What’s Good? : Weaving Opacity in T.J. Dedeaux-Norris’ Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler
written by:Lydia Nichols
In 1946, the year that bridged the returns of the living and the dead to the United States following World War II, Louisiana Creole musician Sam Theard penned “Let the Good Times Roll,” a hit song first recorded by jump-blues band Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five. Sung over lilting piano licks and pelvis-winding horns, Theard’s lyrics beckon everybody, young and old, to get together, spend their money, and enjoy this life that they will only live once - regardless of material circumstances such as inclement weather or past-due rent. That the good times roll, as if water or a wheel, suggests inevitability, that good times were made to move, rushing to breach battle-hardened exteriors, to wash over them in a sort of post-war ritual cleansing.
Unlike the more common admonition to have a good time (see James Brown's "Doin' It to Death"), which connotes possession or holding, rolling good times demand a surrender antithetical to the soldier’s training. The song’s popularity in the mid-1940s perhaps speaks to a calling in the collective consciousness, a cosmic understanding embedded in the archetype of the Returned Hero: People needed life, in its most ardent form, to counter the stultifying death that had characterized not only the soldiers’ firsthand experiences of war but the preceding three decades from the First World War to the Spanish Flu to the Depression.
But Creole veterans did not just return as war heroes - they returned, too, as Americans. As historian Christophe Landry writes, well into the 20th century, descendants of those sold into United States citizenship by Napoleon in 1803 still associated Americanness with Protestant Anglophones[1]. Louisiana Creole culture threatened an emerging culturally-homogenous geopolitical identity that the U.S. sought to concretize, a weapon in the friendly fight against a politically- and economically-fractured Western Europe for control of global resources.
Public education had primed the Creole soldiers for Americanization. A 1921 Louisiana law made it illegal to speak anything other than English in public schools, targeting their native Kouri Vini - otherwise known as Louisiana Creole. The now-endangered language had developed in the 18th century along networks of woven palm leaf pathways that connected plantations to swamps where African, European, Native and Creole people facilitated a counter economy to the plantocracy - sustaining discourse that challenged the slave/free dichotomy through commercial exchange.
Linguistic erasure also compromised the uniquely Creole worldview, its value for opacity embedded within the very name of the language, with Kouri Vini translating to the seemingly oppositional ‘go come’. This erasure cleared the path for racial bifurcation that had not heretofore existed in south Louisiana, at least not in a form consistent with the historical imaginary of the American South as home to distinct black and white worlds bridged only by violence and servitude.[2]
In the Armed Forces, Creole soldiers who, according to census reports, had maintained kinship ties across racial divides - sharing homes and neighborhoods, were racially segregated. Those Kouri Vini speakers who were identified as white became translators in the Maghreb and Office of Special Services agents organizing among Nazi dissenters in Normandy or were otherwise given special appointments that made use of their French language skills[3]. They brought back with them a newfound pride in their heritage and clarity that that pride was only practicable insofar as they made it useful to American hegemony by affirming the value for racial purity. Thus formed Cajun identity, based on a false narrative of Acadian separatism from the hybridity of Creolity.
The good times that were readied to roll upon their return to Louisiana differed for the Creole soldiers. Sure, there’d be crawfish boils and alcohol and pity sex for everybody. But there’d also be an inequitably applied G.I. Bill that would rupture a cultural ecology with federally mandated veterans benefits, including recurring stipends, housing loans, and education grants, that Louisiana’s Anglo-American political elite refused to dole out to Black veterans. And so, when the returned Creole soldiers, battle weary, my own grandfather among them, sang along to Theard’s lyrics - “Don't sit there mumblin', talkin' trash / If you wanna have a ball / You gotta go out and spend some cash” - I wonder if it was with joy or acquiescence.
And as Creoles lost their language, having taken on the mantle of Americanism, the intra-ethnic racial divide created an opening for cultural co-optation. Hence, the phrase “laissez les bons temps rouler,” which first appears on a poster advertising the 1962 Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival and according to Creole linguist Amanda Lafleur was probably translated by an Anglo-American to French, as in Kouri Vini the verb “quittez” would be used in place of “laissez.”[4]
I chart this phrase’s evolution because the process itself, and the context in which it happened, speak to the ideas that call out to me from the work of T.J. Dedeaux-Norris: Be it war, cultural erasure, mobility - the good times that roll for some, often roll over others.
