforces the nostalgic feeling. Castille’s act of sketching the cultural traditions of the Cajuns of the twentieth century can be compared to an inventory of what has already disappeared. In a series of questions, Castille mentions lost Acadian handicrafts and traditions such as the tradition of the “banco” (72– 73), a way to collect money for Cajuns in financial difficulties through organizing card game venues where food and drink were consumed. “Graisse de cochon” (J. Castille 88), lard, which used to be a staple ingredient for cooking, has been replaced by butter and margarine. For Castille, the embodiment of the lost past is Alexandre Leblanc, a blind broom maker who died around the 1930s. Recalling him half a century later, knowing how much Cajun culture has changed, triggers a series of memories in Castille, memories of Acadian art which soon will be no more:

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Et je regarde, si près de moi encore, si loin de nous, des images qui ne seront bientôt plus, à titre posthume, que dans les livres où on les recueille: au bord des bayous, agenouillées sur une planche à moitié submergée, les laveuses de linge et leurs grands battoirs? Les merveilleuses croix funéraires avec leur fleur de lys stylisée, œuvres de forgerons acadiens et anonymes? Les chaises à dossier droit et au siège de cuir étiré, qui sont de l’artisanat acadien pur et exclusif et dont le secret s’en est allé, semble-t-il, avec la nécessité? (88 – 89)

She also recalls the “cottonnades,” sturdy cotton fabrics produced on indigo plantations along the bayous: “[s]i rebelles à l’usure … que nous disions, que j’ai entendu et que j’ai dit: ‘Il n’y a pas fin de cotonnade’” (89). She gives her own definition of the so-called “lirettes de chiffons” because it is missing from the French dictionary Le Petit Robert. These were worn fabrics which were recycled for clothes (89). She recalls the “rouet,” the spinning wheel, and the “moules pour chandelles,” molds for making candles. All these customs are lost, all these “vieilleries” have disappeared; they belong to the past. Castille possesses these memories, which are lost to younger generations. Each object and tradition she mentions is like a souvenir which turns into a memento mori, reminding the reader of the demise of French and of life’s transitoriness. It symbolizes Castille’s longing for the preservation of these artifacts in the collective memory to prevent the possibly moribund future of Cajun culture. Moreover, Castille mentions assemblies which offered occasions to play music and dance, two typically Cajun occupations. Recalling the bals de maison and fais-do-dos, where these two activities were performed, she points out the socializing effect of dancing: “Ce sont les rassemblements provoqués par le goût de la danse qui ont permis aux Cadiens de maintenir de solides liens entre eux et de sauver en commun leur héritage” (82). Community life contributed to the endurance of such traditions as the veillées, the meetings after church, or the coups de mains, just as these traditions helped nurture community life. Although the two traditions have been replaced by dancehalls, dancing has remained a conspicuous trait of Cajun culture, shown by the number of people dancing at music festivals in Cajun Country. The cultural gatherings revolved around another pillar of Cajun culture: food. Significantly, pointing out the revival of the boucherie, Castille acknowledges its socio-cultural importance: “Le cochon comme ciment de l’unité? Certainement!” (87). Besides being the tie that binds people together, the boucheries serve to resuscitate old recipes on the verge of being lost otherwise.¹⁹ Likewise,

 Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre highlight the dual role of the boucherie: It provided “an efficient way of distributing fresh meat” to who participated and a chance for friends and relatives to meet. “Boucheries … nurtured a sense of community in the sense that the reciprocal system

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the Cajun tradition of drinking coffee tightens social bonds. Castille’s description of that tradition creates a reversed Proustian moment: “Quand je me penche sur mon passé, j’en respire bien les odeurs, dont celle, forte, âcre, parfumée, du café” (83). Instead of the drinking of coffee it is the past that evokes the smell of the coffee and has a therapeutic quality: “En buvant … la tasse de café, on se fait des confidences, on évoque ses espoirs, son avenir, son passé, ses soucis, on dit ses rêves et ses craintes” (J. Castille 73). In Castille’s eyes, Cajun music holds a key position in the Cajun Renaissance, for “les sons résistent là où les mots s’effritent” (77). She delineates the development of Cajun music, acknowledging the multifarious foreign influences coming from Germany, Spain, or the French Antilles. She lists numerous songs, such as the Mardi Gras song “Capitaine, voyage ton flag” and “La Valse à Guibeault Péloquin,” a song about a Civil War soldier. Both songs give Castille the opportunity to explain Cajun culture and history. Of course, Castille cannot help but mention “Jolie Blonde,” which she describes as something like the “national” anthem of the Acadians.²⁰ Fittingly, the cover of the first edition of Castille’s book presents a Jolie Bonde painting by George Rodrigue, the acclaimed Cajun painter renowned for his Blue Dog variations. Inspired by the song “Jole Blon,” Rodrigue’s portrait shows a young woman with blond hair, wearing a white dress with a black belt and a white hat, which makes the link to Evangeline quite obvious. Castille also quotes the lyrics of a Cajun song which appears to be “Mon cher bébé créole” (75), recorded for the first time in 1929 by the legendary Dennis McGee and Sady Courville (Savoy 57– 58). Obviously, abandonment and solitude point out the preeminent role of ancestral memory in Cajun music: “[C]’est encore le souvenir ancestral, enfoui dans la mémoire et dans la conscience, qui explique pourquoi, dans toute la Louisiane, les deux thèmes de l’abandon et de la solitude sont les plus exploités, du genre: ‘Moi, chus tout seul y a pus personne qui m’aime dans le pays’” (J. Castille 75). Castille’s longing for the traditional Acadian music echoes the longing passed on through Cajun songs. Castille’s celebration of the Cajun heritage joins a larger trend during the 1980s. Concomitantly with the larger mnemo-cultural movement, the heritage boom developed. “Modern preoccupation with heritage dates from about 1980,” argues David Lowenthal, pointing to the omnipresence of nostalgia thanks to the establishment of the Year of Patrimony in 1980 and such books as “Hélias’s The Horse of Pride, an elegy of rural Brittany, and Le Roy Ladurie’s on which they were based created an interdependence between members of a community that paralleled and underscored their other social ties” (45 – 46).  Ryan Brasseaux also devotes a chapter on the “Cajun National Anthem” and its afterlives (Cajun Breakdown 157– 178).

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Montaillou, an intimate glimpse of a medieval Languedoc village, [which] won these scholars popular fame” (Heritage Crusade 4). As it happens, Jean Fouchereaux compared Castille’s memoir to one of the titles mentioned by Lowenthal, Le Cheval d’orgeuil by Breton writer Pierre-Jakez Hélias (“Jeanne Castille” 79). In the very successful autobiography written in Breton and translated into French by the author himself, Hélias describes the strictly traditional and religious life in his family in Brittany, and how, after World War II, socio-cultural changes repressed these traditions, especially the Breton language. The autobiography is representative of a regionalist wave in French literature, which focused on the disappearing rural life because of increased urbanization. Actually, Pierre Nora considers 1975, the year of the publication of Hélias’s book, as a symbol of the loss of the milieux de mémoire and of the turn toward the lieux de mémoire (Nora, “L’Avènement”). It is unclear whether Castille, who was well read, knew Hélias’s work. Yet both life writings concur in the themes of linguistic repression, the celebration of a culture’s heritage, and the surge of memory. It is the “defamiliarization and sense of distance [that] drives … [the writers] to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present and future” (Boym 50).

6.1.3 The French Cause in Cajun Country Until the first half of the twentieth century, oral traditions were enough to sustain the collective memory of the Cajuns. Since it was passed on within the stable frames of family and community, the Cajuns had no need to write down their history. Their lives were punctuated by social activities that made the recording of events and memories redundant. Still, as Castille shows, the Acadians/Cajuns were not all illiterate as many non-Cajun writers have made us want to believe. A letter by one of her ancestors, dating from 1892, is a good example of refuting the common assumption that Acadians and Cajuns generally could not read or write. Castille emphasizes the exceptionally good French of her ancestor and sets the record straight: “Kaybel Thibodeaux a écrit à mon grand-père … une lettre dont le français est d’une qualité telle qu’il m’arrive de la relire à la seule fin d’en admirer la correction et l’aisance—d’autant plus remarquable que Kaybel n’avait pas reçu une instruction autre que primaire” (26). Castille debunks in a mise en abîme the stereotype of the uneducated Cajun: Both Kaybel and she herself were anything but illiterate. As the transatlantic correspondence between Acadian families attests, some Acadian exiles could indeed write (Carl A. Brasseaux, “Phantom Letters”). Until the late nineteenth century, French was Louisiana’s lingua franca. The growing influx of Anglo-Americans around the turn of

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the twentieth century turned the tide: “Posséder l’Anglais? Oublier le français” (J. Castille 33). For Castille, the survival of Cajun culture depends above all on the continuation of French: Le combat que je mène pour la langue française—celle qui fut, celle qui existe aujourd’hui, celle que je voudrais si forte en Louisiane, en qualité et en quantité—va de pair avec celui que je livre pour la survie de nos traditions, dont le déclin, pour ne même pas penser à la perte, engloutirait la langue elle-même. On n’est fidèle aux traditions qu’autant qu’on peut les nommer, les expliquer, les vivre… La langue est inséparable des conduites—et vice versa. La culture acadienne existe superbement dans les pratiques qui l’expriment: dans les coutumes, les jeux, la musique, cette dernière profondément liée à l’expression orale et écrite que constituent les chansons. Qui renvoient à la langue. (66 – 67; my emphasis; ellipsis in original)

In this passage, the number of words relating to language reveal Castille’s preoccupation with the survival of French. Growing up in a predominantly French environment with a father who pretended not to understand English, Castille and her siblings were compelled to speak French. From 1916 to 1922, Castille received a religious education from the Sœurs de l’Adoration Perpétuelle, later the Sœurs du Saint-Sacrement. The nuns taught in French, except for geography and arithmetic, which were taught in English. Most importantly, catechism was also in French. The Catholic belief, it is clear, was an important means of affirming and maintaining French.²¹ Castille expresses her gratitude for her education and her skills in French not only to the nuns of the convent in Breaux Bridge. Her account becomes a means to acknowledge and commemorate the contribution of the Catholic Church to preserve Cajun culture: “Et, au-delà de mes Sœurs, je rends hommage à l’Église catholique, à qui nous devons de parler encore français. Sans religieux et religieuses, le français serait une langue morte” (27). Repeatedly, Castille points out the decisive role the Catholic Church in Louisiana played for Cajun culture: “Cette préservation de la langue française—et de nôtre âme—l’Église, par le biais de son clergé, n’aurait pu la réussir sans notre adhésion profonde et totale, qui suppose une fois ardente. Nous l’avions, et beaucoup d’Acadiens l’ont encore. … Tout le monde, chez nous en Acadie, allait à l’église” (47). Moreover, the Church was not only the religious, but also the cultural center of Cajun Country, which had far wider consequences for the collective memory of the Cajuns: “L’Église (et l’église) nous donnait à sentir nos liens, et son rôle dans notre  From 1847 onward, when Breaux Bridge founded Saint-Bernard, its first parish church, the priests were French.

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unité a été capital. … J’ai compris plus tard que, au-delà de ses missions spécifiques, l’Église assurait la vie et la survie de notre peuple” (J. Castille 47– 48). Ancelet, in contrast, shows a completely different picture when he argues that the Catholic Church in Louisiana did not preserve French unlike in Quebec, where the Church was a determining factor for the survival of the French language: “[D]ès la fin de la guerre de Sécession, l’Église catholique a commencé à se transformer et se traduire en anglais, anticipant la langue du nouveau pays, et recrutant des prêtres anglophones, surtout des Irlandais” (“Rôle” 395). Another example of the Church’s lack of involvement in the preservation of Cajun culture is the fact that folk songs and folktales were not collected by Churchmen, like in Acadia, but by francophile militants, cultural “missionaries” (Ancelet, “Rôle” 396). Ancelet concludes that “[i]roniquement, si on parle encore en français en Louisiane de nos jours, ce n’est pas par l’effet de scolarisation, mais plutôt par négligence” (“Rôle” 399). Ancelet’s view is carried by a deepseated conviction that the Cajuns have always managed to save their culture through their own strength. Castille, however, is guided by the conviction of the strong relationship between Cajun culture and French culture. Although the invasion of the English language was well under way during Castille’s years of schooling—she was eleven when French was banned from schools—Castille was not aware of the changes affecting the French language in Louisiana. Even after finishing her studies in 1926, she was perfectly unaware of the degenerating language and of the Americans assimilating her people (J. Castille 35). Castille went to Lafayette to study, graduated in 1929, and went to Homer, in north Louisiana, where she stayed until 1932. Her position as a high school teacher of French, history, and social sciences from 1929 to 1973 allowed her to witness the gradual disappearance of French firsthand. It was around 1935/1936 that she realized that her students had lost French, and in 1940 she began her “vie militante” (J. Castille 37) against the complete loss of French. By the end of her career, she was at the forefront of the French language development in Louisiana, holding numerous high-ranking positions such as the presidency at the association “France-Amérique de la Louisiane acadienne” and in the CODOFIL committee. Castille probably did not notice the weakening of French because the ban concerned public schools, and not parochial schools, where the ban on French did not seem of much consequence. The nuns imperturbably continued their lessons in French and allowed the pupils to express themselves in French (J. Castille 31). According to Castille, she has no personal memories of the punishments in public schools, but she refers to the thousands of testimonials:

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Nous n’avons pas un, mais dix, mais cent, mais mille témoignages qui attestent que l’on punissait, souvent par de légers châtiments corporels, les élèves qui, par nature, ou par mégarde, ou par volonté, parlaient français en classe ou dans les cours de récréation. Il arrivait que les maîtres contraignissent les enfants surpris à parler français à se laver la bouche au savon (sans doute pour en chasser les mots impurs) et à s’agenouiller pendant une heure sur des épis de maïs. (31)

Physical punishments such as mouth-washing with soap are a common means of enforcing school discipline for minority groups. Native American children, for instance, also endured such corrective measures for assimilation purposes (Viri 101). Castille feels bitter about the fact that some Cajuns themselves punished the children: “Quelle tristesse! Car ce sont certains de nos maîtres qui prirent à cœur d’appliquer la loi, non pas des maîtres de langue anglaise. La trahison venait donc d’éléments honteux de mon peuple, qui sont à l’origine de la quasi-disparition du français écrit et lu en Louisiane” (31). Castille’s statement about the “disgraceful elements” echoes Jean Arceneaux’s poem “Colonihilisme” from Cris sur le bayou, in which the speaker condemns Cajun teachers contributing to a “génosuicide” and subjugating Cajun pupils to another kind of colonialism coming from within the community: “Il y a rien de plus dégoûtant que du colonialisme / Qui vient de l’intérieur même de la colonie. / C’était pas seulement les Américains / Qui nous ont imposé l’anglais de l’extérieur. / Pensez bien. / Les school boards étaient composés / De Babineaux, D’Arceneaux et de Leblanc. / C’est-tu des noms américains, ça?” (J. Arceneaux et al. 26). The acknowledgment of the wrongdoings by members of the Cajun community is important in the search for identity of an ethnic group: “[I]f the community is completely honest, it will remember stories not only of suffering received but of suffering inflicted—dangerous memories, for they call the community to alter ancient evils” (Bellah et al. 153). Both Castille’s and Arceneaux’s revisionism are part of the awakening process and help to strengthen the sense the Cajuns have of their community. With the reintroduction of French in 1968, Castille redoubled her efforts and taught French courses to Cajun adults. She created the “Semaine française” and the association “France-Amérique de la Louisiane acadienne,” meant to foster the “développement du français et de la culture française” (J. Castille 102), and she participated in the elaboration of exam books in French, initiated by the CODOFIL. Castille’s professional career serves not only to show her community work. Presented like a curriculum vitae in narrative form, her occupational history also functions as an indicator of the presence of the past and a warning signal that the fatal events of the past should not be repeated. Castille emphasizes that language is the foundation of every culture and that the disappearance of the French language in Louisiana leads to the forgetting of the Cajun past and

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its traditions. “[I]l faut,” she notes, “avoir conscience du fait que c’est la langue qui est la base de notre héritage et alors si on perd cette langue, je crois qu’on perd tout notre héritage. Après tout, la langue c’est comme l’eau qui arrose la culture. Et alors sans ça, qu’est-ce qui arrive? La plante meurt” (qtd. in Fouchereaux, “Portrait d’auteur” 202). With the forgetting of the language, of the past, caused by Americanization—“the tempting serpent”—, the origins would be forgotten with time, above all the history of the search for the promised land. Without the French language, the promised land of Acadiana withers. The metaphor of Cajun culture as a plant seems to be a familiar image among the Cajun activists. Famous musician Dewey Balfa also used the metaphor of the tree to refer to Cajun music during his performance at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklore in 1985: “Cajun music is like a tree. Its roots have to be watered or it will die. If a tree is alive, it will grow, and that growth is important, too” (qtd. in Ancelet, Cajun Music 50). Thus, the CODOFIL and the popular movements had the same objective: the survival of Cajun culture. In a way, the quotes by Castille and Balfa reflect the opposite side to Nietzsche’s argument that too much history is harmful: “When the senses of a people harden in this fashion, when the study of history serves the life of the past in such a way that it undermines continuing and especially higher life, then the tree gradually dies unnaturally” (“Uses” 76). With respect to Cajun culture, it is necessary to keep a certain amount of history alive to nurture the tree of culture. Despite her commitment to saving French, it has to be noted that Castille glosses over the heated discussion about French. In his 1979 book about the Cajuns, Rushton, too, stated that “[t]he heart of the Cajun culture is its language.” He continued: “And the heart of modern Cajun cultural politics is a cutthroat debate over what form Louisiana’s French language preservation/revival efforts should take” (289). This debate, taking place during the 1970s and 1980s, is absent from Castille’s work. Her omission to address the French language dilemma is all the more surprising considering that she wrote her work at the climax of the discussion. Louisiana French being an oral tradition, there were no textbooks to teach it. In 1977, the situation escalated with the publication of Cajun French I by James Donald Faulk, a foreign-language high school teacher from Crowley, Louisiana (Rushton 289). Destined for his English-speaking students, the system Faulk devised listed Cajun words and expressions with their phonetic rendition in English so that “you can read the words in English, but it comes out in French” (qtd. in Bernard, Cajuns 126). The CODOFIL, with Domengeaux, preferred to import instructors from France, Belgium, and Quebec, which was, in turn, criticized by Cajun purists. Domengeaux’s retort was acerbic: “They can speak French better than any damn Louisianian” (qtd. in Ancelet, “Perspective” 349). The debate adequately shows that “[w]hile the longing is universal, nostalgia

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can be divisive” (Boym xiii), that while both the Cajun grassroots activists and Acadian elite longed for the irrevocable past, the dilemma about the French language also divided them. Castille’s choice to write in Standard French is evidence of her preference of that variety. However, she never expresses disdain for Louisiana French. On the contrary, she explains the various influences which entered the Louisiana French vocabulary and lists several phonological particularities of Louisiana French such as the old Breton pronunciation of “djable” for “diable”—the devil (65). Although she is aware of the difference between Louisiana French and Standard French, she is not sure how to call Louisiana French—“l’acadien, enfin, je veux dire notre français? Ni celui de Paris, ni celui des provinces françaises” (63)—and explains that it is not learned at school, but transmitted “by blood.” It is because of its oral nature that Louisiana French is spontaneous and creative: Ni limité, ni hésitant, notre français, jusqu’à hier et pour tous les gens de ma génération, est un français du sang, comme je crois l’avoir dit, non pas un français appris à l’école. D’où sa vivacité, sa spontanéité, ses ‘couleurs,’ son pittoresque, qui tient à l’autarcie où nous avons vécu deux cent cinquante ans durant, isolement qui nous a conduits, quand notre mémoire perdait un peu le français ou que nous affrontions les réalités propres à notre pays, à inventer. (J. Castille 64)

With no material to teach Louisiana French, it was the family who took care of passing on the language. This French, however, belongs to the past, for the younger generation has lost the capacity to speak Louisiana French. Despite the numerous efforts to reintroduce French in schools, “[n]ous sommes encore peu nombreux à pouvoir lire notre langue maternelle” (J. Castille 110). This “mother tongue,” however, is not Cajun French, but Standard French. Visibly, Castille’s objective is not to debate which French needs to be promoted. She mentions both Domengeaux’s efforts alongside those by grassroots activists such as the radio shows by Revon Reed, Dewey Balfa, and Camey Doucet (76), the television show Passe partout with Jim Olivier (110), or even Cris sur le bayou which had just come out (110). Yet she implicitly opposes French to English: “Je voudrais tant que mon peuple revienne à la pensée et à la parole originelles: les propos en français, la traduction à partir de lui” (39). Her aim is to help the Cajuns become sensitized to speaking and writing French, and Standard French with its dictionaries and vocabularies offers a norm necessary for the unstable state of Louisiana French. One of Castille’s major contributions to the collective memory of the Cajuns has to do with her memories about a time when French was still the lingua franca in Cajun Country and defined Cajun identity. Around the 1920s and 1930s, the Cajuns still spoke French, and, hence, considered themselves French. Castille’s

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mother, like other Cajuns of her generation, was convinced that she was “Française,” and not “Américaine.” Indeed, everybody who spoke English was American at the time. Castille recalls this mindset in an anecdote, depicting the confounding situation: Je disais à ma mère: ‘Mame, tu n’es pas Française, tu es Américaine!’ Elle me répondait, un peu embarrassée et bougonnante: ‘Mais non, je parle français!’ Alors moi: ‘Oui, tu parles français, mais tu n’es pas Française, tu es Américaine. C’est ta nationalité…’ Elle faisait: ‘Hum! Hum!’ Elle ne voulait pas comprendre et je sais que, tout au fond d’elle, mame ne me croyait pas. (1; ellipsis in original)

Another anecdote further exemplifies the dichotomy between French and American identity based on language. One of Castille’s neighbors, returning from a visit to Mexico with his brother from California, declared to the customs officer at the US-Mexican border that his nationality was French.²² That time is no longer conceivable today: “Je parle là d’une époque qui n’est plus, dont je connais par la tradition orale et par les livres, l’histoire et dont j’ai vécu les dernières années” (J. Castille 3). Castille was probably one of the last to live the biculturalism in Louisiana: “Née Américaine, je mourrai Américaine, mais il m’arrive souvent de penser que j’aurai vécu Française” (J. Castille 17).

6.2 Castille’s Life Writing as histoire-mémoire Throughout her narrative, Castille demonstrates her strong sense of the past. The affect-laden inventory of dying Cajun professions and traditions is telling evidence. The detailed historical passages further point to Castille’s interest in historical memory. Indeed, her preferred field of research is genealogy: “Le goût que je porte au passé—surtout le passé de mon peuple et qui sans doute est à l’origine de ma vocation d’historienne, ce goût a fait de moi une dévote de la généalogie” (J. Castille 17). Through genealogical research, Castille is able to retain some elements of the past which define Cajun identity. As we have seen, nostalgia reflects a special attachment to the past. This particular form of recollection, claims historian David Lowenthal, is, however, only one facet of the attachment to the past: “[I]t is not simply nostalgia that makes the past so powerful. Hindsight and overview enable us to comprehend past environments in ways that

 This answer put Castille’s neighbor in a predicament, for the officer asked for his passport, which the Cajun could not provide. As a result, he was not allowed to continue his journey and his brother, who lived in California, had to go and fetch the passport (J. Castille 1– 2).

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elude us when we deal with the shifting present” (“Past Time” 7). There are different uses of the past, and the presence of nostalgia is only one indicator for the power of the past. Castille’s recourse to the past also shows that it is relevant as both a warning and a sign of hope for the survival of Cajun culture and French. She refers to such significant disasters befalling her community as the hurricane of 1957, which hit Breaux Bridge, and the hurricanes of 1964 and 1965. She does not mention the hurricanes by name, but the dates are heavy with meaning. The storm of 1957 is, without doubt, the terrible Hurricane Audrey. She especially recalls the hurricane which ravaged Cajun Country in 1964, Hurricane Hilda, while the year 1965 is best known for Hurricane Betsy, which greatly damaged New Orleans. More devastating seems to be the experience of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, when Castille was 17 years old (J. Castille 42). Due to heavy rainfall, many levees broke, causing about 250 casualties (see the film The Great Flood). This first major natural catastrophe occurring during her formative years has become ingrained in her memory and serves as a yardstick for later disasters. Castille’s work takes a special place with regard to Acadian history. The revisionist discourse about the Acadian past in the Cajun community, which started in the 1980s, is evidence of a rising historical awareness of the Cajuns as a group, and Castille’s memoir is unmistakably a precursor to all subsequent historical works addressing the Cajun past.²³ It combines both personal, orally transmitted memories, and documented memories. Both traditions, the oral and the written, are mnemonic texts; they are literature dealing with memory and history simultaneously. Early studies on collective memory were based on the premise that collective memory only related to living memory and to the personal memories exchanged between people at a particular time (see Halbwachs). Castille’s life writing invalidates this conception. The entanglement of history and memory, what Nora called histoire-mémoire, is especially noticeable in Castille’s discourse on Acadia. In her article “L’Acadie du nord et du sud: Des lieux de mémoire?” Alison J. Murray draws on the example of the Acadian Renaissance and argues that the Cajun Renaissance represents a moment “où les tentatives d’écrire l’histoire sont en fait des histoires-mémoires” (111). Moreover, the movement represents the realization of the Cajun community that Cajun culture is in danger (Murray 111).

 Dudley LeBlanc’s historical accounts are inaccurate and Revon Reed, who was no historian, wrote a brief “histoire folklorique” in his Lâche pas la patate (Reed 15 – 16). Glen Conrad’s essay collection (1978) includes the first historically researched essays on Cajun history.

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Castille’s understanding of Cajun history, however, also reveals distorted memories. The tourist industry and the surge of nostalgia in Louisiana in the early twentieth century capitalized on Acadian history and myths because concrete links as historical markers did not exist. Castille establishes a history of survival, drawing a parallel between the Acadian miseries and the struggles and discrimination of minority groups.

6.2.1 L’Acadie du nord: The Emergence of a Cajun Historical Consciousness Castille reveals her devotion to genealogical research with the reference to the house where she was born. Its brief description goes beyond a mere architectural representation of an Acadian house. This ancestral place, where she lived with her three sisters and her brother, was built in 1850 by her maternal great-grandfather Tréville Thibodeaux, and it stores her and her ancestors’ memories. Beginning with Tréville’s construction of the house, Castille mentions both the subsequent generations and the changes which were made to the building. Infused by the past, the house serves as a trigger for Castille to sketch her family tree. She recapitulates her ancestors’ wanderings, starting with Amant, the first Acadian in her family to arrive in Louisiana after the deportation, and ending with Pierre Thibodeaux, the first French colonist leaving his native Poitou in France around 1651 to make a new life in Canada. Thus, through the house of the Thibodeaux family, Castille evokes the House of Thibodeaux. Following her maternal lineage, which she concludes with the sentence “Pierre Thibodeaux, le Français, dont, par sept générations interposées, je suis, en Louisiane américaine, la petite-fille française…” (19; ellipsis in original), she continues with her father’s genealogy. Again, she begins with her personal family memories before presenting her relations removed in time and space. A certain José Castel, hailing from the Spanish island of Minorca and bestowing the family name on his descendants, married Osite Landry, the widow of famed Beausoleil, linking Jeanne Castille to the famous Father of New Acadia and one of the founders of what would later become Breaux Bridge. Together with fifteen fellow countrymen, Beausoleil chose a settlement along bayou Teche, which they called “La Pointe,” or Beausoleil’s camp (J. Castille 13). Besides Beausoleil, Castille’s paternal ancestry boasts of another notable person anchored in the collective memory of Cajun culture. Tradition has it that Agricole Breaux built the bridge over bayou Teche to connect its two banks for better eco-

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nomic exchanges, the community of “La Pointe” on the right bank with St. Martinville on the left bank.²⁴ With a solid knowledge about her ancestors—their names, their origins—Castille generates a very strong familial sense of belonging to the Acadian people. Although her reflections relate to either her individual memories or archived administrative information about her family, they can be regarded as a common experience of the Acadian refugees arriving in Louisiana. This reminiscence-chronicle is no isolated case. Many other Cajun families have discovered their ancestry and tell similar genealogical histories so that Castille’s genealogical narrative stands as one example among many in the collective memory of the Cajuns. With her background as an Acadian descendant and as a history teacher, Castille shows her deep interest in the Acadian past and in genealogical research: “Si j’en avais le pouvoir, j’exigerais que la généalogie soit à l’étude dans les écoles. Je vois là, dans sa pratique, l’une des façons de sauver, dans la Louisiane française qui s’efface, la langue française qui se perd et prive les Acadiens de leur être” (17). Rather than listing historical dates and events, she tells the Cajun story through the experiences and the individual life stories of her ancestors. While she re-creates her own past, she also re-creates the Acadian past, beginning with the genesis of the Acadians, their expulsion from Acadia, and their arrival in Louisiana. Castille also displays a historical objectivity and cultural empathy with respect to the Grand Dérangement. Assuring the reader of her credibility as a historian, she gives evidence of her statement through a pledge of authenticity and two repetitions: “Je n’avance rien que l’on n’ait établi avec une totale rigueur. Cette histoire est vraie. … Je n’avance rien que l’on n’ait établi avec une totale rigueur” (7– 8). Accordingly, the number of the deported Acadians she indicates comes closest to the estimated number by contemporary historians. While Cajun historians speak of 15.000 exiles (Carl A. Brasseaux, French 17; Bernard, Cajuns xix), Castille conjectures that about 6.000 – 10.000 were deported (6). However, when it comes to more private memories, including the Acadians’ feelings, it is much more difficult to reproduce their memories without testimonies: “Nous ne connaissons rien de cette frustration, qui ne s’est pas transmise jusqu’à nous, dissipée par l’Histoire” (J. Castille 21). The lack of testimonies makes Castille use specific verbs and phrases to indicate this uncertainty. The recurrent “Il faut imaginer” (6) and “revoyant mes

 St. Martinville was originally settled by French colonists around 1720 and called Poste des Attakapas before it received its current name around 1765. A year later, Beausoleil arrived and settled along bayou Teche (J. Castille 13 – 14).

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aïeux … que j’imagine … je songe. …” as well as the threefold repetition of “[j]’imagine (j’essaie d’imaginer, je crois que j’imagine…)” (18; ellipses in original) replace the “je me rappelle” she uses for her own memories. Both imagination and remembering signal the by-gone past. While the latter expresses memories, the former is supposed to appeal to the readers’ emotions, to give them access to the by-gone past. Castille, for instance, emotionally describes the Acadians’ “long, interminable et fantastique voyage … leur calvaire … après des dizaines de nuits et de jours en mer, sous la garde des soldats-bourreaux et des centaines, peut-être un ou deux milliers de kilomètres en carriole, à pied” (18). Finally, she shows understanding toward the Acadians’ disillusion upon their arrival in Louisiana: Ce soir où j’écris, revoyant mes aïeux, d’abord les plus lointains, que je ne ‘vois’ pas, et pour cause, mais que j’imagine, chaque prénom et patronyme suscitant une silhouette et un flou, hasardeux visage, je songe à la stupeur, à la douleur des Acadiens d’en haut quand, tout à leur bonheur de toucher enfin une terre française, après tant d’épreuves, ils apprennent qu’elle est espagnole! (21)

Through the chain of filiation, Castille does not evoke Acadia as a place, but as a community. Indeed, the links to the spatial entity are missing whereas the lives of Castille’s ancestors have been archived. It is through that chain of memory that old Acadia functions as an imaginary space. Despite Castille’s endeavor to present Acadian history accurately, some elements are not completely correct. While organizing the bicentenary of the Grand Dérangement, celebrated in 1955, Castille started researching the quadrille, a country dance she deems popular among her Acadian ancestors: À la recherche de nos racines, et en vue de la célébration du bicentenaire du Grand Dérangement, dès 1954 j’ai mené des recherches sur le quadrille, dont mon peuple ne savait presque rien et que les Acadiens du vieux temps avaient si fort aimé. … Par le biais de la musique et des danses, je jouais ma partie dans cette tentative pour assurer la renaissance du fait acadien et préserver ce qui nous restait de l’héritage. (79; my emphasis)

Strictly speaking, the quadrille can hardly be called a typical Acadian custom. First introduced in France between 1740 and 1755, it became a popular dance in social clubs in England and the USA in the nineteenth century (“Quadrille”). Likewise, Les Lanciers, a variation of the quadrille Castille started teaching with sheet music she had received from France, spread from Great Britain to France around the mid-1850s.²⁵ Far from hailing from old Acadia, Les Lanciers is Euro-

 The third section in the entry to “lancier” in Le Littré reads: “Terme de danse. Le Lancier ou

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pean in origin and anything but from “du vieux temps.” It is more likely that Castille had the wealthier Genteel Acadians of the nineteenth century in mind, when country dances were very popular at public balls. Castille falls prey to another fallacy. As she recalls, the dance group she organized performed old dances wearing replicas of old Acadian costumes. The girls were clad in blue skirts and white blouses, black sweaters and white pinafores. The boys wore blue trousers, red socks, black shoes, black vests, and white shirts. Obviously, Castille considers this the traditional Acadian outfit, “[n]os aïeux, enfants, s’habillaient ainsi vers 1755” (80). Scholars have, however, exposed this outfit as an invented tradition: For decades, it was generally believed that most of the Acadian colonists were originally Normans, a misconception created by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1847 epic Evangeline and perpetuated by historical literature. This misconception lives on today in Louisiana through the so-called authentic ‘Evangeline’ costume, a seventeenth-century Norman outfit consisting of light blue skirt, white apron and blouse, and black corset. (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 3)

Unknowingly, Castille perpetuates inaccuracies established through the Evangeline myth. Significantly, her dancing group was part of a larger fashion, the Evangeline girls, who traveled around Louisiana to “[cater] to the contemporary nostalgia for the authenticity and charm of yesteryear” (Brundage 279). These real-life Evangeline pageants started as early as 1926 and were shepherded by the civic leader Susan Evangeline Walker Anding. They continued to be encouraged by Dudley LeBlanc, whose endeavors ranged from Evangeline pilgrimages to places as far as Nova Scotia, to the downright exploitation of Acadian history in Louisiana, including his written portrayal of the Acadian dispersal.²⁶ Scholars have since indicated that “[t]he predispersal Acadian pioneers, particularly the women who were said to have ‘a passion for scarlet cloth,’ generally wore brightly colored costumes often consisting of striped cloth” (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 3). The historical reenactments and dance performances of young Cajun women clad in Acadian garments and personifying Evangeline underscore the nostalgic trend of that time.

les lanciers, espèce de quadrille remarquable par les saluts que se font le cavalier et sa dame; importé d’Angleterre en France vers 1854; il se compose de cinq figures nommées les tiroirs, les lignes, les moulinets, les visites et les lanciers” (“lancier”).  Surprisingly, Castille mentions D. LeBlanc only once and very briefly, despite his conspicuous presence on the public scene and his political involvement (34– 35).

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Another historical mistake by Castille is that she ostensibly clings to the mythical idea of the overland route concerning the Acadians’ exile, and leaves out the complex circumstances of the various wanderings: “[I]ls pénètrent en Louisiane, leur terre promise, par le Missouri, le Wabush [sic], l’Ohio” (8). Indeed, she rather follows the general misstatement put forth by Longfellow in Evangeline: “It was the month of May. Far down the Beautiful River, / Past the Ohio shore and past the mouth of the Wabash, / Into the golden stream of the broad and swift Mississippi, / Floated a cumbrous boat, that was rowed by Acadian boatmen” (Poems 71). The myth that the Acadians arrived in Louisiana via the Mississippi River is to be read in the light of the concept of “Manifest Destiny” (McFarland 37).²⁷ Today, we know that the Acadians were scattered to the wind and arrived in Louisiana by the sea. Obviously, Castille, with her brief references to Longfellow and Dudley LeBlanc, unknowingly continues the collective memory based on the mythical traditions. Castille also shows a reluctance to fully reject the Evangeline version by Voorhies and thus perpetuates the image of an enchanted and idyllic Louisiana (9).²⁸

6.2.2 The Buried Past: Cajun Culture and Race Relations One of the first reviewers of Castille’s book pointed out how “le passé revit d’abord par l’évocation du milieu” (Major 63). The Cajun milieu naturally also includes Creole influences. Considering the numerous works addressing both Cajun and Creole traditions, there is no doubt about the entanglements of Cajun and Creole culture. Apart from foodways, folktales, or Zydeco, Cajun and Creole culture show another point of convergence: The ancestors of both groups endured dispersal and discrimination. Despite this shared experience and the acknowledged interrelations of Cajun and Creole culture, the gentrifica-

 “Manifest Destiny,” a phrase first used by John L. O’Sullivan in 1845, expresses the nineteenth-century belief that the United States’ mission was to expand throughout the North American continent. In an article from the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, O’Sullivan expounded on the necessity of annexing Texas, emphasizing “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our multiplying millions” (5).  The groundbreaking works demystifying Evangeline and reexamining the Grand Dérangement and the subsequent settlement in Louisiana had not appeared when Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane was published.

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tion of the Acadians/Cajuns caused a racial sensitivity which led to two separate ethnic groups.²⁹ As a matter of fact, the Cajuns seem evasive when it comes to race relations and the community’s involvement in slavery.³⁰ Writers and scholars have circumvented the topic, some even disclaiming the allegation of slave-holding Acadians.³¹ Until 1979, this view did not drastically change in scholarly literature.³² It was only with the Cajun historian Carl A. Brasseaux, who corrected this view in his books about the genesis of the Cajuns, that a different perspective entered the Cajun discourse on slaves.³³ Influenced by frontier life and biblical teachings, the Acadians saw their wealth in the possession of land and livestock, a view which contrasted with that of the French Creole elite of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Louisiana, whose prosperity was based on menial labor: “Most early Acadian settlers had … served as engagés for the concessionaires and, having thus experienced prolonged servitude, apparently found the idea of bondage repulsive” (Carl A. Brasseaux, Founding 190). Most of them also “initially regarded blacks and mulattoes as their social equals, working and traveling with them” (Carl A. Brasseaux, Founding 191). And yet, as Carl A. Brasseaux explains, slavery in the Acadian community developed soon after they arrived in Louisiana: Frontier egalitarianism was comparatively easy to maintain in Acadia, where slavery was unknown and indentured servitude was a distant and unpleasant memory. In lower Louisiana, however, Negro slavery was a well-established institution at the time of the Acadian

 Over the past fifteen years, black Creole organizations have been formed. Feeling that black people of francophone heritage were being neglected amid the hype about Cajun culture, CREOLE Inc. was founded in 1987 (“C.R.E.O.L.E Inc.”). LA Creole was created in 2004 as a counterorganization to CODOFIL (“LA Creole”).  The first to engage with the topic was Vaughan Baker in an article from 1974. While Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre fail to mention the Acadians’ participation in slavery as well as aspects of segregated Louisiana, James Dormon and Carl A. Brasseaux present the most detailed overviews of Acadian slave-owners during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All three works were published after Castille’s book. Shane K. Bernard briefly mentions segregation in Cajun Country with an example of a “Whites Only” sign in a window of a Cajun eatery in St. Martinville in 1949 (Dormon, People 47– 50; Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun 134– 147; Bernard, Cajuns 54).  See p. 9 in George Washington Cable’s novel Bonaventure: A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana where he mentions the “simple, non-slaveholding peasants.”  Rushton claims in his 1979 book that “[t]he Cajuns, however, rarely owned more than one or two slaves per family, if that many” (82).  Already in 1965, Bona Arsenault mentioned that the testament of the slave-holding Acadian Pierre Arceneaux, which took effect after his death in 1793, showed considerable wealth, including 16 slaves (272– 273).

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migrations, and though most of the exiles demonstrated little interest in the peculiar institution, their children and grandchildren exhibited no such apathy. Beginning in the 1780s, significant numbers of Acadians began to acquire slaves, first as wet nurses and later as field hands. By 1810, a majority of the Acadians residing in the alluvial lands along the Mississippi River and bayous Teche and Lafourche owned slaves. (Acadian to Cajun 4)

Consequently, conflicts between the two ethnic groups emerged, with the Acadians considering themselves superior to the Creoles of color, while the Creoles of color took the Acadians’ upward mobility badly. It is important to note that Castille’s narrative exposes the delusion about non-slaveholding Acadians even before Carl A. Brasseaux published his work, first giving facts about her ancestors’ possession of slaves, and later detailing the overall situation of slavery in the Acadian community. Castille substantiates the claim that Acadians held slaves with three wills by distant ancestors. For instance, Osite Landry, who died in 1810, owned a slave called Claire. The first will, which was set up together with her husband Joseph Castille, does not mention Claire, revealing Osite’s refusal to part with her slave. The second will, however, which dates from 1810 following Joseph Castille’s death, includes Claire, who is to be sold: “‘[I]l y aura une négresse nommée Claire mise à l’encan entre les héritiers adjugée à Joseph Castille. Et le prix est de 4 piastres’” (qtd. in J. Castille 90). Osite’s daughter Marthe also had a slave, the mulatto Euphrasine. In contrast to Osite, Marthe benevolently bequeathed half of her possessions to Euphrasine and did everything she could to have her enfranchised after her death in 1837. According to Carl A. Brasseaux, especially the Acadian exiles from Maryland became increasingly involved in the “peculiar institution” from the 1770s onward. Upon arriving in Louisiana, this group already had an intimate acquaintance with slavery. Detained in the tobacco plantation areas of that English colony, Acadians had come into contact with the local slave population, and ‘ablebodied’ exiles worked side by side with them in the tobacco fields. … The experience profoundly influenced the Maryland exiles, and having found a means of improving their lot and reestablishing their pre-dispersal standard of living, they and their descendants would ultimately establish a plantation economy on the Acadian Coast. (Carl A. Brasseaux, Founding 190)

During their exile, Joseph Castille, Osite Landry, and Marthe Castille, then an infant, all stayed in the Maryland colony where slavery was legal (J. Castille 20). When they arrived in Louisiana, they were already familiar with slave labor, so that they naturally emulated the French Creoles and began to hold slaves. Another convergence regards the familial cradle on Castille’s father’s side. As Carl A. Brasseaux states, “by the early 1770s a handful of settlers in each of the Aca-

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dian posts—usually young men with infant children—had purchased young Negro women as nursemaids or simply as maids to assist their wives after childbirth with household management. In the Cabannocé and Opelousas posts, a majority of the slaves fit this description” (Founding 191). In fact, the ancestors of Castille’s father settled in Opelousas (J. Castille 19), and both Osite and Marthe owned female slaves. However, when Castille claims that “[l]es Acadiens n’ont pas possédé autant d’esclaves que les créoles” (54), she remains vague, for she does not distinguish between the upwardly mobile Acadians and the socially lower petits habitants. At the beginning, the purchase of slaves among the Acadians was motivated by domestic rather than economic needs (Carl A. Brasseaux, Founding 191). This changed, as the class development of the Genteel Acadians and wealthier habitants owning slaves shows. One of the biggest plantations at the beginning of the nineteenth century belonged to an Acadian slave-owner, and Alexandre Mouton, Governor of Louisiana, with his 120 slaves was one of the largest Acadian slave holders (Tregle). Castille’s great-uncle Alexandre Thibodeaux also held slaves, whom he had inherited from his father Narcisse Thibodeaux, Castille’s great-grandfather. Narcisse probably belonged to the group of wealthier Acadians, for he seems to have owned more than two or three slaves. Moreover, when Castille gives a concrete description of the house he built in 1806, she adds that she and her family could never own such a house because they were too poor (92). The contentious relationship between Cajuns and Creoles of color during the nineteenth century depicted by Carl A. Brasseaux continued into the twentieth century, with two novels by Ernest. J. Gaines serving as literary examples (see Commault; Hebert-Leiter, Becoming Cajun 87– 101).³⁴ Also, in quoting from the life story by Tantine, the nickname of Lucille Augustine Gabrielle Landry, a descendant of African slaves from Mauriceville in Vermillion Parish,³⁵ Castille addresses the cruelty with which white men used to treat slaves and Creoles of color. Yet she does not comment on the event told by Tantine which, together with both Carl A. Brasseaux’s and Gaines’s accounts, contrasts with Castille’s observation about the integration of African Americans in Cajun Country: [J]’observe que l’intégration, en Acadiana, s’est faite presque, admirablement. … [M]on peuple s’est bien conduit. Sans doute parce que la culture cadienne n’a pas la rigidité

 The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and A Gathering of Old Men (1983).  Tantine wrote her life narrative at the age of 82. She was 86 years old when her life narrative (Tantine: L’Histoire de Lucille Augustine Gabrielle Landry racontée par elle-même à 82 ans) was published (Landry and Olivier 6 – 7).

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de celle des Anglo-Saxons. Quand l’intégration s’est réalisée, il y avait plus de deux siècles que Noirs et Blancs parlaient la même langue (la française), observaient la même religion (la catholique), adoraient la même musique, où rythmes africains et européens se mêlent. (53)

The reference to Ascalie, or Scalie, a nanny barely older than Castille and her sisters, with whom the Castille girls grew up and played, further emphasizes the positive picture Castille draws of the relations between Cajuns and Creoles (J. Castille 54– 55). Another example Castille uses to show the loyalty between her ancestors and their slaves despite the difficult relationship between Cajuns and Creoles is the story of Oray, one of Narcisse Thibodeaux’s sons, who was left one day together with a few slaves to look after the property. The slaves beat him to death and fled into the nearby swamps. On Narcisse’s return, the slaves who had accompanied him hunted the traitors down and hanged them despite Narcisse’s request to stop the killing (J. Castille 94). Lastly, in 1975, Castille was able to get information about her ancestor Alexandre’s behavior toward his slaves. On the basis of family stories, the daughter of one of his slaves certified that he treated his slaves well and behaved very humanely (J. Castille 53). With regard to the matter of integration, the reader cannot help but think that Castille embellishes the situation and shows the shinier side of the coin. Castille mentions the Creoles of color, though only to further distinguish them from the Cajuns, or as a way to denounce the discrimination of which the Cajuns have also been victims. Generally, Creoles of color remained mostly separate from the white Cajun community although they shared the same religion and the same language: “Socialement séparés, nous étions culturellement unis, sinon mêlés” (J. Castille 53). Until recently, the Creoles of color in Louisiana have held one advantage over the Cajuns: the preservation of French. The law which banned French was more harmful to the French Creoles and Acadians than to the Creoles of color: Cette loi abominable a plus touché les Blancs que les Noirs, dans la mesure où les Noirs, à cette époque, étaient moins perméables à l’anglais que nous. Faute de moyens financiers pour se procurer les produits issus des techniques modernes—les radios, par exemple— faute de pouvoir et de savoir s’intégrer à nous, que l’anglais commençait à gangrener, ils ont été—et sont encore—sans l’avoir expressément voulu, de meilleurs conservateurs de la langue ancestrale que nous. On peut avancer que la ségrégation et, à cause d’elle, leur isolement les ont plus longtemps voués au français que les Blancs. (J. Castille 32)

Castille sees segregation as a boon, for it shielded the Creoles of color from the influence of the English language.

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It seems paradoxical that Castille affirms the successful integration of the Creoles of color while at the same time pointing out the fact that segregation helped preserve French in black Creole communities. Castille recalls that until about 1923, there used to be a separate aisle on the right of the altar in her church, reserved for Creoles of color. As a piece of evidence, Castille includes a similar experience by Tantine, who recalls her Communion in the church of Mauriceville in Vermillion Parish, a church which both black and white people frequented, but where the two groups sat separately. The Communion never took place, for a fight about seats broke out and the church was henceforward prohibited to colored people (Landry and Olivier 7– 8). Castille’s text only subliminally indicates that integration in Acadiana left much to be desired, distorting thus the Cajun collective memory.

6.3 Jeanne Castille: Pioneer of the Francophonie in Louisiana Apart from illustrating the culture and history of the Cajuns, Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane also highlights the impact of neighboring cultures such as the Native Americans as well as other francophone cultures of Colonial Louisiana, including the French Creoles or the Creoles of color. For instance, Jeanne Castille relates how her great-great-great-grandfather Jean-Baptiste Castille purchased land along bayou Robert from Célestine La Tortue, the renowned chief of the Attakapas, in 1804. She continues to reminisce about the Native American legacy, admiring the place names, “aussi beaux que les français” (12). Still, it is the connection to France and the French Creole past which interests her most. As an avid reader, Castille owes much to both the literary classics of France and French Creole literature. The various literary allusions illustrate her great academic knowledge.³⁶ Taking stock of the French past in Louisiana, she sees France as the only future for Cajun culture: Nous voyons dans le passé et dans le français une conjonction heureuse et la seule arme défensive de quelque efficacité. Vivre dans le passé et vivre là (là-bas dans le passé et les souvenirs que nous en tirons) en français: par ce biais, nous détournons la fatalité d’un divorce que l’Histoire—la Louisiane est américaine depuis deux siècles—et la géographie —la France est si loin—ont failli rendre inéluctable. (111)

Castille’s linguistic and cultural interest is clearly turned toward nineteenth-century Louisiana and France. To support her argument, she includes a number of

 Both Castille and her sisters were widely read (J. Castille 39).

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such francophone texts as a family letter, a will, songs, poems, and folktales, which are evidence of the various francophone voices in Louisiana. These cultural documents not only attest to the French origin of Cajun culture, they also establish a socio-cultural frame distinct from such literary productions as French Creole literature. Unlike some fellow activists, Castille does not reject France’s culture, notably Standard French, nor Louisiana’s French Creole culture. Both constitute Louisiana’s past. Surprisingly, although Castille devotes several pages to Acadian history, contemporary Acadia remains absent. Unlike younger fellow Cajun activists, Castille does not reconnect with contemporary Acadian culture; she does not reveal any link to present-day Acadia. In fact, French Canada is singularly absent despite the strong presence of Quebec teachers in Acadiana in the 1970s and 1980s. She must have been aware of the similar situation of French in the Canadian Maritimes and the educational exchanges between francophone Canada and Louisiana. Yet whether she maintained any ties to fellow Acadian activists or writers is not known. One reason might be that a concrete Acadian-Cajun connection developed only in the 1990s and climaxed with the first Acadian World Congress in 1994, the year of Castille’s death. Castille, therefore, never experienced any of the Acadian reunions and was unable to document the growing relations between Acadia and Louisiana. While old Acadia plays an important part in Castille’s construction of the past, she disregards the influence of present-day Acadia on Louisiana. Instead, she reveals a strong penchant for France. It is, so to speak, a return to another home with much older roots, namely the French roots in France. It is maybe for this reason that “acadien” and “français” seem to have the same connotation for Castille. For instance, she uses “français” to refer to the French community of Louisiana, especially to the community in the Cajun heartland. At other times, however, she uses both “acadien” and “français” without distinction: “[Louise Olivier] est venue me voir, n’ignorant rien de la ferveur que je porte à la défense de notre culture française. Et si elle est venue à moi c’est parce qu’elle avait découvert, en parcourant notre Acadiana, que le français et la culture acadienne régressaient d’alarmante façon” (100; my emphasis). In her conclusion, Castille hesitates and admits that she used the two terms inconsistently: [V]oici que j’hésite. Dois-je dire: la langue et la culture ‘acadiennes’, ou la langue et la culture ‘françaises’? Tout au long de ce livre, j’aurai employé indifféremment les deux adjectifs et je m’estime fondée à le faire. Non sans bizarrerie, c’est quand nous avons commencé à perdre le français que nous avons découvert notre identité acadienne. Comme si nous éprouvions le besoin de nous raccrocher à quelque chose dont nous n’avions plus la vision, mais encore le sentiment. (110)

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To a certain Acadian feeling, or mentality, belongs the ability to speak French. What Castille describes as a feeling actually symbolizes the collective memory of the Cajuns. The description of her family tree is another example of the mixing of “French” and “Acadian.” At the beginning of her life writing, she emphasizes the process of “francisation,” i. e., Frenchification: “[N]ous avons francisé tout le monde. … [N]ous avons fait de tous les étrangers des Français” (3; my emphasis). In another paragraph, she uses both “acadianisée” and “francisé” / “francisation” interchangeably: Il avait épousé Anastasie Ree, descendante de Gallois complètement francisé et petite-fille d’Agricole Breaux, le monsieur du pont. Un autre Castille, Jean-Baptiste, c’est une Allemande qu’il avait choisie et, si je puis dire ‘acadianisée.’ La francisation des étrangers a été, chez nous, le fait des hommes aussi bien que des femmes. (19; my emphasis)

While she uses “francisation” more frequently at the beginning, she puts more emphasis on “acadianisation” toward the end of her memoir, using no quotation marks to describe the transformation of Cajun music and how the Acadians assimilated other ethnic influences: “De la même façon que nous avons assimilé les éléments étrangers (Allemands, Espagnols…), nous avons acadianisé les airs des ethnies différentes de la nôtre” (77; my emphasis; ellipsis in original). The same goes for folktales: They were also “acadianisés” (80). Another example is the “acadianized” Domengeaux family. “Domengeaux” is originally a Creole family name (“Some Common Creole Surnames”), but James Domengeaux, “descendant d’une vieille famille acadienne” (J. Castille 107), emphasized his Acadian ancestry, which reached back to Alfred Mouton, Confederate General during the Civil War, and to Alfred’s father Alexandre Mouton, Governor of Louisiana, and ultimately to Jean Mouton, one of the Acadian pioneers and founder of Vermillionville, today’s Lafayette (P. M. Segura). Two other adjectives hint at Castille’s francophone mindset: “franco-acadien,” as in “la culture franco-acadienne,” “la geste franco-acadienne,” or “la cause franco-acadienne” (J. Castille 100, 103, 105), and “français-acadien” as in “La Maison française-acadienne” (J. Castille 103), which she established together with other francophiles, show how the distinction between French and Acadian culture is blurred.

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6.3.1 Uncovering and Acknowledging the French Past in Louisiana Castille’s ode to bayou Teche, analyzed above, echoes Longfellow’s romantic description of that very stream in Evangeline. Here is the view which opens up before Evangeline and her companions upon their arrival on bayou Teche: “Beautiful is the land, with its prairies and forests of fruit-trees; / Under the feet a garden of flowers, and the bluest of heavens / Bending above, and resting its dome on the walls of the forest. / They who dwell there have named it the Eden of Louisiana” (Poems 73). Likewise, Castille venerates the sublime Louisiana landscape: “Beauté et silence des bayous. La forêt et l’eau. Des arbres d’une ampleur et d’une majesté et d’un nombre qui ont dû réjouir mon peuple. … Des chênes qui sont une merveille du monde. … Et le cyprès chauve, au fût imputrescible!” (10). Against all odds, and the familiar echo notwithstanding, Castille actually passes over Longfellow’s celebrated Evangeline in her narrative, focusing instead on Felix Voorhies’s adaptation, Acadian Reminiscences: The True Story of Evangeline: Toute la tragédie des Acadiens s’incarne dans ce couple de fiancés de Grand-Pré, Louis Arceneaux et Emmeline Labiche, dont Longfellow s’est inspiré pour écrire son Évangéline. … Je dis ‘dans la réalité,’ et peut-être que cette histoire (celle-là) est inventée, beaucoup ou un peu. … Peut-être une tombe et un chêne ‘supposés,’ et peu importe si on n’a pas de preuves décisives: dans le destin cruel d’Emmeline et de Louis, les Acadiens ont trouvé l’image de leur Histoire. (9)

Arguably, Castille chose Voorhies’s version over Longfellow’s because it was written by a Cajun who had brought Evangeline’s tale back to Louisiana. Curiously, Castille takes the authenticity of the little book by the judge of St. Martinville somewhat for granted, which hints at how deeply rooted Voorhies’s hoax still was at the time she wrote her personal account. Castille even gives credit to the rumor that Longfellow drew on Emmeline’s story. Obviously, her disregard for American culture is consistent with her nostalgia for myths, and Voorhies’s story served her purpose well. Apart from rehabilitating the Cajuns and providing them with a usable founding story, Voorhies offered Castille another argument for her fight. Voorhies was a respected Acadian and prolific French writer, two traits which were relevant for the French cause. Understandably, Castille does not specify that the story was written in English nor that it became so popular probably because of this circumstance. Castille mostly concentrates on Louisiana’s French past, above all the conjunction of Louisiana Acadian and French Creole cultures. Toward the end of her life writing, Castille brings both cultures together in drawing a parallel between the CODOFIL’s fight for preserving French and the Revolt of 1768 in

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New Orleans, where French Creoles, Louisiana Acadians, and Germans united to protest against the Spanish Governor Antonio de Ulloa’s relocation schemes, and which resulted in the execution of six French Creole leaders by the Spanish in 1769: Nous avons donné notre temps, nous n’avons pas mesuré notre peine, vingt ans durant et jusqu’au CODOFIL, qui assure la relève, pour sauver une langue et une culture qui sont notre raison d’être. L’eût-il fallu, nous aurions donné notre sang. Comme le donnèrent, le 25 octobre 1769, sur le Champ-de Mars de la Nouvelle-Orléans, La Frénière, Noyon-Bienville, Marquis, Caresse, Milhet et Villeré, les uns des Acadiens et les autres des créoles, tous condamnés à mort, et ce jour-là par les Espagnols fusillés pour avoir refusé la cession par la France de la Louisiane, vente qui leur parut impie et contre laquelle ils s’insurgèrent, en créant une ‘République de la Louisiane’ qui devait durer neuf mois. (111)³⁷

The fact that a group of Louisiana Acadians agreed soon after their arrival to take arms against Ulloa is evidence of their alignment with the French Creoles (Carl A. Brasseaux, Founding 73 – 88). The historical anecdote functions as another foundational memory of the Cajuns, demonstrating how, early on, Louisiana Acadian life merged with French Creole life. In establishing the union between the Louisiana Acadians and the French Creoles as the focal point of, and watershed in, Acadian-French relations, Castille draws attention to the Cajuns’ perseverance of, and cultural pride in, the French heritage. Furthermore, Castille’s historical account of the establishment of St. Martinville and Breaux Bridge is yet another example of the long relationship between French Creoles and Louisiana Acadians. Lastly, Castille “acadianizes” the bilingual gazette La Vallée du Teche when she writes that “mon peuple publie … une gazette de qualité” (15). Though no Acadian, the Belgian painter, musician, and chemist H. A. Vander Cruyssen bought L’Union du Pont-Breaux, managed by a local merchant, and renamed it La Vallée du Teche in 1890 or 1891.³⁸ Obviously, Castille’s view of her “peuple” is rather inclusive as it comprises French Creoles, Genteel Acadians, and petits habitants. Another example sheds light on the relation between the French Creole and Louisiana Acadian cultures. Castille nostalgically evokes several French Creole and Acadian place names, linking the past to the present: “[Des Créoles] et

 Contrary to Castille’s statement, Nicolas Chauvin de La Frénière was originally from Montreal, Quebec, while Jean-Baptiste Noyan, dit Bienville—Noyon-Bienville in Castille’s text—Pierre Marquis, Pierre Caresse, and Joseph Milhet were all French Creole citizens from New Orleans (Dawdy 222).  Castille spells the Belgian’s name “Henri Vander Cruyssens” (cf. Tinker, Bibliography 356 – 357).

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des Acadiens sont nés ces noms de lieux qui font la Louisiane américaine chanter en français et pour toujours. … Tous bayous et villes et villages et hameaux et lieux-dits où je suis allée, que j’ai traversés, où je me suis promenée et dont la litanique évocation, ici, me serre le cœur d’une grande douceur” (11). The sweetness of the places and of their names subdues Castille and echoes the nostalgic feeling evoked by the landscape. Yet, more than echoing the eighteenth-century campaigns of the French government to attract settlers to Louisiana, Castille’s nostalgic reflection about the sweetness of her country adopts the Romantic tradition of French authors who eulogized their native country and helped establish a national French sentiment. François-René de Chateaubriand, for instance, who never went to Louisiana, draws an exotic picture of the Mississippi Delta at the very beginning of Atala (1801): “Ce dernier fleuve, dans un cours de plus de mille lieues, arrose une délicieuse contrée que les habitants des Etats-Unis appellent le nouvel Eden, et à laquelle les Français ont laissé le doux nom de Louisiane” (68). This bucolic description is representative of the general attraction foreigners felt with regard to Louisiana. Most importantly, Castille integrates a typically French topos. “Douceur” and “doux” connote an admiration for the landscape, and especially a longing for home. Both Castille and Chateaubriand use the words in the above-mentioned quotes. Castille uses “douceur” even twice within three paragraphs. The noun and the adjective recall the topos of “douce France,” introduced in the old French epic La Chanson de Roland (1075 – 1110) and symbolizing a longing for home.³⁹ Obviously, the feelings of sweet longing are emblematic of loss (Starobinski 285). According to Jean Starobinski, “[l]’adjectif dulcis s’impose comme l’attribut obligé de ce que l’on a abandonné ou perdu à contrecœur et dont l’on se souvient. Il est aussi l’attribut du souvenir présent, pour autant qu’il ne soit pas trop déchirant” (285). As a matter of fact, Castille’s narrative is a discourse of loss and sweet regrets. Although the “douceur” Castille mentions does not express affection for France, nor for her mother country, the United States, it reflects the sweet memories and regret, the nostalgia of the vanishing past she

 Fatally wounded in the battle of Ronceveau Pass against the Saracens in the Basque region in 778, the dying Roland, reminiscing about his “douce France,” is overcome with nostalgic feelings and indulges in sweet regrets for not seeing his country again (Moignet 177). Significantly, it was the discovery of the manuscript of this epic in 1832 which mainly contributed to the circulation of the topos of the sweet regrets. French intellectuals began to capitalize on the remarkable contribution of the French to the battle of Ronceveau Pass, and La Chanson de Roland became a national epic (Gautier vi – cci). Prior to the Roland revival such poets as Joachim du Bellay with the famous “sonnet xxxi” of his collection Les Regrets (1553 – 1557) and Chateaubriand in his “Le Montagnard émigré” (1806) also used this topos.

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observes in the vistas and in the French language of her birthplace in Cajun Country—the yearning for the home she once knew. Castille’s first choice with respect to the literary and cultural heritage is, however, that of the Creoles of color. Two Creole songs and the fable of “La cigale et la froumi,”⁴⁰ “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” in the Creole French dialect represent the Creole oral tradition, while the poetry collection Les Cenelles (1854) is known for spearheading a separate literary genre in the nineteenth century (Lanusse). This collection of poems, written in Standard French, is also the first by free people of color. The majority of the poets were educated in France, and their poems centered around displacement and marginalization. Castille cannot help but feeling nostalgic regarding the triumphal and cultural relevance of the volume: “[C]omment, n’évoquerais-je pas, ici, avec nostalgie que l’on comprendra, ce recueil de poèmes pour la première fois publié en 1845 et republié cinq ans plus tard?” (60). Castille points out the pull France exercised on those black Creole poets and maintains that they lived “dramatiquement une situation d’’exilés de l’intérieur.’ En Louisiane, il ne pouvait respirer … que de France.” To show the gaping void of Louisiana culture in the poets’ creations, she reproduces the entire poem “Heure de désenchantement,” a poem of ten quatrains by Pierre Dalcour, the best-known contributor. Following Castille’s theme of nostalgia, the poem laments the transitoriness of man’s life and possessions: “Ainsi l’homme toujours poursuit une chimère / Et la possession ne peut le satisfaire” (qtd. in J. Castille 62). Last but not least, Castille quotes Tantine’s life narrative to explore the relationship between the Cajuns and Creoles of color. In fact, the narrative, which appeared in 1981, resembles Castille’s life writing with respect to the structure and themes, but it focuses more on the narrator’s personal life, and less on history and the socio-cultural setting. Today, French Creole literature is almost nonexistent except for a few volumes of poetry by Sybil Kein and Debbie Clifton. Clearly, Castille strengthens her argument about linguistic and cultural oppression in Cajun culture by referring to other minority groups. The first scene of French novelist Alphonse Daudet’s short story “La dernière classe” from his collection Contes du lundi (1873), which Castille quotes (28), at first seems only to trigger memories of her early schooldays, for instance, the noise just before class started. Set after the Franco-Prussian War (1870 – 1871) in an Alsatian village, “La dernière classe” evokes the protagonist’s—Frantz’s—last day of school in Alsace-Lorraine before the territory is annexed by the German Empire in 1871. The teacher, M. Hamel, announces to his class the order from Berlin that French in Alsace-Lorraine is to be spoken no more and that a new teacher will be com-

 “Froumi” is Cajun French for “fourmi” in Standard French, meaning “ant” in English.

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ing the next day. Frantz’s account of the last lesson could also be transposed to Cajun Country on the eve of the ban on French, with Castille in M. Hamel’s place: “M. Hamel se mit à nous parler de la langue française, disant que c’était la plus belle langue du monde, la plus claire, la plus solide: qu’il faillait la garder entre nous et ne jamais l’oublier, parce que, quand un peuple tombe esclave, tant qu’il tient bien sa langue, c’est comme s’il tenait la clef de sa prison” (Daudet 9 – 10). In this last class of French, even the elderly of the village have come to listen to French for a last time. This story is, like Castille’s account, a eulogy of French. The parallel between both the Alsatians and the Cajuns exemplifies once more the importance of the theme of linguistic and cultural oppression. The assembled documents of Cajun, Creole, and French literature place Castille, “the autobiographic subject, in a sociocultural surround that makes visible the official, often stereotyped, histories through which they have conventionally been ‘framed’ in order to reframe them” (Smith and Watson 177). Castille reframes Cajun history against the background of such oppressed minorities as the Alsatians. What the two minorities share is the ban on their mother tongue by a dominant culture. By bringing up the wrongs the American government committed against the Native Americans and African Americans, she further widens the circle of oppressed minorities (J. Castille 12).

6.3.2 Castille’s “Gallomania” “Perhaps what is most missed during historical cataclysms and exile is not the past and the homeland exactly, but rather this potential space of cultural experience that one has shared with one’s friends and compatriots that is based neither on nation nor religion but on elective affinities,” muses Boym (53). To Castille, the French language and culture represent such “elective affinities.” Although Castille shows no evidence of spurning Cajun French in her account, she sees the survival of Cajun culture as depending on living francophone cultures. Surprisingly, it is neither Acadia nor Quebec, but France which she sees as the key to the dilemma. While the poets in Cris sur le bayou and the editors of Anthologie: Littérature française de la Louisiane claim that a truthful representation of the new Cajun literature is only to be found in the deep sources of Cajun culture and not in outside influences, Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane seems to reveal an opposing viewpoint. Castille’s depiction of Cajun culture is by no means restricted to typical Cajun/Acadian traditions, or to the francophone cultures of colonial Louisiana. Time and again, Castille refers to present-day France, the historical mother country of Acadia and Louisiana, mostly through literary and historical references

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such as the nod to Daudet. Her motivations to write the book underscore the key role France and the French have obviously played in her life: “Ce que je vais raconter, évoquer, comme je voudrais que les Français le connaissent bien!” (J. Castille 5). Her descriptions not only recall the panegyric of the nineteenth-century Romantic descriptions of Louisiana by Frenchmen and Creoles of color. Such twentieth-century French authors as Yves Berger, Maurice Denuzière, Jean Vautrin, and Michel Tauriac capitalized on the renouveau of Cajun culture in the 1970s and continued the theme of an enchanted Louisiana.⁴¹ Their works catered to the French public’s interest to know more about their forgotten “cousins” in Louisiana. Especially Maurice Denuzière’s popular six-volume saga Louisiane (1977– 1987) about a plantation family’s life in Louisiana from the 1850s to the middle of the twentieth century was a great literary success.⁴² Castille’s work, therefore, also needs to be considered in the context of France’s fascination with Louisiana at the time of its publication. Castille’s life writing not only attests to her deep regard and affection for France, but it also reveals some aspects of its genesis. The epigraph prefacing her account is the first indication of Castille’s relation to France: “Je remercie Yves Berger, le fou d’Amérique et de Louisiane, qui m’a donné l’idée de ce livre. Sans sa ferveur, son attention, ses conseils, notre longue correspondance, je ne l’aurais pas écrit” (1). Castille had already thought of writing down her experiences for posterity, but it was her long-term friend Berger who encouraged her to publish her life story (Fouchereaux, “Portrait d’auteur” 199 – 200).⁴³ The epithet “le fou d’Amérique” in Castille’s dedication refers to Berger’s fictional travelogue Le Fou d’Amérique (1976),⁴⁴ which continues the literary fascination with Louisiana. The scene in which the narrator, contemplating the Louisiana landscape, first murmurs “c’est le plus beau pays du monde,” and then cries out “dans le plus beau pays du monde l’endroit le plus beau. Le plus bel État. La merveille faite plateté” (Berger 245) echoes the moment when Castille evokes her magical bayou Teche, and suggests a kindred spirit.  Berger, Denuzière, and Tauriac were all directly engaged with the Louisiana culture and supported the promotion of French.  The saga includes Louisiane (1977); Fausse-rivière (1979); Bagatelle (1981); Les Trois-chênes (1985); L’Adieu au sud (1987); and with Jacqueline P. Vals-Denuzière: Les Années Louisiane (1987).  Yves Berger, an americanophile author and literary editor of the Éditions Bernard Grasset from 1960 to 2000, was responsible for disseminating minority literatures in France. He introduced underestimated North American authors to the French public like, for example, Quebec writer Marie-Claire Blais and Acadian writer Antonine Maillet (Nadeau).  Other works by Berger, which Castille had probably read and revealed his fascination for the United States, include the prize-winning Le Sud (1962), a novel about Virginia before the Civil War (Berger, Œuvre Romanesque).

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Another fervent admirer of Louisiana was the French journalist and author Michel Tauriac, who wrote the novel Évangéline (1995), a take on the Cajun Renaissance with Longfellow’s epic poem as intertext. The first dialogue in Tauriac’s novel also echoes an element from the end of Castille’s memoir. To highlight the imminent danger of the loss of French, Castille quotes Domengeaux’s blunt request to French President Georges Pompidou: “Monsieur le président, si tu m’aides pas [sic], le français il est foutu en Louisiane!” (107).⁴⁵ In September 1972, an international delegation of 176 teachers arrived in Louisiana to start the project of saving French. In his Evangéline, Tauriac, a participant and thus a witness of the development of the French immersion project, has his character Bob Carencro, the heroine’s grandfather, utter to the French president the line from Castille’s account: “Monsieur le Président, si tu ne m’aides pas, le français est foutu en Louisiane” (16). These transatlantic echoes attest to the exchange of shared views and memories, and to how France participated in boosting the Cajun Renaissance. What distinguishes Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane from other Cajun writings is this franco-centric perspective. Although its publication followed soon after Cris sur le bayou, it stands in stark contrast to the poetry collection. The two works document two different perspectives of that time. Furthermore, Cris sur le bayou appears anti-nostalgic as it celebrates the present, advocating an originality in avoiding the links to the past. Castille, who belongs to another generation than the poets, was able to chronicle a longer period of history and provide a more comprehensive context of Cajun culture than the younger cultural activists of Cris sur le bayou. She interweaves her life narrative with historical details, which, in contrast to other major works about Cajun culture, include the French colonial heritage. The question, therefore, is: For what public does Castille write? When she asks: “Les lecteurs de France … me reprocheront-ils ma gallomanie?” (110), she clearly has French readers in mind. In stressing the importance of the link to France, Castille is ahead of the times. Today, the living language of Standard French ensures the French heritage in Louisiana. Like other Cajun intellectuals, Castille went to visit France. During her first trip in 1962, she met Marie-Louise, a half-orphan child from Amiens in northern France she had “adopted” after the war, and her god-child Christiane, the daughter of one of the soldiers of the Free French Forces who had come to Louisiana to

 Georges Pompidou held office as French president from 1969 to 1974. The sources are ambiguous about the exact time of Domengeaux’s and Pompidou’s meeting. They refer to the summer of 1969, the summer of 1972, or simply do not make any temporal reference (Egéa-Kuehne 123; Smith-Thibodeaux 83 – 84).

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help Charles de Gaulle’s army during World War II and who were hosted by the Castilles.⁴⁶ Her other three visits had a more official background. In 1970, the French government invited her to take a course in linguistics at the university of Besançon (J. Castille 105). She went back a third time in 1973 on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the establishment of La ligne Acadienne in Poitou, a territory comprising the communities of Archigny, La Puye, and Saint-Pierre-deMaillé. This Acadian settlement was founded in 1773 by the marquis Louis-Nicolas de Pérusse des Cars in order to receive the 1.500 Acadians dispersed in the Channel ports for 15 years after the Grand Dérangement. These Acadians, unable to survive another sea trip to Louisiana for reasons of money and health, decided to stay in Archigny (Carl A. Brasseaux, “Scattered” 36 – 38).⁴⁷ On the occasion of the celebration, the town declared Castille an honorary citizen. She returned to France a fourth time, after the publication of her book, to meet Bernard Pivot on his literary talk show Apostrophes, which assured her a growing popularity. Despite her extraordinary endeavors in the Louisiana French Movement, the publication and very favorable reception of Castille’s narrative originated in France and not in Louisiana. The same goes for the appreciation of her life’s work. Prior to the Prix Saint-Simon, Castille had received the very prestigious Palmes Académiques from the French government in 1955 and 1976 (J. Castille 104). In 1984, she received the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur from the French government for her public service. Against this background, the neglect of Castille in Cajun Country appears all the more intriguing. While Castille is rarely mentioned in contemporary works about Cajun culture, the reception in France leaves no doubt about the success of her life writing. Indeed, she is compared to two high-ranking famous women, as is shown by the titles of several critical book reviews. Patrick Thévenon in L’Express in 1983 gave a raving review of the book by a “Jeanne Hachette en Acadie.” Jeanne Hachette was the name given to Jeanne Laisné (ca. 1454-?), a young rebel from Beauvais in the north of France, who had defended her hometown besieged by Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy in 1472 (“Hachette”). Similarly, literary scholar Jean Fouchereaux, who in his review called Castille “reine de la Louisiane” (“Jeanne Castille” 78), plays on the homonymous historical character, Joanna of Castile, Queen of Castile and Aragon. Coincidentally, both women were not recognized for their abilities during their lifetime and both fought for a just cause making most of the means at hand.

 Castille participated in the campaign in 1945 to symbolically adopt children whose fathers had been killed in concentration camps (J. Castille 39 – 41).  It is printed “Archigoy” in Castille’s account, which is obviously a typing error (105).

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When considering the many Cajun cultural ambassadors who have been celebrated since the Cajun Renaissance—from musicians to educators, to politicians—it is striking that the overwhelming majority is male. Indeed, despite Cajun women’s major role in passing on cultural traditions within the family, the existing anthologies seldom mention their decisive contribution to Cajun culture and the formation of a Cajun collective memory (cf. P. V. Daigle; Ancelet and Morgan). Apart from a few exceptions, such as singer-songwriter Cleoma Breaux Falcon in the first half of the twentieth century, and more recently poet Beverly Matherne, Cajun women and their role in preserving Cajun culture have remained invisible. As a case in point, Castille and her endeavors have been conspicuously overlooked by the Cajun community even though her account confirms her as a major force in the preservation of Cajun culture. While Castille’s absence in Cajun scholarly works is puzzling, it also sheds light on the mechanisms of collective memory’s opposite, collective forgetting. The cultural context and the mechanisms of remembering might well provide the answer as to why her literary work as well as her tireless endeavors to revitalize the French language and Cajun culture from the 1940s onward have been sidelined. First of all, Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane remains Castille’s only published book, which gives her only minor exposure. Moreover, the exploits of Cajun women with respect to the transmission of traditions seem to be left out of the public discourse.⁴⁸ Arguably, Castille’s exclusion from the collective memory of the Cajuns might result from the rather paternalistic Cajun community (Henry and Bankston 119). Of course, tied up as they were with family matters, Cajun women rarely had the chance of performing publicly. Even today, Cajun women seem to have a visibly inferior status when it comes to their role in public. Exploring the roles of women in the rural Cajun Country Mardi Gras celebration, folklorist Caroline Ware declares that “despite their importance, women’s activities have received little attention” (2). Women, writes A. Assmann in a more general context, have been victims of “structural amnesia”⁴⁹: “As long as entry into the cultural memory is conditioned by heroism or canonization, women systematically disappear into cultural oblivion. It is a classic case of structural amnesia” (Cultural Memory 52). The major books about Cajun culture reflect this male-oriented view. It seems, therefore, to be no coincidence that of the twelve like-minded supporters of the French cause whom Castille mentions, nine are women (99), with  Carole Salmon reveals that it is mostly through women that French has been handed down in Cajun culture (2).  J. A. Barnes introduced the term in an article on genealogies in an African society in 1947 (227– 228).

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Irène Whitfield Holmes and Tootie, aka Leona Guirard, being the most renowned in Cajun Country. The female majority is possibly due to Castille’s predominantly female surroundings, which is suggested by the fact that she lived with her three sisters in the house of their ancestors for all her life. Yet it might also be a subconscious choice of giving a voice to women who would have been forgotten otherwise. Moreover, scholars have found that the remembrance of artists is “highly dependent on survivors with an emotional and financial stake in the perpetuation of their reputations. … Marital and family status affect the probability that artists will leave behind survivors dedicated to preserving or promoting their reputation” (Lang and Lang 92). Since Castille never married and did not have children, there was no family or offspring who would remember her work. Moreover, her relatively long life may also have been an obstacle to achieving recognition: “While those who enjoy a long life have more time in which to achieve renown, others on the verge of a promising career or struck down in the prime of life … may be better remembered than they might have been had they lived out their lives” (Lang and Lang 93). In some way, Castille was married to the French cause, whose legacy was quite uncertain. In the end, it was never her aim to build a personal legacy nor to be its protagonist. One last reason for Castille’s falling into oblivion relates to her connection with the elitist CODOFIL, which promoted Standard French in Louisiana. Public renown mostly depends on the person’s link to elite circles, as “any link to important artistic and literary circles or to a political and cultural elite fosters the posthumous visibility of an artist” (Lang and Lang 95). Castille’s proximity to the political elite around Domengeaux and her admiration for him, transpiring in the praise at the end of her memoir, should have secured her the expected acknowledgment. Descending from Governor Alexander Mouton, Domengeaux, nicknamed Le Grand Jimmy or Mister Cajun, was not only “a political powerhouse” in his functions first as Louisiana State Representative, then as U.S. Representative, but also the Cajun ambassador to the international francophone community (Rushton 291). However, Domengeaux was not liked by all Cajuns, so that Castille’s involvement with the French cause spearheaded by Domengeaux and the CODOFIL clashed with the objectives of grassroots Cajun activists. Castille’s account exemplifies what Julie Rak wrote about the link between autobiographical accounts and minorities: [Lejeune’s] study of the signature does indicate that autobiographical identities have a usevalue that enables autobiographical narrative to circulate in the public realm. This aspect of autobiographical discourse has been useful for minority writers and speakers who can use the publicity of the discourse to gain visibility as subjects. But the use-value of autobiog-

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raphy can potentially work against these subjects by constructing their identities as exotic, or ‘other’ commodities. (16)

Castille gained visibility in France yet did not manage to establish a perennial presence in Louisiana. The fact that she wrote her memoir in Standard French and acknowledged her “gallomanie” contributed in all likelihood to the gradual disappearance and oblivion of her life and work.

6.4 Conclusion Interweaving her personal recollections with elements pertaining to the collective memory of the Cajuns, Castille becomes a guardian of Cajun memories. Her descriptions and anecdotes have recognition value for the Cajuns, for they draw an affective geography of her home, the Cajun heartland. This geography culminates in the allegory of the promised land, a constitutive element of the collective memory of the Cajuns as indicated by the Promised Land Scenic Byway, a levee route which runs through Henderson, St. Martinville, and Breaux Bridge and takes the visitor into a country with historic houses, exotic wildlife, and authentic Creole and Cajun cuisine (U.S. Department of Transportation). Above all, Castille clarifies that her efforts are a communal endeavor and rely on the help of her sisters and many other people: “Dans ce combat, faut-il le dire, je n’ai jamais été seule. Et au titre de ce livre, des dizaines, peut-être des centaines de personnes pourraient prétendre. À la place de Jeanne Castille, on trouverait, qui sont des amis, des amies et des apôtres convaincus, actifs de la cause franco-acadienne en Louisiane” (99). That her narrative concerns both her life and the Cajun people also transpires in her conclusion: “[L]a renaissance de la culture franco-acadienne ne pouvait être qu’une œuvre collective” (105; my emphasis). Thus, Castille’s life narrative becomes a “collective life narrative” of the Cajuns, speaking to the whole Cajun community: “autant qu’une histoire personnelle, la mienne, l’histoire d’un peuple, le mien. Et, à travers lui, l’aventure d’une culture…” (J. Castille 106; ellipsis in original). At the age of 73, Castille embodied, without doubt, a crucial authority for the preservation of Cajun culture and the French language in Louisiana. By fixing her memories and experiences in a book, she cultivated her plants—the French language, Cajun history, and Cajun culture—just like a gardener, and fulfilled a veritable commemorative body of work. Justifying her “gallomanie,” Castille emphasizes that “si la renaissance de la culture acadienne, pour laquelle nous militons, passe par la langue française, inexorablement, se battre pour le français n’est pas se battre pour la France,

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… mais pour l’Acadie de la Louisiane, dont la singularité nous fonde” (110). Cajun culture is in need of turning toward the external world. Ultimately, Castille’s understanding of French transcends the opposition between Cajun French and Standard French. She does not vindicate or reject Cajun French explicitly and advocates a certain, sometimes distorted, view of the Acadian heritage. In fact, she shows a determination to advocate French and francophone culture. While most Cajun activists have shown more of an acadianophile disposition, Castille never abandoned her passion for France. Her endeavors to preserve the francophone Louisiana culture, including the Cajun and Creole traditions, and to react against American dominance position her at the intersection of the CODOFIL and popular movements.⁵⁰ At the same time, the link to other linguistically and culturally oppressed minorities further extends Castille’s inclusive perspective. Castille assembles personal recollections and historical facts. Her memories then also take an interstitial position between history and memory, as they bear testimony to the strong link between the past and the present. The most significant anecdote describing the interrelation of the present and the past as well as the state of Cajun culture is probably that of the three oak trees in Castille’s garden. The author recalls: Nos jeux d’enfants se sont déroulés sous les fondaisons de trois chênes, si vigoureux, sinon luxuriants, qu’ils avaient fini par se rejoindre et par s’épouser, dans un grand emmêlement de branches et de feuilles, au point de ne plus faire presque qu’un seul chêne, dont la masse prodigieuse et belle ne manquait pas de frapper les visiteurs et nous tout de même, malgré l’habitude. (96)⁵¹

The adjectives “vigoureux,” “luxuriant,” and “prodigieux” evoke a safe and durable abode, and they reveal her emotional attachment to the trees and the place. Castille’s oak trees symbolize strength and fertility. They also entail stability and persistence, all traits Cajuns can relate to thanks especially to the Evangeline Oak in St. Martinville. This tree might be the most popular one, but it is not the only one. Castille also calls attention to an alley lined on either side by oak trees which are decorated with religious paintings inside small cabins: “Sur la route de Saint-Martinville à Catahoula, que ne peut-on pas ne pas voir? Treize chênes; majestueux comme tous nos chênes, de chaque côté de la route, et cloués sur chacun de ces arbres, de petites cabanes en cyprès qui toutes  Castille was obviously a highly regarded member of the Conseil International d’Études Francophones (CIÉF), as reveals a special session in her honor, organized during the congress of the Conseil in June 1995 in Charleston, South Carolina (Fouchereaux, “Portrait” 199).  “Fondaison” is Middle French: “Ce qui a été fondu” (“fondaison”).

