This is a cajun,
Kaleb Trahan, musician.
This from Thursday's TP. Cajun Taliban? Not so fast, cher
By Ron Thibodeaux
Staff writer/The Times-Picayune
It's not unusual to find New Orleanians wrongly portrayed as redneck Southerners by moviemakers and television producers. In the latest twist on Louisiana stereotypes, some national media this week began referring to Baton Rouge-born Taliban suspect Yasser Esam Hamdi as "the Cajun Taliban."
Keepers of the Cajun culture flame across Acadiana were not amused.
First the ABC Radio Network and then Time magazine were peppered with phone calls and e-mail Tuesday and Wednesday from bona fide Cajuns determined to set the record straight.
It all started late Tuesday morning when a Lafayette radio station broadcast an ABC Radio Network national news report on the transfer of Hamdi from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a Navy brig in Norfolk, Va. In the report, Hamdi was referred to as "the Cajun Taliban." Authorities have said Hamdi, 22, left Louisiana for Saudi Arabia with his family when he was 2 years old.
Within a few hours, the network headquarters in New York had gotten enough complaints from Louisiana listeners that it dropped the label.
"I told them, ‘You can say that if you want to, although I do find it insulting, but beyond that, it's inaccurate,' " said historian Shane K. Bernard, archivist for McIlhenny Co., maker of Tabasco sauce in Avery Island. "The fact that this fellow was born in Baton Rouge did not make him a Cajun.
"I explained to them that Cajuns are a federally recognized ethnic group; we've been declared an ethnic group by the federal courts. We're counted as a specific group by the U.S. Census Bureau," Bernard said.
Warren Perrin, a Lafayette lawyer and president of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, also got involved Tuesday, making calls, e-mailing ABC Radio and spreading the word about the cultural faux pas to officials of his organization and many others in the Cajun renaissance movement. When he got home Tuesday night, Perrin found that the latest edition of Time magazine referred to Hamdi as a "ragin' Cajun" in an article titled, "Taliban From the Bayou."
Bright and early Wednesday, Perrin was back on the phone, tracking down the Time writer, who said he used "Cajun" as a generic term.
Can't do that, Perrin told him.
"At that point, he apologized for being so out of the loop on cultural awareness in Louisiana, being from up north and all," Perrin said.
Perrin fired off a letter to the editor of Time in which he admonished the magazine. Then he waited for the evening news.
"I hope it's not picked up by anyone else," Perrin said. "The battle continues."
I can't believe that this story got by an editor at Time! I haven't seen the print version of the magazine, (I stopped reading it years ago when they started looking more like "My Weekly Reader"), but the online version of the article does not now use the word cajun. The ignorance displayed here is dismaying. It's no wonder that we have so many problems with our perception of people in other countries, when we don't even know our own.
Of course, we shamelessly market anything here in Louisiana as "Cajun". Chef Paul Prudhomme made just the right pitch when he sought to introduce his native cuisine to the country. In a relatively short time, Cajun was the thing and clueless chefs everywhere in the country were happily burning meats and fish over seasoned with cayenne pepper and who knows what. It was more than the "culinary fad of the year", it went strong and wild for a decade, and it's still very popular. It caught everyones imagination, and that's the problem; people were excited about it, but they didn't really know anything about it. When the chain restaurants and the fast food places started offering cajun this and blackened that all hope was gone for any real popular understanding of the cuisine and unfortunately for the people who lived this rich style of cooking.
There's a very unique culture here; the Cajuns were originally French colonists from Canada, known then as Acadians. When the British took over Canada, the Acadians were kicked out and they came to Louisiana and settled in the bayous of southern Louisiana where their decendants now live, many of them still speaking a version of the French language. The cuisine that developed was a product of the French heritage, the hot climate and the rich variety of local ingredients, with an emphasis on seafood. Because they settled in a relatively remote area, their culture and the cuisine was not overwhelmed by the French Creole influences of the big city of New Orleans. It stayed fairly pure and largely unknown for years until Chef Paul came along and brought the media attention to it, with the usual media tendency to distill the essence of a culture to a few easy words.
The culture is still alive and there are many groups dedicated to preserving it. What I know about Cajuns comes from what I've read, of course, but also from the Cajuns that I've known... A friend of mine used to bring his mother into the gay bar where he worked on his days off. He told us not to worry what we said in front of her, because she refused to speak or understand American English. They spoke to each other only in Cajun French. (He told me that she understood English fairly well, but since she pretended not to understand it, it was her own problem if she heard something that she didn't like. She was pretty fiesty, (just like her son); she liked all the "dirty jokes" and it became a contest to see who could get her to laugh...) And a Cajun accent in bed is a powerful thing...
Other matters...
The network is still working very well. The laptop is connected and can move around the house some. It has a cam attached to it, which greatly extends the range for cam pics. Not sure what I'll do with it yet...
