Everytime New Orleans marks a centenary celebration it seems as though the city’s bordelic second-nature is in full swing. In 1818, the reluctantly American city dealt with tensions among Louisiana Creoles and Americans. In 1918, jazz was making the city’s culture go global and in turn set the syncopated pace for modern life. With 2018 coming up, New Orleans seems to be debating how to face its precarious geography and hardrooted inequalities head on. Today’s challenges, as with those before, cannot be chased away with a Sazerac. But one advantage today is that the city is openly debating its future, rather than just reminiscing about its unique past. Part of this is spurred by a crise de conscience that emerged after Katrina in which New Orleans and the region together had to think introspectively of what we had lost in ossifying as a Southern port city. Today’s push for francophone education, a flury of music and art that challenges embedded social problems such as violence, and a pride in recognizing that the region’s origins lay beyond exclusively the South are manifestations of this change in attitudes. The space today is one in which Louisiana Creoles have found a growing voice to rethink how we can define not only Louisiana but also the region.
Without defaulting to clichés, I think a unique attribute about how Louisiana Creoles (LC) live today is how we seem to resist binary inclusion and exclusion that has at times been a prevalent force in our country. Perhaps it is the divisive politics of forced Americanization in the 20th Century that left a bitter taste in our mouths. But not being exclusionary in how we identify is an attribute that gives us an advantage today to reenegage and make the case to people within Louisiana, the region, around the country, and internationally, that being Louisiana Creole is important. Although many families and individuals do grow up immersed and proud of being LC, hundreds of thousands of people who may themselves have connections to LCs have neither the historical context nor the community around them to encourage them to embrace the same passion we feel about being LC. We have made great strides in increasing our voice, so I want to propose some ideas that I welcome for debate on how we can rebuild ties with people who have connections to being LC or who are even just interested in the culture and want to see it thrive.
First, I think public spaces are vital for reaffirming community values. This has been evident in the debates around Confederate statues in New Orleans. I think we should champion to have memorials to LCs placed in public spaces as we look to redefine those spaces. We have a range of leaders to admire who of course have their own deep complexities such as Armand Lanusse, Louis Gottschalk, Lizzy Miles, Homer Plessy, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet, all the way to Fats Domino. This is not to tell a linear story of LCs that acts as if there were no difficulties or problems in their stances and beliefs. Rather, these memorials would be a way to recognize that not only have these prominent people shaped the character of Louisiana and the nation but also that they have often been overlooked due to the politics the Confederate statues represented. One statue will not render LC history totally visible. But having tangible instutions in which LCs can shape the narratives they tell about themselves such as the Musée de F.P.C is pushing to do will reaffirm that our space in public life cannot be relegated to some footnote in a history textbook.
Second, although increasing our visibility in the US is vital, I do not think we should hesitate to engage creolophone and francophone countries to build visibility. Our great advantage in engaging francophone and creoleophone countries is that Louisiana has been fertile land for developing indigenous expressions of Creole and French that express the unsensored emotions of LCs in the languages they intended to express themselves. Works such as Camille Naudin’s La Marseillaise Noire are impressive manifestos from LCs that could easily be relevant to a modern audience. Futhermore, I had the opportunity to write on my inititiative to have Louisiana join the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF), but the OIF and other parallel cultural bodies would be helpful in terms of granting international recognition for Louisiana’s francohone and creolophone communities so that we can point to global recognition of our community to rekindle interest at home. When people are aware that hundreds of millions of people who speak French and Creole, the case is easier to make as to why taking stock of one’s own LC identity is important as compared to when people think of identity as an isolated exception found only in Lousiana and the Gulf South.
My hope in presenting ideas for how LCs can increase our voice in the century to come is to catalyze a conversation. I know so many people are working diligently to promote LC and ensure its vitality moving forward. LCs have built homes and communities around our region and the world. But New Orleans serves as a focal-point, both as an idealized and beautifully flawed manifestation of LC culture that is hard to exactly define but is obvious to anyone who has ever been immersed in the culture. We have so much today to show for the continued tenacity of our culture that we should always think of how to make people become just as impassioned as we are and one day themselves become models for what it means to be LC.
-Scott Tilton
scott.tilton@sciencespo.fr