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portent, peintes à la main, des représentations du chemin de Croix” (51). These Stations of the Cross were conceived by Tootie, Castille’s friend and another Cajun woman fighting for Cajun culture. The three oak trees in Castille’s garden symbolize not only the temporal triangle of the past, the present, and the future. By extension, they also represent the Acadian triangle in Cajun Country reuniting France, Acadia, and Acadiana. However, when Castille describes how, first, two hurricanes uproot two of the three oak trees, and how, later, the third is uprooted, too—by rodents coming from Texas, like an American invasion—we cannot help but think of the deterioration of the French language in Louisiana and of the decline of Cajun culture. Although at one time Louisiana was the place in the United States where the most trees were felled (J. Castille 12), the absence of the three oak trees in her garden points nostalgically and symbolically at a temps révolu: “La nostalgie que j’évoquais n’est pas chimère” (J. Castille 112). A bleak future for the Cajuns, indeed. While Castille mourns the loss of several cultural traditions, it is the pending demise of French which concerns her most. Still, Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane seems to conjure up the resurrection of French. As it represents both the quest for the author’s identity and for that of the Cajuns, Castille’s account does not solely cherish the by-gone past and the idyllic landscape of Cajun Country. Castille’s nostalgia, which reflects her apprehension of the disappearance of French, not only reaches into the past; it is also directed toward the future and thus reveals an optimistic side. This utopian dimension of nostalgia (see Boym 5, 322– 326) is also visible in Castille’s writing: À l’année de mes soixante-treize ans, je mesure que depuis trente-trois ans je livre un combat dont le but évident et avoué, la perpétuation de la langue française à la faveur de sa renaissance, obéit à des motifs qui n’ont rien d’égoïste: la sauvegarde d’une culture où s’incarne mon passé, qui justifie celle que je suis et où je puise, par anticipation, le bonheur des années qu’il me reste à vivre. (J. Castille 99)

There is, then, an interplay of two contrary vectors: a retrospective and a prospective view. Only the aged have the ability to contemplate both views. For the German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the aged man (he does not consider women) considers his personal life in relation to broader exterior influences: “[A] man looks at his own existence from the literary movement of his age. … So, to the old man looking back, every moment of his existence is doubly significant, as enjoyed fullness of life and as an effective force in the context of life” (Dilthey 214). Castille’s remembrance serves to project the future and advises the reader to take steps for preserving the culture: To guarantee the future of their culture, the Cajuns have to be aware of their past and their traditions, with French to begin

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with. The prejudices about nostalgia, holding it as “an abdication of personal responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming, an ethical and aesthetic failure” (Boym xiv), belie its beneficial effect of saving a culture from dying: Nostalgia for the past, especially the ethnic past of ‘one’s own’ people, has indeed been a feature of society in all ages and continents, because people have always sought to overcome death and the futility with which death threatens mortals. By linking oneself to a ‘community of history and destiny,’ the individual hopes to achieve a measure of immortality which will preserve his or her person and achievements from oblivion; they will live on and bear fruit in the community. (A. D. Smith 175)

Indeed, the fight against the death of French generates power in Castille: Le combat que nous avons mené était dirigé contre la mort (la mort d’une langue, mort d’une culture, mort d’un peuple), et pour avoir gagné—fragile victoire sans cesse remise en cause, que nous devons sans cesse affirmer par de nouvelles adhésions à la Cause, par un surcroît de ferveur—il m’apparaît, certains jours, que ma vie en tire une espèce d’éternité. (J. Castille 112)

The fight for the French cause was driven by hope, a hope that, although the Cajuns have been subjected to difficulties, posterity will know about the exploits of Castille and others. Castille’s apparent legacy is her life story which encapsulates the hope that future generations will also endeavor to maintain and save Cajun culture and French. Through her life narrative, Castille aims at making the Cajuns’ story known. At the same time, it serves a universal didactic purpose: “Human beings seek to make good on their own past experience and the lessons they believe that experience has taught. They respond to experienced traumas socially and institutionally to try to prevent bad experiences of the past from recurring” (Schudson, “Lives” 8). As a matter of fact, Castille’s nostalgic regrets about the rapidly vanishing past brought about by progress stand in contrast to her concluding thoughts about how time lingers in Louisiana: “[L]’indigène et le voyageur ont le sentiment que le temps, d’une certaine façon, piétine en Louisiane et que mon incomparable pays se transforme moins vite que les autres” (112). Castille’s account parallels the common claim that the American South is divided by the nostalgia of the Old South and the visible ongoing progress. As noted by American literary scholar Richard Gray, “[t]here seems … to be some kind of cultural lag, some sort of fissure or divide between material change and mental alteration. The South, and many Southerners, still manage to inhabit two separate moral territories: the one not quite dead, the other not yet fully born” (226). With respect to the role of writers in cultural movements it has been said that “[w]riters have always functioned as articulate spokespersons for other

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arts. … The traces they leave with their writing help associate an artist with a significant cultural movement” (Lang and Lang 97). Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane can, indeed, be considered as a cultural text, for it provides a first overview of the Louisiana French Movement. Drawing both on written history and oral history, it is the first Cajun autobiographical narrative in French, a narrative which mirrors the lingering wish to belong to France and French culture. Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane places the author at several intersections. Castille links the past, the present, and the future as she emphasizes that the preservation of the French language is crucial for the survival of Cajun culture. She pays tribute not only to a recent past, the Cajun culture of the twentieth century and her life, but also to the distant past. Strikingly, the metaphor of the tree goes against the notion of multidirectional relations. Instead, it accentuates the disposition of adopting a colonial view, namely that the periphery depends on the center, i. e., France. When Lux Éditeurs in Montreal, which publishes works on the social, cultural, and political history of the three Americas (“Mémoire des Amériques”), reissued Castille’s book in the collection of the “Mémoire des Amériques” in 2006, more than ten years after her death, it seemed that the Cajun story had come full circle, linking Acadiana with France and Canada (Acadia and Quebec). Most importantly, in his introduction to this new edition, editor Jean-François Nadeau included a eulogy of Castille by James Domengeaux which he might have offered in gratitude to her laudatory words, but mostly to honor her exploits: Il n’y a pas meilleure que cette dame qui a dédié sa vie pour la langue française et elle est le meilleure [sic] exemple de caractère et de qualité d’accomplissement pour le mouvement français que moi je connais [sic] dans la Louisiane, toute sa vie a été dédiée pour [sic]. Elle était pas [sic] juste professeur dans les écoles, elle était toujours là pour assister dans la culture, dans l’héritage, dans la danse, dans le théâtre. Cette personne humble a donné un exemple à tous et est respectée par tous, et je ne peux pas penser à une autre personne qui mérite plus qu’elle. Elle a travaillé, c’était pas [sic] juste de réunir tous les mois, elle était là tous les jours. Moi je crois cette dame extraordinaire, et que la Louisiane lui doit beaucoup aussi. (vi)

Domengeaux’s portrait of Castille seems to be the first and only fixed one of her contemporaries. Her passion for French culture and her humility, reflected in her unassuming style, as well as the anti-CODOFIL activism of younger, mostly male Cajuns, precluded her from being officially celebrated as another mouthpiece of the Cajun community. Only posthumously, with the Lux edition, did the author finally receive due recognition and more visibility in francophone literature.

7 Migrating Literature: Zachary Richard’s Cajun Tales Despite the confluence of the histories of the different ethnic groups, it is eighteenth-century Acadian history with the Grand Dérangement and the migratory experience which features prominently in the Cajuns’ collective consciousness today. In Cajun Country, local legend has it that when the Acadians were expelled from their homeland, a swarm of lobsters accompanied them into exile. It is worth noting that the legend does not mention the New England colonies, nor France, nor England. Instead, Louisiana, which provided shelter to the majority of the Acadian exiles, appears as the lobsters’ promised land. According to the legend, the miserable conditions during the Grand Dérangement took such a toll on the lobsters that, by the time they arrived in Louisiana, they had shrunk to the size of crawfish (Gutierrez 106).¹ The origin of the legend remains unknown, but its first written evidence appeared in the 1970s, when the Cajun Renaissance was in full swing. With the booming tourist industry in Louisiana promoting Cajun culture, the legend was printed on souvenirs and restaurant menus, and it started to circulate around Southwest Louisiana (Gutierrez 106).² Though it is far from representing an origin story, it still emphasizes the strong relationship between Acadia and Louisiana through the transformation of the lobster into the crawfish. In contemporary Louisiana, the lobster-turned-crawfish legend is still very much present, as L’Histoire de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard dans le grand Nord (2007) attests, the second tale in a trilogy by Zachary Richard, which also includes Conte cajun: L’Histoire de Télesphore et de ‘Tit Edvard (1999) and Les Aventures de Télesphore et ‘tit Edvard au Vieux Pays (2010).³ The tales deal with the adventures of ‘Tit Edvard, a crawfish, and Télesphore, a turtle, from Louisiana, who experience various displacements and go through many adverse  A condensed version of this chapter was already published as an article in 2014 (Köstler, “Migrating Literature”).  Revon Reed tells a slightly different version in Lâche pas la patate: One of the things the Acadians missed most after their expulsion were the lobsters. The lobsters, too, missed the Acadians. Ten years after the first dispersal of the Acadians, a second dispersal occurred: The lobsters embarked on traveling down via the Saint-Laurence River and small streams across the United States reaching the Mississippi River. Led by instinct and love, they reached the Louisiana bayous, but they had shrunk as a result of the hardships endured during the trip. The Cajuns, who did not recognize the little animal, called it “crawfish” (109 – 110).  The first two tales have been translated into English: The Legend of L’il Red (2015) and L’il Red in the Great White North (2017). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-008

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conditions before finding their way home. In focusing on Richard’s three Cajun tales, this chapter explores how the Cajun collective memory expands from a regional to a transnational space with a special focus on the multiple representations of migration. All three tales reveal distinct elements of the folktale, such as the hero who generally stands for the powerless, the ignored, and those outcast by society. On his journey, he has to overcome dangers but is aided by animals or even supernatural forces (“folk tale”). Indeed, Richard’s first tale features what literary scholar Joseph Campbell called the “monomyth,” a fixed structure defining the folktale. In the monomyth, “[a] hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man” (30). According to Campbell, the nuclear unit of the monomyth is characterized by the rites of passage the hero traverses, including separation, initiation, and return. As a case in point, all three of Richard’s tales relate how ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore are separated from their home and initiated into a foreign culture before they return home. A closer look at the three tales, however, reveals that they deviate from the fixed scheme of the traditional folktale. It is not one, but two heroes, and even if the animals leave their familiar surroundings and venture into the unknown, they do not always return victorious. Obviously, the tales show elements of the fable, an originally oral folk tradition. Usually short and pithy, fables rely on their main characters, anthropomorphized animals who speak, cry, laugh, and reason like human beings (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales xxix). Formally, this “narrative fiction in the past tense” (Blackham xi) is set in an indefinite time and place, and it conveys a moral usually emphasizing human virtues or criticizing social ills, thus fulfilling the Horatian saying of prodesse et delectare, to teach and to entertain. Richard’s tales, too, have a didactic and an entertaining objective. They certainly purvey a moral, considering the emphasis on community life, solidarity, tolerance, and the respect of mankind and nature, while the imaginary plot and illustrations by Richard’s stepdaughter Sarah Lattès provide additional entertainment. Yet several elements diverge from the rules of the fable. For instance, the three tales include references to space and time. All are set in the present and mention or allude to concrete historical events of the recent or distant past. While the first tale focuses on an indefinite locality in Louisiana, the locality of the second tale is transported outside the United States, namely to Canada, more precisely to Quebec and New Brunswick. The third tale is set again outside the United States, in France. All three locations taken together compose a Cajun

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triangle as they link Acadiana with Acadia and France. Moreover, the human world is not excluded but it plays a minor role. The tales, therefore, belong rather to the more inclusive genre of the animal tale. In Conte cajun, the French noun “conte,” the single plot line, and the simple style define the story as a tale. Furthermore, the phrase “les vieux m’ont conté” (Richard, Conte 20) shows the important role of orality in the tales themselves. Richard’s use of the present tense, another difference to the traditional characteristics of the fable, produces a sense of immediacy, reducing the temporal distance and approximating the narrative to the oral tradition. With each successive tale, Richard expands the structure to a more complex narrative with a longer and more intricate story line. Ineed, the last tale is three times as long as Conte cajun, and includes more than one story line and several flashbacks. The rule of unity of time, place, and action determining the fable is thus suspended. The wealth and diversity of folktales in Louisiana certify how rooted the storytelling tradition is in the state. The animal tale is the most widely spread and most vital of the genres locally. Moreover, the animal tale can be considered a transnational genre par excellence. “The plot of a popular tale,” noted folklorist Alcée Fortier, “seems to be the common heritage of a number of countries which may have derived it from the same source, but the motifs are often inspired by local customs” (ix).⁴ Barry J. Ancelet identified the animal tale as the genre where the cultural crossover between Cajun and Creole culture is most predominant: “The cultural crossover evident in animal tales parallels the shared character of the cuisine, music and architecture of the two groups” (Cajun and Creole Folktales xxx).⁵ Significantly, Richard draws on this hybrid oral folktale tradition of Louisiana. Unlike the collected folktales, though, Richard’s tales are not primarily derivative of oral tales and thus establish a genuine narrative template for a written Cajun literary genre, where the oral folktale tradition meets with the written tradition. What they share with the Cajun and Creole folktales is the French language, which “remains an important cultural marker that can serve to underscore the origins and allegiance of a storyteller. Many storytellers choose to

 Alcée Fortier’s Louisiana Folk Tales: The French Oral Tradition of South Louisiana (1894) is one of the first collections of folktales, revealing the interrelation of Louisiana French and African influences. Other collections include Dorson, Buying the Wind (1964).  The anthologies Cajun and Creole Folktales: The French Oral Tradition of South Louisiana, edited by Barry J. Ancelet, and Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana, edited by Carl Lindahl, Maida Owens, and C. Renée Harvison, feature stories by a variety of ethnic groups: by African Americans, Cajuns, Native Americans, Isleños, and the Vietnamese.

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tell their stories in French to demonstrate their Cajun or Creole ethnicity” (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales xlix). Indeed, Richard’s choice to write his tales in French is one of the elements revealing his Cajun identity. Richard’s tales, then, represent both a continuation as well as a renewal of the storytelling tradition as they turn the Cajun oral storytelling tradition into a written genre. As a result, Richard’s French tales do not only reconnect with the storytelling tradition of Louisiana and with the Cajun oral repertoire in particular, but they also join the first francophone Cajun prose works by Revon Reed, Jeanne Castille, and Antoine Bourque. Born in Scott, Louisiana, in 1950, Richard received an English education (the reintroduction of French education occurred when he was 18) but spent much time with his maternal grandparents, who were still speaking French whereas his parents would converse in English. Especially his two grandmothers, who solely spoke “le français extravagant de la dernière génération monolingue francophone de la Louisiane” (Richard, Feu 10), bear the main responsibility for Richard’s affinity for French. Since his first extensive stay in Quebec from 1975 to 1981, a time during which he also discovered New Brunswick and his Acadian roots, Richard has been living in two countries, dividing his time between Lafayette, Louisiana, and Montreal, Quebec. The comments on the back-cover of his French biography, published in Montreal in 2004, indicate that Richard’s productions foremost cater to the French-speaking public in Canada: “[C]e Cadien haut en couleur … occupe une place de choix dans le cœur de nombreux Québécois et Acadiens” (Amédée and Brûlé, back cover). Likewise, his most prestigious awards and his travels to other francophone countries for performing and humanitarian purposes leave no doubt about his efforts for the francophone cause.⁶ Still, Richard cannot shed his American nationality. It is this biculturalism which defines him: “L’expérience artistique de Zachary Richard est unique et

 In 2000, Zachary Richard was decorated Knight from the Ordre de la Pleiade—established by the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie in 1976—for promoting the role of the French language in Louisiana and Quebec (“Biographie”). In 2009 he was appointed Honorary Member of the Order of Canada “[f]or his contributions as an author, composer, singer and poet, and for his important role in defending and promoting the French language and the ‘Cadian’ and Acadian identity” (The Office of the Secretary). In 2016, he was decorated Officier des Palmes Académiques by France. An example of his humanitarian efforts is the song “Grand Gosier” on the eponymous album. It is a lament in English and Creole about various natural disasters affecting Louisiana and Haiti in 2010. While the English lyrics are about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Creole part refers to the earthquake in Haiti. “Grand gosier,” meaning “big gullet,” not only refers to the brown pelican, Louisiana’s official state bird, but also to the name of a village in southeastern Haiti (Richard, “Grand Gosier;” Richard, Grand Gosier).

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il participe pleinement à la culture anglo-américaine et la culture francophone d’Amérique du Nord. Il est l’auteur compositeur le plus américain des francophones, et le plus francophone des Américains” (“Biographie”). Richard, who married a Frenchwoman and has long been adopted by the Canadians, is fully aware of his fortunate position and consciously exploits it: I am a Louisiana Acadian, and that’s part of my personality that needs to be revealed. I have a chance to do something that is absolutely unique, thanks to a set of circumstances. I come from an oral tradition which is extremely interesting. I can bring to the contemporary French language an older French, conceived by an American, spoken by an Acadian and expressed today. (Baudoin 465)

It is not surprising that, apart from celebrating his hybrid Cajun identity, he has also developed a transnational identity. The aforementioned set of circumstances is particularly visible in Richard’s three illustrated Cajun tales, for they merge Standard French with Cajun idioms and a distinct Cajun perspective with a transnational outlook. Indeed, Richard’s tales not only mirror his effort to promote French and Cajun culture. In fact, they expand his transnational outlook to include the francophonie and the wider world. In gradually expanding the regional perspective to a transnational perspective, and mixing local and foreign elements, which both play a crucial role in the constitution and preservation of a collective memory, Richard manages to reinvent the oral storytelling genre. Moored in the Cajun geographical space and Cajun cultural traditions, the tales cross both temporal and geographical boundaries and absorb the unfamiliar to reinvigorate Cajun culture. The crossing of boundaries in Cajun culture can be witnessed on two levels. On a synchronic level, the hybrid culture of the Cajuns embraces various ethnic influences. On a diachronic level, the history of the Cajuns is certainly a perfect example of transnational journeys, beginning in France, with stopovers in Acadia and various places of exile, and ending in Louisiana as the final destination. Likewise, Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard travel from Louisiana to Canada and France, and also back in time. As parts of the titles suggest (un ouragan en Louisiane; dans le grand Nord; au Vieux Pays), the tales seem to trace the Cajuns’ roots back to their origins: Louisiana, Canada, and France are the featured locations in the tales and create a geo-cultural triangle. Significantly, the three tales—like all of Richard’s other written works—were published in Montreal, Quebec, by Les Éditions les Intouchables. The lack of publishers as well as the lack of readers in Louisiana pushed Richard to publish outside the United States. The fact that even Richard’s most recent tale of 2010 was not published in Louisiana, but in Montreal, shows how hard it is for the French voice to be heard in Louisiana. The publication of Richard’s Histoire

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des Acadiennes et Acadiens de la Louisiana together with its English counterpart (2012) and the reissuing of his 1997 volume of poetry, Faire récolte (2014), by UL Press indicates that francophone works are gaining ground in Louisiana. Curiously enough, the academic world, above all francophone scholars who have been focusing on a selection of Richard’s poems and songs for their historical and cultural significance, bypassed the tales—very likely because they are seen as children’s stories. The characters’ exemplary tolerant attitude and adaptability convey the image of a permeable culture, a culture which blends with other cultures and relies on transnational exchanges. This is particularly evident in intertextual references to Native American and African mythologies, to French literature, as well as in allusions to decisive historical events. This borrowing from both the collective memory as well as the “memory of literature” (Lachmann, “Mnemonic” 301) of other cultures in Richard’s tales provides a good illustration of Astrid Erll’s concept of “traveling memories.” A specific feature of “transcultural memory,” which is “a certain research perspective … directed toward mnemonic processes unfolding across and beyond cultures,”⁷ it draws on James Clifford’s concept of “traveling cultures” to describe how memory processes are always in flux and transgress boundaries of time and space (Clifford, “Travelling Cultures”). Regarding Richard’s tales, I propose the concept of “migrating literature” as the interrelation of literature and migration is visible on several levels. First, the texts literally “migrated” to Montreal for publication purposes; second, the tales are literature about migration; and third, other “foreign” literary texts and allusions to historical events “migrated” into the tales. Thus, Richard’s three animal tales are a prime example of “migrating literature” and of a transnational exchange. They bring together different regions, respatializing the Acadian diaspora in a geo-cultural imaginary space and undergirding the transnational connection.

7.1 (Re)Locating Cajun Culture Clearly, the legend mentioned in the introduction reflects the Cajuns’ identification with the region of Acadiana as the symbol of the crawfish links the place

 Erll proposes to use “‘transcultural’ as an umbrella term for what in other academic contexts might be described with concepts of the transnational, diasporic, hybrid, syncretistic, postcolonial, translocal, creolized, global, or cosmopolitan.” Considering the transnational crossings in the tales, I opt for the use of “transnational.” I will use “transcultural” only when referring to cultural exchanges within a delimited territory, for instance, within Louisiana (Erll, “Travelling Memory” 9).

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and the people. It comes as no surprise that the metaphorical solidarity between the Cajuns and the crawfish culminated in the adoption of the crawfish as the Cajuns’ very own mascot, symbolizing both Cajun power and ethnic pride. Incidentally, a popular image accompanying Cajun governor Edwin Washington Edwards’s slogan “Cajun Power!” was a “white clenched fist … [whose] fingers were clasped tightly around a bright red crawfish” (Bernard, Cajuns 86). Although the crawfish constitutes one of the best-known emblems of Cajun culture today, it has even come to figure as the state crustacean of Louisiana since 1983, a necessary consequence of the increasing international popularity of Cajun culture (Pitre, Crawfish 127). Crawfish songs, crawfish jokes, the Breaux Bridge Crawfish festival, and crawfish étouffée, a staple Cajun dish, all highlight the crawfish as an ethnic symbol of the Cajuns (Gutierrez 77– 82). Another resemblance between the crawfish and the Cajuns according to Gutierrez is their anomalous character in certain contexts. Before the Cajun Renaissance, Cajun culture was little known outside Louisiana. Thus, “[i]t is appropriate that a people who see themselves as distinctive and atypical should take as a symbol an animal and a food that they and others also see as distinctive and atypical” (Gutierrez 109). Similarly, Richard’s tales are grounded in Cajun space. The crawfish, representing the Cajuns, and the yellow-bellied turtle are typical creatures of Southwest Louisiana’s fauna.⁸ Set in a predominantly natural environment, the tales are inscribed in the genre of regionalism as they present places that have “‘escaped’ the dubious improvements of a stronger and more integrated urban society” (Foote 3). The frequent references to identity markers such as landscape, fauna and flora, language, and the past create an unmistakably regionalist tone which is accentuated with the change of settings to foreign places. Significantly, it is the transnational wanderings and the experience of foreign cultures which help locate Cajun culture. With each tale, Cajun culture becomes more distinct. At the same time, there also emerge similarities with French Canada and France.

 See Cajun author Mary Alice Fontenot from Eunice, Louisiana, who is especially known for her 19-volume series about Clovis Crawfish and his friends (“Living Legends”).

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7.1.1 Conte cajun: L’Histoire de Télesphore et de ‘Tit Edvard (1999)— A Louisiana Experience Conte cajun, the first volume of the triptych published in 1999,⁹ is a tale about a fellowship of animals from Louisiana joining forces for a common quest. The two protagonists, the turtle Télesphore and the crawfish ‘Tit Edvard, are brought together during a hurricane. Unfortunately, little, helpless ‘Tit Edvard has not only lost his parents but also one of his claws. After saving ‘Tit Edvard from the hurricane, Télesphore promises him to try to get the claw back. They start out on an uncertain journey during which they are joined by four frogs—Jean, Jacques, Pierre, and Paul—and two grasshoppers—Henri and Madame La Sauterelle. They find themselves in a number of dangerous situations but are helped by other friendly animals crossing their path, such as the wild cat Bertrand Bernard, the spider l’Araignée Arc-en-ciel (“rainbow” in English), a toad, whom Télesphore names Jolicœur, and the alligator Monsieur Le Coteau Qui Parle, a name the group gives to what they think at first sight is a “speaking hill.” Their encounter with l’Araignée Arc-en-ciel, the spider with magical powers who is supposed to solve the problem of the missing claw, is the tale’s climax. Unfortunately, the spider cannot help them, and the group understands that ‘Tit Edvard’s claw is lost for good. Having failed at their endeavor, the companions return home, but not without realizing, with the help of the alligator’s wise words, that their journey has also had some benefits. Not only have they forged individual identities, but they now possess a collective memory with which they can identify as a group. The regionalist tone of Conte cajun results from allusions to Louisiana and, more specifically, to Cajun culture, which help construct a Cajun sense of place. The adjective “cajun” in the title and a sticker on the cover by the publisher Les Intouchables reading “L’Histoire d’un ouragan en Louisiane” indicates that the tale is evidently set in Louisiana and rooted in Cajun culture. Moreover, Richard’s animal characters are inhabitants of the wetlands, the coastal marsh and swamp region in South Louisiana, and they obviously know their way around “le sud de la Louisiane” (Richard, Conte 20). More specifically, the place name Bayou Croche mentioned at the end of the tale clearly indicates a

 Although Zachary Richard completed the first volume Conte cajun in 1983, it was not until 1999 that it was published (Richard, Conte, back cover).

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Cajun setting. Although a fictive place, the name is not uncommon in Cajun Country.¹⁰ Despite the scarce information about concrete places, it is possible to identify the space the companions are traveling through. Landscape specificities such as cheniers,¹¹ i. e., oak-covered ridges functioning as natural barriers against storm floods, bayous, or prairies, each of which is an emblematic feature of Louisiana and very often linked with Cajun culture, function as geo-cultural codes and give a visual picture of the spatial setting of the tale. The highly symbolic oak trees are of course mostly associated with Louisiana’s plantation culture. The oak ridges, however, have an additional meaning for the Cajuns, who consider them as a symbol of the fight for their culture. The forests of oak trees growing on sand ridges along the Gulf coast have to face terrible hurricanes, and devastation is not an uncommon event. The chenier becomes a means of orientation and symbol of timelessness for the Cajuns. The presence of such emblematic animals as the crawfish and the turtle necessarily leads to the question of stereotypes. Although Richard draws on these symbolical characters and seems to maintain clichéd traits, his characters in the end are anything but the expected stereotypes. At first, both ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore are presented as weak and defenseless creatures. “‘Tit” is a common nickname and a term of endearment in Cajun Country. ‘Tit Edvard’s small size and orphaned state identify him as a vulnerable creature who, at that, becomes disabled when he is deprived of his claw, a major tool to move, provide food, or dig holes to take refuge: “Elle se trouve seule dans un monde tout massacré; elle a perdu sa famille; elle est blessée et sans défense” (Richard, Conte 11). ‘Tit Edvard certainly represents the powerless and outcast who are dependent on others. Yet he will make the most decisive development. From a shy, weak, vulnerable creature, he turns into a strong, self-confident, inspiring leader.¹² “Télesphore,”¹³ too, is a commonly used name in French-speaking Louisiana, exemplifying the popularity of Greek names in francophone countries, espe Apart from bayou Bec Croche, a bayou between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, there also exists a stream called Coulée Croche in St. Landry Parish, between Church Point and Cankton.  “Chênière” in French, derived from chêne, means “oak” in English.  The comic series Crawfish Man by Timothy Edler presents just that image: a heroic crawfish resembling Superman (Edler). ‘Ti Edvard shows parallels to the trickster figure of ‘Ti Jean who also appears in Derek Walcott’s stage play Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958) and Melvin Gallant’s Ti-Jean: Contes acadiens (1973). ‘Ti-Jean is often underestimated because of his small height and weak appearance and stands in contrast to the anglophone trickster figure Little John, whose height and strong-looking body belie his real character (A. J. Arnold 17, 21).  “Télesphore” is of Greek origin and the literal meaning is “the bringer of completion.” This god of convalescence is known for his healing skills (see Antal). Translations also mention the

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cially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Reed 30; J. Castille 19). Like ‘Tit Edvard, Télesphore becomes disabled when he gives his eyesight to a little greedy spider they meet in a forest. With Télesphore’s blindness, his other senses become more acute. In African cultures, turtle products are used for divination (Werness 413), a feature which also relates back to “seeing” skills Télesphore seems to acquire. Télesphore shows perseverance and patience, two traits which coincide with the symbolism of turtles, known for “wisdom, strength, patience, endurance, stability, slowness, fecundity, and longevity” (Werness 412). These markers also coincide with the characteristics of the Cajun spirit. The two animals then stand for both the discrimination and toughness of the Cajuns. Apart from the crawfish and the turtle, the frogs also carry symbolic value in Louisiana. The nickname of the city of Rayne, “Frog Capital of the World,” and the annual celebration of the Frog Festival in May in that city are two other indicators for the relevance of the ouaouarons, bullfrogs, which constitute a sought-after delicacy in Cajun Country.¹⁴ Frogs are usually negatively connoted, partly because of the biblical story of the frog plague and their sometimes slimy secretions, which keep others at bay. In Richard’s tale, the four frogs are an impolite and sneering pack: “[C]e sont des fatras, des bons à rien, partis faire du bien à personne” (Richard, Conte 12). They scoff at the singular appearance of the red crawfish and the green turtle’s back, but they are silenced when they hear about the reason of the quest. Not knowing what else to do, they join the two companions on their search. The inebriated frogs first appear to be indeed a plague. But they turn out to be helpful and show goodwill, especially Paul, the youngest, who manages to free the lot from a big and dangerous black crawfish. Another emblematic character in the tale is the alligator. Alligators are almost a mainstay of Cajun tourism thanks to the countless Cajun Swamp Tours offered to tourists. On their return home, the group stumbles upon the “serpent qui marche sur des jambes et qui connaît beaucoup de choses” (Richard, Conte 41), and they name the wise alligator (“le plus sage de la terre”) “Monsieur Le Coteau Qui Parle” (Mister Speaking Hill) because they mistake the animal for

expression “light bearer” (see Deonna). Besides the mythological figure, a sainted pope in Rome during the second century A.D. also bore the name (“Saint Telesphorus”). Furthermore, SaintTélesphore is the name of a small community in Quebec, Canada.  The frog business started around the turn of the nineteenth century with the Frenchman Jacques Weil and his two brothers, who introduced Rayne’s nickname and used it as a slogan (Bienvenu, Brasseaux, and Brasseaux 38 – 39; “Rayne History”). It is no coincidence that the main characters of Disney’s 2009 movie The Princess and the Frog, which is set in New Orleans and the Louisiana swamps, are two frogs.

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a hill. The encounter with the wise reptile is the last leg of the trip and plays a significant role. Like the composite hero, the group of animals return home with a message, the tale’s moral: The hero “brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole. … [U]niversal heroes … bring a message for the entire world” (Campbell 37). This message is given by Monsieur Le Coteau Qui Parle to the group of animals. Rebuking the group for bemoaning their fate, the alligator demonstrates how their pilgrimage has turned out well after all. Paul and Henri La Sauterelle found self-confidence, Madame La Sauterelle found respect and love for her husband, and the toad found freedom and friendship. Télesphore lost his eyesight but gained a rare vision of things, and ‘Tit Edvard lost a limb, but he found loyal friends (Richard, Conte 43). Thus, in the end, the purpose of their quest turns out to be much more than just the search for a claw. They have learned the fundamental values of trust, friendship, and tolerance. They will transmit their memories of the risky collective undertaking to the next generation.

7.1.2 L’Histoire de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard dans le grand Nord (2007)— A Canadian Experience In the winter of 1998, a year before the publication of Conte cajun, Richard, residing in Quebec, composed the sequel to the first tale.¹⁵ Knowing that Quebec has become Richard’s second home, it is hardly surprising that L’Histoire de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard dans le grand Nord takes place in Canada: “Imprégné du Québec, j’ai écrit cette histoire d’un trait en quelques jours pendant l’hiver 1998. Ce n’est donc pas surprenant que cette aventure commence dans une cabane à castor à Saint-Boniface-des-Agréments, QC” (Richard, L’Histoire, blurb). Richard knew French Canada already from his early experience in Quebec and New Brunswick in the 1970s. That period contributed to his identification with the francophone culture and represented a journey of self-discovery: “[L]e jeune Cadien que j’étais en 1975 a découvert une partie de lui-même en arrivant sur la Butte à Napoléon à Cap-Pelé, en Acadie” (Richard, L’Histoire, blurb). The major turning point, however, which most likely spurred the publication of the first tale and the composition of the second tale, was Richard’s participation at the first Congrès Mondial des Acadiens in 1994.

 It took Richard only a couple of days to write it. Yet the tale was published almost a decade later, in 2007.

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In his second tale, Richard continues the story about Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard but places it in the “big North,” in Quebec and New Brunswick, a territory unknown to both animals. As in the first tale, their adventure starts with a tragic event. On a peaceful fall afternoon, Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard are resting in the sugar cane fields when they are suddenly picked up by a haybaler and catapulted on a hay bale into the atmosphere. Their attempt to jump off the bale at the right time fails, and they end up somewhere in Quebec instead of Louisiana. Fortunately, they are taken in by a hospitable beaver couple, Mario and Maria, who introduce them to the country’s—surprisingly familiar—culture. However, Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard feel the pull of home. With the help of René le Raton, a raccoon, and Louise L’Orignal, a moose, the two companions reach a city where they hope a snowplow will propel them back to Louisiana. The experiment fails, and Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard land only a little further south, in New Brunswick. Once more, help is nearby. They come upon Rose La Baleine, a whale who takes ‘Tit Edvard for a lobster, a species she knows, instead of a crawfish, which she has never seen. Rose leads them into Homardie, the land of the lobsters, who reveal to ‘Tit Edvard the ancestral connection between the crawfish and the lobsters. The lobsters, unfortunately, cannot help the two friends, but a swarm of ravens, on their south-bound journey, finally bring them back to Louisiana. A typical Cajun element in Richard’s tale is the introductory scene of how the two animals are propelled into the air by a haybaler. The very picture of the harvester shooting off a hay bale with the two friends on top might lead the European reader to think of the fictional exploit of the Baron Münchhausen, who goes on reconnaissance atop a cannon ball (Raspe). In fact, the motif is typical of the contes de Pascal, the Pascal stories, an oral tradition being part of the Cajun folktale repertoire and originally limited to Mamou, Louisiana.¹⁶ These modern “stories are spontaneous oral creations which form an ongoing system of exaggerations, lies, and nonsense that is quite popular among those who participate in sessions of Pascal stories. True Pascal stories are not performances of ‘fixed’ texts, but instant improvisations, often conversational in nature” (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales xxxvii – xxxviii). While “the Pascal tradition was centered at one time in the bars along the one-block long stretch of Sixth Street, between Main and Chestnut” (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales xxxvii – xxxxviii), Richard’s tale shows that they have crossed the boundaries of geography and orality.

 Reportedly, these stories were invented by a certain Pascal. The main character is Pascal himself (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales xxxvii – xlv).

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The Pascal stories feature two important characters, Pascal and Jim Israel, his “friend and right-hand man. Jim is the hero of many stories based not on his physical appearance, but on his many exploits. He is always involved in grandiose schemes: going to the moon (in any number of outlandish ways) or reflooding the Pacific Ocean after a terrible drought” (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales xl). Richard’s introductory story in L’Histoire de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard dans le grand Nord echoes “Jim’s haybaler,” a tale by Irving and Revon Reed, in which Jim accidentally gets to the moon on a haybaler after it went out of control (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales 144– 146). In Richard’s tale, the cause for the displacement of Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard is the failed experiment of a farmer who concludes at the sight of the flying hay bale that he must have used a wrong composition of gas. Richard then follows the rule of improvisation characteristic of the Pascal stories and gives “Jim’s haybaler” a twist, sending the two animals not to the moon, but to Canada. First recorded in Barry Ancelet’s Cajun and Creole folktale collection, the Pascal stories, which are traditionally oral, are now part of the collective memory of the Cajuns as they have started to circulate with Richard’s tale, all the while maintaining their improvisational and variable nature. What contributes most to the formation of a Cajun space in Richard’s second tale, though, is the opposition between the familiar and unfamiliar, between the companion’s home and the unknown country. In Canada, Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard are struck by the different creatures and different climate. Most upsetting to them is the feeling of Otherness and the fact that nothing looks familiar. After their literal landfall, they do not recognize the surroundings and realize that they are far away from their home: ‘Tit Edvard ne reconnaît pas les arbres. Toutes les feuilles sont tombées, laissant les branches nues. En plus, il n’y a ni chênes verts ni magnolias, qui donnent au paysage louisianais une touche de verdure même au fond de l’hiver. À la place, ‘Tit Edvard voit des épinettes et des sapins, qui ne ressemblent guère aux grands pins blancs de la forêt louisianaise. (Richard, L’Histoire 23)

Having lost orientation, the two animals look for familiar signs to find a way out. When they encounter the beaver couple, Mario and Maria, the two friends take them for muskrats at first, and, lacking a term to name the animals, they repeatedly call them “rat trop gros pour être un rat musqué” (Richard, L’Histoire 24– 25). They notice that the animals are bigger than the muskrats in Louisiana and the tail looks different. ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore’s initial suspicion is swept away when they understand that Mario and Maria speak French, though with slight differences in vocabulary. They accept the beavers’ offer to help, and, soon enough, the four animals bond and embark on an animated discus-

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sion about the fauna, flora, and cultural specificities of their respective countries. For instance, while coffee is the drink for socializing in Louisiana, tea is generally offered to visitors in Canada. Furthermore, ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore learn about the production of maple syrup, a big export hit in Canada since the 1990s, and about snow: Ils ont appris que beaucoup d’arbres, dans la forêt, contiennent une sève sucrée avec laquelle, au printemps, une fois que la neige a fondu, on fait du sirop. … Ces arbres ressemblent à ce que les Louisianais appellent des planes … mais les planes ne donnent pas de sucre. Les uns et les autres emploient souvent des mots différents pour désigner ce qui est apparemment la même chose. Mais il y a un mot que les deux castors utilisent souvent et dont le sens échappe totalement à Télésphore et à ‘Tit Edvard. C’est ‘neige.’ (Richard, L’Histoire 41)

Since Télésphore and ‘Tit Edvard have never seen snow, they do not know the word for it. No wonder that the first snow comes as a shock to them, who are used to heat and humidity. Another animal the two friends meet is René Le Raton, a raccoon, supposed to help Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard find their way back to Louisiana. Maria declares René “un ami formidable, un grand connaisseur. Il parle plusieurs langues et a déjà été à l’école, et, comme tous les ratons laveurs, il est bien rusé” (Richard, L’Histoire 33). But when they meet René, the two friends are terrified, for they realize that what Mario calls a “raton laveur” is in fact what they know to be a raccoon in Louisiana, which is the enemy of the crawfish. Obviously, the American “raccoon” presents a bigger danger than the French Canadian “raton laveur,” for they soon become friends with René, and he leads them to a town where a snowplow is supposed to toss them back to Louisiana. The plan succeeds, but their flight is stopped too soon, for they land in Quebec. The story of the snowplow mirrors the earlier tall tale of the haybaler, but while the haybaler typically represents the agricultural American South, the snowplow appears as a modern-day symbol of the northern states of the United States and Canada.¹⁷ This little variation ensures the continuance of the Pascal stories. During the short flight, the turtle and the crawfish see Percé Rock on the Gaspé Penninsula along the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. This iconic landmark of Quebec has a Proustian quality, for it reminds the two animals of the beignets Madame La Sauterelle usually makes: “Ils pensent à elle et à sa cuisine avec nostalgie, se rappelant les délicieuses odeurs qui en émanaient” (Richard, L’Histoire 66). They are taken with nostalgia, knowing that the grasshopper couple stayed

 These variations of Pascal stories recall Tim Gautreaux’s and his uncles’ tall tales.

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behind in Louisiana. It seems that the Otherness of the country reinforces the pull home. Upon approaching Louisiana, it is again the sense of smell which stirs up memories and tells Télesphore they are finally back home: “Télesphore … sent aussi [les chênes verts]. Ils approchent de leur pays. Il le sait à l’odeur, une odeur de marécage et d’humidité, et à la chaleur qui les étreint comme les bras d’un ami cher” (Richard, L’Histoire 85). The journey to Canada, representing an encounter with the Other, becomes yet another journey of self-discovery for Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard. The two companions are confronted with a foreign culture which, at the same time, seems strangely familiar. ‘Tit Edvard’s and Télesphore’s Canadian experience not only strengthens their sense of Cajun, or Louisiana identity, it also expands their horizons of knowledge. The beaver, Canada’s national symbol, the moose, and the raccoon contribute to the construction of a Canadian space which contrasts with the culture of the two friends. They come to appreciate both the foreign culture—francophone Canada—and their own—Cajun culture, and overcome cultural stereotypes, which broadens collective memory.

7.1.3 Les Aventures de Télesphore et ‘tit Edvard au Vieux Pays (2010)— A French Experience The third part, Les Aventures de Télesphore et ‘tit Edvard au Vieux Pays, published in Montreal in 2010, resumes the narrative about Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard. Transferring the setting to the “Vieux Pays,” the Old World—more precisely, France—Richard makes the transatlantic Acadian connection come full circle. Again, Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard are alienated by France’s cultural differences, but they soon learn to adapt. Additionally, the contrast with France reinforces specific Cajun traditions and values such as family and community. A little over 150 pages long, the tale is visibly longer than the two previous tales and, thus, resembles rather a novella. Furthermore, the plural in “les aventures” in the title suggests a more intricate story line with more than one plot, as opposed to the singular in “l’histoire” in the title of the second part and the subtitle of the first part. Indeed, the third part includes more than one adventure, as Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard are separated on different occasions and have to fend for themselves without their companions’ help. The fact that they face danger repeatedly further points to the shift from folktale to adventure fiction, including picaresque elements such as the episodic structure and observations on the various animal characters the two protagonists meet. Just as in the previous tales, displacement, discrimination, and the quest for home, recurrent themes in Cajun literature, move the action of the narrative. Additionally, the tale reflects on the importance

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of memory and on the transmission and preservation of Cajun cultural traditions. Moreover, it addresses such issues as immigration and the protection of the environment, which expands the tale to a universal socio-eco-critical tale. The third installment opens with a tragically familiar scene. Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard, enjoying the first sunny days of the approaching spring in the waters of a rice field, are caught by a fishing boat and taken to France. In contrast to the first two tales, the two friends are not the only victims. They find themselves amid a swarm of crawfish, with whom they go through a number of afflictions. Jammed in the dark and foul-smelling bilge, with neither food nor water, the captives endure both a distressing and emotional overseas trip. After landing in La Rochelle, on the west coast of France, they manage to escape with the help of Jacques Cocorichaud, a rooster from the French region of Bresse. Sadly, in the big commotion, Télesphore is left behind. The group of crawfish and Jacques start an errant life in the woods until they are arrested by the “patrouille sauvage,” a wildlife patrol controlling the border between the world of the domestic animals and the world of the wild animals. The rooster is returned to the world inhabited by the domestic animals, but the crawfish have to remain in Fauneville, which resembles a refugee camp. They are visited by an assigned counsel Claude Tomate de la Beletterie, a weasel, who declares that she will find a solution to free them. Since she cannot understand the crawfish, she is helped by an interpreter who turns out to be Télesphore, now a political refugee and free. With her legal training, Claude issues a request to have the crawfish equally recognized as political refugees. In order to succeed, it is necessary to prove that the crawfish are the descendants of a group of crawfish who mysteriously disappeared from France in 1632. Télesphore goes on a quest to find the information and meets La Mémoire Verte, a pseudonym of Madame Lucy La Testuda, the oldest turtle and keeper of memories. As La Testuda cannot help Télesphore, he continues his way to La Rochelle to find out from which port the crawfish could have left France. There, he makes a pact with the rat Paul Rongeur, who orders his gang of rats to help Télesphore find the papers in exchange for his tortoise shells. After a few altercations, Télesphore makes friends with the rats and returns with the papers unharmed, and after still more altercations, the crawfish are finally offered sanctuary. To top it off, ‘Tit Edvard is elected representative of the AGFE, the Assemblée générale de la faune européenne. The tale invokes various typical Cajun customs. The experience of confinement in the ship engenders a conflict between Télesphore and the crawfish, led by Panzer Thibodeaux, a big Goliath-like crawfish who is compared to a Marais Bouleur, the notorious Cajun marsh bully (Richard, Aventures 29). When ‘Tit Edvard intervenes, Panzer recognizes in him his lost nephew. The happy family

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reunion greatly alleviates the dire situation on the ship, and the crawfish begin to explain their family trees, manifesting thus the strong familial ties. The crawfish reunion has a much deeper cultural significance as it echoes all the emotional reunions of Cajun families with their Acadian relatives during the CMA in 1994 and after. The genealogical memory engenders reminiscences of home, and the crawfish are caught by a fit of nostalgia, especially Panzer: “Je suis pris par le mal du pays. Comme vous tous, je m’ennuie de notre chère Louisiane. Je rêve de pouvoir marcher de nouveau le long du bayou Croche. … Mon cœur est en Louisiane, et je ne me reposerai pas avant de rentrer dans mon pays pour voir mes proches” (Richard, Aventures 143). The other crawfish also miss their home in Louisiana: “Oh, la Louisiane, ça leur semble tellement, tellement loin. C’est l’été maintenant et il fait chaud dans leur pays. Les écrevisses rêvent de cette chaleur douce, de ces journées paisibles au pied d’un grand chêne vert, où elles faisaient la sieste, bercées doucement par le vent tiède du sud” (Richard, Aventures 54). To alleviate the melancholic atmosphere in the bilge, the crawfish begin to tell stories and to sing songs: Pour passer le temps, les écrevisses se racontent des histoires. C’est étonnant, le nombre d’histoires et de blagues qu’elles connaissent. Chacune a des choses à dire. Parfois, les histoires sont tellement drôles que les écrevisses rient aux éclats, l’écho de leurs rires oscillant contre les murs de la cale. Ça leur fait du bien. De temps à autre, elles se mettent à chanter. Elles connaissent quantité de vieilles chansons, des chansons de beuverie, des chansons d’amour, des chansons grivoises: ‘Oh! Parlez-nous à boire, non pas de mariage, / Toujours en regrettant le joli temps passé.’ (Richard, Aventures 27)

The singing and storytelling reflect the strong oral traditions in the Cajun collective memory. Based on the popular Cajun drinking song “Parlez-nous à boire,”¹⁸ the lines “Oh! Parlez-nous à boire, non pas de mariage, / Toujours en regrettant le joli temps passé” strengthen the collective memory together with the solidarity of the group. The crawfish sing the song again once they have devised a plan of returning to Louisiana (Richard, Aventures 37). Finally, another reminder of the Cajun background includes Télesphore’s exhortation that the group should not lose courage, a phrase with a mnemo-cultural significance: “Lâchez pas la patate” (Richard, Aventures 63), says Télesphore before he goes on his search for La Testuda.

 Dewey Balfa reintroduced this traditional song (Savoy 255). He also sang the song in the movie Southern Comfort (1981).

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Interestingly, the foreign climate and surroundings of France are of no significant consequence in the third tale. Such stereotypes as Jacques Cocorichaud and Paul Rongeur, the rat, who is pictured as a revolutionary with his béret, a kerchief, and a cigarette hanging from his mouth, give the narrative a French touch. Yet, whereas the changing landscape of north Louisiana in the first tale and the colder climate of Quebec in the second tale put the group of travelers in the position of the Other, something other than the landscape makes the group from Louisiana feel alienated in Les Aventures de Télesphore et ‘tit Edvard au Vieux Pays. Although they grapple with different cultural habits they encounter, for example, the French custom of cheek kissing (Richard, Aventures 78), it is the seemingly strange language of the French animals which disconcerts them most. Of course, apart from landscape and cultural habits, language is another major identity marker which constitutes collective memory and contributes to creating a sense of identity. ‘Tit Edvard’s and Télesphore’s linguistic experiences recall the debate about which French is to be promoted in Louisiana: Standard French or vernacular French, i. e., Cajun or Creole French, or other dialects? While this is no issue in the first tale, it becomes more relevant in the second and third tales. Already in Canada, the two animals experience the effect of a language barrier. First, immediately after their landing they encounter the four ravens whom neither ‘Tit Edvard nor Télesphore understand; then, they hear the beavers speak French with slight differences in vocabulary and accent. It is primarily Les Aventures de Télesphore et ‘tit Edvard au Vieux Pays which deals with linguistic challenges and highlights the difference of the French spoken in France to the dialect version of Cajun French. The most notable scene occurs when the captive crawfish and Télesphore meet the rooster Jacques Cocorichaud upon landing in La Rochelle. Several traits characterize him as a representative of France. He enjoys a high position considering that the Gallic rooster is France’s national symbol. Moreover, since he comes from the region of Bresse, the center of the poultry trade, he is a proud ambassador of high-quality poultry meat. Furthermore, his name is more than fitting since Jacques is a popular French name, reminiscent of the famous wake-up song “Frère Jacques,” thus adding to the dawn-herald symbolism. Cocorichaud, Jacques’s surname, is an equally telling name. It echoes “cocorico,” the onomatopoeic call of the rooster in French. Significantly, the exclamation “Cocorico!” in French refers to the proverbial cockiness and, by extension, chauvinistic behavior of a person.¹⁹  The suffix -chaud is probably meant to harmonize with other names having a similar-sounding suffix such as Robicheaux and Michaux, frequent Cajun and Acadian surnames, or the more frequent ending -eaux, as in Thibodeaux, with its variants such as -auld, -ot, etc. The homophony serves to highlight the transatlantic connection.

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An arrogant and self-centered know-it-all, Jacques Cocorichaud treats his fellow animals haughtily and without respect, especially when they speak French improperly. For him, there is only one correct way to speak French. In contrast, wise Télesphore, a polyglot, notices that Jacques’s French resembles the spoken language of the fowl in Louisiana and that there is a marked difference of accents (Richard, Aventures 32). As to the rooster, he makes no secret of his contempt for the Louisiana French accent. With a disdainful look, he interrupts Télesphore and impertinently corrects his articulation. The turtle, who tries to contain his anger, cannot help making a statement in Louisiana dialect: “Si tout quelqu’un causé pareil, li moun vini ben moins intéressant.”²⁰ Jacques is at a complete loss as to what this means, and Télesphore readily provides a translation. The discussion between Jacques and Télesphore replicates the controversy about the French language in Louisiana. Of course, it echoes Zachary Richard’s own view of Cajun French and Cajun culture. Cultures, and languages, for that matter, are in constant flux and foreign influences are a means for rejuvenation. Considering the precarious state of French—Cajun French is slowly, but surely disappearing—Richard shows that French is alive in Louisiana and that it must be preserved. Obviously, Richard’s French ancestry, his experiences in Quebec, and his concert trips to numerous francophone countries contributed to his becoming the fervent Francophone he is today. His affinity for French, visible in his poetry and his tales, stems mostly from the wish to honor his ancestors and to preserve the language. In his poetry collection, Feu, Richard affirms that French “reste pour moi la langue de mon cœur” (10). Still, Richard is fully aware of the loss of French in Louisiana: Nous avons perdu le français en Louisiane il y a presque cent ans. Peut-être que si on avait continué à écrire, on aurait pu faire évoluer une langue faisant partie de l’expression francophone et suffisamment à nous. Mais cela ne s’est jamais produit. Donc, le rythme et les expressions délicieuses de mes grands-parents vont mourir avec leurs enfants, mes parents. Aujourd’hui, écrire en Louisiane n’est pas seulement un défi d’expression personnelle, mais aussi un exercice d’adaptation et de compromis. (Richard, Feu 10)

Just like ‘Tit Edvard’s disempowerment through the loss of the claw, the ban on French in 1921 deprived the Cajuns of an essential part of their culture. Cajun French mirrors the exoticism of the hybrid Louisiana culture and marks Cajun

 Interestingly, Richard’s translation into Standard French changes “moun,” meaning “world” in Creole French, to “culture”: “Si tout le monde parlait de la même façon, la culture serait appauvrie” (Richard, Aventures 33).

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identity. Richard admits that he has never been at ease when writing in French because French for him is not his mother tongue, but his “langue grand-maternelle” (Feu 10). Nevertheless, growing up in a francophone environment allowed him to nurture his French heritage: “Imbibée des couleurs exotiques et des saveurs fortes de mon pays presque tropical, influencé par des milliers de métissages, avec son accent sensuel et gras, [la langue] résonne dans mon esprit comme une cloche perpétuelle” (Richard, Feu 10). Richard considers language a crucial instrument for identity formation, on both the individual and collective levels. It is no wonder, therefore, that the theme of language understanding is present in all three tales. Richard writes in Standard French, arguably to reach a wider audience, but includes such Cajun idioms as “ouaouaron,” “maringouin,”²¹ “platin,”²² or “coulée,”²³ which are explained in the glossary at the end of each tale. This glossary listing Cajun words and idioms is another noticeable trait of Cajun literature which a number of contemporary Cajun works share, French and English alike. As a paratext, it mostly includes nouns referring to the geography, fauna, and flora characteristic of Cajun Country, and it serves as an aid to readers unfamiliar with the Louisiana vernacular.²⁴ Other stylistic elements are distinctly regional, such as the comparison of scattered paper to Mardi Gras confetti (Richard, Aventures 104). These elements referring to Cajun culture, sprinkled here and there, act as orientation tools. Interestingly, although Cajun culture today is heavily influenced by the English language, Richard abstains from introducing English vocabulary except for commonplace words such as “flatbottom.” Another instance in which language plays a defining role occurs when the crawfish have to prove that they descend from a particular group of crawfish who left France and the Assemblée générale de la faune européenne in 1632.²⁵ Télesphore, acting as an interpreter between the weasel, who only understands Standard French, and the crawfish, makes an interesting discovery: The language the French crawfish speak resembles very much the language the Louisianians speak (Richard, Aventures 69). The genealogical connection of Louisiana French and Standard French might well help the crawfish to get free. The difficulty tracing back ‘Tit Edvard’s ancestors resides in a possible orthographic change in the names. When Télesphore finds La Testuda, she mentions a certain

 A midget.  An inundated low-lying land surrounded by levees for rice and crawfish cultivation.  A small stream which flows into the bayous.  The first tale lists 15 entries, the second 13, and the third 14.  Curiously, Richard makes no reference to how the crawfish from France became the lobsters in Canada.

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Tonnerre Thibeaudeault to be the last to have left France. Télesphore remembers Panzer Thibodeaux’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of the same name but has to acknowledge that the different spelling (‐eaux versus -eault) makes the argument of claiming the territorial rights of the crawfish on grounds of lineage untenable (Richard, Aventures 76). Richard’s tales thus present seemingly disparate cultures, for although Canada and France represent difference and function as foils for Louisiana, they are also mirrors showing similarities with Louisiana. Stephanie Foote notes that “[b]ecause it is a form that works to preserve local customs, local accents, and local communities, regional writing is a form about the presentation of difference” (4). With each displacement, ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore face different cultures, but they are reoriented by familiar cultural elements, for instance, the French language. Similarly, when Télesphore meets the mischievous rats in La Rochelle, he has difficulties understanding them, but he also notices the linguistic similarity. In reality, the rats’ accent resembles the raccoons’ accent in Louisiana: “La tortue a beaucoup de difficulté à comprendre ce que lui dit son interlocuteur. Son langage ressemble à celui des ratons laveurs louisianais, ou à celui des rats musqués. Mais l’accent est très aigu, quasiment impénétrable” (Richard, Aventures 85). Télesphore has a distinguished sense of hearing, an extremely perceptive and tolerant attitude toward the unknown. He tries to make the unknown more familiar in comparing it to what he knows. This contrast and juxtaposition, based on the process of remembering familiar things and learning new things, broadens Télesphore’s horizon. At the same time, memory is preserved.

7.2 Recovering Roots—À la recherche des racines perdues Although the traditional genre of the animal tale excludes references to human life and history,²⁶ Richard’s tales progressively introduce tragic events of Cajun history and other historical landmarks of world history. Télesphore’s and ‘Tit Edvard’s journeys then not only lead them to other spaces, but also back in time. Significantly, the historical events generally connote exile and loss. Two causes of exile and loss have become prime collective symbols in Cajun culture: devastating hurricanes of the past and the memory of the expulsion from Acadia. The fact that these two collective symbols also frame Richard’s discourse is no coincidence, for in times of change, collective symbols have a particular mnemocultural function:

 Legends and historical tales are the genres which deal with human history.

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As new basic conditions of remembering, changing memory interests, and shifting forms of memory loom, national myths and collective symbols become functionalized and their meaning is reconstructed. They serve to continuously ‘reinvent,’ interpret, and instrumentalize the past, the present, and the future (Rieger, Wodianka, and Knabel, “Einleitung” 9; my translation).

Against the background of the Cajun Renaissance, the socio-cultural changes triggered the regeneration of collective symbols denoting the loss of home, i. e., hurricanes and the Acadian exile. More than the tragedies of past hurricanes, the Grand Dérangement epitomizes displacement. No doubt, Acadia as an imaginary space has become a site of memory which connects all Acadians scattered around the world through literary references and ongoing memory work such as commemorative celebrations. Although an indefinite geographical space, Acadia seems to exemplify Douglas Reichert Powell’s statement concerning “sense of place”: ‘[S]enses’ of place and region are not so much essential qualities, imparted by singular events, practices, or topographical features, as they are ongoing debates and discourses that coalesce around particular geographical spaces. Furthermore, it is by looking at those features of a place that seem, at least superficially, to be the permanent stable markers of its identity that we can begin to see the dynamic, evolving, and rhetorical qualities that create and sustain what has often been taken (reductively) to be an ineffable or ethereal, sensory property: the ‘sense of place.’ (14)

The “dynamic, evolving, and rhetorical qualities” Powell mentions are most evident in the depiction of the displacement in Richard’s tales. Each of Richard’s tales enlarges the web of a diaspora narrative in weaving collective symbols and their variations into it. The fateful removals of the two friends not only evoke the memory of displacement and, above all, the Acadian expulsion. The event itself is included as an allegory in the lobsters’ history. The allusions to the Grand Dérangement and Acadia develop with each unfolding tale, in different locations, from a symbolic reference to an explicit reenactment of the event.

7.2.1 Displacement and Loss of Home As a recurrent motif, the loss of home is well-known to Louisiana people. Doubtlessly, the first cause of displacement relating to the reality of the Cajun space is hurricanes. Conte cajun begins in medias res with a hurricane hitting the land and creating chaos:

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L’ouragan était sur la côte et la destruction sur le pays. Tout le monde était couvert d’eau. Les maisons étaient cassés, les arbres capotés, et tous les animaux, sauvages et pas sauvages, nageaient dans l’eau. … Battue par le vent si fort, envoyée là-bas et tout partout, la petite écrevisse ne comprend pas ce qui lui arrive. L’eau est autour, enragée, bouillante comme une chaudière à l’enfer. (9)

This incipit evokes a deep sense of disorientation. The storm is ravaging the surroundings and the surge aggravates the situation. Not only does the hurricane experience resurface in each tale, as ‘Tit Edvard explains to other animals how he came to lose his claw. The scene of confusion is repeated in the incipit of the other two tales. Feelings of loss and desolation then stand at the very beginning of each tale and define the memories of Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard. The second tale, in contrast to Conte cajun, opens with a pastoral scene: Bercés dans les bras d’une léthargie délectable, à la mélodie languissante des cigales, Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard se perdent dans une somnolence délicieuse. Ils entendent vaguement le bourdonnement des abeilles qui dansent au-dessus de leur tête, et le chuchotement du vent qui joue avec les épis. Ils sont remplis de ce bonheur qui se trouve à la frontière du rêve. (Richard, L’Histoire 11)

Just like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore are lulled by the peaceful afternoon sun. Then, suddenly, they are surprised by a big noise: Soudain, les deux amis sont réveillés par un énorme bruit. Ça grogne comme un grognement d’épouvante, comme un coup de tonnerre, comme une crevasse de levée qui vient d’éclater. Affolées, la tortue et l’écrevisse se mettent à courir. Elles n’ont pas connu une telle panique depuis leur naufrage dans l’ouragan voilà quelques années. Toujours endormies, elles courent de gauche à droite, de droite à gauche, de haut en bas, de bas en haut sans pouvoir échapper au bruit effrayant qui semble arriver de tous les côtés. … Ils sont propulsés en culbute sens dessous dessus, sens dessus dessous, tiraillés dans tous les sens, partis dans un tournis tourbillonnant à faire perdre connaissance. (Richard, L’Histoire 11– 12)

Like Alice, who falls into a hole, the two animals are drawn into a vortex, and they feel utterly disoriented. Like in Conte cajun, the two animals are in a state of utter confusion. Terrified, the two friends remember how they felt out of place after the hurricane several years back. Indeed, the hurricane of Conte cajun functions like a yardstick considering the two comparisons, one to the sense of fear in the quote above, the other to the sense of confusion: “[E]t soudainement, ils éprouvent une sensation de grande vitesse, comme s’ils étaient propulsés dans un ouragan. Effectivement, ça leur rappelle le grand vent qui les a râpés pendant toute une journée lors de leur première rencontre durant une tempête, voilà quelques années” (Richard, L’Histoire 12). The memory of

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the threatening hurricane intensifies their insecurity. While circling around the globe on a hay bale, Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard have the sensation of being lost and unable to control their movement. Other experiences of disorientation occur, for example, during the snow storm, or when Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard are propelled by the snowplow: “Cette situation rappelle à Télesphore et à ‘Tit Edvard leur vol en orbite autour de la Terre: le froid, le bruit, la sensation d’impuissance. … Soudainement, une rafale de vent presque aussi forte qu’un ouragan louisianais frappe les amis” (Richard, L’Histoire 52). The repeated comparisons to hurricanes reflect the omnipresence of that natural hazard in the collective memory of the Cajuns. Moreover, they increase the confusion of the two animals. After their short flight through the air, they feel lost yet again: Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard restent sur la butte de neige, désorientés. … C’est [la pensée de Télesphore] avant de perdre contact avec une réalité brutale. … Soudainement, la tortue et l’écrevisse se sentent propulsées, renversées, poussées dans tous les sens, bing et bang, bique et boum, devant derrière, derrière devant, haut en bas, bas en haut. En plus de tout ce fracas, elles ont terriblement froid. La souffleuse de neige les a ramassées et les a projetées avec une force inouïe. (Richard, L’Histoire 61– 62)

Arguably, the sense of being at the mercy of an uncontrollable force becomes a metaphor of external forces menacing Cajun culture, such as, for instance, mainstream American culture. Similarly, Richard’s third tale draws on the theme of disorientation and displacement in the introduction. Once again, the tale begins with the sudden displacement of the two protagonists, after which they feel utterly out of control: Soudainement le monde est bousculé. Tous les deux sentent une propulsion incroyable, comme s’ils venaient de se faire arracher de la terre par un énorme oiseau invisible. Ils ont le tournis tellement fort qu’ils ne peuvent même pas sentir leurs cœurs qui galopent dans leurs poitrines comme les étalons de Gabriel Strauss. … Il leur semble que le temps s’est arrêté, ou bien a commencé à avancer avec une rapidité déconcertante. Les deux amis sont chavirés dans tous les sens, en dessous, dessus, à l’envers, le dedans dehors et les pattes en l’air. … Les deux amis perdent connaissance. (Richard, Aventures 11– 12)²⁷

Again, Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard are beside themselves in the tumbling chaos until they lose conscience. Considering that Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in

 Gabriel “Gobb” Strauss, born in Carencro, Louisiana, in 1892, was a famous Cajun jockey and trainer (“Gabriel ‘Gobb’ Strauss”; Richard, Aventures 153).

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2005, followed a few weeks later by Rita, and Ike in 2008, it is no surprise that Richard’s tale of 2010 includes a hurricane discourse. The third tale also incorporates the memories of the very first hurricane in a mise en abîme. Together with Télesphore, ‘Tit Edvard tells the other crawfish how the storm surge destroyed his home, took away his parents, and devastated the surrounding nature: “Il y avait le grand vent, mais la plus dévastatrice, c’était l’inondation. L’eau salée avait pénétré à des kilomètres à l’intérieur des terres, et nous étions tous effarouchés de voir nos habitations emportées par cette eau sale et brûlante. On est des bêtes d’eau douce, et l’eau salée nous brûlait la carapace et les narines” (Richard, Aventures 23). This motivates Panzer to also tell his hurricane experience: Quand je suis retourné dans l’arbre où [j’avais laissé Tropclaire et Bienfaire], il n’y avait plus personne. Je n’étais plus certain que c’était le même arbre, tellement les choses avaient été bouleversées. Je ne comprenais plus où j’étais rendu. J’ai passé la nuit à chercher. Mais c’était dur. Il y avait toute qualité de détresse partout, les animaux sauvages et les animaux pas sauvages nageaient dans cette eau brûlante. Tout le monde criait, cherchait ses parents, ses amis ou un abri pour se loger. Les arbres étaient noirs de créatures, et une partie des créatures se conduisait avec cruauté, prenant avantage du désarroi pour piller. (Richard, Aventures 24)

‘Tit Edvard’s and Panzer’s accounts trigger similar memories in the other crawfish, and together they reminisce about past hurricanes. It is a veritable collective remembering: “Elles revisitent l’ouragan. Les plus vieux ont connu plusieurs ouragans, mais aucun plus terrible que celui dont parlait Panzer, celui qu’on appelait Audry. Il y en avait eu d’autres depuis et il y en aura d’autres encore. Mais Audry reste gravé dans le souvenir comme le pire de tous” (Richard, Aventures 24– 25; my emphasis). The name of Audry, missing an “e,” alludes, of course, to the deadly category-four Hurricane Audrey of 1957, whose storm surge surprised the residents in their beds and caused hundreds of deaths. Apart from cementing the cohesion between the animals, the collective memory of Audry also triggers a fit of longing: “Elles avaient toutes des souvenirs d’Audry. … Toutes sont envahies de nostalgie” (Richard, Aventures 26). They do not mourn for another hurricane, but for the lives lost during Audry. They long for the time before their deportation, even before their lives were devastated by Audry. It is a longing for a safe home with their families. Ultimately, the reference to Audry is clearly drawn from the Cajun collective memory since Audrey, present in the literary and public discourse (see chapters 8.2.1 and 10.2.1), still hovers in the Cajuns’ memories. The repeated telling further roots the memory into the Cajun collective memory.

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7.2.2 The Grand Dérangement Retold The memory of displacement is best exemplified through the experience of expulsion. In the context of Cajun culture this experience is necessarily the Grand Dérangement. The exile experience also spans Richard’s three tales, which corroborates the status of the Grand Dérangment as a founding myth. Stephanie Wodianka understands myth as a mode of remembering which joins with various forms and subjects of narration. Thus understood, this ‘mythical mode of remembering’ is not an ontological category, but stands in phenomenological, contextual, and interdependent relation of the forms of memory and narration out of which the mythical emerges or is constituted. (“Zur Einleitung” 2; my translation)

She notes that one of the most crucial strategies for myths to survive is their ability to adapt. They need to be actualized to serve mnemonic interests and counter competitive mnemonic forces (Rieger and Wodianka v). Indeed, each new tale by Richard adapts and changes the reference to the Grand Dérangement. They even generate new myths. Although the event is not explicitly mentioned, Conte cajun can be read as an allegory of the Acadian dispersal. The animals’ northward journey to find l’Araignée Arc-en-ciel clearly hints at an invisible force driving them to a home, distant in time and space. Although the exact setting is not mentioned, the direction the companions follow roughly corresponds to the direction to Acadia. After their encounter with the frogs, they start to travel eastward, “vers le soleil levant” (Richard, Conte 12). On seeing an egret flying to the north, they decide to follow the white bird, another common presence in Louisiana bayou country. The chenier they enter and get lost in is their first obstacle. Guided by the cicada, they reach the edge of the oak ridge and find themselves in front of a prairie. The fellowship has left the southern wetlands and enters a new territory north of the coastal marshes, the Cajun Prairie. After crossing the Prairie, they arrive yet further north. Rolling hills, pine forests as well as the red soil allude to the northern and northwestern parts of Louisiana. Clearly, the tale is a distant echo of several Acadians’ subsequent return to Acadia. The award-winning novel Pélagie-la-charette by Acadian author Antonine Maillet, for instance, traces the perilous journey back to Acadia of a group of Acadians.²⁸ In contrast, the northward journey of the eight companions

 The novel’s heroine, Pélagie Bourg dite Le Blanc, is deported to Georgia from where, after

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in Richard’s tale remains incomplete. Even though it is not their intention to go back to the lands of their ancestors, they have a similar goal: to look for something lost. Indeed, the cast-out Acadians had lost their land and possessions, and went on a journey to find what they had lost. Some of them, like Pélagie, went back to Canada after years of exile in the New England colonies and rebuilt their homes. Others arrived in Louisiana and founded a new Acadia there. Similarly, when the companions come back, they build Edvardville. This allusion to Acadian history, though slight, lays the foundation for the retellings of the Grand Dérangement in the other two tales. The pull north alluded to in the first tale is concretized in the second tale. Set in the “big North,” the sequel focuses foremost on Acadian history. After the failed attempt to reach Louisiana with the snowplow, ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore land in Homardie, the land of the lobsters, which echoes the former Acadie thanks to its homonymous ending “-a(r)die” and comparable setting, for it is located in New Brunswick. More importantly, “homard” means lobster in French; hence Homardie refers to the land of the lobster. Hermance le Homard, the chief of the lobsters, enlightens ‘Tit Edvard about his heritage and tells him he is a descendant of the French lobsters—just like the Acadians, who left France to live a better life in Canada: Il y a très longtemps, il n’y avait pas de homards en Amérique. Tous les homards étaient en France, enfin au large des côtes françaises. … [L]a vie des homards n’était pas facile en France. Là-bas, on mange de tout, y compris du homard. Alors, les homards souffraient beaucoup de cela. Ça fait qu’un beau jour, Michel à Edgard Le Homard décide de traverser l’océan. (Richard, L’Histoire 69)

Hermance tells how the lobsters crossed the ocean and arrived on the banks of northeast Canada. There, they founded the land of Homardie and lived in peace and harmony until the day when humans arrived. Hating the lobsters, they deported them in cages and shipped them to all possible places. Hermance then delivers a detailed history of the lobsters, a perfect allegory of the Acadian deportation, the legend of the lobsters turning into crawfish: Alors qu’ils traversent l’océan à la suite du Grand Déplacement, la vie est tellement dure pour les homards qu’ils rapetissent. Ils ne trouvent jamais assez à manger. Et donc, ceux qui se retrouvent en Louisiane, à cause des difficultés du voyage, sont devenus beaucoup plus petit. On finit par les appeler les ‘écrevisses.’ (Richard, L’Histoire 71)

years of misery, she travels all the way back to Acadia with her cart and a large following of Acadians.

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It is worth noting that Hermance calls the incident “Grand Déplacement” which undoubtedly constitutes a reference to the historical Grand Dérangement of the Acadians.²⁹ Yet not only the name shows a parallel to the event of the expulsion, but the event itself as well. A band of lobsters, vagabonding in the Gulf of Mexico, goes in search of a home and arrives in Louisiana. They see the beautiful land where nobody eats lobster. So they send messages to all other scattered lobster communities and tell them to join them in Louisiana. Clearly, the legend reinvents the past, recalling the Grand Dérangement and the difficulties the Acadians had to face. Through this story—another myth—the past is made present, and a link to the Cajuns’ land of origin, Canada, is created. Hermance closes his story by saying that “Maintenant, ici, ce n’est plus la Homardie, sauf dans nos cœurs. On appelle ce pays le Nouveau-Brunswick et, au Nouveau-Brunswick, on mange des homards” (Richard, L’Histoire 71). Life for the lobsters is still difficult. Like Acadia, Homardie has ceased to exist for the lobsters, but the mental image of it persists and connects them, just as the idea of Acadia links the scattered Acadian descendants. The tale then presents a double displacement: ‘Tit Edvard’s and Télesphore’s own displacement and the reference to the dispersal of the lobsters, which parallels the Grand Dérangement. The meeting with the lobsters signifies a pivotal moment in ‘Tit Edvard’s life. He realizes how important the past is, especially the knowledge about his own family: Ils se rend compte à quel point les écrevisses en Louisiane ont perdu la mémoire de leurs origines. Inspiré par l’histoire de la Homardie et plein d’une nouvelle fierté, il décide de travailler désormais à la sauvegarde de la culture des écrevisses en Louisiane et de raconter l’histoire de la Homardie à tout le monde et particulièrement à ses congénères. (Richard, L’Histoire 71)

‘Tit Edvard can be seen as Richard’s mouthpiece, and his awakening corresponds to Richard’s awakening to his Acadian ancestry. Richard fulfills the duty of commemorating and preserving the memory of the Cajuns and their Acadian history by writing down and thus fixing this particular part of Cajun history in the tales. Just as for ‘Tit Edvard, it was indeed a quasi “life-enhancing return” for Richard.³⁰  Déplacement is less strong than Dérangement. Richard might have had “displacement” in mind when writing Grand Déplacement.  “[T]he adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit above described: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return” (Campbell 35).

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The third tale develops the diasporic leitmotif even further, for it is a veritable reenactment of the Acadian tragedy. Together with other crawfish, ‘Tit Edvard and Telesphore are captured and put on-board a ship bound for France. They experience their very own dérangement. Yet the deportation does not exactly correspond to the real Grand Dérangement, for although Acadian families were transported to France, they were not captured in Louisiana. By now, the motif of the capture of Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard, and their powerlessness can be considered a constitutive element in the opening of Richard’s tales. It is Télesphore who realizes what is happening to them: “Il a compris que lui et son ami ont été pris de force pour être exilés de leur pays” (Richard, Aventures 17). There follows an arduous journey in the belly of the ship, which echoes the deportation of hundreds of Acadians to various places. The reenactment of the dispersal is accompanied by the reiteration of the lobsters’ tragic fate ‘Tit Edvard learned from Hermance in the second tale. The little crawfish uses every opportunity to tell his ancestors’ story. Like a ritual, the exile experience is repeated several times by both ‘Tit Edvard, who recounts his story to Claude, and Télesphore, who tries to win over the rats (Richard, Aventures 93). This reiteration is a means of commemorating and preserving the memory of the Acadians, and it illustrates how the Grand Dérangement functions as a myth. The memory of the event is “hot,” as it refers to the past creating a self-image which projects future hopes and intentions through narrative: Hot memory not only measures out the past, as an instrument of chronological orientation and control, but it also uses past references to create a self-image and to provide support for hopes and for intentions. This is called myth. The most preferred form is narrative. (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 62)

Through the variations, both the myth and the memory of the event are kept alive. The Acadian past has, therefore, to use J. Assmann’s terms, both a “foundational” and “contrapresent” function, foundational because the present becomes meaningful and unchangeable, and contrapresent because it shows the break between then and now (J. Assmann, Cultural Memory 62). Myth as something untrue and doubtful and, therefore, belonging to the realm of fiction or invention is capitalized on to legitimize the Cajuns’ existence. Against this backdrop, the lobster-turned-crawfish legend and Richard’s tales can be considered as counter-narratives not just to the American myth of the Pilgrim Fathers, but also to the Evangeline myth, invented by a New Englander who had never been to either Nova Scotia or Louisiana. In retelling the hardships and overseas trip of the crawfish, the Acadian exile experience gains a

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heroic dimension. The trilogy is clearly driven by the wish to bring the Acadian past back into the Cajun consciousness and affectively connect to it.