Kaleb Trahan, musician.
This from Thursday's TP. Cajun Taliban? Not so fast, cher
By Ron Thibodeaux
Staff writer/The Times-Picayune
It's not unusual to find New Orleanians wrongly portrayed as redneck Southerners by moviemakers and television producers. In the latest twist on Louisiana stereotypes, some national media this week began referring to Baton Rouge-born Taliban suspect Yasser Esam Hamdi as "the Cajun Taliban."
Keepers of the Cajun culture flame across Acadiana were not amused.
First the ABC Radio Network and then Time magazine were peppered with phone calls and e-mail Tuesday and Wednesday from bona fide Cajuns determined to set the record straight.
It all started late Tuesday morning when a Lafayette radio station broadcast an ABC Radio Network national news report on the transfer of Hamdi from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a Navy brig in Norfolk, Va. In the report, Hamdi was referred to as "the Cajun Taliban." Authorities have said Hamdi, 22, left Louisiana for Saudi Arabia with his family when he was 2 years old.
Within a few hours, the network headquarters in New York had gotten enough complaints from Louisiana listeners that it dropped the label.
"I told them, ‘You can say that if you want to, although I do find it insulting, but beyond that, it's inaccurate,' " said historian Shane K. Bernard, archivist for McIlhenny Co., maker of Tabasco sauce in Avery Island. "The fact that this fellow was born in Baton Rouge did not make him a Cajun.
"I explained to them that Cajuns are a federally recognized ethnic group; we've been declared an ethnic group by the federal courts. We're counted as a specific group by the U.S. Census Bureau," Bernard said.
Warren Perrin, a Lafayette lawyer and president of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, also got involved Tuesday, making calls, e-mailing ABC Radio and spreading the word about the cultural faux pas to officials of his organization and many others in the Cajun renaissance movement. When he got home Tuesday night, Perrin found that the latest edition of Time magazine referred to Hamdi as a "ragin' Cajun" in an article titled, "Taliban From the Bayou."
Bright and early Wednesday, Perrin was back on the phone, tracking down the Time writer, who said he used "Cajun" as a generic term.
Can't do that, Perrin told him.
"At that point, he apologized for being so out of the loop on cultural awareness in Louisiana, being from up north and all," Perrin said.
Perrin fired off a letter to the editor of Time in which he admonished the magazine. Then he waited for the evening news.
"I hope it's not picked up by anyone else," Perrin said. "The battle continues."
I can't believe that this story got by an editor at Time! I haven't seen the print version of the magazine, (I stopped reading it years ago when they started looking more like "My Weekly Reader"), but the online version of the article does not now use the word cajun. The ignorance displayed here is dismaying. It's no wonder that we have so many problems with our perception of people in other countries, when we don't even know our own.
Of course, we shamelessly market anything here in Louisiana as "Cajun". Chef Paul Prudhomme made just the right pitch when he sought to introduce his native cuisine to the country. In a relatively short time, Cajun was the thing and clueless chefs everywhere in the country were happily burning meats and fish over seasoned with cayenne pepper and who knows what. It was more than the "culinary fad of the year", it went strong and wild for a decade, and it's still very popular. It caught everyones imagination, and that's the problem; people were excited about it, but they didn't really know anything about it. When the chain restaurants and the fast food places started offering cajun this and blackened that all hope was gone for any real popular understanding of the cuisine and unfortunately for the people who lived this rich style of cooking.
There's a very unique culture here; the Cajuns were originally French colonists from Canada, known then as Acadians. When the British took over Canada, the Acadians were kicked out and they came to Louisiana and settled in the bayous of southern Louisiana where their decendants now live, many of them still speaking a version of the French language. The cuisine that developed was a product of the French heritage, the hot climate and the rich variety of local ingredients, with an emphasis on seafood. Because they settled in a relatively remote area, their culture and the cuisine was not overwhelmed by the French Creole influences of the big city of New Orleans. It stayed fairly pure and largely unknown for years until Chef Paul came along and brought the media attention to it, with the usual media tendency to distill the essence of a culture to a few easy words.
The culture is still alive and there are many groups dedicated to preserving it. What I know about Cajuns comes from what I've read, of course, but also from the Cajuns that I've known... A friend of mine used to bring his mother into the gay bar where he worked on his days off. He told us not to worry what we said in front of her, because she refused to speak or understand American English. They spoke to each other only in Cajun French. (He told me that she understood English fairly well, but since she pretended not to understand it, it was her own problem if she heard something that she didn't like. She was pretty fiesty, (just like her son); she liked all the "dirty jokes" and it became a contest to see who could get her to laugh...) And a Cajun accent in bed is a powerful thing...
Other matters...
The network is still working very well. The laptop is connected and can move around the house some. It has a cam attached to it, which greatly extends the range for cam pics. Not sure what I'll do with it yet...
