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...