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I. Ça va?¹

My maternal grandfather, Martin Richard, was Cajun, an American Acadian, a bilingual descendent of that diaspora of French colonists expelled from Nova Scotia (Acadie) and resettled in the bayous west of Baton Rouge. Always a figure in my life, my first memories of him involve short phrases in Cajun French that I learned and recited endlessly in play: comment ça va? Ça va bien, et toi? They were simple, polite, easy phrases, and I repeated them as if only to evoke his attention or presence. At times I forgot the translation, or just forgot the phrases all together, only remembering that there was something he had taught me and that some strange soft sounds could be recollected in his presence and he would smile and reply. I already had English words for just about everything around me, a symbolic grid for naming and inhabiting my environment. But who was this mother's father with words for a space I did not inhabit? Words of a new and different symbolic medium for me to call the other, the mother, in the language of her father, the figure of her Law.

There were times I would blame my mother and father, even my grandfather for never teaching me French. How could they deny me that inheritance? How could I be left like this, monolingual, only knowing English, just like everyone else? Not only was I thwarted from French, my grandfather was bilingual; he had to learn two languages, but I was left with just one, only needing one language. I grew, I felt, with something missing that would always link me to my family. Jacques Derrida writes about the desire for One, original language, and from it the ability to write/remember/claim the first experience, the beginning of one's selfhood. But this experience is always supposed, something unverifiable. He calls it the "monolingualism of the other." The separation from the One, the loss of the One's "language" that represents the time and feeling before selfhood (Derrida calls it "ipseity") is an experience that can only be conceived when you can think - that is, according to Derrida, when you have a language. Central to the monolingualism of the other is the desire to recall the original memory of oneself before one was a self. In this memory should lay your identity, origin, essence. This monolingualism stands for the figure of power, for the language as Law, a Law that spreads its injunction through the subject - that the subject has an identity that is answerable to language and to the law.

My I was not je; my I was unthinkable "before this strangely familiar and properly improper (uncanny, unheimlich) situation of an unaccountable language."² Severed from the One, from a vague "lost" sense of One-ness, I am thrown into a "desire to invent a first language … a prior-to-the-first language destined to translate that memory of what, precisely, did not take place, of what … ought … to have left a trace … palpable, painful, but hardly legible"^3. My first language, my only language (my first privilege) is English. Would French stand in for this "prior-to-the-first" language, my mother's other language, the language of my other? Here were words for a space I did not inhabit, a space in language between my grandfather and myself that existed between and beyond the world nameable to me in English.

I risk overstating their importance, these little drops of French. There is a gaping absence I feel for this language sometimes, something I could not feel for the other languages I wasn't born with but which I've learned more of than Cajun French. The absence is an absence of identification with this branch of my genealogy, missing the ability to identify readily as a Cajun. My grandfather becomes the symbol of the estranged history of his ethnicity, the last thread of a sustained culture (itself always in transformation) now almost completely melted away. Loss of language, loss of history: the idiom seemed the only thing capable of setting this people, this man, this I, apart from the hegemonies of English and America's cultural and racial categories.

A postcolonial reading of Cajun experience in America evokes the way an ethnic minority inside the West can not only be dominated by forces intent on "normalizing" their cultural difference, but also infected by that hegemonic drive to elide cultural difference through symbolic imagery of a mimetic identity. As originally intended to make Cajuns into undifferentiated white Americans, today Cajuns have largely adopted their "whiteness" (with its privileges) while, myself included, on occasion boasting their Cajun-ness as a matter of diversity and multiculturalism at heritage festivals, reunions, or on the odd Census report. American racial politics with its strict distribution of goods, opportunities and cultural values along concrete color lines, led many immigrants of European origin to adopt and violently support an identity that was "white." Being anything less than white meant being black, mixed race, "colored," and was legal grounds for denial of economic and political rights. Acadians/Cajuns in Louisiana were subjected to these hegemonic forces of symbolic identification. As Richard Rodriguez writes, "Who can blame the Irish steward or the Sicilian hatmaker for wanting to be white? White in America was the freedom to disappear from a crowded tenement and to reappear in a Long Island suburb, in an all-electric kitchen, with a set of matching plates."⁴ This is important because identity, racial identity, is the product of a play of forces, incentives, and ideas, not an essential, natural, or original Oneness. The forces can be simply ideological pressures but more often than not they are accompanied by the threat of physical violence if you don't comply; it is always a process that can be situated spatially and historically. Cajun history, all the way up to me, has been a process of acquired, deflected, resisted, and assimilated identities.

