ROUSES_MayJun2019_Magazine-Print

CAJUN FOLKLORE by Sarah Baird

cartoon by Kacie Galtier

If there’s anyone who knows Cajun folklore, it’s Barry Jean Ancelet. Born in Church Point and raised in Lafayette, Ancelet is one of the few people (outside of famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax) de- voted to the preservation of oral traditions — whether storytelling, song or poem — and the revelatory, nuanced, entertaining and complicated truths they reveal about people and places. Thankfully for Acadiana, there are also few people so deeply committed to place and devoted to promoting and sup- porting the region he calls home. “I grew up in a family of storytellers but, of course, a lot of people around here did. It’s the kind of thing you probably wouldn’t think of. You’d just think, ‘Everybody tells stories,’” explains Ancelet. “But as I took French class- es, first in high school and then at university, I started realizing that [the stories] other cul- tures eventually expressed in literature were oral instead in our culture, because people mostly didn’t read or write French in the 20th century. They were actively prevented from learning to read and write French in schools in an effort to eradicate the language. A lot of people persisted in speaking it, and com- municating that way, but they didn’t leave anything on paper, in print.” These new understandings led Ancelet to craft his life’s work around taking these sto- ries that had been passed down orally for so long — through family trees and social gatherings and the grocery store line — and preserving them in all their colorful glory for posterity. “I was unwilling to concede that we didn't have any stories. We had lots of stories; I knew that; I’ve heard them. The only way to get to them was through the oral medium. That meant getting a tape recorder to cap- ture [the stories] and going around to real people and recording them, so that’s what I did for several decades.” And while, at first, that meant almost ex- clusively field recordings, over the course of a masterfully diverse, decades-long ca- reer, Ancelet has now recorded and told the stories and folklore of Cajun country in just about every way imaginable. He’s told them on the radio — most notably on his weekly program, Rendez-vous des Cajuns , which ran for 24 years. He’s told them through mu- seum exhibits; as a professor at the Univer- sity of Louisiana at Lafayette; as an author and poet; as the co-founder of the Festivals Acadiens et Créoles ; and, of course, through music. In 2016, Ancelet and Sam Brous-

sard were nominated for a Grammy for their album, Broken Promised Land , which traces the tale of a great Creole storyteller, Ben Guine, who lived along Bayou Teche. Below, Ancelet gives us a little bit of his own oral history of how humor plays into Cajun country folklore — from naughty priests to deathbed confessions and every- thing in between. When you first started recording Cajun stories and folklore, what were your goals? I was trying to understand: What are the themes? Why do we think it’s funny? What kinds of stories do we tell and for what apparent purpose? The only way to figure that out was to capture enough of them, first on tape and then transcription — writing down on paper what the people had said. The most profound thing I’ve learned about Cajun humor is that it’s very strongly carni- valesque. It revels in natural life, in bodily processes and in natural functions. Cajun humor loves to poke fun at authority — at power — not ever thinking that it’s actually going to dislodge it or overturn it, just that it’ll nudge it, you know? Consequently, very little is sacred. For example, there are no sacred spaces. We tell jokes about priests in a church, and undertakers in a funeral home, and couples in a marriage bed, and people on their dying beds — any place that you would think ordinarily would be stately or somber or serious. Is there a joke that comes to mind along those lines? A priest in a confessional listening to confes- sion on a Saturday, and there was one voice he didn’t recognize. So, after the young lady finished confessing, the priest said, “Well, I don’t recognize your voice. Are you from here?” She said, “No, I’m just passing through.” He said, “Oh really? How’s that?” And she said, “Well, I’m with the circus.” He said, “Oh really? What do you do with the circus?” She said, “I’m a contortionist.” How would you describe Cajun humor, its general sensibility, to someone else?

72 MAY•JUNE 2019