Sexy Ass Cajuns

The Complicated Reasons We Comply

I have done accents before, and we did study American accents in drama school. But I had to hold back a little bit on the Cajun accent so people can understand me. It doesn't sound American at all.

— Tom Payne, English actor portraying a Cajun character in HBO's Luck

[T]he language of authority never governs without the collaboration of those it governs, without the help of the social mechanisms capable of producing this complicity.

— Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

— Eleanor Roosevelt (attributed)

Even when it came out that he was the killer, I found blog posts and comments all over the Web saying that René the Cajun was the hottest, sexiest thing ever to hit HBO. These were conversations about the TV show True Blood (premiering in 2008), a series several of my New York friends insisted that I needed to watch. There was a character on there, one friend told me over drinks at a pub near our grad school, who sounded just like me. This was the same friend who told me I should meet Frank, who is now my husband, so I took her advice and rented season 1. True, René had the best fake Cajun accent I've ever heard on TV (the actor had hired his own dialect coach, a Cajun), but what surprised me was the sexualization and exoticization of Cajuns and Cajun Louisiana. True Blood is set in non-Cajun North Louisiana but consistently borrows images from South Louisiana to create an exotic setting — the moss and swamps, for example, alligators, and Cajun-style homes. There is also a fair share of displaced French names like Bons Temps (the town) and Lafayette (one of the characters), which may come from either the Cajun area or New Orleans (from whose legends vampires are also borrowed) but definitely not from North Louisiana. Meanwhile, even though it turns out René was only faking his Cajun accent (he was really a southern boy named Marshall, posing as a Cajun), you can hear a clip of his speech on YouTube; it's called "Rene's sexy ass cajun accent."

Cajuns are used to being portrayed as dimwitted and drunk, as in Adam Sandler's 1998 Waterboy, and even crazy and murderous, as in Southern Comfort (1981) and Green Mile (1999) (see Bernard 2003). So when we heard that Disney was going to feature a Cajun character in The Princess and the Frog (2009), we were braced for the same old same old. Ray the Cajun firefly did not disappoint. Granted, he's probably the most lovable character in the whole movie, and it certainly was a moving moment when he — spoiler alert — died, but he was also the most illiterate, stupid, toothless, and backward character in the movie. Disney made it seem endearing that Ray was hopelessly in love with a star, which he took to be a fellow firefly with not much to say. Discussions of the movie have mostly centered on stereotypes of African Americans (deservedly, since Tiana is the first African American Disney princess), but it was disconcerting to see Ray and his family characterized as "low class" with telltale signs like obesity, laziness, bad or no teeth, an unusually large family, and clap-on lights (okay, the clap-on lights were kind of funny). And, of the dozen or so accents in the movie, the Cajun accent alone is discussed onscreen, when another character, Prince Naveen (whose own "Maldonian" accent is a Disney invention), calls Ray's accent "funny." Ray's accent actually isn't too shabby — his actor knew Cajuns in the Merchant Marines — and it was a welcomed improvement on Sandler's Cajun Man, who francized (inaccurately) any word ending in on (like inebriation and onions). But if Prince Naveen had called Tiana's African American accent "funny," meaning "not normal," it probably would have sparked massive discussions online. It turns out that it's fine to portray Cajuns as not normal, though, because we're magical. Ray happily explains that his accent is funny because he and his family are from the bayous of Southwest Louisiana, whereupon the Cajun fireflies break into song and change the formerly scary, ugly swamp into a mysterious, surreal, and romantic interlude for Naveen and Tiana.

Another magical film about Louisiana was Beasts of the Southern Wild in 2012. There was a lot of local support for the film, especially since it's based on several real fishing communities in Louisiana that have been continually threatened by coastal erosion. But I wondered if locals, many of whom were in the movie, were surprised upon first viewing the movie to see their livelihoods portrayed like a magical adventure in a faraway land. I wondered if they could even recognize the area with all the sparklers and shaky cams. It was emotional and sublime, but it was so — foreign. The upside was the attention to environmental and political issues in South Louisiana; the downside was the otherization of the people in the film: the happy buffoons, the sex objects, and the noble savages. It's unclear who is Cajun, Creole, or whatever else (I'd say the characters that seem the most Cajun are the chubby, nice, drunk ones), but it doesn't really matter because Cajun/Creole/Louisiana/New Orleans is kind of all the same thing for most Americans at this point. I actually loved the movie, but I felt like I would have to do a lot of explaining to keep my parents and grandparents from guffawing at it.