As a people, if I can generalize, Cajuns lived in relative isolation from mainstream American society until two important events - the flood of 1927 and the Second World War. The flood turned southwest Louisiana into an inland sea, attracting federal relief workers and their accompanying technologies of surveillance and their English language. The needs of the Second World War recruited many Cajun men and women, including my grandfather, out of the prairie and swamp towns and distributed them around the world, making English necessary for their life (and French an asset to translating during the war) in the army and careers outside of rural Louisiana. The history and landscape of rural settlement, the lack of bridges, paved roads, and railroads, and constant political neglect allowed Cajuns the opportunity to maintain their distinct language and cultural identity with less direct intervention by the state (an intervention felt by so many other ethnic groups in America). The slow careless rivers of Louisiana, sung about in French by rural Creoles and Cajuns, proved the obstinate boundaries to the technologies bearing the American cultural narrative of assimilation, the great "melting pot," Protestantism, and capitalism.

But eluding the American framework did not last, as Southern elites and white supremacists worked to align Cajuns and other European immigrants together under the identity of "white," in opposition to black emancipation and, later, to civil rights. This solidarity of whites in opposition to black equality was accomplished by various means, particularly by offering a white identity that carried the privilege to the vote, jobs, and land, and used lynching to intimidate blacks and whites who challenged their laws against interracial marriages or equality. It was, as Homi Bhabha writes, "a process of symbolic identification achieved through a political technology of imaging that hegemonically produces a social bloc."⁵ Action against white ethnic groups became important to dissolving differences of culture or class that could form the basis of alliances between poor whites and blacks and would threaten the hegemony of the state's elites: plantation owners, bankers, and logging magnates. Codifying the state suppression of French were 1916's Mandatory Attendance Act, requiring all Louisiana children to attend school, and 1921's state constitution, banning the use of any other language except English in public schools,⁶ eerily foreshadowing today's politics of bilingual education in the Hispanic American southwest. A common story about my grandfather, about everyone's Cajun grandparent, was how the nuns at school, the teachers, schoolmasters, slapped him for speaking French in class. A friend's grandmother in Houma refused, more than 60 years later, to teach French in the local schools because of that experience. She seems to say to that system: it was you who tried to kill the language in me; why should I help you resuscitate it? The trauma to the children, the last speakers, continues the repression of the language.

Trauma gets passed down. My mother doesn't speak her father's French. Nor do her siblings. Of her dozens of cousins, only one grew up speaking the language. My grandfather just never taught it. And why would he? After the war, working in Baton Rouge, he needed English; his kids will need English for school, jobs, acculturation. The trauma of losing a language was replaced by an incentive, the opening of another monolingualism. As Jacques Derrida writes, "[t]oday, on this earth of humans, certain people must yield to the homo-hegemony of dominant languages. They must learn the language of the masters, of capital and machines; they must lose their idiom in order to survive or live better."⁷ Exit French and enter pop culture.

II. Bien. Et toi?

This essay invests a great deal in revealing the past. I have tried to reconstruct the Cajuns' past in relation to our racial politics, and place the image of my mother's father within the historical effects of hegemony. Cajuns have what could be read as a postcolonial identity and history that, as Bhabha writes of postcolonial criticism, "bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order."⁸ The state's elites made a significant effort to persuade Cajun people that they are something called "white," with interests and values identical to Anglo merchants or wealthy Acadian and non-Acadian plantation owners. Because of this history of English appropriation and French "exappropriation," I can imagine that, had history been different, my own identification would have occurred under completely different conditions with completely different results. I sometimes wonder (and here is where my love of science fiction comes in) what south Louisiana would look like, what it would feel like, if Cajuns in the bayous and rice fields stood aloof, unconvinced by rich Acadians' and Anglos' arguments that their common average skin tone was enough to put aside grievances of an economic and cultural subalternity. At the heart of my wondering is a question of whether it is possible to recall a history for myself outside of the homogenizing master narratives that ignore and obscure the experiences of cultural difference and discrimination inside of American society. Can this anamnesis create a space for an alternative identification (and action) in the face of growing, globalizing economic forces and the contemporary political pressures for a uniform American identity?