7.2.3 The Question of Legacy: Empty Past versus Usable Past Ancestry plays just as important a role as individual and collective life-changing events. As another harbinger of the massive interest in memory, genealogical research facilitates the knowledge of the past and the remembrance of family ties. Names, especially, indicate genealogical relatedness. The presentation of the lobsters in the second tale, for instance, is a veritable inventory of Acadian last names: “Je m’appelle Hermance Le Homard, et voici mes cousins et cousines, les Maillet, les Comeau, les Arseneau, les Doiron, les Leblanc, les Boudreau, les Cormier, les Landry, les Poirier, les Savoy, les Pitre” (Richard, L’Histoire 69). Of course, all these names are also found in Louisiana, which reveals that ‘Tit Edvard is related to the lobsters: “[I]ls sont aussi [les] cousins et cousines [de ‘Tit Edvard]” (Richard, L’Histoire 69). The importance of genealogy also figures in the third tale. Upon meeting Panzer Thibodeaux, ‘Tit Edvard introduces himself by listing first the names of his paternal ancestors and then the names of his maternal ancestors: “Je suis Edvard à Oscar à Balthézar à Onézard à Fétard à Couchetard à Abuchednazar Boudreaux. … [et ma mère est] Geneviève à Giguère à Meunière à Éclair à Finistère à Funiculaire à Tonnerre Thibodeau” (Richard, Aventures 21). The enumeration of random names which are connected through their end rhymes produces a humorous moment. They are also evidence of the strong familial ties, naturally triggering interest in genealogy, which has come to define the Cajun memory discourse: “En Louisiane, on est connu à travers sa famille. Tout le monde est le fils ou la fille de quelqu’un. Les vieux peuvent même retracer leur parenté jusqu’au dixième degré” (Richard, Aventures 21). The theme of genealogy reaches its climax with the investigation of the French heritage of the crawfish, which echoes the circumstances of the French colonists’ departure for the New World. During their research, Claude and Télesphore notice that the crawfish are suddenly no longer listed in the documents of the Assemblée even though they were members four hundred years ago, a telling number of years: “Dans les archives, les écrevisses … sont membres [de l’AGFE], mais soudainement, en 1632, elles disparaissent de la documentation. Alors le siège des écrevisses à l’Assemblée est resté vide depuis presque quatre cents ans” (Richard, Aventures 66). 1632, the year the crawfish are said to have disappeared from France, functions as a key date, for it is in that year that Acadia and Canada became French once more through the treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye,

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and that the French colonists began to migrate to Acadia (B. Arseneault 25; Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 3). When Télesphore returns with the mandatory documents, it is such an exploit that Claude compares Télesphore’s findings to the discovery of the Holy Grail. The papers include lists with the family names of the crawfish—which are also Acadian/Cajun family names, understandably—and thus prove the kinship between the crawfish from Louisiana and the crawfish from France: C’est incroyable! Le nom de Tonnerre Thibeaudeault figure souvent, mais il y en a plein d’autres: Thériault, Arseneau, Granger, Trahan, Landry, LeBlanc, Hébert, Cormier, Comeau, Richard, Pitre, Poirier, Dugas, Boudrot, Babineau, Bourque, Bourgeois, Bastarache, Benoît, Gautreau, Dupuy, Daigle, Doiron et j’en passe. Ces papiers, Télesphore, sont l’histoire de toute une communauté, quasiment toutes les écrevisses de France. Ces papiers présentent une image précise de ce qui c’est passé: les écrevisses quittant la France pour partir vers un nouveau monde. (Richard, Aventures 106)

Télesphore’s success is the second panel to the diptych of the recovery of roots of the crawfish, which started in L’Histoire de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard dans le grand Nord. The search for documented sources about the origin of the crawfish can be read as a metacritical reference to the Cajuns’ awakening. The allegory of the Cajuns’ early history builds upon their founding myth already narrated in part two and extends it by the reference to the French origin, more distant in time. Richard uses historical material about the Acadian deportation and adds the reference to the French past of the Acadians to complete the picture of the Cajun genesis. The experience of displacement becomes a memory narrative as it is again a foil for emphasizing the founding myth of the Cajuns. Thus, the narrative returns to the echo of the theme of migration several times: to the historical event, to the first tale, and to the second tale. Richard expands the theme of memory with the character of Lucy Madame La Testuda, a turtle commonly called “la Mémoire Verte,” the “Green Memory.” As her name indicates, she embodies memory and is, in fact, a living archive. Her existence is a secret known only to a few turtles. The other animals speak reverently of her and, as a highly respected authority, she also seems to be very intimidating. Casimire, the turtle who takes in Télesphore upon his becoming a refugee, asks: [A]s-tu déjà entendu parler de la ‘Mémoire Verte?’ … . La ‘Mémoire Verte’ est le pseudonyme de la Testuda. … Une tortue vieille de plusieurs siècles. Elle possède une mémoire extraordinaire. Elle vit depuis très, très longtemps et se rappelle tout ce qui s’est passé dans sa vie, et même avant, l’ayant appris des aïeux. Elle peut tracer avec certitude la généalogie de tous les animaux dans cette partie du monde. En plus, elle est reconnue comme ‘trésor faunique’ par l’AGFE, et son témoignage a déjà été admis devant la Cour suprême. … Mais at-

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tention, elle habite dans une zone très isolée et le voyage est hasardeux. En plus, elle ne reçoit pas tout le monde. Elle a une sacrée réputation de sauvage. (Richard, Aventures 70)

Lucy, a name evoking the qualities of light, sight, and wisdom, recalls L’Araignée Arc-en-Ciel in the first tale. As in the first tale, Télesphore goes in search of the solution to a problem. He travels to Lucy in order to regain the missing information about the whereabouts of the French crawfish of 1632. Lucy lives alone in a cavern on the crest of a hill, fleeing the brutalities of the world. She likes her solitary life, far away from conflicts and wars. However, seeing Télesphore, she is charmed and wants to know everything about Louisiana, this exotic land (Richard, Aventures 74). Although La Testuda symbolizes the ultimate guardian of memory, she lacks the knowledge about Louisiana, which Télesphore willingly shares with her. With respect to the French crawfish, she remembers the time they existed, but she cannot be of more assistance to Télesphore. The encounter with Télesphore causes La Testuda to reflect on her situation. The fact that La Testuda lives a secluded life and does not disseminate her knowledge is not conducive to maintaining memory. Moreover, she realizes that with her disappearance, the transmission of collective memory is not ensured any longer, so she needs a worthy successor, and Télesphore is her chosen candidate: [J]e voudrais vous parler franchement. Je suis vieille, et mes bonnes années sont derrière moi… Je ne connais pas mon âge. C’est la seule chose dont je ne me souvienne pas. Mais je sais que mon temps sur cette terre tire à sa fin. Il faut que je trouve un apprenti, une tortue à qui je puisse transmettre tout mon savoir et qui pourra continuer la mémoire des animaux. J’aimerais que cette tortue, ce soit vous. (Richard, Aventures 78)

Yet Télesphore declines. He has another task to fulfill. The scene of the turtle La Testuda represents the first explicit discourse about memory (and its loss when transmission is interrupted) and the Cajuns’ awakening to the question of the transmission of memories. What unites the three tales is the entangled histories of Louisiana, Canada, and France. A journey back in time and to the origins of the community, the narrated displacements become redemptive moments, moments for the recovery of roots. As literary texts, they “exemplify the fact that memorial dynamics do not just work in a linear or accumulative way. Instead, they progress through all sorts of loopings back to cultural products that are not simply media of memory (relay stations and catalysts) but also objects of recall and revision” (Rigney, “Dynamics” 352). Interestingly, the stories still revolve around Cajun culture, with Louisiana acting as an anchor, but the changing settings and the historical diasporic element add a distinct transnational note. Yet Richard’s message is not just to

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remember the past. In introducing other, more universal themes, he endows the tradition of the Cajun tale with a new twist. These themes include universal values such as mutual assistance, tolerance toward the Other, and the preservation of nature. Memories of expulsion and diaspora can, for instance, enable other discourses of such memories.

7.3 Transnational Echoes and Trajectories Migration not only strengthens the link to the home culture through the memory of landscape, language, and the past. It transforms a culture as foreign elements are incorporated. While Richard’s tales are portrayals of transnational migrations, they also reveal influences from other cultures. Transnationalism, according to transcultural scholar Rocío Davis, is a “creative practice” which exemplifies “how cultures circulate through particular products … and become emblems of evolving ways of perceiving the United States and its cultures from within and outside the country.” The lack of a written tradition notwithstanding, Cajun authors have created one of their own based on oral traditions. Given that Louisiana presents a rich transcultural reservoir of various folktale traditions such as animal tales, magical tales, or supernatural tales (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales xxv), it is not surprising that Richard’s tales display a certain affinity for the folktale. Furthermore, Cajun writers have been inspired by French and American literature, and they have used familiar works as templates. An innovative literary mixture, the tales disclose a transnational Cajun voice. This is nowhere more evident than in the use of intertextual references. Borrowings from European literary traditions, from African or Native American mythologies, or allusions to particular historical events, identify the tales as transnational—and transcultural—tales. The animal characters inevitably recall the canonical fables by the Greek poet Aesop, made available to the French public by the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine. Although not immediately related to “The Ant and the Grasshopper” (La Fontaine 25), the character of the cicada in the first tale is a distant echo of that fable. The almost blind and slightly hard-ofhearing cicada whom the companions meet, shrugs them off with an impolite and indifferent retort: “je ne peux pas vous aider, même si je le voulais, et je ne veux pas. … Laissez-moi tranquille. Allez-vous-en” (Richard, Conte 22). His tendency to trade, as we know from the fable, shines through when the cicada readily accepts Télesphore’s magnanimous offer to give his eyes in return for showing them the way out of the oak forest. Additionally, the animal tale unites characteristics of other genres. The supernatural element of the Pascal story puts the tale into the tall tale or science

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fiction genre. Other elements recall the Voltairian philosophical tale. “Je ne vois pas avec mes yeux, mais avec mon cœur” (Richard, Conte 38) is one of Télesphore’s profound observations about life and human nature. Strikingly, his statement resembles the fox’s words in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, which have become a famous aphorism: “On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux” (Saint-Exupéry 72). Considering that Saint-Exupéry’s novella was first published in both French and English in New York in 1943 to much critical acclaim,³¹ it stands as a classic for both the Americans and the French. Conte cajun resembles in many ways this latter tale, which also conveys a philosophical message, has speaking animals, and fantastic elements. With ‘Tit Edvard sitting high up on Télesphore’s back during the whole journey, the crawfish is like the Little Prince on his small planet. Another similarity emerges when Télesphore selflessly takes the blame for the quest’s failure on himself. He promised ‘Tit Edvard to find the claw and, therefore, considers himself responsible for the successful outcome of the venture. This echoes the fox’s words to the Little Prince: “Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé” (Saint-Exupéry 74). Télesphore also takes responsibility for his friends through the process of naming them. He first gives a name to the terrified crawfish, Edvard, and then names the toad “Jolicœur.” Yet Conte cajun is more than an intertextual mixture of European tales, for it includes references to tales of other ethnic origins as well. This hybrid nature is especially visible in the choice of characters as they unite characteristics of African and Native American folktales. Télesphore, for instance, can be considered a universal symbol since the turtle figures in mythologies of many other peoples. Famous in Europe thanks to the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare” (La Fontaine 139 – 140), in which the wisdom and the patience of the turtle make up for its slowness, the turtle is also reminiscent of Uncle Remus’s tales, of African origin and published by Joel Chandler Harris in 1881, in which Brer Terrapin, the trickster, outwits other animal characters. Moreover, the turtle plays a fundamental role in Native American folklore, especially in creation myths which present the turtle carrying the world on its back.³² The very beginning of Conte cajun resembles such a myth when Télesphore appears from the waters and rescues ‘Tit Edvard in taking him on his back: “[U]ne tortue paraît dans l’eau à côté de l’écrevisse. … Et tout bonnement, la petite écrevisse se trouve par-dessus la tortue … en plein sur son dos” (Richard, Conte 9). Télesphore symbolizes strength and

 Le Petit Prince appeared in France only in 1946 (Rothstein).  The Iroquois, for instance, tell the story of Great Turtle carrying the earth after the Earth Diver toad brought it up from the waters (Werness 412– 413; Stookey 7, 15).

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acts as the savior throughout the three tales. He takes responsibility for helpless ‘Tit Edvard; for the frogs—first an irritable bunch, but then tamed and turned into fearless accomplices; and for the grasshopper couple, very self-centered at first, but then guiding him, after he has given his eyes to the cicada. Carrying the burden of the quest, both literally and figuratively, the turtle ensures the safety of the fellowship. Conte cajun also includes elements reminiscent of other types of tales such as the Märchen. The scene of the spider l’Araignée Arc-en-ciel with magical powers clearly draws on the fairy tale. The spider’s web has the colors of the rainbow and bedazzles the eight friends. They are blinded by the spider’s shining beauty. This magician, “le plus grand magicien du pays” (Richard, Conte 23), whom Mme La Sauterelle thinks to be a king, is supposed to know how to get ‘Tit Edvard’s claw back, but he has to disappoint the fellowship. While frogs and turtles also appear in Caribbean folktales, the spider, an important character in African and Caribbean oral traditions, holds an exceptional position in the tale. For, despite French Louisiana’s obvious cultural connection with the West Indies, the spider, called Anansi, is unknown among Cajun folktales (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 185). Folklorists have noted “the absence—in South Louisiana as elsewhere in the United States—of the malicious spider, an important character in African and Caribbean oral tradition” (Ancelet, Cajun and Creole Folktales xxix – xxx). Without doubt, the motif of the spider in Richard’s tales is taken from Caribbean Anansi folktales. In West Africa, home of the spider in folktales, the Akan speakers consider the spider a trickster, a “spinner of doubleness” which “embodies the paradox of the threshold, as that which is ‘neither this or that, and yet is both’” (Werness 387). L’Araignée Arc-en-ciel is not malicious, but still awe-inspiring to the company of animals, as they fear that they might be manipulated—another feature ascribed to spiders in folklore. With its shimmering rays, l’Araignée Arc-en-ciel does act as a powerful solar symbol. Spiders are also connected with weaving and weavers (Werness 385). The little spider the group encounters in the chenier tells them which way to take toward the north. Later, they meet L’Araignée Arc-en-ciel, who recommends them to find the snake which walks on legs, the alligator. With the help of the spiders, the journey’s path is woven. Despite the failure of the quest, there is still a happy ending to the tale. After arriving safe and sound, the tale ends with the sentence “[Télesphore] et Edvard sont restés ensemble jusqu’à la fin de leurs jours” (Richard, Conte 46), which echoes the stock phrase in fairy tales “and they lived happily ever after.” Furthermore, Richard interweaves his narrative with events and references from other nations and cultures, which, at first glance, cannot be directly associated with Cajun culture. It is essentially his third tale which reveals transnational allusions, for instance, to French collective memory. After their escape,

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the group of crawfish and the rooster live in the “maquis,” a term which, in World War II, referred to a remote place where the French Résistance fighters, the so-called maquisards or résistants to the German occupation, gathered (“maquis”). Similarly, the animals hide in the woods, traveling only during the night and avoiding farms. Télesphore, too, is guided through the maquis for his dangerous and secret undertaking of proving the French ancestry of the crawfish. His guides are fellow turtles who are members of an underground organization and are only known by pseudonyms (Richard, Aventures 84). Each night another turtle guide gets in contact with Télesphore and leads him through the maquis, which evokes the atmosphere of a difficult and clandestine mission. The intertext of World War II also occurs in another instance. When the hiding crawfish are caught by a wildlife patrol and brought to the refugee camp, the password one of the guards utters to enter the camp is “Jean Moulin” (Richard, Aventures 51). Jean Moulin, a French politician during the first half of the twentieth century, entered the French national memory because of his activities as the chief of the Conseil national de la Résistance, which caused his arrest and torture by the Gestapo. Moulin died during his transfer to Germany after being captured by the SS in 1943, which ultimately made him a hero (“Jean Moulin”). It is not without reason that Richard refers to World War II. It was then that the American army realized the crucial asset of the Cajuns’ linguistic abilities (Bernard, Cajuns 9). In turn, “[t]he war exerted a profound influence on Cajun GIs, giving them a new sense of national identity” (Bernard, Cajuns 11). In the last decades, scholars have shown a growing interest in the role of Cajun GIs in World War II who served in France, Belgium, North Africa, and Southeast Asia, or joined the resistance movement against Germany. Cajun GIs served as translators in Europe, acted as secret agents of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to liaison with the French resistance, or to function as intelligence officers. Referring to Pat Mire’s World War II movie Mon Cher Camarade, which explores the role of Cajun GIs during the war through interviews with Cajun veterans, Carl A. Brasseaux explains that “Cajun translators were as important to the American war effort as the much acclaimed Native American ‘Code Talkers’” (Engelbrecht). Similarly, Télesphore’s abilities as an interpreter —he knows both the animal and human languages—are crucial to the tale’s positive outcome, and identify him as the tales’ mediator: “Télesphore parle beaucoup de langues et comprend un peu le parler des êtres humains. … En plus de comprendre plusieurs langues animales, il sait interpréter les signes parlants des êtres humains, ce qu’ils appellent des lettres” (Richard, Aventures 29 – 30). Thus, Richard stresses bilingualism as the Cajuns’ consequential resource and as important identity marker.

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Although the third tale’s setting, France, has a meaningful role, it seems that it is not France as such which Richard has in mind. Instead, Europe, embodied by the Assemblée générale de la faune Européene, seems to illustrate an exemplary vision of tolerance and solidarity. Indeed, it might be a good blueprint for the Francophonie. During the Assemblée générale de la faune Européene, the crawfish are not saved by the sources documenting their French ancestry, but by a hint of the judges, three boars. The book Lois obscures dont personne ne se sert mentions the law corpus es qui: Dans le cas où un siège appartenant à une espèce reconnue à l’Assemblée Générale de la faune européenne reste vide pendant une période de plus de cent ans, une communauté de la même espèce a le droit de réclamer ledit siège en vertu de sa présence sur le sol européen. Corpus es qui: le corps est ici. (Richard, Aventures 121)

Where the body is, and the relation to ancestors, the land can be claimed. This little episode gains particular significance in light of the tradition of land seizures in the history of the Acadians and Cajuns such as the Grand Dérangement as well as the case of Kouchibouguac (see chapter 5.2.3). Other allusions situate the tales in a postcolonial context. The very promising “A suivre…” at the end of the third tale indicates that this is not ‘Tit Edvard’s and Télésphore’s last adventure. The crawfish and the two friends pine for their home in Louisiana, but the return trip via ship in winter would prove too hazardous. It is Jacques Cocorichaud who presents them with a solution. The ringdoves are getting ready for their migration to Africa, and they are willing to take the company with them. Will there be a fourth tale set in Africa, exploring the African influence in Cajun culture? In any case, the African trajectory already exists subliminally in the trilogy. The black ravens, whom the two friends chance upon in the second tale, point out how they are discriminated against because of their black plumage. The story thus inevitably compares the ravens’ situation to the racial discrimination of colored people. It is, however, in the last tale that the postcolonial context is most apparent. Indeed, ‘Tit Edward’s and Télesphore’s wanderings from North America to Europe, and, for that matter, the Cajuns’ wanderings between Europe and North America, are portrayals of, to use the image by British historian Paul Gilroy, transatlantic routes (Black Atlantic). More specifically, the crawfish company’s passage to France via ship does not only revisit the Acadian deportation. The scene of the animals jammed in the bilge of the ship is reminiscent of the Middle Passage of the slave trade³³:  Carl A. Brasseaux also draws this parallel (French 58).

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Au fond de la cage en métal, elles sont tassées les unes sur les autres. Télesphore, quant à lui, est coincé, sa carapace immobilisée tellement le plafond est bas. Le silence est incommensurable. On n’entend que la respiration des écrevisses. Ce petit bruit à peine audible s’amplifie jusqu’à devenir immense, le son se répercutant contre les murs métalliques de la pièce pour finir par se transformer en une cacophonie énorme, comme le fracas d’une avalanche de pierres. (Richard, Aventures 18)

Additionally, the cruel treatment, the heat, and the lack of fresh air contribute to the parallel (Richard, Aventures 18). Regarding the Acadians and the African slaves, the circumstances of the capture, the transitional state during the passage, as well as their subsequent mistreatment suggest a comparison. In Richard’s tale, then, there is a two-way traffic between the past—the Grand Dérangement and the Middle Passage—and the present—the capture of Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard. Furthermore, when the company of crawfish escapes prison in La Rochelle and takes to the woods, they start to live a “vie marron” (Richard, Aventures 48). Marron, maroon in English, comes from cimarròn, a Spanish expression for “feral animal,” a domestic animal which has returned to the wild. By extension, it was used to refer to fugitive slaves during the colonial period in the American South. Today, the French expression means “to live like a vagabond” (Richard, Aventures 154). Even though these details indicate the convergence of the diasporic history of the Cajuns with that of the descendants of African slaves, it is imperative to contrast the scale and magnitude of the two events. The Atlantic Slave Trade spanned four centuries during which more than 12 million Africans were enslaved and up to two million Africans died during the Middle Passage. As a matter of fact, Richard aligns himself with postcolonial writers such as Martinican Aimé Césaire (Richard, “Zachary Richard”). During his years of militancy in the 1970s, Richard and other young Cajuns advocated what was called Cadienitude,³⁴ in the style of Césaire’s term Négritude. ³⁵ On the one hand, Cadienitude stood for the preservation of the history, language, and culture of the Cajuns and the sharing of the heritage of the Acadian diaspora (Waggoner, “‘Separate’” 162). On the other hand, it was a protest against the stereotyping and the discrimination the Cajuns had been subjected to since the end of the Civil War. The concept aimed at rehabilitating the Cajuns’ self-image and advocated the  “Cadjinitude” is an alternative spelling (Bernard, Cajuns 72).  The Négritude movement was initiated in Paris in the 1930s by a group of French-speaking African and Caribbean students, notably Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon-Gontran Damas. They championed anti-colonialism, anti-racism, the return to the roots, and a renewed pride in African heritage.

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self-affirmation of the Cajuns in order to develop a Cajun identity.³⁶ Richard also uses Césaire’s words to explain his cultural schizophrenia.³⁷ Similarly, scholars juxtaposed the role and impact of Richard’s first poetry collection to the first poems written in the 1930s by Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Sédar Senghor (Pallister, “Departures” 19).³⁸ The postcolonial background in Richard’s tales serves, then, to assert Cajun identity with its francophone heritage in the midst of a dominant Anglo-American society. Considering the third tale’s ending, one thing seems certain: The Cajun-Acadian-French connection will be complemented by the African connection, offering an even more comprehensive picture of Cajun culture.³⁹ ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore will discover a new country with francophone cultures and continue to spread their knowledge about Cajun culture in their function as cultural ambassadors.

7.4 Conclusion Richard’s three tales show plainly the malleability so typical of Cajun culture. The multiple migrations and the transgressions of boundaries identify the circu-

 The movement soon declined and has not been rekindled. The rehabilitation of Cajun identity was largely the result of the less radical Cajun Renaissance.  In an interview (and also on his webpage), Richad refers to an image Aimé Césaire supposedly used to explain Creole identity: To lose or choose between one of the languages, French or English, would be like cutting off one of his hands. Bilingualism is the prerequisite of Cajun culture. It is impossible to do without French or English (Le Moal).  Senghor’s poems were later compiled in the poetry collections Chants d’ombre (1945) and Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1937). The comparison can be extended to the poetry collection Pigments (1937) by poet and politician Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana which shows the humiliating effect of assimilation and criticizes forced acculturation. The juxtaposition of Richard’s tales to the folktales written by Senegalese poet and storyteller Birago Diop, one of the lesser-known protagonists of the Négritude, deserves closer attention. In his tales Les contes d’Amadou Koumba (1947) and Les nouveaux contes d’Amadou Koumba (1958), Diop mixes the oral traditions with modern forms of storytelling, giving thus insight into the African oral tradition and providing African writers a written model they could turn to. Like Richard’s tales, Diop’s tales represent the first endeavor to render oral African tales into a written form. Special thanks to Professor Véronique Porra for this reference.  The experience of the odyssey is obviously a common intersection of the -itude movements such as Négritude, Cadienitude, and coolitude. Mauritian cultural theorist Khal Torabully, who coined “coolitude,” argues that “[i]t is impossible to understand the essence of ‘coolitude’ without charting the coolies’ voyage across the seas. That decisive experience, that coolie odyssey, left an indelible stamp on the imaginary landscape of coolitude” (“The Coolies’ Odyssey” 13).

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lar dynamics of both literature and memory. Considering the characters’ own displacements and the references to, or mise en abîme of, an event which bears a striking resemblance to the Grand Dérangement, there is no doubt that the tales allegorize the Acadians’ expulsion. As such, they are a good example of “palimpsestic itineraries of migration” (R. G. Davis 3). With Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard, the reader travels both to different places—from Louisiana, to Canada, to France—and also back in time—from the contemporary setting to the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this imaginary Acadian triangle of Acadiana-Acadia-France, the Acadian diaspora is reunited. Considering that “[r]egions are not so much places themselves but ways of describing relationships among places” (Powell 10), the concept of “migrating literature,” as explored in Richard’s three tales, illustrates the contemporary interplay of the regional and transnational. In reenacting the past, Richard’s three tales portray a geo-cultural space where the cultures of the Cajuns, the French-Canadians, and the French meet, and they display “regional writing’s strategy of protecting local identities by preserving them in literature” (Foote 4). Richard’s three tales stand as an early written Cajun fictional narrative in French. In all three tales, the plot is driven by the quest for a distinctive element. The first tale’s primordial quest motif refers to the construction of a personal identity. The quest for home and community defines the second tale. The third tale presents the quest of the past, i. e., the genealogical search. In the end, all three tales thematize the search for home and belonging. The leitmotif of the quest undoubtedly allegorizes the Cajun’s very own history and their quest for identity, home, the past, and belonging. Like Homeric echoes, Richard’s tales portray a veritable rite of return, a return home and a return to the past. Each tale reinvents the expulsion story. In Conte cajun, the adventurous quest of the eight companions who fail to find the lost claw but learn the importance of friendship and community foregrounds a process of identity formation. It is the story of finding a self and finding one’s place in the world. In a way, the fellowship’s perilous pilgrimage exemplifies the journey to their inner selves. Yet it also hints at the theme of the Acadian diaspora. As if drawn by some imaginary force, the animals travel back in the direction of Acadia. The second tale deals with the Grand Dérangement more concretely. Télésphore’s and Tit Edvard’s flight is a reversed allegory of the displacement of the Acadians. The explicit narration of the lobsters’ Grand déplacement finally establishes a concrete link to the Acadians’ tragic history. The third tale further develops the theme of the Grand Dérangement as it re-enacts the Acadians’ deportation with the capture of the crawfish and their subsequent transport to France by boat. The two friends’ very own dérangement differs from the original Grand Dérangement in that the point of departure is not Acadia, but Louisiana.

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Still, they land in France, like the thousands of Acadians who were deported and brought to France between 1755 and 1763. Indeed, the friends’ journeys resemble the Acadians’ journey in many respects, and Richard’s narratives not only remind the reader of the Grand Dérangement, but they also fix this memory in some way. Richard pens his own allegory of the Acadian dispersal, which is a means to uphold the collective memory of the Cajuns. As a warden of the past, he finds a way to commemorate and preserve the history and traditions of the Cajuns through his three tales. The tales present manifold transnational journeys also from a narratological point of view. The animals’ migrations figure on the narrative level. On the referential level, the allegory of the Acadian expulsion represents the historical event. Lastly, the genre of the tale migrated from the European continent to the North American continent; and the three tales traveled from Louisiana to Canada for their publication. The detour via Montreal testifies to the French presence in Louisiana and ensures, to a certain degree, the preservation of French in Louisiana. As Richard’s genuine creation, the tales stand at the juncture between the oral and the more recent written tradition in Cajun literature. Visibly, folktale elements from such oral traditions as Native American culture, African culture, European culture, or even Pascal stories still have a function for the Cajun community: The tale preserves those elements which fulfill a function in the community (Bastide, Religions 339). While the connection of Richard’s tales to the folktale tradition suggests a treasure trove for research on Cajun culture, it also ensures the preservation of that tradition through its written fixation. More importantly, the tales create a distinct Cajun literary space within the larger literary spaces of Louisiana literature, multicultural American literature, Acadian literature, and Francophone literature. Considering the few French-speaking Cajun prose writings in Louisiana, Richard’s tales could well fill the void regarding French prose in Louisiana, as they are far more than traditional folktales. They present a number of familiar characteristics of the genre of the tale: Features of animal tales, magical tales and philosophical tales are mixed, and it seems that they may well be the first template for a Cajun tale.⁴⁰ Using the animal-tale/magical-tale/philosophical-tale mix as a backdrop, Richard spices up the genre by composing a typically Cajun tale. He does not simply imitate familiar material but transforms and adapts it into something new. This conscious process of bards and storytellers, who “frankly embroider or improvise the facts to heighten the dramatic import of the story,” is typical of oral

 Indeed, the title Conte cajun is missing the indefinite article one would expect. Thus, it can be considered as the first Cajun tale.

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traditions (Carl L. Becker, “Everyman” 231). In reconnecting the Louisiana hybrid folktale tradition with present and past cultural elements of France and Canada in his narrative discourse, Richard creates a hybrid Cajun narrative. Thus, he not only continues but also reinvents the storytelling traditions of Louisiana. Similarly, Cajun musicians have been adapting and recycling their music—using the same lyrics to new tunes and composing new tunes to familiar lyrics. It is no coincidence that most of the Cajun authors have been playing Cajun music. After all, storytelling and music have a strong connection through their oral origins: The “ancient oral tradition also constantly adapts and updates itself to remain vital, producing jokes, tall tales, and legends that reflect local and contemporary realities and act as social and psychological barometers” (Ancelet, “Mainstream” 1249). Richard’s tales serve as social and psychological barometers, too. The fight against discrimination and the value of friendship are two of the moral themes Richard addresses. The third tale is the most political of the three tales. Richard also speaks for a more tolerant view concerning foreigners. Both the crawfish and the turtle possess exceptional gifts in the sense that ‘Tit Edvard is fearless and altruistic, whereas Télesphore is very wise, has an acute sense of hearing, and is a polyglot. As outcasts yet gifted animals, Télesphore and ‘Tit Edvard correspond to the “composite hero of the monomyth [who] is a personage of exceptional gifts. Frequently, he is honored by his society, frequently unrecognized or disdained. He and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolical deficiency” (Campbell 37). Both animals experience intolerance and discrimination because of their deficiencies and Otherness. At first, they are slighted by the animals they meet, but before long, the two become heroes. In the third tale especially, Télesphore is called various names—Télescope, Téleton, Télechose, Téleshopping, Télésport, Speedo—, all making fun of his characteristic slowness or the sound of his name. The various nicknames and insults echo the denigration of the Cajuns, for they, too, have been given monikers such as Coonass, Coonie (the polite version of Coonass), or Frenchie Frog. Télesphore’s status of political refugee makes his minority status even more apparent. As to the crawfish, they are not acknowledged, for they do not figure on the list of political refugees and thus have still to legitimize their existence— like the Cajuns. Considered as a whole, the three tales present the psychological and moral growth of several characters. ‘Tit Edvard, for example, becomes more confident (Richard, Aventures 47). In fact, the exile experience changes his character and contributes to his understanding and becoming more tolerant toward Otherness. Aside from the geographic and cultural, even iconic, references to Cajun Country and its culture, Richard’s tales reveal ecological precepts. The prepon-

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derance, or even reverence, of nature in the tales is striking: Animals are the protagonists, and urban settings are almost non-existent. Richard had already been anxious to raise an ecological awareness in his music, and his tales follow suit. Especially in light of hurricanes, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the endangered wetlands, the appeal to save the environment becomes more urgent than ever. Against this background, the speech of the animal assembly at the end of the third tale regarding the solidarity with nature and wildlife is a message addressed to the human world community: “Nous faisons face à des défis considérables. La perte d’habitat et l’empiètement de l’espèce humaine sur notre territoire nous posent de grands problèmes” (Richard, Aventures 130). In raising awareness of the endangered future of nature, the tales reveal a universallyminded future-oriented view. Richard has never forsaken his American roots. On the contrary, he cherishes and celebrates the regional culture of Southwest Louisiana more than ever: “Dans cet esprit de régionalisme, je me suis identifié avec William Faulkner. C’est-à-dire un auteur qui s’adresse à tout le monde, mais qui parle d’un petit coin de pays dans le nord du Mississippi. Il ne parle que de ça. Toute sa fiction est ancrée dans un petit carré de pays. Donc, ce que je voulais faire, c’était l’équivalent de ça” (Amédée and Brûlé 198). Richard’s achievement of creating “[u]n univers musical qui parlait à tout homme, mais qui était enraciné dans le sud de la Louisiane” (Amédée and Brûlé 198) can be extended to his narrative universe. What is more, the francophone background of Louisiana, which borders the Caribbean, produces a Franco-American-Caribbean connection. It becomes clear, however, that Richard has long left his little square of a country. Even if the connection to the local is never lost, the transnational becomes more apparent with each tale. As the tales progress, there is a certain realignment, a shift away from Southwest Louisiana to other places which turn out to be important because of their historical and cultural connections to Cajun culture. In reinventing the tragedy of the Acadians from a Cajun perspective and including the lobster-turned-crawfish legend, Richard participates in the dissemination and preservation of the Acadian memory, and thus in the endurance of imaginary Acadia. Notwithstanding the unifying theme of the quest for the common good, the trilogy evolves from a regional to a transnational outlook. The allegorical narrative develops from the identity quest and the preservation of Cajun culture to a quest for the lost past and the preservation of Acadian memory, to the quest for belonging and the preservation of the environment. In crossing multiple boundaries, Zachary Richard not only strengthens the link between the two Acadias, l’Acadie du nord and l’Acadie du sud, and France; he also creates a francophone Cajun prose narrative: The echo of the tales, coming from the allegedly silent voice of francophone Cajun Country, bounces off

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Canada and back to Louisiana. The tales express the necessity of turning toward the wider francophone world for the preservation of Cajun culture, as the links established with Canada, France, and beyond show. The allusions to other discriminated minorities elicit parallels to similar tragedies, such as the Middle Passage, the Jewish diaspora, or the Trail of Tears. Understandably, mostly francophone Cajun writers draw on these analogies since they require the persuasive power of a joint minority community to defend their own marginalized francophone culture. Ultimately, it becomes clear that Richard’s notion of francophonie involves more than just the preservation of the French language and francophone culture. Richard propounds a universal, humanist ideology, allowing for solving today’s social problems. This transnational humanism is also present in his Cajun tales and was officially acknowledged by the Cercle Richelieu Senghor de Paris, which awarded Richard the annual Prix du Cercle Richelieu Senghor de Paris in March 2014.⁴¹ Fittingly, Senghor saw the Francophonie as an integral humanism, a symbiosis of “sleeping energies” from all continents, all races, awakening to their complementary warmth (“Le Français” 844). In many respects, Richard himself epitomizes the link connecting the hybrid Cajun community to both the American and Francophone communities. As a true cosmopolitan and with his musical and literary achievements, he also bridges the gap between the past and the present. The innovative characteristics of the tales not only include the blending of structural devices, but also the reconstruction of the Cajun past in incorporating the link with French-speaking Canada, France, and the Caribbean. All three tales present a complete picture of Cajun culture and history. Thus, the triptych navigates a hybrid space, not only between different geographical spaces, but also between the past and the present, between educating and pleasing the readership. What makes Richard’s tales stand out and present a genuine Cajun prose narrative in French, are, for one, the geographical and cultural specificities. Yet the tales also incorporate a global symbolism, in which different cultures coalesce. They represent transcultural Louisiana as well as the transcultural Acadian triangle. The message of the tales is that dislocation and foreign influences are not purely unfavorable; they also entail a process of gaining other cultural traditions. Indeed, Cajun culture can only benefit from preserving its transnational outlook.

 Le Prix du Cercle, established in 1987, is presented to “a person whose actions have made outstanding contributions to the international influence of the French language” (“Prix du Cercle”).

8 Ron Thibodeaux’s Hell or High Water: How Cajuns Counter the Rita and Ike Amnesia The song “Hurricane Women,” which Cajun musician Abe Manuel Jr. from Grand Chenier, Louisiana, composed after the tragic hurricane season of 2005, testifies to the enduring presence of hurricanes in Louisiana. In the refrain, he sings: “Hurricane women / Can’t leave us alone. / We got each other / So who needs a home? / A dog and our children / It’s all we have left. / Because of Katrina, and Audrey, and Rita / The bayou’s a mess.”¹ With a tinge of sarcasm, Manuel evokes three major hurricanes which have hit the Louisiana Gulf Coast since the 1950s: Audrey, Katrina, and Rita all wreaked havoc in South Louisiana and have become deeply ingrained in the region’s collective memory. Audrey is still remembered as a monster storm laying waste to the coastal parishes and costing hundreds of lives in 1957. The suddenness of the storm surge, which surprised the unprepared residents, and the small local radio and television network (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 19) hampered the recording of the event so that eyewitness accounts are the only remains.² Today, more than half a century after Audrey, the media landscape has drastically changed, and news coverage has become an important means for embedding extreme situations as memorable events into the collective consciousness. As a case in point, when Katrina struck New Orleans on August 29, 2005, the ensuing colossal devastation spawned such an extensive degree of news coverage that the fatal events entered the national, and even international cultural memory. With the world’s attention fixed on one of America’s most influential cities, the debacle in New Orleans overshadowed Hurricane Rita, which made landfall on the Louisiana-Texas border as a category three hurricane on September 24, only three and a half weeks after Katrina. In contrast to previous hurricanes, Rita was peerless, for her tremendous twelve-foot storm surge devastated not just one locale, as is usually the case with hurricanes, but a 250-mile swath of Louisiana’s coastal parishes: from Cameron Parish in the west to Terrebonne Parish in the east (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 2– 4). And yet, government agencies and national media paid scant attention to the hurricane’s aftermath: “When Rita hit, it got everyone’s attention… for about a day, it seemed” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell xv;  The song appears on Manuel’s album Swire from Grand Chenier (2009). The movie Little Chenier (2006), filmed around Grand Chenier before and after Rita wiped it out, features several songs from that album.  One of the earliest written records is Mrs. John R. Smith’s eyewitness account “My Battle with Audrey” (1957). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-009

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ellipsis in original). Curiously enough, that colossal storm remained on the edge of awareness of the press, the state, and the nation, almost on the brink of being forgotten. The failure to give attention to Rita’s aftermath was obviously a consequence of the good evacuation effort of both civilians and the press. This meant that the destruction of the region not only received less immediate public attention, but also that it would fall into oblivion in the long run since there was no footage of the storm to be archived. Another reason was the “Katrina Effect,”³ which produced a wave of books, films, and other popular culture artifacts regarding Katrina⁴ and captured the attention of most of the mass media.⁵ Except for the documentary Hurricane on the Bayou (2006) and an essay collection (2011),⁶ Rita remained absent from public discourse. The year following Rita, a local newspaper underlined that “[e]ver since [Rita] hit, affected residents have complained of a phenomenon they call ‘Rita amnesia’—the idea that the nation, the government and the news media have fixated instead on Hurricane Katrina recovery” (Simpson).⁷

 “Katrina Effect” is “a term initially coined to describe the remarkable surge of early days reporting on Hurricane Katrina and currents of political commentary that appeared in its wake.” Since then, the meaning has changed and the term has been used to “describe a broader range of responses and longer-term impacts of a momentous and tragic event” (Taylor et al., “Preface” xiii). For an analysis of Katrina as a cultural trauma see Eyerman, Is This America?  The numerous books include, among others, Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (2007) and Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2007). Video material includes the documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2007) by Spike Lee, and Jonathan Lisco’s K-Ville, an American television drama series airing from 2007– 2008.  Coverage of Katrina resulted in a number of journalistic prizes. The Times-Picayune of New Orleans was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for “its heroic, multi-faceted coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, making exceptional use of the newspaper’s resources to serve an inundated city even after evacuation of the newspaper plant” (“2006 Pulitzer Prize”). Also, Laura Maggi and Brendan McCarthy of the Times-Picayune received the George Polk Award for “Law and Disorder,” “which examined brutal actions taken by the New Orleans Police Department in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina” (“LIU”).  The film crew of the documentary consisted of the Cajun director Glen Pitre and Cajun Blues guitarist and wetlands activist Tab Benoit. The directors of the documentary, which originally tackled the issue of land loss in the wetlands, revised the objective of the film when first Katrina and then Rita hit during filming. The documentary now testifies how the natural disasters of land loss and hurricanes correlate. The essay collection Covering Disaster: Lessons from Media Coverage of Katrina and Rita mentions Rita in the title, but gives conspicuously few insights into the storm’s story (Izard and Perkins).  Charles Boustany, former Republican U.S. Representative of Lafayette, first used the term “Rita Amnesia” when he asked “a congressional delegation to include Southwest Louisiana, devastat-

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Several circumstances contributed to the collective forgetting of Rita. First, Katrina was still a fresh story when Rita slammed Southwest Louisiana. In contrast to New Orleans, a major international city with historical significance, the small, isolated, and uncelebrated places like Cameron, Franklin, and Abbeville were less consequential for the press and could be reached only with some inconvenience. The public interest in Rita’s aftermath further dwindled as the early evacuation was the reason for the low death toll: Rita caused one casualty, whereas Katrina killed 1.577 people (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 8). Three years after Rita, Abe Manuel’s matriarchic “Hurricane Women” became superannuated as Tropical Storm Ike formed in the Atlantic Ocean in early September 2008. On September 12, the storm took aim at Southwest Louisiana, and, following Rita’s path, inundated most of the same communities again. Just like Rita, Ike received scant attention from the national media, which mainly focused on New Orleans, Louisiana, which escaped major damage, and Galveston, Texas, where Ike made landfall (R. Thibodeaux, Hell xv). The Rita and Ike amnesia exposes the double calamity the people of Cajun Country had to endure. Not only did they suffer from the losses caused by the storms; the fact that they were ignored and forgotten by the press, the government, and the rest of the country added to their wretchedness. To counter this repeated amnesia, Ron Thibodeaux, Cajun veteran reporter and editor of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Times-Picayune, set out to chronicle how first Rita and then Ike washed away communities of the coastal parishes in Southwest Louisiana. His prize-winning book Hell or High Water: How Cajun Fortitude Withstood Hurricanes Rita and Ike presents a series of vignettes in which he gives a voice to the forgotten people of Cajun Country who were struck by the hurricanes.⁸ Despite the omnipresence of hurricanes in the memory and consciousness of the people of Southwest Louisiana, Thibodeaux is the first to tackle the subject from a Cajun perspective. In focusing on Hell or High Water, this chapter explores the interrelation of memory, journalism, and narrative. As we will see, social resilience emerges as an essential characteristic of Cajun culture. The Synthesis Report of 2014 by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change defines resilience as “the capacity of social, economic and environmental systems to cope with a hazardous event or

ed by Hurricane Rita, during its scheduled tour of areas hit by Hurricane Katrina” “to prevent an outbreak of ‘Rita Amnesia’” (Associated Press). During Rita’s first-year commemoration in Lake Charles, the local chamber of commerce distributed candy in mock prescription medicine bottles. The label read: “For the prevention of Rita amnesia. Take as needed” (qtd. In Simpson).  Hell or High Water won second place of the Independent Publisher Book Award in the category of Southern Regional Nonfiction, and the Next Generation Indie Book Awards declared it National Grand Prize Winner of 2013 in the category of Regional Nonfiction.

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trend or disturbance, responding or reorganizing in ways that maintain their essential function, identity and structure, while also maintaining the capacity for adaptation, learning and transformation” (IPCC 127). As disaster discourses treat the theme of survival, they necessarily point to resilience as a crucial element in preserving the sense of community: “Social resilience implies not only a practical flexibility in circumventing the threat, but also a conceptual flexibility in perceiving the temporality or degree of ‘eventness’ of the disaster as variable and contingent. … Ultimately, resilience is an aspect of agency—and thus thoroughly social” (Hastrup 28; my emphasis). In Hell or High Water, Thibodeaux addresses three discursive topics which mirror the origin of Cajun resilience: rootedness and community; memories of historical catastrophes; and finding strength in telling private tragedies and aligning with other minorities. In this chapter, I consider the interviewees’ strong ties to the land and their enduring sense of community—the source of the Cajuns’ resilience and hope. Thibodeaux substantiates this underlying sense of belonging through historical references to establish a history of resilience. The third part of this chapter focuses on how resilience triggers collaborative remembering and vice versa. As a disaster discourse, Hell or High Water demonstrates how critical events like the catastrophes of Rita and Ike are catalysts for a surge of memory affecting both individuals and groups of people (see Cavalli). Except for the few references to Thibodeaux himself in the introduction—the first-person singular reveals the correspondence of narrator and author—, the account is reported by an omniscient narrator who juggles the many-voiced narrative. In interviewing his characters, Thibodeaux endeavored to recover the pieces which used to constitute the ordinary lives of the people before the storms, and he thus made the vernacular and marginalized visible. Additionally, the interviewees represent a collective that shares other fateful tragedies besides the Rita and Ike calamities. Thibodeaux chronicles how the evacuated people all try to recover their lost homes. In addition, his polyphonic and communal narrative is also an attempt to recover a lost past. Besides such legacies of the past as the rootedness in Cajun Country and the strong identification with the community, Thibodeaux interweaves the recent traumatic experiences with other harrowing events of the past, such as family tragedies, a series of previous disastrous hurricanes, and the Acadian dispersal. This chain of afflictions lays out the central theme of the book: the Cajuns’ deep-seated resilience transmitted across generations. Thus, Hell or High Water becomes “collective storytelling, [which] … situate[s] the individual story in the larger metanarrative of the nation’s social history, as ‘history from below,’ binding both tellers and [readers] to the nation as an imagined community” (Smith and Watson 189). The readership is bound to

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respond sympathetically to Thibodeaux’s account as hurricanes also affect other states—Katrina, Rita, and Ike had devastating consequences in Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida. Writing about catastrophes represents a human engagement with singular historical events, personal and collective tragedies and losses. It is linked to memory, knowledge, and imagination as well as to the past, the present, and the future. Like the loss of time, the loss of place is irrevocable (see Butler), but traces of the past remain in form of memories. Thibodeaux’s work can be considered as a means to prevent a second loss, namely the loss of memories, and to recover the memories in a written form to be placed into the collective memory of the Cajuns and made available to a wider public. As a work of creative nonfiction, Hell or High Water belongs to a hybrid genre. “[T]he primary goal of the creative nonfiction writer,” holds Lee Gutkind, “is to communicate information, just like a reporter, but to shape it in a way that reads like fiction.” Incidentally, Thibodeaux is a reporter, and his account features elements which mark it as literary journalism. This rather recent genre is engaged to describe reality, in contrast to scientific journalism, which uses verifiable facts to grasp reality.⁹ Literary journalism involves experience and is driven by an “impulse to describe the quality of ordinary life, consciousness, culture, feelings and sentiments of individuals. … [Literary journalists] use special techniques to get closer to direct experience. … [They] lean toward the humanistic approach that values immersion with the participants in a cultural world” (Sims xviii). Thibodeaux not only immerses himself in the cultural world of the Cajuns for his interviews, but as a born Cajun himself, he knows that world intimately. Several elements reveal that Thibodeaux adheres to a symbolic contract with the reader which defines literary journalism. His account consists of true stories, based on accurate reports, and features no composite characters (see Sims 2– 3). Apart from immersion reporting, literary journalism combines a number of other strategies from both the journalistic and literary realms, among them “complicated structures, character development, symbolism, voice, a focus on ordinary people … and accuracy” (Sims 6). Against the background of the Cajun oral tradition, Thibodeaux’s literary journalism piece can be considered as another kind of storytelling. Although “journalism has typically exhibited a reticence to move beyond the topical, novel, instantaneous, timely,” Hell or High Water exemplifies the claim that “journalism regularly and systematically looks backward” (Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt 2). Against this background, “journalistic ventures into mem-

 Although the term existed before, Edwin H. Ford is considered to have coined “literary journalism” in 1937 (Sims 8).

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ory-keeping are influential in shaping, reinforcing, or renewing cultural memory” (Schudson, “Journalism” 85). Significantly, in interweaving the interviewees’ fresh memories about the storms with accounts about other tragic events, Thibodeaux not only establishes a connection with the past, he also provides a history of Cajun resilience. As the past never supersedes the present, the primary purpose of the historical references is not solely commemoration. On the contrary, Thibodeaux’s account is a good example of what American journalism historian Michael Schudson calls non-commemorative memory. Claiming that “[a]ll people act in relation to memories and usually without commemoration as an objective” (“Journalism” 85), Schudson extends his statement to journalism and makes out three ways in which “journalism makes itself a vehicle or agent of cultural memory without the intention of commemorating”: in “referencing the past to bid for editorial prominence, using the past as a context to help explain a news event, and showing how people act in their everyday lives, sometimes very dramatically, in ways that incorporate a sense of past or future” (“Jounalism” 95). As we will see, Hell or High Water partly draws on non-commemorative journalism to illustrate the Cajuns’ contemporary resilience. A joint analysis of journalism and memory might seem paradoxical considering that journalism is intent on mirroring the present while memory focuses on the past. Still, intersections exist, as journalists do not only contribute to history by documenting the present. They also commemorate public life. Andreas Huyssen, with Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in mind, once made the intriguing claim that “[t]he mode of memory is recherche rather than recuperation” (Twilight 3). Indeed, the questions which govern the analysis of the processes of memory—Whom do we remember? What do we remember? How do we remember? Who remembers?¹⁰—easily correspond to the standard series of questions on which journalistic research is based: Who? What? Where? When? Why? Clearly, news decisively contributes to the making and unmaking of memories. Media scholars started to point out the preponderant role of media for remembering and commemorating events around the 1990s (see Edy). In the past ten years, research on the relationship between memory and journalism has increased (see Kitch; Zelizer), culminating in Journalism and Memory in 2014, the first notable essay collection inscribing journalism into memory studies (Zelizer and Tenenboim-Weinblatt). In light of its journalistic commitment and engage-

 Aleida Assmann adds the fourth question “who remembers?” to the three questions Koselleck poses in his study about what he calls “negative memory,” the inability to remember traumatic events without experiencing them (Koselleck, “Formen” 26; A. Assmann, Schatten 63).

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ment with the past, Thibodeaux’s account is a good example of how memory and journalism converge and influence each other mutually.

8.1 A Tale of Louisiana’s Coastal Parishes Hell or High Water is divided into twelve chapters, each of which is based on interviews with individuals from Cajun Country. Several indicators signal Thibodeaux’s account as Cajun literature. First, “Cajun” appears in the book’s subtitle, leaving no doubt about its subject matter. The introductory chapter briefly summarizes the moment building up to the storm and gives a detailed description of the setting. Its title “Storm Tide on the Bayou” includes another indication of place generally connoting Cajun culture: “bayou.” Yet it also seems a peculiar choice since the image a bayou evokes is generally that of a flat, slow-moving inland stream. A storm tide on the bayou then is an exceptional occurrence. Moreover, not the actual tropical storm is devastating, but its ensuing storm tide. As the most distinctive setting of Louisiana, the coastal wetlands are home and stopover for thousands of migratory birds and an important buffer for the petrochemical industry in the back-laying swamps. The shorelines of Cameron, Vermillion, and Terrebonne Parishes, the main setting of Thibodeaux’s account, are the longest and the most exposed stretches of the Louisiana Gulf Coast and, therefore, figure as the most vulnerable areas in terms of hurricane danger. Sparsely populated—most of the residents are Native Americans and Cajuns—the three parishes have been largely left behind with respect to coast protection plans. As the protecting shoreline diminishes, much of Louisiana’s culture and industry is under threat of being engulfed by the sea. Chapters two to eleven make up the core of the book, and each chapter features several interviewees with one of them functioning as a protagonist. The interviewees have their homes in Cameron, Delcambre, Kaplan, Dulac, Erath, Hackberry, Mouton Cove, and Grand Chenier—all places the storm surge leveled to the ground. Thibodeaux’s selection of native residents reveals a distinct Cajun perspective since most have an Acadian/Cajun surname. Except for three young adults, i. e., Megan Poole, Jamie Billiot, and Ryan Bourriaque, the age of the respondents is between 50 and 80 years. While most characters hail from a bluecollar background, Thibodeaux also includes public figures of Acadiana such as academic Barry J. Ancelet, attorney Warren Perrin and mayor George Dupuis of Erath, Jamie Billiot, representing the United Houma Nation and board member of the CODOFIL (“Council”), Cameron Parish School Superintendent Stephanie Rodrigue, Reverend Glen John Provost, and Vernon Bourgeois, the Sheriff of Terrebonne Parish. He also mentions the late James Fontenot, who was a composer

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of church music, a highly esteemed key figure in the CODOFIL, and a contributor to the Théâtre Cadien (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 8; Waggoner, Une fantaisie collective 364). The interviews in narrative form put the overlooked Cajuns on center stage and record their exploits. In writing about what has been lost through the catastrophe of the hurricanes, Thibodeaux sets about to collect the debris and offers a collective representation of the Cajun community. He eschews forgetting by giving an account of how the individual victims and the various shaken economic and academic sectors, as well as the religious and educational institutions faced the challenges. On a symbolic level, Thibodeaux’s endeavor is similar to Simonides of Ceos’s attempt to reconstruct the seating order with the help of his memory after the collapsed building had erased all signs of the banquet. In Renate Lachmann’s words, “[t]he catastrophe consists in the experience of forgetting. Forgetting is a break—the collapse of walls” (Memory 6). The losses caused by Rita destroyed individual homes as well as whole networks which included jobs, schools, churches, trade, industry, and agriculture, thus annihilating important social frames. In times of ruptures, stability and continuity are key values. They are ensured through remembering. The risk of forgetting, heightened through environmental cataclysms which uproot the existing state of affairs, demands a way to re-establish the previous order. Thibodeaux, like Simonides, serves as the link between memory, catastrophe, and place. One elemental component to reach stability is land, another is community, and the description of the Cajuns’ connection to both components emphasizes the singularity of Cajun culture and the need to write about it.

8.1.1 Land Is Memory Natural and man-made hazards, especially, “are events that can be viewed as breaking into ‘normal’ time by stopping the flow of the everyday” (Wagner-Pacifici 302– 3). “Catastrophe,” “destruction,” “crisis,” “carnage,” “wreckage,” “ruin,” “loss,” “damage,” “wreak havoc,” “clobber,” “swamp,” “scour clean,” “wash away,” “obliterate,” “destroy,” “traumatizing,” “tragic,” “in shambles,” and “post-apocalyptic” are all expressions Thibodeaux uses to describe the picture which awaited the residents of Southwest Louisiana when they returned to their homes. This vocabulary forcefully identifies his account as a disaster discourse and describes how time is suspended and everyday life is disrupted. The state of their home and the day they could return were the two important questions the victims cared to know after the storm. Inquiries about the neighbors’ houses dominated the talk of the residents (Badeaux et al.). As the inter-

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views reveal, almost all houses were washed away, carried into cane fields, damaged, ruined: “Hurricane Rita didn’t just damage the communities of Cameron Parish; it obliterated them. The houses and camps at Holly Beach were washed away, period. Houses throughout Cameron were destroyed. There was almost nothing left in Creole, Grand Chenier, or Johnson’s Bayou” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 25). In Cameron, Louisiana, for instance, the only remaining landmarks included the courthouse, which had already weathered previous hurricanes, and the water tower. In the other parishes, statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which traditionally decorate the lawns in Cajun Country, stood “resolute in the floodwaters, while the homes … [they] once adorned had disappeared” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 27). Consequently, the first who ventured into the destroyed region felt lost because no mark of orientation remained. Still, the residents resolutely set about to rebuild. In such circumstances, people are geared to stability embodied in their homes and their family. More precisely, it was not a question of whether the displaced residents were coming back, but how soon they were coming back. Returning home in the wake of evacuation is a usual practice in Cajun culture, a kind of deep-seated collective memory: “‘I guess you could say it’s bred in us to come back’” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 28), affirms Clifton Herbert, the emergency preparedness director of Cameron Parish.¹¹ Holly Beach, Louisiana, one of the lowest-lying communities and the first to feel the full impact of the storm surge, illustrates the inhabitants’ obstinacy vividly. Situated about 45 miles south of Lake Charles, Louisiana, Holly Beach was washed away by Hurricane Audrey in 1957, by Rita in 2005, and then again by Ike in 2008. A staggering series of before-and-after photographs taken by experts of coastal hazards show how Holly Beach was rebuilt each time, only to be destroyed by the next major hurricane (Sallenger et al. 130, 132). The fact that people returned and rebuilt their homes again and again underlines the strong tie to the land, which hails from the long family tradition in those isolated communities “to pass their homes and land on to succeeding generations; it’s highly unusual to ever see residential property put up for sale. That practice engendered an almost obsessive desire for storm victims to ‘go back home’ to the very home sites where parents and grandparents had lived before them” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 28). In an ethnological study about the Cajuns in the twentieth century, sociologists noted that “[u]nlike most immigrant groups in American history, Aca The third photograph in the mid-section of Ken Wells’s non-fiction book about a CajunIsleño family in the wake of Katrina reveals that the St. Bernard Parish residents had a similar sense of geographic belonging. They printed the slogan “I’m going home to da parish… Are you?” on T-shirts for their campaign to return to their homes (Good Pirates; ellipsis in original).

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dians/Cajuns have remained on the location of their original settlements in Southwest Louisiana. Although the natural environment has been greatly affected by human population and activities, Cajuns continue to live in the area settled by the people they recognize as their ancestors” (Henry and Bankston 73 – 74). Inevitably, those who had lost their house returned to its very spot: [M]any residents were insistent about restoring the exact footprint of what Rita had washed away. And if federal regulations wouldn’t allow them to rebuild their house at ground level in that floodplain, then they brought in a manufactured home, or a mobile home, or a travel trailer onto that spot. And it had to be sited right there. (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 29)

Transmitted from one generation to the next, the land is what keeps traditions alive and the community together. Memory of place prevails despite the absence of a concrete trace of memory. The public response to a relocation scheme for Erath, Louisiana, is another example of the people’s strong attachment to the land. Erath, situated ten miles north of Vermillion Bay, was severely damaged through the storm surge. Urban planners, sent from Baton Rouge, suggested to relocate the entire town to higher ground. The plan was not well received by the local residents, for, missing from the consultant’s actuarial calculations of loss prevention was the projected impact on the way of life for those affected by such a radical move. The balance sheets failed to consider the intrinsic value of la terre—the French concept, conveyed to the New World by Acadian settlers in the 1600s and sustained through for centuries of descendants, that not only does land belong to the people, but the people belong to the land as well. (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 12)

Seen in this light, relocation was clearly not an option for the disaster victims. If the people were relocated, they feared that the community connections they had relied on would disintegrate (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 104). Alternative suggestions such as houses on stilts received a more positive echo. Obviously, some Cajuns do not perceive water as a threat as it has always been an integral part of their lives, both in Acadia and Louisiana. They have learned to confront its vagaries. The watery landscape of the bayous and wetlands has actually become a defining element of the Cajun identity. As a matter of fact, “grounding” can also include a lot of water for island and coastal peoples (Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations” 481). For instance, in Intracoastal City, Louisiana, an unincorporated community in Vermillion Parish, the “people lived off the land, and the land in this case wasn’t even terra firma” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 86). While some might think that the threat comes from the water, the Cajuns obviously have a different point of view.

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Significantly, the original physical structure of the houses is irrelevant. As people grew restless because they were kept from going back to their homes, they devised their own solutions. The fact that some residents returned home with trailers shows how the sense of place outweighs materialism. Leola Terrebonne Trahan, for instance, lost everything three months after her retirement and came back three months after Rita in a FEMA-trailer to Delcambre, Louisiana, which lay in shambles.¹² Leola was back home, but the situation did not improve. During the 14 months she stayed in the trailer, she suffered a variety of maladies triggered by mold, and she became depressive in a “post-apocalyptic landscape that no longer resembled the Delcambre she had known since childhood when her shrimper-father moved the family here from Bayou Lafourche” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 33). And yet she stayed. This Cajun sense of place, which is so much connected to the past and which drives the Cajuns to return to the places they know, finds a familiar echo in Judith Butler’s statement concerning lost places: Places are lost—destroyed, vacated, barred—but then there is some new place, and it is not the first, never can be the first. And so there is an impossibility housed at the site of this new place. What is new, newness itself, is founded upon the loss of original place, and so it is a newness that has within it a sense of belatedness, of coming after, and of being thus fundamentally determined by a past that continues to inform it. And so this past is not actually past in the sense of ‘over,’ since it continues as an animating absence in the presence, one that makes itself known precisely in and through the arrival of anachronism itself. (468)

For Butler, the essence of a place lies in its palimpsestic quality, in the ambiguous conjunction of old and new. Although the place they once knew has vanished, the Cajuns return to that place because it carries memories of the past. These memories find additional anchors in the neighbors and friends who also return. As the telling title of the last chapter indicates: “Home Is What You Make It” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 172), this return requires adaptation. Rita and Ike not only destroyed the homes, the storms robbed the people of their subsistence. In his song, Manuel sings about trappers, farmers, fishers, and about how they rely on what nature provides. Land is thus the most fundamental purveyor of food and well-being in Cajun Country. Yet, the storms did not merely destroy the food supply for individuals. Rita and Ike dealt a huge blow to agricultural businesses as they knocked out the sugarcane, rice, and cattle industries, all firmly established in Louisiana since the 1700s. In Vermillion Parish, the cane fields were littered with marsh grass, called flotant, and debris includ FEMA stands for “Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

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ing utility poles, furniture, and highly explosive gas tanks, which had to be cleared away. Rice farmers faced another challenge: The harvest and soil were ruined by the salt water that had surged over the levees enclosing the rice fields. With the receding tide, the water stagnated in the fields for weeks, and, unable to escape, contaminated the farming ground. It has taken years to restore the battered agricultural sector, which provides the majority of workplaces (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 49 – 58). Despite the displacements and temporary re-emplacement in trailers, the people did not succumb to nostalgia. Except for the obsession to return to the exact spot, they did not speak of their lost possessions. This corresponds to the Acadians’ attitude after the expulsion, who, according to historical sources, did not speak about the loss of their concrete possessions, but about the loss of their relatives (see chapter 2). As Manual sings in “Hurricane Women,” the Cajuns “got each other / … / a dog and … [their] children.” When places vanish, disaster narratives serve as a substitute providing security and continuity. The hurricanes negated the visible marks of individual and collective history of the Cajuns, they obliterated the concrete sites of memory. The only traces left were in the narratives of the Cajun community.

8.1.2 Aiming at Normalcy: Shared Memory and Solidarity While hurricanes Rita and Ike determine Thibodeaux’s account, individuals as much as the community and their acts of solidarity and heroism take center stage: “Inanimate though they were, Rita and Ike—with their human names and menacing personalities—are important characters of this narrative. Mostly, though, this is a story about the people of South Louisiana, their devotion to the place they call home, and their fortitude in the face of substantial adversity” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell xvi). Although the afflicted have different memories of the event, their common experience triggers bonding. In the introduction of Thibodeaux’s work, the use of “we,” “us,” and “our” translates this feeling of inclusion and bondedness which is typical of smaller communities. Indeed, people during the recovery showed an urge to be together and to know where and how everybody was (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 135). Significantly, the focal point of each of Thibodeaux’s chapters is the unyielding sense of a Cajun community. For instance, a long-established custom in Cameron Parish is to ride out the

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storms in family gatherings (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 19).¹³ It is the moments spent together which give people hope and trust amid those uncertain and unsettling times. Communal gatherings traditionally serve as a way to create spaces of certainty and continuity. For instance, for the Cajun community, “the communal peeling of the shrimp, the boiling of the crabs, the making of the gumbo—isn’t a chore. It’s a social event, a means of bringing families together, sharing traditions, and nourishing a distinctive culture” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 12). Cajun culture is still based on such communal events which exemplify that “[t]radition … is an organizing medium of collective memory” (Giddens 63 – 64). In the aftermath of the storms, the victims’ inquiries about their homes actually became an important mechanism of consolidating the community. Since it would take time to rebuild the destroyed homes, the first efforts of the community were to re-establish the social centers and networks as quickly as possible to allow for the community to convene. The verbal exchanges were the first step to rebuild the community as people tried to gauge the damage around them. The exchanges between the residents reflected empathy, solidarity, and hope that the community would get back up again, and they further contributed to a heightened sense of identity with the battered community. This virtual space became the temporary home for the victims where they could find solace, some warm words of compassion, and the hope for a new beginning. After the loss of homes and the sense of place, it is through communication that a new place is established. In the end, as Butler states, loss has an ambiguous function: “Loss becomes condition and necessity for a certain sense of community, where community does not overcome the loss, where community cannot overcome the loss without losing the very sense of itself as community” (468). The experience of Rita and Ike turns Cajun Country into a place of centripetal forces: The shared sense of loss compelled the people of Cajun Country to band together and create a heightened sense of belonging. That shared suffering has a strong bonding quality was already identified by the French intellectual Ernest Renan in his seminal lecture “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” in 1888: What unites people most is shared suffering, mourning demands a communal effort and thus contributes more to national memory than triumphs (75). While alluding to the formation of nations, Renan’s statement is equally applicable to smaller communities. The Cajuns lack a national character, but their self-sufficiency and self-help come to the fore especially in the aftermath of such tragedies as hurricanes. With no physical anchor to hold on to, the sense of com-

 For another example of literary journalism about riding out storms in Louisiana see The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous by Ken Wells (2008).

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munity is more important and more present than ever. This spirit drives the inhabitants to return to their homestead. Their return is also the only way to resuscitate and preserve that spirit. It is the people’s strong sense of community and the resulting sense of an imaginary place which give them that security: People growing up in communities of memory not only hear the stories that tell how the community came to be, what its hopes and fears are, and how its ideals are exemplified in outstanding men and women; they also participate in the practices—ritual, aesthetic, ethical—that define the community as a way of life. We call these ‘practices of commitment’ for they define the patterns of loyalty and obligation that keep the community alive. (Bellah et al. 154)

Solidarity, helpfulness, communication, and remembering constitute practices of community. As Cajun ritual practices, they turn the inhabitants of Cameron, Vermillion, and Terrebonne Parishes into a community of memory. Ultimately, they constitute a shared horizon of experience and of expectation which generates the typical Cajun sense of community. In the ravaged places in South Louisiana, continuity was broken in another respect. Both the environmental and social systems were perforated through the storms. In addition to the severely affected agricultural sector came the destruction of pharmacies, banks, grocery stores, schools, churches, medical offices. Since people in Southwest Louisiana generally live close to their workplace, most people were stripped of their jobs in addition to their houses. With the loss of their jobs, an important center of interaction disappeared. Unemployed, and, what is more, abandoned by insurance companies, people faced hard times: “[T]he storm experience proved to be a monumental collective challenge for the people of South Louisiana” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 6). In Erath, for instance, the majority of the people who worked in the town became jobless. The collective sense of misfortune triggered a collective sense of self-reliance pushing the community to start afresh. The importance of the sense of community is represented by Champagne’s Supermarket in Erath and the store manager Ricky Luquette’s endeavors to reopen this important “community center” as quickly as possible. Founded in 1968 by his uncle Lester Champagne and his family, the supermarket provides food and other supplies—and is a place where people meet and socialize. After Rita, Luquette organized relief efforts to supply various needs and also quickly resumed the hometown service, helping elderly people getting to the store or supplying them with what they needed by someone who would bring the items to their homes (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 103). In the agricultural sector, there were no fewer acts of solidarity: “[T]he initial response in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Rita came from neighbors helping neighbors—sharing provisions, sorting through and clearing away de-

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bris, doing little things to help each other” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 52). With the storm killing the grass fodder for the horses and cows, as well as infesting the drinking water, with the salt water corroding equipment and destroying rice and sugar cane fields, the ranching and farming industries were damaged severely. Nevertheless, people pulled together and helped each other out. Errol Rodrigues, a fourth-generation sugarcane farmer around Erath, applauded this camaraderie: “‘If there was a beauty to this whole deal, it’s a story of a people that pulled together, unselfishly, for the good of the group. … Neighbors took care of watching out for each other’” (qtd. in R. Thibodeaux, Hell 55). A “collective determination—a shared self-reliance that buttressed recovery throughout Cajun country [sic]” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 55) thus defines the Cajun mentality. Struck most by the sense of community in Erath, Louisiana, one visitor from Nova Scotia felt “a silent strength about … [that town], which … [she] attributed to people who could rely on each other. … Perhaps that strength comes from a people who have historically understood the value and importance of community to survival” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 46), she concluded. As another kind of gathering place, schools were equally important for the reconstruction of a thriving community. “For Cameron Parish families who returned to find nothing left of their homes but steps and a slab, the revival of the local schools would prove to be not only a relief, but also an inspiration” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 114). Still, there were students who did not return because they had moved with their families to safer places. Seeing that the Cameron Parish school system lost four out of six schools, unscathed colleges offered “alternative spring break” programs to assist storm victims (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 113). Student Tabatha Harrington was more upset about the destruction of her school than about that of her town because it meant that the students would have to be relocated to another school. She and her classmates “didn’t want to go anywhere else. It was the school where … [she] had gone … [her] whole life. That’s where … [they] had always gone” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 115). Tabatha, who was at an age where life happens at school, subconsciously felt the impending loss of social ties. She was not as upset about her town because she still had her family. A move away from town was most likely less traumatic since she would remain in the social frame of her family. Yet the separation from her friends was much more consequential to her. It was the generation with whom she had experienced important events and with whom she shared memories. Another orienting social frame ensures the stability and continuity of the Cajun community. As in other Cajun writings, the religious mindset plays a significant role in Thibodeaux’s account. According to the Reverend Glen John Provost, it is because of “the Catholic faith … [that] the Cajuns exist in Louisiana in the first place” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 126), it is the Cajuns’ “raison d’être” (qtd. in

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R. Thibodeaux, Hell 126). This religious belief defining Cajun culture is more or less present in every chapter, but it is especially chapter nine, entitled “Do Not Harm My Children,” which focuses on the religious communities of the damaged towns whose churches were useless for services. Since churches have always been important places of congregation and solace, it was necessary to ensure the continuity of services. The regular masses in makeshift chapels during the recovery became an opportunity for the community to be together (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 134): In Provost’s view, [t]he church has been and will always be around here. … It’s not transitory. It’s here, its roots are here. There is a permanence to it. There is a longevity to it. Whether you’re talking about the yellow fever epidemics in New Orleans in the nineteenth century—when the priests and the nuns of the church staying during those times of cholera and yellow fever, when everyone else fled—or whether you’re talking about the hurricanes, this story of the Catholic church’s [sic] permanent assistance and remaining with it is there. (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 141)

The church, hence, is a symbol of community, solidarity, and continuity in the Cajun mindset. Furthermore, the religious belief and the strong sense of family converge with respect to the recovery of the thousands of unearthed caskets. In chapter six, entitled “Dead and Gone,” Sue Fontenot tells of her endeavors to recover her brother’s lost burial casket. Together with like-minded people, she kicked off the search for hundreds of other caskets to give the displaced deceased ancestors their rightful place. The people’s efforts to find the missing caskets and bodies is also indicative of the importance of the past for the Cajuns, embodied by the memorial tubes which are used to help identify the body in case hurricanes displace the caskets. Half a decade after Rita, there were still caskets missing. To commemorate the lost caskets, Cameron Parish established the Hurricane Rita Memorial monument on the front lawn of the courthouse. Its inscription reads: While miraculously no one in Cameron Parish was killed, 38 of its 40 cemeteries were breached and over 340 caskets and their remains were torn from the ground and scattered into marshes, tree tops, fields and canals from as far as 30 miles away. This monument represents some of the most treasured possessions of Cameron Parish. It has been a long journey for them, their families, and those that recovered them. May they again rest in peace. God bless their families. (R. Thibodeaux, Hell, front cover)

The indefatigable search for dead relatives and the monument underscores once more the importance of family and the community. In the people’s minds, the

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deceased persons are not dead and gone, they are still very present. The sense of community also exists … between the living and the dead. Akin to the Catholic concept of the communion of saints is this sense of continuity with the dead who are still visited, whose dwellings are carefully looked after, whose memory is treasured. … [A]n old gentleman in Bayou Lafourche reverently [pointed] to a well-kept cemetery and [said]: ‘Ca [sic], c’est du monde qui respecte ses morts.’ The dead are still very much part of the family. (Allain, “Twentieth-Century Acadians” 141)

This sense of community relates to Anthony Giddens’s stance that “[t]radition is about ritual and has connections with social solidarity” (62). Through their human actions and solidarity, the characters in Hell or High Water shape their histories and strengthen the community’s resilience, exemplifying that “resilience in socio-ecological systems … resides in the people” (Hastrup 20). Only through social bonds and memory will traditions survive.

8.2 Disasters Revisited Hell or High Water depicts more than the Cajuns’ recovery efforts after the two most severe storms of the early twenty-first century. It also documents how the Cajuns’ sense of place is charged with a strong link to the distant past: “From Contraband Bayou to Bayou Carlin to Bayou Terrebonne, members of this diverse population did what their forebears had done for centuries before them: survive, adapt, and thrive in hostile environments” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 4). While chapter four, “Where Tradition Is Cultivated,” documents three highly important branches of Louisiana’s agriculture and economy, it draws its Cajun aspect mostly from two other factors. The Cajuns “know the drill”¹⁴; they live in a land where hurricanes are a frequent occurrence and where family memories about past hurricanes abound. Thibodeaux traces that drill back to a series of previous hurricanes. The Cajuns’ survivor spirit has even deeper roots. Thibodeaux mentions private family tragedies to show the Cajuns’ unflagging resolution to go forward. What is more, the interviewees’ Acadian background and the repeated allusions to such specific historical events as the Acadian dispersal¹⁵ clearly accentuate the Acadian past as a central theme of the book. For Thibodeaux, the Cajuns’

 “They Know the Drill” is also the title of Thibodeaux’s second chapter (Hell 14).  See especially the third chapter, entitled “The Acadian Connection.”

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hardiness is an inherited tradition: “In cities and small towns, along bayou roads and into the sparsely populated swamps and marshes, hardy local residents— who give Louisiana much of its distinctive flavor by the very lives they lead, just as generations before them have done—time and again have responded to adversity by hauling themselves and their communities back up” (Hell 11). In fact, the narratological matrix of Hell or High Water is a chain of afflictions. To add poignancy to the disaster caused by the hurricanes, Thibodeaux meanders between the recent and the distant pasts, establishing a Cajun disaster discourse. The succession of crises in Cajun culture and in each of the protagonists’ lives reveals a strength of character forged by centuries of shared hardships, from the struggle to subsist in the harsh physical and economic conditions of Louisiana’s earlier years to the forced suppression of their culture by a governing elite through much of the 1900s. These are a people of fortitude. And as such, they manifest an inherited, emotional response to tragedy. Their antecedents, after all, include survivors of the Grand Dérangement—the ‘great upheaval’ of the Acadian exile that saw families split apart and sent away, thousands die from disease or deprivation, and survivors imprisoned or shunned in unwelcoming locales. Down through the years, they have faced natural disasters, political and societal oppression, and man-made calamities, and they have closed ranks, endured, and sustained. (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 11)

In referring to the Acadian exile, past hurricane stories, and personal calamities, Thibodeaux deliberately creates analogies to past tragedies to provide a meaningful context for his argument of the Cajuns’ survivor spirit. Despite journalism’s inherent focus on the present, Thibodeaux’s recourse to the past shows that “[t]he past [is] a resource in news narratives” (Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg 116) and that it corresponds to the act of remembering. Catastrophic events intensify the sense of the past and increase the urge to hold on to the past. Set against the hurricane and expulsion discourses, Thibodeaux’s account is, however, rather an example of a reversed strategy of the memory process, for the past is used to highlight the present. Indeed, referring to past hurricanes is a common practice of the local media. For instance, local news media reporting on Katrina drew comparisons to Betsy, which hit New Orleans on the evening of September 9, 1965 (see Reckdahl). Moreover, Thibodeaux’s genealogical references such as the brief account of rice planter Ernest Girouard’s French origin¹⁶ or the tribal history of the United Houma Nation, illuminate the intricate constitution of the Cajuns and other ethnic groups (Hell 64).

 Girouard’s ancestors came from Varennes, France, and arrived in Port Royal in 1646 (Hell 47).

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The media often incorporate “the past … into the present in ways that do not aim at commemoration,” as they “collaborate with larger social processes of cultural memory. … in an effort not to commemorate but to serve internal journalistic incentives; the media seek to capitalize on human drama or to connect to historical shifts, coincidences, or trends that might give their stories a distinctive importance” (Schudson, “Journalism” 85 – 86). Schudson identifies three ways of non-commemorative use of the past. First, the reference to the past serves to heighten the news value, for the unusual event intensifies the importance of the story. Second, mentioning past events helps to explain the meaning of the recent event: “Explaining is a vital way in which the past may be used non-commemoratively” (“Journalism” 91). Lastly, invoking the past allows writers to comment directly on human behaviors that are themselves non-commemorative uses of the past (“Journalism” 88). With respect to his account, Thibodeaux delves back into the past and juxtaposes other fateful events to the Rita and Ike disasters. His account is not a commemoration of the previous hurricanes and the Acadian expulsion in the first place, but “a narratological device in which temporality works in a contrary direction: from the present to the past” (Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg 114). The past then serves as a yardstick for current events in that they are set against and compared to previous events. Stories about miseries necessarily entail narratives of both loss and recovery, and people involved in catastrophes become either victims or rescuers. As tragic events affect individuals psychologically, groups whose social setup is shaken to the very foundations after a catastrophe show signs of instability, too. Collective suffering has recently drawn the interest of sociologists who introduced the controversial term of “cultural trauma.” Indeed, the definition provided by American sociologists in an essay collection might well apply to Thibodeaux’s portrayal: “Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collective feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever, and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander, “Toward” 1). A more precise definition of the term points to the existential effect of traumatic events: Cultural trauma is “[a] memory accepted and publicly given credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation which is (a) laden with negative affect, (b) represented as indelible, and (c) regarded as threatening a society’s [or group’s] existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions” (Smelser 44). Terrible events such as the Acadian dispersal or major hurricanes would seem eligible for being identified as a cultural trauma. Rita heavily affected the residents of the coastal parishes and put them into much distress.

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However, following historian and memory scholar Wulf Kansteiner’s objections to the term (“Genealogy”), I argue that, although the events have marked the collective memory of the Cajuns, the attribute of “cultural trauma” is inappropriate. Besides aestheticizing its original meaning, the use of “trauma” conceals the adaptability and resilience of the Cajuns. Commemorating Rita and Ike as a trauma for the Cajun community would conflict with the resilience narrative the Cajuns have been constructing. According to sociologist Ron Eyerman, “one way of dealing with loss is by attempting to turn tragedy into triumph” (“Past” 161). The shared suffering in the community has doubtlessly a cementing effect and is anything but a sign of a trauma. Far from debilitating the Cajuns, the harrowing experiences are a means of empowerment.

8.2.1 Hurricane Memory: Specters of Hurricanes in Cameron, Vermillion, and Terrebonne Parishes People’s general notion about the South Louisiana climate is that it has no distinct seasons. The residents there like to counter that view arguing that they do have several seasons: Crawfish season and hurricane season are just two of them (R. Thibodeaux, Hell xiii). However, the hurricane season is certainly the one season governing the residents’ collective memory. Starting on June 1 and ending on October 1, with the most active period between August and September, it is defined by a number of rituals summarized under the phrase of “Hurricane preparedness,” which includes personal and property protection as well as risk management. Thibodeaux’s emphasis on the coincidence of his book release on June 5 with the start of the 2012 hurricane season on June 1 tells much about the respect toward hurricanes in Louisiana and their omnipresence in the cultural memory of the community. What is most striking, though, is that Thibodeaux refers to other terrible hurricanes of the past and thus establishes a genealogy of storms. Rita and Ike appear in the book’s title, but Thibodeaux also dwells on the effects caused by Hurricane Gustav, which made landfall in Cocodrie, Louisiana, on September 1, 2008, and gave especially the Houma of Terrebonne Parish a foretaste of Ike a few weeks later. Furthermore, Thibodeaux’s description of Vernon Bourgeois, the Sheriff of Terrebonne Parish and leading figure in the emergency management before Gustav hit, concentrates on the Sheriff’s past hurricane experiences: “[A]s a sheriff’s office veteran, he had worked many storms before—Juan in 1985, Andrew in 1992, Georges in 1999, Isidore and Lilli in 2002, and Katrina and Rita in 2005” (Hell 166). In other instances, Thibodeaux goes beyond simply listing previous hurricanes, reconstructing the terrible moments during and after the storms through

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testimonies. He recalls Hurricane Hilda and relates how on October 3, 1964, strong winds caused the water tower in Erath, Louisiana, to collapse on the City Hall, demolishing the building and killing eight volunteer citizens who were trying to oversee the amateur radio transmissions inside the building (Hell 96). Another storm which is still vividly remembered for its ferocity and which has a haunting presence in Thibodeaux’s narrative is Hurricane Audrey in 1957. As singer Manuel and other Cajun writers such as Barry J. Ancelet and Zachary Richard attest, Hurricane Audrey is deeply rooted in the cultural memory of the Cajuns. It has even become part of the American cultural memory (Gaudet, “‘Stuck on Stupid’” 7, 19).¹⁷ Likewise, Thibodeaux states that “Audrey’s very name conveys an accounting of shattered lives and battered towns, grief and recovery. You only need to say ‘Audrey’; no further description is necessary” (Hell xiv). Mentioned in eight out of twelve chapters, the storm emerges as a leitmotif. Indeed, almost every interviewee has a personal memory of it, or knows people who rode out the storm. Thibodeaux notes that Audrey became the United States’ benchmark killer storm of modern times, claiming more lives than any other named hurricane until it was eclipsed by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. In Cameron Parish, its impact went beyond mere statistics. For decades, parish residents have found themselves in one of two groups: those who rode out Audrey and their descendants. And everyone knew, or knew of, relatives or neighbors who perished. (Hell 16)

Audrey made landfall between the mouth of the Sabine River and Cameron, Louisiana, affecting the same region as Rita would half a century later. As the firstnamed hurricane of the season, it caught the residents unawares in the night of June 27, killing hundreds of people and destroying the towns of Cameron, Creole, and Grand Chenier in Louisiana. Many residents, like Shadd Savoie and Clifton Herbert, recall Audrey because they “grew up hearing these stories. … [their] grandfathers went through it, or … [their] fathers went through it, and it’s bred in … [them]” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 21). The singularity of Hurricane Audrey lies in the fact that it “turned out to be the only Category 4 hurricane ever to make landfall in the United States in the month of June” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 20). Cameron Parish was hit worst, with an official death toll placed at 390, “but that’s widely acknowledged as a low-ball figure; there were individuals or entire families whose bodies were never recovered from the area’s wetlands” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 21). The “rock,” as the court-

 In Richard’s third tale, Audrey is vicariously remembered through the reference to the fictional storm of the homophone name “Audry” (Richard, Aventures 24– 25). See also chap. 7.1.3.

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house in Cameron, Louisiana, is called, was the only remaining building (R. Thibodeaux, “Remembering Audrey”). Significantly, “Hurricane Audrey’s legacy filtered down within … [the aggrieved] families, from one generation to the next” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 21), so that people in post-Audrey Cameron Parish heed advance warnings (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 23). Against this background, Audrey has become the object of collective commemoration. Audrey’s fiftieth anniversary was celebrated on June 27, 2007, with many Audrey eyewitnesses in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties. Guest speaker Robert LeBlanc, emergency preparedness director in Vermillion Parish, reminisced about the storm and recalled that “[i]t was total destruction” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 29). Others compared Rita to Audrey, such as Audrey survivors Wilton “W.A.” LaBove and his wife Toulay LaBove, who recalled how many houses remained after Audrey but noted that Rita destroyed them all. They only found a plate and a statue of the Virgin Mary (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 30). St. John the Evangelist in Cameron, Louisiana, is one of the rare concrete examples symbolizing the people’s perseverance and becoming a site of memory. Built in 1937, the church followed the fate of earlier chapels which were damaged by hurricanes in 1909, 1914, and 1918 (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 136). Then, in 1957, Hurricane Audrey destroyed it. The church was rebuilt, and Bishop Maurice Schexnayder renamed it Our Lady Star of the Sea in 1958. He even composed a “Prayer for Safety in Hurricane Season” which has become a ritual during the Hurricane season in the Cajun community (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 140). Thibodeaux’s remembrance of Audrey turns the event into the origin story of Louisiana hurricanes, without which later hurricanes such as Katrina, Rita, or Ike, as well as the residents’ mentality cannot be understood. Still, more ferocious storms are likely to eventually efface the memory of Audrey. Indeed, Thibodeaux emphasizes the singularity of Katrina and Rita with his statement that “[h]istory was rewritten … in 2005” (Hell xiv). The fast evacuation for Rita shows how the residents were guided by their fresh memories of Katrina: “By the time Cameron Parish residents were advised to move out, they didn’t need much persuading, because the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe had heightened their sense of alarm” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 24). Today, apart from Katrina, Rita has become the most important mnemonic criterion for the residents of Cajun Country. For instance, Thibodeaux puts the storms Gustav and Ike, which marked the year 2008, in relation to Rita. Ike’s trajectory was an “instant replay of Rita” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 140), which seems to be rather an understatement, for the storm surge surpassed even Rita’s flooding (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 67) and caused the death of two people (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 170). With respect to the people’s self-help, Rita also serves as a comparison: “It was worse this time, but they knew what to do. They’d done it before” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 170).

