Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana

Nathan Rabalais’ Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana stands as one of the most extensive comparative studies for the region, touching on a wide range of assorted folkloric expressions. Each chapter focuses on a suite of related folklore figures and draws upon not only the regional archival information, but also international sources, to “place South Louisiana in a larger francophone context in order to better understand how specific tales or morals differ from their counterparts elsewhere” (p. 4). Discussions of regional ethnic identities could, and do, fill volumes of academic work, and the author largely sidesteps much of this by anchoring his work on linguistic usage of French and Louisiana Creole, a move that aligns with the nature of the source archival information.Rabalais demonstrates how both the syncretic cultural diversity of Louisiana and particular historical experiences, especially immigrations, produced and altered the regional folklore assemblage. He does this by placing an emphasis on localization, the substitution of particular elements in a folktale with those of more local salience (such as changing a river to a bayou), and more tellingly, on prisming, moral shifts that occur in folktales as they are told and retold in new contexts. The latter of which, while potentially more subtle, has greater impact on the narrative framework and speaks to the moral disposition of narrators and their audiences. The theme of collective cultural trauma appears throughout as a primary mechanism for generating prisming.The first chapter covers animal trickster figures and uses the trickster “Lapin” (French for “rabbit”) and his dupe “Bouki” (Wolof for “hyena”) to explore a set of related animal tales found in the Louisiana repertoire. This exploration allows the author to underscore how the collective trauma of the slave trade inverted the moral characteristics of these animal stories through prisming, so that instead of a West African tradition that primarily warns the audience of trickster figures, the narrative structure of the stories has been altered in the Louisiana Creole tradition to celebrate their wit. Rabalais expands on this in the next chapter, looking at human tricksters, especially stories about the master thief Roquelaure. Not unlike animal tricksters, this character, who entered French popular imagination likely through seventeenth-century historical figures, was used by Acadian immigrants to Louisiana and their descendants as “a way to place the oppressed culture on equal footing with figures of authority or oppression” (p. 67). In this sense, it helped them work through the cultural trauma of their expulsion from Canada and their mandated placement on the Louisiana frontier by the Spanish.Similarly, a chapter on “Jean le Sot” (Foolish John) posits that Jean le Sot shed his positive attributes, common to the tales in France, to instead serve as a warning to the dangers of foolish behavior in the difficult Acadian frontier communities in Louisiana. When the state of Louisiana forcibly attempted to excise the French language through draconian educational practices in the twentieth century, it further exacerbated the negative portrayal of Jean le Sot. The prisming of the Jean le Sot tales through time serves as a vehicle to understand how Acadian populations and their descendants worked through collective trauma and questions related to identity, culture, and language.The realities of life in early francophone Louisiana again emerge in a chapter centered on fairy tales. Notable is that social hierarchy and related preoccupation with wealth, which are central in the European versions of these tales, are largely absent in both French and Creole tales in Louisiana. When nobility are present, they are largely antagonistic, as in the master thief tales. This flattening of hierarchy also coincides with greater agency shown by female protagonists in these tales, in some instances, which Rabalais attributes to being a more favorable characteristic in frontier communities.A chapter that delves into clerical humor shows how cultural traits of Acadians combined with the historical functioning of the Catholic Church in the region, such as sparse priests in a frontier setting, outsider priests who functioned more as bureaucrats, and a lack of promotion of regional culture on the part of the Church, to foster anticlerical sentiment in the dominantly Catholic region. As such, priests appeared as prominent folklore figures, portrayed in less-than-flattering comical light, in stories that resemble medieval French fabliau in structure and narrative content.The intertwining between folklore and religion returns in the final chapter, which focuses on a broad range of folkloric creatures—such as the “feu follet” (a regional will-o’-the-wisp), and persons, such as “La Christine” (who arrives after Christmas to give candies to children)—the recounting of which are generally experiential in nature and lack any set narrative structure. The broader scope of this chapter, both in terms of content and geographic region within Louisiana, allows the author's comparative approach and handling of archival sources to come through as he weaves together regional tales with corresponding Native American, West African, Caribbean, Canadian, and European analogies. His analysis here further benefits from the deeper explorations of prisming, especially regarding cultural trauma, established in the previous chapters.This work will be of interest to both academics and members of the public interested in Louisiana folklore as well as francophone languages, folklore, and cultures at large. Additionally, those interested in African diaspora, Acadian diaspora, and the intersection between Southeastern Indigenous cultures and European colonization will find useful information. The author further positions this work within a greater linguistic and cultural revitalization movement taking place in Louisiana. Because chapters may constitute relatively self-contained analyses of related folklore figures, teachers could assign individual chapters for specific purposes. Rabalais makes it clear that additional comparative analysis is needed, that documentation of popular non-narrative folklore figures is sparse, and that regional folklore traditions endure and are frequently incorporated into new contexts. Those who take up the mantle of researcher in the region in the future will need to engage with the comparative framework Rabalais has established here for francophone Louisiana.

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