hiddenramen | Entries tagged with cajun stuff

Every couple of months, it seems like, I come back to this one article from Antigravity Magazine called Blanc Like Me.

It's a good article, for the most part—the author and I disagree minorly on a few niche Cajun issues, like CODOFIL (the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, if you're unfamiliar), but in truth, it doesn't even matter. It feels sometimes like the Cajun community is so small (and dying so quickly, to be honest) that everything just kind of... falls away. What you're left with is the knowledge that no matter what little things you don't agree on, this person is one of the few people in the world who gets it.

Anytime I meet another Cajun person in the wild, especially outside of Louisiana, we both get this same hungry look in our eyes, like we're begging the other person to just... nod at us. Acknowledge us. Something, anything, to say, "Me too. I see it. Me too."

I rarely ever talk about Cajun stuff publicly. To be honest, I rarely talk about it at all. It's a minefield, and so few people even know what Cajun is, let alone what any of this shit is, like CODOFIL or Roach v. Dresser. But it feels so... well, shitty sometimes. Not talking about it.

Cajuns are weird. We're the descendants of an attempted ethnic cleansing by the British crown in the late 18th century, burned and bred out of Acadia for refusing to betray our ties with the Wabanaki Confederacy and accept British rule. We floated down the river until we hit Louisiana, far outside of the grasp of the British Empire, and we settled down in a flooded swamp no one else wanted. There's more to our history than just the Grand Derangement—the article touches on it, if you're interested—but that's the crux of it. The thing that we hinge our identity on. We're what floated away from a burning coast and refused to die.

We have our own culture, for the most part. Our own language, our own holidays, our own communities. There's even different kinds of Cajuns, both with different cultures and holidays and dialects, which is one that a lot of outsiders don't know—the difference between the "prairie Cajuns" and the "swamp Cajuns."

Or at least, we used to. Our people are mostly scattered now, fractalized by environmental damage to the Louisiana swamplands and the crippling poverty of Acadiana, and our language is mostly dead. I've seen academics comment clinically before on how ruthlessly efficient the destruction of Cajun French was—a language stamped out almost fully in just three generations flat. I've seen that, in fact. My grandmother, sent to school without knowing a lick of English and then beaten when she dared to speak French. The desperation she had to ensure that her own children spoke English perfectly, the way she only taught them as much French as they needed. The way I barely got any at all from my mother, between how little her family had taught her and how ashamed she was to be Acadien.

I mean, shit. I had to learn my own language in secret so my mother wouldn't freak out about it. When my Grandmother died, I spoke to her with it and she cried. I told her I was proud of who we were, and of her, and one of the last things she ever said to me was, "Ne parle pas trop fort, cher." Don't talk too loud. She was high as balls on morphine; her voice was proud at the same time it was shaking. She cried; so did I.

My mom moved us out of Louisiana when I was small. Acadiana is poor: the schools are shitty and the jobs are scarce. She says that she did it so my sister and I could have better schools, but that's only half-true, if it's even true at all. At least some part of it was how desperate my mom was to get away from her own "bad blood." Her own Cajunness, her own shame. The thing that had gotten her beaten by her foster-mother as a child, leaving her with a jaw that had to be strung back together with wires. I speak French sometimes around her and she pretends that she doesn't understand me. I know that she does, though. I'm not sure if I forgive her for it.

Anyway. This is getting long, and I'm rambling, and I'm tired. I have grad school in the morning, and I really should be asleep. But if you're curious at all about Cajunness, I do recommend that article. I have more thoughts on it—on Cajun whiteness, and on Cajun identity, and on what it means to be a Cajun person accepting that they'll never return to Acadiana, and what that means—but I'm far too tired and too sad to get into it right now.

It kind of feels nice to talk about this, though, in a place that isn't just my sister's inbox. Maybe I'll do it again sometime.

We'll see.