---
Since the 1960s, Louisiana tourism commissions, offices, and bureaus have molded “laissez les bons temps rouler” into a brand.[5] Heated on the coals of profit and pressed to our chests like a contemporary fleur de lis, it is said to represent the region’s joie de vivre, a peculiar confluence of French (beautiful!), African (wild!), and Anglo-American (but temperate!) sensibilities that manifests as a public administration of deviance, peaking at Carnival but accessible in smaller tastes year-round.
And thus, coastal Louisianians are marked, for tourists’ voyeuristic pleasure, goods to be returned to the place to which we belong in case we roll too far.
Dedeaux-Norris, a Gulf Coast native with New Orleans roots, left the region many years ago, first for California, later New England, then Germany, now the Midwest, but they still bear the brand of good times. As both a consequence of the historical context out of which the phrase was born and an heir to that context’s philosophy and aesthetic, Dedeaux-Norris interrogates the phrase “laissez les bons temps rouler” in the exhibition’s assemblages and textile works. I read in their work the question: what’s good and who decides?
Dedeaux-Norris’ work does not incite this question so as to posit a definition, as so often such redefinitions only serve to absolve their originator. And besides, we can leave such endeavors to moral dogmatists. The work, in its Glissantine opacity, invites one to reach for an answer not transparently offered. The viewer must climb the multi-patterned rope braids that stretch from and/or around the frames of the work like a lifeline. Whether we are to ascend or descend, move from within to without or without within is hard to say - of course Christian indoctrination would have me favor the former, but I favor the latter.
Dedeaux-Norris begins this interrogation with their own childhood, diving into the mythological waste bin of memory - wherein they stockpile discarded cloth, old photos, social media memes, and other ephemera - to qualify their experience of time. The way we define good, after all, is bound to the way we chronicle beginnings, hence the Judeo-Christian obsession with the Genesis narrative, when the first woman plunges humanity into death by seeking Knowledge of Good and Bad.
In “Portrait of Meka at 5 Years Old,” Meka being the artist’s childhood nickname, a single braid dissects a matte-black canvas, unraveling at points - like a plait loosened by outdoor play at high noon or a predetermined life path, narrow but hardly straight, from which we diverge and realign, diverge and realign.
The artist’s photographed self-portrait as a young adult travels across several assemblages, from “(Dd) is for don’t and done” to “(Yy) is for Y’all,” carrying fresh fire-colored roses to the altar of memory, like a vestal sacrifice for the protection of the long-gone.
Considering Dedeaux-Norris’ use of weaving in their work, I think again of the ‘pasajes al monte’ of which historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall writes, so named by a Spanish planter who, in search for an escaped slave, found a network of woven palm leaf pathways hidden under tall grasses along which enslaved people would escape into the swamp[6]. The paths were guides, but also an alarm system; the dried leaves crunched loudly beneath the weight of feet to warn fugitives that someone approached. Serving as a sort of underground trade route between the fugitives and those still functioning within the slave/free binary, the pasajes were a key site in the development of Louisiana Creole language, Kouri Vini - another layer of significance to its “go come” name.
I see in the work of Dedeaux-Norris a contemporary cipriere, a dark, dangerous, chaotic, generative place. A refuge. The good times - which is to say, those that have been lucrative for a few - have flattened our hiding places. We don’t even have our own language in which to seek refuge anymore - there are fewer than 10,000 living speakers. But I have to believe there are other ways. The artist invites us to walk the woven path toward an unnameable freedom. Good or bad, it’ll be a time.
[1] Christophe Landry, “A Creole Melting Pot: the Politics of Language, Race, and Identity in Southwest Louisiana, 1918-1945” (Doctoral Thesis, University of Sussex, 2016): 4-5. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/86158/
[2] Landry, “A Creole Melting Pot,” 5.
[3] Jason Theriot, “The French-Speaking Cajuns of World War II: Forging an Identity, an interview with Amanda McFillen. January 13, 2021. 13:33. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/french-speaking-cajuns-wwii-forging-identity-conversation-jason-theriot-phd
[4] David Cheramie, “Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler: History of a Problematic Expression,” Acadiana Profile, October 1, 2021. https://acadianaprofile.com/laissez-les-bons-temps-rouler/.
[5] David Cheramie, “Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler.”