I'm bringing these recent media representations of Cajuns up because they reflect how my people are currently defined outside of our area. First of all, it comes as a surprise to many Cajuns that people are even interested in us. This goes back to long before Hurricane Katrina brought Louisiana into the media. Thomas Dolby, most known for his hit "She Blinded Me with Science," released a 1992 song set in Louisiana called "I Love You Goodbye." Collaborating with some of our locally known musicians like Wayne Toups and Michael Doucet, Dolby actually sang about my hometown, Opelousas. It was cute to me that he mispronounced it with a long o, and that he sang about a "county sheriff" (we have parishes, not counties), but I wondered to death how this musician in England had even heard of Opelousas, kind of like how I couldn't comprehend why we had a hotel in our town. "Under a Cajun moon," he sings, "I lay me open. There is a spirit here that won't be broken." Curiously, he's not the only celebrity interested in Cajun music. Gordan Gano of the Violent Femmes and even Scarlett Johansson recently collaborated with the Lost Bayou Ramblers on their 2012 release Mammoth Waltz. There's nothing quite like a live Cajun version of "Blister in the Sun," fiddles and all.

Second surprise, people think we're sexy/magical/clownish/intimidating or any other adjective to indicate we're somehow so different we should be admired, laughed off, or feared. Cajun characters are generally so obscured by stereotypes in popular representations that it's easier for me to relate to the mainstream characters than the ones who are supposed to be Cajun like me. The stereotypes of Cajuns in these movies and TV shows aren't exactly unique; they're pretty much the same as the stereotypes assigned to other postcolonial communities (peoples who were folded into an empire without their consent). Edward Said developed a list of the characteristics the British attributed to Indian colonials in his book Orientalism: they were presumed to be criminal, sexual/exotic, mystical, illiterate or uneducated, sometimes feebleminded — all the things that make it necessary to rule the people of the colonies since they're incapable of ruling themselves (Said 1978, 12). Empires generously intervene in other groups' and countries' politics in order to save the inferior people from themselves. They need education, religion, civilization, progress, and/or (the latest fad) democracy.

One writer, Dave Thier (2014), recently wrote that Louisiana has fallen prey to a form of Said's orientalism, "Southern orientalism." He was responding to the current trend of depicting Louisiana as exotic in Beasts and other recent Louisiana-set shows like Treme, True Blood, True Detective, and American Horror Story: "Louisiana, we learn from these shows, is something else. It's not like whatever state you're watching it from. Dangerous, primal, magical and otherworldly. It's quaint, honest and unapologetic. Darkness lurks in every hazy corner, uncommon beauty just behind it. Some people down here are sort of French, which is the most magical of all nationalities, except maybe Tibetan." Thier, who claims an insider view of Louisiana, says it's no different from Cleveland, and this magic is simply an invention of the film industry, which is happy to cash in on the state's whopping tax credits. True, Louisiana became the film production capital of the world in 2013, but Thier rolls over to the other proverbial ditch by arguing that Louisiana is not exotic at all but is in fact pretty boring. He admittedly mostly played video games and watched Netflix during his three years in New Orleans. Also, he has never lived in Cleveland. Thier's article "Sorry, Louisiana Is Not Actually Made of Magic" prompted a slew of local comments and response articles defending the things that are to be celebrated about Louisiana. I gravitate toward the defensive side because I do think Louisiana has magical qualities — just like every other environment and culture. Different doesn't have to be better. Or worse. Different is just different. But he's right when he says these over-the-top depictions, even the "positive" ones, "leave the realm of celebration and move wholeheartedly into fetishization — Southern Orientalism, an obsession with an imaginary other."

Postcolonial depictions of Cajuns in pop culture are directly related to Cajuns' status as, essentially, a colony of the US empire — in this case, as a result of what Michael Hechter (1975) called "internal colonialism" in his theorization of British empire. The same way England annexed and colonized what became Great Britain, the United States colonized Cajuns and dozens of other groups into its nation. In the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Cajuns, who had already undergone British exile from present-day Nova Scotia and ethnic cleansing during Le Grand Dérangement beginning in 1755, were transferred from one colonial power, France, to another upcoming one, the United States. Cajuns remained insular and uninterested in modernization or southern capitalism (sometimes called "plantocracy"), operating outside the US economy until they were forced to assimilate educationally in the first half of the twentieth century (more on that later). So Cajuns and many other French-speaking communities in Louisiana are literally colonies that the United States bought and later forcibly Americanized.

At the time of their forced assimilation, Cajuns (as Said explains about Indian colonies) did not have the privilege of representing themselves in the United States' hegemony; instead, the empire renamed them (Acadians became Cajuns) and created stereotypes of their inferiority. Illustrations in magazines from the nineteenth century depict licentious Cajun washerwomen — legs spread-eagled, exposed to the thigh (Brasseaux 1992, 88h) — and raggedy Cajun men in some display of laziness or low moral character (88c,-h). Travel journalist William Henry Sparks made no attempts to disguise his disdain for Cajuns in his 1882 memoirs: "A sallow-faced slatternly woman, bareheaded, with uncared-for hair, long, tangled, black, with her dress tucked up to her knees, bare-footed and bare-legged, is wading through the mud from the bayou with a dirty pail full of muddy Mississippi water" (quoted in Istre 2002, 34). Current depictions, like the ones in The Princess and the Frog, The Waterboy, and Beasts of the Southern Wild, still represent Cajuns as drunk, illiterate, dimwitted, poor, and low class. But even the "positive" depictions of Cajuns in these films as "magical" or "sexy" are disturbing because they relegate Cajuns to the status of others. These postcolonial stereotypes in pop culture references to Cajuns are instrumental for understanding what I really want to talk about: the status of Cajun ways of speaking and current language tensions.

