Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth Century Louisiana

Part I and II of II

French RomanticismMajor Themes and Tenets

• Revolts against the Age of Enlightenment’s aristocratic social and political norms• Reacts against the scientific rationalization of nature• Relocates the source of the authentic aesthetic experience in strong emotion, placing new emphasis on

emotions such as trepidation, horror, terror, and awe—especially that which stems from a confrontation with the sublimity of untamed nature

• Elevates folk-art and customs• Values spontaneity and invention• Values the exotic and unfamiliar• Positions the imagination, when its powers are harnessed, as the means to envision and to escape “the pain of

the century”• Cultivates individualism• Manifest a reverence for the natural world• Prizes idealism• Renews interest in the mystic and supernatural.• Romantics set themselves in opposition to the order and rationality of classical and neoclassical artistic precepts

to embrace freedom and revolution in their art and politics.• Gives birth to the archetype of the poet as a tortured visionary• Revalues the medieval• Places a premium on liminal experience– death, or a confrontation with death• Invokes inter-texts in order to accomplish these upheavals, often inverting the logic or polemic of the text

invoked

Victor Hugo on Slavery in the U.S.August 8, 1851

“Slavery in the United States! It is the duty of this republic to set such a bad example no longer…. The United States must renounce slavery, or they must renounce liberty.”

Chateaubriand’s Americas:Atala (1801) Les Natchez (1826)

• Chateaubriand was the first European author to make America the scene, and the Indian the subject of his romances. Moreover, he claims to have seen a large part of the territory east of the Mississippi; he asserts that he lived in the huts of the savages; and he describes the aborigines, flora, and fauna of the country from Niagara to Natchez. His description of America was not received without question in France, and he replied in 1805 to his critics by saying that Atala (1801) might be a poor production, but that all travelers who had visited Louisiana and the Floridas agreed that in it American nature was painted with scrupulous fidelity. " If the pictures had lacked truth," he asks, " would they have succeeded among a people who could say at each step: 'These are not our rivers, our mountains, our forests ?' Atala has returned to the wilderness and her fatherland has recognized her as a veritable child of solitude."

• Chateaubriand, on his way from Albany to Niagara, sometimes found, he says, “little villages built by the colonists or solitary houses in clearings by the road side; but the country was for the most part a wilderness.” After he had passed the Mohawk and entered the virgin forest he fell into a sort of "intoxication of independence." He ran from tree to tree, to right and left, crying: "Here there are no more roads, no more cities, no more monarchy, no more republic, no more president, no more king, no more men." He gave himself up to " acts of the wild," which made his astonished guide doubt his sanity. In the midst of these exercises he came suddenly upon a shanty and the first “savages” he had ever beheld: a number of men and women, smeared like sorcerers, half naked, with ravens' feathers in their hair and rings through their noses. A little French-man, powdered and curled, in an apple-green coat and a drugget waistcoat, with cravat and cuffs of muslin, scraped a pocket violin and taught these gentle Iroquois to dance. They paid for their lessons, the dancing-master explained, in beaver skins and bear hams. He greatly praised their lightness and in speaking of them always said: "These savage gentlemen and ladies." "Was there not," exclaims Chateaubriand, "something overwhelming to a disciple of Rousseau in this introduction to savage life by a ball which a scullion of General Rochambeau gave to Iroquois Indians.”

• 1) He paints an emancipatory picture of the American “virginal wilderness” which is, in turn, linked to American independence itself.

• 2) He casts the American Indian as Rousseau’s “noble savage”• 3) In 1830, Chauteaubriand declares the America he visited no longer exists, and joins a chorus of French

Romanticists who see the project of contemporary America as a betrayal of its former independent, heroic national spirit.

America in French Romanticism:From Virginal Wilderness to Despoiled Continent

1) By 1830 (with the July Monarchy), Chateaubriand’s Romantic America had been replaced by a triple depreciation of the image of America.

