When I read Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in high school, I had no idea that I was not only reading one of his epic poems; I was also reading a fictionalized account of some of my own ancestry and history.
Yes, I knew I had some French ancestry on my mother’s side, sitting side by side with some German as well. I didn’t know that the German had arrived relatively late, in the mid-nineteenth century, while the French had been there more than a century earlier. And I didn’t know that most of that French had come from Canada, in the maritime provinces collectively called Acadia. A tiny handful of my mother’s French ancestors had come directly from France.
I didn’t know that, at college football games, when I chanted “Hot boudin! Cold coosh coosh! Come on Tigers, poosh, poosh, poosh,” I was using words from my own ancestry. When I read A Cajun Night Before Christmas to my children, I never thought to ask why I could imitate the Cajun accent so well.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.
Photograph: Evangeline, a monument to the Acadians, St. Martinsville, La., via Wikipedia.
Some Thursday Readings
Elegy for a Tow Truck Driver – poem by James Matthew Wilson at Rabbit Room Poetry.
Tribes – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.
“Portrait d’une Femme,” poem by Ezra Pound – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
A Worthy, Doomed Metaphysical Poet – David Deavel at The Imaginative Conservative.
“My Shadow,” poem by Robert Louis Stevenson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.
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