I look into memory, personal and cultural, for a source of identification, a path to stability and identity. For Jacques Lacan, one establishes an identity in "the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image … exhibit[ing] in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form."⁹ This assumption of an image, providing an ideal of mental and physical unity - of identity and intention - is always at odds with the reality, or, to use Lacan's term, the real. This suggests that the unity is simply a mirage, a form - Gestalt - as Lacan calls it. Derrida reiterates the point that there could be an "absence of a stable model of identification for an ego - in all its dimensions: linguistic, cultural, and so on,"¹⁰ that diverges or obstructs the process of identification. What if, in contradistinction to the stable models of English, whiteness, masculinity, education, literature, family, and father, a figure of repression were introduced alongside it, representing the (linguistic) foreigner, the illiterate, the familial and maternal - part of me but alien to me as I know myself? The interdiction of the father's signifier, the phallus, that inaugurates subjectivity and splits the subject from the Other, which is the One, that which is imagined outside of and prior to the subject-in-language, institutes a "demand of a presence or of an absence - which is manifested in the primordial relation to the mother, pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy."¹¹ Demand for love and desire for the Other constitute not only the child's wish "to be the phallus in order to satisfy that desire [of the mother],"¹² but also introduce the image of her father as a potential object of phallic identification used to satisfy the mother. My grandfather was a figure of incredible influence on me, an image of unending interest and mystery. Could it be that my "inheritance" of artistic skill from him is driven by a desire to attain the Other's favor, by imitating, mastering, and assuming my mother's figure of the phallus? At the same time my grandfather as source of identification was, in part, concealed by the power of the English language, fatherly monolingualism that gives so many benefits, so many certainties of identity.

As a result of this identification with the Law, which starts from the phallic splitting of subjectivity, I know myself, like my father, as a white American, the undifferentiated within this society, and thus represented as the basic, universal subject position; around me, caught in a hierarchically sticky web, are various Others that I come to define myself against. But by critically engaging Cajun history, my family tree, its sources of identification and precedent, I negotiate with a difference of culture, an otherness within the territory dominated by an ideology of homogeneous whiteness that supports experiences of simultaneous Cajun/American identification - the foreigner inside the host's home. An engagement that reveals new words for a familiar experience: I looked over a painting with my grandfather, an Acadian home in some bayou of his memory, as he told me the names of the canvas's birds, stairs, trees, foreground and background; its contents and the constellation of its space (re)named, reawakened in his coarse French. These revelations are enunciative modes of Cajun cultural difference. Interestingly, it is through the artwork of my grandfather and his siblings that something uniquely Cajun, or at least familial, transferred to the next generation. Martin Richard's art was almost exclusively of rural Cajun landscapes, traditional homes, churches, or swamps; a continuing representation through paint of what he could no longer express in French. Not for lack of French, but for lack of community in which to speak it. His paintings speak in every language and no language simultaneously. They represent the settings of culture and society, while never authorizing or limiting the language(s) or rules one needs to enunciate or interpret that culture. Acrylics will do just fine.

The spatial/historical situation of the Cajuns presents an interesting problem. Cajuns were colonists who, after doing their part to displace and/or incorporate at subaltern levels Native peoples, were then over-colonized by the Anglo state. By the time the United States annexed the province of French Louisiana, Acadian settlers had become in a sense indigenous and their subsequent treatment by the state raises the Derridean questions of hospitality and foreignness. They became "guests" and citizens within the United States. But even as citizens they remained foreign - continuing to live, unabated for a century, in a different culture and language than their "hosts" - and were both strangers to and subjects of Anglo laws, rights, and constitution. Derrida reads hospitality as containing undecidedly dual and contradictory impulses - on the one hand, a Law of unconditional, absolute hospitality open to both the foreigner and the other; and on the other hand, the many laws of hospitality in existence that are conditional and a matter of enumerated and codified rights - open to only the foreigner, the invited and expected guest. Absolute hospitality would grant the Cajuns an existence as other, asking nothing, not even a name, in exchange; this Law was then penetrated, violated, conditionalized by the laws requiring English education. Living as an other in the "home" of the host was no longer acceptable to the interests of property and the State. Exiled from France, from Acadia, then finally from their own language, sentenced to hear it now as foreigners: "the first and last condition of belonging, language is also the experience of expropriation, of an irreducible exappropriation. What is called the 'mother' tongue is already 'the other's language'."¹³ By this Derrida reminds us that owning or privatizing language as a unique cultural identity is impossible, because language is imposed from outside the subject, constituting him/her through the signifier of the phallus, and it "is in the place of the Other that the subject has access to it."¹⁴