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Repeatedly, Thibodeaux emphasizes this culture of resilience as the glue which keeps the Cajun community together. In contrast to the loss of resilience ascribed to the citizens of New Orleans,¹⁸ Audrey and other hurricanes still permeate the Cajuns’ social memory, which shows the Cajuns’ strong oral tradition of hurricane accounts transmitted from one generation to the next. Not without reason have the Cajuns begun to use the figure of the survivor. They construct this figure on the stigmatizing opposition between urban and rural, and thus distance themselves from the figure of the “vulnerable” assigned to the poor black population in New Orleans: “Les Cadiens … inscrivent [cette figure du survivor] dans la continuité de leur mémoire historique, réaffirmant leur résistance contre l’adversité” (Le Menestrel and Henry 495). Unlike the erosion of the social memory in New Orleans, where a sense of alarm and viable records of past preparations and consequences dwindled with the passage of time (Colten 159 – 160, 172– 173), the permanence of Audrey in the Cajuns’ consciousness shows how this hurricane memory is necessary to prepare for future hazards. A good example of the survivor spirit is the town of Delcambre, Louisiana. Port of Delcambre Director Wendell Verrett explained that they went through it twice. And the people are still here. It really changed the way the community and the community leaders look at this community. We decided to try to develop a waterfront, a commercial retail type development to bring recreation to town and just to do economic development projects. And we’ve had a number of those that are in various stages of progress and that’s unheard of for Delcambre. No one has ever thought even of putting together master plans and water front plans, no one ever discussed any of that before. So there is an effort and a mindset to move forward and to progress and I really think the storms had a lot to do with the willingness of the community to accept these efforts and so that’s, I’d say, the main change is simply the outlook and the mindset of folks here. (Troeh)

After the landfall of Rita and Ike, the community of Delcambre has been coming back. The people have a different perspective, yet their mentality has not changed: They want to move forward and preserve their culture and identity.

 Craig E. Colten claims in his article “Forgetting the Unforgettable: Losing Resilience in New Orleans” that because the inhabitants of New Orleans had forgotten about Betsy, they were not heeding the warnings for Katrina.

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8.2.2 The Transmission of the Survivor Spirit In line with other Cajun writings, Thibodeaux’s account ties in with the Acadian past. Regarding the dearth of eyewitness accounts, the history of the Acadians centering around the Grand Dérangement stands, admittedly, in flagrant contrast to first-hand testimonies of the disasters of 2005. Thibodeaux finds, nonetheless, a way to give the Acadian past a stark presence. He devotes a full chapter to Acadian-Cajun history and locates the Acadian expulsion at the base of a chain of afflictions leading up to the latest hurricane disasters: The hurricanes “were more than just natural disasters. In the bigger picture, those storms posed merely the latest assaults on a people and a way of life whose tribulations date back more than two-and-a-half centuries” (Hell 37). For Thibodeaux, the coinciding dates of the deportation order and Hurricane Rita mirror the paramount significance of the deportation: For such a powerful storm to … [take a destructive swipe across the entire length of the coastal Cajun region of Louisiana] in September 2005 was a coincidence of cosmic proportions. It was 250 years earlier, to the very month, that dramatic and tragic events were set in motion half a continent away—events that would lay the groundwork for the very creation and development of Louisiana’s Cajun culture. (Hell 34)

For many, Rita’s aftermath seemed like a second dispersal. Not only did they have to wait for six weeks before they could return, the total destruction of their houses and the relocation schemes of the government meant that some could not move back into their homes at all. Thibodeaux refers three times to the residents’ “exile” (Hell 28, 75, 123). Against the background of the Acadian exile, the word choice corresponds to what Motti, Zandberg, and Meyers called “reversed memory,” “a storytelling strategy that enables news items to commemorate past events by narrating the present, thus maintaining these events as ongoing occurrences” (123). In this narrative process, “the past is not merely narrated in the service of current objectives; rather, the past is commemorated by means of the narration of the present” (Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg 114). Besides several parts of Thibodeaux’s narrative, the reference to the coinciding dates as well as the photograph of the memorial plaque at the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, Louisiana (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 35), and that of the Acadian cross in Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, in the middle section of the book, entail a commemorative element. Yet Thibodeaux is not driven by the sole urge to commemorate the past. While the memory of the Acadian dispersal pervades his account, it reveals a complex interplay of commemorative and non-commemorative practices. The temporality in Thibodeaux’s narrative works from the present, the hurricanes, to the past. This reversed direc-

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tion of remembering creates a narrative that is both news coverage and commemoration (Connerton, “Epilogue” 260 – 261). With regard to Acadian history as a leitmotif in Thibodeaux’s text, the Cajuns constitute what scholars in 1985 called a “community of memory.” They argue that [c]ommunities … have history—in an important sense … they are constituted by their past— and for this reason we can speak of a real community as a ‘community of memory,’ one that does not forget its past. In order not to forget that past, a community is involved in retelling its story, its constitutive narrative, and in so doing, it offers examples of the men and women who have embodied and exemplified the meaning of the community. These stories of collective history and exemplary individuals are an important part of the tradition that is so central to a community of memory. (Bellah et al. 153)

One such story of collective history in Cajun culture is of course the myth of Evangeline. Considering Evangeline’s omnipresence in other Cajun writings, it is almost a given that Thibodeaux mentions her, too. It is, however, only a brief reference which works as a mere transition to another heroine. Thibodeaux brushes aside the Romantic icon with the story of the Acadian Madeleine LeBlanc, a “more appropriate role model for the Acadian people” (Hell 31). Madeleine was nineteen years old when she and her family were exiled from the Grand Pré area in 1755. Eight years later, they returned to land assigned to them in Baie Sainte-Marie, Nova Scotia. In contrast to the flat and rich land around Grand Pré they used to farm, the new place was rocky and tree-covered, which made settling in quickly even more challenging. It is in view of the hard times ahead that Madeleine LeBlanc is reported to have said: “J’avons pleurez [sic] assez; c’est l’heure de couper du bois”—“We have wept enough; it’s time to cut some wood,” meaning “Let’s get back to business” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 32). Thibodeaux owes his knowledge about Madeleine LeBlanc to Barry J. Ancelet. This oral account is cited by the University of Moncton, New Brunswick, but as with any other oral legend, its origin cannot be fully verified (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 32). It is important to note that Thibodeaux is actually the first to publish the legend in written form. He appropriates and turns the legend of Madeleine, although not set in Louisiana, into a Cajun resilience narrative par excellence. In contrast to his neglect of Beausoleil and the trivial reference to Evangeline, Thibodeaux elevates formerly unknown Madeleine to an authentic Acadian/ Cajun heroine and, more importantly, to a symbol commemorating the Acadian expulsion. The episode of Madeleine LeBlanc serves yet another purpose. To this “reallife cultural heroine” (Hell 31) Thibodeaux juxtaposes the “modern-day Made-

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leine LeBlanc” (Hell 33), Leola Terrebonne Trahan of Delcambre, Louisiana, and describes the survivor spirit of the miserable woman who lived for months in a mobile home. Indeed, Thibodeaux puts her on a par with Madeleine when he writes that Leola Terrebonne Trahan decided “she had cried enough and the time had come to make the best of things and move on” (Hell 33). The reference to Madeleine serves to establish a link to the past and to make stories like that of Leola Terrebonne Trahan more tangible. With this threefold superposition of women—Evangeline, Madeleine, Leola—Thibodeaux continues the Cajun tendency to reject Evangeline, a “specter of inauthenticity” (Jolly), and replaces her with real-life women who, with their great zeal, contrast with the famous icon. Leola’s character also underlines how the pluck of these Acadian and Cajun women has been transmitted across generations, and it acknowledges the responsibility women bore and still bear. Her story is an example of a memory montage through which oral memories and histories are made more present and more alive: [T]he process of the communicative tradition of history runs according to the principle of the montage … , by fitting the most diverse narrative and pictorial set pieces with very different historic and subjective moments of time. This continuous complementing and assembling is a process of bringing something back to life. Thereby we can return to our findings that the memory of families and other communities of memory does not build on a limited and fixed stock of pieces of memory, but that this stock is subject to a permanent overwrite which just happens through actualization during the process of ‘conversational remembering.’ (Welzer, Moller, and Tschuggnall 201; my translation)

Ultimately, this montage technique is another means to distinguish Cajun culture from mainstream American culture. Obviously, this process of conversational remembering shows that the Cajun oral tradition is still valid and remains important. As to the missing sites of Acadian expulsion memory in Cajun Country, the Cajuns now strive to create essential features commemorating Acadian history. One site which Thibodeaux mentions is the Acadian Museum in downtown Erath, Louisiana, founded by Warren A. Perrin, a Cajun cultural activist and attorney from that town who is especially known for his indefatigable and successful fight to have the Queen of England acknowledge the committed atrocities during the Grand Dérangement. Established in 1990, the museum houses three rooms with a themed display in each. In the Erath Room, photographs depict the history of the town of Erath. The Prairie Bayou Room informs visitors about the establishment of the Acadian settlements in Vermillion Parish and the evolution of the present-day Cajun community. As to the Acadian Room,

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the museum’s website presents a detailed listing of Acadian artifacts exhibited there. This room is divided into three sections: the birth of Acadia in 1604, the Grand Dérangement of 1755, and the rebirth of Acadia from 1764 onward. Maps, photographs, paintings, pottery, apparel pieces, most of them donated by visiting Canadian-Acadian delegations, show the strong presence of Acadia in Cajun Country (“About the Museum”). The most important document on display is the Royal Proclamation, obtained in 2003 at the instigation of Perrin and having come into effect in 2004. Based on a petition initiated in 1990,¹⁹ this Proclamation marks a milestone in Cajun and Acadian history and has become a meaningful symbol of the collective memory of the Cajuns. After almost 250 years, Queen Elizabeth II officially acknowledged the forced removal of the Acadians from their homelands in Canada from 1755 to 1763 and declared July 28 to be henceforth the Acadian Day of Remembrance for the Acadian expulsion (Perrin, Acadian Redemption 121). This Royal Proclamation reads that the deportation of the Acadian people, commonly known as the Great Upheaval, continued until 1763 and had tragic consequences, including the deaths of many thousands of Acadians from disease, in shipwrecks, in their place of refuge and in many prison camps in Nova Scotia and England as well as in the British colonies in America. … We acknowledge these historical facts and the trials and suffering experienced by the Acadian people during the Great Upheaval. (qtd. in Perrin, Acadian Redemption 120)

Great Britain did not apologize but at least acknowledged the crimes committed during the Grand Dérangement and officially repealed the order of exile in 2003. As a meaningful symbol of the Acadian diaspora, the Proclamation marks the official end of oblivion. Obviously, the Acadian museum is one of the few places which resembles an archive as it houses tangible memorabilia which give a “physical presence” to history.²⁰ The displayed objects show how the past works as a backdrop and serves to make sense of the present. So when Rita came and heavily damaged the building as well as the objects on display, it was simultaneously an assault on the Cajun past. Many historical documents, photographs, and other impor-

 Perrin based his petition of 1990 on the Petition which the Acadians, deported to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, presented to the English King in 1760 (Perrin, Acadian Redemption 105, 120 – 121).  See Claude Lévi-Strauss’s claim: “Ce qui est vrai d’objets matériels dont la présence physique est attestée dans le sol, pour des époques déterminables, l’est plus encore pour les institutions, les croyances, les goûts, dont le passé nous est généralement inconnu” (“Race” 17; my emphasis).

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tant memorabilia were destroyed, but the Proclamation, the most treasured piece, was saved (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 39, 45). Thibodeaux’s brief account of Perrin’s battle for redress and success further emphasizes the significance of Acadian history for the Cajuns. A quarter millennium after the expulsion, the Proclamation, as a formal document, and the institution of an Acadian Day of Remembrance signify the official end of the oblivion of the Acadian diaspora. Ultimately, the recognition by the Queen can be seen in the context of what Memory Studies expert Jeffrey K. Olick has identified as a new shift of governmental principles, a shift toward what he calls the “politics of regret” (Politics): “The memory boom unleashed a culture of trauma and regret, and states are allegedly now judged on how well they atone for their past misdeeds rather than how well they meet their fiscal obligations and inspire future projects” (Olick, Vinitzki-Seroussi and Levy, “Introduction” 3 – 4). Whereas states used to commemorate heroic and glorious events of the past, states today recognize the crimes committed to racial, linguistic, and cultural minorities to maintain their legitimacy.²¹ It seems ironic that not long after the Queen’s Proclamation ended the century-long exile, the Cajuns had to face yet another exile brought on by the hurricanes. Perrin’s perseverance to right a wrong committed more than two centuries ago is another example of the Cajuns’ determination to fight a battle without the back-up of political parties. Besides Trahan’s and Warren’s struggles, the chapter mentions the re-connection of the Thibodeaux family with their ancestral past. Sara Beanlands, a history major from Nova Scotia, wanted to find out about the history of her family farm. Her family, the Shaws, has owned the farm for seven generations, but until the mid-1990s nobody was really interested in its history. Sometimes on her walks, Beanlands was struck by several sights, or remains from the past: There were the French coins that got plowed up from time to time. The neat patch of flowers that bloomed in the middle of a pasture every year, where a home must have been long ago. The trail through the farm, down to the river, that locals call the Old French road. The spot everyone knows as French Orchard Hill. Even the name Willow Brook Farm harkened back to the willow trees that were brought from France by the Acadians. (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 41)

 Great Britain’s acknowledgment of the atrocities committed in Acadia echoes similar redeeming gestures by other states in the twentieth century. In the U.S., for instance, Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II with the Civil Liberties Act in 1988 (Perrin, Acadian Redemption 111– 112).

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Beanlands discovered that an Acadian village used to be on her family’s property. An excavation revealed that the village was founded by Pierre Thibodeau in 1690. At the Acadian World Congress in 2004, Beanlands spoke about her discovery to the reunited Thibodeau(x)²² families and later went on a tour around the Thibodeau(x) lands with an impressive crowd of Thibodeau(x) descendants: More than one hundred of the visitors followed Beanlands down the Old French road for a tour of the farm’s Acadian sites. Most of them made it up the hill to Pierre and Anne’s homesite, with its stunning view of the environs including that bend in the St. Croix River. Many lingered there, taking more pictures, admiring the scenery, soaking it all in, and connecting with the past. (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 45)

Beanland’s efforts together with the present-day Thibodeau(x) clan at the Acadian World Congress exemplify a “struggle over framing past events as continuous ones” (Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg 125). The reunion of the Thibodeau(x) clan is important in another respect. Since sites of memory about the Acadian origins of the Cajuns can only be found in old Acadia, the clan reunion can be considered as a therapeutic mechanism, “reanimating” links to a past the Cajuns were no longer aware of: Places may also confirm and preserve memories across phases of cultural forgetting. For instance, a particular tradition may have died out, but after a while pilgrims or historically oriented tourists may return to the places that are important to them and discover a landscape, a monument, or a ruin. This leads to ‘reanimations’ in which the place reactivates the memory, but also memory reactivates the place. (A. Assmann, Cultural Memory 12)

In establishing the historical framework surrounding the Acadian dispersal and reunion, Thibodeaux provides evidence of the Cajuns’ rooted resilience and attachment to Acadia. His account of the reunion of the Thibodeau(x) clan held at the deportation memorial park in Grand Pré in 2004 commemorates the past and accentuates the present. Against this background, the pilgrimages to old Acadia resemble the delayed ritualistic pilgrimages indigenous people undertake to ancestral places (see Lévi-Strauss, Pensée 323). The stories of Madeleine, Leola Trahan, Warren Perrin, and other characters of Thibodeaux’s account can be considered as counter-narratives to the American foundational myth. They also go against the Evangeline myth in order to affirm the Cajun identity. Of course,

 Some of the families present at the reunion spelled the surname with an “x,” others without it.

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[t]he stories that make up a tradition contain conceptions of character, of what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such character. But the stories are not all exemplary, not all about successes and achievements. A genuine community of memory will also tell painful stories of shared suffering that sometimes creates deeper identities than success. (Bellah et al. 153)

What crystallizes in Thibodeaux’s work recalls what German historian Reinhart Koselleck observed concerning the experience of the defeated: They learn most from tragic experiences as they gain new insights (Zeitschichten 68). This learning process strengthens the social cohesion of the Cajuns. Despite hardships, they show no unease toward the present or future. Defeats and setbacks have a mobilizing force, for the remembrance of them hardens the vanquished (A. Assmann, Schatten 66). Similar to victims of terrible events, the Cajuns remember the hurricanes and the Acadian expulsion and use them to undergird their search for recognition and restitution, instead of resentment and revenge. Visibly, Thibodeaux’s collection of personal narratives exemplifies how past setbacks have become historical points of reference through a continued narrative of grief. The common hurricane experiences have contributed to the formation of a memory culture, including the transgenerational transmission of previous violent experiences. Meaningful commemorative markers as the Hurricane Audrey memorial in front of Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church in Cameron, Louisiana, the Memorial for unknown victims of Hurricane Audrey behind Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Creole, Louisiana, or the plaque of names listing the Acadian exiles arriving in Louisiana in the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, Louisiana, are not relics from the time before the dramatic events.²³ Still, like relics, they “convince us that we are connected with something that really did happen in the past” (Lowenthal, “Past Time” 12). The new monuments are surrogate sites of memory which help the Cajuns to look to the future: [L]a valeur exceptionnelle accordée à la connaissance des origines. … la connaissance de l’origine de chaque chose (animal, plante, objet cosmique, etc.) confère une sorte de maîtrise magique sur elle: on sait où la trouver et comment la faire réapparaître dans l’avenir. … La ‘mobilité’ de l’origine du Monde traduit l’espoir de l’homme que son Monde sera toujours là, même s’il est périodiquement détruit dans le sens propre du terme. (Eliade 96)

 A photograph of Cameron’s Hurricane Audrey memorial is reproduced in the middle section of Thibodeaux’s Hell or High Water. For the Memorial for unknown victims of Hurricane Audrey see R. Thibodeaux, Hell 18.

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The Cajuns know “either from first-hand experience or by genetic transfer, that body blows to the heart of a small community might be slow to heal, but heal they do” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 29). Thibodeaux’s chain of afflictions recalls Walter Benjamin’s eighth thesis in which he advocates a “tradition of the oppressed”: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (“Theses” 257). In his twelfth thesis, he further claims that it is the oppressed group that stores historical memory.²⁴ This tradition of the oppressed is based on remembering, and Thibodeaux does exactly that: remember previous states of emergency. Ultimately, Hell or High Water illustrates “the bequest of historical experience from one generation to the next; and the attendant passage of that inevitable knowledge of loss and death that are the constants of the human condition, and sometimes, of wisdom” (Hoffman 406). The reconstructed historical memory is intended to further highlight the tradition of resilience and solidarity.

8.3 Collaborative Remembering Beyond the journalistic matrix, Thibodeaux’s account also includes fictional elements. Most interestingly, the first Cajun journalistic prose work walks the line between oral history and life writing, including primarily references to myths but also verifiable facts. Survivors and witnesses have a unique authority; they are the primordial carriers of the memory of an event, for they are the connecting link between past and present: The there-and-then is linked to the here-andnow. It is their challenges and victorious narratives which journalists capitalize on and which attracts the public. The sensationalist element of the glimpses into the private lives of the people hints at the genre of the human interest story, a genre rendering the newsworthy in an entertaining way. In recounting some of the characters’ personal stories, Thibodeaux engages the reader’s interest. Although all Cajuns share the same experience of hurricanes, each individual possesses memories of their own, each forming a different story. Besides establishing the Cajun survivor discourse based on the history of hurricanes and migration, Hell or High Water serves yet another purpose. As a cautionary tale, it addresses issues relevant for the future: The “primary role of mental time travel into the past is to provide raw material from which to con-

 “Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge” (Benjamin, “Theses” 260).

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struct and imagine possible futures” (Suddendorf and Corballis 302). Without a past, no future can be envisioned. Against this background, literary journalism is well-suited for a hybrid culture as it merges different literary genres. As previously shown, Thibodeaux’s work is defined by a Cajun perspective. However, it also extends beyond Cajun culture to a more inclusive, hybrid perspective. In his preface to Hell or High Water, James Carville, political consultant, commentator, and critic from Louisiana, assigns the courage of the Cajuns a specifically American character, thus echoing Ancelet’s claim about the Cajuns’ American frontier spirit: How hardy the people of the bayous overcame … [the] adversity [of hurricanes], time and again, is a story that is not well known—but it’s one worth telling. The story provides only the latest chapter in the rich and unique history of Louisiana’s Cajun people. The survival and endurance of those people and their culture, distinctive as it is, make for a quintessentially American story. (xii)

The American character of the Cajun story lies in the frontier spirit acquired over the past four centuries since the first colonists’ arrival on the North American continent, and in the coalescing themes of migration, diaspora, and hybridization. Furthermore, Thibodeaux’s story presents a hybrid kind of writing from a narratological point of view. To repair the tear in the communal web brought on by the hurricanes, Thibodeaux chooses a particular mode of expression. As shown above, he frequently flashes back into the past and repeatedly refers to previous hurricanes, thus mixing different temporal levels. More importantly, Thibodeaux transcends the Acadian perspective as he includes the voices of another minority, the Houma. In the chapter “A Way of Life Awash,” Thibodeaux explains that the Houma live in the most remote parts of Louisiana and thus suffer most from the ignorance of state officials and the press. They are the forgotten who have no voice, and Thibodeaux becomes their mouthpiece. Generally, people summon historical events for the sake of building a political or national memory of a collective identity (A. Assmann, Schatten 37). In contrast, the polyphonic discourse assembling Cajun voices based on oral transmission and shared fateful events corresponds to a historical memory which has no political purpose, but aims at preserving the Cajun presence. Mentioning other minorities lends additional weight to this presence.

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8.3.1 Thibodeaux’s Multiperspectival Memory Narrative: Recuperating What Has Been Lost Belonging to the genre of creative nonfiction, Hell or High Water is an example of literary journalism, which combines news writing and storytelling. Thibodeaux draws on his journalistic background to establish this documentary-like narrative which includes storm reports, interviews, historical research, oral history, short auto-/biographical anecdotes, human interest stories, and visual texts in the form of maps and photographs. Apart from auto-/biographical elements, the omniscient narrator is also typical of the journalistic genre. For instance, the episode of the Thibodeau(x)-clan meeting in Nova Scotia in 2004, in which Thibodeaux most probably took part, comes closest to an autobiographical account, but Thibodeaux remains invisible. In fact, Thibodeaux has much in common with a historian—both a professional historian relying on documented sources and what Carl L. Becker calls “Mr. Everyman.” In a way, Thibodeaux’s work combines historical consciousness with historical memory, and from a metatextual point of view, it is subjected to rules of poetics in history writing (see H. White). Thibodeaux jettisons journalism’s principles of brevity and authenticity, for the two-hundred-page report with references to oral history differs greatly from the usual news writing. While the use of direct speech, which breaks up the narrative report, is a journalistic device, the use of the past tense throughout Thibodeaux’s text is typical of the literary writing. In fact, even if the journalistic principle aims at providing the newest piece of information, news writing has much in common with storytelling (Darnton). Journalistic texts draw not only on previous templates, but refer to past events, characters, and objects to explain the subject matter. The various voices also highlight Thibodeaux’s versatile handling of both collective and individual suffering. One of Thibodeaux’s narrative strategies is to introduce each chapter with a personal story of his interviewees, most often a tragic anecdote. Especially the last chapter “Home Is What You Make It” includes several losses of the Theriot family. Charlie Theriot, one of Thibodeaux’s interviewees and aged 95, was 15 when he lost his father due to a heart attack. Two years later, in 1929, Charlie’s fifteen-year-old brother Frank accidentally died in a shooting accident. Alone in the swamps, Charlie had to carry his brother all the way back home. In 1967, Charlie’s granddaughter died of sudden infant death syndrome. Such terrible family tragedies are the basis of the Cajuns’ individual and collective resilience. Thibodeaux also mentions the fateful life stories of Sue and her well-known brother James Fontenot. When Rita’s strong surge washed away James’s casket together with hundreds of other caskets, Sue tirelessly searched with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team to find it.

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Another example is the reference to the hostage-taking and murder committed by police officer Chad Louviere in 1996, which was “‘a blow to … [the] community [of Terrebonne Parish]’” (qtd. in R. Thibodeaux, Hell 161) and became seared into the collective memory of the community. A “go-to guy” like Sheriff Vernon Bourgeois was necessary to give back the community some of the trust it used to have in the Police. These introductory personal stories not only show the resilience of the community. They express the strong sense of belonging, the strong ties between the members of the community. Furthermore, these personal stories naturally carry elements of the storytelling tradition. More precisely, they can be considered as human interest stories. In the words of American sociologist Robert E. Parks, a human interest story is what gives the news the character of a story that will be read for its own sake, even when the reader is not at all concerned with it as news. Human interest is the universal element in the news. It is what gives the news story its symbolic character. It is the ability to discover and interpret the human interest in the news that gives the reporter the character of a literary artist and the news story the character of literature. It is in the human interest story that the distinction between the news story and the fiction story tends to disappear. (xxi)

Not sensationalism, but the merging between reality and fiction is relevant. The human interest story developed out of orally transmitted traditions. As Park’s colleague Helen McGill Hughes discovered, the ballad and the folktale of the late medieval period stand at the origin of the contemporary human interest story. In her work News and the Human Interest Story, she pointed out that knowledge and news were spread among the common folk through ballads and folktales such as the Mexican corrido, the Breton and Japanese ballads, and the broadside ballad in London: “The folk tale, like the folk ballad, often celebrates extraordinary events in the life of the people and their legendary heroes. No doubt it was sometimes inspired at a time of general excitement and, in that sense, at least historically, it told the news” (108). Along with what Polish scholar Iwona Irwin-Zarecka argues regarding television, the recourse to human interest stories reflects the need to produce “instant memory” since “the urge to record and to remember remains imbued with strong feelings. … [T]here has to exist a connection with the private emotional world [or the viewing audience], their own sphere of relevance” (171). By interviewing characters, Thibodeaux gives Hurricane Rita and Ike a “human face” (see Irwin-Zarecka 171). Besides describing the collective effort of rebuilding, the references to bereavements also transmit an understanding of life’s transience and a will to take part in the “sharing of humanity” (Irwin-Zarecka 171). In small communities, news and stories circulate more easily because everybody knows one another and is interested in the intimacy existing within fami-

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lies or among friends: “[H]uman interest stories create collective attention, essential for the establishment of a public or demos, and the limitations of that process. Although human interest stories are not unique in this regard, such stories encourage shared identification, important for social cohesion and the maintenance of a public sphere” (Fine and White 57). Against this background, the printed form of a human interest subject matter combines the traditional with the innovative: [T]he ballad version with its human interest, being close to what … [provincial people] are accustomed to in folklore and gossip, can penetrate their society even in the alien form of the printed word and be much sought after. Regarded as a species of folktale it represents a swing of attention from the traditional and the old to the contemporary and the new. (McGill Hughes 118)

Likewise, Thibodeaux’s human interest stories focus on the small news of ordinary people (McGill Hughes 55), and—in contrast to the institutional support of big news—are more likely to create bonding and sympathy because people will identify more readily with ordinary people than with important personalities. Drawing on personal stories of hurricane victims, Thibodeaux continues the Cajun oral storytelling tradition. The author’s obvious tendency to fill out the narrative with little intimate stories of each interviewee suggests that the Cajun oral tradition of storytelling has found a new outlet. As a genre of modern folklore, Thibodeaux’s human interest stories serve to honor the heroism of the Cajuns. Indeed, American historian John W. Dower compares heroic narratives to human interest stories: “Heroic narratives demand a simple, unilinear story line. In popular tellings, that simple line often takes the form of an intimate humaninterest story. Let the ordinary man (or, much less commonly, woman), the individual on the spot, tell his tale” (80). Thibodeaux does not overwhelm his readers with historical details. Hell or High Water is a heroic narrative, or more precisely an assemblage of multiple heroic narratives about ordinary people, both men and women.²⁵ With the hurricane crises at its center, it focuses on each individual’s personal struggles. As a collage of human interest stories, the personal tragedies also help to further strengthen the claim of a resilient culture. Thibodeaux adds a political dimension when he inserts statements by people in charge, such as Sheriff Bourgeois, Mayor Dupuis, or Professor Ancelet. He  It is important to note that Sergeant Russel Honoré, defined by Cajuns and non-Cajuns alike as the culture hero, is not part of Thibodeaux’s account. With good reason, for Thibodeaux’s prime objective is to highlight the efforts and strength of the community, and not of just one individual. For details about Sergeant Russel Honoré as the culture hero see Gaudet, “‘Stuck on Stupid’”; Chappell.

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even sprinkles his narrative with photographs showing two popular public figures, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindahl and actor George Clooney, to show that some personalities did not ignore the Cajuns but were committed to rebuilding the battered communities, thus valorizing the impact of Rita on Cajun culture. This strategy creates the connection to the outside world and lifts Southwest Louisiana out of the oblivion and into the collective consciousness of the United States. The fact that Thibodeaux uses English almost exclusively in his account and presents the Cajuns as an American people suggests an ulterior motive: He wants the Cajuns to be heard and seen beyond the state borders of Louisiana. Yet, apart from the criticism expressed by his interviewees, Thibodeaux himself remains silent concerning questions of responsibility, and he refrains from accusations and analyses of administrative and political failures. Indeed, the apolitical stance is one more trait of the human interest story: This is the paradox of the human interest story: It is profound in creating social linkages, a demos, but directs attention from other stories and other solutions that might improve the life chances of these very people. It is in its ability to foster identification that the human interest story gains significance as it erases politics and policy. In this, identification is consistent with political passive. (Fine and White 77)

The lack of a political agenda is another piece of evidence for the Cajuns’ ingrained self-sufficiency and disapproval of political patronizing, and it emphasizes their preference to remain independent instead of being controlled by inept government institutions and agencies. Hell or High Water is collaborative remembering which nurtures the community with individual memories. It feeds off orally transmitted experiences and memories and thus continues a tradition which has been waning. Collaborative remembering most likely represents the condition for what might be called the Cajuns’ prospective memory. According to journalist critic Jill A. Edy, “collective memory informs our understanding of past events and present relationships, and it contributes to our expectations about the future” (71). More recently, scholars have advanced the claim that memory is not simply limited to its present-past relation, but that it plays an equally fundamental, if not more fundamental role in journalism with regard to the future. Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt has pointed out that “the conceptualization of collective memory is based on the assumption that the remembrance is of that which had already happened—that is, of stories, events, or collective traumas in the past and that have implications for our actions, perceptions, and identity in the present and future” (96). To describe this future-oriented memory, Tenenboim-Weinblatt uses a term from psy-

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chology: She calls it prospective memory. Likewise, Thibodeaux’s account revisits the past and displays a future-oriented and optimistic attitude. Humor, a defining Cajun characteristic documented by the substantial repertoire of Cajun jokes, contributes to this positive outlook. The sarcasm of local postRita responses echo Manuel’s warped humor in “Hurricane Women.” Despite being “sent down by heaven,” the hurricanes are anything but angelic women, turning the world upside down and leaving more than just a “mess” behind. Manuel’s question “Who needs a home?” is certainly rhetorical, for the Cajuns’ strong tie to the land is the basis of their expectations about the future. They do not question their coming back. “‘It’s not if we get back to normal, can we get back to normal. It’s literally when we get there. They’ve got one sight in their mind—that’s the recovery” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 29). People have come back thanks to that distinct future-oriented sense of endurance, passed on from one generation to the next. They carry on because that is what they have learned from their parents and because they want their children to know where they come from. The joint efforts of the community illustrate a specific prospective memory: to save a way of life. This commitment and the people’s strong tie to the past exemplify German sociologist Harald Welzer’s statement that memory serves as an orientation in the present for the purpose of future actions (“Erinnerungskultur”), which complies with what Bellah et al. had already argued three decades earlier, namely that [t]he communities of memory that tie us to the past also turn us toward the future as communities of hope. They carry a context of meaning that can allow us to connect our aspirations for ourselves and those closest to us with the aspirations of a larger whole and see our own efforts as being, in part, contributions to a common good. (153)

Positive actions of that prospective memory include protection efforts and safety measures such as marsh grass planting. “Remembering that physical and social worlds are mutually constitutive” (Hastrup 21) provides a sense of certainty and ensures social cohesion. How relevant the symbiotic relationship of past and future, or retrospective and prospective memory, is for the Cajuns becomes clear in the final sentences of the book, when one of Thibodeaux’s interviewees affirms: “‘I’m the sixth generation on this ridge. That means a lot. … I appreciate that the historical sense is still present here. I fully intend for my children and grandchildren to know a little bit of the Cameron that I knew’” (187). This mentality is consistent with the argument that the memory of the vanquished points to the future, in contrast to the memory of the victors, which sticks to the past (A. Assmann, Schatten 65). In recording the people’s personal sufferings and torment from the natural

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disaster, Thibodeaux lends them a voice and disseminates their stories. Considering that it is their future and the culture’s future which is at stake, his endeavor can be viewed as the future-oriented moral obligation to redeem the people and places forgotten in the wake of the natural disasters.

8.3.2 Extending the Cajun Memory Community Although Thibodeaux describes South Louisiana as a place consisting of various ethnic groups (Hell 9), Cajun culture receives the lion’s share of the account while the black Creole influence is left behind. The introduction includes the photograph of a young Black man with the caption: “Tracy Johnson of New Orleans [who] evacuated to Hackberry for Hurricane Katrina. Two days before Rita struck, he was on the move again, crossing the Calcasieu Ship Channel from Holly Beach to Cameron aboard the ferry Cameron II” (Hell 3). Curiously, it is the sole instance where Tracy Johnson is mentioned, and while this reference seems to evoke an inclusive perspective, extending to the African American community, Thibodeaux fails altogether to give insight into their predicaments. Only in one other instance, and then en passant, does Thibodeaux mention the African American community: The “predominantly African American congregation of Our Lady Queen of Peace [in Lafayette] collected school uniforms, backpacks, and school supplies for children of the storm” (Hell 130). Post-Katrina news reports and public debates deliberated extensively over the calamities of the stricken black population in New Orleans. Arguably, Thibodeaux willfully omitted the African American perspective to distinguish his account from previous ones and also to pinpoint how the Cajuns were neglected in the public discourse. It is perhaps no coincidence that Thibodeaux’s work bears a similar title to American sociologist Michael Eric Dyson’s critical book of 2006, Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster, which argued that Katrina uncovered the rooted racial and social disadvantages in New Orleans. Thibodeaux’s Hell or High Water could well be considered as a companion volume to Dyson’s depiction as it gives an insider’s perspective of the Cajuns as another discriminated ethnic group. In contrast, the media and the public alike overlooked another ethnic minority. In chapter five, “A Life of Way Awash,” Thibodeaux gives a voice to the Native American people living in the remotest part of the coastal wetlands: “Along those lonely routes live Cajuns, African-Americans, and people who ascribe to assorted other ethnicities or none at all. Toward the end of most of those roads, though—farthest removed from the trappings of modern society—are Native Americans, members of the United Houma Nation” (Hell 61). Traditionally,

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the Native American contribution to Creole culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Louisiana and the U.S. has been obfuscated. During the colonization of Louisiana, the lack of women necessarily led to the Frenchmen mixing with Native American women, and thus to an early creolization process. Displacement, discrimination, and the lack of records contributed to the gradual forgetting of the Native Americans of Louisiana (Jolivétte, “Examining” 163; Carl A. Brasseaux, French 127). American assimilation through multicultural marriages and the move of the Houma toward the southern marshes resulted in the apparent dissolution of the tribe. Yet their repeated though unsuccessful endeavors to be recognized as a tribe show that a strong Houma community still exists.²⁶ Today, Houma culture finds itself in an even more precarious state than Cajun culture. Rita struck the Houma particularly hard. The very existence of some communities is threatened because some places have simply vanished. Thibodeaux tells of graduate student Jamie Billiot, of Houma ancestry, who returns to post-Rita Dulac²⁷ in Terrebonne Parish only to discover that “Bayou La Butte, the entire coastal island where … [her father Antoine Billiot’s] family lived, … has disappeared, swallowed whole by the encroaching Gulf of Mexico” (Hell 63). Similarly, with the increased flooding and land loss, residents of Chauvin, Louisiana, who once gave shelter to cousins living fifteen miles farther in Cocodrie, Louisiana, started saying “We’re Cocodrie now,” playing on the meaning of becoming amphibian themselves (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 67).²⁸ To add to the natural catastrophe, the Houma nation lacks “federal recognition from the government and the accompanying money that comes with such official acknowledgment” (Dardar-Robichaux and Verdin). They are the forgotten people of Cajun Country. Jamie Billiot, however, was not discouraged by the loss of her family’s heritage. She established a community center to fight for the preservation of her culture and became the director of Dulac Community Center, which opened on the day of the start of the 2008 hurricane season (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 66). There, like the Houma women before her who “have played important roles as cultural transmitters” (Carl A. Brasseaux, French 127), she has been in

 In 1985, the United Houma Nation filed the Petition for Federal Acknowledgment, but has not been recognized as a tribe as yet (“United Houma Nation”).  Dulac was the first community to have a state-sponsored school in 1950 (Carl A. Brasseaux, French 128).  Other communities like the Choctaw tribe on Isle de Jean Charles are in a worse condition. Leaders even began talking seriously, for the first time, about the prospect of abandoning the property altogether, surrendering it to the Gulf and moving the few remaining residents to higher ground (Sutter). See also Beller and Zanolli.

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charge of numerous cultural activities promoting Cajun and Native American culture. The wetlands are important in another respect. Apart from providing a natural habitat for wildlife, they serve as a natural speed bump against storms. Yet the regulation of the Mississippi River in the mid-twentieth century altered the sedimentation system of the Mississippi Delta which is essential for the marshes. The canal constructions designed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers caused fundamental environmental changes: Every hour, land the size of a football field is washed into the Gulf of Mexico. It is the disappearance of these marshes which intensifies the danger of hurricanes and speeds up the coastal erosion. Both the loss of the islands as natural barriers to slacken storms and the disintegration of the Gulf coast put the regional culture in jeopardy. “It’s an unfolding calamity of fantastic magnitude, taking with it entire Cajun towns and an age-old way of life” (6), wrote Mike Tidwell about the harrowing process of land loss in 2003.²⁹ Thibodeaux agrees, for, together with the people’s very homestead, a whole stock of traditions is disappearing: “And for the people of these roads, people who live quiet, modest lives amid quiet, modest surroundings, something else is ending too: their very way of life, washing away with the wetlands that once embraced them but now are disappearing before their worried eyes” (Hell 60). In 2005, historian Carl A. Brasseaux predicted that before long the Houma would have to migrate: It will be interesting to see how long this unique culture endures as globalization extends its tentacles into the remote corners of this planet, including Louisiana’s coastal marshes, and the nation’s modern Louisiana homeland rapidly disappears in the face of coastal erosion and marshland subsidence, posing the threat that the Houma will be forced to migrate to inland communities. (French 129 – 130)

Loss of land equals loss of memory, which again equals loss of socio-cultural traditions. The hurricane tragedy and the long haul of recovery are two reasons why younger people have started moving away altogether (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 67). The loss of land only accelerates the disintegration of the rural community— the younger generation is already settling further inland in urban areas—and ultimately the disappearance of the culture. Jamie’s story about her ancestor’s lost island represents another assault on the regional culture. As a result of exogamy during the eighteenth century, Cajun

 In Losing Ground: Identity and Land Loss in Coastal Louisiana (2013), David M. Burley documents and analyzes the effects of land loss on the Louisiana Gulf Coast.

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French has remained the lingua franca for the Houma, who are “a rare stronghold for the twenty-first century survival of the Cajun French language in the out-of-the-way places of lower Terrebonne and nearby Lafourche parishes, where most of them continue to live” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 61). Significantly, in 1990, the census “indicated that approximately 60 percent of the Houma residing in Terrebonne Parish and almost 50 percent of the Lafourche Parish Houma over five years of age spoke Cajun French as their first language. Approximately 20 percent of the Houma in both parishes reported that they did ‘not speak English very well’” (Carl A. Brasseaux, French 129). Carl A. Brasseaux compares the present state of the Houma to that of the Cajuns of the late nineteenth century, “when social isolation born out of poverty serves as the principal vehicle for cultural preservation” (French 129). Against this background, Jamie Billiot’s endeavors to rebuild her Native American community seem almost for naught. Natural disasters not only wash away the land, but with it the Houma culture and the French language. The problem of the viability of Cajun French is thus connected to the danger posed by hurricanes. Strikingly, Thibodeaux’s narrative is almost devoid of French, except for one short exchange between one of his interviewees, Margaret Hebert, and Charles Thibodeaux, an elderly resident from Erath whom she helped after the storm and who tested her in Cajun French (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 153). Thibodeaux’s choice to use English mirrors the linguistic dilemma of the Cajuns and results from the fact that, on the one hand, he is not proficient in French and that, on the other hand, an English narrative certainly reaches a wider audience. The reference to the precariousness of Houma culture is a means to put the Cajun community on a level with other endangered minority groups. As for the Acadians, records on tribal history are almost nonexistent, but it is well known that the native tribes in Louisiana fell prey to the shenanigans of U.S. politics. Broken treaties and illegal land cessions forced the Houma off their land: “Around 1850 the Houma began leaving the bayous of upper Terrebonne Parish and moved further south into the coastal marshes to the south. The movement evidently stemmed in part from the group’s increasing marginalization in local society” (Carl A. Brasseaux, French 127). In the twentieth century, the oil and gas industry further marginalized them: “[M]any of the unschooled Houmas lost their land to oil companies in transactions too complex for them to understand” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 64). The Houma history of uprooting and displacement through extermination and assimilation coalesces with the expulsion story of the Acadians. In including the Houma in his Cajun discourse, Thibodeaux extends the dilemma of the Cajun community to another minority, and the shared sufferings of the two ethnic groups gives weight to his argument.

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In giving a voice to the silent and marginalized Houma people,³⁰ Thibodeaux creates a memory community of shared suffering, recovery, and resilience. This transcultural vector of collective memory is substantiated in another work of literary journalism. Ken Wells’s The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous (2008) parallels Thibodeaux’s account in its tendency to ally with other suffering and neglected minorities. Recording the Hurricane Katrina experience of the inhabitants of St. Bernard Parish, Wells focuses on another ethnic group in Louisiana forgotten by the media and the public. The Isleños, represented by the protagonist Robin, a Cajun-Isleño, live around Chalmette, Louisiana, in what used to be Jean Lafitte’s territory, where they have been fighting to save their way of life.³¹ What constitutes the two accounts by Thibodeaux and Wells is their approach to incorporate the vernacular, the grassroots efforts. They also document the cultural diversity and make the plight of the respective minorities known to a larger readership. With respect to the larger issues of preserving the people’s homes and the natural habitat, South Louisiana cannot solely rely on self-sufficiency, but it depends on outside help. Jamie emphasizes the necessity that outsiders know about the struggles of the Houma tribe. Thanks to her “perspective of the outside world” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 69), she was able to reach out for help. She loves “‘when college groups come down. … You can really tap into some activism. And Dulac is a very welcoming community. Our people love to share with them. They want to share their stories” (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 72). Outside help came from Janet Grigsby, sociology professor at Union College in Schenectady, New York, who initiated the wetlands restoration project with her students. In addition, the Cajuns received support from people around the

 A first endeavor to make the Houma voice be heard is the publication of Istrouma: A Houma Manifesto/Manifeste Houma (2014) by T. Mayheart Dardar. In this collection of essays, Dardar recounts the struggles in the aftermath of hurricanes, especially those of 2005, and connects to similar struggles of other indigenous peoples around the world. This bilingual publication —Clint Bruce translated the English text into French—was issued by Centenary College of Louisiana, a circumstance which shows how the francophone community pulls together with other marginal communities.  The term “Isleño” means “islander” in Spanish and generally refers to the Canary Islanders in opposition to the inhabitants of the Spanish mainland, the “peninsulares.” In Louisiana, the Isleños are the descendants of Canarian settlers immigrating in the second half of the eighteenth century and settling in St. Bernard Parish. Other places of Isleño settlement in the Gulf of Mexico include Cuba and Puerto Rico. There, Isleño culture has evolved into a cultural identity as a minority of Isleños have maintained their language, a Spanish dialect, as well as such traditions as the Isleño folk music called decima. However, Isleño culture is very much on the brink of extinction (Lipski; Armistead 1– 8, 12).

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country. A long-term relationship between the Catholic Diocese of Toledo, Ohio, and the Diocese of Houma-Thibodeaux was set up after the 2005 storms. In return, when Northern Ohio’s worst flooding occurred in 2007, Catholics from the Houma-Thibodeaux area quickly responded. Another couple, Sherrill and Helen Sagrera, both 65 years old, received help from seventy-one-year-old Tim Holly from Ohio and Mary Kay Pyles from Florida. Tim’s and Mary’s memories of natural disasters in their home states such as the tornado of 1974 or the four hurricanes which hit Florida in 2004 drove them to offer their help (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 148 – 149). Finally, historian and archaeologist Sara Beanlands from Nova Scotia, responsible for the reunion of the Thibodeaux clan, brought Acadian memorabilia to replace the items lost in the water.

8.4 Conclusion Jill A. Edy has remarked that mediated collective memory includes stories “preserved in the media as a means of legitimating journalists as storytellers” (72). In Hell or High Water, Thibodeaux emerges as a storyteller, as he both pays tribute to the Rita and Ike disasters, and evokes other tragic events ingrained in the collective memory of the Cajuns. Considering that, until the 1980s, Cajun culture was based on oral traditions, Thibodeaux continues this tradition and, at the same time, contributes to the development of a distinct, written anglophone Cajun literature. The Cajun reporter does the work of an artist as he paints various vignettes which, arranged as a whole, give a comprehensive portrait of the Rita and Ike vernacular experience. Although Thibodeaux’s account presents a pioneering genre in Cajun literature, the connection to oral history revealed through, for instance, the Evangeline and Madeleine legends makes a logical consequence. Against this backdrop, Thibodeaux’s discursive strategies are both traditional and innovative, and they contribute to a literary-commemorative journalism that exemplifies the interplay of memory, history, journalism, literature, and folklore. The fact that University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press published the book, attributes to Thibodeaux’s account a certain legitimacy. Thanks to the two Independent Book awards Thibodeaux received in 2013, Hell or High Water reaches not only an academic audience, but also a wider national audience. The vernacular responses in Thibodeaux’s account substantiate the importance of land and home, as well as a genealogy of uprooting. They profess a long-standing determination anchored in the strong cohesion of the community, the memory of the past, and cultural adaptability. In intermingling the recent traumatic events with past tragedies, Thibodeaux creates a distinct Cajun disas-

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ter narrative. The Grand Dérangement, Audrey, Rita, Ike, and a list of other hurricanes all represent major assaults on Cajun culture. Moreover, Thibodeaux’s portrayal includes voices of another ethnic minority, the Native Americans, thus inscribing the Cajuns into a larger discourse on minorities and discrimination. The disaster discourse could be extended to more recent hazards. Indeed, Thibodeaux hints at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, “a catastrophic offshore oil spill which menaced Gulf waters, adjacent inland waterways, thereby endangering as well the only livelihood most of the area’s people knew” (Hell 69). As the latest series of afflictions hitting Cajun culture,³² the “gargantuan” BP oil spill added to the precariousness of Louisiana’s Gulf coast as it posed not only a physical threat to the Gulf of Mexico and coastal wetlands but a more personal threat as well: by fouling the Gulf waters, the spill also imperiled for many Cajun families a vital means of cultural transfer, for it is on the decks of shrimp boats and, afterward, in the kitchen with the day’s catch where many children still learn the language and traditions of their people from their fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles. (R. Thibodeaux, Hell 11)

While writers like Darrell Bourque were incapable of addressing the oil spill disaster in its aftermath (Breed and Smith), Tim Gautreaux, whose family works in the oil industry, endeavored to express his feelings in a short story and an article for the British newspaper The Guardian. ³³ Like Thibodeaux, he also refers to the transmitted sense of disaster: “Those who live in Louisiana all their lives develop an understanding of disaster. We know a hurricane can turn over hundreds of offshore oil rigs in one pass and then come to land and do the same to our homes” (“BP Oil Spill”). With respect to the BP oil spill, the circumstances seem more desperate: It is a “disaster [that] rides like a tumour on the back of the monster Katrina,” Gautreaux explained to The Guardian (“BP Oil Spill”). In exposing a collective belonging based on past sufferings that go beyond individual memories, Thibodeaux’s book becomes more than a tribute to the catastrophes of Rita and Ike. It illustrates how individual suffering becomes a collective strategy of resilience, and it follows up on Cajun literature’s hidden agenda to counter established myths such as that of the passive Cajuns as well as revoking the silence of the Cajuns in giving them a voice. Thibodeaux’s effort

 The socio-cultural consequences of the spill were detailed in three documentaries (SoLa: Louisiana Water Stories [2010]; Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe a la Hache [2014]; Stories from the Gulf [2016]). They show how the disaster affected residents and their way of life along the Louisiana and Alabama Gulf coasts.  The short story “Gone to Water” was specially commissioned by The Guardian and published in 2011. See also Gautreaux, “BP Oil Spill.”

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to keep the memory of Rita and Ike present adds a political touch. Rita—and Katrina, too—revealed how media coverage distorts socio-cultural memory so that “part of the journalist’s job is not just to report the latest happenings but to fit them into some kind of coherent framework for the audience. It is in the quest for coherent understanding, not in the service of commemoration, that journalists may make their most vital contribution to social memory” (Schudson, “Journalism” 88).³⁴ Combining oral with official history, Thibodeaux’s human interest stories work as a foil to the mediatized Katrina experience in New Orleans and highlight how the “dynamic relay between personal and communal memory reconfigures the relationship of forms of communal memory and aims to rework official memory in the nation” (Smith and Watson 177). Thibodeaux does not blame any party but rather amplifies the ability of the Cajuns to find solutions without the help from federal or governmental agencies. Neither does he engage in a detailed ecological discussion about climate change. Yet some Cajuns have started to mobilize against the administrative, political, and partly public indifference and blindness regarding the ecological threat Cajun Country faces. Cajun fisherman and singer-songwriter Drew Landry, for instance, spoke up to the presidential oil spill committee in 2010, and surprised everybody when he took out his guitar and sang his song “BP Blues” (dirtycajuns). The most conspicuous motif emerging in Hell or High Water is the Cajun spirit of survival. Far from giving up what they have considered as their promised land for centuries, the Cajuns use the past to make do with the present and improve the future. Hell or High Water is evidence of the Cajuns’ sense of rootedness and of the past. At the same time, they accept progress and change, for they do not dwell on the losses brought on by the hurricanes. Resilience also entails the future-oriented question of preparedness. In another book about Katrina and Rita, Barry Ancelet equally calls attention to the Cajuns’ survival instincts: When the British exiled … [the Acadians] from Nova Scotia in 1755, it was with the expressed intent of dispersing them among the British colonies so that they might be absorbed and acculturated. This did not happen. Instead of eliminating the Acadian identity, the exile galvanized it. Those Acadians who arrived in Louisiana between 1764 and 1788 were expected to dissolve into French Creole society. This did not happen. They preserved their cultural and social specificity well past the French and Spanish periods. Under pressure from the fierce nationalism that accompanied World War I, they were expected to melt in the American pot. This did not happen. Cajuns found ways to negotiate the mainstream and continue to celebrate their traditions and language. Those living in the southwestern parishes recently affected by Rita were there because they returned and built after Audrey. (“Storm Stories” 7)

 For more details about memory distortion see Schacter, Memory Distortion.

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The hardiness of the Cajuns in the face of this series of assaults on Cajun culture evokes the well-known Cajun adage of “Lâche pas la patate,” which emphasizes the resilience of the Cajuns instead of the presumed hedonism. This Cajun attitude is a philosophy which lends itself to imitation in similar cases of hardship. Cajun traditional values such as the importance of the land and community, the sense of the past, and the alignment to other afflicted minority groups exemplify social resilience and the Cajun’s resistance to adversity. Yet, with the disintegration of Cajun traditions, the fragmentation of the Cajun family, and the increased mobility of the Cajuns—all consequences related to globalization—the Cajun pattern of resilience based on community and communication may be melting away. Efforts to preserve minority cultures, their ways of life, and the surrounding nature have been made by such associations as Bayou Grace, which “mobilizes local and national community in the restoration and protection of coastal Louisiana, with a focus on the rural five bayou communities of lower Terrebonne Parish” (“About Bayou Grace”). The Gulf coast restoration project is another example which shows the “general will to shape a livable future” (Hastrup 12) as well as how natural and cultural dynamics foster each other. Moreover, the Acadian past has a legitimizing function which is without doubt future-oriented. Especially events of high commemorative density are elevated beyond their immediate historical context into symbolic texts that serve as paradigms for understanding other developments in the group’s experience. Thus, collective memory can transform historical events into political myths that function as a lens through which group members perceive the present and prepare for the future. (Y. Zerubavel 9)

The legitimizing function is supposed to distinguish Rita and Ike from the preeminence of Hurricane Katrina, the Cajuns from other ethnic groups in Louisiana, from the culture of New Orleans, and above all from mainstream American culture. Memory’s healing function in times of rupture is to repair the tear in the historical, social, and cultural fabric. As the past recedes, memory takes over: “For an experienced event is finite—at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it” (Benjamin, “Image” 202). It is through remembering, through commemorative rituals and narratives, that Rita is made an enduring event. As today’s media provides for archiving procedures, Thibodeaux’s account becomes a testimony of the people’s responses. Considering the lack of coverage for Rita and Ike, Hell or High Water is an important cultural text. It is a collective

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testimony mirroring the mnemonic processes of the Cajuns after a historical rupture. The terrible hurricanes repeatedly provoked cuts in the Cajun fabric, and Thibodeaux embarks on patching them up through his polyphonic memory account. He knots the various memories together, whereby the new nœuds de mémoire such as the Evangeline-Madeleine-Leola knot, or the Cajun-Houma knot assume the form of a fishing net, or a harlequin coat made of myriad patches stitched together.³⁵ The conjunction between Rita, Audrey, and the Acadian expulsion echoes and projects “a mythical-circular perception of national time” (Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg 121), and the reconstructed memory helps to fix and overcome the break into ordinary time, establishing thus the needed sense of stability and continuity. The list of hardships might give the impression of a victimized group. Instead, it is an affirmation of the culture’s strength. Significantly, the preservation of Cajun culture relies on its rejuvenation: the constant adaptation to changing circumstances without obliterating the past. A group which builds its self-image on victimhood magnified by myth blocks its own opportunities of development and remains unaffected by experiences of other victims (A. Assmann, Schatten 81). Cajun identity is not rooted in victimization. Despite the repeated assaults on their culture, the Cajuns do not display a victim mentality but rather represent resilience. They show traits of the hero who is not passive but takes action. The Cajuns’ actions are a statement against the stereotypical image of the meek Acadians and resigned Cajuns. This heroic discourse is anything but a trauma discourse. Thibodeaux’s choice of “fortitude” in the subtitle of his book indicates the physical and mental strength of the Cajuns from the start. The Cajun story is a story of survival and resilience, and resilience builds on a positive attitude in times of trouble. He foregrounds the people’s improvisations versus protocol red tape, and their undying humor versus despair. In contrast to the flood of Katrina books which mostly focused on what went wrong in the aftermath of Katrina and analyzed the dramatic crisis of the U.S., Thibodeaux uses a more positive discursive strategy: He represents the impact of the forgotten storms in showing what went right. This positive attitude might well be the key to the viability of Cajun culture. For decades, people have been predicting the demise of Cajun culture. Yet there also exists the running joke that “every time someone tries to pronounce a funeral oration, the corpse sits up in the coffin and asks for a beer. In French” (Swick).

 “La mémoire collective est un manteau d’Arlequin, fait de fragments tissés par des milieux sociaux, intellectuels, politiques, des moments historiques, des systèmes idéologiques divers et dans des matériaux hétéroclites” (Petitier 105; my emphasis).

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In the end, after establishing a narrative of the hardships of the people in Bayou country, each of the stories has a positive ending which is emblematic of the Cajun spirit of joie de vivre and supports the Cajuns’ fortitude, presenting a silver lining for their culture. Significantly, the final chapter “Home Is What You Make It” does not end with Charlie and his wife’s deaths, but with the words of Charlie’s great-grandson Ryan Bourriaque, who founded his own family in a home on his family property and who is firmly intent on passing his ancestors’ traditions on to his children.

9 Darrell Bourque’s Poetics of Broken Memory Cajun poetry is not just limited to the francophone literary art in Louisiana. Today, Cajun poems in English are coequal to Cajun poems in French. The most prominent representative of anglophone Cajun poetry is Darrell Bourque, who has published about a dozen volumes of poetry and received numerous accolades.¹ As one of the most illustrious Louisiana poets, he might, in fact, be Zachary Richard’s English-writing counterpart. After all, disregarding the different language choice in their writings, Bourque’s and Richard’s public and private lives show striking parallels and interconnections. Born in Church Point, Louisiana, in 1942, about 20 miles northwest of Richard’s birthplace in Scott, Louisiana, Bourque not only shares Richard’s neighborhood. If, as a young man, Bourque was not as notorious as Richard, he is one of the most influential literary figures in Louisiana today, thanks to his dedication as an English professor at UL Lafayette and especially to his function as Poet Laureate of Louisiana from 2007 to 2009, and again from 2009 to 2011, which involved numerous talks and readings across the state.² Furthermore, Bourque, who followed up on Brenda Mounier’s idea of a French-language Poète Lauréat de la Louisiane française, was responsible for Richard being the first to officiate as such from 2014 to 2016 (LEH). Their Acadian ancestry, their offices as poets laureate as well as the honor of being elected Humanists of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the arts—Richard in 2016 and Bourque in 2019 (M. Martin; Louisiana Book News)—tighten the bonds between the fellow lyrical artists. Starting in the early 1980s, Bourque’s writing career gathered momentum more than a decade later, a trait he shares with Tim Gautreaux. In 2016, he was awarded the James William Rivers Prize for his “‘longstanding commitment to and leadership in the realm of preserving and expanding … [the] understanding of Louisiana through poetry’” (qtd. in “Poet Darrell Bourque”).³ Against this

 Bourque’s works include his PhD thesis of 1981, entitled Carbon Rites; Aubade: For a Summer Morning and the Things Themselves (1982), which is currently out of print; Plainsongs (1994); The Doors between Us (1997); Burnt Water Suite (1999); The Blue Boat (2004); Call and Response: Conversations in Verse in collaboration with Cajun poet Jack B. Bedell (2009); In Ordinary Light: New and Selected Poems (2010); the chapbook Holding the Notes (2011); Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie; and the chapbook if you abandon me, comment je vas faire: An Amédé Ardoin Songbook, published in 2014 and reedited as Where I Waited in 2016.  The Darrell Bourque Award has been established to honor outstanding conference papers (Doallas).  Bourque shares this recognition with Zachary Richard who received the Award in 2012, with Carl A. Brasseaux (2009) and Barry J. Ancelet (1996) among others (“Poet Darrell Bourque”). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-010

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background, Bourque can be considered as a prime representative, if not the vanguard of anglophone Cajun poetry.⁴ Curiously, no major scholarly work has tackled his contributions to Cajun culture and literature except for a couple of reviews and articles.⁵ Bourque’s poetry is, like that of the other Cajun poets, driven by a deep-seated attachment to Southwest Louisiana and the wish to keep the culture and traditions alive through literature. What distinguishes Bourque’s technique is that, although he anchors his poems in the Cajun space, he taps into material extraneous to Cajun culture, uncovers connections and transforms the material into a Cajun artifact. The creative and innovative ways in which Bourque audaciously handles any artistic material makes him a paragon of a transareal Cajun poetry, breaking the ground for a Cajun literature with a universal reach. The recurrent theme of remembering in Bourque’s poetry provides another avenue to tackle collective memory in Cajun literature. For Bourque, writing poetry is primarily an act of remembering. Reflecting about what prompted him to write poems, Bourque stated in an interview that it was the death of his greatgrandmother which triggered his creative gift. He remembers that he “felt deeply the loss of … [his] maternal great-grandmother who was one of … [his] best friends and a spiritual guide as … [he] grew up in rural southwest [sic] Louisiana” (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”). As his Mnemosyne, she set him “on the path of discovering how to creatively remember. … Remembering deeply, creatively, and deliberately is what keeps … [him] writing poems” (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”). The loss he felt with the passing of his great-grandmother equals a sense of brokenness, for the links to both her and the past were severed. Of course, as fragOther recent honors highlight Bourque’s rich contribution to the literary and artistic scene. For instance, in 2014, he received the Louisiana Writer Award, a recognition he shares with Tim Gautreaux, and the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Megan’s Guitar. Operating for about a decade, “the Next Generation Indie Book Awards was established to recognize and honor the most exceptional independently published books in over 70 different categories, for the year. …” (“Next Generation”).  Four of his books inaugurated new chapbook series: The Doors Between Us (1997) is the first of a chapbook series by the Louisiana Press of Southeastern Louisiana University; Plainsongs (1999) was the pioneer issue of the Cajun Writer Series for Cross-Cultural Communications, Merrick, New York; and in 2004, the University of Louisiana began publishing a Louisiana Writers Series with The Blue Boat (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”). if you abandon me started yet another, bilingual, series: The Louisiana Series of Cajun and Creole Poetry / La Série de Louisiane de Poésie des Acadiens et Créoles by the Yellow Flag Press publishes works by Franco-American poets (“Yellow Flag Press”).  Except for a number of interviews, a presentation by Bourque of his early poems (“Plainsongs”) and an essay by American poet George Drew on Bourque’s In Ordinary Light are the only critical in-depth analyses of Bourque’s work.

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ments of the past, memories themselves always appear as broken pieces. Likewise, Bourque’s personal poems, most of them centering around family and the larger Cajun community, are never complete representations of memories and experiences, but rather pieces thereof. Significantly, brokenness is a defining characteristic of Bourque’s work. The poems dedicated to deceased family members and friends best mirror the speaker’s and, by extension, the poet’s broken feelings. Brokenness encompasses the broken social ties as well as the accompanying emotions, such as the feeling of being broken and shattered by loss. Consequently, Bourque’s poems can be seen as a healing mechanism, an attempt to fix what has been broken. Moreover, from a linguistic point of view, Bourque’s use of English represents another broken memory. Bourque grew up surrounded by French-speaking people, but unlike Richard, he was never able to speak his ancestors’ language, nor is he comfortable with writing in French. Thus, he knows only broken French. In inserting French sentences and phrases here and there in his poems, Bourque seeks to fill that lack. The image of brokenness culminates in Megan’s Guitar: And Other Poems from Acadie and Where I Waited, both on a thematic and formal level. It is also in these two works that Cajun collective memory gains additional value, for they show a deepened sense of the past. In these two collections, Bourque tries to negotiate the historical past, which entails also a sense of brokenness: The past appears as broken because only scant historical sources and testimonials exist. Bourque fills in the remaining blanks with his imagination: In Megan’s Guitar, he recreates the Acadian deportation, and in Where I Waited, the unrecorded lives of Creole musician Amédé Ardoin as well as of such Cajun musicians as Iry Lejeune and Cléoma Breaux Falcon. Megan’s Guitar presents an interesting case for at least two reasons. In contrast to his previous volumes of poetry, Bourque, for the first time, delves into the distant past and resuscitates a bygone time, the Acadian expulsion. With regard to history, broken memories have a special quality. Reinhart Koselleck wrote about “gebrochene Erinnerungen”—broken memories—to symbolize the divergent commemorative perceptions of the Germans and the Polish with respect to the commemoration of the Holocaust. In contrast to shared memory, “broken memory” refers to how the political memory of the two countries clash despite their shared past (Koselleck, “Gebrochene Erinnerung”). To reach a compromise concerning the past, both sides need to jointly suture these symbolic fissures. The term “broken memories” also applies to the Acadian past and Megan’s Guitar, as it epitomizes the diverging memories about the Acadian past. When Bourque tackles the Grand Dérangement and reinvents iconic Acadian characters, he also deals with broken memories, i. e., with historical lacunae and distorted rep-

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resentations, with the contrast between the Acadian myth and his own poetic vision of the historical event. Finally, Megan’s Guitar includes a formal innovation which renders the image of brokenness visually. After experimenting with the Petrarchan sonnet in his previous collections, Bourque has settled on a genuine poetic structure, the Italo-Cajun sonnet, or broken sonnet, a form based on the traditional sonnet but split into its formal components and rearranged into a new form. Against this background, Megan’s Guitar represents an important turn in both Bourque’s poetry and the anglophone Cajun literature developing in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Far from being simply Cajun, Bourque’s poetry implies a universal reach. Similar to Richard’s transnationalism, Bourque reaches beyond the regional sphere to include a variety of exotic elements and to establish a transareal space. In Carbon Rites, Bourque’s dissertation of 1981, the poems “Pittsburgh’s Chamber Music” (13), “The Yellow Iris in Jackie Kennedy’s Hair” (24), “Spinoza’s Exile” (25), “Proserpina’s Complaint: A Variation” (37), and “Georgia O’Keefe Will Be Blonde” (60) clearly indicate a wide spectrum of themes: “They focus on one region with an eye for the universal longings and quests of every man” (Bourque, “Carbon Rites”). For Bourque, “there is not a human experience that is more satisfying and enlarging than border crossings” (Bourque, “Mindfulness” 380). It is, then, this very stimulating exchange between the familiar and the Other, the static and the nomadic, which captivates the reader and keeps Cajun collective memory alive. As one critic said, Bourque is “at once profoundly regional—this is the work that had to come from deep Louisiana, from an Acadian heart—and worldly” (Bourque, Blue Boat, back cover). The interplay of the regional and transareal emerges especially in collaborative and transdisciplinary projects with other artists. For instance, Bourque contributed poems to shows of and books by a number of visual artists.⁶ Bourque’s transareal and transmedial outlook also shines through his poems which present a list of artistic sources of inspiration encompassing not only contemporary, but also bygone writers, musicians, and visual artists from across the world. There is no doubt that, although Bourque refers to a wide range of literary and musical works, artwork remains one of the major wellsprings of his poems. Indeed, ek-

 The collaborators include Cajun painter Elemore Morgan Jr. for Where Land Meets Sky (1999); collage artist Lynda Frese for Pacha Mama: Earth Realm (2009); Hunt Slonem, together with crime novelist James Lee Burke for Hunt Slonem: On the Bayou (2010); Creole painter Dennis Paul Williams, together with photographer Philip Gould for Soul Exchange: The Paintings of Dennis Paul Williams (2013); and abstract painter Bill Gingles for Where I Waited.

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phrasis, the artistic description of visual artworks, has become his trademark poetic form.⁷ Bourque’s poetry then lends itself to a productive analysis of how memory crosses multiple boundaries and how this mechanism contributes to consolidating the Cajun collective memory. First, references to place, social ties, and a Catholic outlook identify Bourque’s work as Cajun literature. Second, Bourque’s reanimation of the Acadian expulsion in Megan’s Guitar intensifies this sense and adds a temporal frame to the geographical frame. Third, although Bourque’s poetry is steeped in Cajun culture, it simultaneously opens up to a wider universe of very disparate themes and forms. Using intermedial poetics, which reveal influences from literature, music, and especially the visual arts, Bourque creates a hybrid space, typical of Cajun culture, and ensures the continuity of Cajun culture.

9.1 Bourque’s Acadie Tropicale “Deep roots,” noted literary critic Susan Larson in 2008, “[t]hat’s what Darrell Bourque explores and celebrates—family life, Catholicism, landscape and culture, the ties that bind” (“Louisiana Poet Laureate”). Throughout his poetry, authentic scenes of Cajun culture unfold as Bourque paints a distinct Cajun environment, disconnected from the usual stereotypes of rustic places on the bayou and alligator-hunting Cajuns. Plainsongs, for instance, assembles poems “about a place … [Bourque] felt deeply, a place that shaped who and what … [he] was” (Udall and Bourque).⁸ Bourque culls this sense of place from his memories with his family, often based on photographs, and from family and Louisiana folk traditions. For the poetry collection The Blue Boat, he was inspired by the Lafitte skiff, an “important folk boat … found throughout Louisiana” (Donald W. Davis 151). It is “designed to work in shallow waters behind and along the coast” (Comeaux),

 The rhetorical device of ekphrasis refers to a “[d]etailed description of an image, primarily visual; in specialized form, limited to description of a work of visual art … a key part of the art of description in poetry, historiography, romance, and novels” (Starr 393).  Plainsongs is a bilingual edition of poems, translated into French by famous Cajun musician Christine Balfa and published as Chapbook #1 in editor Stanley Barkan’s Cajun Writer Series for Cross-Cultural Communications, Merrick, New York. Plainsongs includes three poems from “Dancing Dust” and nine from “Carbon Rites” of the Carbon Rites collection. The poem “For a Summer Morning and for the Things Themselves” in Plainsongs is clearly the title poem of Aubade (see Bourque, Plainsongs 43).

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and it is difficult to build. Building a skiff is still a craft in Louisiana today, and “the economy and beauty of a Lafitte skiff made entirely from unwritten plans” amazes boat-building amateurs (Comeaux). A photograph by well-known artist Philip Gould displayed in the Jean Lafitte Center and Library in Thibodeaux, Louisiana, caught Bourque’s attention one day (Larson, “Louisiana Poet Laureate”). It showed a young Houma Indian painting a Lafitte skiff-style fishing boat near his house in Dulac, Louisiana.⁹ Bourque became so fascinated by the structure of that boat that he composed the poem “The Blue Boat” (Bourque, Blue Boat 57).¹⁰ The boat also inspired Bourque to compose the poetry collection according to the boat’s structure: I worked with this idea of the construction of a hull that has to be evenly balanced and a keel/ballast that has to keep the boat ‘centered’ and ‘held’ in the water. Parts 1 and 3 (the ‘hull’ poems) are made up of equal numbers of poems (25), and each poem in Part 1 corresponds to a poem in Part 3; sometimes connected by form, sometimes by subject matter, sometimes by theme. (Udall and Bourque)

Bourque honors the Lafitte skiff tradition by transposing it into a poetic form and integrating it into the literary collective memory of the Cajuns. Bourque “copies” that type of boat into a poem and poetry volume, just as boatmakers copied the Lafitte skiff: “The Lafitte skiff is a one-of-a-kind boat engineered by Louisiana boatmakers, copied by other boatmakers and put to other uses. But it’s been important in the Louisiana boating industry” (Larson, “Louisiana Poet Laureate”). With regard to Megan’s Guitar, music and visual arts converge in the collection, announced by the cover art, a sewn silk piece depicting a woman with a guitar created by Cajun artist Megan Barra from Lafayette. Obviously, Bourque is a fine observer. He pays attention to the details of Louisiana culture and draws inspiration from daily life, following the motto that “[l]and is your first instructor” (qtd. in Z. Smith). Nature, especially, has a prominent place in his poems. Each of his collections includes numerous nature poems which altogether create an expansive panorama of the Louisiana countryside.¹¹ He frequently refers to places in Cajun Country such as the Marais Bouleur

 Dulac, Louisiana, is where the largest community of the Houma tribe lives.  The poem is dedicated to his grandson, Eric Turley.  “Egrets at Bean-cutting Time” (Bourque, Plainsongs 7), “Feeding the Opossum” (Bourque, Plainsongs 34– 35), “The Grammar of Verbenas” (Bourque, Ordinary Light 83), “Louisiana Maples in Late Winter” (Bourque, Blue Boat 67), or “The Mallard at Her Nest” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 10), to name only a few.

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(see the title poem “Plainsongs of the Marais Bouleur” in Plainsongs), the Atchafalaya, Catahoula Lake, Lake des Allemands, and Arnaudville. Megan’s Guitar differs from the previous collections in that it features fewer place references, using instead other means to create a Cajun sense of place. It is divided into three parts, with the first and third parts forming the panels of a diptych. They mirror each other with their echoing titles—“Acadie tropicale” and “Acadie du nord,”—as well as with an equal number of poems: 27. The first diptych is composed of various scenes set in the here-and-now, creating a distinct tableau of contemporary Cajun life in Cajun Country. It orients the reader in two ways: “Acadie tropicale,” which is generally used in the francophone context, serves as a regional marker, which clearly locates the poems in Cajun culture. It also hints at Bourque’s alignment with the francophone Cajun writers who commonly use the term Acadie tropicale to refer to Acadiana. A major characteristic of Bourque’s poetry is his opening poems, which set the tone and reveal his allegiance to the Cajun community. Every collection starts with a meditation on a Cajun image, such as the custom of “Le Courrir du Mardi Gras” in Plainsongs (4– 5), the still-life vista in his South Louisiana home in “Apples, the Blue Plate, and Physics” in The Blue Boat (3), Louisiana flora in “Light Theology and the Persimmon Tree” in In Ordinary Light (5), or childhood memories in “Before the Sparrows Wakened” in Megan’s Guitar (3). The Cajun community can relate to these familiar images and values. Via the speaker’s enmeshed perception of himself and the outside world, the poetic images tap into the collective memory of the Cajuns. In turn, the collective memory is fostered thanks to the written repetition of these familiar images and values. In contrast to other Cajun writers, who started with a viewpoint limited to typically Cajun features, Bourque’s approach is hybrid from the start as he draws on cultural elements from other Louisianians who have no Cajun background.

9.1.1 Establishing a Cajun Space Through Family Memories Bourque’s poetry is evidence of the important role of family ties and genealogy. Each of his works is dedicated to his wife, Karen Bourque (née Gonsoulin). In the acknowledgments of The Blue Boat, Bourque additionally mentions other family members and gives a glimpse of his family tree: “with deepest gratitude / to my mother Anna Daigle Bourque / and to my mother-in-law / Claire Castille Gonsoulin / to my daughters Nicole and Rachel / and their families … In memory of / my

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father-in-law August Abraham Gonsoulin / and my father / Odon Bourque” (v). In this collection, Bourque also dedicates quite a few poems to his family, creating written memories of his parents,¹² grandparents, and great-grandparents.¹³ We can safely say that the speaker in these poems corresponds to the poet. “Elmire,” the title of the English poem and its French version in Plainsongs (the French translation follows the English version), is an early family poem and dedicated to his great-grandmother Elmire David Thibodeaux and her husband Jacques Thibodeaux (24– 25). The title poem “Plainsongs of the Marais Bouleur” of Plainsongs also seems to have a genealogical relevance. The third part of the poem lists 20 first names, some of which are probably family names (Bourque, Plainsongs 12 – 13). Indeed, this assumption is confirmed in “Relatives” in The Blue Boat, which mentions the life of nine family elders and repeats four names from “Plainsongs of the Marais Bouleur”: Philoman, Jean-Ba (Jean-Baptiste), Aristile, and Odon. Again, the position of the poem “Relatives” at the beginning of the second part of The Blue Boat, the “hull,” gives the nine family elders considerable importance, especially since it reveals private details about each of them (Bourque, Blue Boat 37). Moreover, the first two lines of “Plainsongs of the Marais Bouleur”—“Listen to their names. / What they call themselves” (Bourque, Plainsongs 12)—echo the first line of “Relatives”: “The sounds of their names in my memory” (Bourque, Blue Boat 37). Tellingly, more than a dozen of the 60 poems in The Blue Boat feature family members in the titles, while still more deal with family members in their content. These family poems tell stories about the speaker’s private life, for instance, in “Posing for Our First Communion Picture” (Bourque, Blue Boat 11). Most of all, however, they tell of the dense and strong network of his family, and of the family’s importance of transmitting memories and traditions to the next generation. Bourque honors his ancestors and venerates his descendants: “Putting William to Sleep” and “Jamie Walking” are dedicated to his grandsons William and Jamie (Bourque, Ordinary Light 93 – 95). The speaker’s claim “We are rooted to everyone in the family” in the poem “Things to Teach Grandchildren” (Bourque, Blue Boat 49) is without doubt an echo of Bourque’s notion about family life.

 The speaker’s parents feature in five poems in The Blue Boat: “My Father at Grand Isle,” “My Mother Teaches Us to Speak in Tongues,” “My Mother’s Memory, Portrait,” “My Mother Gets Dressed for Sunday Mass,” “My Father in the Sun” (18, 32, 52, 72, 88). His parents appear again in three poems from In Ordinary Light: “The Angel in My Mother’s Back,” “My Father at Bat,” “My Mother’s Right Foot” (7, 24, 102).  The Blue Boat features two poems about the speaker’s grandparents: “Claire, Sonnet after Surgery” and “Newlyweds near High Island, 1937” (27, 58).

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The poems rooted in private life help create a distinct Cajun setting as they include cultural elements recognizable for every Cajun. These personal memories about daily occupations are anything but ordinary to the speaker. They are cherished miniature portraits. The first diptych of Megan’s Guitar deals with his contemplations about present-day life, which is “made up of the nameable in life closest in time” (C. Leblanc, “Interview”) to his life. The 27 poems can be subdivided into three categories, with nine poems each: Starting out with the speaker’s private life, in which place, Cajun traditions, and Creole culture play a significant role, the poems extend toward the Cajun community, and finally to a larger community of artists transcending the Louisiana borders. The first three poems begin with the speaker’s early family memories and depict fragments of his childhood. The introductory poem “Before the Sparrows Wakened” functions as the opener of the collection and describes the speaker’s awakening at the dawn of day. The speaker remembers how, in the early morning hours, still half asleep with the other children in the room, he used to listen to his aunts’ gathering in his mother’s kitchen. The children were not awakened by the sparrows, “still drowsing lazily,” but by “the voices and the perfume creeping / into the woodwork as water plumped / the dark, rich grounds in the little blue pot / sitting inside another pot on the stove” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 3). It is the familiar sounds and smells which trigger mental images in the somnolent speaker’s mind. While the women shared anxious thoughts, they also shared “whatever was left from yesterday: / sweet dough pie or fig cakes, / gateau sirop or des oreilles de cochon” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 3). Although it is the speaker’s memory, the poem becomes a collective experience, for the noise of the women gathering, the smell of coffee, the mentioning of typical Cajun sweets like gateau sirop ¹⁴ and oreilles de cochon,¹⁵ and the atmosphere of approaching morning are highly evocative of Cajun rituals. In another poem, “Holding the Notes” the speaker remembers his mother cutting corn for maque choux, a Cajun dish made of spices, onions, tomatoes, and stewed fresh corn (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 141). According to Marcia Gaudet’s comparative study on Cajun and Creole food, gateau sirop, oreilles de cochon, and maque choux are typical Cajun dishes, although today Cajun cuisine can rarely be distinguished from Creole cuisine (“Is It Cajun” 151). Opposed to the memory of the women is the poem “Sunday Afternoons Behind T-Maurice’s Dancehall,” which is a memory of the male family members horse-race betting after church. The speaker recalls how his father and uncles

 Syrup cake.  Pig’s ears.

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would gather and watch the horses, bet, and have a closer look at the horses after the race. The tradition of horse racing and horse betting is still popular today in South Louisiana (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 181– 182). More importantly, the reference to T-Maurice’s dancehall has a mnemo-cultural significance. The authors of Cajun Country remark that “[t]hough there once were tracks in many settlements, one of the most popular of these bush tracks was Chez Petit Maurice, located near Bosco behind a well-known dance hall of the same name. The track and hall were owned first by Maurice Richard and later by his son Ellis” (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre 181– 182). Through his poetic image, Bourque anchors the memory about T-Maurice’s dancehall into the Cajun collective memory. Other childhood recollections are depicted in “The Washhouse,” a poem about memories resurfacing when the speaker enters his grandmother’s washhouse. With the very first line, “[t]ime collapsed in my grandmother’s wash house” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 5), the reader plunges into the past without ever losing the link to the present. The Mamou leaves and okra, core ingredients for gumbo, along with other herbs, garden tools, and clothes the speaker contemplates in that familiar place trigger memories of how they were to be put to use were his grandmother still alive. The place and the items are out of order; they are no longer used since modern commodities such as the washing machine or ready-made food items have rendered them obsolete. The last third of “Acadie tropicale” functions as a closer to the family portrait series as it deals with the passing away of family members and friends.¹⁶ “Acadie tropicale” then represents the cycle of life beginning with childhood memories and closing with memories of the passing of people close to the speaker. With regard to religious rituals, Bourque’s first poetry collection, Plainsongs, is in line with the early poetry collections in French, for it inquires into Cajun cultural rituals such as Mardi Gras, Easter, or All Saints Day. Given that he grew up in a Catholic household where high mass music was common, it is not surprising that the Gregorian chant tradition served as a matrix to Plainsongs. “The Easter Meal” deals with the Cajun tradition of “pacque[r] eggs” (Bourque, Plainsongs 14), a tradition where the pointy ends of two eggs are knocked against each other until one egg breaks. These poems about religious rituals recall Zachary Richard, who also composed poems about the Mardi Gras, Pacquer, and La Toussaint. Another religious ritual, explored in three poems of Cris sur le bayou, appears in Megan’s Guitar. In “Standing Water in the Yard on the Feast Day of

 These poems were already published in Bourque’s third chapbook Holding the Notes, in honor of Bourque’s mother, who passed away in 2009.