[6] Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1995), 166.
written by:Lydia Nichols
In 1946, the year that bridged the returns of the living and the dead to the United States following World War II, Louisiana Creole musician Sam Theard penned “Let the Good Times Roll,” a hit song first recorded by jump-blues band Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five. Sung over lilting piano licks and pelvis-winding horns, Theard’s lyrics beckon everybody, young and old, to get together, spend their money, and enjoy this life that they will only live once - regardless of material circumstances such as inclement weather or past-due rent. That the good times roll, as if water or a wheel, suggests inevitability, that good times were made to move, rushing to breach battle-hardened exteriors, to wash over them in a sort of post-war ritual cleansing.
Unlike the more common admonition to have a good time (see James Brown's "Doin' It to Death"), which connotes possession or holding, rolling good times demand a surrender antithetical to the soldier’s training. The song’s popularity in the mid-1940s perhaps speaks to a calling in the collective consciousness, a cosmic understanding embedded in the archetype of the Returned Hero: People needed life, in its most ardent form, to counter the stultifying death that had characterized not only the soldiers’ firsthand experiences of war but the preceding three decades from the First World War to the Spanish Flu to the Depression.
But Creole veterans did not just return as war heroes - they returned, too, as Americans. As historian Christophe Landry writes, well into the 20th century, descendants of those sold into United States citizenship by Napoleon in 1803 still associated Americanness with Protestant Anglophones[1]. Louisiana Creole culture threatened an emerging culturally-homogenous geopolitical identity that the U.S. sought to concretize, a weapon in the friendly fight against a politically- and economically-fractured Western Europe for control of global resources.
Public education had primed the Creole soldiers for Americanization. A 1921 Louisiana law made it illegal to speak anything other than English in public schools, targeting their native Kouri Vini - otherwise known as Louisiana Creole. The now-endangered language had developed in the 18th century along networks of woven palm leaf pathways that connected plantations to swamps where African, European, Native and Creole people facilitated a counter economy to the plantocracy - sustaining discourse that challenged the slave/free dichotomy through commercial exchange.
Linguistic erasure also compromised the uniquely Creole worldview, its value for opacity embedded within the very name of the language, with Kouri Vini translating to the seemingly oppositional ‘go come’. This erasure cleared the path for racial bifurcation that had not heretofore existed in south Louisiana, at least not in a form consistent with the historical imaginary of the American South as home to distinct black and white worlds bridged only by violence and servitude.[2]
In the Armed Forces, Creole soldiers who, according to census reports, had maintained kinship ties across racial divides - sharing homes and neighborhoods, were racially segregated. Those Kouri Vini speakers who were identified as white became translators in the Maghreb and Office of Special Services agents organizing among Nazi dissenters in Normandy or were otherwise given special appointments that made use of their French language skills[3]. They brought back with them a newfound pride in their heritage and clarity that that pride was only practicable insofar as they made it useful to American hegemony by affirming the value for racial purity. Thus formed Cajun identity, based on a false narrative of Acadian separatism from the hybridity of Creolity.
The good times that were readied to roll upon their return to Louisiana differed for the Creole soldiers. Sure, there’d be crawfish boils and alcohol and pity sex for everybody. But there’d also be an inequitably applied G.I. Bill that would rupture a cultural ecology with federally mandated veterans benefits, including recurring stipends, housing loans, and education grants, that Louisiana’s Anglo-American political elite refused to dole out to Black veterans. And so, when the returned Creole soldiers, battle weary, my own grandfather among them, sang along to Theard’s lyrics - “Don't sit there mumblin', talkin' trash / If you wanna have a ball / You gotta go out and spend some cash” - I wonder if it was with joy or acquiescence.
And as Creoles lost their language, having taken on the mantle of Americanism, the intra-ethnic racial divide created an opening for cultural co-optation. Hence, the phrase “laissez les bons temps rouler,” which first appears on a poster advertising the 1962 Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival and according to Creole linguist Amanda Lafleur was probably translated by an Anglo-American to French, as in Kouri Vini the verb “quittez” would be used in place of “laissez.”[4]
I chart this phrase’s evolution because the process itself, and the context in which it happened, speak to the ideas that call out to me from the work of T.J. Dedeaux-Norris: Be it war, cultural erasure, mobility - the good times that roll for some, often roll over others.