"'Displaced persons', exiles, those who are deported, expelled, rootless, nomads," Derrida writes, "all share two sources of sighs, two nostalgias: their dead ones and their language … [they] often continue to recognize the language, which is called the mother tongue, as their ultimate homeland."¹⁵ In analyzing myself, I find I am nostalgic for the language from which I am in exile. Displaced and deported inside the very same land where my ancestors used to speak French, there is a historical possession (of the language) that is denied, made impossible. But this possession is a "fantasy of property" that conflates the "mother tongue" with the exile's nostalgia for the homeland:¹⁶ language is always leaving oneself in speech, in reference, in quotation marks. It is "that law originating from elsewhere, certainly, but also primarily the very language of the Law. And the Law as Language."¹⁷ Imposed from outside the self, it forms the subject and leaves the bittersweet taste for the Other, the imagined feeling of plenitude and certainty before this lost, wandering self became thinking. Cultural diversity, a construction "safe in the Utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique collective identity,"¹⁸ regards language as the repository of certainty, stability, and identity, despite being thrown into physical or psychological diaspora. Cultural diversity represents culture as an empirical object to be studied or possessed, unchanging, uncontested from within by its own production of statements. On the other hand, the politically engaged notion of cultural difference, the process by which cultural authority is claimed or resisted through its production of statements, provides space for thinking culture as something non-identical with the possession of language, as an enunciation capable of producing alternative statements "adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification."¹⁹ Bhabha calls cultural difference a matter of "enunciation" because language as a medium of cultural identification and production is "crossed by the différance of writing,"²⁰ the iterability and non-identity of language to intention or to an absolute property of the self. Desiring the rejuvenation of a lost language for purposes of reconstituting a certain essence of cultural identity is problematic if it remains uncritical of both the function language plays in the processes of identification and of the ways in which cultures are transformed by their own enunciations of new demands in the name of their traditions.

III. Comme ci, comme ça.

The break-up of white supremacist hegemony must include the development of the creative enunciation of cultural difference from within the ethnic groups and classes that were incited, persuaded, or threatened into being the proponents of its ideology. The processes of power, the use of the educational apparatus to remove French from the tongues of children in order to produce an "American identity" among Cajuns today exposes identification as a political process in and of itself. I speak English because it was imposed on my grandfather; English is no more natural to my identity than French is. Constrained by discourses of a uniform, monolingual American identity, the fate of Cajun French is now reduced to a "cultural heritage," a promotional advertisement for the state's tourism industry. Though the intent has been to sublimate Cajuns' linguistic difference, Cajun people are still able to remember family and times in another symbolic accent, disclosing the fact that

because the master does not possess exclusively, and naturally what he calls his language … he cannot maintain any relation, of property or identity that are natural, national, congenital, or ontological, with it, because he can give substance to and articulate [dire] this appropriation only in the course of an unnatural process of politico-phantasmatic constructions.²¹

Anamnesis of this cultural difference and the history of "unnatural … politico-phantasmatic constructions" is instrumental to producing an alternative model of identification. The discourses that project a white or American identity within an English rubric are also the same that hegemonically, legalistically, and commercially marginalized French, Spanish, Italian, Irish, Anglo, et al., identities. Nationalist politics call for this "flattening [of] the text … [this] sovereignty whose essence is always colonial, which tends … to reduce language to the One, that is, to the hegemony of the homogeneous"²² that has no source, nature, or essence that is outside a politically constructed enunciation of cultural authority. This applies to a possible Cajun nationalism, too, that would conceivably call for the return to francophonie as "essential" for Cajun identity. Importantly, this identity through language is problematic because of the coexistance of difference among Louisiana's various francophone communities: not just within the Cajuns, but also among mixed-race Cajuns, the Houma and Coushatta nations, Creole and black francophones, and even newer arrivals from former French Indochina: Lao and Vietnamese immigrants in south Louisiana. The enunciation of a cultural difference from within Anglo, white identification should actively recall a history of heterogeneity, and produce the recognition of difference and racism at work in the creation of white identity, but avoid clinging to another ethnic identity in opposition to white supremacy. The meaning of our genealogies has been "exappropriated" already by this historical, political elision of difference; the memories must not be reappropriated for new fictional identities based on their difference. No culture, whether hegemonic or subaltern, is "unitary in [it]self, nor simply dualistic in the relation of Self to Other."²³ Cultures are themselves contingent and historical, and lack any original identity with their "lost" languages. As I said above, Cajun francophonie is shared among many non-European Louisianians; any demand to claim francophonie as essentially Cajun, to essentialize Cajun identity, would operate to the exclusion of other communities and races that through intermarriage and cultural transmission have "hybridized" or de-Cajunized the Cajuns.