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Saint Médard,” the speaker describes how during the forty rainy days they would retreat inside and read books to while away the time (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 6). Bourque explains that [t]he thin tread [sic] of religious practice and ritual in the Saint Medard story is just that: a reminder that the threads to the past are fragile and rare. When the Acadians came to Louisiana in the two big migrations, 1765 and 1785, they eventually built strong Catholic communities, but the early rituals and practices and beliefs largely went unrecorded. … Stories like Saint Medard stay in the consciousness perhaps because these people were farmers and cattlemen and trappers and fishers and the weather was always something they had to pay attention to. Rain for 40 consecutive days or the lack of it would have had an impact on their daily lives and it would have had longer range consequences as well. Perhaps it is because of that connection to their daily life that such a feast day became important. But the practices and celebrations of Mardi Gras, the Lenten observations, the feast of la toussaint and many other Catholic beliefs (and superstitions) are an essential part of who these people were and how they lived their lives. (C. Leblanc, “Interview”)

Originally a Catholic feast, Saint Médard has lost its original meaning in Bourque’s poem. It is no longer a day to venerate the Saint, for the speaker no longer thinks about the agricultural impact of this weather facet. Instead, the speaker has turned it into a reading ritual. Although religious festive days as remnants of the past punctuate the calendar of the Cajuns, the meaning of some of them has changed. Some Cajuns might not celebrate the religious rituals as they used to, but the popular beliefs still endure thanks to family transmission, which nurtures the link to the past.

9.1.2 Bourque’s Community In Bourque’s works, the recollections about personal experiences extend beyond the social frame of the family and are complemented with scenes of the wider Cajun and local non-Cajun community, mostly artists and writers who contributed and still contribute to Cajun culture. For instance, Bourque dedicated “Peonies” in The Blue Boat to Terry Clay Girouard (9), who contributed with his artwork to Plainsongs, and “The Ducks at Lake des Allemands” and “Louisiana Maples in Late Winter” in In Ordinary Light to Tim Gautreaux and Marcia Gaudet, respectively (39, 191). It is especially in Megan’s Guitar, though, that Bourque connects to contemporary Louisiana writers, musicians, and visual artists through dedications and allusions. This collection also reveals an underlying connection between Bourque and francophone Cajun writers, especially Barry J. Ancelet, with whom he shares the neighborhood of the Marais Bouleur. Ancelet not only favorably re-

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viewed Bourque’s The Blue Boat, but he also wrote a bilingual preface to Megan’s Guitar. As the title of the first diptych, “Acadie tropicale,” and the end notes indicate (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 73), Bourque is indebted to Acadie tropicale: Poésie de Louisiane, the second Cajun poetry collection in French published in 1983.¹⁷ Obviously, Bourque deliberately reused the title, setting up a concrete connection to francophone Cajun poetry. Bourque also reconnects to the theme of awakening, the leitmotif of Cris sur le bayou. In the first diptych, “there is a recurrence of poems that have a reveille or a réveiller theme and réveiller in French is kind of a wake-up theme. So I knew that the first poem had to be that kind of poem, and I knew that a few poems later I would want to repeat that particular theme” (Jones and Bourque). The opening poem, “Before the Sparrows Wakened,” indeed follows up on the theme of awakening. The most revealing aspect of Bourque’s cooperation with Ancelet is the fact that it was in Ancelet’s living room that Bourque saw Megan Barra’s original silk piece and had the idea for Megan’s Guitar. Bourque admits that Ancelet acted “as sounding board” for that volume of poetry (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 90). Most importantly, Bourque followed Ancelet’s suggestion to include female voices in the Cajun narrative about Acadia in the second diptych in order to compensate for the lack of female accounts in Cajun literature (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 80; The Louisiana Review). Bourque’s relationship with Ancelet—and also his cooperation with Brenda Mounier to establish a French language poet laureate and his celebration of Kirby Jambon, for whom he composed a laudatory poem to celebrate his Prix Henri de Régnier (Jambon, “Poèmes de Darrell Bourque”)—welds together both anglophone and francophone traditions and is an attempt to recover his French past. Visual art is another means Bourque uses to create a sense of place. He establishes his own poetic landscape of Cajun Country, appealing to the Cajun community as a group in alluding to the works of landscape painters and visual artists. Significantly, it is the poems about the works of such Cajun artists as landscape painter Elemore Morgan Jr. which best show the importance of place and tradition in Louisiana. Although Elemore Morgan Jr. had no Acadian ancestry, he was lauded as one of the premier Cajun painters, the “dean of Acadiana artists” (“Elemore Morgan Jr.”).¹⁸ While Bourque’s poems analyze Morgan’s art, they also include latent links to Cajun culture. Each poem relating to  Edited by David Barry, Acadie tropicale features Arceneaux’s poem “Acadie tropicale” from 1979.  Born in Baton Rouge, Elemore Morgan Jr. is known for his en plein air landscape paintings of Southwest Louisiana nature scenes. From 1965 to 1998 he taught painting and drawing at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (Bourque, “Elemore Morgan Jr.”).

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the eminent Cajun en plein air painter evokes place memories. Morgan also painted other panoramas, such as the Manhattan skyline (Bourque, “Elemore Morgan Jr.”), but he is mostly revered for his Louisiana landscape paintings with the wetlands, the Cajun Prairie, and the rice fields near his home in Vermillion Parish as his favorite painting subjects, as well as for reproducing the shifting incidences of light throughout the day. Bourque’s poem “The things Elemore Left Behind,” for instance, is keyed to the painting Cows in a Field (2005): “They have no work to do today these cows of his, / … . / he used to offset pink and purple and red in towers / of cloud, how he set the force of water just so in pumps / in rice fields. … Notice how trees kiss / sky, how prairies open, notice the cows I made for you” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 32). With Bourque’s poems, Elemore’s paintings have entered literary memory. The poem “Elemore from the Other Side” is written from the perspective of the painter and refers to a series of heron paintings: “Beaded / earth in rice fields was mine just for the looking & when I’d fully given what was mine to give, a heron might fall from the sky” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 27). The image of the falling heron might seem bizarre at first, but it has a specific significance. This is what fellow Louisiana painter Bryan Lafaye remembers about Elemore’s stroke of inspiration one day: One day, years ago, I pulled up in his driveway in Maurice and Elemore was out in the yard looking down at something, excitement in his eyes. As I got closer, I realized it was a great blue heron. He looked up at me and said, ‘It just fell out of the sky, just now. What do you think I should do with it?’ We discussed options, which included boiling some rice, but he said, ‘I’d really like to paint it.’ And he did, for about eight weeks. The bird lay there on a platform on his studio floor, and it never showed signs of aging while Elemore studied and painted that bird. He managed some fine watercolor paintings of that heron, and we continued to be amazed at its remaining intact. (“Elemore Morgan Jr.”)

Bourque thus fixes this personal story into a poem and makes it available to the larger public. Most of the artists who inspired Bourque hail from an academic background and, apart from Barry J. Ancelet and the late Elemore Morgan Jr., include his UL Lafayette colleagues John Hathorn and Lynda Frese, as well as Meghan Fleming from McNeese University, in Lake Charles, Louisiana.¹⁹ The poems dedicated to non-Cajun artists in Megan’s Guitar, such as the five poems keyed to collage works by Frese or “Cloud Shifts,” the first poem of the bridge section and based on Fleming’s painting Cloud Shift, have no concrete connection to Cajun  Meghan Fleming, who lived in California and Upstate New York, has been teaching at the Visual Arts Department at McNeese University since 1999 (Kemp).

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culture, but rather contribute to Louisiana culture more generally. The fact that they are all assembled in “Acadie tropicale” expresses Bourque’s inclusive perspective and an understanding of the interdependence of the various influences in Southwest Louisiana. Another connector bridging the social frame of the family and that of the wider Cajun community is Cajun music, the mainstay of Cajun culture. “Des Papillons: With Octa Clark and Dewey Balfa at Mulates” from In Ordinary Light (12) pays tribute to a popular song by Octa Clark and Dewey Balfa, two eminent Cajun musicians, who regularly played at Mulates, a famous Cajun restaurant chain which started in Lafayette (“About Us: Mulate’s”). The poem “Church Point Breakdown” from Megan’s Guitar is, however, the most comprehensive poem about Cajun music and the most typical Cajun tableau of the first diptych. It attests to Bourque’s love of music, especially Cajun music: “The first songs I ever heard were French songs, mostly French children’s songs, then came a deluge of Cajun and Zydeco music—Iry Lejeune and Clifton Chenier—and country songs by Hank Williams and Kitty Wells and the Carter and Cash families, then Chuck Berry” (C. Leblanc, “Interview”). With “Church Point Breakdown,” a poem of five stanzas with an irregular meter and rhyme scheme, Bourque takes up Iry Lejeune’s classic two step “Church Point Breakdown” and turns it into a new art piece. Each stanza includes one or more italicized titles of traditional songs anchored in the Cajun music repertoire. The first song reference appears in the sixth verse of the first stanza. “[T]-galop, t-galop,” which is linked here to the image of a child riding the leg of an adult, refers to “Tit Galop pour Mamou,” a popular Cajun folk song recorded by the Balfa Brothers in 1965 (Savoy 258). While the song describes how the speaker rides to Mamou and sells off his horse to buy candy for his children, Bourque’s stanza describes lap bouncing as the “first lesson / in mobility” in a child’s life. The poem moves on parallel to the child’s growing up, mentioning “Saute Crapaud,” in the second stanza, a traditional children’s song to learn “double-entendre / along with resilience / and rejuvenation, / an early lesson / in transformational syntax.” Likewise, “Frère Jacques,” in the third stanza, one of the best-known old French folk songs, refers to “a call / in rounds to mindfulness, / to get on with your life, / not to sleep your life away” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 13). The remaining five songs listed in the fourth stanza are from both the Cajun and Creole repertoires and mirror the tribulations of adult life: “Bonsoir Moreau” is Bois Sec Ardoin’s and Canray Fontenot’s version of a traditional Creole goodnight song. “J’ai passé” refers to the classic Cajun love song “J’ai passé devant ta porte,” supposed to be based on the eighteenth-century concerto for classical guitar by Spanish composer Fernando Sor (Ancelet, Cajun Music 17), and also

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known as “Mon cœur t’appelle” as sung by Cleoma Breaux Falcon (Savoy 105). “La Porte d’en arrière” by D. L. Menard is “likely the single most played and recorded Cajun song” (Savoy 275 – 276) and tells the story of a hard-headed drunkard who pines after the times when he still had friends and money. Iry Lejeune’s waltz about a lost love, “Viens me chercher,” shares its melody with other songs by such musicians as Amédé Ardoin, the Balfa Brothers, and Rodney Lejeune. Finally, in “Les flammes d’enfer,” based on Austin Pitre’s version recorded in the late 1950s, the speaker laments his prison sentence for killing his aunt (Savoy 265 – 266). Bourque’s poem breaks down the growing up of a child in a musical way, with each song corresponding to a specific time in human life. It starts out with four well-known children’s songs, then moves on to such experiences as lost love in adult life, until it ends with the “Flames of Hell,” which can both relate to the time in prison or the end of life. The poem progresses in such a way that it also shows the development of early traditional French songs to typically Cajun songs. It is a list of Cajun music hits known to every Cajun and an integral part of the collective Cajun music repertoire. Significantly, Bourque acknowledges the cultural entanglements in Louisiana early on in his poetry. The poem “From Pon-Yo’s Black Side” merges Cajun music and Zydeco (Bourque, Plainsongs 8 – 9). The Cajun-centric “Acadie tropicale” in Megan’s Guitar also includes poems about Creole culture. Bourque honors especially contemporary Creole literature with his poems dedicated to such contemporary Creole writers as Ernest J. Gaines, representative of Creole culture and encapsulating the lively exchange of various literary traditions in Louisiana. Their inclusion serves to show that Cajun culture has no boundaries, and that the cultural flow is unhampered. Commissioned for the opening of the Ernest J. Gaines Center of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in October 2010 (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 74), the poem “‘Of Men and Rivers’” is as much a poem about fishing, as it is an aperçu of characters from Gaines’s most famous novels, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Jimmy and Big Laura), A Lesson Before Dying (Jefferson, Miss Emma, Tante Lou, Vivian), and Of Love and Dust (Marcus). Fishing in the watery landscape, the Catholic belief, and the storytelling tradition, where the imagination and reality mix (Bourque’s poem also mentions his friend Reese Spooner and his Aunt Augustine) are what connects the two writers.²⁰

 The title of the poem also echoes two other masterpieces of American literature: The poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) by Langston Hughes and the novel Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck. The metaphor of the river, inspiring both Hughes and Gaines (and Bourque) as well as defining the African American experience, make the poems converge. With respect to

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Bourque refers to still another Creole literary figure. “Turtle Dreams” describes the making of turtle soup, a typical Louisiana dish. The New Orleans poet Mona Lisa Saloy is not mentioned by name in the poem, but Bourque indicates in the end notes that the speaker’s “Creole friend … [who makes] poems about her father catching and cooking caouane / for their supper” (Megan’s Guitar 23) is Mona Lisa Saloy (Megan’s Guitar 77). In using “couane,” which means “turtle” in Creole, the poem mixes Creole and Cajun cultural elements. Likewise, “Gueydan” is known to be a Cajun place and “Bayou Wikoff” a Creole place: “One night I am hand-fishing for turtles in Gueydan, / one night I am in the shallows of Bayou Wikoff” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 23). The cultural mix, with food and fishing as shared cultural traits, ultimately represents the hybrid memories in Louisiana. Besides these allusions to the two famous contemporary Creole writers, “Acadie tropicale” features another poem which clearly extends the geographical frame to a wider Creole community. The bilingual poem “Venus Rising in Haiti”—it is written in English interspersed with several stanzas in Creole French—is dedicated to Gertie, a little orphan girl from Haiti and the subject of a portrait by artist Barbara Hughes which she first showed at her exposition “Little Ones of Haiti”: “When Barbara Hughes saw you that day / in the courtyard at the orphanage, / she saw nascent Venus just landed / in a place where she was very happy” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 16). Although Hughes’s show was presented in 2009, one year before the earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010, Bourque’s poem turns Gerti into a collective symbol of all orphaned children of Haiti in the wake of the natural catastrophe. In reworking the painting into a literary form, Bourque recalls the tragic earthquake and fixes the event into collective memory. The speaker describes the little girl’s new white shoes with taps but with no ties and creates connections with Roman goddesses (Venus and Flora) so that the break caused by the catastrophe is made whole again. “August 2005,” the prose poem following “Venus Rising in Haiti” that evokes the tragic hurricanes hitting Louisiana in 2005, establishes a parallel between the natural disasters in Haiti and Louisiana and weaves a net of memories connecting the cultures of Haiti and Louisiana while symbolizing endurance and continuity.²¹

Of Mice and Men, the themes of the characters’ dreams and aspirations as well as human interaction connects the novel with the poem. Special thanks to Daniel Stein for the two references.  In his notes, Bourque discusses the cultural, historical, and linguistic ties between French Louisiana and Haiti and how the distressing consequences of Hurricane Audrey in 1957 and of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 parallel those of the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 76).

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The Cajun-Creole context becomes even more apparent in Bourque’s latest collection, Where I Waited. The dozen poems honor various Cajun and Creole musicians of the twentieth century. Above all, the collection is dedicated to Amédé Ardoin, the iconic Creole accordion and fiddle player from Eunice, who is credited with being the father of Cajun music. Playing with black Creoles, e. g. Canray Fontenot, as well as Cajuns, e. g. Dennis McGee, Ardoin has been both revered and scorned. The circumstances of his death are unclear. The best-known legend has it that he fell prey to a band of white men, who beat him to death because he had arguably taken a kerchief offered by a white girl to swipe off his sweat (Savoy 67). Although Bourque relied on memories by still-living contemporaries of Ardoin, the narrative tends to be more fictional than historical. It is the first work to commemorate a Cajun-Creole and to negotiate racial boundaries in Cajun culture. Bourque’s position as the former Poet Laureate of Louisiana allows him to act as a mouthpiece for Creole literature which, for lack of significant representatives, is subject to lesser visibility and, thus, more in danger of being forgotten.

9.2 Negotiating Historical Memory The poems about Cajun traditions and the lyrical portraits of family ancestors illustrate that the past is an integral part of Bourque’s poetry. With the disappearance of family elders, the living connections to the past are cut. It is, therefore, important to keep the past present in the memory of posterity. According to British historical sociologist Anthony D. Smith, “[t]he return of the past is necessary because of our need for immortality through the memory of posterity which the seeming finality of death threatens. In our descendants’ memory lies our hope. That requires our story to be set down, to become ‘history’” (208). The poem “My Mother’s Memory, Portrait” in The Blue Boat clearly emphasizes this necessity. For the speaker’s mother, who might be Bourque’s mother, life “was always about not forgetting. / … . Remembering that a life cut away from past life is illusion” (52). Even if a number of poems deal with the works of by-gone world-famous artists, Bourque seldom engages with the historical and socio-cultural background of these poems, be it the Edo period (Bashō), the Renaissance (Albrecht Dürer), or the Baroque period (Bach). The majority of Bourque’s poems do not venture beyond the recent past. The passing away of family members triggers questions about ancestry and identity. Significantly, Megan’s Guitar—which is dedicated to Bourque’s wife Karen and “our families, both present and those extended back in time and space” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar vii)— represents Bourque’s endeav-

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or to supplement this void with poems about his deceased ancestors and with imagined memories of a particular history: the Acadian past. Against this background, Megan’s Guitar presents an important shift, for it is with this collection that the distant past enters Bourque’s poetic discourse. For the first time, Bourque delves into Acadian and Louisiana Acadian history and explores the temporal frame of Cajun culture. The main title as well as the titles of the first and second diptychs anticipate the exploration of the Acadian saga. As a transition connecting the two diptychs, Bourque inserts what he calls the “bridge section”: a connector bridging the gap between the two diptychs, between “Acadie tropicale” and “Acadie du nord.” This middle section, entitled “Megan’s Guitar,” includes three poems which involve “transmission and vehicles of transmission: dreams, changes in the weather, guitars, songs, histories, transience” (C. Leblanc, “Interview”). “Cloud Shifts,” “Megan’s Guitar,” and “Vanitas” are “the window, or portal, or passageway leading into the older history embedded in the world we think we know and understand” (C. Leblanc, “Interview”). Seemingly taken out of time, they hang between the present and the past in a sort of limbo and thus serve as ideal connectors between the two Acadias, the Acadia of the south and that of the north, between the Cajun present and the Acadian past. Sketchy hints at the Acadian past already appear in two poems of the first diptych and the bridge section. While the title of the poem “First Winter at Camp Beausoleil” provides the only reference to the Acadian context (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 34),²² the third part of the title poem in the bridge section of Megan’s Guitar is a more concrete foreshadowing of the Acadian story. Entitled “Megan’s Guitar,” it ends with the image of the woman with the guitar starting to play a song about the “histories / we didn’t know were ours to tell, of people / we didn’t know we knew: stories of Mi’kmaq / & Attakapas, of the old men of Martaizé & / Saint Domingue, of Broussards & Trahans, / of Castilles & Babineauxs wavering like time / inside this curved & and trembling world of ours” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 40). These last lines of the poem commemorate the forefathers of the Cajuns: two native tribes of old Acadia and Louisiana, a local group of French colonists from Martaizé, a small village in the present-day Poitou-Charentes region in France, Saint Domingue, and four names of the Acadian found-

 “Camp Beausoleil” was the name of the place where the early band of 193 Acadians from Halifax, Nova Scotia, arriving with Joseph Broussard, dit Beausoleil, in 1765, settled, close to the Poste des Attakapas which later became St. Martinville (B. Arseneault 269).

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ing families.²³ It also announces the beginning preoccupation with Acadian history in this volume of poetry. Indeed, it is the second diptych which exclusively negotiates the Acadian past. After having laid the foundation of a Cajun space in “Acadie tropicale,” Bourque steps back into the past and adds to the Cajun place memory a temporal frame: “Acadie du nord” reconstructs the Acadian past and thus stands in geographical and temporal opposition to “Acadie tropicale.” “Acadie du nord” developed out of a visit to the exhibit “L’Acadie d’ailleurs à ici” by Canadian photographer Sue Mills in Lafayette,²⁴ which showed photographs of writers, artists, historians, storytellers, musicians, and other people from the Canadian Maritimes and Acadiana, “who see themselves as ‘cultural keepers of the flame’” (Udall and Bourque). Next to the photographs stood the people’s remarks to the following question: “In your heart, or in your mind, where do you find Acadie[?]” (Mills). For Bourque, the “idea of [Sue Mills’s exhibit] … was not just a geographical area but included some spiritual geography or emotional or psychological geography as well” (Udall and Bourque).²⁵ As the first poem of “Acadie du nord,” “How We Became a New World People” sets the pattern for the other poems. The speaker describes the Grand Dérangement as a momentous turn for the Acadian community: “Before the world we’d always known became a place we hardly knew / at all, we lived at ease with whatever came our way. … / … So when they burned our houses to move us west. … / … we’d become other than what we were before” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 45). The following 26 tableaux illustrate how the fictional and historical characters deal with the exile experience, each in their own way. “Acadie du nord” then becomes an “exploration through historical character and incident in order to understand the present” (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”). Bourque gives a voice to a dozen characters, both fictional and historical, men and women.

 Martaizé and La Chaussée were seigneuries owned by Charles de Menou d’Aulnay de Charnizay. It is from there that the bulk of original Acadian colonists emerged (Faragher, Great and Noble Scheme 44– 45).  Mills started the project “L’Acadie d’ailleurs à ici” in 1999. Since then, the exposition has traveled from Nova Scotia, to Quebec, to Louisiana, and to other places (Mills).  The idea to tell the story of the Cajuns in a creative way also interested Zachary Richard, and both Bourque and Richard began working together. The joint project was to take the form of an opera and to concentrate on Joseph Broussard’s life and achievements. Due to the project’s growing scope, Bourque and Richard chose to go separate ways. Richard produced the musical Les Attakapas: The Story of the Cajun People, which was performed in 2015 on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 90), and Bourque wrote “Acadie du nord,” establishing a psychological geography through the intimate description of the characters’ actions and emotions.

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The monologic version of the Grand Dérangement popularized by Longfellow’s poem and the extended myths is thus set against a hybrid voice of memory.²⁶ To the imagined characters of Madeleine LeBlanc, Madeleine Richard, René Leblanc, and Evangeline, Bourque juxtaposes historical characters including Beausoleil, his daughter Françoise, his wife Agnès née Thibodeaux, her sister Marguerite Thibodeaux, Elizabeth Brasseaux, Madeleine Comeaux Trahan, Marie Landry Bourg, Olivier Terrio, and Jean Guilbeau. The historical characters might be real, but their characteristics, their actions and behavior, their thoughts, fears, and experiences are imagined. In the preface to Megan’s Guitar, Ancelet argues that Bourque’s artistic discovery of Acadia “has the effect of reanimating this Acadie, both real and imagined, with all the torments and triumphs of history, and which finally counterbalance Longfellow’s representation, instead conjuring up characters, both historical and fictional, who did and still do what it takes to not only survive but to thrive and find happiness and honor in our adopted land” (xiii). The lifelike portraits bring the past closer to the present and embed a reconstructed Acadian memory into the consciousness of both the Cajun and Louisiana community. These portraits function as counter-memory. They do not only recall forgotten Acadian heroes and heroines but transform myths such as that of Evangeline. Longfellow’s depiction of the Acadian expulsion established itself, in Yael Zerubavel’s terms, as a “master commemorative narrative,” a “basic ‘story line’ that is culturally constructed and provides the group members with a general notion of their shared past. … [focusing] on the group’s distinct social identity and … [highlighting] its historical development” (6 – 7). The fact that Bourque does not follow the historical chronology does not exclude the poetry collection from being a master commemorative narrative, since “the master commemorative narrative occasionally suspends this linearity by the omission, regression, repetition, and the conflation of historical events” (Y. Zerubavel 7). For instance, the poem “Beausoleil Loses His Son” mentions the date 1758, but it precedes “Beausoleil Faces the Final Solution,” which tells of his setting up a hidden army in the woods in 1755. Time and the chronological succession of events are irrelevant; it is the context which matters. In creating a sense of floating time, it is also possible to bring the events closer to the present and to evoke empathy in drawing parallels to other events of dispersion.

 Bourque explains almost each poem in the end notes, giving details about the speaker or the characters of the poems. These extensive annotations include detailed background information and references to both historical sources and oral testimonies. Intended for a wider, non-Cajun readership, they become an integral part of “Acadie du nord.”

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While place is relevant for the belonging of the characters, the poems are character-driven and mostly reflect the respective feelings and thoughts. Each poem corresponds to a viewpoint from either the Acadians as a group, or from an Acadian character. Since time is not demarcated and the poems do not follow a particular chronology, the poems present fragmentary images. In this respect, Bourque’s “Acadie du nord” bears a striking resemblance to Jean Arceneaux’s “Morceaux de mémoire en prose” from Suite du loup, which also includes pieces, “morceaux,” about the past.²⁷ Both become examples of the fragmentation and incompleteness of the past. Unlike Arceneaux’s “Morceaux de mémoire en prose,” which is in full prose, Bourque’s “Acadie du nord” is written in the broken sonnet form, which emphasizes both the fragmentation and piecing together of the fragments. Obviously, Bourque does not connect with Canadian-Acadian poets or writers who have contributed an extensive literature on the Acadian dispersal. Instead, he looks for established Cajun representatives.

9.2.1 Honoring the Founding Fathers of Acadie Tropicale In “Acadie du nord,” Bourque fleshes out Cajun history and imbues the hidden past with a meaning for today’s Cajuns. Place names and cultural traditions are symbolically charged with Acadian and French heritage. The titles of the poems, for instance, list the various places the Acadians lived in, were brought to, and traveled to: from Acadia (Beaubassin), to their exile in the New England colonies (South Carolina), New Brunswick (Caraquet), France (Belle-Île-En-Mer), and Saint Domingue²⁸; and finally to their new emplacement in Louisiana (Lafourche, Camp Beausoleil, Beaubassin).²⁹ Moreover, in juxtaposing places such as

 Bourque refers to the prose piece about Louis Arceneaux by Jean Arceneaux in the end notes (Megan’s Guitar 87).  With respect to the Acadians’ Saint-Domingue experience, Bourque points to the diverging statements in Carl A. Brasseaux’s and Bernard’s works: “Such variance and discrepancy as suggested by these two accounts of the Acadians’ Saint-Domingue experience are not unusual in this story of the Acadians. Exiled, expunged, or ethnically-cleansed people the world over have such scant and contradictory histories, often filled more with holes and questions than reliable fact and account” (Megan’s Guitar 85).  The titles of the poems are as follows: “Building the Dikes at Beaubassin,” “René Leblanc’s Account of the Passage to South Carolina,” “Madeleine Richard’s Flight to Caraquet,” “Madeleine LeBlanc comes to Baie Sainte-Marie,” “From Grand-Pré to Belle-Ile-En-Mer,” “Madeleine Comeaux Trahan Sails to Louisiana with Her Children, 1785,” “Oliver Terrio at the Headwaters of Bayou Lafourche,” “Beausoleil Leaves Saint-Domingue,” “Mary Landry Bourg Near Lake

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Beaubassin in Acadie to Beaubassin in Louisiana, and highlighting common cultural traditions, Bourque establishes a strong Acadie-Louisiana connection.³⁰ Another poem, “Beausoleil’s Last Night,” opposes two rivers, the Petitcodiac and the Teche, which were both sites of memories for Beausoleil. The poem records the Acadian commandant’s numerous dreams of his home, of his walking along the Petitcodiac, a river in New Brunswick which flows into the Bay of Fundy, until he wakes up “drenched in this bed near the Teche” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 69). The likeness of the rivers despite the different landscape and climate triggers nostalgic memories of home in Beausoleil. The poem “Tintamarre” also underscores the links between Louisiana and Acadia. A very popular celebration especially in Canada, where people go out in the streets making noise with any kind of objects to show that Acadia still exists, Tintamarre is less celebrated in Louisiana.³¹ Moreover, in contrast to the ageold custom of Saint Medard, the celebration of Tintamarre is a good example of an invented tradition. As Herménégilde Chiasson explains: “Cette coutume a été inventée dans les années 1970. … Par déformation on a fait de cet événement une tradition et les gens sont déçus de ne pas lui trouver un fondement historique, mais ça viendra de la même manière qu’on s’évertue à trouver une descendance acadienne à ceux qui n’en ont pas” (150). When the speaker in Bourque’s poem explains how they “choose new sieves or pans of rust, / make a show of dins for both the hearing and the deaf,” this anachronistic reference is a means to evoke the Acadian context. In comparison to the role of the characters, place matters less in “Acadie du nord.” It can be said that, aside from the two heroes Beausoleil and Evangeline,

Borne,” “Beausoleil Leaves New Orleans,” “Early Life at Camp Beausoleil,” “Jean Guilbeau’s Journey from Beaubassin to Beaubassin.”  It has to be noted that neither of the places exist anymore. Beaubassin in Acadie was destroyed by Father LeLoutre and the Micmacs in 1750 to prevent the British from taking possession of the place (B. Arseneault 141).  Tintamarre continues to have a meaning in Louisiana: Le Tintamarre is a French language newspaper published by college students in 1996 (Bruce 225). In 2003, Dana Kress, French professor at the Louisiana State University in Shreveport, Louisiana, established Les Éditions Tintamarre, a university publishing house in Shreveport, merging the two collections “Éditions Tintamarre” (which publishes historical works of literature, mostly critical and annotated nineteenth-century French editions), and “Les Cahiers du Tintamarre” (which publishes contemporary French works and reedits nineteenth-century French works without annotations) (Bruce 224– 225). Considering that the publishing house is located in north Louisiana, outside of Cajun Country, the name “Tintamarre” serves to capitalize on the past and the connoted noise-making to make French heard within the sea of American culture. Ultimately, the idea of making noise draws attention to the vitality of Cajun culture.

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most characters would have been forgotten were it not for Bourque’s poetic portraits. It might be because of a reluctance to remember. More plausible, however, is the explanation that the transmission of those family stories was interrupted by the wanderings and other hardships befalling the Acadians: “In the beginning [the Acadians] had many heroes and knew them quite personally, but the distances of time and geography, continuous ethnic persecution by humiliation and fragmented isolation had eroded their history” (Perrin, Acadian Redemption vii). With one third of Bourque’s poems featuring Beausoleil, he emerges as the most prominent of Bourque’s historical characters. How important Beausoleil is to the Cajuns is reflected by the repeated reference to the Broussard ancestry, including the first biography, penned by one of his descendants, Cajun activist Warren Perrin in 2004. Bourque’s nod in the end notes to Chuck Broussard’s Beausoleil connection is one example.³² Significantly, Bourque’s poetic sequence of Beausoleil’s life is the first creative account of the rebel as Everyman. Beausoleil’s heroic status has a number of reasons.³³ Born as Joseph Broussard in 1702 in Port Royal, he married Agnès Thibaudeau, the daughter of one of the most influential Acadian families, at the age of 23, with whom he had eleven children. Before he reached the age of 25, Beausoleil had already been involved in four civil disputes. He was accused of “assault and battery, consorting with the Indians, a land dispute and a paternity claim” (Perrin, Acadian Redemption 9). For Perrin, “Beausoleil’s involvement in so many legal disputes at so young an age heralds the character of a man who would become, from the British point of view, an outlaw, murderer and pirate, and, to the Acadians’ view, a patriot and the ‘father of New Acadia’” (Acadian Redemption 15 – 16). Together with his brother Alexandre—both received the nickname of “Beausoleil,” after their native village near Port Royal (Perrin, Acadian Redemption 5)—he set up revolutionary campaigns against the British. As a result, the British considered him their archenemy and imprisoned him a number of times before he finally left Acadia and led a group of Acadians to Louisiana. Beausoleil emerged from the expulsion as the symbolic leader of the Cajuns and is considered today to be the Acadian folk hero (Perrin, Acadian Redemption 43, 57).³⁴

 Cajun painter Chuck Broussard from Scott, Louisiana, is “one of contemporary Louisiana’s most accomplished landscape painters” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 74).  The parts on Beausoleil in this subchapter were published in 2014 (Köstler, “The Grand Dérangement”).  Beausoleil’s presence seems to be more conspicuous in Louisiana than in the Maritime Provinces, certainly because of his status as American emigrant. During the 400th anniversary celebration of the founding of Acadia, the Société nationale de l’Acadie, which promotes and protects the rights and interests of the Acadians of Atlantic Canada, gave special attention to

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Remarkably, the Acadian resistance around Beausoleil contrasts with the passivity and resignation of the Acadians in Longfellow’s poem. Likewise, some of Bourque’s poems present a Beausoleil different from the negative portrayals of the British, a man of honor and fighting for his morals and values: He “was filled as ever with declarations / for the things he knew we could build a life on: being right or being fair” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 52). Other poems present a strong leader who also shows fatherly emotions with respect to the death of his son in “Beausoleil Loses His Son” and to his daughter in “Beausoleil Talks to His Daughter Françoise” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 49, 54). He is also portrayed as a contrite confessor in “Beausoleil Confesses to LaLoutre [sic]” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 47). The importance of Beausoleil as a cultural icon represents a Cajun desire to enshrine a hero of their own, to oppose a courageous fighter of flesh and blood to meek Evangeline, a figment. Today, Beausoleil is very much present in Cajun culture. In Broussard, Louisiana, named after its founder Valsin Broussard, a Beausoleil descendant, tourists can visit the Valsin Broussard House, the oldest house in the town, built around 1876. In Vermillionville, La Maison Broussard, which belonged to Armand Broussard, a son of Beausoleil, has become a historic site, and the Famille Beausoleil Association commissioned Floyd Sonnier, a renowned Cajun pen-and-ink artist, “to design a limited-edition commemorative coin of Beausoleil” in 1997 (Perrin, Acadian Redemption 77). Two years later, the city of Broussard erected a monument in honor of the two Broussard brothers, Beausoleil and Alexandre (Perrin, Acadian Redemption 77). This monument is an important sign of the extension of the Cajun cultural memory, for “[t]he erection of new monuments in the public space is … often construed as the final outcome of a process whereby minority counter-memories are accommodated within the larger social frame and given state recognition” (Rigney, “Divided Pasts” 93). Apart from these sites of memory, the arts also pay tribute to Beausoleil. The American muralists Robert Dafford and Herb Roe imagined their own Beausoleil. Roe’s portrait shows a kneeling Beausoleil whose right hand leans on an iron sword. Dafford’s mural, commissioned for the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville in 2002, depicts the arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana with Beausoleil as their leader in the center. Its counterpart, showing the Acadians preparing

Pierre du Gua, Sieur de Mons and founder of Acadia, and not to Beausoleil, presumably because he was not representative for the English Canadians (Rudin, Remembering 2). Nonetheless, Beausoleil’s figure has a significant cultural impact on Canadian-Acadian culture, given that he appears as a character in several books by Acadian authors as, for instance, in Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-la-Charrette (1970), J. Alphonse Deveau’s Le Chef des Acadiens (1980), or Claude LeBouthilier’s Le Feu des mauvais temps (1989) (Perrin, Acadian Redemption 59).

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for their overseas trip from France to Louisiana, can be seen in the rue des Acadiens in Nantes, France. Moreover, songs have been dedicated to the rebel’s memory. Apart from Richard’s anthologized songs “Réveille” and “La Ballade de Beausoleil,” James Peter Louviere paid tribute to the Father of New Acadia in 2003 with the song “Hey, Hey, Beausoleil” (Perrin, Acadian Redemption 51). Last but not least, the internationally known Cajun music band BeauSoleil chose its name in honor of the rebellious historical character. The most recent endeavor to unearth evidence on Beausoleil is the resurrection of the idea to locate Beausoleil’s burial site. The idea of the so-called “New Acadia Project,” of which Bourque is also a member (Dobie, “Darrell Bourque”), was developed by Perrin and other Beausoleil descendants in the mid-1990s (Perrin, Acadian Redemption 84), especially in the context of the preparations for the FrancoFête’99 and of the Acadian World Congress held in Louisiana in 1999. In July 2013, The Advocate of Baton Rouge reported on “[r]esearchers seeking to fill gaps in early Acadian history” and doing archaeological work “to locate and explore the sites where the early Acadians lived and the graves where they now rest” (Burgess). According to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s website, which supports the project, it is “a long-term, collaborative undertaking in public archaeology, public history, and cultural resource management planning” (Rees). Beausoleil’s ghost is obviously still present and his memory will certainly not fade away. These sites of memory, of course, serve other purposes besides firmly rooting the Cajuns in Acadian history. In fact, the figure of Beausoleil is lent heroic dimensions, which might potentially result in an inflation that becomes the basis for the creation of a new myth.³⁵ The promotion of Beausoleil also conceals other early Acadian leaders. Olivier Terrio, for instance, is another important figure during the early Acadian settlement in Louisiana. In the appendix to his second volume on Cajun history, historian Carl A. Brasseaux writes: Though the story of the 1785 Acadian influx is well known, the subsequent careers of the two organizers of the migration—Henri Peyroux de la Coudrenière and Olivier Terrio— has [sic] remained obscure. Indeed, the poignant tale of Terrio’s attempt to gain compensation for his unflagging efforts in France on behalf of the Spanish crown is largely forgotten. (Founding 203)

Terrio contributed to the Louisiana colonization project in France but “received recognition only from his fellow Acadians” (Carl A. Brasseaux, Founding 203).

 Evidence of Beausoleil’s marketability was given by African American singer Beyoncé Knowles, who created some ado when she revealed her Beausoleil lineage (“L’Acadie”).

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In Bourque’s poem “Olivier Terrio at the Headwaters of Bayou Lafourche,” which commemorates Terrio’s efforts, the speaker, who is obviously Terrio himself, narrates his life and travels. Born in Prince Edward Island, Terrio was deported to St. Malo in France in 1759 when he was four years old. His family then settled in La Ligne Acadienne in Poitou but later moved to Nantes because they could not cultivate the poor land. Terrio is largely responsible for organizing the big overseas trip of the approximately 1.600 Acadians to Louisiana in 1785: “On La Bergère I made my way into Acadie tropicale …” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 60). Besides bringing over half of the Acadians who would eventually populate Louisiana, Terrio has an additional relevance for Bourque. As the reader finds out from Bourque’s end notes in Megan’s Guitar, Terrio is one of Bourque’s ancestors: “Olivier was the father of Jean Toussaint Terrio, the father of Olivier Aristide Terrio, the father of Jean Olivier Terrio, the father of Eddi John Theriot, my grandfather; all of them of Ascension Parish around Donaldsonville” (83). Bourque’s poem about Terrio is thus another instance where historical and personal memory meet. Bourque honors two other Acadians. Jean and his father Joseph Guilbeau, dit L’Officier, also contributed to the establishment of the Acadian settlement in Louisiana. Joseph Guilbeau fought alongside Beausoleil against the British and was deported between 1755 and 1763. In Louisiana, he signed, together with other Acadians, the Dauterive Compact with the Spanish, an agreement which founded the ranching tradition in Cajun Country. In Bourque’s poem “Jean Guilbeau’s Journey from Beaubassin to Beaubassin,” Joseph’s son Jean recalls: “And here was the deal: we would each get twenty-five acres of land, five cows / and their calves and one bull from Antoine Dauterive, on halves. It was clear / that this was a good deal and that we could make it” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 71). Reportedly, the Dauterive Compact is at the origin of the Prairie Cajuns, the first Cajun cowboys (B. Jones). Like Beausoleil, Joseph Guilbeau died the first year after his arrival, leaving his wife and twelve-year-old son Jean with his brothers to fend for themselves. For his services in the Revolutionary War under Governor Galvez, Jean was given a land tract near Carencro, Louisiana, where he started ranching and farming. His wife, Marie Arceneaux, was the daughter of Pierre Arceneaux, another Acadian pioneer who had named his habitation Beaubassin. Beausoleil, Olivier Terrio, and Joseph and Jean Guilbeau “they all become models for other oppressed Acadians and possibly even for other people who need hard-headed leaders who go against the currents of their own societies and times” (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”). “Acadie du nord” exemplifies how historical characters like Beausoleil and his peers have been dug up from the historical archive. The fixation into literature of such cultural elements as traditions, personalities, and ideas ensures

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that these maintain a long and stable activity in the collective memory of a group. According to A. Assmann, who distinguishes between functional memory and storage memory, this long-term stability is due to the fact that the boundary between functional and storage memory is not hermetic, but can be crossed in both directions. From the ‘active’ functional memory, defined by will and consciousness, elements of less interest continuously fall back into the archive; from the ‘passive’ storage memory, new discoveries can be retrieved and incorporated into functional memory (Schatten 57; my translation).

Bourque’s poetic reanimation exemplifies how literature actualizes forgotten historical characters—Beausoleil, Terrio, and the Guilbeaus—and moves them from the archive, and thus from passive memory, into the—active—functional memory. Yet there are also imagined elements which can be fixed in the functional memory. The imaginary René LeBlanc is a foil for the Beausoleil character, a notary in the village and an ally of the British. He is the fictional embodiment of the argument that the British posed no threat or danger to the Acadians. He is also the embodiment of the Acadians who learned that no satisfactory resolution with the British was possible and who were subsequently forced to leave Acadie with Beausoleil in 1764. (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 80)

His son Ernest is also fictional, as is Ernest’s marriage to Françoise. Lastly, “René Leblanc’s Account of the Passage to South Carolina” recounts an “imagined event based on tales and rumor about Beausoleil’s travels and wanderings between 1764 and 1755 [sic]” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 80). These fictional elements serve to fill in the blanks of Acadian history and memory.

9.2.2 The Role of Acadian Women: A Counter-History Bourque’s historical reenactment of the Acadian expulsion seems to be governed by such Acadian men as Beausoleil, Olivier Terrio, and Joseph and Jean Guilbeau. In reality, more female than male characters constitute “Acadie du nord,” and about one third of the section gives insight into the experiences, labors, thoughts, and sufferings of Acadian women. Strikingly, both historical characters including Elizabeth Brasseaux, Madeleine Comeaux, Marguerite Thibodeaux, Marie Landry, and Agnès Thibodeaux, and such fictional characters as Evangeline, Madeleine Richard, and Madeleine LeBlanc constitute Bourque’s poetic narrative. As a result, the endeavor to rehabilitate the Acadian women’s role during the Grand Dérangement extends Longfellow’s Evangeline myth in two ways. First, like other Cajun writers who want to preserve the collective memory

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of the Cajuns, Bourque focuses on historical characters to add more authenticity to the founding story of the Cajuns. Second, he introduces an original perspective in recalling the courageous Acadian women who more often than not had to do without any instructions from their fathers, brothers, or husbands during these difficult times. In “Beausoleil Talks to His Daughter Françoise,” for instance, Beausoleil is anything but paternalistic. Instead, he reveres his daughter’s strength and resolve: When it seemed everyone was against me, / you were not. You are your mother’s child and from you both I’ve learned / how to steel a heart to what everyone else sees as a senseless resolve. The sea / we’ve been released into is a sea where even the resolute drown. But you, my dear one, will not drown. Your arms and legs and heart and lungs can take on / whatever arms and legs and heart and lungs are often and repeatedly asked to do / when trouble shows its face. (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 54)

The fact that it is the Acadian hero who gives heroic traits to his daughter adds poignancy to Bourque’s message. Bourque states that the emphasis on the Acadian women’s heroic feats is a way to counter the frequent tendency to feminize and romanticize, and even diminish and infantilize women. … Such is what happens largely to the Evangeline character as she is characterized in the Longfellow epic. The other possibility is that women face a double erasure, one in the actual history of genocidal activity and one in the reportage of events and characters. What relationship Françoise had with her father is not recorded anywhere, but she was with him when they arrived in Louisiana territory, and I cannot imagine her as weak or easily victimized, even by an event as large and as potentially overwhelming as this one was. She is constructed here to be a true daughter of the commandant. (Megan’s Guitar 81)

In countering the distorted memory of the Evangeline myth, Bourque makes the female characters part of a counter-memory, an “alternative commemorative narrative that directly opposes the master commemorative narrative, operating under and against its hegemony. … [It] is essentially oppositional and stands in hostile and subversive relation to collective memory” (Y. Zerubavel 10). Bourque’s female characters all show a distinct strength of character. One female heroine, in particular, has become rooted in the Cajun literary consciousness. After Thibodeaux in Hell or High Water: How Cajun Fortitude Withstood Hurricanes Rita and Ike, Bourque, too, honors Madeleine LeBlanc, the nineteen-year-old Acadian woman who was exiled with her family from the Grand Pré area in 1755 and returned to land assigned to them in Baie Sainte-Marie when the war ended in 1763. In contrast to the flat and rich land around Grand Pré they used to farm, the new place was rocky and tree-covered,

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which made settling in quickly even more challenging (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 82). In the poem “Madeleine LeBlanc Comes to Baie Sainte-Marie,” Madeleine describes how the exiles “sat there hunched / in grief wondering how to cling to vapors and cold air. No holy rood / made itself visible to us. This was not a world of miracles. Our bones / told us, finally what we had to know. The fish at our feet, the woods / and hills never spoke, but I saw platters on tables in a house I’d own” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 57). Although Bourque does not repeat Madeleine’s reported phrase “Nous avons pleuré assez. C’est l’heure de couper du bois et faire un logis” word for word, the line “I didn’t join the others in the weeping” (57) is still a clear echo. Indeed, as Bourque reveals in his notes, Madeleine’s story, told to him by Barry J. Ancelet, is the basis for the poem.³⁶ Clearly, with Madeleine’s appearance in Thibodeaux’s and Bourque’s works, she is about to become the epitome of the hardy and confident Acadian female exile. Curiously enough, this originally Acadian legend is almost nonexistent in Acadian literature, except for a vague allusion in Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-laCharrette, when the narrator expresses Madeleine LeBlanc’s intention to fell a tree as a symbol of a new beginning for the LeBlanc family.³⁷ Without any particular connection to Cajun culture, the legend, obviously based on oral storytelling, was brought by Ancelet from Acadia to Louisiana where it has now been fixed into a written form by two Cajun writers. Maybe it is the name of the settlement built by the LeBlancs which connected Bourque to Madeleine: Pointe de l’Église, the exile’s new settlement, is a namesake of Bourque’s birthplace in Louisiana, Church Point. It was certainly LeBlanc’s legendary fortitude, emphasized by the image of a woman grabbing an ax to cut wood, which inspired him to write a poem about her. Bourque also devotes two poems to the historical character of Elizabeth Brasseaux. As historian Carl A. Brasseaux’s ancestor, she was already a protagonist in Trois saisons, the only short story collection by Antoine Bourque, alias Carl A. Brasseaux, published in 1988. Bourque’s two lyrical texts devoted to her are supposed to further underline the courage of the Acadian women, who, on their own, took matters in hand to provide for their children during

 In his end notes to Megan’s Guitar, Bourque retells the legend of Madeleine: How she “rose and grabbed an ax. … [and how she responded when asked what she was doing:] ‘Nous avons pleuré assez. C’est l’heure de couper du bois et faire un logis.’ [We’ve wept enough. It’s time to cut wood and build a shelter]” (82).  “C’est tout près, dans la vallée de Memramcook, qu’elle abattrait son premier arbre, Madeleine LeBlanc, sous le regard ahuri de son homme et de ses frères qui n’en croient point leurs yeux…. Allez, flancs mous, c’est icitte que je nous creusons une cave et que je nous bâtissons un abri! Madeleine, digne rejeton de la charrette par la voie des femmes” (Maillet, Pélagie 316).

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the exile. The poem “Elizabeth Brasseaux’s Turn” is set in a colony on the eastern seaboard and depicts Elizabeth’s resistance to various temptations, including the fictional seduction by Beausoleil. Her strength of character and resolve transpire at the end of the poem, which entails the hope of a better future: “One day she saw a future for both / herself and her children in another place than this and when she tossed / the first coin into the jar, the ring of metal on glass turned her south / somehow” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 61). Elizabeth is drawn south to Louisiana, a motif which contrasts with the common idea of the Cajuns drawn to Acadia in the north. Madeleine Comeaux Trahan shows a similar trusting and optimistic disposition. Deported to France, Madeleine tells in “Madeleine Comeaux Trahan Sails to Louisiana with Her Children, 1785” how she resettled in Belle-Île-en-Mer, a rocky island off the French Atlantic coast, with her husband Pierre Trahan and their children.³⁸ Unfortunately, Pierre dies, and since the land is too poor to cultivate, she sees no other choice than to leave for Louisiana: “Now she would sell what she had to sell, rake / what she had to rake to get by and then some. She’d do what she had to do to band / with those leaving here for Louisiane” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 59).³⁹ In spite of all the hardships, Madeleine Comeaux Trahan still has faith and trust: “Little by little she knew her time would come around / again. She’d sail the ocean with her children, put back who they all were trace by trace by trace” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 59). A third example of a brave woman is Madeleine Richard, who represents the group of Acadians who took to the woods after the deportation order. This fictional character envisions a future for the Acadians despite their heavy losses: “everything we had come to dread / had come down on us. So we took seeds of Tintamarre to Caraquet, / to bang one day on pots, to dance in open air with the living & and the dead” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 55). As stated above, the tradition of Tintamarre did not exist at the time of the expulsion. Bourque’s reference to the “seeds of Tintamarre” then stresses the ingrained tenaciousness and future-oriented attitude of the battered Acadians. The poems may depict miserable lives. Yet all the poems about Acadian women share a positive ending, with the characters showing a determination equaling that of Madeleine LeBlanc. In analogy with Thibodeaux’s portraits of Cajun characters, Bourque presents a perspective which contrasts the accepted image of the meek Acadians.

 Pierre Trahan was one of the men whom Colonel John Winslow had summoned to the church of Grand Pré in 1755 (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 82– 83).  Surprisingly, “Louisiane” is not italicized.

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It should not come as a surprise that Bourque devotes a poem to Evangeline, the inveterate icon of Cajun culture, in Megan’s Guitar. Yet Bourque’s depiction of her in the poem “Evangeline Speaks” is different from what the reader might expect. She declares: “That girl you think you see beneath the oaks beside the Teche, she is other / than the girl I was. …” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 62). Although she is an “important figure in the Cajun imagination,” she “speaks as a trope and an icon; not a historical figure” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 84). Clearly, Evangeline’s own words betray Longfellow’s influence on Bourque: “I had to do mostly with what people wanted of me. / I am the loyal one, the one faithful to a man I may or may not have held dear. / … . I was always covered / with right image & right sound, measured neatly in what others wanted to believe” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 62). In giving Evangeline a voice, Bourque transforms the memory of Evangeline as transmitted by Longfellow and the extended myths. The fact that Evangeline speaks for herself is an act of emancipation. Curiously, her statement is defined by a series of actions she did not do, a passivity which recalls Longfellow’s heroine: I was surely with all those other women forced to leave a life they had grown into, but I was never what they were, never a mother, never even married. ............... I was not among those that fought back, wielded axes, or negotiated with bears for a place to live. I was never with the women who foraged for medicinal teas to save a spouse in a wild land no one knew, or nursed a child, never smothered by want or dread. I never planted crops or took them in, never had to cleave through thicket and vine to make a way for myself. (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 62)

This description ex negativo serves, in fact, to enlarge the tableaux of the Acadian characters. Besides the strong Acadians, there were certainly also less strong characters who would be held accountable for their passivity. The fact that Bourque devotes a poem to Evangeline diverges from the general opinion among Cajuns and Acadians that Longfellow’s Evangeline does not contribute to an authentic portrayal of Cajun (and Acadian) culture. In a documentary on Evangeline in 1996, Barry J. Ancelet remarked how the Evangeline myth actually harmed Cajun culture: Évangeline a volé notre histoire. Sans pas par méchanceté mais par l’intérêt qu’on lui a accordé. Après l’histoire de Longfellow, que Longfellow a imaginée, l’intérêt qu’on a accordé à Évangeline a remplacé la vraie histoire, notre vraie histoire. Elle a remplacé tous les héros qu’on aurait pu avoir. Les vraies personnes—et les personnes imaginées. Elle était tellement dominante dans un sens littéraire, dans un sens invention d’une mythologie pour un peuple qu’elle a rendu tous les autres héros pas nécessaires. (Évangeline en quête)

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In contrast to this view held by Ancelet and other Cajuns, Bourque has a different conception of Evangeline’s cultural role. He is grateful for Longfellow’s epic poem, for it was one of many avenues in his history research. Instead of copying and producing another nineteenth-century poem, Bourque wanted to create something new and contemporaneous: In some ways I felt that I had a responsibility to Longfellow for having told the story earlier. In some ways I think that what he did with the story of the Acadians in the poem Evangeline is that he allowed it to sort of incubate in a way for a later writer to come back and retell the story. In many ways, I am grateful to Longfellow because he gave me a sort of blueprint I could work against. One of the things I wanted to do was to lift it away being a 19th century Romantic expression as I understood it. I was always guarded against that 19th century American Romanticism. Yet I didn’t want to trash Evangeline because I felt grateful for the story having been preserved. (Jones and Bourque)

Bourque does not reject Longfellow’s Evangeline but considers it as an essential element in the collective memory of the Cajuns since the character of Evangeline has been one defining aspect of Cajun culture for a long time. In that sense he consciously exploited the myth, starting off a recovery of this mythical narrative. Bourque’s Evangeline has her own role to play and is just as integral a part of the Acadian diaspora as all the other strong-willed Acadian women. One female character has a particular significance for Bourque. The poem “Agnès as a Memory” features Beausoleil’s wife, Agnès, who is largely absent in Cajun history although she contributed to the continuance of the generation of the Cajuns by bearing Beausoleil eleven children. The memory of her is like a ghost, a “large absence” as the speaker says in the poem, and she “represents all those who have disappeared and who were erased, but whose strong and vital presence followed and inhabited those who persevered” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 86): Her name is not on any list we have, no sure way to know where she went or how she went from those she loved so. Her life was filled with grief and rent it seemed. And here she is, a large absence in the story and in the lines of those expelled from homes and lands and friends. Quince she tended in her garden is gone too. Felled trees in forests she took long walks in, rinsed out like figures in old cloth. What she spelled in our story is now nearly erased. She, a cave we can walk around in, a shade neither bent

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nor curved nor lined. All she was she gave to her name, gave nothing to what she spent. (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 67)

The speaker opposes Agnès’s doings and habits to the transitoriness of things: Similar to the loss of “homes and lands and friends,” “[q]uince she tended in her garden has gone, too,” and “What she spelled / in our story is now nearly erased.” In an interview, Bourque explained why Agnès was such an important figure to him. She embodies all other Acadian women who fell through the net of memory: The Agnès poem is an important poem to me because what it contains is perhaps the very reason I wrote the book. Memory fades and there are erasure forces all around us where history and culture are concerned. And, recorded history sometimes contains deliberate misrepresentations. … The tenuousness of both life and history, the incompleteness of recorded history, the tendency to disempower and diffuse the feminine in recorded history, all stuck [sic] me as significant when I thought of women like her who were so essential to the survival of these dispersed souls. What I hope I have done in this poem is to suggest that women like her are perhaps most powerful in the way they exist as residual presences in the culture. Her spirit is elusive and ever changing and therein lies her power as a historical figure. She is important in what actually happened to her and also in what she has become in the memory of a culture. (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”)

Thanks to Bourque, who has retrieved the residual presence of Agnès from storage memory, she is now part of the Cajun collective memory. Bourque’s second diptych is a counter-memory in many respects. He resurrects historical characters and interweaves their life stories with those of fictional characters. Thus, he not only remembers historical characters, including those whom history has almost forgotten, but invents characters who represent those of whom no traces are left. More importantly, it is the first time that the female characters of the Acadian expulsion are given a voice. Bourque endeavors to set the record straight about the women’s role during the Grand Dérangement. He explains that [w]hile the women might be the main source of strength in the family and while they might be the ones holding communities together, they were not regarded as the subjects of historical documentation. The scant or missing stories of the women is problematic historically because we do not know the motivations for the actions of separation, we do not know much about how much of a threat they might have been to the British but in pre-colonial families the locus of power was always shared, most of the time with the women taking a shadowed place in the stories. In this book of poems I wanted the women like Elizabeth Brasseaux, Marguerite Broussard, Madeleine Trahan, and others, to be signs that they did indeed make important decision [sic], were indeed agencies of heroic action, and

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will. The story of their part in the migrations is not recorded, or hardly recorded. They are mostly figures in census figures and ship manifests, but They [sic] did more than follow their husbands and sons. (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”)

Through his poetry, Bourque tries to fill in the gaps in Acadian and Cajun history by presenting a counter-memory entailing a two-fold reversal. First, Bourque’s characters are anything but passive Acadians. Instead, each of the characters shows vivacious and spirited features, which repudiates the romantic image conveyed by Evangeline. Second, Bourque honors the Acadian women who, as a rule, have been neglected in the historical discourse. Thus, Bourque is “drawn to the outsider, the neglected—to whatever is threatened with erasure” (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”). Megan’s Guitar is the first anglophone Cajun literary work to explicitly engage with the Acadian expulsion, combining the historical with the fictional. It thus prefigures not only Bourque’s, but also the anglophone Cajun literature’s awakening to the past, acting as a counter-memory to previous depictions. As Karl Marx observed about major turning points in history, retrospection or “[t]he awakening of the dead” is meant to glorify the present struggles, not to wallow in nostalgia for the sake of the past. It is meant to “[find] once more the spirit of revolution, not … [to make] its ghost walk again” (90). Alternating between historical and fictional tableaux, Bourque creates a full-fledged and tangible portrait of the ancestors of the Cajuns. In lieu of giving a definite historical account, the poet wants to capture the various possible exile experiences of the Acadians. Thus, he also deconstructs the myth of the expulsion of the entire Acadian population, shedding light not only on the experience of the Louisiana Acadians, but also on those Acadians who returned to Nova Scotia such as Madeleine LeBlanc, or those like Madeleine Comeaux Trahan, who landed in BelleÎle-en-Mer in France. In doing so, he introduces a credible counter-history. Bourque’s poetic counter-memory is compatible with the Cajun collective memory. Actually, it is the counter-memory which supports and nurtures the collective memory of the Cajuns. Both history and myth are necessary to prevent collective memory from withering. As George Lipsitz astutely observed, [c]ounter-memory is a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal. Unlike historical narratives that begin with the totality of human existence and then locate specific actions and events within that totality, counter-memory starts with the particular and the specific and then builds outward toward a total story. Counter-memory looks to the past for myths that seek to detach events and actions from the fabric of any larger history, counter-memory forces revision of existing histories by supplying new perspectives about the past. Counter-memory embodies aspects of myth and aspects of history, but it retains an enduring suspicion of both categories. Counter-memory

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focuses on localized experiences with oppression, using them to reframe and refocus dominant narratives purporting to represent universal experience. (213)

Bourque found these “localized experiences with oppression” in the women of the Grand Dérangement who became the basis of his stories and ultimately Cajun history. In drawing on history and myth, Bourque actualizes and regenerates the collective memory of the Cajuns. He reassembles the pieces of the past and recovers a unified past through his writing. As a sort of Acadian memory regained, his poetry represents the repository where the fragments of things and facts are preserved. With Megan’s Guitar, the broken pieces of the past are united—and with his writing, Bourque preserves the memory of the Acadians. This act restores the lost memory and becomes a memorable past for future generations.

9.3 Creating a Universal Cajun Poetry Through Transmediality In an interview Bourque gave to literary critic Susan Larson in 2008, he pointed out that although his writing is steeped in Cajun culture, he, like every writer, seeks to address universal themes to reach a wider audience: “You write out of your history and your geography … and what I think is that the challenge is to not become a regional poet. We can say that Robert Frost is a New England poet, but that diminishes him in a way if that’s the only way we think of him. Those woods he wrote about, those miles to go before he sleeps—those are universal things” (“Louisiana Poet Laureate”). Although Bourque’s poetry expresses a distinct rootedness in Cajun Country, it actually crosses boundaries on multiple levels, extending the range of influence and revealing a wider awareness of the universe. For instance, the notion of brokenness, which, at least since the publication of Megan’s Guitar, has been a defining feature of Bourque’s poetry, appeals to many people. Indeed, Bourque finds creative outlets to translate his personal brokenness and extend it to a more general understanding. The loss of family members or friends and the loss of French translate this sense of brokenness. Finally, the creative reassessment of the broken Acadian history is a means to address the community of the dispossessed in a universal way. Bourque’s poetry, writes Ancelet in the preface to Megan’s Guitar, is “a celebration of the universal, understanding that the universe is composed of an infinity of localities” (xiii). These localities include French, Creole, Acadian, and even Japanese or Chinese culture. What is more, they correspond to various artistic disciplines, such as visual arts, music, and literature. Bourque’s poems disclose an affinity for art especially, ranging from local to foreign authors and ar-

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tists; from Renaissance to modern and post-modern art forms that include painting, textile and graphic design, and photography. Allegedly, it is because Bourque grew up in a hybrid culture which is already predisposed to crossing boundaries that his poetry has a global component. Each of his contemporary “guides and models” is a “creator and a kind of cultural nexus” (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”). Another such cultural nexus is religion, or rather spirituality, a conspicuous marker of Bourque’s poetry. Bourque’s Roman Catholic education clearly manifests itself in his poems even though he never preaches that belief. At the same time, the poems also draw on a much broader spiritual understanding and shed light on Bourque’s vision about human values and people’s relation to their surroundings. For instance, the contemplation of nature acquires a spiritual quality in Bourque’s poetry and links him to Transcendentalist writers such as American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. The new poems in In Ordinary Light reveal Bourque’s vision of light-suffused things in the world and clearly possess a universal and transcendent spirituality. As Bourque confessed in his interview with Susan Larson, he also embraces other spiritual beliefs. More concretely, he stopped being a practicing Catholic and has turned toward Buddhism—which is another similarity to Richard.⁴⁰ In fact, Bourque claims that during his morning meditations he calls upon “all the spiritual leaders that he has ever appealed to” (Larson, “Reading Life”), which intimates a pluralistic spirituality. Bourque substantiated his heterogeneous poetic approach in an article entitled “Mindfulness, the Jumping Universe, and the Language of Inscape: Crossing Borders for the Public Good,” in which he reveals more details about his spiritual, artistic, and philosophical precepts. As a term originating in Buddhism, “mindfulness” means to become aware of one’s connection to the surrounding world. It is, however, not just pure attention. Swiss theologian Georges B. J. Dreyfuss explains that mindfulness is a process, a cognitive shift from making sense of our experiences: When we understand that our experiences are impermanent, “pleasant events are seen as fleeting rather than permanently satisfactory and unpleasant encounters are seen as temporary setbacks rather than deeply upsetting defeats” (51– 52). For Bourque, “the poem, … music and art and the iconic buildings that house things” (Bourque, “Mindfulness” 382) are expressions and extensions of mindfulness. They represent the place and idea of mindfulness and “serve the public good to best effect when the tropes of traveling from interiorities to borderland and back again have free range” (Bourque, “Mindfulness” 382).

 Bourque received the first refuge vows in Buddhism (Larson, “Reading Life”).

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The image of unhampered travels from interior to border and back is taken up with the “jumping universe,” a term introduced by American architect Charles Jencks in 1995 to describe a new world view based on complexity science, which “shows the universe to be more creative and dynamic than previously thought. This shift in thinking … is from a traditional religious perspective to a cosmogenic orientation: the view that we inhabit a self-organizing universe in which the mind and culture are understood to be not accidental but typical of its creativity” (Jencks 1). Bourque’s use of ekphrasis is an excellent example of this philosophy. It appears in his descriptive poems which are based on paintings and in which he jumps from the received painted image to his own poetic painting. It is in his ekphrastic poems that this border-crossing comes best to the fore. The third element mentioned in the article, the “language of inscape,” refers to “inscape,” a concept developed by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Catholic poet during the period of English Romanticism. Hopkins believed that “there is a kernel or core of being on the inside that is reflected in the outside world of who and what we are—or more importantly, of how we arrive at being-in-the-world and how we abide with being-in-the world” (Bourque, “Mindfulness” 379). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Hopkins’s term describes “the individual or essential quality of a thing; the uniqueness of an observed object, scene, event, etc.” (“inscape, n.”), and it is sustained by what Hopkins called “instress,” a certain force or energy (“instress, n.”). Hopkins’s inscape can be traced back to the theology of the medieval scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus, who is known for coining the concept “haecceitas,” translated as “thisness,” which expresses the in-the-world-being (“haecceity, n.”). One of Bourque’s earliest poems in Plainsongs is called “Haecceitas” and describes how the speaker’s creativity is inspired by nature: I am walking / the paths in / this holy plain. / I am sleeping / in its ditches. / My eyes / are / dividing / the world in / four pieces, / then in all / the directions / in between. / My ears / are hearing / what I think / is not there / when I think / the wind has / gone elsewhere. / I am making notebooks / of the grasses / in the prairie. / I am making songs / with the names / of trees. / I am lying down / on this holy / ground to meet / the intelligences / in these / rooms, / to know / what cells / say / or how cells / say— / now slither, / now fly, now / turn. (46 – 47)

Bourque’s “Haecceitas” gives the impression of the speaker becoming one with nature while wandering through the prairie and among trees. It also contains a resounding echo of the poetic imagery of such nineteenth-century American writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who described how he became a “transparent eyeball” (Emerson 29) and felt as being “part or particle of God” while walking

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through nature; or the poet Walt Whitman, who also made “notebooks / of the grasses / in the prairie” with his volume of poetry about the American people, Leaves of Grass. Like Whitman, who became the pioneer of Modern American poetry, Bourque has become the pioneer of Cajun poetry in English. What is more, he finds his inscape not only in Louisiana, but also in European and Oriental literature and art. With the help of medial intertexts from other cultures, Bourque transcends the artistic community of Louisiana and the USA to establish a distinct cosmopolitan platform. Obviously, the use of “inscape” is a good approach for presenting the fusion of a multitude of elements. With its typical feature of crossing borders, it becomes synonymous with the “jumping universe” and “mindfulness.” Bourque mends brokenness by creatively associating and adapting poetic forms and images. Megan’s Guitar is the first collection of poetry which comprehensively illustrates brokenness and how it is mended through such an “underlying energy force.” This force is represented through the image of “flow,” a recurring metaphor in Bourque’s poems embodying the notion of change and mutability. On a concrete level, Bourque unites several fields of art—poetry, visual art, and music—, each of which becomes a mnemonic support and serves as a basis for his considerations of the flow between the inside and outside worlds. On an abstract level, this movement is represented through images of water, dreams, and memory which are always in flux. They serve as circuit and conduit without boundaries. With respect to dreams, the narrative is even more multilayered because the boundaries between the real and the imaginary and all of the possible trajectories are blurred. There, consciousness coalesces with imagination. As ideal border-crossing metaphors, dreams are where the universe jumps unhamperedly. Out of Catholicism and Buddhism, Bourque has developed his own understanding of the world, the understanding that everything in the world is connected and driven by an interior force. The inscape of Bourque’s poetry is visible in the language, the intertextual and intermedial references, notably in the form of ekphrasis, and an open-minded spiritual approach, all of which contribute to mend Bourque’s broken poetry. Ultimately, “mindfulness,” “jumping universe,” and “inscape” describe the crosspollinating processes of collective memory in general.

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9.3.1 Translating Brokenness: Bourque’s Art of Poetry As the most self-evident element embodying brokenness, death recurs time and again in Bourque’s poetry. Incidentally, the chapbook Holding the Notes (2011) is dedicated to two of Bourque’s close relatives, his mother-in-law and his own mother, whom he lost in 2006 and 2009 respectively. Megan’s Guitar takes up the theme of death in over a dozen poems, including poems from Holding the Notes. The sorrow and loss accompanying death appear, for instance, in “Dreams and Nightingales,” which revolves around an unidentified dying person (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 24– 25). Other poems subliminally relate to the speaker’s private life. The poem “Passage” visits the speaker’s mother-in-law on her deathbed (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 28). “Holding the Notes” contemplates the pending death of the speaker’s mother, and the following “Prayer Card” discloses his thoughts about how the picture of his mother on the prayer card shows only a fragment of her: “Nothing / here would ever tend toward what was wild / in her, or rent, or over-blown, or too-sweet, / or maimed” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 29 – 30). The poem about the prayer card is a sort of double commemorative ritual. First, the card itself entails the ritual of commemoration of a deceased person. Second, writing about the prayer card can be seen as a commemorative ritual, too. Indeed, “writing technique replaces ritual” (Lachmann, Memory 9). Bourque also pays homage to Elemore Morgan Jr. and commemorates his art in two poems, “Elemore from the Other Side” and “The Things Elemore Left Behind” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 27, 32). Obviously, Bourque is at a point in life when he seeks consolation in turning the memory of his family and community into poetry. In addition, the commemorative poems highlight the relationship between death, memory, and forgetting, between past, present, and future. The speaker in “Vanitas,” who “ponder[s] passage,” observes that we “are always wedded / to everything before and after us. …” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 41). In contrast to the myth of mnemotechnics, which determines death as a trigger for forgetting, Leonardo da Vinci viewed death as the ultimate stage of remembering (Lachmann, Memory 4). Bourque’s poems about life’s finality contain both movements. The passing of family members and friends is an incentive for Bourque to write his memories of them into poems which, in turn, also serve as receptacles of memory for future remembrance, for commemoration. Bourque’s broken private past extends to a broken Cajun collective memory. Despite his Cajun-French roots, Bourque belongs to the lost generation who

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never learned to speak French.⁴¹ He states that he was “brought up in a family and community where French was the first and dominant language of the elders, but also one that was forbidden in any educational process or institution, I grew up removed from what I still consider my native language even though I cannot speak it” (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”). Incapable of speaking or understanding French, Bourque composes poems in English only. Except for such traditional Cajun-French terms as the “grand courrir,” “pacquer,” and “bourré,” as well as a few French sentences in The Blue Boat, Bourque’s poetry is conspicuously void of French. In Megan’s Guitar, the second diptych “Acadie du nord” features italicized French idioms, sometimes even interfering with English. French words include “calebasse,” “traître,” “des rigolets,” and “vacherie” (51, 65, 68).⁴² It is striking that Bourque never uses “Cajun” in Megan’s Guitar and that “Acadie” and “Cadien” are not written in italics (66). With “Cadien,” however, the speaker refers to the Acadians from Canada. In contrast, “Cadie” appears in italics, hinting at the Native American origin of the term. When Bourque lets his Acadian characters speak, they only rarely use French exclusively. For instance, when Marguerite Thibodeaux Broussard describes Beausoleil’s determination, it is a statement epitomizing the merging of the French and American cultures: “So when he raised / his voice above the rest and screamed on y va, my reply was aux bateaux” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 63). When Beausoleil speaks to his daughter and quotes phrases from her, it is also in French: “Un Cadien échappé n’est pas un Cadien perdu,” or “Ne rapportez pas des idées toutes faites” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 54). The idea of brokenness not only concerns the theme of death or the loss of French, but also the poetic form. In that respect, Megan’s Guitar represents a major formal innovation in Bourque’s œuvre. As a rule, Bourque shows great formal flexibility, using such fixed verse forms as aubades, sestinas, sonnets, villanelles, haikus,⁴³ or composing in free verse. Though most of his poems are written in that latter form, Bourque seems to have a preference for the sonnet. This very strict form of poetry consists of an octet with the rhyme scheeme abba abba and presenting a question to which a solution is offered in the following sestet (the rhyme scheme varies: It can be either cde cde or cdc cdc). Bourque began

 His education began “in listening to at least three languages: English, Cajun French and the Creole French of St. Landry Parish in a rural community near Bellevue” (Bourque, “Louisiana”).  The two French poems in Plainsongs were translated by Christine Yvette Balfa.  Haikus include the series “Egret Haiku” in Call and Response (25 – 26); “Issa,” “Basho,” “Buso” in In Ordinary Light, all three of which conclude each of the three sections in the collection (15, 32, 48).

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intuitively to experiment with the Petrarchan sonnet in The Blue Boat and has come to produce almost exclusively sonnets for Megan’s Guitar. Strikingly, his sonnets break with the original form. More precisely, they are “broken” in several respects: They break with form, meter, rhyme, and rhythm. Using the Petrarchan form of the octet followed by a sestet, Bourque breaks the octet into an opening and a closing quatrain, and he positions the sestet in between these two quatrains. Although the poems seem, at first, to follow the pattern of an iambic pentameter, that pattern is broken up after a few lines. Besides the predominantly regular rhyme scheme, abab cdc ded abab, Bourque’s sonnet form also includes off-rhyme, slant rhymes, and eye rhymes (Udall and Bourque). As to the rhythm, the enjambed lines further accomplish the break of the regular form. Bourque then found a form which “would do a few things specifically to meet … [his] needs” (Udall and Bourque). These needs result from his life experiences: the broken ties to the past and the broken ties to French. This peculiar situation of knowing about his French past but being incapable of connecting to it, triggered the urge to express the broken tie to his linguistic heritage. Bourque explains: I grew up in South Louisiana in a bilingual culture in a monolingual household because my parents were the first generation of people who were punished for speaking their native language. So what ended up happening was that the French that I learned was broken French. … I still can neither make myself understood or understand French in Paris. My English was much the same. Uhm, because of that kind of horse, two horses, that I was trying to straddle. And so I got the idea that with this formal form that I was using I thought it would be a kind of neat idea to play on this idea of brokenness. (Folse)

Since he “had a sonnet variant that … [he] knew was” his, he called it the ItaloCajun sonnet, or “broken sonnet” (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”).⁴⁴ In Megan’s Guitar, thirty-nine poems, about half of the volume, are written in the broken sonnet form, with ten of them in “Acadie tropicale,” and two—the first and the third—in the bridge section. Significantly, “Acadie du nord” features this form exclusively, which epitomizes the broken past. Unlike Shakespeare’s sonnets with their final couplet, Bourque’s broken sonnets have neither a conclusion nor a surprising twist. Nonetheless, there seems to be a sort of conclusive statement beginning variously in the last four lines and frequently introduced by

 Of the 60 poems in The Blue Boat three are written in the broken sonnet form. It also features three other sonnet variations. The number of broken sonnets augments in In Ordinary Light: Of the 36 poems, 16 are broken sonnets, and four are written in the English sonnet form.

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such conjunctions as “but,” “so,” “if,” or such question words as “whatever” for declarative statements. Considering that poetry is originally an oral art form, it is important to note that Bourque’s broken sonnet form remains invisible when performed. In its written form, however, it acquires value as a cultural object. Even if some poems seem to have no obvious connection to Cajun culture, a link is established through the form of the broken sonnet. For instance, the poem “‘Of Men and Rivers’,” dedicated to Gaines, relates to Cajun culture on a formal level, considering that it consists of two broken sonnets. Notwithstanding the sense of brokenness inherent in the Italo-Cajun sonnet, the final product is an amalgamate poem, a poem which only in its single components seems broken. In its new form, it is complete. Bourque’s innovation then signifies a distinct viability of Cajun literature. The idea of translating broken language and history into a broken form is an appropriate way for wronged minorities to express their own brokenness. Bourque actualizes brokenness on yet another level. Lost Acadia is surely the epitome of the Cajuns’ broken history. Not only does this historical chapter entail the casualties of numerous Acadians. The lack of witnesses and sources also means a breach in continuity, in the link between past and present. Significantly, the fragmentary structure of the Acadian broken memory can be extended to people traumatized by violence in general, and there is no doubt that Bourque, like Richard, advocates a collective memory of the dispossessed and oppressed: My knowledge of the Acadian story heightens my insistence on human rights everywhere. The story of any oppression is the story of all oppressions. If you have been part of a story of oppression and erasure like this one, it seems to me that every country’s challenges and policies on immigrant populations becomes a story that you are powerfully connected to. … No story of violations of human rights is unconnected to what happened to us as Acadians. Every genocide is connected to all other genocides. … We are the Armenians, the Jews, the Untouchables, the Gypsies as they are called by so many. (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”)

Bourque thus implicitly refers to the Acadian expulsion as a genocide. From 1979 until recently, scholars have defined the dispersal as an “act of genocide” (Rushton 4; Jobb 1; M. Arseneault), while others like Faragher consider this calamity as “the first episode of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing in North America” (Faragher, Scheme 473).⁴⁵

 In his petition to the Queen of England, Warren Perrin declared the deportation a genocide. First introduced by the Russian writer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, the post-war neologism “genocide” was used by the United Nations to indict Nazi leaders. In his book, Perrin replaced the

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Moreover, he relates to other writers who show an “understanding of the immigrant mind, the dispersed psyche, and the various ways they cherish and articulate the migratory heart” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 89).⁴⁶ Actually, he prefaces Megan’s Guitar with quotes from works by two notable authors who deal with diaspora in their works: Blindness by the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago and The Cat’s Table by the Canadian poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje. Saramago’s quote, “Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are,” positioned at the incipit of Megan’s Guitar (xi), addresses the question of identity. Apart from all visible and nameable things, there exists something inside us without a name which still shapes our identity, even if we have lost our home and family. That something includes memory, and the poet’s task is to try to name this something inside us and make it visible in order to understand our past, present, and future. Megan’s Guitar is an inquiry into the various elements constituting Cajun identity through the contemplation of contemporary Cajun culture and the Acadian past. By extension, it speaks for any oppressed minority culture. The quote from Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table preceding “Acadie tropicale” foreshadows “Acadie du nord” and makes the link to another place in the past: “I’ve met many who remain haunted by the persistent ghost of an earlier place” (Ondaatje 139; Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 1). Taking up the theme of immigration, Bourque implicitly describes Cajun Country as a land of immigrants and, with the quote, foreshadows the third part about Acadia which is like a persistent ghost of an earlier place.⁴⁷ This understanding is extended in the second diptych by another quote from the same novel: “It was not only the things we could see that had no safety. There was the underneath” (Ondaatje 97; Bourque, Megan’s

term with “ethnic cleansing,” though quoting excerpts from newspaper articles including statements such as the dispersal being “the clearest case of genocide you can find” (“The Petition;” Acadian Redemption 21, 40, 103, 106). Faragher makes a distinct verbal adjustment, rejecting the term “genocide” for the Acadian expulsion: “Mass murder was not a feature of the Acadian expulsion” (Scheme 470). Instead, he calls the deportation an “ethnic cleansing”: “[B]ut the events of 1755 bear a striking similarity to more recent episodes of ethnic cleansing” (Scheme xix, 470). His comment echoes a statement by Maurice Basque, who also emphasized that the Acadian deportation cannot be called a genocide (Perreault). Already in 1999, Basque described the event as an act of “nettoyage éthnique avant la lettre” (Basque, Barrieau, and Côté 22).  Bourque’s other literary muses, who deal with memory, errantry, and the intersection of both personal and public history, include such contemporary prize-winning writers as Mexican-American writer Luis Urrea and American poet Natasha Trethewey.  The quote continues: “Every immigrant family, it seems, has someone who does not belong in the new country they have come to. It feels like permanent exile to that one brother or wife who cannot stand a silent fate in Boston or London or Melbourne” (Ondaatje 139).

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Guitar 43). As a test of courage, the narrator of The Cat’s Table and his travel companion hide in safety boats. When a storm comes up, they experience the full power of the elements and the underneath, i. e., the threatening waters below their safety boats. The scene encapsulates figuratively the experience of migration which entails danger and insecurities. For the Acadians, there was no safety net wherever they arrived, so “the underneath” was their vulnerability and the risks the new places posed for them—be it Maryland, Haiti, Louisiana, or France. This insecurity echoes the last line in the last poem of the first diptych, “First Winter at Camp Beausoleil”: “In songs played in platinum registers / no air is sure & no one is safe” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 34). Through the intertextual references Bourque endeavors to describe the brokenness in the Cajun collective memory. At the same time, these profuse intertextual and transmedial links help mend the broken memory.

9.3.2 Mending Brokenness: Bourque’s Multicultural Vistas Bourque’s art of memory resides not only in bringing broken memories to light. Bourque also strives to make broken memories whole again. His acknowledgments, dedications, quotes from, and allusions to other works of art unveil an intricate and multidimensional web of memories. In remodeling the selected elements, he turns them into something new. This border-crossing technique resembles very much the collage or montage technique, where various bits and pieces are juxtaposed and superposed, and whose meanings coalesce into a new meaning. They are broken pieces which act for Bourque as a support to symbolically mend brokenness. Formally, the collage technique reveals itself in the pattern and design of Bourque’s poetry. In his analysis of Bourque’s poem “Feeding the Opossum,”⁴⁸ American poet George Drew points out how “the back and forth of long and short lines mirrors the erratic, stop and go movements of the opossum as it makes its way to the speaker’s house, to the ‘tin filled with food / for cats’” (71). Similarly, the poem “Sunday Afternoons Behind T-Maurice’s Dancehall” in Megan’s Guitar has a pattern which evokes a distinct image. The memory of the bushtrack races where “nearly always … only two horses ran” are formally rendered in the form of nine couplets—the two-verse stanzas mirroring the bushtracks (C. LeBlanc, “Review”). Parallelisms such as in the line “[o]ur nights are

 The poem first appeared in Plainsongs (34– 35) and was reprinted in In Ordinary Light (71– 73).