Louisiana French and Cajun English

In South Louisiana, the French part of Louisiana sometimes called "the northern tip of the Caribbean" (Gaudet 2003, vii), Cajuns and other francophone populations are still struggling with issues of linguistic permission as a result of language policies and prejudices. Louisiana French was legally banned in 1921 during a wave of English-only policies, and public schools were designated as the sites that would implement this prohibition. Children were physically punished for speaking French — even on the playground — and eventually French was almost completely shamed out of public spaces (Ancelet 1996). My grandfather was one of those kids on the playground, and he must have learned his lesson really well, because he practiced oratory alone in his bedroom to learn nearly flawless English, then hitchhiked his way through an MBA and raised his own children in an English-only household. By the time I came along, the older folks in my family spoke "Cajun" (as we called it) only when they didn't want us to understand them — to fuss about us, or to whoop and holler about whatever it was they whooped and hollered about.

Louisiana Cajun French is the variety of French spoken by descendants of the Acadians who immigrated to Louisiana and people who assimilated into Cajun culture. It's commonly described as seventeenth-century "folk French," incorporating vocabulary influences from surrounding Native American, European, and African languages as well as English. Several Frenches came to Louisiana in three waves of immigration, according to the Dictionary of Louisiana French: As Spoken by Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities (Valdman et al. 2010). The first wave consisted of colonists from Quebec and different parts of France (1699–1762), the second wave was the influx of Acadians from Nova Scotia during the Grand Dérangement (1764–1785), and the third wave were elite French speakers from St. Domingue (now Haiti) and France who were attracted to the "flourishing plantation economy" (xi–xii). The Frenches meshed to different degrees to produce a variety of Louisiana Frenches, also absorbing some Spanish and Native American vocabulary for things local to Louisiana — fishes, plants, and mosquitoes, for instance. Because Frenches local to Louisiana were separated from continental French, they evolved in different directions, so Cajuns and other Louisiana francophones still use older words like char (cart, carriage) for "car" instead of the Parisian voiture. A Cajun soldier in World War II, for instance, said he encountered a French officer abroad who told him he spoke seventeenth-century French "that had been forgotten in France" (Bernard 2003, 9).

Self-identification and ethnicity are complex arrangements in Louisiana, but in general the state is divided into North Louisiana, encompassing a variety of Anglo communities, and South Louisiana, encompassing a variety of "ethnic" communities (Cajuns, Creoles, Native Americans, Isleños, and many more). North Louisiana tends to identify with other southern states in what is often called "the Bible Belt," like Arkansas, Alabama, and Mississippi, whereas South Louisiana has been called the "Catholic pocket of the Bible Belt" or "south of the South." It's not entirely accurate to divide the state geographically because there are pockets of French-speaking communities as far north as Natchitoches, but most Louisiana locals have settled on the north/south divide, describing Louisiana as almost two different states. When I was still very young, my father moved up to a tiny town just outside Alexandria, which is part of Central Louisiana (CenLa) but identifies mostly with North Louisiana. As I visited his family every other weekend, it was fascinating to hear my stepsister's accent change from a liquid Avoyelles Parish French inflection to a southern staccato; our three younger brothers grew up identifying completely with North Louisiana and still sort of talk out of the sides of their mouths.

Another cultural and geographical division is the line between Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Louisiana, usually demarcated by Baton Rouge's central and almost neutral position. A lot of locals say that everything west of Baton Rouge is Cajun and everything east is Creole, so the two areas have been divided into, respectively, Acadiana (named after the original settlement of Cajuns' ancestors in present-day Nova Scotia before their exile) and the greater New Orleans area, or NOLA (short for New Orleans, Louisiana), but this also isn't entirely accurate. The areas are indeed very different culturally, but it's not just a difference between Cajun and Creole. There are plenty of Creole French and Spanish speakers in Southwest Louisiana, and there are plenty of self-identifying Cajuns in Houma, just south of New Orleans. Since the name "Acadiana" excludes a lot of people who don't identify as Acadian or Cajun but who live in Southwest Louisiana and are integral to local culture, I prefer to stick to the geographical state associations, acknowledging that there are pockets of variations: North Louisiana is grouped in with the other southern states, with similar accents, foods, and culture; and South Louisiana (or SouLa, pronounced "so-la") encompasses the variety of non-Anglo communities, generally including NOLA (but not always) and generally excluding Baton Rouge, which most locals acknowledge to be a pocket that better suits North Louisiana. Incidentally, many locals informally prefer the older postal abbreviation "La." because the newer "LA" is inevitably confused with Los Angeles.