What cannot be remembered is my grandfather's language - which is not my own, but I never had it to lose in the first place. I know it as part of a genealogy that reveals how close it might have come to being my first language, but by the powers of the host I have a language instead of une langue: "In spite of appearances, this exceptional situation is, at the same time, certainly exemplary of a universal structure; it represents or reflects a type of originary 'alienation' that institutes every language as a language of the other: the impossible property of a language."²⁴

I don't actively identify myself as Cajun, but the figure of Cajun-ness in my grandfather remains strong in the snippets of French I gleaned from him, and especially in our shared artistic impulses that he spent his life accomplishing through painting watercolors and murals. My grandfather was a source of inexhaustible creative power. I write this essay in a room surrounded by his paintings of Cajun front stoops, churches, and wildlife; my room at home is covered with his mural of African wildlife. I began imitating this will to draw as a child when family members constantly pointed out this performance as my inheritance of the "Richard drive" to create art. I continue to think of art and language in the same way, as unique modes of communication.

When I started thinking about Cajuns, they were to me "Americans-with-a-difference." We weren't French, Quebecois, Haitian, or Walloon; we were all allied. But Cajuns nowadays seem staunchly American, lacking any of the francophone solidarity or identity they may have possessed years ago. The history of expulsion and settlement and the mapping of south Louisiana's topography in French and Indian tongues inspire a vibrant and relevant connection with the land and language. They have inherited from the Acadians, whose insistence on neutrality during the French and Indian War got them expelled from Nova Scotia, a sort of "resident alien" position and consciousness - as much or more a part of the land as anybody, but, for a time, institutionally, linguistically, religiously, culturally, and politically not like their neighbors. I have desired this difference, especially linguistically - if I had had French from birth, I could be reading Derrida now in his "own" tongue, and still write to you in this language. This sense of identity, heritage, and inheritance of language was never transmitted, but I never fully extended my hand to receive it either. It is like feeling an overwhelming presence of absence. Jacques Derrida writes, "An identity is never given, received, or attained; only the interminable and indefinitely phantasmatic process of identification endures."²⁵ My own process of identification is like a house, built using the American architecture of English, the desires of the homogeneous suburbs, the opportunities of the upper middle-class. Lurking in this house is the ghost of my deceased grandfather (he had lived with my family in this house while I grew up), who tells a story from both the inside, as American, and outside, as Cajun, of this narrative of American cultural identity, a ghost painting my walls, speaking with a different accent.

Bibliography

Bhabha, Homi K. "The Commitment to Theory." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. V. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001.

Bhabha Homi K. "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: the Question of Agency." The Cultural Studies Reader, 2^nd ed., Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 2000.

Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1998.

Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2000.

Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience." Écrits: A selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.

-. "The Signification of the Phallus." Écrits: A selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1977.

"Louisiana's French History." Council for the Development of French in Louisiana.. CODOFIL. 2 Dec. 2004 http://www.codofil.org/english/lafrenchhistory.html

Rodriguez, Richard. Brown: The Last Discovery of America. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

Notes

1. The section titles are Cajun French phrases I learned from my grandfather; I can only transcribe what I heard, my education in French through him being entirely oral, since he remained illiterate in French, his first language, until his death.

2. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford U P, 1998) 29.
3. Derrida, Monolingualism 61.
4. Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America, (New York: Penguin Books, 2002) 140.
5. Homi K. Bhabha, "The Commitment to Theory", The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. V. Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001) 2389.
6. "Louisiana's French History", Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, 2 Dec. 2004
7. Derrida, Monolingualism 30.
8. Homi K. Bhabha, "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: the Question of Agency", The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 2000) 190.
9. Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience", Écrits: A selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 2.
10. Derrida, Monolingualism 60.
11. Jacques Lacan, "The Signification of the Phallus", Écrits: A selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 286.
12. Lacan, "Signification" 289.
13. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford U P, 2000) 89.
14. Lacan, "Signification" 288.
15. Derrida, Of Hospitality 87, 89.
16. Derrida, Of Hospitality 89.
17. Derrida, Monolingualism 39.
18. Bhabha, "Commitment" 2393.
19. Bhabha, "Commitment" 2393.
20. Bhabha, "Commitment" 2395.
21. Derrida, Monolingualism 23.
22. Derrida, Monolingualism 40.
23. Bhabha, "Commitment" 2395.
24. Derrida, Monolingualism 63.
25. Derrida, Monolingualism 28.