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filled with terns / and turns” in the poem “The Mallard at Her Nest” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 10) indicate how homophones add to the linguistic creativity of Bourque’s poetry as they merge pattern and poetic image: The flight of the terns is defined by turns and loops in the sky. All three examples execute Hopkins’s principles of “inscape”: “[A]s air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern or what I am in the habit of calling ‘inscape’ is what I above all aim at in poetry” (qtd. in McChesney 22). The power of a poem, which is also the reason for the beauty of a poem, comes from its pattern, the defining arrangement of various elements. Considering that music is poetry’s equal counter-part and that Cajun music defines Cajun culture, it is almost a given that music inspires Bourque’s poetry. His education ranged from “the language, lessons and music of the Latin High Mass,” to the music of Zydeco and rock ‘n’ roll musicians, to other registers of the music repertoire (Bourque, “Louisiana”). While such other Cajun poets as Arceneaux or Richard draw on traditional Cajun and Creole music, Bourque’s poetry encompasses a far wider range of music. For instance, Bourque was inspired by classical music for the structure of two of his collections. High mass music served as the blueprint for Plainsongs, while the structure of his second fulllength manuscript, Burnt Water Suite, was influenced by Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello: “The structure of the book loosely follows the lead and model of the classical suite which begins with a prelude, followed by an allemande, a courante, a sarabande, one of several galanteries, and ends with a gigue” (Udall and Bourque). Megan’s Guitar shows a mix of references to both Cajun music and famous classical pieces of the nineteenth century.⁴⁹ Significantly, the references to classical music are part of “Acadie tropicale,” i. e., of contemporary Louisiana-Acadian culture, and add an exotic note to the atmosphere in “Acadie tropicale.” While they disclose the author’s likes, they reveal great imaginative potential. Music reaches out to people on a universal level. The epigraph preceding the sestina “Passage” in Megan’s Guitar, “everywhere, an image I can’t read” (28), must be understood as a communal feeling in view of the departure of a loved one. Quoted from the poem “Grosse Fuge” by the American poet and memoirist Mark Doty (Doty 18 – 24), the epigraph points to the entanglements of memories represented in the poem. Ludwig van Beethoven’s Große Fuge inspired Doty to write a poem about his partner, who was dying of AIDS. While Beethoven’s Große Fuge “traveled” into Doty’s poem, both the classical musical piece and

 Zigeunerlieder by Johannes Brahms, Winterreise (1827) by Franz Schubert, and Große Fuge (1825 – 1826) by Beethoven.

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Doty’s poem served as intertexts to Bourque’s “Passage,” a contemplation about the speaker’s dying mother-in-law. What links Doty’s and Bourque’s poems are the themes of loss, brokenness, and the contrapuntal musical composition to which both look to express their pain. Artistic recreation and the memory that others have endured hardships help surmount communal loss. Death, or loss, then, is a nexus where memories meet. It is a “nœud de mémoire” which attracts poetry and music, and where communal mourning occurs. Finally, music embedded in poetry which is again embedded in poetry is nothing else than a collage or palimpsest. This flexible manner of using other art forms and re-arranging them is highly reminiscent of the musical mix in Cajun music. It both translates brokenness and unity, for the end product clearly presents something finished uniting different voices and expressing a modern view of Cajun identity and culture. Another transmedial technique which shows elements of the collage and which has become Bourque’s signature form is ekphrasis. If we take into account the poems triggered by family memories via photographs, memories of rooms once inhabited by departed ancestors, objects, or paintings, it becomes clear that images define Bourque’s work to a substantial degree. Indeed, his poetry is essentially founded on visual art: “For each of us, remembering is often connected to the senses through which we access the world. And, for me, that sense is the visual” (Udall and Bourque), Bourque once explained. He locates the images he wants to remember and imagines the poems he wants to write with the help of paintings, photographs, and collages. Bourque’s affinity with visuals led him to study architecture for two semesters before he ended up in the English Department. Though not a painter, he reveals himself to be a creative landscape artist for his garden (Larson, “Louisiana Poet Laureate”). Bourque’s love of art is best visible in the covers of his collections, which combine visual art and Cajun culture such as Terry Clay Girouard’s linocut of a cypress swamp for Plainsongs, or his painting of a blue boat for The Blue Boat. In Ordinary Light features replicas of the glass pieces of Bayou Plaquemine Brûlée Diptych by Bourque’s wife Karen. The front cover shows a persimmon tree with an egret and the persimmon tree in moonlight on the back cover alludes to the idea of illumination and enlightenment, which takes up the theme of the collection. As for Megan’s Guitar, Bourque selected an art piece made of sewn silk by artist Megan Barra, which shows a woman playing a guitar. The title of the collection pays tribute to the artist as it mentions her name and refers to the motif: “Megan’s Guitar.” Indeed, Barra’s artwork lies at the core of Bourque’s inspiration to the poetry collection. As Ancelet explains in the preface to the collection, it was Barra’s sewn silk piece which caught Bourque’s attention and triggered the idea of the collection: “The fecund vision of the poet, driven by his

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curiosity, gushed out of that moment to explore the past, to reconsider the present, and to shine a light on the future” (xiii). In writing ekphrastic poems, Bourque continues a deep-seated tradition, for the connection of poetry and painting reaches as far back as Horace’s formula ut pictura poeisis, “a poem is like a picture” (Horace, Satires 361), which is considered to follow up on the dictum from the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium: “A poem ought to be a painting that speaks; a painting ought to be a silent poem” (Caplan 39). Plutarch seems to acknowledge that claim when he writes that “Simonides … calls painting inarticulate poetry and poetry articulate painting: … for the actions which painters portray as taking place at the moment literature narrates and records after they have taken place.” Ekphrasis, the art form where painted memory becomes poetic memory, is in fact a double transposition. The mental image is first transposed into its pictorial representative, which is then transformed into a poetic artifact.⁵⁰ In Bourque’s poetry, the epitome of the collage technique is the union of visual art and music. The Petrarchan sonnet “Quartet, with Rembrandt,” for instance, opens with an epigraph by Soviet composer Dimitry Shostakovitch and then draws a poetic image referring to tableaux by French painter Édouard Manet and the Dutch painters Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt (Bourque, Blue Boat 68). The multiple artistic layers of music, painting, and poetry create a multimedial poem. It is, however, oriental art especially, with its traditional ekphrastic poetry, which has had the biggest impact on Bourque (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”). Bourque’s muses include Chinese artists of the thirteenth century and Japanese artists of the first and seventeenth- to nineteenth centuries; he draws on Hindu and Buddhist scriptures as well as Persian and classical Greek poetry.⁵¹ Strikingly, Megan’s Guitar has fewer exotic intertexts than The Blue Boat, Call and Response, or In Ordinary Light, and announces a return to Cajun culture. Most significantly, the poems in “Acadie du nord” are highly self-sustaining, for none of them refers to a visual artwork, which further underlines the dearth of material about Acadian history. Still, the collection emphasizes Bourque’s achievement to

 English poet William Blake as well as such members of the Pre-Rafaelite Brotherhood as Dante Gabriel Rossetti are good examples of the alliance of poetry and painting.  Besides Chinese poet and painter Qian Xuan, Bourque’s muses include major Japanese poets and artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as poet Matsuo Bashō, poet and painter Yosa Buson, printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige, and Kobayashi Issa, an important haikupoet and lay Buddhist, and Bourque’s regular muse (Ordinary Light 15; Megan’s Guitar 18). Other poems relate to the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (Ordinary Light 110, 143) and the Japanese poet and court lady Sei Shōnagon (Blue Boat 23, 49).

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establish a connection between seemingly foreign elements and Cajun culture, ultimately turning the intertexts into typical Cajun artifacts. Bourque’s poetic translation of Barra’s art piece “Woman with Guitar,” which is actually the first of two silk pieces called “Women with Guitar I” and “Woman with Guitar II,” contains fourteen ekphrastic poems, eleven in “Acadie tropicale” and all three poems of the bridge section. Nine are written in the broken sonnet form. Besides the aforementioned Cajun artists, the ekphrastic poems are also keyed to works by such non-Cajun painters as Barbara Hughes, Lynda Frese, Meghan Fleming, New Orleans painter Ida Kohlmeyer, and Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. Although these non-Cajun artists have no particular link to Cajun culture, Bourque achieves to “Cajunize” their works by using the ItaloCajun sonnet form or establishing connections to Cajun culture. Significantly, the collage artist Lynda Frese shares a couple of themes with Bourque: “The subject of memory has been an important theme in my art making. In its process, collage becomes a kind of remembering. It is a reinvention of a history or myth embedded in the photographs. I have an attraction for objects which evoke the past. I use symbols that move between and into realms that are personal, cultural, and universal” (“Lynda Frese”). The themes of nature, memory, death, as well as the use of the collage technique is what inspires both artists. In choosing the broken sonnet form, Bourque transforms Frese’s artworks into Cajun art, all the while keeping the universal message of the original works of art. Despite his lack of French, Bourque tries to recapture the language not only through references to Louisiana and Acadia, through French place names or French culinary dishes, but also, and maybe even more crucially, through his ekphrastic poetry keyed to works by such francophone painters as Antoine Watteau, Pierre Bonnard (who is especially present in The Blue Boat), Edgar Degas, and Henri Matisse. The ekphrastic poems from Megan’s Guitar especially exemplify how Bourque “Cajunizes” the artists’ paintings. In “Sunday Afternoons Behind T-Maurice’s Dancehall,” the speaker associates the image of the horse race with Degas’s paintings about horse races⁵²: “None of us had seen / Degas’ horses or his paintings of them at country tracks / like this one, but he could have painted any one of us / in this scene, me still deciding between Moss Bluff & Green Flash / in the first, a cousin favoring Running Rivers in the fifth” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 4). Degas, whose ancestors came from New

 Le défilé / Chevaux de courses devant les tribunes (1866 – 1868) is the first of a series of paintings about horse races by Degas (“Edgar Degas”).

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Orleans and Haiti, spent six months with his relatives in New Orleans in 1872 (Prah-Perochon). Through this Louisiana connection, Degas’s motif of the racehorses converges with Cajun culture, where horse racing has long been a popular entertainment and sport.⁵³ Bourque’s attraction to van Gogh and other post-Impressionist painters who were inspired by the landscape of southern France is self-evident, given that Cajun Country, notably the Gulf coast region, has been compared to the French Riviera. Holly Beach, Louisiana, for instance, bears the nickname “Cajun Riviera,” and Rheta Grimsley Johnson must have had this comparison in mind for her travel account about Cajun Country, entitled Poor Man’s Provence (2008). Strikingly, the link between the paintings and Bourque’s poetry seems to be the color blue.⁵⁴ That color is also the connecting link between southern France and South Louisiana.⁵⁵ Apart from general poems about Southern France such as “The Fortune Teller in the Camargue” in The Blue Boat (24), it is van Gogh’s paintings merging the geography and culture of Southern France with that of Louisiana which are the most meaningful. In Bourque’s poem “Van Gogh Comes to Louisiana le jour de la Toussaint” from The Blue Boat, the speaker claims that “Amsterdam is everywhere. / Abbeville is Auvers-sur-Oise in this light. / Here the Camargue is Holly Beach and Cameron, / Kaplan and Gueydan” (66).⁵⁶ Based on van Gogh’s series Saintes-Maries of 1888, in particular on the painting “Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries,” Bourque’s poem be-

 The horse theme comes full circle in “Jean Guilbeau’s Journey from Beaubassin to Beaubassin,” the last poem in the collection, with the reference to the Dauterive Compact, which stands at the origin of the ranching culture in Cajun Country.  Pierre Bonnard’s Nu dans le bain, Henri Matisse’s Nus bleus series, and Vincent van Gogh’s boat series, all defined by the color blue thanks to the themes of water and sky, inspired Bourque, who used the color in a more abstract way to point to thoughts, ideas, and dreams.  Lafcadio Hearn, known for his works on Creole culture, repeatedly referred to Louisiana’s blue water and blue sky in his short story about the hurricane of August 1856, “Chita: A Memory of Last Island” (1889). Jeanne Castille also mentions the Acadians’ cultivation and dyeing of textiles with indigo blue: “[C]omme nous n’avions pas de fixateur de couleurs, alors mon peuple cultivait l’indigo … je me rappelle, bleues avec des reflets violets et rougeâtres, les grandes plantations d’indigotiers entre deux bayou?” (J. Castille 89). Since the hurricanes in 2005, a blue object has gained symbolical value in Louisiana: The blue tarp was an omnipresent sign in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Singer-songwriter Sonny Landreth devoted the song “Blue Tarp Blues” to the victims of Hurricane Katrina (Landreth). In fact, the blue tarp has become an ambiguous metaphor. On the one hand, it is used for protection. On the other hand, it is an emblem of devastation, as shows David Cheramie’s poem “La cité des tois bleus au pays des zombies” (Julie 84– 85).  Auvers-sur-Oise is a small town in northern France where van Gogh stayed the last years of his life.

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comes a hybrid artifact as it transforms the French painting, which is inspired by the Japanese art of drawing with a reed pen—a distant echo of Bourque’s penchant for oriental art—into a Cajun poem, superposing Cajun places on French and Dutch places, and merging Dutch, French, Japanese, and Cajun art. “Van Gogh’s Samaritan” in Megan’s Guitar, which is a meditation about van Gogh’s The Good Samaritan, seems to be disconnected from Cajun culture, were it not for the broken sonnet form which gives the poem its Cajun spirit (16). No doubt, sight plays a pivotal role in Bourque’s poetry. Yet the visual sense does not only relate to concrete things in the outside world. Contemplation, for instance, relates to the double process of seeing and remembering as we try to understand what we see in recalling similar images. Moreover, dreams are also images which appear before the inner eye and they frequently appear in Bourque’s poetry. As the poet himself confessed, Federico Fellini’s Book of Dreams (2008) and Rodger Kamenetz’s Last Night’s Dream: Discovering the Hidden Life of the Soul (2007) are two of his most important books about dreams. Drawn by “the oneiric, as a way of understanding the world we live in” (Udall and Bourque), Bourque delves into the realm of the unfathomable to try and make what he finds fathomable through his poetry. The dream is crucial for Bourque, for it can texture or enrich narrative in a meaningful way. The idea of the dream as an approach to art and as a way to shape the art itself, gives us a new way of looking at ‘character’ as well. And that new way of looking at ‘character’ gives us an opportunity to see ourselves as much more textured than we might see ourselves if we only look at ourselves as movers in a story that is logically and ‘sensibly’ directed. There is a whole part of human experience that can be accessed through dream. (Udall and Bourque)

Megan’s Guitar features about half a dozen poems with “dream” or “dreaming” as the main theme.⁵⁷ Like memory, dreams have a collage-like quality, the speaker explains in “The Mallard at Her Nest”: “Most dreams are pasted graphics we create / from bits and pieces sticking to us like tags / we will not let go, or cannot let go. …” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 10). Both in memories and dreams, the line between the real and the imagined is blurred, a “space between the water line and the horizon,” as the speaker describes it in “Unfinished Painting” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 9). The poem “Dreaming My Father-in-Law,” for instance, exemplifies this multiperspectival approach. The speaker dreams that, as he crosses the garden gate, he becomes his father-in-law Abraham, all the while remaining present: “I was

 The motif of the dream appears in Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 10, 23, 24– 25, 26, 27, 28, 39.

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as clearly in my own shirt as I was in his” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 26).⁵⁸ Abraham begins to sing “Down by the Riverside,” and the speaker joins in humming the song. A second threshold is crossed in the last line of the poem, “& the Abraham in me dropped the knife,” which creates an image of yet another transformation of the speaker and alludes to the biblical narrative about the Binding of Isaac. While the spiritual “Down by the Riverside” establishes a link to the biblical context through references to the Old and the New Testaments (McMillin 44), the image of the knife connected with the name “Abraham” certifies it. Incidentally, scholars have pointed to the relationship between memory and dreams since the introduction of classical mnemotechnics. They see the human mind as a sort of library of our dreams. For Locke, too, dreams were connected to remembering. Arguing that dreams are “[c]haracters drawn on dust, that the first breath of wind effaces,” i. e., that during sleep, the Soul “thinks” apart, leaving no impressions on the body and thus no memories (112), he equaled lost dreams to forgetting. Bergson, in contrast, saw in dreams manifestations of “pure memory” (see Matière 197– 272), when memory emerges instantaneously. Psychologists like the Austrian Sigmund Freud started to consider dreams as voices from the past which haunt traumatized individuals (see Jenseits). Today, trauma studies still draw on dreams to analyze and help patients (see Caruth). This approach contrasts fundamentally with that of Halbwachs, who made a functional distinction between memory and dreams. While memories are defined by a logical structure, dreams are made of disconnected and distorted sequences, he wrote (Cadres 4– 15). Dreams are, in other words, broken memories, reshuffled and mixed to produce a different picture. Against this background, the fragmented quality of dreams is a good means to both illustrate the notion of brokenness and highlight the changeable nature of memory. In its endless opportunities of reshuffling the pieces, fragmentation allows and triggers change and renewal. Likewise, the changeable and regenerating nature of memory is necessary for memory to persist. Robert Wagner-Pacifici emphasizes memory’s impermanence when he claims that “[c]ollective memory vibrates—it is existentially committed to being provisional” (301). Both change and continuity are essential elements to revive and renew a culture. Bourque never loosens the ties to his culture, but he also tries to incorporate new elements ranging from Albrecht Dürer’s hare to Albert Einstein’s violin or Rosa Parks’s angel. Change triggers contemplation, which allows us to see things differently. Bourque’s creative process, then, is not static. On the contrary, his philosophy is one of interconnectedness and dialogue, of crossing borders:

 Abraham was also the second name of Bourque’s father-in-law.

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Themes, fields of art, and cultures are yoked together. Every new addition is like a fresh breeze giving new life to the cultural object and to the tradition, actualizing and regenerating it. As a piecing together of fragments, Bourque’s writing technique resembles very much Morgan’s painting technique, which the speaker describes in “Elemore from the Other Side”: “A house, a porch, a line of trees, or one tree alone, I dissected / and put together again” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 27). Bourque’s poetry functions as a medium of collective memory as the poems dissect the artwork and put it together again. Paradoxically, this collage technique presupposes that the creative process relies on inventing and remembering, the latter being a representation, a doubling, a making present of something absent (see Lachmann, Memory 8). In the end, Bourque’s poetic process amounts to remembering, for memory begins with speech: “Everything we try to say begins on slabs, is built / on a silence and a blankness memory fills” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 33). Emerging from consciousness, mindfulness, and imagination, memory is everywhere: “Memory sings on denim and canvas and duck & on / finethreaded cottons & on lawn even …” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 39; my emphasis).

9.4 Conclusion In the poem “Late Echo” by American poet John Ashbery, the speaker expresses the necessity of recreating, imitating, and repeating: “[I]t is necessary to write about the same old things / In the same way, repeating the same things over and over / For love to continue and be gradually different” (As We Know 88). Writing is a dialogic process involving continuity and change. This process also defines Bourque’s poetry, and, ultimately, is a prerequisite for the viability of Cajun culture. Bourque’s poetic principle to roam his surroundings for inspiration—from his immediate surroundings in Cajun Country, to Louisiana, and to a more global space—exemplifies this dialogic process. As Bourque explains in his preface to his collaborative work with Jack Bedell, Call and Response, poetry is indeed a form of dialog: Poetry is … one form of conversation. It is a way of talking back and talking into things— talking back and talking into memory, and ancestry; talking back and talking into the geographies I inhabit and the family I am part of; talking back at calamity and experience; talking into relationship, talking back and talking into the languages that have shaped my understanding of the world I live in; talking back and talking into history; talking into possibility and into hope. (ii)

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In his poetic dialog, Bourque spans several cultural fields, including literature, music, and visual arts. He communes with a broad spectrum of people—writers, musicians, and especially visual artists—, transcending the community of the family and appending a wider international community. In his response to the Louisiana Writer Award, Bourque emphasized: None of us write in isolation from our brothers and sisters, from our ancestors, from both our friends and those we perceive as adversaries. We write the stories of our communities, however we see or define community. We write in a sort of correspondence with those who have come before us. There are no new stories but we are ever in search of our story, the story that will be a response to our in-the-world-being. Our poems are made of others’ music, our histories come to us through what others have painted or sung or dramatized or dreamed. (“Louisiana”)

Even if the work of the writer is a solitary one, he is not lonely after all since he is surrounded by a community of writers. The words Ann Dobie uses to describe Bourque’s home—his house and gardens—also apply to his poems: They “are quintessential South Louisiana, with a twist” (Dobie, “Darrell Bourque”). While the first volumes of poetry such as Plainsongs stand as a reservoir of individual memory, focusing primarily on Bourque’s Cajun home and personal experiences, his later work turns more and more toward the outside world, distant in time and space, and reveals a more comprehensive worldview. As a case in point, Megan’s Guitar represents Bourque’s first poetic exploration of the Acadian past, in which he intertwines family memory with historical memory and thus displays an exchange of individual and collective memory. Significantly, Bourque is the first Cajun English-language poet to tackle Acadian history in a creative and poetic way. At the same time, he represents the corresponding voice to the first francophone Cajun writings. Despite the different language choice, Ancelet includes Bourque in the community of francophone Cajun poets: “Let us listen to this voice as it joins the harmony of howls on the bayou” (“Preface” xiii). There is no doubt that the “howls” refer to Cris sur le bayou. Indeed, Megan’s Guitar follows up on that pioneering poetry collection in several respects, including consolidating the memory about Beausoleil. Understandably, “it is the writing about the dispersed heart that ties … [Bourque] to certain writers that … influence … [him]” (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”). Frese’s claim that “[i]n memory, persons and places coalesce, forming a geography of the remembered” (“Lynda Frese”), applies to Megan’s Guitar especially. The lost home, such as Acadia, continues to guide the exile’s imagination, and it comes to life again through the recreation of historical events. According to the speaker in Bourque’s Cajun sonnet “How We Became a New World People,” colonists and, by extension, immigrants share a certain strength of

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mind: “New world people learn to listen, to call / in different tongues and they cannot be bothered by the hem / of boundaries. New world people have a hundred words for fall / and how to rise from fall, and they write those words in anthems” (Megan’s Guitar 68). Bourque’s poetry, which connects Cajun elements with the past and the wider world in a sensible way, both dissects the individual parts only to rearrange the pieces into one significant whole. His poetry is not just Cajun, but cosmopolitan. It is relational in the Glissantian sense. To understand and to “appreciate connections with sensibilities and figures of another time, another place” is what stimulates Bourque’s imagination (C. LeBlanc, “Interview”).⁵⁹ The constant use of enjambements in the Cajun sonnet form mirrors the cyclical movement pervading Bourque’s poetry. As a form of infinitude, this movement is like a circle or a vortex, without a beginning or an end, and it ultimately stands for the natural cycle. For Bourque, movement means above all crossing borders. Incidentally, the eight-like form of the guitar is a good example of Bourque’s border-crossing concept. Any poet who does not know movement is handicapped in every sense, in verse, in stanza, in form. “Wherever we live,” writes Bourque, “and however we experience our world, our scapes are defined by interiors and borders. What we make in the world and what we construct to serve the world are defined similarly by interiors and borders” (“Mindfulness” 379). According to him, cultural institutions like museums and libraries “do the most good, have the most value” when they “jump outside or aside the forms and models that have shaped them” (“Mindfulness” 382). Similarly, the poet crosses borders for the public good: “Being a poet is about articulating our humanness, wherever we find it” (Mooney). Even if Bourque transcends borders with his ekphrastic poems, his poetry remains Cajun through his use of Cajun motifs and the Cajun-Italo sonnet. In creating the broken sonnet form, Bourque merges the Old World poetic tradition of the Italian sonnet with the history of the Cajuns and maintains a tradition through which Cajun culture continues to shine. The recourse to non-Cajun artifacts is a means of rejuvenation and reveals a vital exchange mechanism between local poets and artists as well as international writers. In piecing memories together, Bourque’s poetry represents intermedial art and interartistic dialogue. His message is that everything can be healed; one simply needs to

 This statement by Bourque actually converges with a statement by Glissant about literature in general, namely that our surroundings consist of hidden connections which are made apparent by literature (Glissant and Isidori; see also chapter 10.4).

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take a look around. Bourque’s poems have a contemporary quality although many are based on artwork dating back several centuries. The object created in the past is brought into the present. Art is a communal, collective, accessible, universal medium, open to all and shared by all. This balancing act between present and past, between Cajun culture and other cultures from around the world is what defines Bourque’s poetry. In recapturing the past, painting the hybrid constitution of Louisiana, and continuously adding other elements, Megan’s Guitar becomes a means to mend Bourque’s feeling of brokenness. His poetry becomes a collage in which the original still exists but is barely visible: “The road the poet travels is a circuitous one. A writer’s influences come from everywhere and the influences sometimes get so folded into the work that they are hardly knowable” (Bourque, “Louisiana”). The sources may be imperceptible, yet the theme of exile and the concurrent recourse to collective memory allow the writer to zero in on the various influences. Michael Sartisky from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities fittingly called Megan’s Guitar an “antidote to the fragmentation of modernity” (Bourque, Megan’s Guitar 93). Megan’s Guitar is a gumbo of memories where multiple fragments of the past and the present commingle. According to George Drew, it is the capacity of cultivating the link between the past and the present that defines good poetry: “One mark of a master poet is that he knows thoroughly and pays homage to poetic traditions while declining to bend his knees before them. When the poet adopts a basic traditional form but feels free to loosen it, to fit it to his needs, his aesthetics, one knows one is in the company of a master” (66). Reflecting on Cajun culture with its strong social ties, the Louisiana landscape, and cultural traditions, Bourque honors his culture and contributes to forming the Cajun collective memory. Additionally, his poems are collective in that they unite cultural elements of Cajun culture with various exotic influences. Bourque excels in achieving an alliance between the most diverse genres and aspects. The yoking together of visual art and poetry establishes a call and response between author, artist, and, ultimately, reader. Bourque’s poetry becomes a repository of hybrid memories which, rearranged, catalyze ever more images.

10 Kirby Jambon’s China Baroque Poetry The French verb “jongler,” “to juggle” in English, commonly describes the ability to manipulate concrete objects like balls, rings, or clubs artistically. In a figurative sense, “jongler” also means to have a knack for words or to deal with many tasks at once. Coming from the Latin word “ioculare,” to joke or to jest, and the old French word “jangler,” “jongler” entails attributes of the playful and the entertaining (“jongler”). The word has yet another meaning. In Acadian and Cajun French, it also refers to a mental capacity. Used as a transitive verb, it means “to think about, to worry about”; the intransitive verb signifies “to think, to meditate, to reflect, to ponder, to worry”; and its corresponding noun, “jonglement,” stands for “reverie, brooding, fretting” in Standard French (“jonglement”). The meaning thus strongly connotes the act of meditating. The “jonglements” in Petites communions: Poèmes, chansons et jonglements, the title of Kirby Jambon’s poetry collection published in 2013, are just that: meditations. The title also provides a synonym, “communion,” whose double meaning is disclosed in two epigraphs preceding the corpus of poems. The first epigraph is a dedication to Jambon’s wife Jen and “notre plus intime des communions” (Jambon, Petites communions 7), referring to the mental or spiritual exchange between two people. The “jonglements” in the subtitle then concur with “petites communions” in the main title, since both refer to reflection or cogitation. The second meaning of “communion” is given in the second epigraph, which focuses on the religious sense of the word and defines the “petite communion ou communion privée” as a “cérémonie où on admettait à l’eucharistie les jeunes enfants, dès ‘l’âge de raison’” (Jambon, Petites communions 9). Human interchanges, creative artistic connections, and a religious or spiritual belief are thus the interlocking themes of the collection. More than any other Cajun poet, Jambon showcases the multidirectional workings of memory. At the same time, Jambon’s linguistic dexterity, wit, and creativity transpiring through his poems remove any doubts about his talent as a juggler. The malliteration in the preface of Petites communions is a good example, for it not only imitates the transcendent, vibrating meditation sound of Indian religions —“Om”—or the humming of a song, it also visually represents the juggling of the consonant “m”: “je m’exprime en mélange de message des maîtresses que je mâche et je masse et je mêle pour mener les méninges de la matrice jusqu’à la mort” (15; my emphasis). Moreover, Jambon juggles with languages, alternating between Cajun French, Standard French, and English, sometimes even within the same line of the poem. Indeed, there is no doubt that language is one of Jambon’s primordial concerns. His poems demonstrate a linguistic artistry and a https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-011

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linguistic act of remembering as they feature clever mix-ups of phonemes, exotic plays with words and phrases resulting in brilliant puns, and unexpected rhyme patterns, all of which create ingenious images and compelling meanings, similar to Richard Guidry’s Cajun monologues C’est p’us pareil of 1982. Understandably, Jambon’s linguistic gymnastics have prompted others to call him Guidry’s worthy heir (Louder, “Kirby”).¹ It is no surprise that the Prix Henri de Régnier, which Jambon received in honor of Petites communions from the Académie française in 2014, is considered a triumph especially among the francophone community, both in Louisiana and internationally. Never before has a Louisiana native won this prestigious distinction, and Jambon himself sees this feat “as a validation, a validation of French Louisiana and French Louisiana literature” (Merryweather). It is no coincidence that Jambon, the junior poet in the circle of francophone Cajun writers selected for this project, celebrates French. Born in Thibodeaux, Louisiana, in 1962, he grew up in a family where the Bayou Lafourche dialect was spoken and where the pride of the Cajun heritage prevailed. Driven by the aim to transmit French to younger generations,² he firmly advocates the preservation of Louisiana French through his teaching, activism, and performances as a poet and storyteller. His first poetry collection, L’École gombo, appeared in 2006 and earned him the Prix Mondes francophones (Leupin, “Remise”). His poems all show a deep rootedness in Cajun culture, and L’École gombo, especially, contains a considerable amount of personal memories relating to Cajun Country landscapes—above all to his home Bayou Lafourche—, his family, cultural traditions, and his teaching experiences. In contrast, Petites communions, which appeared seven years later, reveals a more extended understanding of Cajun culture. In this collection, Cajun culture serves Jambon as a foundation to expound on general subject matters, most of which deal with deviant attitudes and socio-ethical challenges in American society. As a matter of course, the poems also have an educational element: They are lessons about Cajun culture and universal moral values acquired through the teacher’s life experiences, which include travels to Acadia, Quebec, Nova Scotia, France, and Guadeloupe (Merryweather). Jambon’s achievement to render the language variability typical of Cajun French in a written form is not his only contribution to the preservation of Louisiana French and Cajun culture. On a thematic level, the Cajun poet juggles between motifs from Cajun, French, and American culture, providing an authentic representation of contemporary bilingual  Richard Guidry’s death in 2008 caused a considerable stir in the world of francophone activists and intellectuals (Louder, “La Louisiane”).  He has been a French Immersion teacher at Prairie Elementary school in Lafayette for over 30 years (Jambon, “Qui ça?”).

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Cajun life, of a thriving francophone culture amid mainstream American culture. In his latest poetry collection, Chercher la chasse-femme, published in 2017, Jambon hones his linguistic and literary play, confirming the Franco-American reality in Cajun Country. This chapter analyzes how Jambon’s poetry interrogates Cajun identity, focusing on community, cultural exchange, and linguistic pluralism to present a profoundly hybrid collective memory. Indeed, Jambon’s poetry is full of literary and cultural cross-references, puns, and double entendre. It transcends linguistic and cultural boundaries, reuniting the francophone and English speakers of Louisiana into the group Jambon calls “franglophone” (Petites communions 15). Although the present plays a major role in his poetry, with Jambon’s personal past and contemporary American history deeply determining his poems, Jambon does not completely discard the distant past. References to Louisiana’s hurricane history, or allusions to the Acadian tragedy serve to make sense of the present. Using Cajun culture’s specifities as a basis, Jambon remodels that culture through adding and adapting foreign components. Seemingly disparate elements are yoked together, producing new and variegated pieces. Against this background, Jambon’s poetry, which reveals his philosophy, can be described as “China Baroque poetry.” This term is inspired by the prose poem “China Baroque, ma femme et moi” in Petites communions, in which the narrator describes his wife’s fascination with jewelry made of broken pieces of China porcelain. He transposes this art onto his own poetic technique and turns it into an original poetic aesthetics, making his identity with Jambon self-evident since both share their love of the family, crafting, and poetry: “Ça me fascine cette idée de prendre des morceaux des objets de beauté, de la famille, de la mémoire, des sentiments et de les recycler en décorations corporelles comme montrer au monde ce qu’on aime et qui ce qu’on est. Et moi, j’aime écrire la poésie” (Jambon, Petites communions 35). Both jewelry and poetry carry something of the past. Through the natural process of reuse and the rearrangement of existing material and ideas, new art is created. This strategy of rejuvenation is thoroughly intertextual and exemplifies the creative processes of memory and Cajun culture. It is a process of recovering traditional elements and infusing them with new life. The reassembling of images from the past and present, of different geographical places in the world, of personal events and events affecting American society in general, can be compared to what sociologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called bricolage in his La Pensée sauvage (26 – 33). Jambon acts according to Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur, who is able to execute a number of diverse tasks using the material at hand at a particular moment:

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[S]on univers instrumental est clos, et la règle de son jeu est de toujours s’arranger avec les ‘moyens du bord,’ c’est-à-dire un ensemble à chaque instant fini d’outils et de matériaux, hétéroclites au surplus, parce que la composition de l’ensemble n’est pas en rapport avec le projet du moment, ni d’ailleurs avec aucun projet particulier, mais est le résultat contingent de toutes les occasions qui se sont présentées de renouveler ou d’enrichir le stock, ou de l’entretenir avec les résidus de constructions et de destructions antérieures. (Lévi-Strauss, Pensée 31)

What links the work of the bricoleur to a mnemonic process is that the bricoleur draws on the remains of the past. In his study on the culture of Afro-American peoples in South America, French sociologist Roger Bastide offered a new sociological theory, combining Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage with Halbwachs’s concept of collective memory. This joint study of “l’imagination reproductrice,” “the reproductive imagination,” and “l’imagination créatrice,” “the creative imagination,” allows us to grasp the dialectic play between the processes of collective memory and of bricolage: Memory and imagination are interdependent (Bastide, “Mémoire” 78). Jambon’s poetic constellations mirror the dialogic relation between collective memory and bricolage as well as between francophone Cajun culture and both mainstream American culture and the francophone world. His poetic strategy is a promise for the future, for he does not oppose Cajun biculturality but acknowledges it as elemental to Cajun culture. Ultimately, he inscribes the hybrid memory of Cajun culture into the global world.

10.1 Jambon’s Gombo School Jambon’s poetic inspiration emanates from his memories and is thus firmly rooted in Cajun culture. His early poems, especially, express his personal experiences and draw on a familiar Cajun consciousness defined by his immediate surroundings: the bayous, the prairies, and the swamps; crawfish, opossums, and chaouis; Cajun music, Cajun cuisine, Mardi Gras, and Catholicism. “Rôder,” for instance, Jambon’s first poem written in 1997, thematizes his growing-up around Bayou Lafourche (Merryweather). He pursues this traveling theme in Petites communions as we see in the poem “me promener dans mon monde”: “avec mes bagages de paroles et musique, prières et leçons / j’sus parti chercher la puissance, la douceur du moment / en rôdaillant” (29). His understanding of “rôder” also includes mental traveling: “[E]n me perdant quelque place en dedans / mes yeux à ouvrir… / mais les regrets du passé, les craintes de l’avenir / et une visite de mon angoisse, ça va pas finir / mes fruits à pourrir, mes vacances à aigrir / …ah, back à la maison” (Jambon, Petites communions 29; ellipsis in

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original). Despite the sweetness and power of traveling, past, present, and future fears still haunt the speaker so that he is most content when he is back home, in both his concrete home in Cajun Country and his spiritual home. What concerns Jambon most is the here-and-now. In L’École gombo, most of Jambon’s poems are based on his teaching experience. The collection is divided into five parts whose titles make a concrete link to school: “L’école d’été (incluant excursions)”—summer school; “La rentrée encore”—the start of the school year; “Fêtes et défaites”—a play on the homophones of “feasts” and “defeats” in French; “Tests et recettes,”—tests and receipts; “Va quand ce…” (ellipsis in original)—a linguistic play on “vacances.” Beginning with the poem “Allons z’enfants,” which is dedicated “à tous mes élèves qui m’élèvent toujours” (Jambon, L’École 15), the volume includes other poems evoking quotidian rituals, especially school rituals which obviously largely contribute to Jambon’s memory—a social frame of memory he shares with so many other people. Family memories, likewise, represent the school of life and reveal the strong connection between Jambon and his family.³ Other poems in his collections include covert references to his extended family and the Cajun community. Family poems and school poems reflect quotidian rites and traditions as they become memory through their written form. Although Jambon’s poetry is strongly related to the Louisiana landscape and features common topographical elements, the image of Cajun culture comes primarily from Jambon’s language choice. In mixing the Bayou Lafourche dialect, Standard French, and English, he produces a new voice, which mostly capitalizes on the uncodified Cajun French and bilingualism. The language mix and the references to Cajun culture establish a hybrid space. It is the bilingualism as well as the dedications and references to the activist community that characterize Jambon’s poetry best. The notion of heterogeneity is also reflected in his use of various poetic genres, including songs with regular forms and haikus juxtaposed to poems in free verse or prose poems. Jambon’s engagement with Cajun culture is concomitant with his interrogation of Cajun identity. “Qui’c’qu’on est?” in L’École gombo explicitly deals with the Cajun dilemma of assimilation. Furthermore, while the speaker in the poem “rituel quatre” acknowledges the diverse effects of cultural influences— “que les effets / de notre influence sont nombreux, / positifs ou négatifs” (L’École 41)—the speaker of “French Kiss,” composed for a conference on bilingual education in Lafayette in 2000, nonetheless asserts that, despite the diffi-

 Jambon dedicates a poem each to his mother (“à Mom”), his father (“à Pop”), his wife Jen, his stepdaughter Morgan, and his niece Kaitlyn.

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culties, the Cajuns still have a distinct identity: “Ouais, ça bouille, mais déborde pas. / Ouais, on bouille, mais on brûle pas. / Pas comme le melting pot, / ‘where the scum rises to the top, / and those on the bottom get burnt’” (L’École 46). The key to the Cajuns’ survival is to accept diversity: “Embrasse la diversité, / Vive la différence” (Jambon, L’École 46). This difference, however, results in the difficulty of defining Cajun culture, as the poem “entre Friday the 13th et la Saint-Valentin” illustrates: It addresses not only the question of identity, but also the language problem: “Explique-moi la / culture cadienne, / la différence / entre cadjin / et acadien, / aussi créole. / Comment ça s’fait, / le Mardi Gras, / tous ses courirs / et ses colliers? / C’est quoi un krewe? / Pourquoi la honte / parler français? / Pourquoi on dit / ‘comment ça s’plume’ / et ‘qui’ pour ‘quoi,’ / ‘alors que pas’ / et ‘cher crime vas’?” (L’École 91). The collection succeeding L’École gombo, Petites communions, continues to explore Cajun identity. The poems show the importance of music, storytelling, and place, and they identify the Cajuns as a poetic people. The concluding sentence of the preface by Jambon, set off by spaced lines and italics, not only sets the Cajun scene for the collection through such typical Cajun expressions as “on rentre en dedans” and “l’enfant après jouer.”⁴ It also extends the theme of the collection as it analyzes the boundaries of the creative mind: “Allons, on rentre en dedans l’idée imaginée de l’enfant après jouer le rôle des prophétiques, en drôle de phonétiques…” (15; ellipsis in original). The playfulness of the poems results from the numerous alliterations, rhymes, and double sense of words and phrases. Lastly, as the section “Passer le sabbat au Gumbo Music School,” which implicitly refers to his first book, exemplifies, Jambon continuously returns to his own poetry as well as to that of his colleagues, establishing a closed circle of Cajun poets.

10.1.1 Jambon’s Franglophone Geographies Jambon’s poetry is a continuous interrogation of the role of language. “[L]a question de la langue qu’on parle est toujours / au bout de la langue,” writes Jambon in L’École gombo (71). The fact that he was brought up bilingually is noteworthy considering that his mother was punished and beaten in school for speaking French. At one point in his youth, he stopped speaking French, only to take it up again when he was older (Merryweather). Jambon’s bilingualism and reflec-

 The Cajun expression “être après” corresponds to “être en train,” i. e., “to be in the act of (doing s.t.)” (“après”).

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tion on living in two languages opposes him to monolingual Cajun writers like Tim Gautreaux, Darrell Bourque, or Ron Thibodeaux, who never spoke French at home. The nostalgic childhood memories the speaker expresses in “Rôder” in L’École gombo are evidence of a time when French was part of the quotidian communication, and they could well reflect Jambon’s own memories: “La mémoire est peut-être trop courte. / Mais la douceur de c’temps-là / est goutée quand on parle de c’temps-là / dans la langue que j’parlais pas dans c’temps-là. / Aujourd’hui, Mom et Pop et moi, / on s’parle dans cette langue. … C’est doux de parler des vieux temps, / de parler cette belle langue, / de rôder” (134– 135). While “rôder” symbolizes mental traveling, the repetition of the signal phrase “c’temps-là” sets a wistful tone and the words “douceur/doux” create a nostalgic mood. Furthermore, the contractions of the preposition “de,” the reflexive pronoun “te,” or the definite pronoun “ce” as in “d’ça,” “t’es,” and “c’temps” clearly embed the poem into the oral genre. Significantly, “Allons z’enfants,” the first poem in L’École gombo, is an incentive to speak French.⁵ Declaring that “Je peux parler Français à l’école / Je veux parler Français à l’école / J’aime parler Français à l’école,” the speaker recreates a lesson of French. He then conjugates the phrases “aller parler Français” and “vouloir faire qc” (Jambon, L’École 15 – 17). There follows a list of daily activities such as cooking, fishing, and harvesting, which all present moments when French is spoken and transmitted in Cajun culture. The speaker’s threefold declaration about speaking French at school recalls Arceneaux’s militant “I will not speak French on the school grounds” in “Schizophrénie linguistique,” yet stands as a stark contrast to it since French is not only spoken on and off the school grounds, but at workplaces, in restaurants, and on the radio. Jambon writes in French to counter the painful memory of the ban on French and the common assumption of the disappearance of French. It is, therefore, no surprise that the question of the French language remains central even in Petites communions. The lines “Parlé le français comme c’est la seule langue qui existait / … retourner aux racines de culture et de foi” (Jambon, Petites communions 27– 28) from the personal poem “Couler le sang,” which deals with the speaker’s worries about his father’s heart condition, translate the enduring importance of the French language. French, like blood, runs through his father’s veins, and, like his father’s health, it is in a precarious state. The jonglements about his father and French evoke memories about his grandfather and great-grandfather, who both spoke French only. These memories

 It is also reminiscent of the beginning of the Marseillaise, the French national anthem: “Allons enfants de la patrie.”

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provide essential links to the past and urge the speaker to continue to speak French. Strikingly, Jambon’s hallmark is “drôle de phonétiques” (Jambon, Petites communions 15). According to his cousin, David Cheramie, Jambon “writes in a French that had left France many years ago” (Cheramie, “Kirby”). Similarly, in the induction speech, l’Académie française compared Jambon’s choice of language to that of the French poets François Villon and Clément Marot, who still wrote in an uncodified French (“Discours”). Prior to the establishment of the Académie française by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, French was not codified, hence the variety of spellings. Likewise, the regional uncodified varieties of Cajun French offer, in contrast to Standard French, a far wider range of linguistic possibilities. Occasionally, the meaning of words and phrases remains unintelligible. Jambon, who has not lost the capacity to speak the Bayou Lafourche dialect, which he learned from his parents, relatives, and the surrounding Cajun French community, includes a “Petit glossaire cadien lafourchais” in L’École gombo, which becomes simply “Glossaire” in Petites communions. The glossaries include such typical and recurrent expressions as “asteur/e” (“now”), “icitte” (“here”) “aussitte” (“also”), “Nonc” (“uncle”), “piastres” (“dime”), “char” (“car”), “nous autres/nous aut” (“we”), “àyoù/èyoù” (“where”), and “quitte-lé” for “laisse-le” (“let him be”). There are also poems with less frequently used vocabulary such as “bol à main”—a wash basin—in the “chambre à bain”—the bathroom—in the poem “deux des derniers dérangements” (Jambon, Petites communions 69). At first, these poems seem cryptic to the uninitiated reader, who might picture the “bol à main” as a bowl with handles. Once the linguistic background is explored, though, they become intelligible. Such is the case with “cabri dans l’maïs” in Petites communions. According to the Dictionary of Louisiana French, the expression “il y a un cabri dans l’maïs” is used “when s.o.’s underpants have crawled up and become stuck between the buttocks” (“cabri1”). The poem “cabri dans l’maïs” therefore is a distinctly Cajun poem as it uses a Cajun expression to address the dilemma of language choice. In fact, it is an allegory of the difficulty of the writing process. Indeed, the creative writing process needs patience and is frequently hampered by writer’s block: ça veut pas sortir, / j’attends la voix, / mais son message est pris là d’dans / j’connais pas / àyoù sont les clés d’sa prison / mon dieu c’est agaçant, / gênant, / embêtant, / collant, / dérangeant, / piquant, / tracassant, / troublant, / attinant, / blessant, / dégoutant, / grattant, / démangeant, / gâtant, / étouffant, / brulant, / et j’veux qu’ça sorte / carrément, et passe mon temps / guettant, / espérant, souhaitant… (Jambon, Petites communions 37; ellipsis in original)

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Arguably, writing about the creative block could be the solution to the problem. Moreover, some poems in L’École gombo display the particularities of Cajun pronunciation. For instance, they contain such typical oral features of Cajun French as the aspirate “h” instead of “j” in “deheuner,” “déhène,” “h’aimerais,” and “hambon;” or the ellipsis of “v” as in “‘oir” (“voir”), “‘oisin” (“voisin”), and “suire” (“suivre”). Words beginning with an English “th” are spelled as they are pronounced: with a “d” or “t” as in “dis” or “tink.” Words like “djeule” for “gueule,” “frèmer” for “fermer,” and “froumi” for “fourmi” further pinpoint freedom of spelling as a major concern for Jambon. Of course, rules also apply to his poetry, for they ensure the flow of communication: “Et pour la grammaire, / l’orthographe, la ponctuation / et l’accord, / d’accord, / il ne faut pas qu’on empêche / la communication” (Jambon, L’École 120 – 121). It is probably on the grounds of a better comprehension that Petites communions features fewer Cajun spellings. Another kind of variability pervades Jambon’s collections: His poetic language capitalizes on the benefits of bilingualism and draws on language transfer. Besides using predominantly French, i. e., Standard French and Louisiana French, as in the poem “Mon gain pou couri,” written in Creole French and dedicated to the “beau monde créole” (Jambon, Petites communions 123 – 124), Jambon flavors his poems with English. “French Kiss,” “La co-écoute,” and “Chiac attack, Jack (un peuple en deux actes)” in L’École gombo exemplify this medley of both English and French. They show how Jambon has adopted a middle way, distinctive of Cajun culture. Besides Anglo-American words such as “soutte” for “suit,” “guime/guème” for “game,” which have entered the vocabulary of Cajun French, his poems include a multitude of bilingual phrases. Significantly, Jambon’s poetry is defined by code-switching, the borrowing of words or phrases to describe language mixing patterns (see Poplack). With respect to Acadian identity construction in Acadian poetry, Gammel and Boudreau argue that “language mixing … can become a powerful ‘reverse discourse,’ a tool of resistance” (52). Even though they mention the term “linguistic schizophrenia” in their study, they do not refer to Arceneaux’s poem “Schizophrénie linguistique” in particular. Their argument is, however, equally applicable to Cajun poetry. In their view, linguistic schizophrenia exemplifies what Michel Foucault calls “discours ‘en retour’” (Volonté 134): It “fosters linguistic and cognitive versatility to meet contextual demands, maintain fluency among bilinguals” (Gammel and Boudreau 53). In deliberately choosing scholarly expressions—a medical term for a mental disorder and an adjective relating to the human language—and combining them to express the dilemma of Cajun bilingualism, the poets also demonstrate their ability of self-reflection. Obviously, the bilingual approach and

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code-switching seem to be appropriate ways to solve their dilemma of language choice, their linguistic schizophrenia. Jambon’s poem “Chiac attack, Jack (un peuple en deux actes)” is an extensive illustration of code-switching: I remember ma memère / she would curse dans les deux langages / ‘got dog moudit merde du diable de son-a-ba-bitch de moudit’ / … / bèbe, I tink we’re too late, on peut pas le guetter à soir /—c’est ok, worry pas, on peut le watcher demain / … / une langue menacée est pleine de références linguistiques / beaucoup plus qu’une langue majoritaire / on s’inquiète de son influence sur la nôtre, sur nous autres / ce n’est pas pareil l’autre manière / we make no faux-pas when we experience déjà-vu / at a secret rendezvous. (L’École 71– 72)⁶

As the speaker of his poems emphasizes, a minority language draws more on linguistic borrowings and references than a lingua franca. In Petites communions, Jambon continues this bilingual play. In the preface, he writes that he is “[à] la fois partie des mondes francophones, anglophones, et franglophones” (15). While Anglicisms and Americanisms are part of Jambon’s linguistic repertoire, the most obvious “franglophone” elements are visible in such bilingual titles as “Pensée out of the box grâce au courriel de la belle-famille” (Petites communions 85), “Life rings and preservers du lendemain matin” (Petites communions 93), or “Sampling les misérables” (Petites communions 107). This code-switching extends Jambon’s possibilities of playing with the language. Frequently, the playfulness includes the visual, as in the spelling of words, and the auditory, as in homophones. “H’aimerais me présenter” in L’École gombo is one example of how bilingualism contributes to unchain a creative act and display verbal acrobatics. The poem is a linguistic exploration of the opposition of the aspirate “h” in Cajun French and “j” in Standard French, culminating in a wordplay. The name “Jambon,” which means “ham” in English, is pronounced “Hambon” in Cajun French. The speaker then establishes the link to “ham” and makes the image come full circle. The play on words does not end here, for another meaning of “ham” exists, namely in the expression of “ham actor”: “Hambon, / mais pas hambon comme le hambon que h’ai déhà manhé / auhord’hui pour mon déhèner, / et pas hambon comme ein ham d’ssus l’stage dans ein play” (Jambon, L’École 153). After rejecting the description of “ham actor,” the speaker concedes that he might be like the “ham on stage” after all: “Tu sais, peut-être j’sus comme le ham d’ssus l’stage après tout” (Jambon, L’École 154). In the poem, many images collide and mix. Jambon

 Jambon’s use of Chiac, a Canadian-French dialect heavily influenced by the English language, evokes several Acadian poets and their poetry in Chiac.

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delves into the memory of both the English and French languages to create a hybrid image of his identity. In Petites communions, Jambon intensifies this creative memory play between languages. The play on the homophones of “voix” and “voie,” i. e., “voice” and “way, route, pathway,” in “La voix intérieure,” the title of the first part, and “Voie extérieure,” the title of the third part, establishes a conceptual link between the spiritual and the secular, a juxtaposition which necessarily recalls Bourque’s “inscape.” Another memorable connection between language and theme appears in “Silly bandz,” a poem reflecting on the ridiculous ban of rubber bands because the teacher considers them an obsession, and whose title echoes the final exclamation “silly bans” (99), implying the silliness of bans in Cajun history such as the ban on French in 1921. Other wordplay linking religious with worldly matters include the word “pécheur,” which means sinner and sounds like “pêcheur,” “fisher” in French. The poem “Comme un pauvre pécheur” in L’École gombo (79 – 80), for instance, plays on the Cajun tradition of fishing and the religious notion of the sinner. Another example is the play on words with “Seigneur,” “Lord” in English, in Petites communions. Jambon writes “seigneur” in lower-case letters to allow for more variability. The final phrase “Parole d’un soigneur” in the second reading of “La Messe en solitude” (Jambon, Petites communions 152– 153) transforms the stock phrase of “Parole du Seigneur” by replacing the first “e” with an “o”: The “Lord” becomes the “Healer.” Another recurring synonym for “seigneur” is “senneur” as in “Évangile du Senneur” (Jambon, Petites communions 155), the concluding phrase in the tenth poem of the “Messe en solitude,” and in “xxiii. Fraction: Agnus Dei,” which starts with the phrase “Le prétendu, en imitation du geste du Senneur. …” (Jambon, Petites communions 174). Significantly, “senneur” is the word for a fishing vessel, the so-called “seiner” in English. Thus, the two homophonous references establish another analogy between religion and fishing, two traditional features of Cajun culture. Oral cultures in particular display an endless repertoire of wordplay which serves to give weight to the intended meaning: “In an oral culture, the sounds are literally the basic units of meaning, with almost unlimited possibilities for punning. The awareness of spelling tends to restrict the free play of the comic imagination” (Charney 19). This characteristic element of oral cultures, in turn, allows for the overlapping of homonymy and homophony. It is the multilingual play between the Louisiana French, Standard French, and English that make Jambon’s poetry so original. Most importantly, the repetitive variations serve a mnemonic function and, hence, are a crucial tool for preserving the memory of both French and the cultural traditions in Louisiana.

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10.1.2 The Cajun Poets’ Society Music is one of Jambon’s master muses. He composes song lyrics and is involved with the Cajun music scene.⁷ In the poem “ix. Acclamation: Chantons une chanson d’espoir” in Petites communions, Jambon draws on the motto attributed to Plato: “La musique donne une âme à nos cœurs, des ailes à notre pensée et un essor à l’imagination” (180). The poem “Chansons d’espoir” in the section “La voie extérieure” argues for the virtues of a music that teaches the listener about a culture’s history, values, and attitudes. As his poetry shows, Jambon borrows and rearranges lines by famous Cajun musicians. For instance, the expression “par la porte d’en arrière,” a stock phrase often used to express a surreptitious action, originally comes from the song “La Porte d’en arrière” (“The Back Door”) performed and recorded by the famous Cajun singer-songwriter D. L. Menard in 1962. Jambon reuses the phrase in his poem “Qui l’a volé?” in L’École gombo, in which the speaker shares his sorrow about having lost a treasured book, probably stolen “through the back door” (107). In the poem “Mayday,” a poem which addresses fishing and idleness, the speaker acknowledges that “j’ai fait une grosse erreur,” a phrase taken from Iry Lejeune’s song “J’ai fait une grosse erreur” (Petites communions 117). The poem “Parti en démêlant,” dedicated to “Pop,” is another example of how Cajun music, this time Cajun songwriter Vin Bruce’s version of “Le vieux hobo,” influences Jambon’s poetry. The connection between Bruce’s song and Jambon’s poem is the image of a canal. While the homeless and abandoned lover in the song is going to sleep on a boat in a canal, the speaker of the poem finds himself in Canal Yankee, listening to Vin Bruce singing “Le monde me poursuit tout partout, eusses me garochent / un coup d’caillou…” (Jambon, L’École 145; ellipsis in original). Likewise, the poem “Comme un pauvre pécheur” includes a few italicized song lines. The line “I’m so lonesome I could cry” (Jambon, L’École 80), from the eponymous song recorded by country music singersongwriter Hank Williams in 1949, relates to the Cajun theme of loss. The poem culminates with the famous lines of the traditional Cajun song “Les flammes d’enfer,” “Flames of Hell”⁸: “Chère Mama, priez pour moi. / Sauvez mon âme des flammes / d’enfer” (Jambon, L’École 80). This last line makes the poem come full circle: The poor sinner cries out for help to be saved from  He received the 2014 Festival International de Louisiane’s David Lofton Volunteer of the Year Award for his 18 years of service to the Lafayette music and arts festival (Ourso).  “Les Flammes d’enfer” is a much-covered version of Douglas Bellard’s “Mon canon le case que je suis cordané” (Savoy 266).

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hell. Although Jambon mostly draws from the Cajun music repertoire, other musicians and music genres strengthen the main argument of the sinner’s troubles as the first quote shows, “All my trials lord, soon be over” (Jambon, L’École 79), taken from the folk song “All My Trials” by the American folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary, which was popular in the 1960s. Jambon contributes to making Cajun music become collective memory, not just Cajun collective memory, but also American collective memory, seeing that it is just as meaningful as other famous billboard hits. The general word “chansons” in the subtitle of Petites communions positions music as one of the main themes of Petites communions. The fourth section, entitled “Passer le Sabbat au Gumbo Music School,” leaves no doubt about Jambon’s own musical talents. It includes nine Cajun and Creole songs, each in a different rhythm, ranging from two step and valse to swamp pop, prog rock, metal, and hip hop.⁹ The first song of the section, “La patate j’ai pas pu lacher,” dedicated to “la musique cadienne et notre amitié,” refers to Jimmy C. Newman’s hit song “Lâche pas la patate,” thus simultaneously honoring the famous Cajun musician and perpetuating a famous Cajun motto. The poem “la crabe molle” also draws on three inspirational Cajun sources. According to the addendum below the poem, these include Horace Trahan, Nathan Abshire, and Callinectes Sapidus, the Latin expression for “crawfish.” In the poem, the line “les bons temps qui te tuent” (25) refers to Nathan Abshire’s famous exclamation “The good times are killing me,” and recalls such poets as Jean Arceneaux who also drew on Abshire’s slogan. Horace Trahan is the accordionist and vocalist of the band Horace Trahan and the Ossun Express. Jambon repeats a part of the refrain from Trahan’s song “Ça va pas comme tu veux,” namely “la vie tu connais ça va pas comme tu veux” (Jambon, Petites communions 25 – 26). In the poem “dépêcher pour espérer,” the italicized verses “j’ai passé devant ta porte / j’ai crié, ‘bye bye, la belle’ / y a personne qui m’a répondu… / … / Oh yiyaille mon cœur fait mal” (Jambon, Petites communions 97; ellipsis in original) are quotes from the famous song “J’ai passé devant ta porte.” Instead of the traditional heart-break song, however, Jambon uses the quotes to lament the pressure exerted by present-day society. Clearly, the quotes show the importance of traditional Cajun music and, at the same time, honor the Cajun music repertoire. Cajun music can even become therapeutic as the fifth of the “Méditations mat Rap seems to be one of Jambon’s favorite genres. In “Allons z’enfants” in L’École gombo, the character Mouma Z’oie presents a rap conjugating “parler francais” (15). At the award ceremony in Paris, Jambon performed the poem “C’est comme ça (Une autre chose que j’sus trop vieux pour avoir composée)” and informed the audience that it actually is a rap (Jambon, Petites communions 103 – 104; “Remise”).

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inales” reveals: “la lecture d’un rapportage d’une tragédie humaine ou d’un passage défiant des saintes écritures s’adoucit avec une valse du regret ou un stomp de bosco” (Jambon, Petites communions 57), the “Stomp de Bosco” being one of the most widely played Cajun songs. Another creative potential reveals Jambon’s poetry as hybrid memory. In an interview with Judith Merryweather for the NPR program All Things Considered, Jambon listed Jean Arceneaux, Zachary Richard, David Cheramie, and Darrell Bourque as his literary muses and thus confirmed that he heavily draws on fellow Cajun poets. L’École gombo manifests the memory of a bicultural community engaged in defending French and preserving Cajun culture: Amanda Lafleur,¹⁰ David Cheramie,¹¹ Elaine Clément,¹² Kristi Guillory,¹³ Jolène Adam,¹⁴ and Brenda Mounier,¹⁵ to each of whom Jambon dedicates a poem, are all engaged in promoting the French language in Louisiana, be it as a teacher or as a member of the CODOFIL. The poem “Fricassée d’poésie” perfectly shows his fascination with the Cajun literary community as it is dedicated to a group of Cajun writers and activists which include Jean Arceneaux, Earlene Broussard, David Cheramie, Deborah Clifton, Étienne Dugas, Richard Guidry, Charles Larroque, David Marcantel, André Melançon, Katy Miller, Brenda Mounier, Zachary Richard, and “à toute la suite des loups de mon pays” (Jambon, L’École 113). This last reference discloses a like-mindedness with Jean Arceneaux, who introduced the wolf metaphor in his “Suite du loup.” Besides resembling a recipe for a fricassee including such traditional Cajun ingredients as the roux, the motif of the Jolie Blond, the fais-do-do, the motif of the “catholique à gros grain,” i. e., a Catholic who does not strictly follow church rules, the poem takes up the wolf metaphor to describe a certain “hunger” for acknowledging the Cajun identity. Jambon’s affinity for the wolf theme also derives from poetry collections like Clifton’s feminist A cette heure la louve and David Cheramie’s Lait à mère. Obviously, Cheramie and Jambon are not only bound by family ties (they are cousins), they also share a fascination for linguistic variability. Two of Jambon’s poems can be traced back directly to Cheramie, whose name appears in the dedication

 The poem “si j’m’ai pas trompé dans l’amarre de l’autre poteau” (Jambon, L’École 43).  The poem “La foi des saints” (Jambon, L’École 47).  The poem “La co-écoute” (Jambon, L’École 59).  The poem “Chercher l’inspiration au beau milieu d’une sécheresse d’hiver en prenant un autre café glacé…” (Jambon, L’École 85; ellipsis in original).  The poem “Pré de moi” (Jambon, L’École 141– 142). Jolène Adam was also extensively engaged in promoting Cajun culture in California (DeWitt vii, 34, 214).  He presented “tous les jours devraient être la fête des mères” at Mounier’s “salon de dimanche après-midi” (Jambon, Petites communions 91– 92).

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of the poem “La foi des saints” in L’École gombo. In addition, the poem contains clues about Cheramie’s influence: “Eh cousin, / lâche pas, nègre, / ni la patate ni la parole, / ni la page où tu écris ta peine et ta joie, / ni la plume remplie de lait des seins de foi” (Jambon, L’École 47). The title and the last line play on the homonyms “saints” and “seins,” “saints” and “breasts.” The reference to “lait des seins” recalls Cheramie’s signature image of the bitter milk in “Il y a des loups dans mon pays,” but it is then rearranged with the Cajun saying “lâche pas la patate,” the speaker urging his cousin to not lose hope, probably with regard to French. The annotations to “xv. Pénitentielle: Pardonnez-nous notre péché” in Petites communions (162) reveal that Jambon continues to draw on his cousin’s poetry, notably the line “Il y des loups dans mon pays. / Il se lèvent la nuit et font zire leur poésie” from Cheramie’s poem “Il y a des loups dans mon pays” (Lait à mère 20). Evidently, the metaphor of the wolf has established itself as a Cajun trope. In his blog “La chasse au loup,” which is also the title of one of his poems (Jambon, “À propos”),¹⁶ Jambon stated that [l]a figure du loup, chez les poètes franco-louisianais, évoque les images de l’errance et de la menace, de l’identité solitaire et communale. Le loup chante les blues de sa peur de devenir loup garou. La louve écrit une poésie que personne ne peut lire, une poésie qu’il faut hurler au-dessus les marmonnements et grognements de l’homme. Le petit loup s’échappe, chasse et toujours veut jouer. (“Chasse”)

Considering that the wolf metaphor can be traced back to Jean Arceneaux’s wolf series, it is no wonder that Jambon shows a particular admiration for Arceneaux, aka Barry Ancelet. “Lettre à un communiant” in Petites communions is an homage to the Cajun ambassador. This epistolary poem mentions a full address of the addressee (“Jean Arceneaux, rue des Rodeurs de nuit, Marais Bouleur, Louisiane”), where and when the letter was written (“Lafayette, les après-pâques 2007”), and it explicitly refers to the addressee: “Cher Jean” (Jambon, Petites communions 79). The invented address is heavy with meaning, considering that it mentions the name of a famous poet known for his nightly wolf poems and a play set in the Marais Bouleur area. The speaker corresponds to the author,

 Cousin de personne gives the following definition of its website: “Cousin de personne est une aventure associative franco-québécoise qui a vu son champ d’action s’élargir au fil du temps. Son nom exprime la nécessité de sortir de relations figées pour atteindre une réciprocité culturelle sans rapports de force et permettre une ouverture véritable à toutes les littératures d’expression française. Nombreux à vouloir emprunter ce chemin, nous entendons défricher les terrains littéraires trop confinés et défaire les clichés coriaces.”

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as the concluding words indicate: “Avec appréciation, KIRBY JAMBON” (Jambon, Petites communions 80). The prose poem assembles all the elements Arceneaux assembles in his poetry, and it presents him as the master poet preceding Jambon: “Ouais, je crois qu’on s’a rencontré, même si t’as hit the road, rôdaillant à la suite du loup, criant sur le bayou, longtemps avant mon premier roder d’bébé” (Jambon, Petites communions 79; my emphasis). Jambon presents Arceneaux, Barry Ancelet’s alter ego, although he has never seen him, and foregrounds Arceneaux’s knack for masquerade: … je crois que je t’ai vu en bas d’un masque de mardi gras, derrière un déguisement de porte-parole, au fond de la mare de culture, m.c. Marais-coureur qui se sentait peut-être intimidé par l’intimation de partager tes paroles intimes, tes jonglements que tu jongles ensembles avec tes responsabilités d’être représentant de tout ce que nous autres on représente, comme troubadour troublé par le devoir d’être génie autant que génuine, d’être artiste autant qu’archiviste, d’être fils unique autant que typique, d’être canaille, capable et camarade, meilleur padnah de tous les Cadiens, tout en étant mari, papa et être humain. (Jambon, Petites communions 79)

Evidently, Arceneaux has become collective memory. Beside the masquerade, the quotation lists other characteristics relating to Jean Arceneaux/Barry Ancelet. “M.c.,” which the speaker translates as being the acronym of “mare de culture,” “cultural pool” in English, could also relate to the immediately following “marais-coureur,” evoking Arceneaux’s nightly runs in the swamps (“rôder”). Inevitably, the word “marais-coureur,” which rhymes with “marais bouleur,” hints at Arceneaux’s origins as a resident of that particular area. Originally, though, “m.c.” stands for “Master of Ceremonies,” a term designating the host of a public event. As a matter of fact, Barry Ancelet is the m.c. of the Rendez-vous des Cadiens. The speaker’s initial aim to see if he knows Arceneaux finally results in the blurring of both Arceneaux and Ancelet: “Ouais, je crois bien qu’on s’a rencontré, peut-être qu’au bal pour les bons temps qui pleurent comme Nathan Abshire ou à la radio pour les bons temps sans heures à la Pointe Noire ou à la maison dans l’amour d’une ballade de guerre et d’un cochon de paix ou à l’école dans l’amour d’un joli blond et une jolie blonde que tu m’a prêtés” (Jambon, Petites communions 80). The reference to school and the blond girl or boy whom the speaker might have “lent” to Arceneaux clearly change the frame if we consider that Ancelet was a professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and most certainly taught some of Jambon’s pupils. Finally, Jambon uses the motifs of the “bons temps,” the “cochon de paix” (not “lait”), and the “joli(e) blond(e)” for his own

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purpose: The times can indeed be good, and, of course, Jambon has had a blond child or two as pupils. Petites communions reveals other Cajun sources of inspiration. As an elementary school educator, Jambon naturally favors simple and short forms of poetry. The fifth section of Jambon’s collection, “fin de semaine des haikus dessus un bayou,” features a series of nine haikus, which inevitably recall Zachary Richard’s early poetry when Richard used this poetic form in abundance. Jambon’s haiku series is evidence that Richard’s introduction of the haiku form into francophone Cajun literature has affected other Cajun poets. While Richard’s haikus are primarily portraits of the archetypal Cajun landscape, Jambon’s haikus, in addition to being deeply marked by the South Louisiana climate, are very much tied to the speaker’s personal memories. The nine haikus include personal musings about wet feet while walking the dogs, a moment’s rest while wife and daughter are at the mall, or simply the quietness of Sunday mornings. Three haikus describe the three days of a weekend, from Friday to Sunday, each being marked by a notable event. “haiku central contre sud” (Jambon, Petites communions 134) refers to a Friday night football game between the teams Central and South (Lafourche). Dancing and crawfish define the “haiku du french food festival” (Jambon, Petites communions 138), which is Saturday’s highlight. The event is usually held in autumn, and family relatives arrive—“et tante faient route” (Jambon, Petites communions 139). “haiku d’au revoir d’habitude” (Jambon, Petites communions 141) describes Sunday, a day of mass or of returning home. The notion of a hybrid Cajun literature culminates when Jambon communicates with anglophone Cajun writers. The second part of the collection, entitled “Méditations matinales (une neuvaine aux corps sacrés?),” exemplifies Jambon’s Catholic background. Written in the form of the novena, a Christian tradition consisting of nine prayers usually dedicated to a saint or the Holy Trinity, these morning meditations also include clues to another major Cajun poet. From the list of dedications, “au jardin de bourque et ses huit prières” (Jambon, Petites commuions 51) stands out as it is a reference to both Bourque’s wellknown garden and his poem “Eight Prayers in an August Garden” from The Blue Boat (38). While Bourque’s poem transposes the traditional Roman Breviary consisting of eight prayers (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, and Compline) to present a spiritual experience with nature, Jambon’s nine morning meditations present the speaker’s personal experiences with his surroundings and thus transfer the secular into the religious structure. For instance, the first prayer, which reads “ma douche-bénitier lave des taches originelles et certaines moins rares” (Jambon, Petites communions 53), transforms the shower into a holy water font, “ma douche-bénitier,” which arguably washes off original “stains” and other less rare stains.

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Clearly, Jambon looks to fellow Cajun authors for inspiration, without ever imitating them. He keeps the Cajun context and creates something new. In Petites communions, Jambon even goes a step further. In “Quèque chose que j’sus trop vieux pour avoir écrit (Peut-être un autre repassage de seconde lecture),” Jambon passes the torch of reclaiming the French heritage to the next generation. The group, to whom he dedicates the poem, includes the Cajun musician Rocky McKeon, a fluent speaker and defender of Louisiana French,¹⁷ Valérie Broussard,¹⁸ Ashlee Michot,¹⁹ Andrew Suire, and Mandy Migues.²⁰ These allusions to fellow Cajun poets and musicians revitalize Cajun poetry and consolidate it as a literary genre. Finally, one cannot overlook Jambon’s indebtedness to Acadian authors. The speaker’s creative inhibition reflected through the list of participles in “cabri dans l’maïs” mentioned above echoes not only the speaker’s struggle in the final section of Arceneaux’s “Je suis Cadien” but also the speaker’s fight in Raymond Guy LeBlanc’s “Je suis Acadien” (see chapter 4.2.3). Furthermore, in his letter to Jean Arceneaux, the speaker/Jambon mentions the Acadian vanguard writer Antonine Maillet, demonstrating the strong links between Cajun Country and Acadia: “l’essence d’amour jouait ta schizophrénie, un jambalaya chantait ta misère, pendant que ton alter ego traversait icitte et là-bas et le pont qu’est pu là pour nous défendre devant les gros chiens lettrés, en disant, ‘je suis cadien,’ c’est pas picocher dans l’nez et pis ça a bien fait rire Madame Maillet” (Jambon, Petites communions 79). His poem “Chiac attack, Jack (un peuple en deux actes)” is a good example of Jambon, the “bricoleur,” as being especially inspired by poetry in Chiac, another “franglophone” language. In the 1960s, young Acadians, mostly from Moncton, New Brunswick, started demanding the right to speak and write in Chiac, a mix of French and English, with a few Acadian words.²¹ In the poetry collection Éloge du chiac (1995), for instance, Acadian poet Gérald Leblanc lauded the linguistic freedom and creativity of Chiac: “en plein bricolage linguistique, vieux

 Rocky McKeon received the Prix de la Création for his poem “L’argent a peur” in 2008 (McKeon).  Valérie Broussard is the president of the organization FrancoJeunes, founded in 2008 (Capomaccio).  Ashley Michot is a photographer and the wife of Louis Michot, fiddler, formerly bassist of the band Les Frères Michot, and now frontman of the Lost Bayou Ramblers (Michot; Tortorello).  Mandy Migues is the president of FrancoJeunes, an organization uniting young professionals promoting French in businesses, and a teacher at Lafayette high school (Radio-Canada Info).  For the documentary Éloge du chiac (1969), young people from Moncton described how they walked the line between French and English.

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mots français entrecoupés d’expressions anglaises, verbes anglais à terminaisons françaises, ça brasse dans le lexique et en pleine modernité. …” (G. Leblanc 7). Similar to such other avant-garde Acadian poets as Dyane Léger from New Brunswick, Jambon decomposes and recomposes words for the sake of graphic play and innovative meanings. The burst of syntactico-stylistic structure creates a literary freshness and new exceptional images. In writing in Chiac, the Acadians assert the Acadian language in the literary field. As to Jambon, his use of Chiac strengthens the connection between Louisiana and Canada. Both Jambon and the Acadian poets share the intention to take up arms against the uniformity of language and to keep the memory of Acadia and Cajun French alive.

10.2 History as Chain of Memory Although Jambon’s poems are firmly rooted in contemporary society, several poems address events of the distant past, some of which Jambon was unable to witness. More precisely, while L’École gombo relates mostly to contemporaneity, Petites communions engages more extensively with the distant past. Two motifs, especially, merging the distant and the recent past, define Jambon’s poems, namely the motif of hurricanes and the motif of dispossession. With regard to hurricanes, Petites communions contains Jambon’s first and only poem dealing with a series of memories based on lived and transmitted hurricane experiences. These transgenerational memories recall what Marianne Hirsch labels “postmemory,” a concept used to describe the experience of persons growing up among narratives of traumatic pasts, a “structure of interand trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience” (Hirsch 106): Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories of their own right. (Hirsch 106 – 107)

Not just tragic experiences, but all human experiences carry an affective weight, leaving imprints on a person’s mind even if he or she only hears of the event as somebody else’s memory. The concept of “Postmemory” can be extended to the “memories” of the Acadian expulsion, all the while revealing a more global perspective, both on the geographic and demographic levels. In both his collections, Jambon establishes the connection between Louisiana and Acadia mostly through poems

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dealing with language or the bicultural heritage such as “French Kiss,” “Héritage culturel,” and “Pré de moi.” The 1755 event is, however, not the only exile experience which Jambon tackles. Although it stands at the center of attention, it is linked to various dispossessions of other minorities in the Western hemisphere. It is striking that Jambon’s attention is directed at the serial character of these events. This lineage of historical dispossessions illustrates the repetitiveness of history and the uninterrupted continuation of the past in the present. The diaspora discourse is not based on family memory but, like the hurricane discourse, shows how “Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (Hirsch 107). Significantly, writing is a means to evacuate disturbing experiences, to fill in gaps created by traumatizing ruptures, and to transmit memories through generations. Postmemory is, in fact, nothing else than a trace of loss, which is itself a “bequest of historical experience from one generation to the next” (Hoffman 406).

10.2.1 Remembering Hurricanes 2005, the year of the hurricanes, left indelible marks on the Louisiana cultural memory. Although published one year after the catastrophe, L’École gombo remains silent about hurricanes. Most probably, the poems of the collection were written before the storms, while the preparation for the publication of the collection coincided with Katrina and Rita. In contrast, Petites communions features “Mémoire des ouragans,” a four-part prose poem with each part recalling major hurricanes which affected Jambon’s family. The three paragraphs of the first part, which recall early family memories of major hurricanes, have no punctuation marks except for commas. The paragraphs are the only dividing feature of the text, which evokes the image of a wavelike movement. At the same time, the structure mirrors the flowing motion of the narratives that circulate among the residents of Bayou Lafourche and the narrator’s memories. Evidently, the series continues the hurricane discourse established with Arceneaux’s poetic series “Ouragans I,” “Ouragans II”, and “Ouragans III” in Suite du loup, Jeanne Castille’s description of uprooted oak trees, ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore’s experience in Richard’s Conte cajun, Bourque’s poem “August 2005,” and especially Thibodeaux’s post-Rita chronicle. The first part of Jambon’s hurricane memories is entitled “Mémoires familiales de Betsy (et de ‘93)” and intertwines two family memories. Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in 1965. The number “‘93” refers to the year 1893, a strong hurricane season with two hurricanes, each causing about 2.000 casualties. The

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speaker mentions the refugees of “la Chênière,” a reference to the terrible Chênière Caminada Hurricane, the category-4 hurricane hitting Southwest Louisiana on October 2, 1893, and nearly destroying the village and island of Chênière Caminada.²² If we assume the correspondence of the speaker with the poet, the memories of the narrative are not first-hand, but transmitted memories, and the speaker’s “memories” of the storm of 1893 become an exemplary case of postmemory, or what the protagonist Sethe in Toni Morrison’s Beloved calls “rememory,” the act of remembering something even if it is not your memory²³: Nous autres, mon père, ma mère, ses parents, moi et mon frère ensemble dans la maison que mon père a bâtie, une maison blanche avec des colonnes blanches sur la galerie, qui se trouve à la Côte Blanche, village nommé pour ses galeries en avant peinturés en blanc, nommé, on dit, par les réfugiés de la Chênière après l’ouragan de 1893, des refugiés dans la famille qui racontent des histoires des femmes et filles noyées et pendues par leur cheveux accrochés sur les branches des bois, histoire d’un grand-père qui s’a sauvé dessus une branche qui flottait dans l’eau haute, mémoire d’une image d’un nonc qui pouvait pas s’empêcher de verser autant de larmes en racontant ses mémoires de ‘93, mémoires gardées par les vieux et les moins vieux du Bayou Lafourche. (Jambon, Petites communions 71; my emphasis)

Clearly, the indication of the year with no further details points to the severity of the storm, which inspired a few literary accounts and caused its fixation into the national memory.²⁴ The mental image of houses in Côte Blanche, the place where the speaker grew up, triggers the memory of the 1893 hurricane. Allegedly, refugees from Chênière Caminada, among them the speaker’s ancestors, relocated and founded Côte Blanche, named after the white-washed houses and colon-

 Also called Grand Isle Hurricane (Longshore 213 – 214). The other fatal storm of that year was the Savannah-Charleston Hurricane which made landfall near Savannah, Georgia, on August 27, and killed about 2.000 people (Longshore 372– 373).  Sethe calls “rememory” that which is remembered again, even by somebody whose memories they are not: “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. … What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened” (Morrison 35 – 36).  Kate Chopin also refers to Chênière Caminada and the 1893 hurricane in her short story “At Chênière Caminada” (1893). The short story was published under the title “Tonie” only three weeks after the hurricane devastated the peninsula. The revised version with the new title appeared in the collection A Night in Acadie in 1897. Her novel The Awakening (1899) also features Chênière Caminada as the main setting. Grace King’s short story “At Chênière Caminada” (1894) also deals with the natural disaster.

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nades on the porches. The speaker uses the word “refugiés” to set the stage for the Cajuns as a dispossessed people. In the next paragraph, the speaker continues his retelling of another harrowing hurricane experience. Despite the recurrence—“chaque année”—of hurricanes, it is Hurricane Betsy which marked the memories of the community in the 1960s. Jambon would have been three years old then, an age when his personal memories would be largely fragmented. Likewise, the speaker’s memories move from collective memories—“histoires”—shared in family reunions to personal memories: Bayou Lafourche, éyoù le monde raconte chaque année des histoires des ouragans passés, des histoires de dommage, des vies dévastées, des histoires de Betsy, histoires des vents qui hurlent, des bois qui tombent, des branches et bardeaux qui volent, puis dans la famille, des histoires de l’eau qui rentre dans la chambre de moi et mon frère, la pluie qui passe à travers une porte barrée, ma mère et grand-mère qui pleurent en désespoir qui prient leur chapelet au Bon Dieu et à Sainte Marie, leur dernier espoir, mon père et grand-père qui essaient de conforter et consoler leurs femmes, tout en masquant leur peur, moi et mon frère, bébés qui proche ouvrent pas l’œil quand l’œil de l’ouragan nous approche. (Jambon, Petites communions 71; my emphasis)

Here, the long sentence and lack of periods represents the mind of a child which is not yet able to cogitate coherently and coordinate chronologically what he sees. Through the transgenerational transmission of the stories, the hurricane discourse becomes collective storytelling. Although the Cajuns have to live with a constant sense of insecurity, they also draw strength from these stories. While the first part of the poem consists of transgenerational memories, the second and third parts selectively describe some of the speaker’s personal hurricane memories. “Mémoire personnelle avant Andrew” evokes the ritual of watching the weatherman and his predictions on television. Hurricane Andrew, a major category-5 hurricane making landfall near Morgan City, Louisiana, in August 1992, ripped through the oil and sugar cane towns of Cajun Country. One memory sticks out, namely that of how young greenhorn Bob Breck deferred to weather expert Nash Roberts (Jambon, Petites communions 72). Because of the unpredictability of hurricanes, the speaker liked to act as a weatherman himself, drawing world maps and showing them to his family only to make his own previsions about the hurricane’s path. The time when the family gathered to ride out a storm was the most cherished time for the speaker: “Il faut dire que ce danger de mauvais temps amenait souvent, pour moi, que des beaux temps: l’école était fermée, toute la famille était chez nous, la cuisine sentait la plus haute des cuisines, la cuisine cadienne de ma mère” (Jambon, Petites communions 73). Waiting for the weatherman to say that this time they would “miss the brunt

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of the storm,” the community lived the moments preceding the hurricanes filled with hope of a good ending. This memory mirrors many a family habit today. The third part, entitled “Blessé par une balle évitée,” focuses on the speaker’s adult life and his personal memory of Hurricane Andrew. As the speaker mentions pupils of Saint Francis Xavier, a school in Old Metairie in New Orleans, we might again presume that the speaker corresponds with Jambon, who as a 30year-old had taught at that school. As in the first part, he honors wise persons, such as his godmother Romainedé Hébert, called Nénaine Ticon, with other elders as carriers of knowledge and memory, as well as those holding the family together: “comme Cadien, on connaît le temps, les bons et les moins bons ont roulé dessus nous autres. Et on guette…” (Jambon, Petites communions 74; ellipsis in original). At the end of the section, Jambon addresses the bias of the media that has repeatedly dismissed Cajun Country, and he sarcastically quotes a weatherman’s conclusion of Hurricane Andrew, only to discredit him and to end with a hint at Katrina, the bullet which—finally—hit Louisiana: ‘Hurricane Andrew has hugged and battered the south Louisiana coast and has finally come on shore in Vermillion Parish, south of Lafayette. It looks like most of us in Southeast Louisiana have literally dodged a bullet. ‘Literally? Yeah, really.’ Mais c’était une balle qui était trop proche pour ma famille. Une balle qui a tiré et tué notre sanctuaire de plaisance, notre Camp Pacane au Bayou Tête d’Ours. Une balle qui a tiré sur et proche tué notre camp de complaisance, notre tête de sécurité, encore une fois. Depuis Andrew, à la première annonce d’un ouragan dans la mer, mes parents faient des réservations à un hôtel au Texas ou l’Alabama. Avec l’exception de Katrina. (Jambon, Petites communions 75)

Jambon and his family did not dodge the bullet, considering that Andrew destroyed their camp at Bayou Tête d’Ours. The storm devastated many places, and the Cajuns were forgotten and ignored by the official press. This attitude would repeat itself in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina. The fourth part, “4? …et pour Katrina? à venir?,” playing on “à venir,” i. e., “to come,” and “avenir,” “future,” features just one phrase, a question in parentheses: “(Quand mes écrits étouffent mes cris?)” (Jambon, Petites communions 75; ellipsis in original). The aftermath of Katrina was such a horrendous experience that the speaker wonders how long it will take until his writing will provide the awaited healing. Katrina and Rita, like Andrew, are two other examples of how the media misrepresented the actual situation. The cries, which the speaker hopes to stifle through writing, echo the trope of the very first anthology Cris sur le bayou so that the image of the outcry reflects a deeper sense of urgency.