---
Since the 1960s, Louisiana tourism commissions, offices, and bureaus have molded “laissez les bons temps rouler” into a brand.[5] Heated on the coals of profit and pressed to our chests like a contemporary fleur de lis, it is said to represent the region’s joie de vivre, a peculiar confluence of French (beautiful!), African (wild!), and Anglo-American (but temperate!) sensibilities that manifests as a public administration of deviance, peaking at Carnival but accessible in smaller tastes year-round.
And thus, coastal Louisianians are marked, for tourists’ voyeuristic pleasure, goods to be returned to the place to which we belong in case we roll too far.
Dedeaux-Norris, a Gulf Coast native with New Orleans roots, left the region many years ago, first for California, later New England, then Germany, now the Midwest, but they still bear the brand of good times. As both a consequence of the historical context out of which the phrase was born and an heir to that context’s philosophy and aesthetic, Dedeaux-Norris interrogates the phrase “laissez les bons temps rouler” in the exhibition’s assemblages and textile works. I read in their work the question: what’s good and who decides?
Dedeaux-Norris’ work does not incite this question so as to posit a definition, as so often such redefinitions only serve to absolve their originator. And besides, we can leave such endeavors to moral dogmatists. The work, in its Glissantine opacity, invites one to reach for an answer not transparently offered. The viewer must climb the multi-patterned rope braids that stretch from and/or around the frames of the work like a lifeline. Whether we are to ascend or descend, move from within to without or without within is hard to say - of course Christian indoctrination would have me favor the former, but I favor the latter.
Dedeaux-Norris begins this interrogation with their own childhood, diving into the mythological waste bin of memory - wherein they stockpile discarded cloth, old photos, social media memes, and other ephemera - to qualify their experience of time. The way we define good, after all, is bound to the way we chronicle beginnings, hence the Judeo-Christian obsession with the Genesis narrative, when the first woman plunges humanity into death by seeking Knowledge of Good and Bad.
In “Portrait of Meka at 5 Years Old,” Meka being the artist’s childhood nickname, a single braid dissects a matte-black canvas, unraveling at points - like a plait loosened by outdoor play at high noon or a predetermined life path, narrow but hardly straight, from which we diverge and realign, diverge and realign.
The artist’s photographed self-portrait as a young adult travels across several assemblages, from “(Dd) is for don’t and done” to “(Yy) is for Y’all,” carrying fresh fire-colored roses to the altar of memory, like a vestal sacrifice for the protection of the long-gone.
Considering Dedeaux-Norris’ use of weaving in their work, I think again of the ‘pasajes al monte’ of which historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall writes, so named by a Spanish planter who, in search for an escaped slave, found a network of woven palm leaf pathways hidden under tall grasses along which enslaved people would escape into the swamp[6]. The paths were guides, but also an alarm system; the dried leaves crunched loudly beneath the weight of feet to warn fugitives that someone approached. Serving as a sort of underground trade route between the fugitives and those still functioning within the slave/free binary, the pasajes were a key site in the development of Louisiana Creole language, Kouri Vini - another layer of significance to its “go come” name.
I see in the work of Dedeaux-Norris a contemporary cipriere, a dark, dangerous, chaotic, generative place. A refuge. The good times - which is to say, those that have been lucrative for a few - have flattened our hiding places. We don’t even have our own language in which to seek refuge anymore - there are fewer than 10,000 living speakers. But I have to believe there are other ways. The artist invites us to walk the woven path toward an unnameable freedom. Good or bad, it’ll be a time.
[1] Christophe Landry, “A Creole Melting Pot: the Politics of Language, Race, and Identity in Southwest Louisiana, 1918-1945” (Doctoral Thesis, University of Sussex, 2016): 4-5. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/86158/
[2] Landry, “A Creole Melting Pot,” 5.
[3] Jason Theriot, “The French-Speaking Cajuns of World War II: Forging an Identity, an interview with Amanda McFillen. January 13, 2021. 13:33. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/french-speaking-cajuns-wwii-forging-identity-conversation-jason-theriot-phd
[4] David Cheramie, “Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler: History of a Problematic Expression,” Acadiana Profile, October 1, 2021. https://acadianaprofile.com/laissez-les-bons-temps-rouler/.
[5] David Cheramie, “Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler.”
[6] Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1995), 166.