2) The figure of the American Negro becamethe sole refuge for the Romantic Hero (in terms of French literary production).

3) In the U.S., however, the South was casting itself in a Romantic light with its portrayals of plantation life.

The Negro as Romantic Herovs.

Romantic Portrayals of Plantation Life

American Romanticism

• The European Romantic movement reached America in the early nineteenth century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe.

• Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world is a source of goodness and human society a source of corruption

• Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected rationalism and religious intellect. It appealed to those in opposition of Calvinism, which involved the belief that the universe and all the events within it are subject to the power of God. The Romantic movement gave rise to New England Transcendentalism which portrayed a less restrictive relationship between God and Universe. The new religion presented the individual with a more personal relationship with God. Transcendentalism and Romanticism appealed to Americans in a similar fashion.

• American Romance embraced the individual and rebelled against the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition. The Romantic movement in America created a new literary genre that continues to influence modern writers. Novels, short stories, and poems began to take the place of the sermons and manifestos that were associated with the early American literary principals. Romantic literature was personal, intense, and portrayed more emotion than ever seen in neoclassical literature.

“Memories of the Wilderness”by Charles-Oscar Dugué

“The Tapeworm”by Joseph Déjacque

Talking Points: 1) The tension between (or fusion of)

Enlightenment revolutionary principles and Romantic ideals in Louisiana Creole Poetry

2) The propensity in this body of poetry to capitalize on this fusion in order to level social critiques: namely, of the institution of slavery

Louisiana Creoles and gens de couleur libres 1) Louisianan Creole: Starting at the end of the seventeenth century, the term Creole was used—throughout the territory encompassing the

Louisiana purchase—to refer to people who consider themselves (or who are) descended from French colonial settlers, African slaves, and Native Americans. Prior to this and in this context, the terms was used to refer to enslaved African-Americans born in Louisiana.

2) The term itself, though, has inter-American variations and dimensions and was first employed by none-other than El Ynca Garcilasso de la Vega—who wrote "The name was invented by the Negroes... They use it to mean a Negro born in the Indies, and they devised it to distinguish those who come from this side and were born in Guinea from those born in the New World [….]” Hence, from its very inception, the term was used to distinguish New World “Negroes” from those born in “Guinea” (Africa).

3) In the early colonial years, there were few European women in the colony. French men took African women as mistresses or common law wives, and sometimes married them. Even when more women of European descent were in the colony, wealthy white Creole men often took mixed-race mistresses before, or in addition to, their legal marriages, in a system known as plaçage. The young women's mothers often negotiated a form of dowry or property settlement to protect them. The men would often transfer social capital to their mistresses and children, including freedom for those who were enslaved in the early years, and education, the latter especially for sons.

4) As in the French or Spanish Caribbean and Latin American colonies, the Louisiana territory also developed a mixed-race class (an outgrowth of a tripartite race/caste system of slavery without parallel in what is now the United States) of whom there were numerous free persons of color. These people were referred to as gens de couleur libres.

5) As a group, the mixed-race Créoles rapidly began to acquire education, skills (many in New Orleans worked as craftsmen and artisans), businesses and property. They were overwhelmingly Catholic, spoke Colonial French (although some also spoke Louisiana Creole French), and kept up many French social customs, modified by other parts of their ancestry and Louisiana culture. With enough numbers, the free people of color also married among themselves to maintain their class and social culture. The French-speaking mixed-race or mulatto population came to be called Black Créoles and Créoles of color. "New Orleans persons of color were far wealthier, more secure, and more established than blacks elsewhere in Louisiana.“

6) The transfer of the French colony to the United States in 1803 under the Louisiana Purchase amd the arrival of Americans from New England and the South ignited an outright cultural war. Some Americans were reportedly shocked by aspects of the cultural and linguistic climate of the newly acquired territory: the predominance of French and Catholicism, the free class of mixed-race people, the strong African traditions of enslaved peoples. They pressured the United States' first Louisiana governor,, W.C.C. Claiborne, to change it.