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Remarkably, the structure of the prose poem resembles a hurricane. The first section consists of three distinct paragraphs but lacks any period, which creates the image of unceasing rain. The speaker’s vortex-like thoughts resemble a hurricane. The two long paragraphs of the second section include unusually long sentences but have a few periods which may stand for gusts of wind and the hurricane gaining momentum. In the third section, the paragraphs and sentences become shorter, and the action rises with the speaker’s memories of Hurricane Andrew. The year 2005, when the storm seems to have literally taken the air and words away, is the climax. The hurricane account is followed by “Chansons d’espoir,” a lyrical piece Jambon composed one year after Katrina and which develops the hurricane discourse. As the title indicates, the song discloses hope and resilience. Indeed, because the people of New Orleans and Louisiana are part of the global community, they rise up again: “Les sœurs Katrina et Rita ne sont pas les premières cavalières de l’apocalypse. Une Nouvelle-Nouvelle-Orléans se lève plus haute que les levées pendant que nous nous rendons compte que la ville fait partie intégrante de la Louisiane, qui fait partie intégrante du pays, qui fait partie intégrante de la planète, qui fait partie intégrante de l’univers” (Jambon, Petites communions 77). More often than not, tragic events are at the origin of major achievements. The hurricane discourse, which, against the background of the Acadian past, becomes a prolonging of the Cajun collective history of dispossession, also reflects a collective history of endurance.

10.2.2 Historic Dérangements and Their Role in Cajun Culture Even if the image of Acadia and the concurring reference to the Grand Dérangement are peripheral in Jambon’s poetry, a few poems are evidence of their importance. The dedication “à mes grand-mères, descendantes de Beausoleil, … .,” prefacing L’École gombo (5), is a first hint at Jambon’s origins and the relevance Beausoleil has for his family. The collection also contains poems which were mostly inspired by their intended audience: “Qui’ c’qu’on est?” was written for a presentation on Cajun culture in Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia, during the summer of 2000. The speaker traces back the Cajuns’ identity to their ancestors in Acadia: “On a des grands-, grands-… grands-parents qui étaient / déportés / de l’Acadie / ou peut-être la Cadie, / ou / peut-être que pas” (Jambon, L’École 21; ellipsis in original). In “Chiac attack, Jack (un peuple en deux actes),” the speaker condemns the double victimhood of the Acadian descendants: “Acadie / assimilée / la Cadie / la comédie / d’un peuple qui n’a pas et qui n’avait jamais un pays / à eux-

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mêmes / … / on joue des rôles de victimes, d’Évangéline et Gabriel, / des stéréotypes” (Jambon, L’École 73). The dramatic poem first denounces the dispossession of the Acadians and then their stereotyping and marginalizing. Moreover, the site of Grand Pré, which is highly evocative as the site of memory where the tragedy of the Acadian dispersal began, plays a role in the poem “Pré de moi,” written in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, in 2000: “Papas et pépères et mes grandes, grandes, grands-mères / d’un autre temps. / Au ras du pré… / le Grand-Pré, le grand, grand, grand pré / de c’temps là. / Le sacré maudit pré éyoù ça s’est passé, / éyoù ça a tout commencé, / une famille séparée” (Jambon, L’École 141; ellipsis in original). As he stands on the dike, the speaker shares his intention of regaining, of repossessing the past: “Je te reprends. / Au ras des digues, / je te reprends” (Jambon, L’École 141). These words are all the more symbolic as they recall the dike-building Acadians who toiled to gain land—land they lost in 1755. Acadian history lacks concrete sources, but Jambon finds a way to fill in the blanks: He draws, for example, on Cajun singer-songwriter Bruce Daigrepont and his reconstructed Acadian narratives. Jambon’s poem “Allons déambuler,” which is prefaced by a quote from Daigrepont’s song “L’Acadie à la Louisiane” (1989)— “L’Acadie à la Louisiane, / Un grand voyage pour notre monde?” (Jambon, L’École 69)—evokes the image of the errant Acadian and implicitly establishes a connection to the motif of the Wandering Jew: “Allons errer en Acadie comme l’Acadien errant” (Jambon, L’École 69). Both the Jews and the Acadians were expulsed from their homeland, both traveled a long distance to their promised land, and both their descendants have been keeping up their communal ties until today. The speaker concludes that it is the Acadians’ and Cajuns’ attribute to be nomads: “Allons déambuler de l’Acadie à la Louisiane / et à l’autre sens, sans ambulance. / Capable, nous allons et nous irons, / sans raison et sans se sentir coupable. / Ambulant est notre monde” (Jambon, L’École 70). In the end, the Cajuns do not err, but they amble. Similarly, although “La dernière valse du Cherokee (encore)” includes only the word “dérangement,” its juxtaposition to other disturbing events is a call to acknowledge the Acadian dispersal as one of the many crimes against humanity: “1– 2– 3 / Esclavage / Dérangement / Trail of Tears / Holocaust / Vietnam / Gulf War I / 9 – 1– 1 / Gulf War II / Pas encore / P’us jamais / S’il vous plaît” (Jambon, L’École 63). Ultimately, the chronological list of savageries ends with the injunction to put an end to them. Similar to Richard’s third Cajun tale, the two poems are examples of Paul Gilroy’s “knotted intersection of histories” (Against Race 78) as they establish an alignment of Cajun history with the slave trade and the Holocaust.

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The history of Acadia is also referred to in Petites communions, but as in the previous volume of poetry, it plays a secondary role. While “dérangement” as well as the corresponding verb, “déranger,” and adjective, “dérangeant,” appear more frequently, it is only the fifth section of Petites communions, “Messe en solitudes,” that explicitly deals with the Acadian expulsion. The prose poem “viii. Seconde Lecture: Un repassage de l’Épitre de Saint-Pierre à Saint-Paul” is a list of illegal land appropriations starting with the Acadians’ loss of their land. The Grand Dérangement is not explicitly mentioned, but the generic words “dérangeait” and “dérangement” are strong enough to evoke the memory of the event: Rappelle-toi l’temps quand nos ancêtres croyaient que c’était l’temps de quitter leur pays de gros chiens enragés pour recommencer leur vie dans un nouveau territoire des petits habitants, d’un monde juste et égal. Rappelle-toi l’temps quand des autres gros chiens enragés croyaient que c’était l’temps de se débarrasser leur territoire de ce petit monde qui les dérangeait dans un grand dérangement. (Jambon, Petites communions 152– 153)

This prose poem includes poetic elements, for it abounds with repetitions of specific phrases, which creates a ritualistic rhythm. Like a refrain, maybe even a litany, the phrases “Rapelle-toi l’temps,” “croyaient que c’était l’temps,” “un monde juste et égal,” and the opposing pair “gros chiens” and “petits habitants” recur time and again, creating a picture of ever-repeating History. “Rappelle-toi l’temps” recalls the common phrase “Je me souviens” on the license plates in Quebec, but instead of a personal remembrance, it is an injunction to recall. In the Cajun context, “gros chien” generally refers to elites, i. e., wealthy people or politicians, and any person called this epithet is thought to be a big shot (Gold 270; “chien1, gros chien b”). While the “gros chiens enragés” in Jambon’s poem refer to all the tyrants and oppressors the history of the Western world has known, the “petits habitants” or “petit monde” stand for the oppressed subaltern peoples of history. Interestingly, the chronicle begins with the French colonists leaving the old continent to settle North America in the seventeenth century. It continues with their expulsion but does not mention the exact date or place: “Rappelle-toi l’temps quand des autres chiens enragés croyaient que c’étaient l’temps de se débarrasser leur territoire de ce petit monde qui les dérangeait dans un grand dérangement” (Jambon, Petites communions 152). Thus, the Acadian dispersal opens the history of mistreatments and land appropriation which followed in the centuries after. The expulsion becomes the starting point of all subsequent human dispersals, of all “dérangements,” as the speaker continues to list historically oppressed peoples of the world community. This list includes the monarchs of seventeenth-century France whose feudal regime made the French peas-

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ants leave for Canada. It also refers to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who opposed the English King George III during the American Revolution: “Rapelle-toi l’temps quand Thomas et George et des autres ont dit que c’était l’temps de faire la guerre pour se séparer d’un autre George et ses gros chiens enragés pour avoir un pays des grands habitants, d’un monde juste et égal” (Jambon, Petites communions 152); to Andrew Jackson and his Indian Removal policy causing the Indian Wars and the Trail of Tears: “Rappelle-toi l’temps quand Andrew et des nouveaux gros chiens enragés croyaient que c’était l’temps de se débarrasser leur territoire d’un monde plus juste et égal qu’eux même, qui restait dans ce pays avant George et ses amis et qui disait que leur terre étaient volée” (Jambon, Petites communions 152– 153); to Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, both important African American abolitionists and civil rights defenders during the fratricidal Civil War: “Rappelle-toi l’temps quand Frederick et Sojourner et ses amis croyaient que c’était l’temps que la vérité soit dite que tout le monde dans ce pays était pas traité juste et égal et pour cette raison des nouveaux gros chiens ont fait la guerre où les petits habitants se battaient, frère contre frère, au nom des grands chiens planteurs” (Jambon, Petites communions 153). The speaker moves on to war crimes in the twentieth century and alludes to Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust: “Rappelle-toi l’temps quand les petits-petits-enfants des gros chiens de notre pays croyaient que c’était l’temps d’aller dans les vieux pays quittés pour se battre contre un autre gros chien enragé qui essayait de voler des autres terres en même temps qu’il croyait que c’était l’temps de se débarrasser son pays d’un autre petit monde” (Jambon, Petites communions 153). The speaker also mentions the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s: “Rappelle-toi l’temps quand Peter et un autre Paul, ensemble avec Mary, chantaient que c’était l’temps qu’on avait un marteau pour bâtir la justice avec Martin et ses amis qui marchaient pour qu’un autre monde soit traité juste et égal” (Jambon, Petites communions 153). Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers formed the American folk-singing trio Peter, Paul & Mary, and their hit song “If I Had a Hammer,” which they sang at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, refers to the freedom marches led by Martin Luther King during the 1960s. The speaker also recalls John Lennon, who sang “Imagine” in 1971, and the anti-war slogan of the 1960s “Make love, not war”: “Rappelle-toi l’temps quand John croyait que c’était l’temps d’imaginer un autre monde par faire l’amour et pas la guerre” (Jambon, Petites communions 153). He then closes with the Gulf Wars and the War on Terror after 9/11, led by George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, respectively: Rappelle-toi l’temps quand un autre George, comme son père George, croyait que c’était l’temps de bâtir un nouveau monde, pas trop différent que le vieux monde, par faire la

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guerre, au nom d’un dieu d’amour et d’un pays ou les gros chiens contrôlent le petit monde, contre un autre monde qui se croyait traiter pas égal et qui croyait que c’était l’temps que George et ses gros chiens enragés retournent dans leur pays et paient pour les grands dérangements qu’ils ont fait à tous le monde. (Jambon, Petites communions 153)

After Bush senior started the first Gulf War, the revenge (“paient”) came with the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001, in the wake of which Bush junior launched another “grand dérangement” in Irak, the second Gulf War. Against the background of all these dispossessions, the speaker wishes to achieve a just and equal world, “un monde traité juste et égal.” According to him, love is the key: “D’après moi, je crois aussi que c’est l’temps. C’est l’temps de s’aimer, tout le monde. Même si on connaît pas comment l’faire. C’est l’temps de s’aimer. Je t’aime. Soit dérangeur ou débarasseur, dégrée ou grée, soit Pierre ou Paul ou Jean ou Georges, soit gros ou petit, je t’aime. Soigne-toi et Soignez tous” (Jambon, Petites communions 153). Again, the poem shows how pun-loving Jambon is, especially regarding first names. It is important to note the plural in “Georges” at the end of the text, so that “George” becomes a collective name for all the tyrannical leaders called George. Peter and Paul are two other names which also appear in other poems. In the present poem, Jambon plays first on the French saying “dégréer Saint Paul pour gréer Saint Pierre,”²⁵ which means to replace one misery by another. Jambon transfers the religious reference to the Cajun context when he refers to Peter from the village of Boudreaux and Paul from the town of Thibodeaux at the beginning of the poem: “Pierre, petit apôtre de l’Éternel au village de Boudreaux, par ordre de bon Dieu, notre père, et de son fils, notre espoir, à Paul, mon grand frère en la foi, à l’église de la ville de Thibodeaux…” (Jambon, Petites communions 152). In fact, the Cajuns Boudreaux and Thibodeaux belong to the Cajun joke repertoire as they are the caricatures of two “hapless hunters and trappers who always used to be outwitted but nowadays are more likely to end up the winners” (Dubois and Horvath, “‘Let’s tink’” 245). Through the various double entendre, the prose poem is taken out of its religious context and inserted into a secular context as it mixes biblical memory with historical memory and motifs of popular culture.

 There exists the expression “déshabiller saint Pierre pour habiller saint Paul” in Standard French. An equivalent in English could be the expression “to rob Peter to pay Paul,” which means to solve a problem, but making another problem worse, or to pay a debt and at the same time make another debt.

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It is also interesting to note that “grands dérangements” takes the plural form in the poem.²⁶ Adopting the expression with the lower-case letters, Jambon also refers to a more general meaning connoting predicaments. He reverses the meaning of “grand dérangement”: From the specific meaning describing the event of 1755, he extends it to other “dérangements” in American history—and even in everyday life considering “deux des derniers dérangements,” a poem using the image of unclogging drainpipes to address the question of liberty and freedom (Jambon, Petites communions 69).

10.3 Cultivating the Tie That Binds Jambon’s poetry does not solely represent Cajun, French Louisiana, or Acadian culture. The poems engage with the larger world, attesting the interrelatedness of Cajun culture to other francophone and non-francophone cultures. The poem “réflexion” in L’École gombo, for instance, juxtaposes two landscapes: “du côté du vermillion / à la côte d’azur / les verts peuvent toujours / laver les blues” (103). Playing with “ver-/vert” and “azur/blues” (and not “bleus”!), Jambon, like Bourque, connects the Cajun (Vermillion Parish) with the French Riviera (Côte d’Azur). Additionally, the reference “les blues,” which stands for the African music tradition emerging in the American South around the end of the nineteenth century, contrasts with “les verts,” arguably creating the statement that the outdoors can help with overcoming distressing times.²⁷ Guided by the question concerning his position in the grand scheme of things (Merryweather), Jambon writes poems which necessarily extend the Cajun collective memory as they reach beyond the boundaries of Cajun Country. While L’École gombo already pointed to the transcultural mix—the attribute “gombo” is a popular met-

 A look into the semantic evolution of “dérangement” reveals that, originally, the Acadians used the term “Grand Dérangement” in a broader sense to describe “révolutions des guerres.” According to several historical documents, the term has been applied to not just one occurrence, but to several dispersion events starting in 1749 with the Beaubassin Acadians leaving their homes and the burning of their houses by the French. Actually, the term “dérangement” was first used by Acadians of the Beaubassin region in 1773 and originally referred to the longer period of the Acadian expulsion (R.-G. LeBlanc 12– 13): “La déportation de 1755,” remarks historian Ronnie-Gilles LeBlanc, “n’était qu’un événement dans une série d’événements qui se sont succédés à partir de 1749 – 1750 jusqu’au début du XIXe siècle et qui ont eu de lourdes conséquences pour le peuple acadien” (17). He suggests, therefore, to use the term to describe the events befalling the Acadian community between 1749 and 1764 (20).  The expression “se mettre au vert” means “to go into the countryside.”

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aphor used to describe both Cajun and Creole cultures—, Petites communions, especially, is evidence of his border-crossing experimentalism, creativity, and wit. Jambon’s second poetry collection further differs from the first in that Jambon plays more openly with intertextuality ranging from French texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to American and Acadian texts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The section “Méditations matinales (une neuvaine aux corps sacrés?)” is dedicated not only to the Holy Trinity, “au nom du père et du fils et du saint esprit,” but also to persons and objects sacred to the speaker: “aux vies de la femme et de la fille et de la sainte famille / aux épitres de boileau et au jardin de bourque et ses huit prières / aux traitements de la maman blanchard de la maison verte / au bon matin, aux yeux ouverts” (Jambon, Petites communions 51). Besides Bourque, Jambon shows his appreciation of the French moralist Nicolas Boileau, known especially for his epistles and L’Art poétique, an attempt to revolutionize French poetry. Jambon’s hybrid poetry is deliberate and spontaneous and thus a perfect example of Bastide’s claim that invention, as a synthesis of initially dissimilar elements, is a sign of progress (Prochain 11). With his china baroque poetry, Jambon uncovers the manifold hidden connections around him. Furthermore, like Cris sur le bayou, Castille’s life writing, Gautreaux’s fiction, and Bourque’s poems, Jambon’s poetry collections outline a distinct relation with Catholicism. While L’École gombo includes single references to religious aspects, Petites communions overtly addresses a religious belief, starting with “communion” in the title. The 77 poems, which are grouped into six parts, all relate more or less to the religious, or spiritual realm: “La voix intérieure,” “méditations matinales (une neuvaine aux corps sacrés?),” “La voie extérieure,” “Passer le sabbat au Gumbo Music School,” “fin de semaine des haïku dessus bayou,” “La Messe en solitudes.” Structurally, the collection develops from an exploration of the interior to the exterior, and finally joins the two spheres in “La Messe en solitudes.” Several titles, and even whole parts of the collection, refer to a Christian belief and take up the structure of religious writings such as the poem “Dieu croit (Un autre credo),” a variation of the Christian credo, and the aforementioned section “Méditations matinales.” Jambon also repeatedly uses the phrase “ainsi soit-il” in his poetry (Jambon, Petites communions 62, 157, 158, 160, 173). After Arceneaux in Cris sur le bayou and Cheramie in Lait à mère, the phrase continues to be a common trope in Cajun poetry. According to Jambon, the prerequisite for an ongoing global communion is to open up to the outside world and to accept change. The structure of Petites communions presents that openness. While “Allons ouvert” is the opening poem, the poem “Envoi: Alors, on sort en dehors” closes the section of the “Messe” and the volume of poetry. Yet it uses an exhortation to “go out,” into

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the open. Movement entails change; without it, there is no progress. The Cajuns, above all, know about change and its benefits, and Jambon’s poetry mirrors this mindset through the use of intertextuality and linguistic play.

10.3.1 Extending the Cajun Artistic Circles Jambon’s bilingualism and poetic language function as more than a catalyst for a Franco-American literary network. They constitute interactional dynamics in which any notion of hierarchy dissolves. Petites communions, especially, brims over with literary and cultural allusions to both French and American cultures. For example, a reading session of poems by French poet Clément Marot inspired Jambon to write the epigram “d’estre paresseux (et amoureux) sur ung beau dymanche” in the French poet’s style. The poem imitates not only the spelling— “ung beau dymanche,” “il escrivoient,” “pour un doulx baiser”—but also quotes from one of Marot’s epigrams, “CCXIX—Huictain,” though with a slight syntactical change: “deux fois naistre, si je pouvois” (87).²⁸ Jambon’s dizain—it is not a huitain like Marot’s poem—is one of the few poems with a regular rhyme scheme. In his version, Jambon yokes the past—Marot’s language and epigram—with the present—his thoughts on Marot’s language. Jambon honors other famous French and francophone writers. The first part of the collection, entitled “La voix intérieure,” refers to the poetry collection Les Voix intérieures (1837) by the French writer Victor Hugo, and it is followed by a quote from that work (which itself includes a reference to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice).²⁹ The fourteen poems of “La voix intérieure” sketch out the speaker’s personal thoughts and ideas, and the mise en abîme of quotes mirrors the entanglement of the English and French cultures. Jambon reveals his penchant for Hugo again in “Sampling les misérables,” a poem consisting of six quotes by writers all of whom denounce social injustice.³⁰ Besides the allusion in the title to Hugo’s famous novel Les Misérables (1862), the poem includes a quote from Hugo’s poem “Ultima Verba” in Les Châtiments (1853), a collection of satirical poems Hugo wrote in his exile against Napoleon III’s regime. Reiterating one line by Hugo, “Et s’il n’en reste qu’un, je serai celui-

 The original line (l. 7) is: “O, si je povois deux fois naistre” (Marot 280).  It seems that it is not Portia, but Lorenzo who utters the words: “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. …” (Merchant 5.1.83 – 85).  Jambon once acted as Jean Valjean, a character from Hugo’s Les Misérables (Jambon, “Kirby”).

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là,” the speaker calls for acting out against injustice. This line is followed by a quote from “In the Event of My Demise” (2000) by American rapper and actor Tupac Shakur: “When my heart can beat no more, I hope I die for a principle or a belief that I had lived for” (Jambon, Petites communions 107). Against this background, Jambon’s poem is inscribed in a poésie engagée denouncing discrimination and evil in the world. Other poems condemn such evils as the effects of commercialism in “Gombo d’poule for the soul” (Jambon, L’École gombo 76), or as the trauma of war in “Allons faire route pour la maison” dedicated to “les vétérans de la guerre et de la paix” (Jambon, Petites communions 121). Despite the muted Acadian militantism, Jambon is candid about socio-political problems and insists on the importance of moral values. One good example of the transcultural entanglement and dynamics of collective memory in Jambon’s poetry is the wolf motif. Prefaced by the italicized explanation, “Les Cherokees nous racontent qu’il y a une bataille entre deux loups à l’intérieur de nous et le loup qui gagne est celui que l’on nourrit” (Jambon, Petites communions 85), the prose poem “Pensées out of the box grâce au courriel de la belle-famille” explores the Native American origin of the wolf motif. The speaker denounces hypocrisy and arrogance, intolerance and guilt, fear and hate, materialism and hedonism. Despite the various vices, he has not lost hope, for love is composed of happiness, faith, and understanding: “Pourtant je vois encore un feu dans la cheminée chez le loup d’espoir. Il a besoin d’ingrédients pour faire son gombo d’amour: la joie, la foi, la compassion, la compréhension” (Jambon, Petites communions 88). While Jambon uses the Cherokee legend for his own purpose and transforms the wolf metaphor, it can be traced back to French poetry as shown in chapter four about early francophone Cajun poetry. The ambivalent attitude corresponds to that purveyed by the Native American legend which Jambon draws upon and adapts into the story of the two wolves within Cajun culture battling each other. While Jambon credits a number of francophone authors as his muses, it appears that the references to popular culture, notably to hit songs, almost exclusively have their origin in American popular culture. Already in L’École gombo Jambon uses famous quotes and popular mottoes to bring his message across to the reader. The phrase “les sounds of silence” in the poem “Mayday” is one such example: “Dans mes temps de tracas, / la Mère de Marie à Paul arrive / chanter les sounds of silence / pendant cette journée à la course / où le meilleur gagne le poisson de Christ, de Darwin, d’avril” (Jambon, L’École 117). The plural form and lower-case letters cannot hide the link to the legendary song “The Sound of Silence” (1964) by the singer-songwriters Simon & Garfunkel. Jambon also adds such primordial elements of Western culture as the fish, which turns out to be a symbol of multiple meanings in French: It is used as an ancient Chris-

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tian symbol and as a parody (P. Williams).³¹ The humorist connotation of the latter is expanded with the reference to “poisson d’avril,” the French meaning of April fool’s day prank. Clearly, the various connotations of “poisson” instantiate the mosaic of Jambon’s China baroque poetry. One of the best examples illustrating this poetic and mnemonic strategy is the poem “Hemming my way” (Jambon, Petites communions 89 – 90), which describes the writer’s duty to write while skillfully mixing pop culture with literature. The 35 lines of the prose poem are written in free verse without punctuation, except for a few commas and question marks. The fact that there are no periods or capital letters gives the impression of an overflow, and corresponds to the speaker’s feeling of being overwhelmed by today’s mass of information and social controversies. Despite the lack of stanzas, the themes and images structure the poem. While the first twelve lines express the speaker’s helplessness and frustration regarding the overwhelming issues he wants to address, the following fifteen lines list a number of possible topics to write about. In the last four lines, he concludes that he might lack ink, but luckily, there is the computer. The poem resembles a puzzle as it contains jumbled cultural references and hidden keys to unlock the poem. The title, for instance, has a double meaning. “Hemming my way” describes how the speaker tries to “hem” his way, to find his way out of the chaotic themes to write about. Yet it is also a pun combining the name “Hemingway,” a reference to the renowned American author Ernest Hemingway, and the famous song “My Way” by American singer and entertainer Frank Sinatra. While various words, phrases, and mental images evoke Hemingway, the musical reference not only alludes to the close relationship between the two famous people, but make writing and music converge. Additional allusions to Hemingway include “papa,” which appears in the very first line of the prose poem and is the novelist’s nickname³²: “papa dit que l’écrivain doit pas parler mais écrire ce qu’il a à dire” (Jambon, Petites communions 89). The line is a translated quote from the banquet speech Hemingway held after having been awarded the Nobel prize in 1954: “A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it” (“Ernest”). The phrase “does the bell toll for me” in line 20 obviously refers to Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls set

 As Thomas Lessl, a speech communication expert, explains, the Darwin fish emulates the Christian symbol to the point of ritually profaning it: Two little feet were added to the Jesus fish as well as the name “Darwin” inside the symbol (Lessl).  In 1966, American editor and writer A.E. Hotchner published the biography Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir. In an interview from the early 1970s, Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson also admitted to calling Hemingway “Papa” (A. Baker).

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during the Spanish Civil War (1940). It is transformed in the subsequent line which describes the “toll” the speaker has to pay: “au moins il faut que je paie un toll / je dépense le sang de mes plumes” (Jambon, Petites communions 89). The speaker does not pay a toll of blood, but of ink: The payment, “le sang de mes plumes,” represents ink. Writing, evoked by the word “plumes,” feathers, then is described as a demanding activity, one taking its toll on the writer. The second mention of “papa” in line 26 also relates to the importance of storytelling. The speaker urges “papa” to write his stories: “papa don’t preach mais je me rappelle pas bien tes histoires / raconte-les encore, encore mieux écris-les.” However, he realizes that it is impossible, for “papa” committed suicide: “t’as mis la carabine dans la bouche une année avant que j’sus né” (Jambon, Petites communions 90). As a matter of fact, Hemingway did die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The references to “papa,” writing, and the death circumstances substantiates the correspondence of “papa” and Hemingway. Moreover, the temporal reference “une année avant que j’sus né” backs up the claim that the speaker corresponds to Jambon: Hemingway died in 1961, a year before Jambon was born, in 1962. Besides being a homage to Hemingway, “Hemming my way” is also one of the most assertive of Jambon’s socio-political poems. The allusions to Hemingway serve as the basis for a more general interrogation of the author’s duty to write. Referring to a number of topical themes, most of which are very cryptic, the speaker becomes overwhelmed with the problems in today’s world. The references include mostly celebrities who have made it onto the front-page of newspapers and magazines for their controversial behavior. One of them is singersongwriter Lady Gaga, who is outspoken about her bisexuality and who raised strong criticism for wearing a “brassière-carabine à la gaga” (Petites communions 89), a machine-gun bra outfit, during her world tour in 2013, while the United States debated gun-control. The speaker then quotes a famous line from Pink Floyd’s song “Wish You Were Here,” recorded in 1975: “so, so you think you can tell, heaven from hell” (Jambon, Petites communions 89). In rearranging the reference to “heaven” and “hell” in French, Jambon then manages to subtly develop his message and to dismiss the lack of friendship: “l’enfer du ciel / lequel s’appelle pink, laquelle m’appelle plus” (Jambon, Petites communions 89). From Pink Floyd, the speaker shifts to Pink, another contemporary pop-singer who tackles the deterioration of American social values and the disenchantment of the American Dream. Pink’s advocacy of LGBT rights finds a distant echo a few lines further down when the speaker makes a veiled hint at tragedies which resulted from gender discrimination: “porter le violet pour qui se sont suicidés” (Jambon, Petites communions 89). The color purple has been adopted by LGBT rights activists, notably the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation

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(GLAAD), who invite people to wear purple clothes on Spirit Day (usually observed on the third Thursday in October), an annual awareness day which began in 2010 “as a way to show support for LGBTQ youth and take a stand against bullying” (“About GLAAD”). This action has also become a day for remembering the victims of cyberbullying during the 2010s when several minors, some of them LGBT youths, had been harassed by schoolmates on social media to the point that they committed suicide. The lines “comment chanter comme un phoque qui est phoqué en alaska / quel beau dommage” echo the song “La complainte du phoque en Alaska” recorded by the Quebecois rock group Beau Dommage from Montreal, Quebec, in 1974. This song evokes the dreams and memories which emerged thanks to the Quebecois movement during the 1970s: “Cré-moé, cré-moé pas, quéqu’part en Alaska / Y a un phoque qui s’ennuie en maudit / Sa blonde est partie gagner sa vie / Dans un cirque aux États-Unis.” Of course, the phrase “sa blonde est partie” strongly resonates in Cajun culture since the performance of “Ma blonde est partie” by the Breaux Brothers, today more commonly known as “Jole Blon,” the Cajun anthem. Like the seal in Alaska pining after his blonde who went to the US, the speaker in “Jole Blon” pines after his girl who left him. Jambon’s choice to use the word “phoqué” has a strong effect as, besides denoting “seal,” it also echoes the vulgar four-letter English word pronounced with a French accent. Finally, the line “papa don’t preach mais je me rappelle pas bien tes histoires” (Jambon, Petites communions 90) gestures at yet another celebrity apart from Hemingway. Jambon draws on a line from the refrain of the danse-pop song “Papa Don’t Preach” (1986) by the American singer Madonna. In her song, the singer deals with the decision of a pregnant girl to not submit to her father’s demands to abort the baby. These references to Hemingway and controversial pop singers and groups serve as a basis for a more general interrogation of the writer’s duty to address problems of the contemporary world. The final question “Comment écrire tout ça” sums up the preceding similar-sounding questions: “comment dire,” “comment chanter.” In juggling with the images from popular culture and rearranging them through wordplay, Jambon transmits his franglophone point of view as well as the challenges every human being is confronting today. What surprises in “Hemming my way” is that the Cajun cultural context is left behind. Except for the reference to Beau Dommage, the poem features elements of the American cultural storehouse only, from Hemingway and Sinatra to such celebrities of popular culture as the “mikes and mikes of sports radio” (Jambon, Petites communions 89)—a reference to the American sports-talk radio show Mike & Mike on ESPN, hosted by Mike Golic and Mike Greenberg—to Lady Gaga, Pink Floyd, Pink, and Madonna.

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Ultimately, “Hemming my way” is evidence not only of Jambon’s high esteem of art but also of the link between art and humanism, which he reveals in prefacing the section “La Voie extérieure” with a quote by Alice Walker. In the quote, Walker claims that literature and, by extension, art can only come from good people: “Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for?” (Jambon, Petites communions 65). Art is the conduit through which the interior voice of the poet travels in order to reach the outside world. It can teach tolerance and moral values. So does Jambon’s poetry with its humanism.

10.3.2 Jambon’s Philosophy: Connecting Religious Memory to Moral Values Besides revealing Jambon’s humanism, Petites communions is an illustration of transcultural memory par excellence. Such transcultural thinking finds its apex in the final section, “La Messe en solitudes,” of Jambon’s Petites communions which draws on a number of international writers and musicians.³³ Writings from different epochs and by authors around the world make “La Messe en solitude” a universally resonating piece of art. Setting his poetry on a level with other classic works of world literature as well as popular literature, Jambon points the way for contemporary Cajun literature, calling for its existence alongside other canonical works. “La Messe en solitudes” is crucial in another respect. As a rewriting of the Roman-Catholic rite and sacred music, it is the most striking example of Jambon’s creative appropriation, surpassing his previous writings in originality, poetic deftness, and linguistic mastery. Generally speaking, a Mass not only refers to the central act of worship of the Catholic Church, the Eucharist. It also defines a choral composition where the liturgy is set to music. The title of Jambon’s “Messe en solitudes” is a play on words based on the combination of “Messe en sol,” meaning “Mass in G-major” in the fixed Do-solfège, and the addition “solitudes.” Based on the Catholic liturgy, Jambon creates a Cajun version of the mass, defined by multilingual wordplay, references to francophone and anglophone cultures, and a decidedly pacifist worldview, insinuating that all good  A look at the appendix “Notes, inspirations, reconnaissances” shows that the sources of inspiration for “La Messe en solitudes” include works by Joyce Carol Oates, Sybil Kein, Gabriel Fauré, Diana Butler Bass, Mark Obmashik, Kari Jo Verhulst, Plato, Marcus Borg, Alexander Pope, David Cheramie, Marc Pernot as well as French traditional hymns, Edwin S. Barnes’s “Gloria,” references to the Bible and to historico-cultural events (178 – 181).

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comes from art and creativity. Often, the linguistic acrobatics result in enigmatic images which need to be pieced together. It is an example of Jambon’s versatile usage of traditional poetic forms which are yoked together with themes of Cajun and American culture. The mass, in Jambon’s view, is the ultimate legacy in terms of the work of art. Given that Classical composers wrote masses as a means of receiving recognition, he confesses, tongue-in-cheek, that he “had the audacity to believe that Louisiana literature is as important as classical music” (Merryweather). As a matter of fact, Jambon refers to several composers and their masses in his poems. He has a penchant for Beethoven, not least because he was born the same day as the famous German composer, only 185 years later.³⁴ Moreover, in his notes to Petites communions, Jambon quotes from La Messe de Requiem, en ré mineur, composed between 1887– 1900 by French Romantic composer Gabriel Fauré. Jambon’s mass was inspired by the first line of Fauré’s “Messe,” “Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna,” a prayer for the dead sung by the choir. The second inspiration is a statement on the Réquiem by Fauré himself: “Mon Réquiem a été composé pour rien… pour le plaisir si j’ose dire… Peut-être ai-je ainsi, d’instinct, cherché à sortir du convenu…” (Jambon, Petites communions 178; ellipses in original). This statement is equally applicable to Jambon, who wanted to create something unconventional with his mass. Although sacred musical compositions inspired Jambon, his “Messe” is not composed in the typical five-part structure but resembles rather the 24part ceremony of the Catholic liturgy. In a series of 26 lyrical and prose texts, Jambon’s mass progresses like a religious mass, from the “Introït” to the “Salutation,” “Kyrie,” “Gloria,” “Collecte,” “Première lecture,” “Graduel,” “Seconde lecture,” “Acclamation,” “Proclamation,” “Réclamation,” “Homélie,” “Credo,” “Prière universelle,” “Pénitentielle,” “Charité fraternelle,” “Offertoire,” “Sanctus,” “Institution-Élévation-Consécration,” “Anamnèse,” “Intercession et Doxologie,” “Notre Père,” “Fraction-Agnus Dei,” “Communion,” “Post-communionBénédiction-Commission,” and finally the “Envoi.” As each poem corresponds to one part of the religious mass, they preserve the religious frame. However, with respect to the language and the themes, Jambon modulates and transforms each part of the mass. The result is a new mass, the first Cajun mass. Most significantly, “Messe en solitudes” is strongly linked to the oral repertoire and acquires a ritualistic sense when performed and spoken aloud.

 Phonologically, the first three syllables in “Messe en solitude” resemble those of “Missa solemnis,” one of Beethoven’s most famous masses.

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In “vi. Première lecture: Un passage du deuxième livre de l’Ancienne nouvelle,” for instance, Jambon creates a new reading of Deuteronomium. Usually, the first reading is from the Old Testament. Jambon’s first reading accordingly refers to the second book of “L’Ancienne nouvelle,” of the “old tale.” What follows is a story full of verbal acrobatics, made possible through the variability of uncodified Cajun French: Voici les paroles que le prophète Aïeux adressa à toute Descendance, de l’autre côté du Bord, dans le désert, dans la prairie, vis-à-vis de Cœur, entre Parein, Mareine, Aimay, Aitranget et In’Conus. Il y a onze journées depuis Léquol, par le chemin de la montagne de Lados, jusqu’à Responsaba Dulte. Dans la quarante-quatrième année au onzième mois, le quatre du mois, Aïeux parla aux enfants de Descendance selon tout ce que l’Éternel lui avait ordonné de leur dire. C’était après qu’il eut battu Ind’Ifferens, roi des Parresseuzes, qui habitait à Sein-ésophe, et Krainte, roi de Violans, qui habitait à Ignorrence et à Préjujai. De l’autre côté du Bord, dans le pays d’Icitéasteure, Aïeux, commença à expliquer cette loi, et dit: C’est l’temps! (Jambon, Petites communions 150)

The religious background is present in biblical references such as “prophète,” “l’Éternel” and “désert.” Yet a number of elements add to and transform the scene. Some of the written words look unfamiliar while an oral presentation discloses the wordplay more readily. Concerning the geography, the reading presents two allegorical settings identified by the use of nouns with upper-case letters. The first scene is set on the other side of “Bord,” in the country of “Icitéasteur,” in front of “Cœur,” and amidst “Parein, Mareine, Aimay, Aitranget et In’Conus.” While the first words refer to what seems to be geographical spaces (“Icitéasteur” is a contraction of “icitte,” “here,” and “asteur,” “now”), the other nouns refer to Everyman: Anybody could be a godfather, godmother, foreigner, or stranger. The second setting refers to a past event when “L’Éternel” waged war against allegorical mischievous kings such as “Ind’Ifference [Indifference],” King of the Idles, and “Crainte [Fear],” King of the Violent. Similarly, the imaginary geographical references such as “Léquol [school]” and “chemin de la montagne de Lado [teen], jusqu’à Responsaba Dulte [responsible adult]” sketch out an allegorical map of life, including the different life cycles as well as the human virtues and vices. This procedure of imaginative mapping is reminiscent of the “Carte de Tendre,” a map inspired by the novel Clélie (1654– 1660), by Madeleine de Scudéry, where virtues and vices were supposed to lead the way to a good life and away from trespasses and temptations. In the case of Jambon’s poem, the map joins the religious with the secular and ordinary. Jambon’s psalm “vii. Gradual: Psaume de sang vain” (Petites communions 151) also plays on language and mixes the religious with the secular. As Jambon acknowledges in his notes, the psalm was inspired by Psalm 3, David’s song

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about his flight from his son Absalom. In Jambon’s version, it is Lorgueil, i. e., Pride, who flees from his son, Ladéfaite, i. e., Defeat. The psalm also contains a hidden reference. The title, “Psaume de sang vain,” is a linguistic play on Psalm 120, “sang vain” being homonymous with “cent vingt.” This psalm is the first of 15 psalms (Psalms 120 – 134) which are called the gradual psalms, or the songs of degrees or steps. They represent the prayers of a returned exile, songs pilgrims sing while walking the 15 steps to ascend to Jerusalem (Corbett). Jambon thus joins two biblical hymns together to evoke the theme of flight and exile. Kari Jo Verhulst, a Lutheran Chaplain at MIT who inspired Jambon, writes that “[t]he psalms remind us that our prayers are not simply our own, but that we pray with and through and for the community” (Verhulst). More specifically, she argues that “[t]he Psalms defy our notions of profane and sacred, proving that everything that we feel, witness, do unto others, and have done to us is acceptable subject matter for conversing with the Divine. They invite us to bring every part of ourselves into our houses of worship. If we omit expressions of faith lost, of rage, of disdain, and of the desire for revenge, we leave parts of ourselves at the door” (Verhulst). Both psalms teach us that vices belong to us as virtues do and that we come with them before God. Jambon’s psalm version is a modern translation of the original psalm which keeps the intention, i. e., preserves the memory, of giving hope and showing tolerance toward others. Jambon’s objective is not to preach Catholicism through his poetry. Rather, he uses the mass for its creative potential. Like the mass, which connotes “mission,” Jambon’s mass, too, has a message, namely that mankind should be more tolerant and caring, that communion and community are key. Despite this communal aspect, the poet’s musings are rather solitary acts. In the same vein, Jambon mentions Joyce Carol Oates, according to whom “[w]riting is the most solitary of arts” (Oates xi). She continues, however, arguing that “art is the highest expression of the human spirit… [and t]he individual voice is the communal voice” (Oates 1). Although Jambon’s “communions” give the picture of solitary meditations, the poems exhibit a highly communal spirit, exemplified by the poem “xxiv. Communion”: “Les solitudes se rassemblent en multitudes / à l’autel de l’interdépendance des imperfections” (Jambon, Petites communions 175). Everything comes together at the altar of the interdependence of imperfections. Jambon’s “Messe” is a good example of the connection between religious tradition, literature’s interconnection, and collective memory. Drawing on the Catholic tradition, Jambon connotates Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s claim regarding the connection of religion and collective memory: “En plaçant la tradition, c’est-à-dire l’invocation d’une lignée croyante, au centre de la question de la religion, on associe immédiatement le devenir de celle-ci au problème de la mémoire collective” (177). Most importantly, as the primary religious source in Judeo-

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Christian cultures, the Bible unifies large parts of the world. Jambon’s references to biblical verses and stories, therefore, also allow non-Cajuns to identify with his philosophy. Finally, Jambon’s mass is by no means a “petite” communion. On the contrary, “Messe en solitudes” is a grand finale in which Jambon pulls out all the stops to jump the borders. Petites communions illustrates how a religious belief expands collective memory. While Jambon’s mass is characteristically Cajun on a linguistic and thematic level, it addresses more existential questions about spirituality, identity, and the common good, giving hope to the reader. Jambon walks the line between seriousness and humor: “Icitte il y a une ligne entre sérieux et farce et guette-moi je la marche” (Jambon, Petites communions 127). Even if the road takes him “[d]ans le noir du soleil,” confronting him with turbulent moments where anxieties and fears control his life, all will turn out well: “Et le tour va venir un jour pour un monde juste et content” (Jambon, Petites communions 129). Jambon’s rewriting of the mass is not only a way of interpreting and making sense of the religious mass and the Scriptures, but also of showing how generosity, altruism, and philanthropy give meaning to life. With his last section of Petites communions, Jambon creates a new poetic genre by combining the two genres of the musical and ritual mass and by yoking together the religious with the secular. He transforms the liturgy into poetry. Moreover, Jambon’s “Messe en solitudes” combines the more recent Cajun tradition with the old, yet still prevalent tradition of Catholicism. Significantly, the mass in Europe, which became fully developed around the early fourteenth century, reached its zenith from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries, the period before the Acadians left France. Through his mass, Jambon establishes a link between the cultural productions of the old world and Cajun culture in the New World.

10.4 Conclusion Close to four hundred years after the establishment of the Académie française in 1635 (Caput 7), which occurred shortly after the departure of the first French colonist for Canada in 1632, this pre-eminent French institution supervising the French language development awarded the Prix Henri de Régnier for the work in local speech by an Acadian descendant, honoring the linguistic variability of Louisiana French. In this context, Jambon’s poetry offers a view on the status quo of Cajun culture, and assesses the value of its traditions and influences. Individual and collective memory addressed in poems such as “xx. Anamnèse: La mémoire: passée, présente et immortelle” (Jambon, Petites communions 170) or

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in the hurricane series encompasses the past, the present, and the future. Yet the recurring phrase “c’est le temps” puts emphasis on the here-and-now. Indeed, it recalls the epicurean ideal of “seize the day,” which finds its echo in the Cajun joie de vivre. Art, especially music, not only preserves a cultural repertoire of memories, it also transmits values and a certain art de vivre. Music even encompasses the laughter of a child, as in the poem “47 ans et toujours à l’école” in Petites communions, in which the speaker explains that “si un jour je trouve quelque chose plus beau que le sourire d’un enfant je vas le façonner en forme de lunettes et les porter tous les jours et si jamais j’entends quelque chose plus doux que le rire d’un enfant ça sera la seule chanson dans mon ipod” (47). Indeed, laughter is the ultimate cure and the speaker’s/Jambon’s very own philosophy: “i’ faut rire,” the speaker in “Mon philosophy à moi” in L’École gombo repeats (83 – 84). Jambon’s most singular and powerful element, however, is that his poetry presents Cajun French as inherently Franco-American. This impartial celebration of both French and American culture is very unlike the mindset of Jambon’s fellow Cajun French poets. At a round-table during the Acadian World Congress in 1994, Zachary Richard, a paragon of Franco-American culture, was asked if “littérature cadienne” could also exist in English. He answered: “La réponse, qui paraît peut-être paradoxale pour une communauté vivant aux É.-U., est définitivement ‘non’ … il est impossible de concevoir une littérature cadienne sans qu’elle soit de langue française. … Une littérature cadienne est par définition de langue française” (“L’Émergence” 505).³⁵ About a quarter century later, things have changed, and there is no doubt that, with his œuvre, Jambon has partly vitiated Richard’s claim. Obviously, the littérature cadienne cannot do without the English language. As early as in 1991, Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre acknowledged the crucial impact of the American context on Louisiana French culture: The Louisiana French repertoire is heavily influenced by the American context in which Cajuns have lived for over 350 years. The connections between Louisiana and France, and Louisiana and Africa, are undeniably important, especially in the oldest genres. But the social, geographic, and cultural connections between Louisiana and America are also very important, especially in the most contemporary genres. Louisiana is not only part of the French-speaking and Creolespeaking [sic] worlds. It is also a part of the American South, of the Gulf Coast, of the Caribbean Basin, of the Mississippi Valley, of the American West, of the political United States, and of the New World. (223)

 Richard’s paper was published almost a decade later.

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It is important to note that Ancelet, even though he uses the term “American” in its widest sense, does not refer to the linguistic impact of American culture on the “French-speaking and Creole-speaking worlds” of Louisiana. It is Jambon who insists that both American culture and the English language contribute to forming Cajun culture, including Cajun literature. Above all, it is the hybrid constitution of Cajun culture, its transculturalism that inscribes Cajun literature in the American context. With Jambon’s contribution, Cajun poetry has reached a state in which cadienneté and américanité can be seen as equivalent. Although he has a predilection for writing in French, American culture, both literary and popular, is an inherent part of his poetry. This evolution bears a striking resemblance to that of Acadian poetry. In 1988, French writer Martine Jacquot argued that, after two decades, Acadian poetry had arrived at a point of convergence where the concepts of acadianité and américanité overlap: L’imagination du poète lui permet d’englober les éléments du monde américain, tout en restant fidèle à ses origines. … La culture américaine a pénétré l’Acadie et l’Acadie s’est ouverte sur le monde, dans un échange culturel qui ne ressemble plus à un envahissement, à un vol d’identité. Et si les thèmes traditionnels tendent à tenir moins de place, les textes récents n’en sont pas moins acadiens pour autant. Les bases de l’imaginaire restent les mêmes. (“De l’acadianité” 141)

Thus, Cajun literature strives to remain true to its origins all the while adopting American elements. As Jambon’s poetry shows, bilingualism and biculturalism have a multiplying effect on collective memory. Like other Cajun writers, Jambon uses mutability as a mnemonic mechanism, for instance, in making fragmented things whole again. There is no better example than his preface to Petites communions, which is a single sentence, several lines long, expressing the inter-relatedness of all things in life: À la fois partie des mondes francophones, anglophones, et franglophones, à la fois partie du corps du christ et de l’âme critique, à la fois partie de la famille et la famine humaine, à la fois partie et séparé des amitiés les plus intimes, je grouille et je fouille en multitudes de solitudes, chantant dans la sainte mer et dansant sur la sainte terre, je m’exprime en mélange de message des maîtresses que je mâche et je masse et je mêle pour mener les méninges de la matrice jusqu’à la mort, pour bénir des belles bêtises et sortir des sortes de sorts, je me trouve bien parmi les liens, les attachements se cachent pas, tout partout sont les connexions, je trouve que nous on se nourrit tous de nos communions. (15)

This sentence is a stylistic outburst of rhymes, sound repetitions, and mental ideas. Above all, however, as disparate as the ideas may seem, they are held together by a common theme: communion. Jambon’s poetry also corresponds to

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how two collective memory scholars view Halbwachs’s mémoire collective: a “shared image … made up not only of what people actually recall and then pass on but also of things that have somehow been recovered, embellished, or even invented to serve some contemporary cause” (Lang and Lang 80). The study of how one culture coalesces with other cultures has been the object of transculturalism. For Richard Slimbach, “[t]he test of transculturalism is to think outside the box of one’s motherland, seeing many sides of every question without abandoning conviction, and allowing for a chameleon sense of self without losing one’s cultural center” (211). Jambon’s poem “Quatre coins du petit monde (plus un)” epitomizes this transcultural approach, for it reunites various cultures. The speaker/Jambon meets Mauritian immigrants of Chinese descent in Nova Scotia and comes across an article by a young scholar from Réunion Island who compared Jambon’s poetry with the poetry of a Mauritian poet. This multicultural mix is a perfect example of Glissant’s “l’écho du chaos-monde”: The world’s chaos consists of multiple echoes.³⁶ Jambon’s statement in the preface of Petites communions, “Je me trouve bien parmi les liens, les attachements se cachent pas, tout partout sont les connexions, je trouve que nous on se nourrit tous de nos communions” (15), is another instance echoing Glissant’s idea that the principle of literature is to uncover the hidden connections: “Ce qu’il y a autour de vous ne relève pas de la description réaliste, de même qu’elle ne relève pas de l’histoire qu’on raconte. Ça relève de séries, de connexions qui sont cachées, qui ne sont pas évidentes. La littérature c’est remettre au jour les connexions cachées” (Glissant and Isidori). The Mauritian connection in Jambon’s poem highlights the arbitrary transareal connections of the speaker’s life, and evokes Torabully’s metaphor of creole cultures as a coral. In the end, as Lévi-Strauss observed, no culture is alone; every culture coalesces with other cultures, and it is this process which establishes cumulative series (Race 41). Jambon’s poems emphasize the highly creative processes of collective memory at work. They not only show the hybrid ties within South Louisiana culture, or the connections between the distant and the recent past. In true Cajun fashion, Jambon borrows forms, images, and genres from other cultures and reshapes them into a Cajun artifact. Similar to Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s idea of “new mestiza” (Borderlands), Jambon offers a border-crossing, hybrid perspective of Cajun culture. Ultimately, Jambon’s poetry rather reflects the unpredictable outcome of the encounter of heterogeneous elements. Instead of Lévi-Strauss’s “closed universe  The presentation preceding the poem “Bayou” in Les Grands Chaos (1993) reads: “Approche d’un temps primordial, terre et eaux mêlées, où le rythme de la voix est élémentaire: Ici, battu de huit cadences. Tout se fond en cette mer et cette terre: Mythologie, la nuit africaine, le Vésuve imaginé, les caribous du Nord. L’écho-monde parle indistinctement” (Glissant, Poèmes 400).

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of instruments” (see Lévi-Strauss, Pensée 31), Jambon’s inventory is open and under constant construction. He is an artiste-bricoleur who relies on both his assembling skills and the inspiration emanating from the existing relations between the elements. Thus, Jambon’s poetry exemplifies Glissant’s notion of creolization as it presents a multitude of interconnected memories, a communion of different languages, of different genres (poems, songs, prayers), of different cultures; and it is through Jambon’s written communication that they are preserved —to reverberate in the world of posterity.

11 Conclusion and Outlook Southern fiction, it has been claimed, “tends to celebrate those who do not leave the community but integrate themselves into it, while still maintaining their individuality and dignity—that is, without being completely subsumed by the community” (Brinkmeyer 4). There is no doubt that Cajun literature celebrates those who contribute and integrate themselves into the Cajun community while upholding their individuality. Cajun literature reflects, however, even more complex dynamics. As this book has sought to show, Cajun literature gradually developed from the occasional Cajun text into a unique literary form, revealing the consolidation of a Cajun collective memory and identity. Thanks to three specific modes of remembering—a self-reflection of the present culture and identity, an intensified exploration of the past, and an open symbiosis with other cultures—Cajun literature has found a way to mature without being weighted down by either the past or by the bleak prospect the ubiquitous mainstream American culture and the proclaimed demise of the French language offer Cajun culture. Although the complex history of the Cajuns, their heterogeneous constitution, and the imperiled state of their culture challenges the determination of a distinctive group identity, the Cajun revival certainly made an official Cajun collective memory apparent. That period also figures as an example of the paradox of forgetting: Only when the Cajuns realized they were about to lose, i. e., forget the French language and their traditions, did they start to dig into their past and seek out the fundamental aspects of Cajun culture. This tightrope walk between forgetting and remembering, between the past and the present, is also valid for literature in which, as T. S. Eliot remarked, the poet (and, by extension, the writer) “is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living” (“Tradition” 22). Living memory, meaning memories fixed through rituals or circulating media, ensures an ongoing memory work. Cultural texts such as literature function “as the mnemonic art par excellence. Literature supplies the memory for a culture and records such a memory. It is itself an act of memory. Literature inscribes itself in a memory space made up of texts, and it sketches out a memory space into which earlier texts are gradually absorbed and transformed” (Lachmann, Memory 15). Literature absorbs collective memory. It acts as a space where the distant past and the present (or recent past) coagulate. Like an individual’s view from inside a cave toward the outside world, access to memory is restricted. Literature provides the means to make apparent hidden memories and their connections. It tentatively reproduces reality as in, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-012

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for instance, life writing, and also expresses concepts of the past and future, both in fiction and non-fiction. As mediators, writers not only record but disperse memory through their works. The Cajun texts make apparent elements affirming the Cajun identity which are likely to remain invisible otherwise. The recurring motif of the loup or references to songs by Amédée Ardoin, Nathan Abshire, Iry Lejeune, and the Balfa Brothers become firmly rooted and help crystallize Cajun identity. References to cultural traditions and fellow Cajun writers, activists, or CODOFIL members declare to the world that the Cajuns exist despite numerous adversities and their state as an ethnic minority. In fact, Cajun culture has an inherent sense of defying the odds: Nous nous trouvons, plus de deux siècles plus tard, encore Cadiens. Si nous avons survécu plus ou moins bien, c’est parce que nous avons appris à négocier la marge en nous adaptant, en innovant les réponses aux pressions de la majorité, des réponses qui quelquefois résistent directement, qui résistent beaucoup plus souvent indirectement, comme un tour de judo socioculturel, utilisant la force de l’adversaire. (Ancelet, “Marginalité” 366)

The emerging written tradition thus serves to define Cajun identity as well as to exemplify and ensure the continuance of Cajun culture. Bringing together the memories of “the unacknowledged legislators who come to us in the form of the writer, the storyteller and the poet” (Bourque, “Louisiana”), Cajun literature is also evidence of the existence of a Cajun collective memory. Thanks to such major memory coordinators as Barry J. Ancelet or Darrell Bourque, this “vernacular”¹ memory celebrates the distinct landscape of the bayous and the prairies as well as such memorable socio-cultural traditions as music and storytelling. Cajun literature further acts as a point of intersection of individual and collective memory, for cultural descriptions evoke personal memories and trigger collective views which the individual has acquired through socialization. The Cajun texts reveal how important social anchors are for the individual and the community, and that social belonging determines the Cajun sense of place. Accelerating changes in the world, however, jeopardize the communal life of a larger community, and “without the context of a larger community [the] sense of family is hard to maintain. Where history and hope are forgotten and community means only the gathering of the similar, community degenerates into lifestyle enclave” (Bellah et al. 154). Fakelore, which still governs certain areas of Cajun cul-

 According to American historian John Bodnar, “vernacular culture … represents an array of specialized interests that are grounded in parts of the whole. They are diverse and changing and can be reformulated from time to time by the creation of new social units” (14).

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ture, especially when it comes to tourism, represents such a “lifestyle enclave.” Cajun literature, however, nurtures the context of the larger community—for instance, the cultural community, the francophone community, the community of writers and artists, etc.—through an equilibrium of repetition and innovation. This is a necessary process, for “[s]ince we must live through our posterity, the offspring of our families, that history and its lesson must belong to us and tell our collective tale. Hence our myths, memories and symbols must be constantly renewed and continually re-told, to ensure our survival” (A. D. Smith 208). Literary works mirror the relationship between the authors and their time; they depend on the relationship between writers and their time and community. It is the present which makes us better understand the past and turn towards it (Viau, Grands Dérangements 307). The fact that the Acadian expulsion figures prominently in Cajun culture—and also increasingly in literary works—indicates that particular part of Cajun history as determining Cajun culture. It also supposedly points to a potential obsession with the past. Especially in the wake of drastic transformations, the past emerges with greater force to the extent of becoming a haunting presence. Past traditions, wrote Karl Marx, weigh like a nightmare on the living. In times of revolution, people are intent on creating something new, but they make their own history under circumstances transmitted—or borrowed —from the past (89). This fixation on the past necessarily results in a fossilization of memory. Like Hamlet’s father, who returns as a ghost,² the past is always present yet seldom fully graspable, for it appears only as a reconstructed memory. It is not the harbor whereto a ship heads. Rather, it shines like a beacon, always in sight, but never within reach. Moreover, “[w]here the creation of a sense of the past is not in the hands of professional historians, it is all the more likely that the past will be used as a resource for legitimating rather than as an avenue toward truth” (Schudson, “Past” 287). Indeed, Dudley LeBlanc’s efforts for an Acadian revival in exploiting the Evangeline legend served to legitimate the existence of Cajun culture. The historical revisionism spurred by Carl A. Brasseaux in the 1980s and 1990s, however, modified the Cajun collective memory. Following the Royal Proclamation in 2003, the date of July 28 keeps the memory of the expulsion alive even though the Cajuns lack any concrete “Erlebniserinnerung” (Theunissen 10 – 26), any memory based on experience.³ Likewise, literary texts which ritual The Nordic version of Hamlet’s twin brother Amlethe—consisting of the words “am” and “Lethe”—already carries the notion of repression and forgetting (Haverkamp 88).  As a contrast, the inspiring force emanating from Acadian sites of memory in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia is much more powerful. Unlike in the Cajun music scene, where Acadia is mostly absent except for a few songs and the short-lived band Réveille, the Acadian music scene is

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ize historical memory might be reflections of the burden of the Grand Dérangement. In fact, the recourse to the past is a means of self-scrutiny and community construction. At first, Cajun writers filtered out the distant past, but then they transformed the fictive legacy of the Acadian past embodied by Evangeline and introduced such historical characters as Beausoleil or other (semi‐)fictional characters, thus denouncing the “specters of inauthenticity” (Jolly) established by Longfellow and his followers and giving the Acadian past a multi-dimensional view. Far from being possessed by the past, the Cajun writers increasingly use it to make sense of the present, preserve Cajun culture, and cultivate the Cajun identity. In reconstituting the past and enlivening it through poetic and aesthetic variations, historical events seem to be closer and more immediate to our present. Lastly, although works such as, for instance, Castille’s life writing portray an irrevocable and irreversible past through the alteration and vanishing of traditions and the surrounding landscape, they simultaneously fix memories. The event of the Grand Dérangement also endures as an omnipresent antecedent in the context of contemporary dislocations to which the Cajuns are subjected. Despite the tragic consequences of such incisive events as displacement and dispossession, the Cajuns generally abstain from a nostalgic or melancholic attitude; they do not lament or rant about their misfortunes to excess, which might appear as apathy. Considering that their cultural understanding is grounded in the land, they have been acutely aware of the necessity to save the natural habitat of Southwest Louisiana in the wake of hurricanes or oil spills. Most Cajun writers were unable to write about the human-made catastrophe of 2009. Darrell Bourque, for instance, confessed in 2010 that he did not know “how yet to translate that into the language of a poem. … One of the great lies and the great myths we’ve told ourselves is that there’s a division between the natural world and the human world. … And I think we’re as much an extension of the natural world as the plankton and the pelican” (qtd. in Breed and Smith). To avoid becoming refugees again, this time “réfugiés environnementaux” (Pitre, “Bayou Lafourche” 254), they must safeguard the jeopardized environment. Only about a decade after the disaster, Cajun writers have started to mobilize against the environmental deterioration of the land with the publication of a non-fiction book by Carl A.

defined by bands with such telling names as 1755 and Grand Dérangement. At the same time, there are voices who claim that Acadian culture is weighted down by its past. Acadian cultural activist Hérménégilde Chiasson, for instance, condemns the negative influence of Evangeline and the overwhelming cultural production it generated. In an article, “Oublier Évangéline,” he advocated to forget Evangeline in order to loosen the Acadians’ attachment to this distorted vision of the past. However, in demanding to forget Evangeline, Chiasson only contributes to the commemoration of the icon.

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Brasseaux (Ain’t There No More: Louisiana’s Disappearing Coastal Plain [2017]) and poems by Jack B. Bedell (No Brother, This Storm [2018]).⁴ It seems only natural that today’s Cajun activists connect the fight for the environmental cause with that for their culture and for the French cause. Despite the growing collective consciousness regarding a genuine Acadian past and the constant fight for the preservation of Cajun culture, Cajun texts offer a prospective view. Indeed, writers take not only the present and the past into consideration, but also the future. In fact, it is a writer’s task to establish a link between the past and the future: “L’écrivain d’aujourd’hui est toujours un écrivain futur” (Glissant, Entretiens 122). Victor Hugo, musing about the function of the poet, argued in 1840 that “[t]oute idée, humaine ou divine, / Qui prend le passé pour racine / A pour feuillage l’avenir” (“Fonction” 31). A century later, French philosopher Gustave Thibon also acknowledged in a lecture on tradition and movement that “[l]e passé ne nous intéresse pas en tant que tel (nous ne sommes ni embaumeurs, ni gardiens de musée), mais comme support et matrice de l’avenir. Et si nous veillons sur les racines, c’est par amour pour les fleurs qui risquent de sécher demain, faute de sève. Toute civilisation digne de ce nom se reconnait à la fécondation perpétuelle du présent par le passé” (97). This approach might well apply to the Cajuns’ understanding and handling of the past exemplified by the inscription “Un peuple sans passé est un peuple sans avenir” on the apron of the Eternal Flame located in the Acadian Memorial Garden. Without doubt, the development of Cajun literature gives more ample evidence of the necessity to find a balance between tradition and movement. Today’s notion of a heterogeneous Cajun culture contrasts with the uniform perception transmitted by outsiders. Indeed “[m]onolithic notions of identity, often shaped by defensiveness or victimology, clash with the conviction that identities, national or otherwise, are always heterogeneous and in need of such heterogeneity to remain viable politically and existentially” (Huyssen, Twilight Memories 5). Despite, or rather because of, socio-cultural changes, the Cajuns have forged a collective consciousness made both of intrinsic images and of stereotypes conceived by the outside world. Over the past four decades, Cajun literature has managed to let go of the centripetal force of outside ascription by non-Cajun writers to become a literary form which is driven by a centrifugal

 Ain’t There No More: Louisiana’s Disappearing Coastal Plain (2017) by Carl A. Brasseaux, Davis, and Twilley is part of a series about America’s third coast, the “forgotten coast” in Brasseaux’s words (“Acadian History”).

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force all the while engaging in a dialogue with the surrounding literary world.⁵ In adopting (and adapting) the cultural invention of Evangeline, the Cajuns attempt to “convince and coerce insiders and outsiders … to accept the autonomy of a ‘we’” (Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations” 479 – 480). Especially francophone Cajun literature evokes a highly hybridized memory culture as it juggles with Cajun French, Standard French, and English. Although Benedict Anderson had most certainly only one language in mind, his claim that “from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood, and that one could be ‘invited into’ the imagined community” (145) equally applies to such bilingual groups as the Cajuns. Zachary Richard’s statement in an interview in 2014 echoes this view: What is happening in South Louisiana in terms of ethnic identity is completely language determined. There are two parallel phenomenon [sic]. On the one hand there is a new generation of young ‘Cajuns’ who are functionally monolingual Anglophone. Which does not prevent them from identifying themselves strongly as ‘Cajun.’ This identity is based on heritage, life style and personal affiliation. On the other hand the French speaking community is evolving to a larger more inclusive identity which I would call ‘Louisiana Francophone’ as opposed to strictly ‘Cadien.’ The days of the native French speakers (those whose maternal language is French) are drawing to a close. With the demise of this generation, a new French speaking collective is emerging. This community is not specifically ‘Cadien’ although most of its members would identify themselves as such. This group includes international French speakers (largely the professional educators who are teaching French immersion) as well as Louisiana French speakers who do not consider themselves specifically Cajun. (Richard and Shoeffler Comeaux)

It is, therefore, quite remarkable that the French language is no longer necessary for a person to identify as Cajun. This much the Cajun texts of the past two decades have shown: The Cajuns’ position is not just interstitial (Hebert-Leiter, Becoming Cajun 5). Rather than existing in-between two different cultures, the Cajuns live in two cultures. The challenge of the Cajun community then is to confront this bicephalous identity (Denis), which turns out to be a constant fight for the Cajuns and for other francophone minorities in North America: “Que ça soit au Missouri, en Louisiane, ou au Québec, de vivre en français en Amérique est un acte de résistance, voulu ou non, conscient ou pas” (Richard, “Préface” 9). While “[i]nternational French can be and is used to launch local varieties” (Brown, “Development” 224), inventive

 In referring to the centripetal and centrifugal forces of the cultural world, I draw on Bakhtin’s concept presented in his essay “Discourse on the Novel” (Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination 259 – 422).

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works which play with local varieties such as Jambon’s poems honor the ethnic identity of the Cajuns. In the end, French will be determined by those who use French, who leave a trace of the development of the writing process besides communicating ideas, feelings, and reflections (Ancelet, “Valoriser” 145). Against this background, literature is also where the written word unites with its older sibling (Glissant, Traité 190), the oral tradition: “Écrire, c’est dire, littéralement” (Glissant, Traité 121). As oral storytelling is phasing out in today’s modern societies, the oral tradition still constitutes the core of Cajun literature and is an essential tool in preserving the Cajun collective memory. Especially poetry, though no longer an oral skill, makes use of songs from the Cajun and from the American and French repertoires as well as of elements of the storytelling tradition as, for instance, in the section “Fables” in Jack B. Bedell’s No Brother, This Storm. Similarly, the prose genre with Richard’s tales about ‘Tit Edvard and Télesphore, Gautreaux’s stories, and Castille’s and Thibodeaux’s non-fiction accounts incorporate the Cajun folklore tradition. The production of francophone Cajun literature, according to Ancelet, is important for two reasons. For one, it shows a high degree of creativity, which is a miracle considering the systematic efforts to eliminate the French language and identity in Louisiana. Moreover, francophone Cajun literature uses distinct poetic strategies and a symbolic capital of its own, constituting the continuity of traditions and the symbolic force determined by the Louisiana context. To Ancelet, each Cajun expressing herself in French and in her own terms is a “living exception” (“L’Exception” 81). Four decades after Cris sur le bayou, francophone Cajun literature is far from fading, nor is the Cajun collective memory about to be clouded by indiscriminate details. Through writing down oral traditions, the Cajuns have gained empowerment: “l’oral-écrit-oral multiplie l’ouverture et trace dans l’impromptu ardent du monde, qui est la seule forme de la permanence” (Glissant, Traité 114). Cajun literature mirrors this development of the Cajun collective memory and it makes the culture of the Cajuns visible. The Cajun collective memory seeks holdings also outside of Cajun culture and transgresses borders to create a transnational imaginary, hence adopting a transcultural outlook. Indeed, the processes of collective memory have been compared to the habits of the cuckoo: “Comme les oiseaux qui ne pondent que dans le nid d’autres espèces, la mémoire produit dans un lieu qui ne lui est pas propre” (de Certeau 131). Traveling and migration not only delimit a geographical space, they also sustain the spirit and imagination, thus mainly contributing to collective memory. Heterogeneous and malleable, Cajun culture exposes what Glissant called “identité relation” (Mémoire 38): a space where American culture merges with the fancophonie du nord (i. e., Quebec, New Brunswick, parts of Ontario, Belgium) and the francophonie du sud (i. e., the Carib-

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bean, Africa), thus mixing the perspective of “périphérie vs. France” of the former with the post-colonial perspective of the latter. Cajun literature is rooted in Cajun culture but has also established connections to Canada, France, and other francophone countries. Thanks to its flexible boundaries and the ability to adapt to whatever Cajun authors bring into it, collective memory in Cajun literature has moved from a local and regional to a more global outlook, best embodied by the transnational Acadian imaginary as well as such imagined communities as the francophone community and ethnic minority communities. Alternating between repetition and change, between rootedness and rootlessness, the Cajun collective memory continues to sustain Cajun culture. The Grand Dérangement is a good example of the entangled nature of memory, for it denotes an imaginary transcending such themes as displacement. Cajun writers further seek to make the fragmented memory of the Acadian dispersal whole again by drawing parallels to other traumatic events and showing solidarity to the rooted errantry (“errance enracinée”) (Glissant, Poétique 49) of other minorities such as Native Americans, African Americans, or Jews. As certain rituals disappear, the written tradition seems to be the only viable means to preserve and make Cajun culture visible. Yet texts also carry an inherent risk: They might be removed from circulation and communication (J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis 91). It is, therefore, important that institutions organize, archive, and restore collective memory, and that fellow writers and artists connect: “The political, economic, and social relations of the author (or sometimes the author’s friends, publishers, heirs) have a great deal to do with the establishment of a reputation as a ‘classic’ or a ‘great art’ … once enshrined, the work accumulates a self-perpetuating rhetorical power” (Schudson, “Past” 288). Further, as Lang and Lang found out about recognition and renown, source material about authors is also relevant for remembrance (103 – 104). Those Cajun authors who have a wide exposure through publications and critical reception will endure longest. Although Cajun writings are still little known in the US and internationally, they promise to reach a wider audience thanks to an increasing support of the arts in Louisiana. Moreover, literary critical discourse paves the way for the emergence of an original Cajun literary history, which ultimately helps Cajun works become collective memory. Yet there are also Cajun writers whose voices are less audible. For instance, the Cajun literary field remains rather silent about female writers. Two studies have explored the crucial role of Cajun women in transmitting language and traditions (Ware; Fontenot and Brasseaux), but according to the official discourse, the majority of the initiators of the Louisiana French Movement as well as the founders of Cajun literature are men. The presence of men like Dudley LeBlanc or James Domengeaux has eclipsed female actors like musician Cleoma Breaux

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Falcon or Jeanne Castille, whose endeavors are relatively ignored today despite the honors she received from France. Even today, male writers attract more attention than female writers. The few Cajun women writers (i. e., Beverly Matherne) are still rarely acknowledged by the wider public. More recently, such male writers as, for instance, Darrell Bourque have pointed to the importance of the female voice in literature. It is to be hoped that women’s literary exploits will soon receive their deserved acknowledgment. As to the legitimacy of literary productions, it is necessary to address the literary quality of the works in order for the Cajun writers to remain acknowledged and safeguard the written tradition. Hans R. Runte emphasized this solicited effect of literary productions in an article about the state of Acadian literature— which could also apply to Cajun literature: Tôt ou tard, il se posera pour les littératures qui nous occupent aujourd’hui la question épineuse de la qualité. Tôt ou tard, l’enthousiasme bienveillant que suscite notre admiration devant le renouveau de l’écriture française en Amérique devra céder la place à l’examen critique, parfois cruel, des divers corpus. Tôt ou tard, nous devrons passer du simple dénombrement de la création littéraire artisanale à la quête de la littérarité qui ne cesse de se dérober, mais à laquelle nous devons néanmoins encourager les auteurs. (“L’Acadie” 85)

According to Runte, it is the reflection on the literary act, the metaliterary discourse, with its purpose and effect which defines the quality of an emerging literature: “L’écrivain professionnel se doit de demander ce qu’est la littérature” (“L’Acadie” 86). Cajun literature is not simply folkloric literature, satisfying the readership with portraits of moss-hanging oak trees, poor Cajun backwood-trappers, or fishers incapable of speaking English. Nor does a consistent re-visitation of the Acadian expulsion define Cajun literature. Instead, the selected Cajun writers have successfully embarked on a constant re-questioning of Cajun identity, acknowledging the Acadian past, while reassessing it according to their present needs and purposes. Although Cajun literature is not as extensive as Acadian literature, writers like Jambon, nonetheless, reflect on the work of a writer. Besides “Hemming my way,” his “Messe” in Petites communions investigates the position and duties of the artist who is a central character in the first and last poems of the section, “i. Introït” and “xxvi. Envoi.” The speaker expresses the artist’s effort to overcome the fear of revealing himself and his soul to the public (145). It is no easy matter for any author, much less for ridiculed Cajuns, to put out a written piece. The closing poem, in turn, repeats the artist’s uncomfortable position: “l’artiste s’expose devant / notre œil nu … on se sent / sans défenses, défensif, reculant comme l’écrevisse” (Jambon, Petites communions 177). Still, the artist retains the audacity to write. The speaker in the poem “xv. Pénitentielle: Pardon-

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nez-nous notre péché” pleads: “Pardonnez-nous notre péché / nous autres, on a l’audace d’écrire, / voler en plumes, monter en encre, / on arrache et on déchire / le cœur ouvert sur la page blanche / qui tache et saigne hors du corps, / l’idée qui fond en pleine vue / et à l’œil nu on fait du tort, / allitère des débris, des déchets dépouillés” (Jambon, Petites Communions 162). The writer and artist cannot help but abide by the demand to reveal the most intimate fears and feelings. After all, a culture depends on them as memory carriers. Another thematic element points to a conscious reflection of the role of memory for Cajun culture. While the literary representation of memory figured only rarely in the early Cajun writings, later writings such as Les Aventures de Télesphore et ‘tit Edvard au Vieux Pays, Hell or High Water: How Cajun Fortitude Withstood Hurricanes Rita and Ike, Megan’s Guitar, or Petites communions concretely engage with the function of memory and its significance for Cajun culture. The big, old turtle Mémoire Verte in Richard’s third tale embodies memory itself, as does the guitar in Bourque’s volume of poetry. The fact that memory has entered the literary discourse in Cajun culture seems to substantiate Nora’s oftquoted remark that “people talk so much about memory only because there’s none left” (Nora, Realms 1). Yet contemporary Cajun literature is anything but a lieu de mémoire. Rather, the Cajun writers have created a different space, a milieu de mémoire, where they negotiate Cajun identity and memory. Cajun literature has come to function as an important external medium of the memory of the Cajuns. By reconstructing the past and appropriating counter-narratives to Evangeline as their founding myths, the Cajuns distance themselves from mainstream American culture and make their own choices about how to best represent Cajun identity. Over 150 years after Longfellow’s poem, the attachment of the Cajuns to Evangeline has not abated – on the contrary. What is more consequential, Evangeline also serves as a blueprint for literary and artistic renderings by Cajun writers and artists, even if Evangeline characters today resemble more a Joan of Arc, as featured in Bourque’s and Thibodeaux’s works. Apart from representing a counter-memory to American culture, Cajun literature also contrasts with the French Creole literature of the nineteenth century, as well as with other contemporary francophone literatures. Cajun literature counters the memory of Cajun stereotypes and uses the symbolical capital of Cajun culture as scaffolding to escape the regional folklorization or a mythical past. In generating a Cajun literature, Cajun writers, artists, and scholars have formed a normative collective memory of Cajun culture – which is nonetheless a fine example of the process of infinite cultural cross-fertilization since it allows original aspects to emerge at the cultural and linguistic intersections (Scepi 455). The new Cajun literature serves not only to transmit knowledge, but also to pre-

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vent the culture’s demise and forgetting. Above all, it represents an act of therapeutic creativity, for it counters misrepresentations of the group. As something durable and perennial, Cajun literature is an emancipatory and legitimizing act seeking external recognition. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, literature has a unique characteristic. The written texts, unlike ruins, come to us pure and with a feeling of presentness: This is like nothing else that has come down to us from the past. The remnants of the life of the past, what is left of buildings, tools, the contents of graves, are weather-beaten by the storms of time that has swept over them, whereas a written tradition, when deciphered and read, is to such an extent pure mind that it speaks to us as if in the present. (Gadamer, Truth 163)

Depending on social and cultural factors, it is likely that literary texts can develop a feeling of pastness. Taking into account the historical background, Cris sur le bayou, for instance, can now be considered as a site of memory commemorating the first effort of a group of people to creatively render the poetics and aesthetics of Cajun culture. Understanding sites of memory not as a stable entity but as a fundamentally mnemonic process, Rigney emphasizes that they “are constantly being reinvested with new meaning” and that they thus “become a self-perpetuating vortex of symbolic investment” (“Plenitude” 18). The best example of the dynamic transformation of a site of memory is the myth of Evangeline, which, as an existing monument, is modified by new works of art (see Eliot, “Tradition” 15). In turn, the general perception of Cajun literature will be modified with each new publication, as will the critical view making hence the present study subject to alterations. Friedrich Nietzsche attributes man, a people, or a culture with a “plastic power” which allows them to grow in an extraordinary way, to transform and incorporate past and alien elements, to heal wounds, to replace lost things and to rebuild broken pieces.⁶ This malleable power is seated in memory: In making broken things whole again, it has a healing effect. Cajun writers have searched for a genuine way to express the feeling of loss and to counter disorder, and they have come up with such innovative motifs and forms as the werewolf, the broken sonnet, and ellipses (see Bedell’s last volume of poetry Elliptic).  “…how great the plastic power of a man, a people, a culture is: I mean by plastic power the capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds” (“Uses” 4).

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They also draw inspiration from natural motifs to express changeability and hope of renewal. Water, especially, represents an ambivalent motif as it not only represents regeneration and is essential for the survival of Cajun culture. The aggravating natural catastrophes such as hurricanes or land loss constitute one of the biggest threats to Cajun culture. The Cajun community thus becomes an organic community which handles its culture creatively. Still anchored in the culture(s) prevalent in Cajun Country, the Cajun collective memory as represented in Cajun texts shows signs of continued diversification—evidence of the Cajuns’ entry into the globalized world. Similar to the conceptual dissent which sustains the memory debate, the malleability of Cajun culture, which is partly responsible for the inconclusive determination of Cajun identity, is what keeps Cajun culture alive: While “consensus may facilitate inertia” and leads to invisibility, controversies ensure that a memory is renewed and kept alive (Rigney, “Divided Pasts” 94). Despite its disparate nature, Cajun collective memory contributes to the formation of a Cajun identity anchored in Cajun Country as a concrete region and in the Acadian past. The overview of the state of Cajun culture in the twenty-first century which Richard provided in a blog-entry of 2014 pertains to the francophone community in Louisiana, but can be extended to the Cajun community: “The French speaking [sic] community in Louisiana is evolving from an isolated and inward looking segment of society toward one which is open to outside, cross cultural influences while being strongly attached to its own cultural traditions” (Richard, “French”). In search of a cultural unity, the Cajuns distinguish themselves as Other and keep away from too dominant influences. Cajun writers select elements in a way that Cajun images and traditions remain memorable and do not become a “rampant growth”⁷ leading to forgetting. At the same time, they incorporate at will elements from other ethnic groups of Louisiana, American culture, and the world. The permeable social frame of Cajun literature allows for a humanistic and tolerant worldview. The Cajun writers’ message is not circumstantial, but universal, resembling a religion of the spirit served by the writer in the name of truth. In 1979, Dave Peyton gave an interview, in which he concluded that I have no doubt there will be Cajun literature in the future. The area is too fertile and alive with stories, traditions, and legends to remain fallow forever. The Cajun story, however, will not be told by someone from outside the region who has simply a knowledge of literature

 In his historiographic work on Jewish memory, Jewish historian Yerushalmi stated that any study which “does not aspire to be memorable is in peril of becoming a rampant growth” (Yerushalmi 101).