7) When Claiborne swiftly moved to make English the official language, French Créoles in New Orleans were outraged and allegedly paraded the streets and rejected the Americans' effort to transform them overnight. In addition, upper class French Créoles thought many of the arriving Americans were uncouth, especially the rough Kentucky traders who regularly visited the city, having maneuvered flatboats down the Mississippi River filled with goods for market. Creoles of both white ancestry and free people of color resisted American attempts to impose a binary culture splitting the population into black and white, as they were used to one in which there was a fluid upper class of mixed-race people. Following the Union victory in the Civil War, though, the Louisiana three-tiered society was gradually overrun by larger numbers of Americans who believed in the binary division of people by race.

Les Cenelles (1845)

The very first collection of works by African Americans was published by Armand Lanusse in New Orleans in 1845. Les Cenelles contains poetry in French by seventeen writers of the 19th Century. The poems are reflective of the French Romantic Movement in literature and do not contain overt references to the social problems of the day because of the strict laws prohibiting publication of anything that could be suspected of causing racial unrest. The title of this collection of poetry, Les Cenelles, choix de poésies indigènes, alludes to the time-consuming local custom of collecting mayhaw berries in the swamps of Louisiana and also points to the contributors’ shared des ire to create an “indigenous” American school of poetry, a desire that is, arguably, without precedent.. While Armand Lanusse was the most important contributor, Les Cenelles also included poems by Pierre Dalcour, Victor Séjour and Camille Thierry. With the decline of the tri-partite class-system, these three men--members of prosperous New Orleans Creole of color families--all chose to pursue their literary careers in France where, in keeping with the ideals of their romantic poetry, they might enjoy relative artistic and social freedom. Dalcour was known for his friendship with Victor Hugo; Séjour served as the private secretary of Napoleon III; and Thierry settled down in Bordeaux, where he published his poetic works.

“The Louisianan”by Tullius Saint-Céran

themes

Talking Points:

1) How is wealth portrayed in this poem, and how does this portrayal coincide or contradict with the French Romantic indictment (in the generation of 1830) of American materialism and its supposed betrayal of the original promise of an independent U.S.?

2) How does the ideal “Louisianan” described in this poem embody and/or complicate the French and Romantic ideal?

3) To what extent does this “[l]ofty” Louisianan embody the Romanticization of Enlightenment ideals that we, last time, qualified as a cornerstone of Creole poetry from this era?

“Fatherland”by Alfred Mercier

T

Talking Points:1) How does the persona

characterize the difference between his site of exile (Paris) and his Fatherland?

2) How does the persona figure his estrangement from his youth and its concomitant closeness to the natural world in similar or different terms than the other poets we examined? And how do aquatic symbols inform how the persona and poem confront and negotiate time?

3) How does the knowledge that Gentilly is both a city in France and was (and too a large par still is) a center of Creole life in New Orleans effect a good close-reading of this poem?

4) How is wealth and position portrayed in this poem?

5) Is the polemic of the intertext invoked reworked in typiical Romantic fashion?

“The South’s Constant Revolt”by “Henry”

Talking Points1) We talked about the tension created when Southern aristocratic life began to be portrayed in romantic terms while, at the same time, most Romantics were casting a harsh eye on the hypocrisies of a slave-holding South? How does (or does it?) this poem stage this conflict?2) What are the larger implications of the fact that the persona’s muse now “lay[s] silent”?3) This poem is replete with the political language of the Enlightenment (as it manifests in the Age of Revolution? Is the presentation of this language straight forward? Does it reflect the prevailing French Romantic (or the prevailing Creole Romantic) ethos concerning the incompatibility between Enlightenment ideals of revolution and Romantic ideals of individualism?4) This poem qualifies as something more than sardonic? How does the persona use wit and irony to use Romantic and/or Enlightenment ideals to critique the institution of slavery?