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and writing. The person who tells the Cajun story will have to be a Cajun himself or herself, or he or she will have had to have lived there and become sensitive to the Cajun life. (Deutsch and Peyton 89)

While non-Cajun writers who have lived in Cajun Country draw on Cajun culture for their writings,⁸ Cajun writers increasingly produce writings from the midst of their community. As the second installment of The Louisiana Series of Cajun and Creole Poetry (La Série de Louisiane de Poésie des Acadiens et Créoles) after Darrell Bourque’s if you abandon me, comment je vas faire: An Amédé Ardoin Songbook (2014), Jack Bedell’s chapbook Elliptic (2016) ensures the continuance of the Cajun collective memory, incorporating references to Acadian fables and Cajuns songs. The same goes for Florida-born Hardy Jones, who has been investigating his Cajun ancestry on his mother’s side in People of the Good God (Jones, “Getting to Know”), or Nathan Rabalais who has picked up the slack in francophone Cajun poetry. Finally, it has to be noted that the Cajun community of authors is not restricted to Acadiana. Given that such authors as Beverly Matherne, Ken Wells, and Martin Pousson produce Cajun literature outside of Cajun Country, we cannot speak of a community of place in a strict sense. Living outside of Louisiana, they still share a common sense of place with Louisiana-based writers, for it is the landscape, the climate, the distinct Cajun traditions, and cultural adaptability which characterize their works. With Kirby Jambon, Nathan Rabalais, and Joshua Caffery following in the footsteps of the pioneer Cajun poets and forming a distinct poetry of their own, we can definitely expect more Cajun poetry (as well as prose) in the future. In accordance with the famous verse “Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter,” “What remains is what poets create,” by German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (Sämtliche Werke 198), only the poet (or writer) has the intuitive capacity of ensuring the permanence of memories. Just as monuments are crucial in forming the identity of survivors and descendants, so are literature, music, and the visual arts. For these mediums, too, help build a sense of identity long after their creators have vanished (see Koselleck, “Kriegerdenkmale”). The personal memories and ideas of the Cajun writers are, once fixed in their texts, shared with the Cajun community and the wider world. The circulation, variability, and diversity of these memories will constantly accrete the Cajun literary corpus. More and more texts will refer to the historical past and to previous texts, though in a dif-

 For instance, Waggoner; North Carolina writer Moira Crone with her short story “Fever” from the collection Dream State: Stories (1995); New Orleans writer John Biguenet with his novel Oyster (2002); R. Reese Fuller with his creative non-fiction work Angola to Zydeco: Louisiana Lives (2011); or Tom Cooper with his novel The Marauders (2015).

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ferent form and manner. In the end, “the ‘new’ may well be only a different kind of something old … cultural renewal can be effected by the replacement of one cultural memory by another one” (Grabes, “Introduction” xii). The present corpus of Cajun texts highlights how innovative approaches which maintain links to traditional elements can stimulate memory processes. The thematic overlappings and the affinity for intertexts reveal the adaptive nature of Cajun culture, while innovative forms and ideas demonstrate its vitality. With each new text, the Cajun writers establish foundations for future writings and contribute to the transformation of the collective memory of the Cajuns. Remarkably, they reaffirm a statement made in 1991 that “[t]he most consistent element in Cajun Country may well be an uncanny ability to swim in the mainstream. The Cajuns seem to have an intuitive understanding that culture is an ongoing process, and appear willing constantly to reinvent and renegotiate their cultural affairs on their own terms” (Ancelet, Edwards, and Pitre xviii). As a logical consequence, my analysis, formed by an understanding of the present, will be seen in a different perspective in the future and differ from later interpretations. It will be interesting to see how the Cajun collective memory develops and how it will be interpreted in the future.

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Index If the title of a volume of poetry bears the exact same title as a poem, it is listed after the poem.

Abshire, Nathan 104, 122 f., 128, 421, 424, 454 Académie française 1, 410, 416, 448 Acadia, imaginary 24, 107, 136, 141, 150, 237, 267, 283, 304, 460 Acadian – Day of Remembrance 332 f. – exile, person 20 f., 24, 73, 134, 175, 178, 227, 236, 241, 262, 290, 335, 382, 374, 381 f. – French 140, 167, 409 – heritage 8, 30, 39, 100, 133, 138, 153, 219, 258 – history 3, 14 f., 21, 30, 37, 72, 77, 109, 134, 179, 187, 234 f., 237 f., 245, 262, 288 f., 330 – 333, 371 f., 378, 380, 388, 400, 406, 433, 457 – literature 12, 33, 94, 136, 140, 302, 382, 461 – memory 130, 304, 373, 388 – migration 6, 18, 241, 364, 378, 387 – National Acadian Day 133, 139 – order of exile 3, 19, 329, 332, 383 – past 3 f., 6 – 6, 31, 34, 37, 39, 41, 48, 57, 72 f., 75, 105 f., 129 f., 133, 136, 138, 151 f., 155 f., 174 f., 181 f., 208, 234, 236, 290 f., 322, 329, 351, 356, 371 f., 396, 406, 432, 456 f., 461, 464 – poetry 136, 417, 450 – Renaissance 37, 234 – resistance 27, 109, 377 – revival 108, 455 – World Congress 39 – World Congress 1994 39, 73, 108, 133, 245, 278, 449 – World Congress 1999 378 – World Congress 2004 334 Acadian deportation see Grand Dérangement Acadian diaspora see Grand Dérangement https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110772715-014

Acadian dispersal see Grand Dérangement Acadian exile see Grand Dérangement Acadian exodus see Grand Dérangement Acadian expulsion see Grand Dérangement Acadiana 7 f., 104, 113, 147, 158, 179, 183, 219 f., 222, 231, 242, 244 f., 259, 261, 264, 267, 301, 312, 360, 365, 372, 465 acadianité 39, 133, 450 Acadie du nord, space 129, 136, 213, 219, 234 f., 304, 360, 371 f., 373, 374 f., 379 f., 393 f., 396, 400 Acadie du sud, space 213, 219, 234, 304 Acadie tropicale, space 94, 126 f., 129, 136, 358, 360, 363, 365, 367 – 369, 371 f., 374, 379, 394, 396, 398, 400 Aesop 294 Affaire de Louvain 146 African 1, 39, 78, 82, 122, 255, 295, 298 – 300 – culture 124, 271, 302 – folktale 295 f., 300 – influence 264, 298 – jungle 204 – music 437 – mythologies 267, 294 – tradition 78, 296 African American 40, 97, 191, 242, 251, 264, 343, 368, 378, 460 – abolitionists 435 – music 192 f. – literature 12 f. Against the Tide, film 98 allegory 213, 222, 257, 283, 287 f., 292, 301 f., 416 – allegorical – map or life 446 – narrative 304 – setting 446 American – Census 1970 7

516

Index

– Census 2000 7 – Civil War 4, 21, 26 f., 157, 178 f., 226, 246, 252, 299, 435 – culture 113 – Dream 29, 159, 442 – history 196, 314, 411, 437 – literature 12 f., 27, 187, 205, 294, 302, 368 – mainstream culture 3 – 6, 9, 26, 31, 33 f., 48, 56, 59, 62 f., 102, 105, 112, 115, 119, 124, 127, 132, 135, 149, 159, 191, 285, 331, 350 f., 411 f., 453, 462 – music 196, 218 – Revolution 435 américanité 136, 143, 450 Americanization 1, 3, 119, 123, 160, 175, 213, 231 amnesia see forgetting Anansi, folktale character 296 Ancelet, Barry J. 2, 3, 7, 10, 14, 18 f., 20, 25, 27, 32 f., 35 – 37, 38, 41, 42, 68, 79, 91 – 95, 97 f., 100 f., 103, 104 f., 107 f., 110 f., 113 – 115, 116, 117 f., 123 f., 126, 128, 131, 138, 143, 146 f., 149, 152, 166, 181, 185, 188, 201 f., 225, 229, 231, 238, 240, 255, 263 – 265, 273 f., 292, 294, 296, 303, 312, 326, 330, 337, 340, 350, 354, 362 – 367, 373, 382, 384 f., 388, 399, 406, 423 f., 449 f., 454, 459, 466 – Jean-le-chasseur et ses chiens 38, 97 Anderson, Benedict 22, 24, 78 f., 86, 220, 458 Anding, Susan Evangeline Walker 238 animal tale 37, 264, 267, 282, 294, 302 anxiety of influence 96, 143, 152 Anzaldúa, Gloria E. 83, 451 – Borderlands: The New Mestiza—‘La frontera’ 83, 452 – “new mestiza” 451 Apostrophes, talk show 213, 254 Appadurai, Arjun 38, 79 Arceneaux, Jean 2, 35, 38, 41, 91, 93, 97, 99, 100, 101 – 103, 104, 106 f., 109 – 112, 114 – 116, 117,118 – 132, 136 – 138, 141, 143 – 151, 230, 365, 374, 398, 415, 417, 421 – 424, 426, 428, 438 – “À la musique” 104, 125

– “À Larry Ménard et tout le reste” 104 – “Acadie tropicale” 365 – “Appel à l’éxil” 91 – “Assimilation” 111 – “Blues du besoin” 104, 126 – “Chanson pour Louise” 104 – “Charge: Lui (Living Under the Influence)” 128 – “Chêne vert” 101 – “Chère Dyane” 144 – “Colonihilisme” 111, 230 – “Combustion spontanée” 125, 119 – “Dix ans après” 112, 114 – “Eau travaille” 116 – “Enfants du silence, I” 119 – “Enfants du silence, II” 125, 119 f. – “Exil II” 106 f. – “Fille Cadienne” 123 – “Je suis Cadien” 126, 129, 141, 426 – Je suis Cadien 41, 125 – “Jeu d’été entêté” 102 – “L’eau haute du printemps” 102 f. – “La nouvelle valse du samedi au soir” 104, 107, 122 – “Le loup en hiver” 126, 150 – Le Trou dans le mur: Fabliaux cadiens 38 – “Louis Arceneaux” 130, 132 – “Mardi Gras, Mamou” 103 – “Mélonie Brasseux” 130 – 132 – “Mine de rien” 129 – “Northbound and down” 123 – “Nuit chaleureuse” 102 – “Ouragan I”/“Ouragan II”/“Ouragan II” 127 – “Paris, 1979” 106 f. – “Pour mes enfants que je n’ai pas encore faits” 112 – “Réaction” 109, 112, 119 f., 124, 129 – “Richard Dugas” 130, 132 – “RPSVP” 104 – “Schizophrénie linguistique” 125, 118, 143 f., 415, 417 – “Suite du loup” 126, 145 f., 422, 424 – Suite du loup 126 – 130, 141, 144 f., 147, 148, 374, 424, 428 – “Tambours” 116, 151 – “Un état bilingue” 112

Index

– “Vol de nuit” 128, 130 – “190 West” 117 Arceneaux, Jean et al. – Cris sur le bayou: Naissance d’une poésie acadienne en Louisiane 42, 91 – 95, 98, 100, 102, 104 f., 109, 112 – 115, 117, 120, 122, 124 – 129, 136, 138, 140 f., 143, 145, 148 – 151, 209, 212, 230, 232, 251, 253, 363, 365, 406, 431, 438, 459, 463 Arceneaux, Louis 28, 130 f., 247, 347 Arceneaux, Thomas 219 archipelagic – characteristics 83 – communities 83 – concept 133 – nature of cultures 40 archipelago 40, 82, 84 – memory as 82 archipelization 83 Ardoin, Amédée 104, 354,356, 368, 370, 454, 465 Ardoin, Bois Sec 367 – “Bonsoir Moreau” 367 Aristotle 86, 96 – De memoria et reminiscentia 96 – Poetics 86 Arseneault, Guy 138 art of memory 61, 64, 71, 87, 397 – Cajun 100 Ashbery, John 405 – “Late Echo” 405 assimilation 14, 70, 111 – 114, 119, 121, 124, 135, 136, 139, 144, 151, 189 – 191, 210, 230, 300, 344, 346, 413 – American 62, 99, 344 Assmann, Aleida 23, 29, 38, 42, 44, 46 – 48, 51 – 55, 58 f., 61, 65, 73, 74, 9, 85, 89, 255, 311, 334 f., 337, 342, 352, 380 – “truncated past” 73 Assmann, Jan 44 – 46, 50 – 55, 59 f., 62 f., 75, 77, 84, 86, 132, 290, 460 – “Bindungsgedächtnis” 60 Attakapas 151, 179, 236, 244, 371, 372 autobiographical account 212 – 216, 256, 261, 338

517

autobiography 31 f., 88, 205, 214 f., 214, 217, 227, 242, 368 awakening 103 f., 112, 120, 150 f., 230, 289, 292 f., 305, 362, 365, 387, 429 – Cajun 96, 153, 292, 387 – memory as 62, 91, 94 – 97 Bach, Johann Sebastian 370, 398 – Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello 398 Bakhtin, Mikhail 87, 458 – The Dialogic Imagination 87, 458 bal de maison 32, 58, 183, 225 Balfa, Dewey 106, 231 f., 278, 367 – “Parlez-nous à boire,” song 278 Balfa Brothers 33, 367 f., 454 – “Tit Galop pour Mamou” 367 Baron Münchhausen 273 Barra, Megan 359, 365, 399 f. Barry, David et al. 42, 35, 94, 365 – Acadie tropicale: Poésie de Louisiane 42, 35, 94, 365 Bartlett, Frederic C. 49, 51, 66 Bashō, Matsuo 370, 393, 400 Bastide, Roger 58, 67 f., 71, 78 f., 90, 302, 412, 438 Baudelaire, Charles 16, 86, 142, 144, 147 – flaneur, motif 16 – Les Fleurs du mal 144 – Spleen de Paris: Petits Poèmes en prose 147 Baudrillard, Jean 162 Bayou Lafourche dialect 1, 410, 413, 416 Beasts of the Southern Wild, film 43 Beat – generation 137 – movement 138 – poets 137, 148 Beatles, band 183 Beau Dommage, band 443 – “La complainte du phoque en Alaska” 443 Beausoleil – Camp Beausoleil 235, 371, 374, 375, 376, 397 – icon 377 f. – Joseph Broussard 100, 107, 109, 117, 130, 138, 140, 233, 235, 236, 330, 371 –

518

Index

373, 374, 375 – 381, 383, 385, 393, 406, 432, 456 – symbol 150 BeauSoleil, band 378 Bedell, Jack B. 355, 405, 457, 459, 463, 465 – Elliptic 463, 465 – No Brother, This Storm 457, 459 Bedell and Bourque 355, 405 – Call and Response: Conversations in Verse 355, 405 Beecher Stowe, Harriet 23 – Uncle Tom’s Cabin 23 Beethoven, Ludwig van 104, 398, 445 – Für Elise 104 – Große Fuge 398 Belisle Davis, Albert 37 f. – Leechtime: A Novel 37 – What They Wrote on the Bathhouse Walls, Yen’s Marina, Chinese Bayou, Louisiana 37 Bellah, Robert N. 9, 13, 50, 230, 319, 330, 335, 342, 454 Bellard, Douglas 420 – “Mon canon le case que je suis cordané” 420 Benjamin, Walter 51, 78, 85, 86, 91, 150, 170, 197, 336, 351 Benoit, Tab 307 Berger, Yves 252 – Le Fou d’Amérique 252 Bergson, Henri 60, 65, 404 Bernard, Shane K. 2, 9, 26, 33 – 35, 38, 40, 92, 114, 117, 124, 129, 159, 164, 166, 168, 175, 181, 183, 190, 213, 231, 236, 240, 268, 297, 299, 374 Berry, Chuck 367 Bertrand, John 35 biculturalism 233, 265, 450 biculturality 13, 216, 412 – bicultural – approach 16 – community 422 – dilemma 147 – heritage 428 – identity 150 – minorities 114

– status 35 Biguenet, John 465 – Oyster 465 bilingualism 2, 14, 124, 140, 147, 297, 300, 413 f., 417 f., 439, 450 – bilingual 28, 36, 41, 92, 120, 125, 248, 347, 355, 358, 365, 369, 394, 410 f., 413 f., 417 f., 458 Blake, William 400 Bloom, Harold 96, 143 Bodnar, John 454 Boileau, Nicolas 438 – L’Art poétique 438 Bonnard, Pierre 401, 402 Boogie Ramblers, band 168 Botkin, B. A. 195 – A Treasury of Mississippi River Folklore 195 boucherie 32, 58, 74, 225 Bouchillon, Christopher Allen 145 – “Talking Blues” 145 Boudreaux, Pauline 129 Bourque, Antoine 37, 41, 265, 382 – Trois saisons 37, 382 Bourque, Darrell 1 f., 11, 13 f., 38, 41, 77, 111, 349, 354 – 408, 415, 419, 422, 425, 428, 437 f., 454, 456, 461 f., 465 – “Agnès as a Memory” 385 – “Apples, the Blue Plate, and Physics” 360 – Aubade: For a Summer Morning and the Things Themselves 354, 358 – “August 2005” 369, 428 – “Beausoleil Confesses to LaLoutre” 377 – “Beausoleil Faces the Final Solution” 373 – “Beausoleil Loses His Son” 373, 377 – “Beausoleil Talks to His Daughter Françoise” 377, 381 – “Beausoleil’s Last Night” 375 – “Before the Sparrows Wakened” 360, 362, 365 – Burnt Water Suite 354, 398 – Carbon Rites 354, 357, 358 – “Church Point Breakdown” 367 – “Claire, Sonnet after Surgery” 361 – “Cloud Shifts” 366, 371

Index

– “Des Papillons: With Octa Clark and Dewey Balfa at Mulates” 367 – “Dreaming My Father-in-Law” 403 – “Dreams and Nightingales” 392 – “Egrets at Bean-cutting Time” 359 – “Eight Prayers in an August Garden” 425 – “Elemore from the Other Side” 366, 392, 404 – “Elizabeth Brasseaux’s Turn” 383 – “Elmire” 361 – “Evangeline Speaks” 384 – “Feeding the Opossum” 359, 397 – “First Winter at Camp Beausoleil” 371, 397 – “From Pon-Yo’s Black Side” 368 – “Georgia O’Keefe Will Be Blonde” 357 – “Haecceitas” 390 – “Holding the Notes” 362, 392 – Holding the Notes 354, 363, 391 f. – “How We Became a New World People” 372, 406 – if you abandon me, comment je vas faire: An Amédé Ardoin Songbook 354 f., 465 – In Ordinary Light: New and Selected Poems 354 f., 359, 360 f., 361, 364, 367, 389, 393 f., 397, 399 f. – “Jamie Walking” 361 – “Jean Guilbeau’s Journey from Beaubassin to Beaubassin” 375, 379, 401 – “Le Courrir du Mardi Gras” 360 – “Light Theology and the Persimmon Tree” 360 – “Louisiana Maples in Late Winter” 359, 364 – “Madeleine Comeaux Trahan Sails to Louisiana with Her Children, 1785” 374, 383 – “Madeleine LeBlanc Comes to Baie SainteMarie” 374, 382 – “Megan’s Guitar” 371, 399 – Megan’s Guitar: And Other Poems from Acadie 354 f., 356 – 360, 362 – 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 379 – 388, 391 – 394, 396 – 408 – “My Father at Bat” 361 – “My Father at Grand Isle” 361

519

– “My Father in the Sun” 361 – “My Mother Gets Dressed for Sunday Mass” 361 – “My Mother Teaches Us to Speak in Tongues” 361 – “My Mother’s Memory, Portrait” 361, 370 – “My Mother’s Right Foot” 361 – “Newlyweds near High Island, 1937” 361 – “‘Of Men and Rivers’” 368, 394 f. – “Passage” 392, 398 – “Pittsburgh’s Chamber Music” 357 – Plainsongs 41, 111, 354 f., 358, 359, 360 f., 363 f., 368, 390, 393, 397, 398 f., 406 – “Plainsongs of the Marais Bouleur” 111, 360 f. – “Posing for Our First Communion Picture” 361 – “Prayer Card” 392 – “Proserpina’s Complaint: A Variation” 357 – “Putting William to Sleep” 361 – “Quartet, with Rembrandt” 400 – “Relatives” 361 – “René Leblanc’s Account of the Passage to South Carolina” 374, 380 – “Saute crapaud” 367 – “Spinoza’s Exile” 357 – “Standing Water in the Yard on the Feast Day of Saint Médard” 363 f. – “Sunday Afternoons Behind T-Maurice’s Dancehall” 362, 397, 401 – “The Angel in My Mother’s Back” 361 – “The Blue Boat” 395 – The Blue Boat 354 f., 357 – 361, 364 f., 370, 393, 394 f., 399 – 402, 425 – The Doors between Us 354 f. – “The Ducks at Lake des Allemands” 364 – “The Easter Meal” 363 – “The Fortune Teller in the Camargue” 402 – “The Grammar of Verbenas” 359 – “The Mallard at Her Nest” 359, 397, 403 – “The Things Elemore Left Behind” 366, 392 – “The Washhouse” 363

520

Index

– “The Yellow Iris in Jackie Kennedy’s Hair” 357 – “Things to Teach Grandchildren” 361 – “Tintamarre” 375 – “Turtle Dreams” 369 – “Unfinished Painting” 403 – “Van Gogh Comes to Louisiana le jour de la Toussain” 402 – “Van Gogh’s Samaritan” 402 – “Vanitas” 371, 392 – “What Elemore Left Behind” 366 – Where I Waited 354, 356, 357, 370 – “Woman with Guitar I/II” 400 Bourque and Bedell – Call and Response: Conversations in Verse 354, 393, 400, 405 Boym, Svetlana 73, 217 f., 220 f., 223 f., 227, 232, 251, 259 f. Brahms, Johannes 398 – Zigeunerlieder 398 Brasseaux, Carl A. 2, 10 f., 18 – 20, 21, 23 – 30, 32, 37, 41, 57, 77, 80, 103, 105, 106, 131, 170, 179, 201, 227, 236, 240 – 242, 248, 254, 271, 297, 298, 344 – 346, 355, 374, 378, 382, 455, 457, 460 Breaux, Agricole 235, 246 Breaux Brothers 123, 443 – “Ma blonde est partie” 123, 443 Breaux Falcon, Cléoma 111, 123, 255, 356, 368, 460 bricolage 78, 82, 411 f., 426 bricoleur 411 f., 426, 452 broken memory see memory broken poetry 391 broken sonnet 357, 374, 394 f., 401 f., 407, 463 Broussard, Earlene 106, 129, 422 Bruce, Vin 420 – “Le vieux hobo” 420 Buddhism 13, 138, 389, 391, 400 Burke, James Lee 10, 12, 31, 186, 357 Bush, George W. 435 f. Bush, George W. H. 435 f. Buson, Yosa 400

Cable, George Washington 12, 31, 179, 240 – Bonaventure: A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana 31, 179, 240 Cadienitude/Cadjinitude 121, 299, 300 cadienneté 39, 450 Caffery, Joshua 465 Cajun – Cajun power 268 – consciousness 8, 14 f., 20, 28, 38, 56, 65, 154, 190, 220, 222, 291, 412 – cuisine 2, 13, 34, 169, 257, 239, 362, 364, 412 – definition of 1, 6 – 9 – emancipation 2, 38, 90, 125 – exodus 175 – folktales 4, 6, 10, 38, 41, 92, 110 f., 149, 229, 239, 263 – 265, 273 f., 294, 296 – French 3, 7, 9, 16, 26, 11, 14, 32 – 38, 57, 69, 92 f., 110, 113, 115, 116, 120, 126, 131, 137, 164, 166 f., 177, 179, 181 f., 231 f., 250, 251, 258, 279 f., 346, 392, 409 f., 413, 416 – 418, 427, 437, 446, 449, 458 – variability 16, 113, 115, 122, 218, 410, 417, 419, 422, 446, 448 – history 2, 26, 30, 57, 72 – 74, 76 f., 105, 126, 131, 181 f., 215, 234, 235, 251, 257, 282, 289, 329, 374, 378, 385, 387419, 433, 455 – identity 2, 5 – 9, 13 f., 35, 38, 40, 45, 54, 56, 59 f., 69, 81, 91 f., 101, 112,118 f., 121, 154, 165, 171, 181 f., 187, 203, 204, 207 – 209, 216, 221, 232 f., 265 f., 300, 315, 334, 352, 396, 399, 411, 413 f., 422, 454, 456, 461 f. 464 – GIs 33, 105, 297 – life writing 212, 215 – literature 1, 4 – 6, 11 – 16, 18, 27, 30, 34, 33, 37 f., 40 – 42, 44 – 47, 53 – 55, 60, 62, 67 f., 73 f., 81, 84, 86, 88, 90, 93 f. 95, , 100, 107, 109, 113, 118, 126, 128, 150, 154 – 156, 187, 207 – 209, 212, 251, 276, 281, 302, 307 f., 312, 348 f., 355, 357, 365, 387, 395, 425, 444, 450, 453 – 455, 457 – 465 – littérature cadienne 11, 40, 449 – littérature franco-louisianaise 11

Index

– music 2, 4 – 6, 9, 13, 33 f., 36 f., 69, 98, 100, 101, 104 – 109, 111, 114, 122 – 124, 126 – 129, 148, 152, 155, 165, 167 f., 170, 186, 190, 209, 218, 220, 226, 231, 246, 303, 367, 370, 378, 398 f., 412, 420 f., 455 – oral history 54, 57 – past 2, 73, 129, 167, 200, 230, 234, 305, 332 – poetry 11, 36 f., 42, 91, 93 – 95, 100 f., 103 f., 106, 112 – 114, 117, 124 – 126, 129, 136 f., 142, 145, 151 – 153, 354 f., 365, 388, 391, 417, 426, 438, 440, 450, 465 – Renaissance 2, 18, 35 f., 38, 43, 45, 56, 62, 67, 74, 91, 93, 96, 99, 107, 115, 120, 122, 151, 181, 183, 186, 212, 218 – 220, 226, 234, 237, 253, 255, 257, 259, 262, 268, 283, 300 – revival 2, 35, 39, 60, 62, 93, 186, 213, 231, 453 – song 33, 101, 106, 168, 190, 226, 368, 420, 422 Cajunism 33 f. Campbell, Joseph 263, 272, 289, 303 “Capitaine, voyage ton flag,” song 226 Cardinal Richelieu 416 Carpet Bag Constitution 27 Carroll, Lewis 284 – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 284 Caruth, Cathy 76, 404 Carver, Ada Jack 31, 69 – The Cajun: A Drama in One Act 31, 69 Casey, Edward 65, 163 f., 208 Casgrain, Henri-Raymond 23 Castille, Hadley 118 – “200 Lines: I Must Not Speak French” 118 Castille, Jeanne 2, 4, 14, 27, 212 – 239, 240, 241 – 261, 265, 271, 402, 428, 438, 456, 459, 461 – Moi, Jeanne Castille, de Louisiane 212 – 214, 239, 244, 251, 253, 255, 259, 261 Catholic 9,13, 19, 23, 156, 158, 164, 180, 187, 192, 198, 322, 348, 358, 363 f., 389, 422, 425, 444 f. – belief 8, 104, 182, 198 – 200, 203, 206 f., 210 f., 228, 364, 368

521

– Church 21, 27, 198, 200 – 203, 228 f., 321, 335, 444 – faith 164, 187, 199, 320 – writing 198, 202, 204, 206 f., 390 – religion 153, 201 – tradition 153, 198, 447 Catholicism 39, 198, 200, 202 f., 204, 206 f., 358, 391, 412, 438, 447 f. Certeau, Michel de 61, 70, 77, 186, 459 Césaire, Aimé 82, 299 f. Chateaubriand, François-René de 25, 249 – Atala 249 – “Le Montagnard émigré” 249 Chatelain Sr., Jude R. 38 – Graines de parasol 38 Chenier, Clifton 367 chenier/chênière 39 f., 270, 287, 296 Cheramie, David 2, 9, 35, 41 – 43, 83, 148, 402, 416, 422 f., 438, 444 – “Il y a des loups dans mon pays” 423 – Julie Choufleur: ou Les Preuves d’amour 35, 83, 402 – “La cité des tois bleus au pays des zombies” 402 – Lait à mère 35, 148, 422 f., 438 – L’Allée du souvenir 35 Chiac 140, 417 f., 426 f., 432 Chiasson, Herménégilde 21, 92, 142 f., 375, 456 Choates, Harry 123 – “Jole Blon” 123, 220, 226, 443 Choctaws 158, 344 Chopin, Kate 31, 429 – A Night in Acadie 429 – “At Chênière Caminada” 429 – Bayou Folk 31 – The Awakening 429 Cicero 64 – De Oratore 64 Civil Rights Movement 435 Clark, Octa 367 Clifford, James 267, 315, 458 Clifton, Debbie 97 f., 99, 115, 118, 121, 122, 125 – 127, 136 f., 148 f., 151, 250, 422 – A cette heure la louve 148, 422 – “Blackie Frugé” 121 f. – “Cuauhtémoc” 151

522

Index

– “Situer situation” 121 f. Cœur fidèle, film 98 Cœurs Batailleurs, TV series 98 code-switching 417 f. codification 113 CODOFIL 33 – 36, 92, 106, 112, 129, 147, 215, 229 – 231, 240, 247 f., 256, 258, 261, 312 f., 422, 454 “Colinda,” song 124 collaborative remembering 309, 336, 341 collage 71, 89, 145, 340, 357, 366, 397, 399, 400 f., 403 f., 407 collective consciousness 20, 65, 306 – American 341 – Cajun 26, 47, 60, 65, 93, 152, 262, 457 collective memory 4 – 6, 16, 42, 44 – 47, 49 – 55, 59 – 61, 63, 66 – 71, 78 f., 82, 84, 87 – 89, 99, 105, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116 f., 124 f., 128, 151, 153, 165, 171, 182, 194, 197 f., 213, 216 f., 220, 225, 234, 255, 266 f., 269, 276, 279, 293, 318, 341, 347 f., 351, 355, 360, 369, 380 f., 387, 391, 395, 404, 406, 408, 412, 421, 424, 440, 447 – 451, 453, 459 f. – American 208, 421 – Cajun 2, 4 – 6, 9, 15 f., 20, 24, 38, 48, 51, 54 – 62, 73 f., 76, 80 f., 83 f., 90, 94 f., 97, 104 f., 111 – 114, 116 f., 122, 124, 126, 137, 143, 145, 149 – 152, 158, 178, 183, 185, 187, 194 f., 208 f., 212, 215 f., 227 f., 232, 235 f., 239, 244, 246, 255, 257, 263, 274, 278, 285 f., 302, 307, 310, 314, 325 f., 332, 339, 348, 356 – 360, 363, 380, 385 – 388, 392, 397, 408, 421, 437, 453 – 455, 459 f., 462, 464 – 466 – Franco-American 108 – French 296 – hurricane 325 – hybrid 411, 373 – literature as a medium of 4, 87, 89, 404, 462 – three modes of 60 – 62, 453 collective remembering 50, 65, 86, 286 commemoration 3, 6, 74, 88, 308, 311, 324, 327, 330, 350, 356, 392, 456

– commemorative 4, 54, 72 – 74, 187, 257, 283, 329, 335, 341, 348, 351, 356, 377, 388, 392 – communicative memory 51 – 54, 187 community of memory 9, 13, 50, 69, 319, 330 f., 335, 342 Connerton, Paul 33, 57, 66, 185, 330 Conrad, Joseph 193, 204 – Heart of Darkness 204 contrapresent function 132, 290 Contre vents, contre marées, film 98 conversational remembering 52, 331 Cookie and the Cupcakes, band 168 – “Mathilda” 168 coolitude 83, 300 Coonass 166, 180 f., 303 Cooper, Tom 465 – The Marauders 465 coral, motif 83 f., 451 coup de main 32, 203, 218, 225 Courville, Sady 226 crawfish 123, 127, 157, 163, 165, 262, 267 – 271, 273, 275, 277 – 279, 281 f., 286, 288, 290 – 293, 295, 297 – 299, 301, 303 f., 325, 412, 421, 425 creative nonfiction 310, 338 Creole – cuisine 239, 257, 264, 362 – culture 10, 33, 105, 149, 239, 245, 247, 264, 344, 362, 368, 388, 438, 402 – definition of 1, 10 – literature 33, 368, 370 – music 10, 398 creole culture 15, 80 f., 83, 451 Creoles of color 10, 12, 13, 25, 26, 104, 241 – 244, 250, 252 creolization 54, 80, 84, 344, 452 Croce, Jim 168 – “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” 168 Crone, Moira 465 – “Fever” 465 – Dream State: Stories 465 cultural memory 42, 44, 46, 50 – 55, 59 – 63, 69, 74, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 132, 187, 216, 255, 290, 311, 324 – 326, 334, 466 – American 326

Index

– Cajun 325 f., 377 – international 306 – Louisiana 428 cultural text 29, 89, 125, 136, 261, 351, 453 cultural trauma 76, 307, 324 f. Dafford, Robert 377 Daigrepont, Bruce 433 – “L’Acadie à la Louisiane,” song 433 Dalcour, Pierre 250 – “Heure de désenchantement” 250 Damas, Léon-Gontran 299 f. – Pigments 300 Darbone, Luderin 190 – “Quitter la maison” 190 Dardar, T. Mayheart 347 – Istrouma: A Houma Manifesto/Manifeste Houma 347 Daudet, Alphonse 250 – 252 – Contes du lundi 250 – “La dernière classe” 250 Dauterive Compact 379, 401 Davis, Fred 73, 217 Davis, Rocío 294, 301 Deepwater Horizon oil spill 3, 265, 304, 349 Degas, Edgar 401 Deleuze, Gilles 81 Denuzière, Maurice 34, 252 deportation 78, 80, 286, 290, deportation order see Acadian Des Marais, Émile 37, 40, 41, 97 f., 99, 101, 121, 209 – “Apologie du peuple français de Louisiane” 101 – “Les Faux Jetons” 121 – Mille Misères 37 Desbiens, Patrice 120, 143 Desdunes, Rodolphe Ancien 12, 13 Desnos, Robert 130 Deveau, J. Alphonse 377 – Le Chef des Acadiens 377 Diamond, Jim 144 – “Hiyo Silver Away” 144 diaspora 106, 337, 396 – discourse 428

523

– narrative 283 – Jewish 305 – memories of 294 – diasporic concept 267 – conscience/conscience diasporale 94 – element 293 – history 299 – leitmotif 290 Dilthey, Wilhelm 259 Diop, Birago 300 – Les contes d’Amadou Koumba 300 – Les nouveaux contes d’Amadou Koumba 300 disaster discourse 309, 313, 323, 349 disaster narrative 317, 348 f. discours ‘en retour’ 417 dispersion 289, 434 displacement 3, 109, 162, 217, 224, 250, 262, 274, 276, 282 f., 285, 289, 292 f., 301, 317, 344, 456, 460 – allegory 301 – Houma 346 – memory of 287 dispossession 428, 436 – Acadian 433 – Cajun 432, 456 – motif 427 Domengeaux, James 33, 35, 92, 108, 231 f., 246, 253, 256, 261, 460 Domino, Happy Fats 104 Doty, Mark 398 – “Grosse Fuge” 398 Doucet, Camey 232 Doucet, Carol J. 35, 42 – La Charrue: Poésies 35 Douglass, Frederick 435 dream 150, 159 f., 210, 220, 369, 371, 375, 392, 402 f., 406, 465 – Acadian 20 – American – memory 65, 66, 85, 391, 404 – motif 403 Drew, George 355, 397, 408 Dreyfuss, George B. J. 389 Drisdelle, Rhéal 139 f.

524

Index

du Bellay, Joachim 116, 249 – Défense et illustration de la langue française 116 – Les Regrets 249 – “sonnet xxxi” 249 Dubus, Andre 204 Dubus, Elisabeth Nell 31 Dürer, Albrecht 370, 404 Durkheim, Émile 65 Dylan, Bob 145, 183 Ebbinghaus, Hermann 170 Edler, Timothy 270 – Crawfish Man, comic 270 Edmonds, David C. 179 – Yankee Autumn in Acadiana: A Narrative of the Great Texas Overland Expedition through Southwestern Louisiana, October-December 1863 179 Edwards, Edwin Washington 268 Edy, Jill A. 311, 341, 348 Einstein, Albert 404 ekphrasis 89, 358, 390 f., 399 f. ekphrastic poem 407, 390, 399 – 401 ekphrastic poetry 400 f. Eliade, Mircea 335 Eliot, T. S. 55, 71, 90, 453, 463 Ellison, Ralph 120 – Invisible Man 120 Éloge du chiac, documentary 426 Éluard, Paul 60 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 389 f. emplotment 88 f. Erll, Astrid 5, 45, 48, 50, 52, 53, 86 – 89, 267 ethnic cleansing 395 European literary traditions 294 Evangeline 123, 213, 385, 455, 458, 462 – character 21 – 23, 32, 28 – 30, 131 f., 176, 226, 239, 247, 330 f., 352, 373, 375, 377, 380 f., 384 f., 387, 433, 456, 462 f. – cult 29 f., 174 – girls 30, 72, 238 – icon 23, 29, 75, 176, 330 f., 384, 456 – legend 23, 150, 348, 455

– myth 22, 29, 37, 57, 130 – 132, 176 f., 209, 238, 290, 330, 334, 373, 380 f., 458 – oak 28 f., 101, 258 Evangeline girls 30, 72, 238 Evangeline, film 29 exile 80, 106, 171, 250 f., 282, 303, 329, 333, 357, 396, 408, 428, 439, 447 – Cajun 106, 175 – person 133, 241, 406, 447 expulsion 23, 287, 294 fais-do-do 58, 225, 422 fakelore 38, 123, 454 – “Mon cœur t’appelle” 368 Faulk, James Donald 92, 117, 231 – Cajun French I 231 Faulkner, William 153, 154, 187, 193, 304 Fauré, Gabriel 444, 445 – La Messe de Requiem, en ré mineur 445 Fellini, Federico 403 – Book of Dreams 403 Feux Follets 36 Flaherty, Robert J. 223 “Flames of Hell/Les flammes d’enfer” 368, 420 Fleming, Meghan 366, 401 – Cloud Shift 366 folk medicine 185 folktale 4, 6, 10, 36 f., 38, 41, 92, 97, 98, 104, 106, 110 f., 118, 145, 149, 187, 195, 202, 229, 239, 245 f., 263 – 265, 273 f., 276, 294 – 296, 300, 302 f., 339 f. Fontenot, Canray 367, 370 Fontenot, James 179, 312, 338 – Les Attakapas 179 Fontenot, Mary Alice 268 Ford, Edwin H. 310 forgetting 59 f., 62 f., 79, 96 f., 99, 120 f., 150, 153, 155 f., 162 f., 173, 175, 181, 183, 204 – 207, 230 f., 308, 313, 328, 334, 344, 355, 370, 387, 392, 404, 453, 455, 463 f. – amnesia 105, 162, 306 – 308 – cultural oblivion 255 – oblivion 63, 71, 99, 120, 155, 256 f., 260, 307, 332 f., 341

Index

– oblivion, river of 59, 210 – Rita amnesia 307 f. – structural amnesia 255 Fortier, Alcée 123, 264 Foucault, Michel 77, 192, 417 foundational function 290 foundational memory 75, 90, 248 foundational/founding history 23, 156 foundational/founding myth 3, 15, 23, 132, 287, 292, 334, 462 founding story 23, 247, 381 francité 39 Franco-American 108 f., 137, 147, 304, 355, 411, 439, 449, Francophonie/francophonie 1 f., 34, 39, 79, 135 f., 142, 151, 265, 266, 298, 305, 459 French – ancestry 280, 297 f. – ban on, 1921 3, 32, 38, 59, 111, 114, 118, 180, 229, 243, 251, 280, 415, 419 – linguistic-cultural dilemma 36,117, 137, 145, 147, 149, 151, 179, 215, 231 f.,346, 416 – 418 – existentialism 148 – heritage 2, 9, 31, 37, 59, 115, 122, 374, 426 – literature 12, 33, 92, 98, 227, 251, 267, 294 – past 292, 365, 394 – reintroduction of 230 – Résistance 297 French Creole 219, 248, 350 – culture 33, 245, 247 f., 388 – language 1, 93, 97, 113, 148 f., 250, 279, 280, 369, 392, 417 – literature 12 f., 27 f., 34, 41, 93 – 95, 244 f., 250, 279, 462 – past 244, 247 French Creoles 10, 12, 25 f., 29, 32, 240 f., 243 f., 248 French Louisiana literature 25, 33, 410 “Frère Jacques,” song 279, 367 Frese, Lynda 357, 366, 401, 406 Freud, Sigmund 51, 143, 404 Frugé, Blackie 104, 121 f. Fuller, R. Reese 465 – Angola to Zydeco: Louisiana Lives 465

functional memory Fury, film 205

525

380

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 89, 97, 463 Gaines, Ernest J. 31, 193, 205, 242, 368, 395 – A Gathering of Old Men 31, 242 – A Lesson Before Dying 31, 368 – Of Love and Dust 31, 368 – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman 31, 205, 242, 368 Gallant, Melvin 270 – Ti-Jean: Contes acadiens 270 Gaulle, Charles de 34, 254 Gautreaux, Tim 2, 12, 14, 38, 153 – 189, 191 – 211, 275, 349, 354, 355, 364, 415, 438, 459 – “A Sacrifice of Doves” 153, 199 – “Attitude Adjustment” 155, 191 – “Deputy Sid’s Gift” 193 – “Died and Gone to Vegas” 194 – “Easy Pickings” 167 – “Floyd’s Girl” 165, 172, 176, 189, 193, 199 – “Gone to Water” 349 – “Good for the Soul” 199 – “Idols” 191, 193 – “Little Frogs in a Ditch” 197, 199 – Same Place, Same Things 153, 154, 165, 166, 172, 176 f., 182, 189, 193 f., 199 – Signals: New and Selected Stories 154 – “Sorry Blood” 172 – The Clearing 153, 157, 174, 177 – 179, 181, 191, 193, 195 f., 200 f., 203 – 206 – The Missing 153, 154, 155, 174, 177, 179 – 181, 191 – 196, 204, 206, 210 – The Next Step in the Dance 153, 154 f., 157 – 163, 164, 165 – 177, 180, 182 – 185, 186, 188 f., 191, 193 f., 199 – 201, 203 f., 207, 209 – 211 – “The Pine Oil Writer’s Conference” 206 – “Waiting for the Evening News” 194, 197, 199 – Waiting for the Evening News 153 – “Welding with Children” 182, 196 – Welding with Children 153, 167, 172, 181, 199, 206

526

Index

genealogy/généalogie 22, 105, 175 f., 233, 235 f., 255, 291, 292, 325, 348, 360 – genealogical 136, 278, 32, 301, 316 – connection 281, 291 – research 233, 235 f., 291 genocide 118, 395, 296 Giddens, Anthony 318, 322 Gilroy, Paul 298, 433 Gingles, Bill 357 Ginsberg, Allen 137, 142 Gioia, Dana 206 f. Girouard, Terry Clay 364, 399 Glissant, Édouard 15, 80 – 83, 133, 162, 406, 407, 451 f., 457, 459 f. – “Bayou” 451 – “errance enracinée” 460 – “identité relation” 459 – Les Grands Chaos 451 – Poèmes 451 – Poétique de la relation 15, 80 f., 162, 460 – Traité du Tout-Monde: Poétique IV 459 Gogh, Vincent van 401 f. Gould, Philip 2, 10, 35, 94, 108, 357, 359 Grand Dérangement 2 f., 20 – 23, 30, 37, 39, 73 f., 76 f., 106, 134 – 136, 155, 216, 236 f., 239, 254, 262, 283, 287 – 290, 298 f., 301 f., 323, 329, 331 f., 349, 356, 372, 376, 380, 386, 388, 432, 434, 436, 437, 456, 460 – Acadian – deportation 3, 22 f., 37, 39, 72 f., 75, 107, 130, 132 – 135, 222, 235, 288, 290, 292, 298, 301, 329, 332, 334, 356, 395, 437 – diaspora 23, 39, 94, 106, 175 f., 267, 283, 299, 301, 332 f., 385, 396, 428 – dispersal 16, 24, 80, 178, 208 f., 238 f., 241, 262, 287, 290, 302, 309, 322, 324, 329, 334, 374, 395, 433 f., 460 – exile 19, 22, 74, 83, 106, 175, 239, 241, 262, 266, 283, 287 f., 290, 323, 329, 330, 333, 350, 372, 374, 383, 387, 428 – exodus 20, 23 – expulsion 2, 8, 20, 22, 30 f., 32, 73, 75, 107, 131 – 133, 175, 212, 236, 294,

262, 282 f., 289, 301 f., 317, 323 f., 329 – 333, 335, 346, 352, 356, 358, 373, 376, 380, 383, 386, 395, 427, 434, 437, 455, 461 – Great Upheaval 323, 332 Grand Pré 21, 74, 133f., 247, 329f., 334, 374 (kursiv), 381, 383 (kursiv), 432f. “Grand Texas”, song 190 Grau, Shirley Ann 31, 177 – The Condor Passes 31, 177 – The Hard Blue Sky 31, 177 Great Upheaval see Grand Dérangement Great Mississippi Flood 234 Guattari, Felix 81 Guidry, Richard 35, 37, 106, 115, 129, 410, 422 – C’est p’us pareil 35, 37, 410 Guilbeau, Jean 373, 375, 379 f., 401 Guilbeau, Joseph 379 f. Guillory, Karla 97 – 99, 115, 117 Guillory, Kristi 422 Guirard, Leona, aka Tootie 256, 259 Gunsmoke, TV series 166 habitual memory 185 Hachette, Jeanne, aka Jeanne Laisné 254 Hacking, Ian 49 haecceitas 390 haiku 103, 137 f., 393, 400, 413, 425, 438 Halbwachs, Maurice 46, 49 – 52, 54, 59 f., 64 – 66, 68 – 71, 77 – 79, 89, 155, 198 f., 212, 234, 404, 412, 451 – “images-souvenirs” 60, 65 – La Mémoire collective 49 f., 51, 64, 71, 78 – La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte 50, 71, 198 – Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire 46, 50 f., 54, 59, 64, 66, 69 – 71, 77, 89, 199, 404 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler 21 – An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia 21 Hall, Stuart 51 Harris, Joel Chandler 295 Hautecœur, Jean-Paul 24

Index

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 21 – The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair 21 Hearn, Lafcadio 402 – Chita: A Memory of Last Island 402 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 64, 79, 95 f. – Hegelian interiorization 151 Hélias, Pierre-Jakez 226 f. – Le Cheval d’orgeuil 227 Hemingway, Ernest 441 – 443 – For Whom the Bell Tolls 441 heritage boom 71, 226 heterogeneity 16, 45, 97, 214, 413, 457 heterotopia 192, 206 Hiroshige, Utagawa 400 Hirsch, Marianne 427 f. histoire-mémoire 233 f. Hitler, Adolf 435 Hofer, Johannes 217 Hokusai, Katsushika 400 Hölderlin, Friedrich 465 Holmes, Irène Thérèse Whitfield 190, 256 Holocaust 57, 76, 356, 433, 435 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 390, 397 Horace 87, 263, 399 – Ars Poetica 87 Horace Trahan and the Ossun Express, band 421 Houma 10, 11, 157, 312, 323, 325, 337, 343 – 348, 352, 359 Hughes, Barbara 369, 401 Hughes, Langston 368 – “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” 368 Hugo, Victor 147, 439, 457 – Les Châtiments 439 – Les Voix intérieures 439 – “Ultima Verba” 439 human interest story 336, 338 – 341, 350 humanism 1, 188, 204, 210, 350, 444 hurricane 125, 127, 183, 234, 259, 269 f., 282 – 286, 304, 306 – 310, 312 – 314, 317 f., 321 – 329, 333, 335 – 337, 340, 342, 344 – 346, 347, 348 – 356, 352, 369, 402, 411, 427 – 432, 449, 456, 464 – Hurricane Andrew 325, 430 – 432

527

– Hurricane Audrey 234, 286, 306, 314, 326 – 328, 335, 349 f., 352, 369 – Hurricane Betsy 234, 323, 328, 428, 430 – Hurricane Chênière Caminada 429 – Hurricane Gustav 325, 327 – Hurricane Hilda 234, 326 – Hurricane Ike 286, 306, 308 – 310, 314, 316 – 318, 324 f., 327 f., 339, 348 – 351, 381, 462 – Hurricane Katrina 3, 65, 285, 306 – 308, 310, 314, 323, 325 – 327, 328, 343, 347, 349 – 352, 369, 402, 428, 431 f. – Hurricane Rita 3, 65, 286, 306 – 310, 313 – 319, 321, 324 – 329, 332, 338 f., 341 – 344, 348 – 352, 369, 381, 428, 431 f., 462 – Hurricane Savannah-Charleston 429 Hurricane on the Bayou, film 307 Huyssen, Andreas 44, 56, 311, 457 hybridity 55, 80, 83, 138, 188 hybridization 54, 90, 337 hyperreality 162 individual memory 46, 49 – 53, 65, 68, 88 f., 184, 197, 215 f., 220, 406 inscape 389 – 391, 397 f., 419 intermedial – art 407 – poetics 358 – reference 391 intertext 87, 94, 126, 137, 235, 297, 391, 398, 400, 466 intertextual – bonds 90 – link 397 – mixture of European tales 295 – mnemonics 87 – procedure 87 f. – reference 16, 113, 142, 267, 294. 391, 397 – strategy 411 intertextuality 53, 75, 87, 113, 438 f. invented tradition 62, 75, 123, 238, 375 Isleño 264, 314, 347 Issa, Kobayashi 400 Italo-Cajun sonnet see broken sonnet

528

Index

Jackson, Andrew 435 Jäger, Ludwig 52 “J’ai passé devant ta porte,” song 367, 421 Jambalaya, band 128 jambalaya 15, 426 Jambon, Kirby 1 f., 14, 35, 42, 365, 409 – 452, 459, 461 f., 465 – “Allons déambuler” 433 – “Allons faire route pour la maison” 440 – “Allons ouvert” 438 – “Allons z’enfants” 413, 415, 421 – “47 ans et toujours à l’école” 449 – “cabri dans l’maïs” 416, 426 – “C’est comme ça (Une autre chose que j’sus trop vieux pour avoir composée)” 421 – “Chansons d’espoir” 420, 432 – Chercher la chasse-femme 411 – “Chiac attack, Jack (un peuple en deux actes)” 417 f., 426, 432 – “China Baroque, ma femme et moi” 411 – “Comme un pauvre pécheur” 419 f. – “Couler le sang” 415 – “dépêcher pour espérer” 421 – “d’estre paresseux (et amoureux) sur ung beau dymanche” 439 – “deux des derniers dérangements” 416, 437 – “Dieu croit (Un autre credo)” 438 – “entre Friday the 13th et la Saint-Valentin” 414 – “Envoi: Alors, on sort en dehors” 438 – “Fêtes et défaites” 413 – “French Kiss” 413, 417, 428 – “Fricassée d’poésie” 422 – “Gombo d’poule for the soul” 440 – “H’aimerais me présenter” 418 – “Hemming my way” 441 – 444, 461 – “Héritage culturel” 428 – “i. Introït” 461 – “ix. Acclamation: Chantons une chanson d’espoir” 420 – “La co-écoute” 417, 422 – “la crabe molle” 421 – “La dernière valse du Cherokee (encore)” 433

– “La foi des saints” 422, 423 – “La patate j’ai pas pu lacher” 421 – “La rentrée encore” 413 – “L’école d’été (incluant excursions)” 413 – L’École gombo: Poésies 410, 413 – 423, 427 f., 432 f., 437 f., 440, 449 – “les bons temps qui te tuent” 421 – “Lettre à un communiant” 423 – “Life rings and preservers du lendemain matin” 418 – “Mayday” 420, 440 – “Mémoires familiales de Betsy (et de ’93)” 428 – “Mon gain pou couri” 417 – “Mon philosophy à moi” 449 – “Parti en démêlant” 420 – “Pensées out of the box grâce au courriel de la belle-famille” 418, 440 – Petites communions: Poèmes, chansons et jonglements 1, 409 – 412, 414 – 451, 461 f. – “Pré de moi” 422, 428 – “Quatre coins du petit monde (plus un)” 451 – “Quèque chose que j’sus trop vieux pour avoir écrit (Peut-être un autre repassage de seconde lecture)” 426 – “Qui l’a volé?” 420 – “Qui’c’qu’on est?” 413, 432 – “réflexion” 437 – “rituel quatre” 413 – “Rôder” 412, 415 – “Sampling les misérables” 418, 439 – “Silly bandz” 419 – “Tests et recettes” 413 – “Va quand ce…” 413 – “vi. Première lecture: Un passage du deuxième livre de l’Ancienne nouvelle” 446 – “vii. Gradual: Psaume de sang vain” 447 – “viii. Seconde Lecture: Un repassage de l’Épitre de Saint-Pierre à Saint-Paul” 434 – “xv. Pénitentielle: Pardonnez-nous notre péché” 423, 461 – “xx. Anamnèse: La mémoire: passée, présente et immortelle” 449

Index

– “xxiii. Fraction: Agnus Dei” 419 – “xxiv. Communion” 447 – “xxvi. Envoi” 461 Janet, Pierre 46, 47, 51, 66, 85 Jefferson, Thomas 435 Jencks, Charles 390 Jews 40, 51, 56, 82 f., 305, 395, 433, 460, 464 – Wandering Jew 433 Joanna of Castile, Queen of Castile and Aragon 254 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature 154 Johnson, Rheta Grimsley 402 joie de vivre, attidude 141, 203, 353, 449 Jolie Blond, motif 123 f., 226, 422, 424, 443 Jones, Hardy 38, 465 – People of the Good God 465 Jones, Leonard 139 – 141 Jordan, Louis 122 f. – “Let the good times roll” 122 journalism 47, 50, 308, 310 – 312, 323 f., 338, 341, 348 – 350 – literary 15, 310, 318, 337 f., 347 f. – scientific 310 Just War, theory 202 K-Ville, TV series 307 Kamenetz, Rodger 403 – Last Night’s Dream: Discovering the Hidden Life of the Soul 403 Katrina Effect 307 Keats, John 144 – “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 144 Kein, Sybil 97, 250, 444 – Gumbo People 97 Kerouac, Jack 137, 142 – On the Road 137 King, Grace 176, 429 – “At Chenière Caminada” 429 – Balcony Stories 176 – “The Story of a Day” 176 King, Martin Luther 435 King George III 435 Kohlmeyer, Ida 401 Koselleck, Reinhart 217, 311, 335, 356, 465

529

Kouchibouguac: L’histoire de Jackie Vautour et des expropriés, film 98, 139 Kouchibouguac National Park 139, 298 Kristeva, Julia 87, 114 La Chanson de Roland 249 Lachmann, Renate 4, 87f., 90, 267, 313, 392, 405, 453 La Fontaine, Jean de 294 f. La ligne Acadienne 254, 379 La Tortue, Célestine, chief 244 “La Valse à Guibeault Péloquin,” song 226 Lâche pas la patate, Cajun proverb 124, 278, 351, 421, 423 “Lâche pas la patate,” song see Newman, Jimmy C. Lady Gaga 442, 444 Lafitte, Jean 132, 347 Lalonde, Michèle 92 Landry, Lucille Augustine Gabrielle, dite Tantine 242, 244, 250 – Tantine: L’Histoire de Lucille Augustine Gabrielle Landry racontée par elle-même à 82 ans 242 Langer, Susanne 49 Law, John 26, 222 Le Goff, Jacques 186 Le May, Pamphile 23 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 226 – Montaillou 227 LeBlanc, Dudley 30, 72, 75, 234, 238 f., 455, 460 Leblanc, Francis 97, 99, 123 f. Leblanc, Gérald 136, 138 f., 140, 142 f., 147, 426 f. – Éloge du chiac 140, 426 LeBlanc, Madeleine 330 f., 334, 348, 352, 373, 374, 380 – 383, 387 LeBlanc, Raymond Guy 136, 138, 140 f., 426 – Cri de terre 140 f. – “Je suis Acadien” 141, 426 LeBouthilier, Claude 377 – Le Feu des mauvais temps 377 Leclerc, Félix 142 Léger, Dyane 142, 144, 427 – Graines de fées 144

530

Index

Lejeune, Iry 97 f., 99, 104 – 106, 123, 127 f., 356, 367 f., 420, 454 – “Church Point Breakdown” 367 – “J’ai fait une grosse erreur” 420 – “La valse de quatre-vingt-dix-neuf ans” 128 – “La Valse du Pont d’Amour” 105 – “The Convict Waltz” 105 Lejeune, Philippe 214, 256 – Le Pacte autobiographique 214 Lejeune, Rodney 368 Lennon, John 435 – “Imagine” 435 Les Attakapas: The Story of the Cajun People, musical 372 Les Cenelles 250 Les Cenelles, club 25 Les veillées d’automne, film 108 Lethe 59, 455 Léveillé, Claude 92 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 78, 82, 332, 334, 411 f., 451 f. – La Pensée sauvage 78, 323, 411 f., 452 life writing 12, 15, 88, 212 – 216, 220, 227, 233 f., 246 f., 250, 252, 254, 336, 438, 454, 456 linguistic schizophrenia see schizophrenia Lipsitz, George 56, 387 literary journalism see journalism literary memory see memory literature of exiguity 40, 122 littérature cadienne see Cajun literature littérature franco-louisianaise see Cajun literature Little Chenier, film 306 Locke, John 86, 96, 404 – Lockean terms 96 Lomax, Alan 57, 124 Lone Ranger, TV series 144 Long, Huey P. 27 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 12, 14, 21 – 23, 28 – 30, 86, 100, 107, 109, 130 – 132, 176, 202, 238 f., 247, 253, 373, 377, 380 f., 384 f., 456, 462 – Elegiac Verse 14

– Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie 21, 22 f., 29 f., 86, 100, 107, 132, 176, 202, 238 f., 247, 385, 462 loss 3, 56, 59 f., 77, 106, 121, 155 f., 168, 173, 206, 224, 249, 163, 173, 227, 249, 259, 280, 282, 308, 313, 315, 318 f., 324 f., 328, 338, 344, 350, 382 f., 392, 398, 420, 428 – and death 336, 392, 398 – and memory 163, 171, 293, 310, 345 – experience of 3, 155, 163, 173, 184 – feeling of 146, 162 f., 190, 284, 318, 356, 463 – material 20, 163, 317 – of a person/social ties 59, 155, 123, 128, 193, 317, 320, 338, 355, 388 – of cultural traditions 259 – of French 99, 128, 180, 229, 253, 280, 388, 393 – of heritage 155, 344 – of home 223, 283, 318, 386 – of land 65, 155, 307, 344 f., 434, 464 – of natural habitat 102 – of paradise 222 – of place 310, 316 – of time 310 – symbol of 227 – topology of 159 Louisiana – Acadian Flag 219 f. – Acadian history 30 – literature 14, 24, 101, 302, 445 Louisiana French 26, 203 – culture 262, 410, 449 – ethnic group 26, 203 – folk songs 190 – influence 264 – literature 25, 33, 36, 410 – language 1, 3, 7 f., 11, 33, 36, 112, 114, 149, 190, 201, 231 f., 280 f., 410, 416 f., 419, 426, 448 f., 458 – poetry 149 – speaker 458 Louisiana French Movement 34 f., 38, 92 f., 108, 254, 261, 460 Louisiana Story, film 223 Louisiana Writer Award 1, 154, 355, 405

Index

loup/wolf 126 – 130, 141, 144 – 148, 150, 374, 422 – 424, 428, 440, 454 loup garou/werewolf 145 – 150, 423, 463 Louviere, James Peter 378 – “Hey, Hey, Beausoleil” 378 Lowenthal, David 24, 65, 71, 73, 79, 223, 226 f., 233, 335 Madonna 443 f. – “Papa Don’t Preach” 443 magical tale 294, 302 Magritte, René 59 – La mémoire 59 Maillet, Antonine 37, 94 f., 136, 213, 252, 287, 377, 382, 426 – “Evangeline Deusse” 213 – La Sagouine 37 – Pélagie-la-charette 37, 287, 377, 382 mainstream American culture see American Mallarmé, Stéphane 144 Manet, Édouard 400 Manifest Destiny 239 Mannheim, Karl 51, 66 – 68, 77 f. – “social location” 67 Manuel Jr., Abe 306, 308, 316, 326, 342 – “Hurricane Women,” song 306 – Swire from Grand Chenier, album 306 maquis 297 maquisard 297 marais bouleur 109 – 111, 424 Marais Bouleur, place 109 – 111, 116, 277, 359, 360 f., 364, 423 Marcantel, David Émile 27, 31, 41, 97, 115, 422 Märchen 296 Mardi Gras 226, 281, 360, 363 f., 412, 414, 424, 363, 412 – Cajun Country 103, 122, 255 maroon 299 Marot, Clément 416, 439 – “CCXIX—Huictain” 439 Martin, Désirée 32, 212 – Les Veillées d’une sœur: ou Le Destin d’un brin de mousse 32, 212

531

Martin Wèbre et les Marais Bouleurs (une pièce en français ‘cadien par Nous Autres 110 f. Marx, Karl 387, 455 master commemorative narrative 373, 381 Matherne, Beverly 35, 41, 42, 255, 461, 465 – Bayou des Acadiens/Blind River 35 – Images cadiennes: Poems in French and English = Cajun Images 35 – Je me souviens de la Louisiane: Poetry in French and English = I Remember Louisiana 35 – Lamothe-Cadillac: Sa jeunesse en France 35 – Le Blues braillant: Poèmes en français cadien et en anglais = The Blues Cryin’: Poems in English and Cajun French 35 Matisse, Henri 401, 402 Maxime, Lili 34 McGee, Dennis 226, 370 McGill Hughes, Helen 339 f. McPhee, John 38 Meillet, Antoine 96, 114 memory – archive 46, 183, 292, 379, 380, 460 – ars memoriae 53, 61, 64 – as archipelago 82 – autobiographical 49, 71 – broken 354, 356, 395, 397, 404 – collective forgetting 255 – counter-memory 89, 113, 373, 381, 386 f., 462 – culture 16, 50, 65, 88, 335, 458 – dynamics 45, 49, 63, 82, 84, 86, 89, 94 – figures of 60 – French national 297 – genealogical 278 – historical 38, 71, 74, 107, 150, 175, 182, 197, 233, 336 – 338, 370, 406, 436, 456 – hybrid 84, 373, 369, 408, 412, 422, 458 – index of loss 56 – in literature 87 – literary 94, 125, 150, 366 – multidirectional 48, 82 f., 409 – narrative 89, 292, 338

532

Index

– national 45, 53, 73, 79, 221, 297, 306, 318, 337, 429 – negative 311 – nœuds de mémoire 48, 59 f., 82, 352, 398 – non-commemorative 311 – official 45, 350 – of literature 87 – palace 16, 64 – place 315, 372 – political 45 f., 52, 53, 54, 337, 356 – prospective 210, 341 f. – reversed 329 – shared 45, 68, 317, 356 – social 44, 50 – 54, 66, 71 f., 78, 221, 328, 350 – socio-cultural memory 350 – storage 380, 386 – studies 44 f., 48, 50, 52, 53, 65, 79, 85, 311, 333 Menard, D. L. 101, 127, 368, 420 – “La Porte d’en arrière” 368, 420 – “Under the Green Oak Tree”/“En bas du chêne vert” 101 Ménard, Larry 104 Middle Passage 298 f., 305 migrating literature 262, 267, 301 migration 2, 86, 107, 133, 139, 207, 263, 267, 292 – 294, 298, 300 – 302, 336 f., 396, 459 – Acadian see Acadian – Cajun 18, 158, 189 f. – Creole 97 – mass 79 – transnational see transnational milieu de mémoire 74, 164, 227, 462 mindfulness 357, 367, 389 – 391, 405, 407 Mire, Pat 98, 297 Miron, Gaston 142 f. mnemohistory 30, 45, 75 Mnemosyne 71, 78 – goddess 85 – muse 355 – river of the Underworld 59 Molière 144 – Le Malade imaginaire 144 “Mon cher bébé créole,” song 226

Mon Cher Camarade, film 297 monomyth 263, 303 Morgan Jr., Elemore 357, 365 f., 392, 404 – Cows in a Field 366 Morrison, Toni 429 – Beloved 429 Moulin, Jean 297 Mounier, Brenda 354, 365, 422 Mouton, Alexandre 242, 246, 256 Mouton, Alfred 246 multidirectional 48, 83 f., 261, 409 Munch, Edward 120 mutisme polyforme 114 myth 23, 75, 235, 287, 290 Nalbantian, Suzanne 85, 88 Nashville Agrarians 188 – I’ll Take My Stand 188 Native American – children and assimilation 230 – Code Talkers 297 – culture 302, 345 – decimation 76 – folklore 295 – heritage 1 – literature 12 f. – mythologies 267, 294 – Renaissance 33 Native Americans 10, 19, 26, 40, 77, 83, 134, 151, 178, 244, 251, 264, 295, 312, 343 f., 346, 349, 460 Négritude 299, 300 Neumann, Birgit 86, 215 New Orleans 7, 10, 13, 20, 25 f., 27, 34 f., 35, 69, 95, 103, 105, 115, 122, 137, 157, 159 f., 169, 174, 180, 191 f., 196, 206, 234, 248, 270 f., 306, 307, 308, 321, 323, 328, 343, 350 f., 369, 375, 401, 428, 431 f., 465 – Mardi Gras 103 Newman, Jimmy C. 421 – “Lâche pas la patate” 421 Newport Festival 33 f., 218 Nietzsche, Friedrich 76, 90, 175, 205, 231, 463 – “plastic power” 463 No Mercy, film 42

Index

non-commemorative memory see memory non-commemorative practice 329 Nora, Pierre 50 f., 57 f., 60, 65, 73 f., 186, 217, 220, 227, 234, 462 – Les Lieux de mémoire 50, 60, 65, 73 f., 217 – Realms of Memory 462 nostalgia 38, 213, 216 – 218, 220 f., 223 f., 226, 231, 233 – 235, 238, 247, 249 f., 259 f., 275, 278, 317, 387 – armchair/ersatz 38 – collective 217 – definition of 217 – reflective 221, 224 – restorative 221 – nostalgic 223, 238, 249, 260, 456 – feeling 217, 224, 249 f. – memories 224, 375, 415 – moment 169, 223 – mood 220, 415 – references 22, 248, 259 – vision 212 – 261 Oates, Joyce Carol 444, 447 oblivion see forgetting O’Connor, Flannery 153, 187, 192 f., 202, 206 – “Everything that Rises Must Converge” 193 – “Parker’s Back” 193 official memory see memory Olick, Jeffrey K. 4, 44, 45, 88, 333 Olivier, Jim 232 Olivier, Louise 245 Ondaatje, Michael 396 – The Cat’s Table 396 Opper, Frederick Burr 166 oral history 54, 57 f., 202, 261, 336 – 338, 348 order of exile see Acadian Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts 116 O’Sullivan, John L. 239 Paiement, André 144 – La vie et les temps de Médéric Boileau: ou Y a t’y quêquechose de plus en ville, qu’y a pas dans le bois? 144

533

palimpsest 83, 399 – palimpsestic 188 – constitution 188 – itineraries 301 – quality 316 Paré, François 38, 40 f., 119 Parks, Robert E. 339 Parks, Rosa 404 “Parlez-nous à boire,” song Pascal, Blaise 224 Pascal, Roy 215 Pascal stories/contes de Pascal 273 – 275, 294, 302 Patrice, Desbiens 120, 143 – L’homme invisible/The Invisible Man 120 peculiar institution see slavery Percy, Walker 153, 187, 192 f., 206, 210 performative utterance 113 f., 117 Perrin, Warren A. 3, 30, 109, 312, 331 – 334, 376 – 378, 395 Peter, Paul & Mary 421, 435 – “All My Trials” 421 – “If I Had a Hammer” 435 Petrarchan sonnet 357, 393, 400 philosophical tale 295, 302 Piaget, Jean 47 Pilgrim Fathers, myth 23, 290 Pink, singer 442, 444 Pink Floyd, band 442, 444 – “Wish You Were Here” 442 Pitre, Austin 368 – “Les flammes d’enfer” 368, 420 Pitre, Glen 307 Pivot, Bernard 213, 254 Plato 86, 96, 150, 420, 444 – Theaetetus 96 Plutarch 400 poésie engagée 113 f., 136, 440 Poet Laureate 98, 354, 358 f., 365, 370, 388, 399 poetic influence 125, 143 – poetic misprision 143 politics of regret 333 Pompidou, Georges 253 Pope, Alexander 444 Pope John Paul II 201

534

Index

popular culture 52, 209, 307, 436, 443 – American 3, 136, 144, 168, 187, 440 postcolonial 267 – background 300 – context 298 – writer 299 postmemory 427 – 429 Pousson, Martin 38, 465 Prix Henri de Régnier 1, 365, 410, 448 Prix Saint-Simon 213, 254 prodesse et delectare 87, 263 prodigal son, parable 199 promised land/terre promise 2, 22 f., 128, 145, 213, 222, 231, 239, 257, 262, 350, 433 Protestant work ethic 203 prospective memory see memory Proust, Marcel 51, 86, 170, 226, 275, 311 – À la recherche du temps perdu 170, 311 – Du côté de chez Swann 170 – madeleine episode 170 – “mémoire involontaire” 170 Prudhomme, Paul 169 puritanism 169 Quebec 1, 18, 23, 30, 34 – 36, 40, 42, 84, 92, 94 – 96, 97 f., 106, 125, 133, 135 – 140, 142, 151, 229, 231, 245, 248, 251 f., 252, 261, 263, 265 f., 271, 272 f., 275, 279 f., 372, 410, 434, 443, 458 f. – literature 94 Quebecois Movement 443 quest 160, 175, 207, 210, 213, 259, 269, 271 f., 276 f., 295 f., 301, 304, 350, 357 Quintilian 64 – Institutio Oratoria 64 Rabalais, Nathan 35, 465 – Le Hantage: Un ouvrage de souvenance 35 Rabelais, François 116 – Rabelaisian variability 115 ramasserie 32 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François de 21 – L’Histoire philosophique et politique des établissement et du commerce des Européen dans les deux Indes 21

Reagan, Ronald 333 Reclus, Onésime 1 Reed, Irving and Revon 274 – “Jim’s haybaler” 274 Reed, Revon 8 f., 11, 36, 42, 123 f., 212, 221, 232, 234, 262, 265, 271, 274 – Lâche pas la patate 36, 42, 212, 221, 234, 262 regional writing 192, 282, 301 regionalism 268, 304 Rembrandt 400 remediation 89 Renan, Ernest 318 repeating island 40, 83 resilience 80, 308 – 311, 322, 325, 328, 330, 334, 336, 338 f., 347, 349 – 352, 367, 432 – social resilience 308 f., 351 Réveille, band 109, 455 reversed memory see memory Revolt of 1768 247 Rhetorica ad Herennium 64, 399 Richard, Kenneth 97, 99 Richard, Zachary 2, 13 f., 30, 35, 37, 41 f., 77, 83, 93, 97 – 100, 101 f., 103, 106 – 109, 115, 116 – 118, 121, 125 – 129, 132 – 140, 142 f., 147 f., 152, 213, 262 – 305, 326, 354, 356 f., 363, 372, 378, 389, 395, 398, 422, 425, 428, 433, 449, 458 f., 462, 464 – “8 août” 134 – “11 août” 134 f. – “13 août” 135 – “Au Saint Valentin” 103 – Bayou des mystères, album 107 – Cap Enragé, album 133, 139 – “Chêne vert” 142 – Conte cajun: L’Histoire de Télesphore et de ‘Tit Edvard 262, 264, 269 – 272, 283 f., 287, 294 – 296, 301, 302, 428 – “Cris sur le bayou” 125 – Faire récolte 98, 101, 125 f., 128, 132, 137 f., 142, 147 f., 267 – “La Fête des Acadiens” 128, 129 – Feu 98, 129, 133 – 137, 142 f., 147 f., 152, 265, 280 f. – “Français d’Amérique (suite)” 142

Index

– “Grand Gosier,” song 265 – “Haiku de Mercredi des Cendres” 103 – “Jeune loup” 147 – “Kouchibouguac” 139 f. – “La Ballade de Beausoleil” 100, 107, 109, 117, 138, 140, 378 – “La Ballade de Jackie Vautour” 139 – “La Fête des Acadiens” 128 – “La vérité va peut-être te faire du mal” 128, 132 – Les Aventures de Télesphore et ‘tit Edvard au Vieux Pays 262, 276 – 282, 285 f., 290 – 293, 297 – 299, 303 f., 326, 462 – L’Histoire de Télesphore et ‘Tit Edvard dans le grand Nord 262, 272 – 276, 288 f., 292 f. – Migration, album 107 – “Mohican” 142, 152 – Outre le Mont: Poésies 98 – “Pâque” 103 – “Partir au Grand Mardi Gras I, II, III” 103 – “Petit Codiac” 139 – “Piège piégé” 128 – “Poème Aux Canards Sauvages” 107 – “Poème Aux Grands Chênes Verts” 102 – “Poème aux têtes de cochon” 139 f. – “Poème pour la défense de la culture” 128, 138 – “Poètes dans la basse ville” 142 – “Première rencontre” 128, 129 – “Réveille” 107 – 109, 117, 133 – 135, 138, 140, 378 – “Rouge d’amour (Rouge de Namur) à Arthur Rimbaud” 142, 147 – “Shells of Shotgun” 128 – “Terre” 133 – “Têtu” 128 – “Trouve Lac Begneaud” 116 – Voyage de nuit: Cahier de poésie, 1975 – 79 98, 102, 125, 127, 137 – 139, 147 f. Richard LeBoeuf & Two Step, band 128 Ricœur, Paul 58, 186 Riley, Steve 105 Rimbaud, Arthur 142, 146, 147 f. – “Bal des pendus” 148 Rita amnesia see forgetting

535

Rodrigue, George 226 Roe, Herb 377 Roger, Aldus 168 – “One More Chance” 168 Rolling Stones 183 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 400 Rossillon, Philippe 142, 152 Royal Proclamation 3, 75, 332, 455 Runte, Hans R. 33, 461 Saint Augustine of Hippo 70, 173 – Confessions 70 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de 295 – Le Petit Prince 295 Saint Medard/Saint Médard 103, 127, 364, 375 Saloy, Mona Lisa 369 Sandburg, Carl 144, 145 – The Cornhuskers 145 – “The Prairie” 145 Saramago, José 396 – Blindness 396 Savoy, Marc 18, 124, 129 Savoy, Wilson 105 schizophrenia 143 – 146, 426 – cultural 121, 300 – linguistic/schizophrénie linguistique 118, 121, 125, 143 f., 415, 417 f. Schubert, Franz 398 – Winterreise 398 Schudson, Michael 47, 50, 260, 311, 324, 350, 455, 460 scientific journalism see journalism Scotus, Duns 390 Scudéry, Madeleine de 446 – Clélie 446 Second Vatican Council 202 Segura, Chris 37 – Marshland Brace: Two Louisiana Stories 37 – Marshland Trinity: Three Louisiana Stories 37 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 1, 34, 39, 299, 300 – Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache 300 – Chants d’ombre 300

536

Index

Shakespeare, William 394, 439 – The Merchant of Venice 439 Shakur, Tupac 440 – “In the Event of My Demise” 440 shared memory see memory Shōnagon, Sei 400 Shostakovitch, Dimitri 400 Simon & Garfunkel 440 – “The Sound of Silence,” song 441 Simonides of Ceos 64 f., 69, 313, 400 Sinatra, Frank 441, 443 – “My Way” 441 site of memory/lieu de mémoire 38, 60, 65, 73 f., 79, 82, 100, 105, 164, 209, 213, 222, 223, 227, 234, 283, 317, 327, 331, 334 f., 375, 377 f., 433, 455, 462 f., slave trade 76, 298 f., 433 slavery/esclavage 25, 77, 240 f., 433 – slave/esclave 25 f., 82, 113, 134, 240 – 243, 299, 251 – peculiar institution 29, 241 Slonem, Hunt 357 Smith, Anthony D. 370, 455 Smith, Mrs. John R. 306 – “My Battle with Audrey” 306 Snyder, Gary 137 f. social framework/cadre social 58 f., 61, 63, 66, 68 f., 79, 89, 99, 129, 155, 209, 215, 245, 313, 320, 364, 367, 377, 413, 464 – Cajun 114 f. social memory see memory social resilience see resilience socio-cultural see memory Sonnier, Floyd 377 Sor, Fernando 367 Southern Comfort, film 42, 205, 278 Southwest Louisiana 1, 26, 94, 102, 156, 179, 188, 223, 262, 268, 304, 307, 308, 313, 315, 319, 341, 355, 365, 367, 429, 456 St. Germain, Sheryl 125 Starobinski, Jean 217, 249 Steinbeck, John 153, 368 – Of Mice and Men 368 f. Stivell, Alan 108

storytelling 46, 104, 187, 194 – 197, 208, 210, 216, 264 f., 278, 300, 303, 310, 329, 338 – 340, 368, 414, 442, 454, 459 – Cajun 13, 26, 32 f., 74, 104, 198, 265 f. – collective 409, 430 – oral 156, 187, 192 f., 197, 209, 265 f., 340, 382, 459 structural amnesia see forgetting tabula rasa 96 Tauriac, Michel 34, 101, 252 f. – Évangéline 34, 253 Terdiman, Richard 56, 70, 88 terre promise see promised land Terrio, Olivier 373, 374, 378 – 380 “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” fable 250, 294 The Big Easy, film 42 The Great Flood, film 234 The Princess and the Frog, film 43, 271 “The Tortoise and the Hare,” fable 295 Théâtre Cadien 98, 106, 179, 313 Thibodeaux, Ron 2, 14, 181, 308 – 352, 381 f., 383, 415, 428, 459, 462 – Hell or High Water: How Cajun Fortitude Withstood Hurricanes Rita and Ike 306, 308 – 323, 325 – 328, 329 – 331, 333 f., 335, 336 – 351, 381, 462 Thibon, Gustave 457 Three Little Pigs, fairy tale 127 Tidwell, Mike 345 Tintamarre 42, 375, 383 Tootie see Guirard, Leona Torabully, Khal 83, 300, 451 – Chair corail, fragments coolies: Poésie 83 Toups, Wayne 105, 128 Trahan, Leola Terrebonne 316, 331, 334, 352 TransArea Studies 84 transareal 84, 355, 357, 451 transatlantic 227, 253 – connection 276, 279 – routes 298 Transcendentalist writer 389

Index

transculturalism 79, 450 f. – transcultural 45, 294, 305, 437, 451 – element 2 – exchange 79 – memory 44, 45, 49, 267, 347, 440, 444 – outlook 459 – processes 84 – tale 294 – thinking 444 transculturality 80 transgenerationality 76 – transgenerational – memory 76, 427, 430 – transmission 335, 430 transmediality 388 – transmedial 357, 397, 399 transnationalism 79, 142, 294, 357 – transnational 39, 84, 142, 267, 294, 296, 301, 304 – Cajun poetry 142 – Cajun voice 294 – element 2, 293 – exchange 79, 267 – genre 264 – humanism 305 – identity 266 – imaginary 459 f. – journey 266, 268, 302 – literature 84 – memory 45, 48, 84 – migration 18, 294 – perspective 136 f., 266, 304 f. – space 142, 263 – tale 294 transparent eyeball 390 trauma 89, 158, 260, 325 – collective 341, 427 – cultural 76, 307, 324 f. – culture of 333 – discourse 352 – memory and 76 – studies 404 – war 440 – traumatic 320 – collapse of oil industry 158 – event 75, 106, 311, 324, 348, 460 – experience 76, 309

537

– knowledge 427 – past 82 f., 204, 427 – traumatized/traumatizing 313, 395, 404, 428 traveling cultures 267 traveling memories 267 Trethewey, Natasha 396 Truth, Sojourner 435 Twain, Mark 187, 193 turtle 262, 268 – 271, 275, 272, 280, 292 f., 295 – 297, 303, 369, 462 Ulloa, Antonio de 248 Uncle Remus 295 Urrea, Luis 396 ut pictura poeisis 399 Vander Cruyssen, H. A. 248 Vanishing Pearls: The Oystermen of Pointe a la Hache, documentary 349 Vartan, Sylvie 168 – “Bye Bye Leroy Brown” 168 Vautour, Jackie 98, 139 Vautrin, Jean 34, 252 veillée 32, 74, 108, 212, 225 Verlaine, Paul 142, 148 – Les Poètes maudits 148 Vermeer, Johannes 400 Villon, François 416 Vinci, Leonardo da 392 Voltaire – Voltairian tale 295 Voorhies, Felix 28 f., 30, 130 – 132, 176, 239, 247 – Acadian Reminiscences: The True Story of Evangeline 27 f., 30, 130, 247 Vu du large, film 98 Waggoner, May Rush Gwin 27, 37, 42, 106, 110 f., 179, 222, 299, 313, 465 – Le Chant de l’arc-en-ciel 37 Wagner-Pacifici, Robert 313, 404 Walcott, Derek 149, 270 – “Le loupgarou” 149 – Ti-Jean and His Brothers 270 Walker, Alice 444

538

Index

Warburg, Aby 51, 71, 78, 87, 89 – Mnemosyne Atlas 71, 78 – pathos formulas/Pathosformeln 71, 78, 87 Washington, George 435 Watteau, Antoine 401 Weber, Max 203 – Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus 203 Weinrich, Harald 56, 59, 173 Wells, Ken 38, 314, 318, 347, 465 – The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous 314, 318, 347 Welty, Eudora 165, 208 Welzer, Harald 49, 52, 331, 342 werewolf see loup garou When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, film 307 White, Hayden 88, 338 – Metahistory 88 Whitman, Walt 142, 144, 145, 223, 391 – “America’s Characteristic Landscape” 145 – “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing” 142

– Leaves of Grass 142, 391 Williams, Catherine R. 21 – The Neutral French: Or, the Exiles of Nova Scotia 21 Williams, Dennis Paul 357 Williams, Hank 367, 420 – “I’m so lonesome I could cry” 420 wolf see loup World War I 174, 177, 195 f., 350 World War II 33, 57, 98, 105, 223, 227, 254, 297, 333 Wundt, Wilhelm 51 Xuan, Quian

400

Yates, Frances 64 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim Young, Mark 59 – “#178 Memory” 59

51, 56, 70, 464

Zachary Richard, toujours batailleur, film 98 Zerubavel, Eviatar 61, 66 Zerubavel, Yael 351, 373, 381 Zydeco 104, 239, 367 f., 398, 465