“Epigram”by Armand Lanusse

Talking Points:1) Epigram is defined both as a short, witty

poem that expresses a single thought or observation AND as a concise, clever, paradoxical statement. How does this poem engage with both of these notions of “epigram”?

2) How does the poem frame plaçage vis-à-vis piety, wealth, and religion?

3) If this poem is an indictment of sorts, what is the character and dimension of this indictment?

4) Why do you think this brief poem is, by far, the most famous ever penned by a Louisiana Creole poet?

“Recollection of Kentucky” (1837)by Adrien Roquette

Talking Points1) To what extent does the

persona of the poem reflect Roquette’s reflect an engagement with French Romanticism?

2) How are God and Christianity positioned and repositioned in this poem? To what extent is the polemic of the Biblical epigraph reified or reworked in the course of the poem?

3) Why does this persona, as does the persona who inhabits “Memories of the Wilderness,” draw recollection and lost childhood to the fore?

4) How are times past and present portrayed in the course of the poem vis-à-vis its depiction of the American Indian?

5) Why does the persona characterize his position in Kentucky as exilic? Is his a tragic exile from his “native land?

6) How are Roquete’s wilderness and Indians portrayed in a radically different light than Rowlandon’s or Marrant’s?

Hosea 2: 2-142 "Plead with your mother, plead--for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband--that she put away her harlotry from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts; 3 lest I strip her naked and make her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and set her like a parched land, and slay her with thirst. 4 Upon her children also I will have no pity, because they are children of harlotry. 5 For their mother has played the harlot; she that conceived them has acted shamefully. For she said, 'I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.' 6 Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns; and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths. 7 She shall pursue her lovers, but not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them. Then she shall say, 'I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better with me then than now.' 8 And she did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who lavished upon her silver and gold which they used for Ba'al. 9 Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my wine in its season; and I will take away my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness. 10 Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her out of my hand. 11 And I will put an end to all her mirth, her feasts, her new moons, her sabbaths, and all her appointed feasts. 12 And I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, of which she said, 'These are my hire, which my lovers have given me.' I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall devour them. 13 And I will punish her for the feast days of the Ba'als when she burned incense to them and decked herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the LORD. 14 "Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.

Literature of the Americas: A Bourgeoning Field1) The kind of comparative analyses to which we must make recourse to understand how the ever-

emerging African-American canon came into being—by, in part (we must not forget that the traditions also build upon themselves in various contexts [national and otherwise], drawing on both established European norms and genres (Trans-Atlantic influence) and by participating in inter-American literary conversations about literature and the integral part it plays in the various national imaginary of newly independent American nations—necessarily brings us into contact with one of Literatures most exciting new fields: Literature of the Americas.

2) In coming to grips with what constitute a Literature of the Americas, it is imperative both to recognize both cultural and literary differences and to underscore distinctive themes, genres, and commonalities that result from historical or cultural circumstances. These commonalities suggest the possibility of defining a corpus that can be meaningfully described as a “Literature of the Americas,” but do not by any means suggest that the literary production of Americas is a homogeneous whole. Rather, the idea is that the historical and cultural circumstances of the New World gave rise to common literary motifs.

3) With these factors in mind, it is possible to delineate three ways that the Literature of the Americas have come into being:a) As a response to specific and distinct historical circumstances, literary genres traveled from one area to another. For example, we saw how the “captive motif” traveled across the hemisphere in response and in accord with nationalist genocidal designs and how the motif was re-worked to suit other aims in the case of Marrant. We might also remember the inter-American dimensions of the trope of the talking book: a trope central to many slave narratives that finds it source in El Ynca Garcilasso de la Vega’s account of Pizzaro’s conquest of Athualpa.b) As a response to a need to invent national or regional pasts that both inform literary works and establish literary patterns. Like all nationalisms, American regionalism and nationalism tends to stake, for itself, a historical past that precedes national independence.c) As a response to Hemispheric historical events.